Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

Fried says, still shaking his head, “I do not do this—”

“It’s entirely up to you, sir, I just want you to know you’re welcome and it’s fine with Mr. Crawford — Simon.”

“J a , Si-mon,” says Fried, as though it were two words.

“Now, you know what to say if anyone asks why you’re here?” Jack puts his hat back on and adjusts it.

“Guest professor of Western University, London.”

“That’s right.”

Jack takes a last look around. There is nothing more for him to do. The fridge is stocked, there is toilet paper in the bathroom, and on the small dining table is a map of London. Simon has seen to everything. Except for a TV. As an afterthought, Jack goes to the map and circles Storybook Gardens.

“Orchids,” he says, eliciting a faint smile from Fried. “Auf Wiedersehen for now, sir.”

“Goodbye,” says Fried.

The door closes behind him and Jack hears the slide and schunk of locks, followed by silence. He can feel Fried looking at him through the peephole, waiting for him to leave. He turns back the way he came, down the silent swirl of red and orange, and dismisses a mild sense of anticlimax. Well, what did he expect? A glass of schnapps and a chinwag about the space race? Give Fried a week or so, Jack thinks, and he’ll be thirsting for company. Jack will have him out to the house for supper, relaxed and nursing his pipe — that’s what the tobacco smell was, he realizes now, Fried and Froelich smoke the same brand. The two of them might very well hit it off — both Germans, both men of science displaced by war. Jack reaches the elevator and pauses at the recollection that Henry is Jewish. Well, what difference should that make to Oskar Fried? Jack has committed that error once already: assuming that Henry was an anti-Semite because he was German. He presses the button and waits. Fried is a scientist. He of all people is likely to be above that sort of thing — what does it matter if you’re black, green or blue when you’re splitting the atom? Maybe Jack can pour a few good Löwenbräus and get them talking politics — if not science. Introduce his kids to Fried, knowing that one day he can tell them they met a real live defector. A Soviet scientist, straight out of the history books.

The elevator opens and he steps in. As the doors close, he hears a small dog yapping from somewhere in the building; otherwise he encounters no one on his way back to the car.

Madeleine has built a tank and a station wagon. Claire has finished her house and built a church which they have agreed is also the school and the A&P. They are arranging farm animals around their new subdivision when the phone rings in the kitchen.

“Hello? … Hi Sharon …,” says Mrs. Froelich. “Yeah, she is.” She laughs. “Well I wouldn’t mind if she did … no big deal … sure, I’ll send her home….”

Madeleine watches out the Froelichs’ living-room window as Claire walks away down the driveway. Marsha Woodley is there at the foot of it, talking to Ricky. Claire reaches out and takes Ricky’s hand. Marsha takes Claire’s other hand and the three of them walk down St. Lawrence Avenue like that, toward the McCarrolls’ house, just as though Ricky and Marsha were her parents and Claire was their little girl.

Jack drops off the staff car and returns to his office to find a message telling him to call the CO. He asks his admin clerk, “When did this come in?” Has he been missed? His clerk answers, “An hour ago, sir.” Jack dials the CO’s extension — what will he say if Woodley asks where he has been? Jack doesn’t relish the thought of lying to his commanding officer.

He needn’t have worried. Woodley was calling to advise him that the prime minister has finally ordered an increase in the alert status. The Canadian armed forces are at “military vigilance”—a level just short of the U.S. defcon 2. But Diefenbaker still has not made a statement in support of the U.S. And the alert is to be implemented secretly. “You’ve got to be kidding,” says Jack.

Our Voodoo interceptors “may or may not” now be armed with Genie nuclear missiles which we “may or may not” have in our possession.

“Fun ’n’ games, eh?” says Hal.

“Bunch of Mickey Mouse politicians.”

“Let’s keep our eye on the ball, shall we? Old Dief needs all the help he can get.”

Jack gets the message. There has been enough bellyaching about government in the past couple of days; the people of Canada elected Diefenbaker for better or worse, and that’s who the military is working for. The new state of alert will have little effect on the operations of RCAF Centralia. They are in for more high-tension thumb-twiddling; all the more reason to cool it with the complaints.

“Righto,” says Jack.

“’ Wiedersehen.”

Jack crosses the Huron County road and enters the PMQ patch. He feels tired for some reason. Kids are out playing. In the Boucher driveway, a team’s worth of hockey equipment is laid out to air, and up ahead, in Jack’s own driveway, the Rambler is parked awry, which is how he can tell Mimi’s been out shopping. Everything looks normal. But that’s just a veneer. Normal has begun to mean that we could all be annihilated in a matter of hours. He takes a big breath of autumn air. You never had it so good . Who said that? How can something be so true and so false at the same time?

He sees his daughter come out of the Froelich house with the German shepherd dog. Jack would rather she didn’t get so close to that animal — they can turn on you. But she’s fearless, clutching its fur, her eyes squeezed shut as the dog “guides” her across the street. And he remembers what it was he was going to do today. Drop in on Mr. Marks.

He watches her arrive at the front step and open her eyes. The dog lopes home; she turns and sees Jack and runs to him. He opens his arms, catches her and swings her around—“Dad, give me an aeroplane!”

He takes her by an ankle and a wrist and spins. She’s fine. She has forgotten all about “duck and cover.” He won’t alarm her by bringing up the subject again, with its attendant spectre of annihilation.

“Eat up, Mike,” says Jack. But the boy picks at his dinner. One-word answers to all Jack’s questions. “How was school?”

“… Okay.”

“Sit up straight, mister, and eat what your mother cooked for you.”

He feels a degree of annoyance that he knows is out of proportion to the situation. He would like to blame it on the current world crisis but he knows it predates that. The boy is becoming sullen. Mimi says he has entered the “awkward age.” Jack replied, “In my day, we couldn’t afford an ‘awkward age,’ we were too busy putting food on the table.” And she came back with that French astringency: “You want him to have the things you never had, well this is one.” He was stung, but glad that his wife is able to best him so reliably in these matters. It gives him permission to be “a nice papa.” Because lately he has had the sense that he is flying blind when it comes to the boy. His own father never would have stood for these truculent one-syllable retorts. But then Jack wouldn’t wish his own father on anyone.

Mimi says, “Qu’est-ce que tu as, Michel?”

The boy looks up at his father. “Dad, are we on alert?”

Jack stabs his mashed potatoes with his fork. “There’s nothing for you to worry about, Mike. The only ones who should be worried are those poor old crows, they must’ve got an awful fright when the siren went off today.” And he winks at Madeleine.

“What if there’s a war, are we just gonna sit there?” asks Mike.

Madeleine expects him to be told that there isn’t going to be a war, how many times do I have to—? But her father eats steadily, chewing, chewing his potatoes, his lips getting thinner. Is someone in trouble?