Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

The street lights come on, dispelling the five o’clock gloom as Jack rounds the corner, the snow squeaky cold beneath his rubbers. He fills his lungs with clean crisp air. Tomorrow is his first day of leave. He sees Henry Froelich out hammering a nail into his front door. Elizabeth is bundled up in her wheelchair, a pyramid of snowballs in her lap. She is throwing them at unpredictable angles for the dog, who leaps to catch them between his jaws, where they explode.

The words escape Jack’s lips: “Fröhliche Weihnachten, Henry!” He feels himself redden instantly. Time to take the bull by the horns. He walks up the driveway.

“Hank, I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Being such a … knucklehead.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean….” He reddens again. He can’t apologize for his stupid “You’re a typical German, Hank” remarks because that gets too close to a painful, private subject — Jack knows about Froelich’s tattoo only by accident.

“Jack, are you okay?”

“Yeah, Henry, I’m just — look, I only recently realized that — I realize you don’t celebrate Christmas, so I’m sorry for—”

“But we do celebrate.” Froelich hangs a wreath on his door. “My wife likes to celebrate the solstice.”

“The solstice?”

“Festival of light. Like Chanukah.”

“Oh. Happy Chanukah.”

Froelich smiles. “Jack, I am a Jew. But I am not religious. You worry too much.”

Jack relaxes. The scrape of a shovel catches his attention; he turns and notes with approval his son shovelling his driveway across the street. In Froelich’s front yard, the big dog rolls on his back in the snow. Jack is ambushed by a rush of pure happiness. “Henry, I don’t give a damn if you’re pagan, Moslem, Hindu or from Mars, you and Karen are coming to the New Year’s Eve formal with me and Mimi as our guests.”

“No, no, this we do not—”

“Aber ja!” exclaims Jack, counting on his fingers, slapping them into his palm. “You’ve fixed my car, my lawnmower, filled me up with good homemade wine, it’s time I had a chance to pay the Piper.”

Froelich is about to object again. The two men stand, eyes locked, and a twinkle of amusement enters Henry’s. He shrugs. “What the heck. I mean, thank you.”

When he tells Mimi the Froelichs are coming to the mess for New Year’s, she gives him a Mona Lisa smile and turns back toward the kitchen.

“What is it?” he asks.

“Rien du tout . I think it’s lovely you invited them.”

He follows her. “You do not, what are you thinking, woman?”

She pauses at the stove, bites her lower lip — a touch of malice just enough to be sexy — and says, “I’m curious to see what she wears, c’est tout.”

“You’re bad.”

She lifts her eyebrows briefly, then turns and bends, a little more than she needs to, to check the mincemeat pies.

On Saturday the twenty-third, chaos reigns in the rec centre as the children’s Christmas party gets underway, to the helium strains of The Chipmunks’ Christmas Album . Flushed faces bulge with candy canes, grown-up voices cry above the din, “Don’t run with that in your mouth!” A mountain range of wrapped gifts surrounds the towering Christmas tree, each package bearing a tag marked “girl” or “boy.” Madeleine knows better than to bother opening one marked “girl” but she also knows not to court public humiliation by taking one marked “boy.” She joins in the ecstatic mayhem of chasing and screaming. Every kid in the PMQs is there, and so are many from the surrounding community — including a busload of orphans who arrive with a detachment of nuns, all of whom seem to know Mrs. Froelich. For once, Madeleine plays with all her friends at once, including Colleen. She experiences a moment of trepidation when a genuinely rotund Santa Claus enters. But it isn’t Mr. March, it’s Mr. Boucher. “Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas, Joyeux Noël!”

On Christmas morning, Mimi opens a big box from the St. Regis Room of Simpson’s and says, as she always does, “It better not be a you-know-what.” It isn’t a mink coat, but Jack has nonetheless courted her wrath with an extravagant silk negligée. Mike receives the supreme gift of walkie-talkies. Madeleine doesn’t receive a weapon of any kind, but neither is she burdened with more dolls. Her booty includes a Mr. Potato Head, an Etch-A-Sketch, a toboggan, yo-yo, puppet theatre, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and other treasures too numerous to mention — chief among them a psychology kit complete with white goatee, glasses and ink spots.

Only one gift requires acting. It comes in a little blue Birks box, and Maman looks so pleased as Madeleine unwraps it that it makes her feel plungingly sad. The kind of sadness that is possible only on Christmas morning; your dear mother, smiling and hoping you will like the special present she has picked out.

A sterling silver charm bracelet. With one charm on it already—“That’s just for openers,” says Dad, pleased to be giving his little girl a young-lady gift. “Merci maman.” Madeleine compresses her lips into a smile, swallowing the lump in her throat.

Her mother fastens the bracelet onto Madeleine’s wrist and her family admires it. She keeps it on for church, then takes it off to go tobogganing, returning it to its blue box on her dresser. Wondering how long she can go before having to wear it again, she closes the lid on the silver bracelet and its single charm — her name.

ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, Jack is shaved, showered and Brylcreemed by five. He wipes fog from the mirror, dries the walls of the tub, sets out a fresh towel and hollers, “It’s all yours, Missus.”

Mimi is in her slip, taking curlers out of her hair, when the phone rings. Jack calls, “I’ll get it!” and grabs it before either of the kids can answer. “Hello? … Oh … oh, that’s too bad, Vimy. Yup, yup, not to worry, I’ll tell her.”

He puts his head in the bedroom door and says to his wife at her vanity, “That was Vimy Woodley. Martha’s got the flu.”

Mimi’s hands fall to her sides, a freshly liberated curl droops and bounces. “Merde!” Without a babysitter, at the eleventh hour. She glares at him and says, “Marsha.”

“What?”

“Oh never mind, Jack,” and lets slip the ultimate Acadian curse word: “Goddamn!” smacking her thighs. She starts yanking out curlers and pitching them among the silver combs and brushes on her table.

“Wait now, sweetie, just keep doing what you’re doing, I’ve got an idea.” He kisses her bare shoulder. “Wear the No. 5 tonight, it’s my favourite.”

Jack hands Mike the Kodak Instamatic and a flash cube, and the boy positions his parents in front of the fireplace and the oil painting of the Alps. Jack is in his formal mess kit — short blue coat with black bow tie, blinding-white shirt front and black cummerbund. Blue pants with gold stripes down the sides, tapered at the ankle, where concealed stirrups cause them to fit snugly over the high-polish ankle boots that lack only a Cuban heel to render them utterly hip. Mimi is in an off-the-shoulder gown of silk in shades of green and gold, with a shimmering satin stole. Her hair is done, her face is radiant, eyelashes long, décolletée within the bounds of good taste and off the scale of sex appeal. Flash .

Then Mike snaps a picture of his parents with the Froelichs: Henry in a freshly pressed brown tweed jacket with suede patches at the elbow, his usual white shirt and black tie. Mimi discreetly observes every detail of Karen’s attire: an open-weave shawl over a dress that appears to be essentially a floor-length turtleneck. The shawl is lumpy black, but the dress is composed of several dull reds and purples that seem to have bled into one another. She has brushed her long hair and applied two horizontal lines of red lipstick. Beaded earrings dangle from her lobes. On her feet, a pair of embroidered Chinese slippers. The dress manages somehow to be both dowdy and clinging. The woman is obviously not wearing a girdle; her slimness is no excuse, slimness is not the point, shape is.