She puts on a big-band record she bought in nurses’ training in Montreal. Chick Webb and his orchestra. Demon on the drums. “Time to cut the rug,” she says, pushing back the coffee table.
They watch their parents jive, dangerously close to the crystal roosters from Spain, perilously grazing the oil painting of the Alps, rattling the end tables where the Hummels share pride of place with the Royal Doultons.
Mike and Madeleine take turns being whipped around like spaghetti at the end of their mother’s arm — she looks fiercely serious one second and the next she is laughing like a teenager — at times like this, she seems more like a babysitter than their mother. “It’s a wild party!” shouts Madeleine, and she and Mike dance in a frenzy, wash-the-dishes-dry-the-dishes-turn-the-dishes-over! Dad laughs until his face turns red and his gold tooth flashes. He snaps a picture. Maybe this Christmas we’ll get a home movie camera.
After supper, a solemn rite. To do with love and loss. The loss of the past, and its transformation into precious memory. This alchemical feat always includes popcorn.
There is nothing so persuasive to deep recall as the hum of the slide projector in the dark. The audible fuzz that follows each colour slide as it sh-clinks into view. The longer ago the picture, the longer the moment of silence before Dad’s cheerful voice in the dark: “That was a beautiful day, remember that day, Maman?”
A picnic among the pines of the Schwarzwald. Maman sitting on the plaid blanket, legs folded sideways, sunglasses and white kerchief. A tenderer-looking Mike, Madeleine with her long braids, squinting at the camera.
Sh-clink. It is not remembering so much as not forgetting. Madeleine contemplates the slides intently. Reverently. Each is an emblem of a vanished world. A doorway in a mountain, sealed forever.
Sh-clink. Monaco. The pink palace where Princess Grace lives. “That was the day I broke my heel and you got so mad at me,” Mimi says to Jack. Certain things must be remembered after each slide. The pastry we had there, Madeleine got lost on the beach here—“I wasn’t lost, I went for a walk.”
“That was one of the nicest holidays ever, remember, kids?”
Sh-clink. Camping on the Riviera. Jack’s crumpled straw hat and four-day growth of beard. “The best accommodation in Europe costs you either a thousand francs or five.”
Sh-clink. “The fruitcake!” Grandmaman’s fruitcake, which had been mailed from Canada the previous Christmas and took a whole year to arrive. Still moist and rummy. “A piece of that fruitcake every day, boy, I tell you you’d live forever,” says Jack, as he always does.
“That was one of the nicest Christmases ever, remember, Jack?” says Mimi.
“I remember.”
Sh-clink. Alberta. “How’d that one slip in there?” says Jack. A tiny bundled Madeleine in a baby carriage perched atop a snowbank.
“I remember that,” she says.
“You do not,” says Mike.
“Do so!”
Sh-clink. Hameln. They have not looked at this slide before, so there are no comments that go with it yet. It is of Madeleine and Jack standing in front of the statue of the Pied Piper.
“There’s Uncle Simon.”
Jack says, “Where?”
Madeleine gets up and points at the screen, where a shadow spills across her father’s trouser leg and the skirt of her dress — the silhouette of head and raised elbows. Simon, taking the picture.
This is one thing Madeleine has on Mike; she has met Simon. He taught their father to fly. He told her to call him “Uncle.” He is a decorated veteran. He laughed at everything she said and asked her to come work for him. He did not look exactly like David Niven but that’s who she has come to associate him with — the kind of dashing grown-up who might offer you a cocktail and think nothing of it. He said, “The best spy of the Second World War was a woman, did you know that?” And told her about a member of the French Resistance, Jeannie Rousseau — pronounced “Johnny.” “Do you know what her code name was?”
“No.”
“It was ‘Madeleine.’”
She smiled shyly but she could feel her destiny stirring.
Johnny told the Allies about Hitler’s secret weapon. “The V-2 rocket,” said Uncle Simon. “That’s why we were able to bomb their factory.”
“Operation Hydra,” said her father. “You were in on that show, weren’t you, Si?”
Simon just smiled and said, “I and a few others.” Then he looked back down at Madeleine. “We’d never have been able to do it without Johnny.”
“Did you know her?” asked Madeleine.
“I’m afraid that’s classified, old girl.” And he laughed.
Sh-clink. Blank.
“Time for bed, kids.”
“Aw Dad,” says Mike, “can’t we just have one more tray? Can we just see the hockey slides?”
The boring hockey slides from Cold Lake, Alberta. Backyard rinks and arenas and Mike and his friends with frozen snot, poised over their hockey sticks, no girls allowed. “Not the hockey, Mike!” Madeleine is suddenly savage.
“Temper down, now,” says Dad gently.
“Yeth, the hockey,” says Mike. “He shootth, he thcores! He-he-he-HA-ha!”
Mike can’t even do Woody Woodpecker—“Shut up!” she screams.
“Allons, les enfants, c’est assez!”
“Come here, old buddy.” And she goes to him. He picks her up. She hooks her pajama legs around his waist. She is too old to be carried upstairs to bed; she is so delighted and mortified that she mashes her face against his shoulder, but not before glimpsing Mike mouth the word “baby” at her, with his eyes crossed.
“Tell me a story, Dad,” she says, using as mature a voice as possible.
“It’s late, old buddy, you have to be fresh as a daisy tomorrow to start grade four.”
Four. A benevolent number, brown and reasonable. Her school dress and ankle socks are laid out over a chair with her new shoes on the floor. It’s as though she herself had sat down in the chair and disappeared, leaving only her clothes.
“Just one story, Dad, please.” She still has her arms around his neck from when he leaned down to kiss her good night, he is her prisoner.
“Just one,” he says.
“Tell me the story of the crash.”
“Why do you want to hear that again, why don’t we read….” And he reaches for her Treasury of Fairytales.
“No Dad, the crash.” This is not a once-upon-a-time type of evening.
“All right then. But after that, schlafen.”
There are some stories you can never hear enough. They are the same every time you hear them — but you are not. That’s one reliable way of understanding time.
He sits on the edge of her bed. “It was right here in Centralia….”
The story of the crash is already changing with you; it used to begin, It was on a little training station called Centralia, way out in the back of beyond.
“I was flying lead in formation….” At the controls of his Anson trainer. Getting ready to join a bomber stream sixty miles long over the English Channel.
Madeleine rests her cheek on the pillow and gazes at his belt buckle, a fly perfectly preserved in amber. It’s good to gaze at an object and listen to a story.
“I was coming in for a landing….” In a month he’d be flying ops. At the controls of a Lancaster bomber — a real beauty of a beast. Suited up in full gear complete with Mae West — the buxom life-preserver for those fortunate enough to bail out over water.