Way the Crow Flies (15 page)

“Elaine!”

“Mimi!”

They haven’t seen one another since Alberta.

“I didn’t even recognize little Lisa!” cries Mimi. “You look grand, Elaine.”

“I’m big as a house.”

“What are you, six months?”

“Five!” Mimi insists that Elaine “go get Steve and join us, there’s plenty.” Elaine returns with her husband, a bottle of vodka, a plate of Hello Dolly squares and a snapshot of Lisa and Madeleine in the tub, age one. Madeleine and Lisa are amazed to discover that they have been friends for years. They giggle with mortified delight at the embarrassing photo, and Auriel examines it, flabbergasted. This was all clearly meant to be.

Steve and Jack slap one another on the back and Jack calls his son over. “Mike, this is the man who took your tonsils out in Cold Lake, say hello to Dr. Ridelle.”

Henry Froelich has brought a bottle of homemade wine, and his daughter Elizabeth in her wheelchair. His wife has brought their twin baby boys, and a pot of chili con carne. Mimi takes in Mrs. Froelich at a glance—a man’s old white shirt, faded black stirrup pants—smiles, receives the blackened pot from her and tells her the babies are beautiful—they are in rubber pants and undershirts. There are grass stains on the woman’s sneakers. “Lovely to meet you, Mrs. Froelich.”

“Please call me Karen.”

Jack makes introductions all around. The Bouchers and the Ridelles shake hands with the Froelichs and agree that of course they know one another. The Woodleys appear to be more intimately acquainted. Hal asks Froelich if “their boy” is going to play varsity basketball this year, and Vimy asks Karen about her work downtown. A moment later—in the house, tipping an aluminum mould onto a plate while Jack opens more beers—Mimi says, “She’s a funny one.”

“Who?”

“Karen Froelich.”

“Who? Oh, is she?”

“Well, you can see.” She lifts the mould deftly from the jellied salad—peas and pineapple suspended in a jiggling, faceted green mound.

“She looks all right to me,” says Jack.

“What do you mean by that?” She darts him a look, reaches for her cigarette, taps the ash.

“Well, not everyone’s got your style, baby.” He offers her a glass of beer. She shakes her head no, then takes it, sips and hands it back. Her red sleeveless blouse is turned up at the collar, her black capri pants reveal just the right amount of leg between hem and espadrille. The lipstick stain on her cigarette filter matches the kiss mark on his beer glass.

“Not to mention,” says Mimi, “have you tried her chili?”

“No, but it sure smells good.” He winks and she flushes. Like shooting fish in a barrel, getting her riled.

“Chili con carne, my foot. She forgets the carne”—butting out her cigarette, picking up her jellied salad. Jack grins and follows her back outside.

The grown-ups sit on lawn chairs, with plates on their laps and drinks at their feet. Lisa’s mother, Elaine, laughs at everything Lisa’s father says. Steve is the senior medical officer on base—“and resident golf pro,” jokes Vic. The kids are at card tables placed end to end, Madeleine, Mike, Roy Noonan, Auriel Boucher, Auriel’s younger sisters and Lisa Ridelle. The Froelich babies crawl around on the grass pursued by Auriel’s two-year-old sister, Bea, in a bonnet and sunsuit. Karen Froelich feeds Elizabeth chili con carne—the sight of the food sliding in and out of Elizabeth’s mouth makes Madeleine gag, so she tries not to watch, while trying not to seem to be trying not to watch.

Vic and Mimi argue in French; she swats him with an oven mitt and he cringes elaborately.
“Au secours!”

“Vic,
parlez-vous le ding dong?”
calls Jack from the barbecue, presiding in his apron that says CHEF.

“I speak French, I don’t know what your wife is speaking.”

“Ma grande foi D’jeu, c’est du chiac!” Chiac
, Acadian French, the “creative
langage local,”
with as many variations as there are communities across the Maritimes.

“‘
D’jeu’?! C’est quoi ça, ‘D’jeu’?!”
Vic knows she means
Dieu
—God—but he imitates her in lilting feminine tones with an elaborate rolling of r’s and she’s laughing too hard to swat him again.

“Where did you find this one, Jack?” asks Vic, in his own Trois-Rivières twang. “She talks like a hillbilly.”

“I picked her up in the Louisiana bayou.”

Henry Froelich says, “Really?”

Mimi exclaims, “No!”

Jack says, “I found her in New Brunswick—”

Mimi nods and Jack continues, “on the Indian reservation—”

“Jack!”—using the oven mitt on him—
“allons donc!”

Karen Froelich says, “Mimi, are you part native?”

Mimi’s laugh decelerates to a polite smile. “No, I’m Acadian.”

“That’s why she speaks so uncivilized the French,” says Vic in a parody of his own accent.

His wife, Betty, says, “You’re one to talk, cheeky frog, murdering the language of Louis Quatorze”—she pronounces it “cat oars”—“with your heathen patois.”

“Acadian,” says Karen. “That’s really interesting. There was actually quite a bit of intermarriage between the Acadians and the native Indians, wasn’t there?” Her tone betrays no awareness of her faux pas.

There is a pause. Everyone is smiling. Jack knows that Mimi will assume the woman is catty, but he can’t see anything but interest on Karen’s face. She looks like a stranger in a strange land, here among the lawn chairs. Even her husband is recognizable in his way—a bearded, rumpled professor. But Karen is a woman with undone hair and no makeup, talking about the finer points of Canadian history. “That’s how they got out of taking the oath of allegiance to England, right? Before the Expulsion.”

Mimi smiles and shrugs.

Karen continues, “By claiming Indian blood.”

Jack looks at Mimi. Will she roll with it? Tell the story of
le grand dérangement? That’s why I’m so good at moving
.

Vimy Woodley comes to the rescue. “We know so little of our own history, really, don’t we? I’m afraid I’ve never heard of the Expulsion.”

Jack tells the story of the English forcing the Acadians from their homes two hundred years ago, and Mimi rallies: “That’s why I’m so good at moving.”

They all laugh, and Betty Boucher reaches for Mimi’s hand. She says in her Manchester accent, thick as a good cardigan, “Well I’m English, love, and I’d like to say I’m sorry. There!”

At the kids’ table, Mike stands up and whips his arm round and round like a propeller. When he stops, his hand has puffed and turned red with tiny burst capillaries.

“Wow,” says Lisa, and turns her eyelids inside out.

“Neat.”

Then they all follow Roy Noonan around the side of the house to watch what he can do with his braces and retainer. He leans forward with his hands on his knees and chews his tongue until a waterfall of clear saliva pours from his mouth.

“Kids,” calls Maman, “come get your dessert.”

Mike breaks into song: “Comet! It makes your bathroom clean”—to the tune of the Colonel Bogey March—“Comet! It tastes like Listerine”—leading them back the long way around the house—“Comet! It makes you vomit! So drink some Comet, and vomit today!”

Betty clears the table and asks Vimy if her daughter Marsha can babysit Saturday. Mimi scoops ice cream into cones for the kids and asks Steve his opinion on appendectomies.

“Well,” he answers, “my motto is, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Mimi smiles up at him and says, “You sound just like my husband.”

Hal is drafted by the kids to adjudicate the start of a pickup game of softball. Steve and Vic slip into the house for more beer, and Jack stands chatting with Henry Froelich. “What’s your background, anyhow, Henry? Math? Science?”

A couple of beers in the Centralia summer evening and Hamburg 1943 is awfully far away—Jack can see nothing wrong in getting to know his neighbour. And Froelich doesn’t appear to mind the question, seems relaxed despite his tie and long-sleeved shirt.

“My subject was engineering physics,” he says, then raises his eyebrows as though gauging the degree of Jack’s interest.

“Wow,” says Jack. “What the heck is that?”

Froelich smiles and Jack tips the wine bottle over the man’s glass. “Go ahead, Hank, I’m all ears.”

“Well….” Froelich crosses his arms and Jack can see him in a lecture hall—the axle grease under his nails could just as easily be chalk. “I studied, and then I taught, how things go.”

“What things? Planes, trains, automobiles?”

“There are applications for all these, yes, and others. Propulsion, you see. But I was a very theoretical young man. I did not—um—dirty my hands, as they say.”

“Not like now,” says Jack, gesturing with his thumb at Froelich’s motley-looking old jalopy across the street.

Froelich nods. “Yes, I grow pragmatic with age.”

“I’m going to take a wild guess, Henry. You were a professor, am I right?”

“Yes I was.”

“A doctor of … engineering physics.”

“Ja, genau.”

“Well what the heck are you doing teaching the multiplication table out here in the middle of nowhere?”

Froelich laughs. Vic joins them. “What’s so funny?”

Jack is about to dodge the question, not wishing to put Froelich on the spot if he’d rather not discuss his past, but Froelich answers, “Physics. My first love.”

“No kidding, you a science buff, Henry?”

“He’s a PhD,” says Jack.

Steve joins them with a fresh beer.

“That’s not too shabby,” says Vic. “Nuclear?”

“Engineering.”

Vic shakes his head. “If I had my life to live again, that’s what I’d do, that’s where the action is, eh? Avionics. Jet propulsion. Rockets.”

It’s on the tip of Jack’s tongue to ask Vic if he didn’t get enough of “things that go boom” during the war, blasting away in the back of a Lanc, but he remembers Froelich and says instead, “I’d be an astronaut.”

“What do you want to do that for?” says Vic. “That’s not flying, that’s just sitting on a big bomb and praying.” Froelich breaks a smile and nods. “‘To the moon, Alice!’” cries Vic.

The others chuckle but Froelich looks a bit bewildered. Is it possible he has never seen
The Honeymooners?

Steve muses, “The moon is an ideal setting for golf. Imagine how much longer it would take to play eighteen holes in zero gravity.”

Jack knows Steve is two years younger than himself. But even without that information, he would know by Steve’s particular brand of insouciance that he’s not a veteran. Not that veterans can’t be insouciant—Simon, case in point. But Simon’s insouciance has an edge. Like Vic’s bonhomie—he is still drinking in every moment, grateful to be alive. Like Hal Woodley, over in the field behind the house, pitching for the kids. This is what they fought for.

Jack says, “Well we better get there quick or you know what we’ll find on the moon.”

“What?” says Steve.

“Russians.”

Vic and Steve laugh.

“Wernher von Braun said that and he oughta know.”

“Who’s he?” asks Steve.

Vic rolls his eyes, and Jack spells it out. “Von Braun is Mr. Ballistic Missile. Grand Pooh-bah of the American space program. NASA to you.”

“Oh
that
von Braun,” says Steve. “Had you going, didn’t I?”

“Stee-rike!” cries one of the kids, and out in the field the teams trade places.

Steve says, “Why would anyone want to go the moon, anyhow? It’s cold up there.”

Like Moscow, thinks Jack, reminded of Simon’s comment last summer. He takes another swig of beer. “Well what are we going to do, let the Russkies beat us at everything? At the rate they’re going, they’ll be there in ’65.”

Vic says, “The moon is, it’s … the holy grail, it’s the brass ring….”

Froelich sighs. “Forget the moon just now, we are talking here about space, yes? A band of cold and dark one hundred miles above the surface of the earth, worthless—”

“Yeah,” says Steve.

“—apart from that it is an extension of air space and this is where the next war will be decided.” Jack pours Froelich more wine. “From up there”—Froelich points—“the Soviets can interfere with Western satellites, they can—how do you say—?”

“Neutralize,” says Jack.

“J
a
, neutralize missiles before they will leave the ground or the submarine. They also can launch a space station, they can arm it like a garrison and make extraordinary reconnaissance of earth. The moon is somewhat a minor scene, a….”

“A sideshow.”

“
Genau
.”

“USAF wants to make the moon itself into a permanent base.”

“That’s what the Russians are shooting for,” adds Vic. “That’s why they’re ahead.”

“But we’re not in it for the same reasons,” says Jack. “NASA is a civilian agency. Pure research.”

“If pure research is the point,” counters Steve, “why don’t they just make a space station for experiments, why bother going to the moon?”

“Because the moon is something we all understand,” says Jack. “Even a tribesman in darkest Africa can look up and marvel at what a feat that would be, and that’s real power, when you capture the world’s imagination. The U.S. needs to demonstrate its superiority to the world, and not just for show, for very practical reasons. You can’t have the Third World looking to the Soviet Union for—”

“That’s right.” Vic gestures with his beer. “When you’re sitting in a banana republic with a tinpot dictator—”

“And the Communists have got a man on the moon,” says Jack, “and they’re promising a chicken in every pot—”

“Sputnik was just the tip of the iceberg—”

“Look at
Vostok III
and
IV
—”

“What are their names? Nikolayev?”

“And Popovich,” says Froelich.

Jack nods. “The ‘heavenly twins.’”

The Russian cosmonauts have just completed a feat straight out of science fiction: a dual orbit of the earth in separate space capsules, passing within an incredible one hundred miles of one other for a total of 112 orbits, more than five times the distance to the moon. The Americans will be lucky to achieve a mere six orbits next month. The logical next Soviet step: a fantastic manoeuvre involving
the mooring of two spaceships, and from there, complete control of space and target earth.