His wife and son are sitting at the kitchen table playing gin rummy. Mimi gets up and puts the kettle on. “Jack, would you like a cup of tea?”
He finds his copy of Time among Mimi’s women’s magazines with their hairdos and recipes, and relaxes on the couch. In East Berlin a boy is shot attempting to escape over the “Wall of Shame” and takes an hour to die while people on the west side scream across at the guards to do something. He flips through — the sound of his wife and son chatting in the kitchen is all the more soothing because Jack doesn’t understand French — President Kennedy in swim trunks, surrounded by women in bikinis. Infighting at NASA. Jackie Kennedy on waterskis. From the kitchen comes the whistle of the teakettle. Rockets and bikinis, what’s the world coming to? Wernher von Braun demonstrates the Saturn booster engine for the President. U.S. military advisers are helping the South Vietnamese in “the most successful operation yet carried out against the Communist Viet Cong.” Rocket-size crates on the Havana docks….
Mimi places a cup and saucer on the side table next to him. He registers its arrival as though from a great distance — from the blackness of outer space, so that his failure to say thanks is not rudeness, merely a consequence of a law of physics. Time’s view is that Castro could have been easily “erased” if only Kennedy had properly backed the Bay of Pigs invasion last April, which it now terms “a synonym for fiasco.” Jack reaches for his cup. The pundits at Time think Kennedy is being soft on Communism, but what do they suggest? An unprovoked invasion? We might as well become Soviet citizens if we’re going to adopt their tactics. He turns the page. “OPINION Toward the Year 2000. The U.S. will defend Canada whether Canada likes it or not….”
“Jack?”
“What’s that?” He looks up from his magazine as though surfacing from sleep.
Mimi is standing over him with the tea pot. She says, “I said, do you want some hot?” “Oh. Oh, yeah. Merci.”
In Madeleine’s room the ceramic face of a little Bavarian boy, surprised by a bumblebee on his nose, shields the night light. Tomorrow is the first day of school, the dawn of a bright new era. She closes her eyes. Colours flit rapidly behind her lids. She floats up, the bed listing like a sailboat. Was there really such a person as Peter Pan? If you believe hard enough, will you hear him crowing? Are there still talking ravens? When I grow up I will have a dog. I will have a red sportscar. The bed slips gently down the stream … when I grow up….
~ ~ ~
THE CROWS WAITED until things had cooled down there. When the blue dress with the girl inside it had become just that, they dropped down — one, two, a third — to stand at a polite distance. And began to work the charms. Tug. Tugging at the bracelet. And one charm was free. The successful crow rose into the air with a flashing silver prize in its beak. Her name. Then the others flew away, and she was left alone.
BACK TO SCHOOL
Write “all right.” Both “all right” and “all wrong” are written as two separate words. Write “all right” and “all wrong” again.
MADELEINE DOES NOT NEED to be walked to school by her father, but it was their first-day-back tradition when she was little. St. Lawrence Avenue is full of kids in new clothes — cotton dresses and ankle socks for the girls, plaid shirts and high-top sneakers for the boys — all freshly ironed, barbered, braided and brushed. Some are being walked to school by their parents, but those kids are younger than Madeleine. She had intended to go with Auriel and Lisa, but at the last minute couldn’t bear the thought of Dad watching his old buddy walk away without him.
Jack whistles through his teeth and glances about at the sunny pageant. Madeleine takes his hand to make up for the fact that she would rather not be seen walking hand-in-hand with him to grade four. He winks down at her. “Don’t be nervous, old buddy.” There is no harm in letting him think that’s why she has taken his hand. She smiles for him.
They pass the empty green bungalow on their left. Whoever moves in there will be late for school. Mike is walking up ahead with Roy Noonan, wearing his new 4 Fighter Wing baseball cap over his fresh crewcut. He has a Spiderman comic book in his schoolbag — Madeleine saw him put it there but she didn’t tell on him. Her dress has no pockets. It has a panel of crinkly fabric across the chest and a jazzy print of Africans playing bongos on the skirt — it’s okay considering that it’s a dress. She carries her white cardigan hooked by a finger over her shoulder — this is a less sissy way of carrying a cardigan, it’s the way you would carry a bomber jacket if you had one. All she wanted was penny loafers; instead Maman bought the new Mary Janes. There is no way to pretend they are anything else.
She is hot on the outside and chilly on the inside. Butterflies. Her father says the best performers get them on opening night. This is opening day. Fresh scribblers. Fresh kids. Fresh teacher. Fresh self. She longs to let go of his hand and slant away like a kite. “Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Um. Can you meet me after school and we can walk home together?”
“Don’t you think you’ll want to be with your buddies by then?”
“No.”
“Well, we’ll see. You decide at lunchtime, okay?”
She looks up at him, his eyes shaded by his hat brim. “Okay.”
He is in his summer uniform. It looks just like his other one except, instead of blue, it’s khaki. He wears his hat with the brim pulled a little lower than usual on sunny days to prevent his old eye injury from flaring into a headache. Madeleine loves his uniform — both the khaki and the dress blues — but her favourite part of it is his hat. The badge over the brim is beautifuclass="underline" a red velvet crown edged in gold braid and beneath it, in brass, the albatross in flight, bold beak facing to its left. Some say it’s actually an eagle, and there are still vigorous debates about this in the mess, but according to her father any right-thinking air force man knows it’s an albatross. A bird of great good fortune. Unless you happen to kill one. Besides, an eagle is an American symbol.
Above his left breast pocket are sewn his wings. Even if an air force man is no longer a pilot, the wings remain part of his uniform. This spring, if Madeleine gets enough Brownie badges, she will fly up to Girl Guides. Then she too will have a pair of wings to pin proudly over her heart.
“Here we are,” he says. The schoolyard. The sound of the crowd rises like a wheel of gulls over a turbulence of bobbing heads, eddies of stripes, polka dots and plaid, the occasional adult sticking up like a spar. Jack surveys the scene, his hand still around Madeleine’s. He spots Mike in the crowd and touches the brim of his hat. Mike reciprocates with the bill of his baseball cap.
Madeleine says, “Well, I guess I better go,” because it seems that otherwise Dad will wait for the bell.
“All right then.” He leans down. “Do your best, sweetie. Do it your way.”