“I’ve been feeling….” She wishes she had the excuse of an oxygen mask to hide the rise of sorrow.
She closes her eyes and hears him say, “Spit it out, old buddy.”
She opens her eyes and smiles. “I used to feel guilty.”
“Why, what for?” His blue eyes have sharpened. Even his left eye is awake.
“Because I made Ricky go to jail,” she says, and feels her forehead wrinkle at the childish syntax. “Because … I think my testimony caused him to be convicted.” Her face contorts, and she begins to breathe through her mouth.
Her father is looking at her hard.
“No it didn’t.”
It’s his man-to-man voice. If she didn’t know him so well, she might think he was angry with her. But she knows he’s worried.
“I’m okay, Dad. It’s just, you know, over the years, I’d read in the paper”—seeking refuge in a sarcastic tone—“‘convicted on the evidence of child witnesses’ and I’d think, ‘Gee, maybe he actually was guilty and I don’t have to feel so bad,’ and that’d make me feel worse.” She needs to say the words. About Mr. March. And then something will be all right. Say it. She opens her mouth but nothing forms except a pool of saliva under her tongue.
Jack says, “You weren’t the only witness.”
“I know.”
“Those two little gals—one of them was a friend of yours, what were their names? Martha?”
“Marjorie.”
“That’s right.”
“And Grace.”
“Well, they did him in.” His choice of words is like a bump in the road.
She waits. Then asks, “What did they say?”
“A whole lot of nonsense.” He reaches for the mask.
“I always thought”—willing herself not to cry, her face feels like a balloon full of water—“thought I disappointed you that day.”
He juts his chin forward and his face darkens. “Let’s get one thing perfectly clear,” he says. “You have never—and I mean never, not once—disappointed me.” Do you read me? He takes another breath.
He’s fading. Don’t go, Dad. Returning to the shades. Wait. It will be too late to tell him. About the silence of the school after three. The smell of orange peels and pencil shavings. The empty corridor she walked afterwards, past our gracious Queen, running when she got outside to make a breeze to soothe the sting, it doesn’t hurt. I was so strong, I didn’t know that I was small. Dad, watch. She opens her mouth to tell him and hears him say—
“I waved.”
She blinks. Tears suspend. “What?”
“It was me. I saw Rick on the road that day. I waved.”
She sits, lips still parted with what she was going to say, but it’s gone.
“I was the one in the car.” He holds the clear mask up to his face, closes his eyes and inhales through his nose. Exhales, opens his eyes and looks at her. True blue.
She shakes her head slowly, waiting, as though for Novocaine to wear off. She sees the shape of a man behind a windshield, sun splintering off it, the outline of his hat, his hand. Dust in the wake of a blue car on a country road in spring….
“Why didn’t you say something?” she asks.
“I was doing my job.” And he tells her.
She leans her elbows on her knees, looks down at the white pile carpet between her feet and concentrates on breathing evenly. She slips her hands into her armpits to warm them. Something has fallen away. Quietly, with no fuss. The ground beneath her feet.
“… Oskar Fried, I don’t know what his real name …”
Uncle Simon and Mr. McCarroll
“… my number two …”
Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency
“… a drunken U.S. Marine officer arrested for espionage a few years later …”
NATO
“… the space race …”
NORAD
“… threat from Soviet missiles …”
USAF
“… Cuba on the brink …”
USAFE
“… Berlin set to blow …”
The Pentagon
“… one individual can’t possibly see the whole picture …”
The Moon
“She never would have been in Centralia,” says Madeleine.
“Who?”
The schoolyard
“Claire,” she answers.
His bad eye has begun to seep. He wipes it with his wrist. “That was a terrible tragedy.”
Madeleine stares at him. Who are you? is the logical next question. It lasts less than a second, the glimpse of the strange man in the gold recliner, freshly defined as though by the flash of a camera illuminating a previously unseen shape in the dark. Then he is her father again. Smaller than he used to be. A little lost in his golf shirt. His white tennis shoes looking too new, too substantial, the way old people’s new shoes do.
“‘Tragedy’ is a word people use when they don’t want the blame.” she says.
If Claire had never moved to Centralia, who would Mr. March have selected in her place? A little girl with a dark brown pixie cut….
“… imagine flying through a thick fog where you can’t tell what’s up or what’s down. In a case like that, you have to—”
“It didn’t make the world safer, Dad.”
“—trust your instruments. And it worked, we beat them.”
“Beat whom?”
“The Soviets. They’re crying uncle.” The expression on his face is obstinate. An old child.
She says, “Do you think the world’s going to be safer when the wall comes down?”
He leans toward her. “I’ll tell you a secret, old buddy, sometimes it’s hard to know what’s the right thing to do, but if you’re ever in doubt, just ask yourself, ‘What’s the hardest thing I could do right now?’”
“Mr. Froelich died.”
Jack sighs and reaches for a tissue to dab his eye. “I think he may have been killed.”
“Who killed him? Simon?”
“More likely someone Simon told.”
“… the CIA? Why, for the sake of Oskar Fried?”
“Presumably.”
“You told Simon about Mr. Froelich.”
“It was my job to tell him.”
Everything has become granular. She can feel her lips, her face, the air around her; she can see the coffee table, the fighting roosters, the Alps, the television, all of it turning to sand, set to disintegrate at the slam of a door.
“I’m not saying it was right,” says Jack. “I told Simon before I knew what could happen. That’s no excuse.”
She is struck dizzy by a jolt of memory—Maman dragging them to the car while Dad stood in the doorway, looking shell-shocked. The day after her testimony. Maman almost screeching at her to get in the car, main-te-nant! She got them out of there. Far from the place where a man lived who killed children.
“My involvement didn’t change the fact that, if the police had ever had a hope of catching the man who did it, they never would have looked at the Froelich kid in the first place. Whoever it was had to be long gone by then. Because there was never another similar murder in the area.” It’s his last-word-on-the-subject voice.
Is this the voice Mike always heard? Is this the father Mike had? What would she have done if she had had this father? Would she have found a gun and a jungle? Kill or be killed.
From the basement Maman calls, “Madeleine.”
“What?” she bellows back at the stairs.
“Come down here, I want to show you something.”
“In a minute!” She turns back to her father.
What did you do in the Cold War, Daddy?
“… we beat them in space …”
Why?
To keep the world safe for you kids.
Why?
To make sure there would be a world for you to inherit.
Why?
“Everything we did was for your sake.”
“Maybe you should have
asked us for help,” she says.
“Asked who?”
“The kids. We were born into it. The world that could be destroyed in a matter of hours. We were tougher than you.”
“Look me in the eyes.” She does. “What I did was one tiny part of a much larger effort. There were countless operations like it, and many were much more costly. Some were genuinely effective. Others you’d have to write off as sunk cost. The point is not ‘Was what I did worth it in and of itself?’ Look at the Second World War, look at the Dieppe raid. That was a travesty.” His eyes narrow, along with his mouth, his voice—flinty. “A thousand Canadians killed, two thousand taken prisoner, for what? So the Brits could test out a bunch of tactical theories. But the bottom line is, we won, and no one’s calling Churchill a war criminal. If our leaders today had one-tenth his guts and brains…. He’d never have got mired in the likes of Vietnam….”
They are still for a while, their breathing audible. His lower lip is compressed against his upper one, lids drooping with every inhalation. On the TV, a new improved Mr. Clean visits two women in a toiletless bathroom.
“Dad?”
“Yeah, sweetheart?” Jack watches her carefully, gauging her expression. What will she do with what he has told her? She looks worried, but in her face is an appeal. It reassures him. It’s the same look she always gave him when she knew something was wrong but she also knew she had come to the right place with her problem. My little girl.
“Do you remember my teacher in Centralia?”
“… Mr. Marks.”
“Mr. March.”
“Sure, I remember him, why?”
She doesn’t reply right away. He reaches out his hand. “What’s wrong, sweetie?”
Finally, she says, “… He died.”
He watches her face crumple, and she weeps. He opens his arms. She comes to him, kneels by his chair.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” he says, stroking her head. “That’s too bad.”
Her face is hidden in her hands on the armrest of his chair, her shoulders begin to shake. Should he call her mother? “When did he die?”
She doesn’t answer, she is crying too hard. He didn’t know she was so fond of her old teacher.
“Was he very old?”
She shakes her head but doesn’t look up. Keening softly, like a poor dog. “You know what, old buddy?” He thinks he hears her reply, “What?” so he continues, “I think maybe you’re taking it extra hard because of all the sad things that happened in Centralia.”
His throat tightens, helping lighten his voice to a tone that used to come naturally years ago, when she was a child—the once-upon-a-time voice. “But you know, it’s a funny thing, ’cause even though some sad things happened there….” He pauses, blinks and clears his throat. “We had some of the nicest remember-whens in Centralia.” He feels tears on his cheeks. So as not to take his arms from around her, he raises his shoulder to his face and wipes them away on his shirt.
“Remember how you used to come with me into Exeter to get my hair cut and you’d entertain the troops? Remember going to the market in London for crusty rolls and good German wurst? Remember Storybook Gardens?” He strokes her head—hair so soft, still shiny like a child’s. “Remember those mice in the Christmas window at Simpson’s, and that little pussycat jazz band?” He chuckles. “Remember the first day of school, when you had me walk you there and held my hand the whole way? That’s the last time you ever needed me to do that.”
He pauses for breath. There is all the time in the world…. You kids have your whole life ahead of you…. “That’s the funny thing about life, eh? Some of the nicest memories are mixed up with the saddest ones. And that just makes them nicer. You have to think of the good times. That’s how I think of your brother….” And if we spoiled you, it was because we loved you so much. Wanted you to have what we never had, you and your brother….
Jack doesn’t picture his son. He sees the blue dome over that place where it is always summer, where the white buildings bask in sunshine, the parade square shimmers and the little coloured houses wait for the men to come home at five. That’s where his son is. Jack is there too, with his family. His beautiful wife. All he ever wanted.
He strokes his daughter’s head and realizes that he is nodding in time to something. A vestige, perhaps, of an old impulse to rock his child. She seems calmer now. He was always the one she came to, and she always allowed herself to be consoled by him. Can a child know what a gift that is to a parent?
“It’s okay, sweetie,” he says, because she is still crying. “Hey, I meant to tell you. You know that dog in the stormpipe? Well, the fire truck came and got him out. Safe and sound, I saw him. It was a beagle.”
He told her a hard thing today. Perhaps she will hold it against him, but he believes she will understand one day. He told her because she is his best. And she should know what she’s made of. “You’re my best,” he says to her softly, “my best old buddy.”
Madeleine weeps, water leaving her like darkness draining. She yields to this blessed respite. To what remains. Glimpsing once more—from her old hiding place, across the distance of years—her father gently comforting her for what he doesn’t know hurts her.
After a while she feels his hand come to rest. She moves it carefully and stands up. He is asleep.
She wipes her face and blows her nose. Looks down at him. His head tilted, lips parted, hands lax on the arms of his chair; straggling fingers, ten spent soldiers. In his lap, the oxygen mask. Fighter pilots and invalids. Per ardua ad astra….
She bends to kiss him. His skin soft as suede, faint capillaries and tributaries visible, traces of an old torrent. His cheek is wet, whiskers less dense now. Old Spice.
“See you, Dad.”
Through adversity to the stars.
She is putting on her jacket in the front hall, but turns at the sound of her mother mounting the basement stairs.
“You’re younger than I am, Madeleine, you could come downstairs.” Mimi sees her reaching for her car keys. “Where are you going at this hour?” She arrives at the top of the steps a little out of breath. In her arms, a froth of yellowed satin and lace.
“What’s that?”
Mimi smiles shyly. “I thought you might like this.”
Madeleine stares. “Your wedding gown?”
Mimi nods, forehead crinkling bashfully.
It’s on the tip of Madeleine’s tongue to inquire pleasantly, “What for? Halloween?” But she has sunk below the comedy watermark, the calm of the almost-drowned is upon her. She sighs.
“Madeleine, qu’est-ce que tu as?”
“Nothing, I’m fine, I just … oh, I remember what I was going to ask you, pourquoi tu ne m’as pas dit que papa avait besoin d’oxygène?”
Mimi shrugs her shoulders, eyebrows rising in tandem—her old show of impatience. “Why would I tell you? You know anyway he has this pill, he has that pill”—counting on her fingers—“he has the glycerine, the beta blockers, he has the oxygen, it’s the same.”
Madeleine waits.
Finally Mimi drops her shoulders and her eyebrows. “We didn’t want you to worry.”
“I’m worried anyway, plus I’m the only one left, who are you going to worry if you don’t worry me?”
Mimi says, “You’re crying,” and moves to touch her daughter’s face.
Madeleine backs away reflexively and feels an immediate pang of guilt. “I’m okay, Maman, thanks, that was such a good fricot but I’ve got to get back, I’m working.” She reaches for her keys on the hall table but they fall from her hand—when did she pick them up? She stoops to recover them.
“What were you talking about with Papa?” asks Mimi. Maternal radar. She meets her mother’s eyes.
“He told me he waved,” she says matter-of-factly, and observes the air go flat around her. “You knew, eh?”
Her mother’s features tighten. “Of course I knew,” says Mimi. “I’m his wife.”
“Why didn�
��t you go to the police?”
“He’s my husband. He’s your father.”
“He’s a criminal.”
Madeleine hears the smack, feels her face burn with the slap she can see poised in the palm of her mother’s hand. But no one gets slapped.
“It’s okay,” she says, “I’m leaving.”
“Don’t be silly, Madeleine,” says Mimi, draping the wedding gown over the banister, turning toward the open kitchen. “Come,” she says, lighting a cigarette, “I’m making a poutine râpée for you, you’re too thin, then we’ll play Scrabble.”
Madeleine stares after her mother. No wonder I’m so fucked up. The smoke reaches her and she inhales the refreshing menthol difference, resisting its power to comfort her. “Mother, did you know oxygen is highly flammable? It is also highly inflammable.”
“Madeleine, your trouble is you’re too much like me.”
“I am nothing like you.”
Mimi turns on the tap, pulls on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and starts scrubbing potatoes. Her husband is dying.
Madeleine inquires reasonably, “Have you thought of cutting down to, say, three packs a day?”
“You call yourself a feminist, but you’re not very nice to your mother.”
Madeleine sighs. She notices the kitchen table, already set for breakfast for three. A cock-a-doodle tea cozy forms a quilted freestanding complement to matching napkins and placemats. Next to her father’s plate sits a long, narrow plastic container with fourteen compartments stamped with the days of the week and “a.m.” or “p.m.” In the centre of the table, the salt, pepper, sugar, toothpicks and napkin-holder cluster on a lazy Susan. It’s ten P.M. Do you know where your life is?
“Qu’est-ce que t’as dit, Madeleine?”
“Nothing.”
Madeleine stands immobilized in the spacious foyer, like something delivered by mistake from Sears. Around her rise the clean lines of the condo. On the wall that leads down to the rec room are framed family photos, starting with her parents’ wedding, then descending, posting by baby by holiday, black-and-white to colour, The Story of Mimi and Jack. The pictures stop in 1967—the four of them at Expo in front of the American pavilion—a geodesic dome. Mike had long hair.
The Way the Crow Flies Page 81