“Dad?” through the slats at the top of the stairs.
He looks up. “What are you doing awake, old buddy?”
“I can’t sleep.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve got butterflies,” says Madeleine.
Mimi heads for the staircase. “You’re cold in those baby-dolls.”
“No I’m not!” Madeleine loves her baby-dolls. They are the closest thing to Steve McQueen sleepwear—boxer shorts and undershirt.
“Where’s old Bugsy?” asks Jack.
Madeleine’s heart leaps. “I don’t know. I had him yesterday when we came into the house.”
“Well where did you leave him?” Jack glances about.
“I don’t know.” Her eyes fill with tears.
Mimi mutters, “Mon Dieu, Jack, you could leave the well enough alone.” But she joins the search while Madeleine sits, stricken, on the stairs.
Maman does not like Bugs. She thinks he’s unsanitary. He has never been washed because there is a small record player or something in his stomach—when you pull his string he says several typical Bugs Bunny things. These days his voice sounds far away, his words obscured by static as though he were sending a radio message from outer space, who toined out da lights?
Jack is bent down looking under the couch when Mike’s voice comes from the top of the stairs: “He’s in my room where you left him.”
“Michel,” says Mimi, “what are you doing up?”
“I can’t sleep with all the noise,” he says, joining his sister on the landing in his cowboy pajamas.
Madeleine runs to her brother’s room. Bugs is lying face down on the floor as though he’s been shot. She turns him over and he looks as amused as ever, Gee, doc, I didn’t know you cared. She picks him up and hugs him, wondering if Mike will be angry with her for snooping in his room. Bugs is the evidence.
But Mike isn’t angry. He climbs back in bed, saying, “’Night, squirt.”
Who is this nice Mike? Where’s the one who used to get so mad at her? The brother who played with her and tortured her, the one she bit, leaving tooth-marks in his arm? Two tears run down her cheeks as her father picks her up and carries her to bed.
“What’s wrong, old buddy?”
She doesn’t know how to blame it on Mike because, after all, he has been perfectly nice. “I was just sad about Bugs. He’s getting old.”
Jack tucks the covers around her. “He looks pretty spry to me. He’s got bags of mileage in him yet. Besides, Bugsy was never born, so you know what that means.”
“What?”
“He’s going to live forever.” He sits on the side of her bed and says, “Now you snuggle down and go to sleep so you can wake up fresh as a daisy, ’cause I’ll tell you what, tomorrow night we’re going to have a barbecue and you can invite your new buddies.”
“Okay, Dad.”
“’Night-night, now.”
“I made you some hot,” says Mimi, handing him a fresh mug.
He sips and says, “Oh, I invited someone for supper tomorrow night.”
“What?”
“Vic Boucher and—”
“Oh, Jack—”
“It doesn’t have to be a big deal—”
“It’s a big deal”—nodding, holding out her arms, surveying the chaos. Today she unpacked everyone’s clothes, did the beds, unpacked the kitchen, washed every utensil, pot, plate and pan, but the rest of the house…. “You want me to entertain like this?”
“I’ll throw something on the barbecue.”
“What am I going to do to you?”—losing syntax when she’s upset.
“I don’t know, what are you going to do to me?” He winks.
“Tu sais c’que je veux dire, how can you invite people when”—throwing up her hands—“oh Jack … who are they?”
He follows her upstairs and her rant becomes a whisper, then disappears behind the bathroom door. He goes into their room and places his gift on her vanity table. A little something he has been carrying in his shaving kit since Europe.
She returns from the bathroom, unzipping her own dress, you’re cut off, monsieur, but when she catches sight of the Chanel No 5 spritz bottle she drops her arms and says, “Oh Jack.”
“I’m still mad at you,” she whispers when he turns out the light and joins her in bed.
He reaches for her, fills his hands with her breasts, miraculous, her skin warm as sand, inhales at her neck, he has shaved for her, she bites his shoulder. “Come on,” she says. “That’s right, baby,” their first night in the new house, “that’s right.” It’s so easy, like dancing with her, and when she lies beneath him and opens like a tulip Jack is glad to know she is stronger than he is, she must be to take him like that, to stay soft and welcoming the way she does, only her fingertips hard in his back, “Oh Jack….” To stay soft the harder he gets, only her fingernails and her nipples, “That’s right, that’s right….” Her mouth, her tongue, her half-closed eyes in the moonlight, face turned to one side, for no one else, for him, “Take what you want, baby, take it. C’est pour toi.”
Madeleine is wide awake in her new room. The sheets are nervous. They don’t recognize these walls either. The pillow is stiff, no one can relax around here. The moon pours through the naked window that overlooks the grassy circle out back. She resists the urge to suck her thumb. She quit two years ago, bribed by Maman and Tante Yvonne with a brunette Barbie doll. Madeleine quit cold turkey, not because she wanted a Barbie but because she didn’t, and it was so nice and so sad of Maman to think she was buying something special for her little girl. Madeleine pretended to be thrilled with the doll, who still lives in the pink satin-lined closet she came in. Sleeps there in her wedding dress, like a vampire. All Madeleine wants for Christmas is a set of six-guns and holsters. Girls never get anything good.
She has to pee. She gets up and creeps across to the bathroom with Bugs. Sits him down facing away from the toilet. Her pee sounds loud in the empty bathroom. She flushes the toilet—Niagara Falls—closes it, climbs onto the lid and looks out the window. Across the street, the porch light is on at the purple house. The wheelchair is gone, but beneath the light and its halo of mosquitoes sits a girl. Next to her lies the German shepherd dog, asleep. The girl should be asleep too, do her parents know she is not in bed? Is she allowed to be out in the middle of the night? And is she allowed to play with that knife? She has a stick and she’s whittling it. Sharpening it.
WILLKOMMEN, BIENVENUE, WELCOME
THE NEXT MORNING, Madeleine saw the empty wheelchair again through the bathroom window. “Dad, whose wheelchair is that?”
He glanced out the window and said, “Beats me.” And the two of them resumed shaving.
Her technique is identical to his, the only difference being that his razor makes a lovely sandpapery sound as it moves down his cheek while her razor, not containing a blade, is silent.
They wiped their faces with their towels and applied Old Spice.
At breakfast, Mimi told Jack that the kids were frightened of that big dog across the street—“No we’re not,” said Madeleine—“and all the junk in that driveway gets in my nerves.” She wanted him to go over there and find out what was with that family.
“I’ll bet they’re perfectly nice,” he said over his newspaper. “Just a bit eccentric.”
“I had enough eccentric at home, merci, that’s why I married you, Monsieur, to get away from eccentric.” She caught the toast as it popped.
Now Madeleine crouches behind the confetti bushes at the foot of her front lawn as her father crosses the street. The wheelchair is gone again. Tools lie scattered in the driveway next to the old wreck that sits on blocks, hood up. She curls her hands into a spyglass and watches her father knock at the screen door. What if the door opens and a long green tentacle comes out and yanks him inside? What if the person who answers the door looks perfectly normal but is really from another planet and is merely disguised as a human being? What if Dad is merely disguised as
Dad and my real dad is being held prisoner on another planet? What if everyone is an alien except me and they are all merely pretending to be normal?
The door opens. A man with a dark curly beard shakes hands with Dad. A man with a beard. In a frilly apron. Of all the strangest things you could possibly see on an air force base.
Her father disappears into the purple house and Madeleine comes out from behind the bushes. Should she go after him? Should she tell her mother? She returns to her lemonade stand at the foot of the driveway. “Two cents,” says the sign. In her empty pickle jar, nine pennies. Mike said, “Make mine a double, bartender.” And Roy Noonan paid a nickel and let her keep the change. All the other kids are either too little to have money, or too old to take notice of her. After a while, two girls her own age stop and one says, “I hope you’re washing those cups.” Girly girls.
When Dad comes out he’ll buy three and she’ll have fifteen cents. Enough for a candy necklace, two Pixy Stix and two Kraft caramels, with plenty left over.
Jack’s neighbour stands almost at attention, his posture an absurd contrast with his full-length frilly apron; its print faded and freshly grease-stained, it protects an immaculate long-sleeved white shirt and narrow black tie.
“Hi, I’m your neighbour, Jack McCarthy.”
The man nods formally. “Froelich,” he says, and sticks out his hand. It would not take a rocket scientist to figure out that Froelich is not military personnel. They shake hands. “Perhaps you wonder about the dog. He is harmless.”
“That’s nice,” says Jack, “but I’m just here to say hello.” Adding, with a grin, “Wie geht’s, Herr Froelich?”
Froelich hesitates, then, “You take a coffee, yes?” He does not wait for a reply, but turns and heads for the kitchen at the rear of the small house. Jack waits in the vestibule. A carved wooden sign hangs by the door: “Willkommen.” A record is playing in the living room; Jimmy Durante sounds crystal clear, Jack looks around the corner to see what kind of hi-fi it is—Telefunken, same as his own. Eat an apple every day, take a nap at three…. Jack whistles along under his breath and glances about. To his right, a heaped laundry basket on the stairs. In the living room, newspapers crest up against a worn armchair, toys litter the floor, which is covered by a dusty Persian rug smudged with dog hair. In the middle of it all, a playpen where two babies in diapers bounce rattles and a teething ring against the head of an older child who sits facing away from Jack. A girl, judging from the hair, not long but not short either—the extent of Jack’s lexicon of feminine coiffure. A guitar leans in one corner, a coffee table is piled with magazines and books—one in particular catches his eye. He can smell something cooking—the simmer of an all-day soup at nine in the morning.
Froelich reappears with two mugs. “Cheers,” he says.
“Prost,” replies Jack.
“Please to call me Henry.”
Madeleine is relieved to see her father emerge from the purple house. Coffee cups in hand, he and the bearded man peer under the hood of the wheelless car and chat, while the man points at things in the engine.
Madeleine sees her father turn, still talking, and look at her. The bearded man turns too and they start toward her across the street. When they reach the lemonade stand, her father says, “This is our Deutsches Mädchen.”
Her parents call her this because she picked up so much of the language, courtesy of her babysitter, with whom she went everywhere—beautiful, bespectacled and bebraided Gabrielle, of the sidecar and the one-armed father.
Mr. Froelich looks down at Madeleine and says, “Wirklich?”
“Ja,” she answers, embarrassed.
“Und hast du Centralia gern, Madeleine?”
“Um, Ich … I like it okay,” she says, seeing the German words tumble away like loose bricks as she reaches for them, turning to rubble in her memory.
“You come over to our house, Madeleine, we’ll speak Deutsch, you and I.”
He buys a glass of lemonade and drinks. “Aber das schmecht.” His black moustache glistens, his lips are red and moist. He has a smile like Santa Claus. A thin Santa Claus, with a bald spot, a black beard and shiny dark eyes. And a bit of a stoop, as though he were leaning forward, the better to hear you. He is older than the normal dads.
“The Froelichs have a girl about your age,” says her father.
Yeah, thinks Madeleine, and she has a knife. But she says politely, “Oh.”
“Ja, we do”—Mr. Froelich nods to her—“perhaps a little older.”
“Mr. Froelich teaches at your school.”
“How do you feel about mathematics, Madeleine?” he asks, and smiles when she makes a face.
“Maybe Mr. Froelich can give you some tutoring.” Jack turns to Froelich. “The Germans are way out in front when it comes to math, wouldn’t you say, Henry?”
Jack buys a glass of lemonade, pronounces it “ambrosia” and returns with Henry Froelich across the street to the mismatched rust and rainbow collection of car parts, vaguely recognizable as some kind of Ford. Henry turns up the cuffs of his white sleeves, just once, then proceeds to tinker and chat. Jack smiles. Only a German would wear a white shirt and tie to work on an engine.
The Froelichs have lived in the PMQs for five years. Longer than any personnel. “What do you think of the mess, Henry? Worth the price of admission?”
“I have not seen it.”
Jack is surprised. Teachers as well as VIPs from the civilian community all have the privilege of becoming associate members of the officers’ mess, and most do.
“I haven’t a tuxedo or a—how does one say, a ‘dinner jacket’?”
“You don’t need all that nonsense,” says Jack. “Come as you are.”
Froelich glances dubiously at his filthy apron, and the two men laugh.
“What part of Germany are you from originally, Henry?”
Froelich rummages in his tool box. “The north.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Hamburg.” He holds up a spark plug. “This type is Champion.”
“Is that a fact?” Jack doesn’t press him for details. Hamburg was carpet-bombed in the summer of ’43. If Froelich was there, he’s lucky to have survived. If he had family there, it’s a subject best avoided. “I see you’re reading Silent Spring,” recalling a book on the coffee table. “What’s it like?”
“My wife is reading it, she has it from the book-every-month club.”
“That’s your wife’s too, I take it.” Jack indicates the apron.
Froelich smiles and wipes his hands on the faded swirl of roses. “Actually, not.”
Jack thinks of the inside of the Froelichs’ house—lived in, to say the least—and wonders what Mrs. Froelich is like. A thick woman with flaxen hair coming loose from a bun. Perhaps she works outside the home. Mimi is right, the Froelichs are eccentric.
He watches his neighbour bent over the engine, lips compressed in concentration. It is impossible to meet a man of his own age or older and not wonder what his war was like. And while it’s true that you might not want to dig too deeply into a German’s war record—not to mention those of their Eastern European allies—the majority of these fellows were just soldiers. Ordinary men like himself. In any case, Henry Froelich appears a bit old to have seen active duty.
“Look, we’re having a couple of people over for a barbecue tonight. How about it, Henry?”
Froelich looks up. “We should be the ones to feed you, you only now have arrived.”
It occurs to Jack that he may have just started World War Three with Mimi, but he presses on. “No big deal, come on over and take potluck.” He sets his mug down on the roof of the old jalopy. “We’ll see you tonight, eh, Henry?” Adding, as he heads back across the street, “And don’t forget to bring your wife.”
“Invite the whole street,” says Mimi, a carpet tack between her lips. “I mean it Jack, je m’en fous.”
The kitchen curtains are already up, and the big oil painting of the Alps is hung ove
r the fireplace—how did she manage that on her own? He watches her tap the nail into the kitchen wall with the hammer, then he hands her a wooden plate. “A little to the left,” he says. “Good.” In carved letters around its rim, Gib uns heute unser tägliches Brot. She has her Singer sewing machine set up in a corner of the living room, against the staircase wall, and, hanging in its usual place above, her mother’s hooked rug of bright orange lobsters in the waves.
“Why are they cooked if they’re still swimming in the ocean?” Jack always asks, and she always pinches his ear between her nails. She does so now—“Ow!”
“Dad,” says Madeleine, banging through the screen door, “can you set up the TV?”
Mimi says, “No TV during the day.”
“That shouldn’t count in daylight saving time.”
“She’s going to be a lawyer, that one,” says Mimi.
“I can at least set it up,” says Jack.
“After you get the groceries.” Mimi comes down the stepladder.
Madeleine slouches. In her hands, the pickle jar with all of eleven cents. “There’s nothing to do.”
“I’ll give you something to do,” says her mother. “You can dust the baseboards.” Madeleine heads back out the door to play. Jack catches Mimi’s eye. “Reverse psychology,” she says.
“Advanced management.” He closes in for a kiss but she fends him off and heads for the counter, where she rummages in her Yuban coffee can for a pen and writes out a grocery list. Mimi’s kitchen—indeed her house—is a model of organization, with the exception of a six-inch square by the telephone: thatch of recycled envelopes, elastic bands, welter of pencil ends and—Jack swears—inkless pens, a tin pop-up address book inscribed according to her own arcane code. The phone rings, she picks it up. “Hello? … Yes … hello Mrs. Boucher … Betty…. Please call me Mimi….” She laughs at something Betty says. “Yes, I know! … That’s right…. Well I look forward to meeting you too.” She laughs again. “That’s right, sooner than we expected”—looking daggers at Jack—“They’re all the same…. Now, you don’t have to bring a thing, there’s plenty of…. Around six and bring the kids…. All right, bye-bye.” She hangs up and turns back to Jack with both hands on her hips. “Lucky for you, Monsieur. Betty Boucher is bringing potluck. She can’t believe how Vic would tell you yes when he knows perfectly the house is still toute bouleversée.”