The cave is yawning open still. Emitting a draft, exerting a pull.
We were supposed to think it all began with NASA. But it began with the Nazis. We knew this, half remembered it, but a great deal was at stake and we put it from our minds. Events without memory. Bones without flesh. Half a story—like a face gazing into an empty mirror, like a man without a shadow.
What do shadows do? They catch up.
AND THAT’S THE WAY IT IS
These fragments I have shored against my ruins….
T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”
WHERE IS JACK? He’s reading his newspaper. Please do not disturb him.
He left something back there in 1963. Stepped out of it like stepping from a stream, and the current that had borne him along went on without him, water disappearing round a bend.
When you are in it, the current feels inevitable. When you step out of it and have to walk, nothing is inevitable. You notice time, bowed closer and closer to the earth by the weight of what you carry on your shoulders. The newspaper is a soothing companion, filled as it is with pieces of time presented to the reader pebble by pebble, but never as a bird’s-eye view. Turn the page and the pebbles collapse into dust, to be replaced tomorrow: Scientists Track Chernobyl Cloud. Afghan Freedom Fighters Repel Soviet Invaders. Prehistoric Fish Discovered. Crinkle of the turning page. A woman’s voice reaches him, as though through parting mists. “I said, Jack, do you want some hot?”
“What’s that—? Oh, merci.” Crinkle.
To see Jack reading the paper, edges gripped, is to see Jack for the past twenty-some-odd years. Not that he hasn’t been busy. He got his posting and moved his household from Centralia in August ’63. He taught leadership and management to the officer cadets at the Royal Military College in historic Kingston, with its antique forts and cannons still aimed at the Americans across Lake Ontario. He retired from the air force when they moved to Ottawa in the early seventies, and opened his own management consulting firm. “I’m a glorified accountant,” he liked to joke. He did well. They put in a pool. And until the heart trouble, he had every intention of pulling up stakes and moving with his wife to Bahrain or Saudi Arabia or some other friendly foreign part. Run an oil refinery. A hospital. Managerial skills are endlessly transferrable nowadays.
There is no longer an RCAF anyhow, the yahoos on Parliament Hill have seen to that. Jack hates the vulgar synthetic green uniform that all personnel now have to wear, obliterating the distinctions among land, sea and air. In summer, a cheap white version shows off the contours of jockey shorts, foolish in the extreme—as if the military hasn’t come into sufficient disrepute, tarred with the brush of American folly in Vietnam.
But he has no patience with young people who take their freedom for granted, whining about “American imperialism.” Where do they think their “free this” and “free that” come from? We like to blame the Americans, but we like to spend the dividends too. Who do we think invented Agent Orange? The baby boomers have yet to produce a single real leader—where is their Churchill, their Roosevelt, their Mackenzie King? He enjoys it when his daughter argues with him—“Oh yeah? What about your Stalin, your Hitler, your Mao?” She is the best of a poor lot—a generation of draft dodgers and potheads. Crinkle.
This facile anti-Americanism is, at best, naive—like so many Americans themselves, wide-eyed and trembling yet again in shock at their “lost innocence.” They never had it. What they had was a sandbox and a long neck. That’s why they fail to notice when their security agencies traipse around the planet shelling out weapons like Halloween candy, overthrowing elected governments, training religious fanatics, death squads and drug dealers. Contra, my foot. Does the poor bastard on the shrinking production line in Flint, Michigan, have a clue what’s being done in his name? Or why he may be called upon to donate a son or two to the cause? The Soviet Union is crumbling from within, creating a power vacuum; the world is flooded with arms, most of them American-made; Eisenhower’s military-industrial warning is playing out; it’s more likely than ever that we’ll all go up in a mushroom cloud; meanwhile, the President is consulting astrologists and singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” with our own sorry excuse for a prime minister. Crinkle.
On the other hand, it’s important not to lose sight of the big picture: the West appears to be winning the Cold War and, whether because of or in spite of that fact, it’s still free. Still democratic. More or less. We must be doing something right.
Mimi took his old blue uniform and hung it down in the rec room closet in a garment bag. He doesn’t recall what he did with the green abomination—that was only one of the many things that went crazy in the world after Kennedy was killed by a “lone gunman” in Dallas. That must have been some bullet, able to change direction in midair. Maybe it was designed by Wernher von Braun.
Jack barely allowed himself to register relief when, in November 1963, he read in the paper that Richard Froelich’s death sentence had been commuted to life. Relief was not for him. He pressed on, piece by piece: the next house, and the next, and the next school for the kids, and automatic car windows and microwave ovens, from black-and-white to colour, from split-level to Tudor style; picture frames from wall to packing box to wall again, “a little to the left, that’s good there.” The same wall only different, the same only different, the same only different, and the next desk and the next, a backyard pool, an empty nest and then a condo with a minimum of stairs. Jack and Mimi.
Like many men of his generation, Jack doesn’t really have friends of his own. His wife organizes that side of things. It would be nice, however, of a summer evening, to light a cigar, smell the grass, watch the sun go down through the incline of the sprinkler and talk about this crazy world. About the possibility that we may someday discover another one. Solve the world’s problems over a good German beer. But when he allows himself to picture this, only two men join him on the lawn under the hot blue of evening, and they are now much younger than he is. Sealed in memory, protected from the decaying effects of oxygen. Forever young. Simon and Henry. My friends. I lost them in the war.
He reaches for his tea.
He gets The Globe and Mail, the Ottawa Citizen, The Times of London, The Washington Post and the Sunday New York Times.
In May 1966, he read that Ricky Froelich had been transferred to a medium-security prison in Kingston, set on a working farm across the highway from their suburb. A job came up in Ottawa and Jack grabbed it. He knew his wife didn’t want to risk running into Karen Froelich at the Kmart.
He sips—“Mimi!”—scalding his tongue.
His son was arrested for possession of marijuana, but the sentence was suspended and the record later expunged. He experimented with LSD, joined the air cadets, quit, was expelled from high school. He quit hockey and took up football. An overrated game. An American game.
In July 1966, Jack read in The Washington Post that a senior American army officer had been arrested for selling atomic, missile and bomber secrets to the Russians. The man—Lieutenant Colonel Whalen—had been deputy director of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, JIOA. Simon had mentioned it only once, but Jack had a military man’s head for acronyms, and he instantly recalled that the JIOA had run Project Paperclip. Lieutenant Colonel Whalen had hand-picked foreign scientists for recruitment by the U.S. God knows how many spies posing as defectors he had knowingly imported into American military R & D programs. There was a photo of him emerging from his office at the Pentagon: a craven look in his eye, the big head, skinny arms and soft gut of the career alcoholic. The highest-placed American officer ever convicted of espionage. Simon’s boss. Crinkle.
Jack becomes absorbed in an article on the next page about the new supertankers, marvels of technology. Reads all about a new artificial heart. Just think, the day is not too far off when we’ll be able to cure diseases before they even start, with just a flick of a genetic switch. History in the making.
Jack has never told his wife about what he did
in Centralia. She still thinks his strange behaviour had to do with Karen Froelich. What would she think if he told her the truth now? With the passage of years there have been fewer and fewer reasons not to tell her. But he has become so accustomed to keeping the secret that he is wary now of dislodging it. Like an old piece of shrapnel adhering to tissues and vessels—removing it might cause more harm than leaving it to rust and seep. Things have a way of changing when exposed to the air—they rot.
Assassination upon assassination, demonstration upon riot, black power, flower power, power to the people. Students shot dead on campus, people’s sons and daughters face down on the grass. In ’69 we got to the moon. We beat them. Crinkle.
In late 1970 the McCarthys were informed that their son, Michael, was missing. That same year, FLQ terrorists tried to bomb, kidnap and murder their way to civil war in Québec, then fled to Cuba. Prime Minister Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, suspending Canadian civil liberties. Mrs. Trudeau sang a made-up song to Fidel Castro and began dating Mick Jagger.
In 1973 he read in The Globe that Ricky Froelich had been “quietly paroled under a new name.” It was over.
That day, he gave some thought to what he had done back in 1963. The events rose in his memory, separate and solid as cinder blocks. The facts. He saw them float and find one another, the pieces arranging themselves in his mind’s eye until he could have drawn them as a flowchart leading to a deliberate and foreseeable outcome. This he called taking responsibility. The accompanying cost-benefit analysis took shape so that, twenty-three years on, if he were to tell what had happened in spring 1963, he would report on how he had made a decision. He would not tell the foolish tale of how he allowed a decision to happen to him. How he desperately ran to catch up with, then tried to outrun, a decision. How he feared he had betrayed his duty as a Canadian officer. How he feared for his life. How a family was destroyed. He salvaged what he could and did his best to believe it: I did not come forward because I knew that the life of one boy was less important than the cause of freedom, even if I was not able to perceive, from my limited vantage point, precisely how that cause would be served. Or if it would be served. I did my job.
“Jack?”
Crinkle.
Piece-by-piece living is hard to do. It may even feel like the hardest thing. But it has this going for it: you never need to know what it is you’re carrying on your shoulders.
Jack had his second heart attack in the driveway, turning to see if he had locked the car door. He had his third in the hospital, while waiting for bypass surgery.
IN NOVEMBER OF 1963, Richard Froelich’s sentence was commuted from hanging to life imprisonment. He found out from the newspaper.
He was moved from the death cell to the Provincial Training School in Guelph. There were boys his own age, and sports. Two and a half years later, at the age of eighteen, he was transferred to the maximum-security prison in Kingston, where he was raped. He was then transferred to a medium-security facility on the outskirts of town, called Collins Bay Penitentiary—a grand Victorian pile in the neo-Gothic style, set amid the acres of a working farm.
Collins Bay Pen also comprises the farm annex, a minimum-security facility where inmates work in the fields and tend the animals. Escape would be easy, but is rare. If you are an inmate of the farm annex, chances are you will soon be paroled. In time, Rick was transferred there. Parole, however, was a thorny issue for the authorities, because Rick would not admit his guilt. How, then, could he be rehabilitated?
He raised rabbits and worked in the fields. His father was gone but the rest of his family visited as often as possible, although they were not permitted to bring his dog. He avoided close friendships within the prison because everyone always left eventually. The staff of guards, janitors, cooks, social workers and psychiatrists got on well with him. He was not raped at Collins Bay.
He had many sessions with many psychiatrists. In those days the concept of wrongful conviction had yet to gain currency. But there was psychology. And there was pharmacology. Some of Rick’s psychiatrists admitted that they could not tell whether he was guilty. His chief psychiatrist had come to like him, and to believe that Rick had repressed the memory of raping and killing the little girl. Like his colleagues, he pointed to Rick’s murky childhood—a defenceless Métis child, parents unknown, an institutional upbringing to the age of twelve, when he might have been subject to sexual interference at the hands of his keepers, finally adopted by an unconventional couple. Not surprising that, as an adolescent, Richard Froelich had experienced a psychotic break during which he attacked and killed the little girl. The consensus among the doctors was that the best they could do for the young man was help him remember his crime. And come to terms with it.
He was given truth serum—sodium pentothal, administered intravenously—and lysergic acid diethylamide, administered orally. LSD had been developed by the CIA via a course of illegal experiments, with the help of German scientists who had been imported in the post-war period. The fact that the drugs were still experimental was no impediment to Canadian prison authorities, who may or may not have known that their development had been funded by a foreign intelligence agency. This course of innovative drug therapy was part of an effort to help Richard Froelich recover his memory, thus allowing him to rehabilitate to the point where he could be safely released back into the community.
Eventually, Rick had difficulty remembering details of the days leading up to and following these drug treatments. And having recounted repeatedly the events of April 10, 1963, while under their influence, he found that aspects of that day which had always been stable in his mind, began to shift and disappear in patches, as though consumed by moths, and he became uncertain how to match up the tatters that remained.
He was diagnosed by a panel of psychiatrists as egocentric, grandiose, guarded, impersonal, defensive, narcissistic, schizoid and characterologically psychopathological.
A few years into his sentence, there was something called a “reference.” Queen Elizabeth II summoned Richard Plymouth Froelich to present arguments to the Supreme Court to assist them in deciding whether or not there was a legal basis on which to order a new trial.
This time, Ricky testified on his own behalf but showed no emotion. He impressed some as arrogant and overly controlled. A “chilling absence of affect” was noted. The panel of judges was not favourably impressed by his claim that he could remember little of what had happened on April 10, 1963, when he had left the PMQs at RCAF Centralia in the company of the nine-year-old victim.
The original evidence of the child witnesses was upheld. No new evidence was brought forward.
There had never been a subsequent similar murder in Huron County.
The court found insufficient grounds to order a new trial.
AFTER-THREE TV
“Even a joke should have some meaning—and a child’s more important than a joke, I hope.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
MADELEINE REMOVES a flesh-coloured bathing cap from her head—it sports a glued-on grey comb-over and a permanent sprinkle of dandruff—and places it on a Styrofoam head that stands, impaled and impassive, on the makeup counter of her dressing room. She takes off a pair of thickly rimmed men’s glasses, lenses fogged with dulling spray, and adds them to the blank face. Loosens and removes a narrow black tie with a mysterious smudge—egg?—then sloughs off a vast grey suit jacket purchased at Mr. Big & Tall. She slips shirt and suspenders from her shoulders in one motion, and the trousers—sixty-five-inch waist—drop to the floor. She steps out of a pair of men’s size twelve brogues—brown, permanently dusty—then reaches behind to undo the snaps of her prosthetic torso. The opposite of a corset, it encases her in sculpted foam-core fat. Being constructed of a non-breathing synthetic, it’s hot, especially under television lights. Good night Maurice. She steps into the shower.
Madeleine is entering her prime—like the moment known to film people as magic hour, that fifteen or so
minutes in which there is no sense yet of the approaching evening, even though the sun has breathed its first sigh of descent. No one has died of cancer yet. No one has given up. Early sorrows feel like ancient history, and current crises are manageable. Madeleine’s father has heart problems, but they are under control—it turns out he doesn’t need the bypass. There is AIDS, but that’s a terrible aberration, and even it seems to be a plague of the young. Most straight people still feel safe, and lesbians feel safest of all.
Madeleine stands under the shower, allowing her short hair to melt and her shoulders to drop. She starts to sing. Assisted by the burbling of water past her lips, she does Louis Armstrong, “what a wondahful woild….”
She was a tragedian between the ages of eleven and seventeen. It began at the Grand Theatre in Kingston, with an inspired Saturday-morning drama teacher called Aida. Aida was from the north of England—big-eyed, thin-lipped, with a raspy voice, a stricken expression and dyed red hair. She had been to RADA. She was Madeleine’s first grand passion after Miss Lang. It wasn’t a sexual attraction with Aida, however, but a passion of the soul. In Aida’s classes, Madeleine survived Auschwitz, a shoe her only companion; resisted cannibalism in a stalled elevator; decided who should live and who die in a rowboat adrift on the South Seas—“Wahtah wahtah everywheh, nor any drop to drink.” Aida didn’t reprimand her for using accents.
Madeleine lifts her face to the water. She always goes slow after a show, whether live or taped or somewhere in between. At all other times she is a moving target. It’s not possible to walk on water, but it’s possible to run. Just as it’s possible to dance on thin air. Keep talking and don’t look down. Move at the speed of thought, uncatchable as a wascally wabbit, swifter than a Road Runner, meep meep! She stands still, eyes closed, lips parted, allowing the water to love her.
The Way the Crow Flies Page 66
