Way the Crow Flies (47 page)

“You should join the choir, little girl, you have good pitch,” says Mr. March.

Jack was surprised how good it felt to hear Simon’s voice. He put it as casually as possible—careful to keep any hint of complaint from his tone—that it might be wise to brief McCarroll at this point. Make Fried feel a little more secure, knowing there was a second car on hand, another number to phone. Or if not McCarroll, it might be time to bring Mimi into the loop—in fact she could help. She could visit Fried during the day, do a little shopping, cooking … as Jack spoke he began to like this idea more and more.

Simon said, “Bugger’s driving you mad.”

Jack laughed.

“I didn’t warn you, Jack, because I didn’t want to prejudice you, but I’m not surprised. He’s working you like a bloody housewife.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Look, you don’t need to put up with it, I’ll have a word with him and—”

“Forget it, Si, I think I know what his game is.”

“Oh? What’s that, then?”

“He wants a goddamn car.”

“Christ.” Simon groaned. “It’s what he’s been after from the start.” Fried had asked Simon for a car when he defected. “I told him, forget it. Too risky, too complicated. He could drive it into a ditch—”

“Or get pulled over for speeding.”

“It opens up a whole new can of worms. An expensive one.”

Jack surmised a series of false documents: driver’s licence, registration, ownership, insurance, plates. “Who will you register it under?”

“I won’t, simple as that.”

“What about—?”

“Not your headache.”

“Look Si, why don’t I brief McCarroll? It’s what he’s here for anyhow, and between the two of us—”

But Simon preferred to take on the chickenshit task of wangling a car for Fried, rather than allow the Americans in a moment before it was absolutely necessary. He said it was because he wanted the operation to remain airtight. Briefing McCarroll would mean making it porous. That would mean air pockets. “And you know what that means.”

“Turbulence,” said Jack.

“Don’t say I never gave you a Christmas present.”

Midweek, Jack catches a quick flight on a Beechcraft Expediter to Toronto. He has lunch with his counterpart, the OC of the Staff School up on Avenue Road, and makes plans for an exchange. Then he takes a taxi out to Toronto International Airport. Following Simon’s directions, he walks to the far northeast corner of the parking lot. Simon has worked quickly as usual. The 1963 metallic blue Ford Galaxy coupe is there waiting, just as Simon said it would be, with a brand-new set of Ontario plates. Jack opens the door, lifts the mat and finds the keys. It’s a spiffy set of wheels, the kind he would like to buy for Mimi when they can afford a second car.

He gets in, puts on his sunglasses and pulls into the brilliant December day. He makes good time back to London, and when he arrives at Fried’s apartment at dusk and drops the keys into the man’s open hand, Fried actually forms a small smile and says,
“Danke.”

“Fröhliche Weihnachten, Oskar.”

“Fröhliche Weihnachten, Herr McCarthy.”

He has the taxi drop him in the village of Centralia, just beyond the station and out of range of inquiring eyes, and gives the driver a decent tip.

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.

O
N
N
EW
Y
EAR’S
E
VE
, 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.

Mimi had handed Karen a sherry when they arrived. “That’s a very pretty dress, Karen.”

“You think so? Thanks, Mimi,” she replied, as though Mimi had just given her a present. “I got it at a thrift shop in Toronto.” She nervously tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Nice hands, short unpainted nails.

Henry kissed Mimi on both cheeks.
“Aber schön
, Frau McCarthy, you look ravishing.”

“He’s right, Mimi, you do,” said Karen and, try as she might, Mimi could detect not a drop of malice in her tone.

“’Night-night kids,” Jack says now and, in his most jovially man-to-man voice, “Help yourself to anything and everything, Rick.”

“Except the liquor cabinet,” jokes Karen.

Mimi hopes her smile doesn’t look too pained.

The men help the women on with their coats, carry their shoe-bags for them, and the four of them bundle into the Rambler. Mike, Madeleine, Colleen, Ricky, Elizabeth and Rex look at one another in the living room. The twins are already sound asleep up on Jack and Mimi’s bed, behind a barricade of pillows. Ricky says, “What do you guys want to do?”

No one says anything at first—Colleen and Elizabeth may be used to having Ricky around, but for Mike and Madeleine it’s as though a god has descended from Mount Olympus.

They feast on hot dogs and Kraft dinner. Ricky and Mike play table hockey, violently jerking the handles while commentating from high above the Montreal Forum: “Hockey Night in Canada!” Ricky has brought a stack of forty-fives. Madeleine and Colleen
make popcorn as Jay and the Americans blast. Ricky ransacks the upstairs closet for blankets and drags them down to the basement, where he empties the bookcase and tips it against the wall to form a lean-to. Madeleine looks at Mike, who stands by, hesitant, then says, “My dad doesn’t let us do that.”

“Do what?” asks Ricky, opening the duffel bag where the camping equipment is stored.

“Make shelters.”

“It ain’t a shelter, it’s a fort.” He drapes blankets and sleeping bags over the bookcase and the basement furniture. “’Sides, you’re going to clean it all up before they get back.” He tosses Mike a flashlight, says, “You’re it,” and turns off the lights. Madeleine yelps in spite of herself. They play hide-and-seek in the dark all over the house—except in Jack and Mimi’s room. Madeleine has to change her pajama bottoms due to a slight accident brought on by terror and mirth. They jump on the beds and take turns shooting each other with Mike’s cap gun, dying spectacularly; they try one by one to tackle Ricky but he is invincible, hurling each assailant onto a mattress. They have a pillow fight in the dining room; the oil painting of the Alps is knocked askew, the couch cushions are on the living-room floor. Rex, exhausted from rescue attempts and the vain effort to herd everyone into one room, yields finally to temptation and, as intoxicated as the others, chews one of Mimi’s rubber spatulas. Through it all, Elizabeth sings, drops off, wakes up, listens while Madeleine reads aloud her Cherry Ames book, and falls out of her wheelchair reaching for an Orange Crush. “Lizzie, you’re drunk!” says Ricky, mopping up the mess, opening another bottle of the best—Mountain Dew. “It’ll tickle yore innards!” he howls.