“Madeleine. Viens, c’est l’heure du dîner.”
Supper that night is quiet. Madeleine keeps waiting for something to happen, but nothing does.
“Pass the peas, please,” says Mike. Her father doesn’t criticize him for sprinkling sugar on them.
Madeleine wishes the radio were on, even the boring news. The rain is not comforting against the window, it’s a monotonous reminder that there’s nothing to talk about.
“You’ve got Scouts tonight, is that right, Mike?” asks Jack. Mike grunts in the affirmative, but her father doesn’t reprimand him. Something is terribly wrong with this picture. Her father is being extra nice, covering something over, as if he’s leading up to telling them some awful news — he has a terminal disease. What if he only has a year to live?
“Pass the butter, sweetie.”
It’s too much. Her face crumples, tears drop onto her tepid canned peas; even in the midst of her grief, she notices and wonders if she’ll get out of eating them.
“What’s wrong, little buddy?”
“Madeleine, qu’est-ce que tu as?”
Mike rolls his eyes.
“Shut up!” she screams at him savagely. Her father gives Mike a look, then opens his arms to Madeleine. She climbs onto his lap and weeps into his shoulder. “I’m sorry!”
“What are you sorry for, old buddy?” His amused voice, the one that tells you it’s time to worry because he’s reassuring you.
“Nothing!” She weeps, grinding her fist into her cheek. When she looks up, they are alone at the table.
“Tell me what you did in school today.”
Today Madeleine watched for the police through the window. “Nothing,” she says.
“Did you sing? Did you do arithmetic? Draw pictures?”
“Art’s on Friday.”
“Well, tell me what you drew last Friday.”
“It was on Thursday. I didn’t get a star though.”
“That’s okay, art is subjective. Do you know what subjective is?”
“No.”
“It means a matter of opinion. Art is a matter of opinion.”
“The butterflies got a star.”
“Butterflies. Not terribly original.”
“They were yellow, they were really good.”
“What did you draw?”
She tells him about Robin crying, “Holy Thursday, Batman!” He laughs. She feels better.
“Humour is often underrated,” he says. “But it’s the hardest thing of all.”
He tells her about the old vaudevillians like Bob Hope working their way up, second by second, to a golden three-minute routine packed with reliable laughs. “Comedy is the brain surgery of the performing arts.”
“Are they going to hang Ricky Froelich?”
“No, no, no, they won’t do that.”
“Um. How do you know?” She tries to make her voice sound polite, so as not to seem rude in questioning his judgement.
“Well, first of all, he’s a juvenile.”
“A delinquent?”
“No, no, juvenile just means that you’re not yet an adult, so you can’t be punished as an adult.”
“Do they ever hang kids?” asks Madeleine, knowing that she will soon be ordered to “think nice thoughts.”
He sounds a little insulted when he replies, “Of course not, the chances of that happening nowadays are virtually nil.”
Like the chances they’ll drop the bomb.
“First of all, the case probably won’t even go to trial. You see, there has to be what’s called a hearing, and that’s when the judge’ll say, ‘Listen fellas, there’s no direct evidence here—’”
“It’s all circumstantial.” The kind Perry Mason deals with.
“That’s right, and he’ll throw it out.”
Madeleine says, “Want to watch Rocky and Bullwinkle?”
They watch as Boris Badenov and his evil Russian girlfriend, Natasha, try to sabotage a circus act, only to be foiled by J. Rocket Squirrel and his trusty moose companion. During the commercial, Madeleine asks, “But what if they don’t throw Ricky out?”
“No jury in its right mind would convict him on no evidence.”
“Yeah, but if they did?”
He looks her in the eye, and for the first time he speaks to her in the man-to-man voice. She feels her spine straighten, knowing it means he believes she can take it like a man.
“If they convicted Ricky Froelich of murder,” he says, “the worst-case scenario would be life in prison.”
She sees Rick in black and white stripes, behind bars, a matching cap on his head, go directly to jail, do not pass go….
He leaves his tea on the coffee table and goes to the kitchen cupboard over the fridge. He pours a drink from the bottle of Scotch.
Candid Camera comes on.
“But even that won’t happen,” says Madeleine, still in man-to-man mode.
“What’s that, sweetie?” He returns to the couch. “Rub Dad’s head, eh?”
She kneels beside him and rubs his head, saying, “He won’t even go to jail.”
“No, he won’t,” says Dad and takes a sip.
Cheerful voices sing from the television, exhorting the audience to smile — You’re on Candid Camera!
“’Cause he didn’t do it,” says Madeleine. Her father gets up to raise the volume. “That’s what I told the police.”
“What’s that?” He turns to her, still bent over the TV. “What about the police, sweetheart?”
“They came to the school.”
He straightens up. “When?”
“Yesterday.”
“What for?”
“To ask questions.”
“About what?” She regrets bringing up the subject. How will she be able to confess to her father that she lied to the police? His face is red. “Who was there?”
“Just me,” Madeleine answers. “And Mr. March.”
“Who asked you the questions?”
“The one in the suit.”
“Inspector Bradley?”
“Yeah.”
“For the love of….” He places his glass down on the coffee table in a measured way that Madeleine recognizes as fury. He goes to the kitchen and removes the phone book from a drawer — not banging anything, licking his finger and flipping the pages with deliberation. It seems he isn’t angry at her after all. All the same, she has stepped through a weave of grass and fallen into a trap, it isn’t possible to know where adults have dug them. She watches him dial.
“Hello, is this George March? Jack McCarthy here, I’m Madeleine’s father….” Madeleine is too shocked to reach for a cushion. “There’s something I’d like you to explain to me….”
She has the nervous giddy feeling of when Dad is mad at something but it isn’t her — the godforsaken tent pegs! She watches the look of bewildered outrage enter his eyes. He is saying, “I’d like you to explain why I shouldn’t drive over to your house right now and break both your arms.”
She chomps the inside of her cheek and reaches for a couch cushion.
“… Oh, I think you know why, mister.”
Mister! She bites into the fabric.
“‘Exercises’? I’m not calling about schoolwork, buddy, I’m calling about what happened yesterday in your classroom after three.”
Madeleine’s eyes feel as big as saucers.
“I don’t care what the police said, the law says parents must be consulted before their children are interrogated.” His fingers are white around the receiver. “I know she told the truth, I’ve raised her to tell the truth, that’s not the point….”
Madeleine grins into the cushion, laughter frozen in her throat.
“You’ll be lucky if you still have a job by the time I’m through…. You’re damn right it won’t happen again.” And he hangs up.