Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

She and Christine live in the top half of a Victorian house in the Annex, a leafy downtown neighbourhood of artists, students, immigrants and lefty yuppies. On her way down Brunswick toward Bloor she breathed deeply of spring, and noticed that the sidewalks were packed with look-alike couples. There were identical lesbians with neatly pressed sweatshirts and big glasses. There were gay men with matching sideburns. There were straight couples in khakis and windbreakers — stick a canoe on their heads and it’s anyone’s guess. Twinsexuals. At the post office in the back of the pharmacy, she reached into her pocket for money to buy stamps and found a “Final Notice” for a delivery — funny how one never receives a “First Notice.” She handed it across the counter and the elderly Korean lady gave her a brown-paper package about the size of a cereal box. She opened it — a bran flakes carton, mummified with masking tape. Inside, a dozen stale muffins and a note in her mother’s hand, “Ma chérie, bon appétit . No news, love and prayers, Papa et Maman. P.S. Remember Mr. McDermott across the street? He died. Papa bought a new Olds.” Madeleine smiled in private oblation to love and absurdity.

She doesn’t really have time to do the AIDS benefit, but doesn’t want to say no to a good cause. And Tommy is persuasive. She went to her high school graduation prom with him. Tomasz Czerniatewicz. She’d had paralyzing crushes on two people — Stephen Childerhouse and Monica Goldfarb — but was too shy to approach the former burnished god, and her desire for the latter dark lady simmered behind a fire-curtain of denial. It was not hip to be queer, it was perverted, and not a single rock star had yet admitted to bisexuality. She tried to escape the “bad feelings” but it was like outrunning a cartoon bullet that passes you, skids to a stop midair, turns and nails you. She saw The Children’s Hour at fourteen, while babysitting, and went home with a temperature and stomach flu. She had watched, bathed in shame, yet riveted by the desire palpable in the boarding-school air between Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn. Shirley felt so “sick and dirty” she hanged herself, freeing Audrey to seek solace in the manly embrace of James Garner. Madeleine sought solace in James Garner’s manliness too, but couldn’t quell the broken record of svelte Shirley sobbing, “I feel so sick and dirty!” Like George’s parrot, “sick-and-dirty, sick-and-dirty, grawk!” Supposedly the film is a metaphor for the Communist witch hunts of the fifties. Tell that to the lesbians.

She had intended to boycott the prom and spend the evening scoffing at it with Tommy and the other marginals from the drama club, but she was so shocked by his invitation that she said yes. Her mother was thrilled and worked for weeks sewing Madeleine a formal. “Ah, Madeleine, que t’es belle! We’ll take a picture to show your brother when he comes home.” Tommy wore a baby blue tuxedo with a hot pink cummerbund, anticipating disco by a good few years.

They had bonded over the fact that Madeleine was not allowed to wear jeans to school and he was not permitted to grow his hair, even to a length acceptable in the Dutch army. He wore glasses that made him look like a physicist, which was what both his parents were at the National Research Council. The whole family wore identical Nana Mouskouri glasses, and they all had short hair except for the mother, who wore a scraped-back bun. Mr. and Mrs. Czerniatewicz were Polish immigrants, they had survived the war. So much for the sixties; the older Czerniatewicz brothers listened to classical music, excelled at math, wore flood pants, and had pocket protectors and bone structure to die for. They were at university, but had played high school football with Mike and, like him, were all-star athletes. Except for Tommy, who’d been born with a hole in his heart—“that’s why I got piano lessons.”

He reminded Madeleine of Gordon Lawson — a perfect gentleman, with the hanky to prove it. But with a wicked streak of humour; when she went to his house after school and met his parents, he told them she was Jewish, and she could hear their chiselled smiles atrophy with a clink .

She suffered torments of guilt, but Tommy begged her to keep up the ruse and soon she was in too deep to back out. Mr. and Mrs. Czerniatewicz grew fond of her, queried her about her culture and beliefs, and it was all she could do to fend off their desire to meet her wonderful parents who had survived the camps and changed their name to McCarthy to facilitate immigration. Stymied in their efforts, the Czerniatewiczes struck up a friendship with a Jewish scientist at the stark lab where they hunted for particles, and wound up at a Passover Seder the following spring. Tommy pranced and clicked his heels together: “We’re like the Littlest Hobo and Lassie, spreading love and understanding.”

He tutored her in math, and they spent hours belting out Broadway tunes while Tommy pounded the piano and Madeleine danced like a Gumby Gwen Verdon.

Her best friend, Jocelyn, went to the prom with the captain of the football team, the impossibly good-looking, strong and silent Boom Boom Robinson. His sandy curls lapped at the collar of his midnight blue tux, and before dawn, when she and Madeleine ditched their formals and dived into the backyard pool, Jocelyn confessed that he was nice enough but he “didn’t even try anything.” They dried off and ate a loaf of Wonderbread fondue: take a slice of Wonderbread, squish it into a ball, dip it in a bowl of melted chocolate chips.

Tommy and Boom Boom ran into each other ten years later, at Woody’s Bar in Toronto, fell in love and moved in together. Boom Boom died six months ago and Tommy has been raising funds and awareness ever since. That’s how he and Madeleine hooked up again. His hair is even shorter than it used to be, platinum buzz cut. He teaches at a high school for the performing arts.

“I had a huge crush on your brother, Madeleine.”

MADELEINE IS STARING at a spot on the taupe carpet. Feels her mouth in the shape of an upside-down smile, her cheeks striped with tears, nose red with crying, is that the real reason clowns have red noses?

Nina puts a glass of therapeutic spring water into her hand.

She drinks, feels tadpoles in her stomach, contents of a swamp, thickening, things hatching. “I feel sick,” she says, and drops her forehead to her hand.

“Madeleine. Can you close your eyes for a moment?”

She does. Tears seep out.

“What is it?”

“My brother,” she says, and weeps.

“He died,” says Nina.

“We don’t say ‘died,’ we say ‘missing.’” She reaches for the tissues and covers her face with her hands, sobbing. “My poor dad.”

“Were they close? Your brother and your father?”

Madeleine shakes her head, blows her nose and almost laughs. She lobs the sodden wad into the wastebasket, pulls a fresh handful from the box and tells a story.

In the spring of ’69, when Madeleine was fifteen, Mike came home to Ottawa in a United States Marine Corps uniform.

“What the hell are you wearing?” said Jack.

He was supposed to have been out west, working on an oil rig in Alberta. Instead, he had completed basic training at Parris Island. His head was shaved. He was newly muscled, neck straining against his collar.

“Have you got a brain in your head?” asked Jack, white around the mouth. “Are you that stupid?” Smacking his newspaper down on the kitchen table.