Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

“What was it?”

“Project Paperclip.”

She waited but he was silent. A commercial came on. “What did they do?” she asked.

“They got us to the moon.”

On TV, the Man from Glad bagged a housewife’s leaky garbage.

“How?”

“By importing German scientists after the war. Nazis, some of them.”

“Was von Braun a Nazi?”

“Darn tootin’. So was Rudolph.”

“Who?”

Rudolph, Donald Duck, Apollo … like something out of Mad Magazine . But he wasn’t joking. He wasn’t even using his man-to-man voice, he sounded different. Constricted. The aural equivalent of looking through a telescope from the wrong end. “That must’ve been illegal.” She knew that much from school, despite what her father liked to call the Mickey Mouse curriculum.

“It sure was, and it’s still classified,” he said. “So not a word.”

“Madeleine.” Maman was in the doorway with her yellow rubber gloves on.

“How do you know about it?” she asked her father.

He winked, and sounded like himself again. “You better go help your mother.”

Madeleine was graduating high school in three weeks. In three weeks her life would begin. She slouched into the kitchen. Behind her she heard the TV switch off and the patio doors slide open. A short time later, she and her mother heard the roar of the old lawn-mower, and as they chopped rhubarb and peeled apples for the church bazaar they saw him through the window, crossing at intervals back and forth, closing in on a shrinking border of longer green around the swimming pool.

She felt sorry for her father. Trapped in a suburb. With a wife incapable of discussing the subject that fascinated him most. She looked at her mother, pricking the pie crust with a fork before sliding it into the oven. Mimi could not tolerate even the mention of the name Froelich.

“My mother’s way of dealing with difficult subjects was to bury them.”

Nina asks, “How did your father react when you came out?”

“Oh, he was — he wasn’t nearly as bad as Maman — my mother. He always asks how Christine is — unless my mother’s in the room, because she’ll throw a fit—”

“What does that look like?”

“Oh, oh it’s all pointy and shrill and hysterical. My dad, on the other hand, takes us for lunch when he comes to Toronto.”

“How does your mother feel about that?”

“We don’t tell her.”

“You keep it secret?”

“Not a secret, we just don’t … well, yes, okay.”

“Whose idea is that?”

“It’s not an idea, we just don’t want to deal with her freak-out.”

Madeleine recalls strolling back to her father’s hotel with him after that first visit: “How do you think Maman might feel if she knew the three of us had had lunch?” he asked.

“She’d freak.”

He smiled. “You know, when I met your mother she wasn’t much younger than you are now. Full of beans. Real little spitfire, like you. She’s never been afraid of anything. I’ve been afraid of plenty, but she … would’ve made a good officer. She’s been through a lot, your mother.” Eyes on the sky, compressing his lips. “She’s a real lady.”

She felt suddenly ashamed — sad and full of guilty love for Maman.

“Her feelings might be hurt,” she said.

Dad nodded and made his mild wincing expression. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“I won’t mention it if you don’t.”

He smiled and winked at her. Pilot to co-pilot.

“So it was your father’s idea,” says Nina.

“He’s the one who has to live with her. At least he supports my relationship.”

Nina is silent.

“What?”

“So you knew Richard Froelich.”

Madeleine nods.

“Did you know the child who was murdered?”

Madeleine shrugs. “Kind of.”

Nina waits.

Madeleine is silent.

Nina asks, “Did your father do intelligence work?”

Madeleine almost laughs. “He’s a management consultant.”

“How did he know about Project Paperclip?”

“I don’t know, he … reads a lot. Well, he reads newspapers. And Time . And The Economist… .” She can almost feel the lightbulb over her head when she says, “Uncle Simon.”

“His brother?”

She shakes her head. “His old flying instructor. This glamorous David Niven kind of guy, you know? British — the ascot, moustache, the whole bit. He offered to train me as a spy.” She hits the arm of the swivel chair in delight. “Any bets he was an intelligence type!”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s dead.”

They sit silent for a few moments. Then Madeleine asks, “Have you ever heard of Dora?”

“No.”

“What were you thinking just now?”

“Oh, just that it’s an odd name.”

“The Nazis liked to give pretty names to horrible places.”

“Yes, but Dora was also the name of a patient of Freud’s.”

Christine has told Madeleine this story. Dora was a famous “hysteric.” She told Freud that her father had interfered with her sexually, and Freud believed her at first. Then he started hearing so many rape and abuse stories from so many women that he decided they were all deluded.

“Your father believed Henry Froelich.”

“Yeah. He was about the only one who did.” Madeleine looks at the ceiling, compressing her lips. “My dad is like that. Loyal.”

WHAT HAPPENED in a cave long ago. What happened in a classroom. What happened at a crossroads, in a meadow, on a bridge.

When the Piper was not paid, he treated the children as he had the rats. Led them away. They disappeared into a mountain. All but one who was lame. What was in the mountain?

They never found Henry Froelich’s body. Jack never heard from Simon again. He never heard of Oskar Fried again. All the children disappeared into adults, all but one who returned to the earth and remained there. Forever young.

The cave called Dora remained part of East Germany, borders shifting around it. The Berlin Wall began to crumble from within. One side could no longer afford the arms race and, like a homeowner taking the precaution of opening windows before a hurricane, parted the Iron Curtain and called it glasnost. The wind reawakened a babel of nations, and they wanted borders that followed bloodlines.

Oil crises, hijackings and environmental disasters. “Terrorism” arose to rival “Cold War,” and “covert action” entered common parlance. Security required secrecy, and so did its crimes, but all was worth it if we managed to avoid “the big one.” As it turned out, the small ones were very profitable, waged by “freedom fighters” or “terrorists,” depending on who had last sold them arms. The trick was to spread the weapons and the cash around in such a way as to keep the Third World, the Arab world, all the “other” worlds, at each others’ throats. The West was winning.

Rockets bred anti-ballistic missiles and spawned dreams of Star Wars — safety nets in the sky, life imitating entertainment to lull the prosperous into forgetting about the danger lurking in human hearts; the same anger that triggered a holocaust in 1914 with a simple assassin’s bullet, its trajectory traceable through a century. Fanaticizing anger. Anger that requires no bullets. Anger that consumes empires.

Still the cave waited. Gaping, sore and empty. As time went by, it mattered less and less that in 1969 a rocket went from Florida to the moon and men walked there. Good men. People’s dads.