Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

He reaches for the clipboard. “The following little girls….”

After supper, the hum and rattle of Mimi’s sewing machine competes with Sing along with Mitch . Madeleine watches the bright fabric passing beneath the pistoning needle, her mother’s foot working the pedal like an accelerator. She is lengthening Madeleine’s clown costume. Sewn from an old set of drapes, their indestructible muslin patterned with tropical flowers in crimson, emerald and canary-yellow, pleated and pompommed. Madeleine looks longingly at the hat — she is not allowed to wear it till Halloween. Constructed of Life magazines rolled up, shellacked and upholstered, it’s pointed like a dunce cap. She recalls that Anne Frank is somewhere in there, smothering. She takes a deep breath and looks away.

“You’ll get a job at Barnum ’n’ Bailey in a costume like that,” says her father. “You’ve got the smartest maman in the world.”

On Saturday, a U-2 spy plane is shot down over Cuba, killing the pilot, and they all put their clocks back an hour, for daylight saving time. Madeleine endures figure-skating lessons at the arena, where the torment of picks and figure eights is mitigated by the presence of Auriel, who looks like a self-described “velvet sausage roll” in her tutu — and the sight of Marjorie, dander bouncing with every forward thrust, keeps them in silent stitches. Madeleine is stalwart through swimming lessons in the echoey indoor pool, survives the churning fug of the change room and emerges gratefully to watch Mike’s hockey practice, hot chocolate steaming from a paper cup in her hand, swinging the heels of her boots against the scarred bleacher boards. Mike plays defence. She relishes each crisp swoosh and slice of his skates, admiring the look of concentration on his face, his cheeks pink with exertion. Afterwards, she watches, mesmerized, as the Zamboni heals the surface of the ice. Her brother and Arnold Pinder emerge from the locker room with Roy in tow, lugging his heavy goalie equipment, and the four of them watch as the big boys power onto the ice with graceful strides, sticks pivoting from their gloved hands: passing the puck, turning on a dime to skate swiftly backwards. Ricky Froelich is among them, skirting the boards easily, dangerously, flicking his hank of hair out of his eyes with a toss of his head. He was suspended last year for fighting, but it hasn’t happened again.

In the afternoon the McCarthys go shopping in London, and at the crowded entrance to the Covent Market, Madeleine sees a young man and an old lady parading with signs, Ban the Bomb and Insects Shall Inherit the Earth .

That night, Jack sits with his wife and son on the couch and watches the Newsmagazine special on CBC. Knowlton Nash talks with White House press secretary Pierre Salinger in Washington, and a succession of officials line up to praise Khrushchev’s “statesmanlike decision” to dismantle the missiles. The relief is palpable.

“It pays to stand up to a bully, that’s what history teaches, Mike.”

Madeleine sits cross-legged on the floor, waiting for the news to be over. Jack called them in to watch “history in the making.” The main anchor, Norman DePoe, sums up: “… men are still dying in the rice paddies of Vietnam, the steaming jungles of Laos and the high thin air of the Himalayas. The little wars go on, but at least we’re not going to have the big one. At least not yet anyway, and suddenly at last there’s hope that we may be able to settle the little ones too.”

“Where’s Vietnam?” asks Mike.

“It’s in south-east Asia,” answers Jack.

“Is there a war on there?”

“There’s always a bit of a one.”

They stay tuned for Ed Sullivan.

That night, Jack tells Madeleine, “It’s all over, little buddy, nothing left to worry about.”

There will not be a nuclear war in our lifetime.

“You can wake up tomorrow and go to school feeling free as a bird,” he says. “So much for Mr. Marks.”

He turns out the light. And Madeleine’s eyes stay open.

OCTOBER 31 IS THE BEST DAY of the year: Halloween. Everyone goes to school in costume. Doing normal schoolwork in a costume makes everything including arithmetic seem easier. Each class has its own Halloween party; the grade fours have bobbed for apples, and devoured a cake with orange icing brought in by Mr. March. But Madeleine is itching for the main event: nightfall. Trick or treat. She watches the clock, poised to flee with the bell.

“The following little girls….”

It never crossed her mind that they would have to do exercises with their Halloween costumes on. It makes no sense. She stands against the coat hook, her head sweating under her pointed pompom hat, and waits.

“I don’t want to be a clown.”

It’s almost dark out. Younger children are already making the rounds, accompanied by parents and older siblings. Jack is up in Madeleine’s room, where she stands, clown hat in hand, her face glum despite her big painted smile, and framed by the ruffled collar. He wants badly to laugh but he stays solemn. “Why not, sweetie?”

Madeleine thinks. “I grew out of it.”

“I think it fits you fine.”

She looks down.

He asks, “What would you rather go as?”

“A golfer.”

“A golfer? How come?”

“I don’t know”—which is the truth.

“Well now, I have a set of golf clubs and a golf bag and we could fix you up with a cap and a moustache and whatnot …”

Madeleine brightens— a moustache?

“… but do you think that might kind of hurt Maman’s feelings?”

Oh. Madeleine hadn’t thought of that. She feels suddenly terribly sad for Maman, when she thinks of how Mr. March touched the beautiful clown costume she sewed. She says, “I could be a clown going golfing.”

Now he laughs. “Yeah, you could.”

“With a moustache.”

“Sure.”

They go into the bathroom and Jack wipes the red lipstick from her face — grinds it off with a face cloth, then takes one of Mimi’s eyebrow pencils and draws a handlebar moustache on her upper lip. She goes into her room and gets her pillow. Stuffs it under her costume, then enters her parents’ room and stands in front of the full-length mirror. She is Mr. March dressed up as a clown disguised with a moustache going golfing. She smiles. “Thanks Dad.”

She shoulders her golf bag and sets out with Auriel and Lisa. Auriel is a Hawaiian dancer with a coconut bra, and Lisa is Judy Jetson with go-go boots. Madeleine has taken only the putter so the bag won’t be too heavy — she will use it for candy. Her Unicef box jingles already with pennies that Dad put in “to get the ball rolling.” The PMQs are aglow with grinning pumpkins, alive with ghosts and skeletons, cowboys, Indians, pirates and fairies. Mike is dressed as a bedraggled soldier of fortune, despite his father’s offer to help rig him out as Billy Bishop. Arnold Pinder wears his dad’s camouflaged hunting outfit and totes a BB gun. Both boys have streaked burnt cork under their eyes. Roy Noonan is dressed as a hot dog.

After trick-or-treating at a couple of houses, Madeleine drifts away from her friends, drawn by a sudden urge to try out her golf swing in the park. “Fore!” she yells, and swings into the darkness. The iron weight pulls her around full circle. Grace and Marjorie scurry past. Marjorie is a pregnant lady, Grace is a teenager with a stuffed bosom and smeary lipstick. Marjorie turns and spits, “Watch what you’re doing, Madeleine!” Madeleine swings and swings until she is dizzy, and discovers a new kind of crazy laughter as a runaway ventriloquist puppet — opening and closing her mechanical jaw, head jerking back and forth in time with her evil laughter. She laughs out of the park and down St. Lawrence Avenue, past Claire McCarroll in her bunny costume holding her dad’s hand.