The Way the Crow Flies

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  What will you do when you get there, Madeleine?

  I will tell my dad what happened to me. And my mother will make me a plate of food.

  Why must you tell now?

  Because there is a person who can save me, a perfect donor match, she is nine, I have to find her before it’s too late.

  I will say, Dad, someone hurt me.

  I will say, Dad, please walk me to school today.

  Watch me, Dad.

  And I will never again have to wait my turn in the lonely lonely classroom where the clock is always set at five past three.

  She is hungry and almost happy. She drives out of the rain and into one of Ottawa’s unlikely tropical sunsets.

  Sailing along the Queensway, glimpse of the flag atop the Parliament Buildings. Maple leaf. No emblem of war or victory or workers’ solidarity. A leaf red as a crayon, the kind children collect in autumn.

  There is a way back, after all. Through the front door of a new ground-floor condo in the suburbs of Ottawa. It opens onto all the modern conveniences and the one person in the world capable of taking her back there. Once upon a time there was a young air force pilot named Jack and a pretty Acadian nurse called Mimi.

  Open Sesame.

  ONCE UPON A TIME, there were magic words that soothed us. In defence of democracy. Just say no. Resolve. Freedom. Justice. We no longer liked the word “war” because it conjured up pictures of soldiers burning villages in order to save them. But war was potent if it was summoned against a concept or social condition. When we went to war against people, we preferred to call it by names that resembled movie titles, with their comforting implication of beginning, middle and end, as well as their expedient hint at a sequel.

  Some of us conscientiously gathered proof to justify attacking tyrants, while others waited to examine the evidence duly laid out. But we all ignored the story of how we had helped to create them: the drug lords, the war lords, the nuts who, with our help or the help of our friends, had cut down the ranks of the moderate among them. This was an old story and we wanted to believe in a new world order, so we ignored it. But empires have always divided and conquered, tilted and tolerated. And prospered for a time. It’s a question of balance, and the problem, in the end, is always greed. Like the story of the king who grew hungrier the more he ate. Like the aldermen of Hamelin, who, seeing their fair city cleansed of rats, refused to pay the Piper.

  Once there was a golden age. Post-war, green dream, people raised families and there was more than enough of everything to go around. People from all over the world came to find freedom, peace and prosperity. The Great Experiment worked. Never have so many lived so peacefully, never has so much diversity thrived, never has dissent bred so much opportunity. This beautiful idea made gloriously concrete, this raucous argument, ungainly process, cacophony of competition and compromise; this excellence that emerges from disarray like a smartly dressed woman from a messy apartment in time for work. This precious mess. Democracy. How much can be done in its name before, like an egg consumed by a snake, it becomes merely a shell?

  Once upon a time in the West.

  THE AIR FORCE CROSS

  I was much too far out all my life

  and not waving, but drowning.

  Stevie Smith, “Not Waving But Drowning”

  WHEN SHE ARRIVES, her mother says, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nice to see you too.”

  “Je suis ta mère, you can’t fool me.”

  She steps inside. “Maman, it’s just spur of the moment, that’s all, I had the day off.”

  Mimi raises an eyebrow, then hugs her. The condo is high-ceilinged, its foyer leading past the kitchen and opening onto a spacious dining and living room. The halo of newspaper around the gold La-Z-Boy lowers and her father’s head appears around the side. “Whozat?” he says playfully, staring down his reading glasses.

  “Hi Dad!”

  Mimi closes the front door behind her—“We’re not paying to air condition the outside”—and ushers her into the kitchen, which overlooks the foyer as well as the dining and living area from behind a waist-high wall and several decorative pillars. “Come and eat, you’re too thin, what’s that you’re wearing? I’m taking you shopping.”

  Madeleine follows her mother, thoroughly annoyed, deeply reassured. She hugs her father, who joins them in the kitchen and laughs to see her so unexpectedly.

  She eats a “heart smart” version of Maman’s fricot au poulet. How’s After-Three? How’s Stark Raving Madeleine? Are you still planning on going to the States? “Jack, let her eat.” He moves slowly to the fridge, fumbles in a compartment and, with a wink, brings out a foil-wrapped brick.

  “Mon D’jeu, qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?” cries Mimi.

  Crack cocaine, a human skull—a pound of butter. This house has become a cholesterol-free zone, but Jack has obviously been hiding a stash. He plunks the butter on the table in front of Madeleine with a wheezy chuckle—“For you. Some skin on your bones”—grins himself mauve and returns to the living room.

  Mimi shakes her head and says, “You have the nicest papa in the world.”

  The kitchen is immaculate. The one patch of chaos flourishes around the phone: stacks of rubber-banded envelopes, a jumble of pens—most of which, her father claims, are out of ink—the old dented pop-up tin address book, whose entries he swears would flummox a Bletchley Park code-breaker, and a Maxwell House Coffee tin jammed with mysterious essentials impossible to inventory. It strikes Madeleine for the first time that her mother’s filing system—her way of working—is not dissimilar to her own. In this kitchen, you don’t dare throw anything away unless your name is Mimi.

  Her mother is loading the dishwasher, effortlessly executing a spatial feat the equivalent of cramming twenty-five people into a VW bug. She pauses and holds up a mug stamped with some sort of impressionistic painting. “A lesbian gave me this mug.”

  Madeleine looks up, at a loss. “… That’s nice.” Is this the breakthrough? Are we going to have the Movie of the Week reconciliation now?

  But Mimi asks, “What are you doing this summer?”

  “Working probably.”

  “Why don’t you come with your father and me to Bouctouche? Your cousins would love to see you.”

  “Maybe I will.” Sure, I’m thirty-two years old, why wouldn’t I take a holiday alone with my parents? By the way, Maman, I’m divorced and in love.

  The Pope, Queen Elizabeth II, Charles and Diana and The Blessed Virgin Mary look down from a row of commemorative plates on a plate-rail that runs the upper perimeter of the kitchen, their ranks bolstered by the Acadian flag, the Eiffel Tower, the crest of 4 Fighter Wing and a New Brunswick lighthouse. The cuckoo clock is mounted over the stove as usual, the same faint apprehension hovering about its closed door.

  Past the kitchen—at the far end of the living room, by the patio doors with their sheers—Madeleine can see that the television is on and muted—Murder, She Wrote, a rerun. On the coffee table the crystal roosters still duke it out and, above the door to the master bedroom, Dürer’s praying hands preside. The stereo is playing a cassette of east-coast fiddle music, Grandmaman’s hooked rug with the cooked lobsters in the waves hangs over the couch, and in pride of place above the mantel of the gas fireplace is the oil painting of the Alps. Plus ça change.

  Madeleine tries and fails to wedge her plate into the dishwasher, so rinses it in the sink and joins her father in the living room. He sits half reclined in his gold La-Z-Boy, newspaper fanned out in front of him, several more washed up around his chair. She sinks into the couch to his right and is tempted to turn up the TV, stretch out and veg. Why did she come here again? Wasn’t it so she could rest? Regress? Hey Dad, want to play Chinese checkers? She pulls her eyes from the screen to the side table, about to reach for the remote when she sees it. Tucked under the table, an oxygen tank. Industrial green with a transparent plastic coil and mask, it hits her like an obscenity.

  She finds her voice and a
sks casually, “When’d you get this groovy accessory?”

  “What? Oh that, little while ago. Keeps me fit for my jog around the block.”

  She wills her smile to hang in place, like a picture too heavy for its nail. “That’s good, so it helps, eh?”

  He shrugs. “It’s more for show. I take a little nip now and then to please Her Nibs.” He grins and gestures with his thumb toward the basement stairs, where Mimi has gone to look for something.

  Madeleine smiles back. She doesn’t question the charade.

  Why didn’t her mother tell her that Dad is on oxygen now? That changes things. When you see the oxygen van pull up in front of a house, you know someone in there has had it. Don’t think that. She swallows. “Just as well to have it on hand, eh?”

  “Oh yeah,” he says, picking up the paper.

  “Dad?”

  He drops the paper, looks up suddenly and says, “Wait now”—clears his throat of reediness. “I just remembered.” And gets up.

  She can tell he is moving spryly on purpose, for show. For her. What’s worse is that she wants him to. She doesn’t want to see him shuffle the way he did in the hospital, with his bracelet and gaping blue gown. Hospitals are where people go to shuffle, and when they no longer need to shuffle they go home. She doesn’t want to see him shuffle here. It would mean he was sent home shuffling. Sent home to die. Don’t.

  She watches him disappear into the bedroom with the deliberate spring in his slippers. On the TV, Angela Lansbury talks to a nervous man with sideburns and confronts him with a titanium letter opener. Jack emerges from his bedroom and tosses her something. She catches it.

  A silver cross suspended from a red-and-white-striped ribbon. The Air Force Cross.

  “That’s for you,” he says.

  She looks up. “Wow.”

  He says, almost sighs, “Thought you’d like that,” returns casually to the La-Z-Boy and reaches for his newspaper.

  This is all the conversation he will muster for another few moments. That’s what the newspaper is for now. It helps to smooth over the patches when he no longer has breath for speech.

  “Thanks, Dad.” She closes her hand around the medal until she feels its four points dig into her palm—this is the way not to cry when your father gives you something he wants you to have after he dies.

  When she can open her hand again, she looks down at it. Silver thunderbolts and wings, a cross composed of propeller blades topped by an imperial crown. For valour courage and devotion to duty whilst flying, though not in active operations against the enemy.

  “You got this in Centralia in, what? Forty-two?”

  “Forty-three.” He’s reaching over the side of his chair, fishing in his newspaper pile.

  “Can I help you find something?”

  He shakes his head, going pink, his old irritation. “Maman puts my papers into the recycling before I’ve read half of them.”

  “Which one are you looking for?”

  “Couple months ago.” He reaches toward the table for his glasses, and finds them on his nose.

  She rifles through and finds a yellowed two-year-old copy of The Washington Post.

  “That’s it.” He looks at it accusingly. “She must’ve hid it on me,” he says in his playful tone, leafing through it.

  Madeleine says, “I was thinking of going back there. To Centralia.”

  “How come?” he asks, and clears his throat.

  “I want to see if there are any bones in that stormpipe,” she answers, blinking in surprise at her own words. He raises his eyebrows but continues skimming the Post. “Remember there was a dog trapped?”

  He shakes his head, but she can see him taking a reading, getting a fix….

  “The night of flying up.”

  He locks on.

  She takes a deep breath, but quietly, not wanting to worry him. She is already trembling, cold. “You told me the fire truck came and saved it.”

  He smiles and nods.

  “Is that true?”

  He opens his mouth and forms a word, then another, but no sound comes out. Then his voice kicks in, as though he were transmitting through radio static, and he continues without going back to the beginning of his sentence. She pieces it together.

  He has said, with a convivial grin, “Why would I lie to you?”

  “To make me feel better.”

  That sounded harsh—as though she were angry at him. She has no reason to be angry. Especially at him, especially now.

  He shrugs as if to say, “Fair enough,” then folds the Post and hands it to her. It’s crumbling at the seam but the page is intact. A photograph of an old man walking down the steps of a building in Washington. He’s flanked by a middle-aged woman and three men in suits.

  RUDOLPH RELINQUISHES US CITIZENSHIP. She skims the article: Nazi…. NASA…. War crimes come to light….

  “Dora,” says Jack.

  Madeleine looks up. “The rocket factory.”

  “Bang on,” says Jack, and she is glad to have pleased him. “Remember Apollo?”

  Rudolph, Dora, Apollo. What kind of story is this?

  She looks back at the article. Arthur Rudolph. Wernher von Braun’s right-hand man. He has left the U.S. rather than face charges of crimes against humanity dating back forty years, to his time as general manager of an underground factory called Mittelwerk.

  “They don’t say anything about Dora here.”

  “They never do,” says Jack, and she hears the old sarcastic note. “It was a code name.”

  She looks back at the article. Yet another old Nazi. “Took them long enough.”

  “Rudolph managed the space program, he and von Braun got us to the moon.”

  Rudolph with your nose so bright…. Concentrate.

  “The Americans pinned a medal on him, and now they’re finished with him they want to fling him in jail,” says Jack.

  “Isn’t that where he belongs?”

  Jack shrugs reasonably—“You’re probably right”—and sighs reaching for today’s paper: “Fella in Texas just got an artificial heart, how do you like that?”

  She can feel her mind glazing, fights the pull of the news, the TV, the smell of baking. “Dora—that’s where Mr. Froelich was.”

  “That’s right,” says her father. “He was a slave.”

  Slave. The word is like a wound. She watches his profile. Finer, the skin drawn more closely than before over the bones, the involuntary sadness at the corner of the eye that comes with age—exacerbated in his left eye by his old scar. His mouth still set against all odds, lips moving slightly as he reads—he never used to do that.

  She wonders how to bring up the subject. What she has come here to tell him.

  “Tens of thousands of them died, and some were hanged right in front of that fella’s office.”

  Madeleine looks back at her father. “What?” Then at the photo again. She reads the caption: Rudolph and daughter….

  “He’s trying to come to Canada now.”

  “We won’t let him in, though.”

  “Probably not. Not at this point.”

  “Is that what—? Did he get into the States because of Project Paperweight?”

  “Paperclip.”

  She returns the disintegrating Post to the newspaper pile as it dawns on her—what her father is telling her. “Is this the guy Mr. Froelich saw?” Maybe his hearing is going a little, because he doesn’t answer. “Dad?”

  “No,” says Jack.

  “What?”

  “That’s not the man Henry Froelich saw.” He continues reading his Ottawa Citizen. “They just performed laser surgery on a man in Detroit”—he pronounces it “lazzer”—“zapped a blood clot in his brain, pretty soon we won’t need surgery at all. They’ll map the human genome and get in there and engineer everything at birth.”

  “Did Mr. Froelich ever tell you who he saw?”

  Jack nods, and she waits as he lifts the clear plastic mask to his face and takes a drink of oxyge
n before she asks, “Who?”

  “An engineer.” He exhales through his mouth. “Henry didn’t know his name.” He looks at her for a moment, and she waits for him to speak but he returns to his paper.

  “Did you tell the police?”

  “Tell them what?”

  “About the engineer?”

  “Hank told them.”

  “How come they didn’t do anything?”

  “I don’t think they believed him.”

  Because his story was tied to Ricky’s alibi. The one she helped to undermine. She tightens her hand around the medal again.

  Jack raises the mask toward his face, pauses—“It was a different time. We were after Communists then, not Nazis. Old war”—then inhales.

  It takes her a moment to realize that he has said, “Cold War.” He draws in the oxygen slowly, his lids half closing as though in prayer. He will be asleep soon. Then it will be too late in the evening. And if she waits till morning, the sunshine will persuade her that she’s fine and ought not to burden him with her story. She knows now how to begin. Dad? I have to tell you about something sad that happened to me a long time ago, but don’t worry, the story has a happy ending. See? I’m happy.

  She watches his face fall—like a slackened sail, it abandons expression, and it’s clear how much effort has gone into the rigging of an ordinary smile. Are we all making that effort all the time, unaware of what it costs?

  He glances at the mask but doesn’t reach for it. He turns his clear blue gaze on her. “What is it, sweetie?”

  It’s suddenly painful to hear him. Not because his speech is faint or laboured but because it is not. She is hearing her father’s voice for the first time in—how long? It has been eroding, crumbling like a shoreline. She feels tears standing in her eyes. Is it because of what she has to say, or because, at the sound of his voice, her father has returned? As though a younger version of him has been permitted to come up from the shades and sit here in the living room of the condo. If she closes her eyes she will see the back of his sandy crewcut, elbow out the car window, hairs on his forearm combed by the breeze. Who wants ice cream?