Mary Cyr

by David Adams Richards

  “We damn well are French.”

  “Just a tadpole’s worth!”

  “No one ever said a mean thing to your mother.”

  “You called her British.”

  “Well dear, she is.”

  “And Nan—my aunt is, how do you say in anglais—French!”

  This would be precocious at twenty, and was said when she was thirteen and her mother was still alive but no longer living with them.

  She would not apologize. She would not say sorry—there was sorrow in her—a great masterly whirlwind of sorrow she had to deal with, confront every morning when she woke, like a giant weight upon her—but would not say sorry.

  Only Perley stuck by her, the boy she tormented to distraction, and the boy she teased and even seduced at seventeen, one hot summer afternoon for something to do; and then when he was in his underwear trembling, she simply turned and left the room. (Or this is what the rumour stated.)

  She left for years. Lived here and there after her son, Bobby, died. But then people lost sight of her. She became wise and earnest and wanted to help—things like Greenpeace. Stopping whatever oil pipeline she could, even while living off assets that came from oil pipelines, thrusting down now from Alberta.

  So she was a very rich woman living off of many assets she deplored, and, like certain of her friends in the Kennedy family, who she had met as a child, she never seemed to see the contradiction. Well, it was the problem of most moneyed leftists. But fortunately, or unfortunately, she herself wasn’t leftist—not really in the slightest. But she was Mary Cyr. So then they could take her to be anything, use her for any cause or scandal, and then leave her be.

  From the childhood escapades to the university and charities and African diplomats she dined with because she had just turned up there. To the atrocities she spoke about in Maclean‘s magazine, with a picture of her reading a university brochure as if she really wanted to go.

  “I am against all sorts of atrocities—I could pick out quite a few I am against—most of them, really—except a few of the sillier ones—you know at times some people just get a notion in their heads—and run amok.”

  Then she would write a note to Perley saying, in her queer but rather handsome handwriting:

  “As you can tell I am—getting most of the publicity.”

  That she was getting more publicity than either Greg or Warren.

  “And by the way—those newspapers are really mine, so when you print something about me, make me sound clever.”

  2.

  BUT WHAT PERVADED MARY CYR NOW WAS REALLY WHAT HAD pervaded her always, an aura of sudden (sudden) tragedy in a dark cell with brown eyes searching John for his soul, and a smile on her face—there was bravery in this, if nothing else. The Cyrs knew how to be brave. Her father did too know how to be brave; out of that wilderness of temperament he fashioned his own illusive flights, and destroyed himself, but not without courage. So John now thought. Her father was a Spitfire pilot in the Second World War, was in the Sinai with an Israeli forward tank position in 1967 and was the first journalist to report that the Israelis had smashed through and were destroying defensive positions, that their air force had destroyed Egyptian planes on the ground. That is, the first Western reporter to see it first-hand. Why John thought about this was that there was bravery in her sudden smile if nothing else.

  It had been three or four years since he had heard a word from them. They had become in his own lore simply the really rich family he had once dealt with. In fact they had turned their back on him when he got into trouble in his own department. Though this could not really be said, for the rich act with a kind of impartiality and dismissing someone was not really a betrayal to them. That sounds like a cliché, until one has spent time with the rich. No matter how close you thought you were to them they could always fall back on the employer-employee ratio. Of course they could be so generous at times it astounded you. And John never knew really why. That is, why he was astounded, or what the motivation was they had for certain kinds of kindnesses. Garnet too had moments where he showed this side of the dynasty. Perley, he had always felt, was the most subjected to belittling and the most human.

  But now with that phone call, it was as if their treachery never mattered. That they had almost four years ago simply told him to go away did not seem to be remembered. When he had stormed into the cottage looking for her (trying to protect her—he had forgotten from what) and they were sitting having drinks with former prime minister Mulroney, who stood politely to shake his hand.

  John was ushered through the front porch and into the side kitchen, where he was given a large glass of pure orange juice—almost as if this was the main reason for his visit. They stood around him watching as he drank it. Then they took the glass away and washed it.

  Then they asked him what in hell he was doing there. He begged to see her, to see if she was okay, but they said he could not. He was let go—calling the reason for his dismissal his emotional attachment to her.

  “You have a rather deep emotional attachment to her,” Garnet said.

  Yes—he had. So he was let go. And they did not contact him again.

  That is, they could scorn you, not lift a finger to help, let you walk through the desolate ages alone, time and again, and then suddenly in the middle of the night the phone doth ring:

  “Hey, John—this is Garnet Cyr. How are you?”

  It was as simple as that.

  “Mary—what happened to her? What’s wrong?” he asked, looking through the night table drawer for a match to light a cigarette while he heard the storm ascending outside against the planks and boards of his motel room.

  “Well, she’s got herself into a world of trouble, John—we thought she was back in Toronto but kept phoning her the last while with no answer—so what we were thinking is—”

  “This is an unlisted number—how in the world did you get it?”

  They did not even have to answer that.

  “When is the last time you had any contact with her?”

  “Oh, months and months—over three years ago.”

  So he went in the night to find the woman (perhaps the only woman he ever really loved and was never allowed to) behind a scarred metal door. She was so much younger and so much richer than he was.

  He was staying at Los Marinas Resort—the place she had been staying. His villa was called the Beautiful Vista, or the Wonderful View—or something. Hers, across the way, was a two-storey villa with patio and stairs, it was called Ángel de la Mañana.

  Angel in the Morning, or Angel of the Morning.

  But both these villas had seen better days. The whitewash was faded and so were the small plants that bordered them.

  There was some terrible heaviness come over him because of the ruined and seedy place, a smell of displaced human eroticism; a sad, languid sunlight.

  A place for refugees, some might say—or middle-class working people taking their first and only vacation south; but not a place for her. How in hell did she end up here?” Of course he was being exclusive for her sake, and he knew it.

  3.

  HE WAS PUT IN A SMALL VILLA WITH A FEW SIDE WINDOWS, a faded potted plant and small velvet Mexican paintings of bullfighting. The shadows of the sun lingered there and then dissipated and went elsewhere. It reminded him of a Robert Mitchum movie somehow. He loosened his tie and opened the second beer he had bought. Then he looked through his pockets for the pills his doctor had given him. He held the bottle out at arm’s length to study what it said, with an inquisitive self-depreciating look. And shrugged.

  His breathing was more laboured than it had ever been. But down in Mexico the heat was already oppressive and his chest was sore again. He sniffed and looked through some papers where he had written down the constable’s name, the name of the jail, the name of the town Oathoa; a town of 1,800 people. He was continually losing what he had written down—not like his friend Constable Markus Paul, who seemed to have a wealth of notebooks, filled
with information.

  John had a few scribbled notes. And the resort brochure. He flipped it over and read it as if he was interested:

  LOS MARINAS—a small, private resort tucked away in Oathoa, charming, out of the way and modern—with panoramic views of the Sea of Cortez. Feed the dolphins, visit the principal ruins of the Lost Tribe of the Jaguar. Listen to the music of the mariachi, dine on the beach with tuxedoed waiters. Swim in the sea, walk along our golden sands, explore the jungle, the splendorous Cave of the Crystals. Visit our licensed casino or just relax in your own Jacuzzi.

  It said the same in German, Japanese and Spanish.

  Lady Mary Cyr had been running from something. He wasn’t sure what. But she had entered Oathoa almost a month ago.

  She was called “Lady Mary” because her grandfather Blair Cyr had become Lord of Doak in 1986. He was reviled for taking a lordship, and giving up his Canadian citizenship; she, for calling herself “Lady”—and for fifteen years insisting on it. This imperial strain in her was nonsense and John knew it. Now everyone in her family was pretty well dead, except for Garnet and young Perley (who was in fact forty-six). Not on the other, more important and richer, side—that is, Lady Mary Cyr, for all her wealth, was a poor relative.

  She was one of the few family members to attend Blair Cyr’s funeral in 1997. (The idea that he had died in the Bahamas and she had brought his body home sitting up in a private airplane was fodder for jokes by academics in the universities here, and others too, none of whom, as Mary said, would ever themselves give up a seat on a plane.)

  By that time (he had lived too long) his empire was taken over by Greg and Donald Warren Cyr, Mary’s other cousins, who she hardly knew. She saw pictures of them in Canadian newsmagazines, being compared to young Kennedys. That might be true, except they were far richer than the Kennedys.

  “Where’s my money—I want my money” was one of the headlines in one of the papers that the Cyrs did not control, showing Mary Cyr on a balcony overlooking some ocean. (She was in Brisbane, Australia, at that moment, John discovered later.)

  She was on an allowance. She would receive the greater portion of her finances on her birthday this year: that is, in six months as the crow flies. But there was a certain catch—it stipulated this largesse of many millions of dollars be given to a woman who had “retained” herself. This was a strange word, one inserted into the equation by lawyers eight years before, who, abrupt, bright and at times abysmal in their dealings, decided it was a way out for her family. That is, if she was examined—people are always examined—and found to be incompetent—then she had not retained herself; and she would be kept on a sizable allowance.

  At that moment, in a jail cell in Mexico, Mary did not know of the word retained or what it would suggest to others.

  Had she retained herself? That would depend, John knew now, on him. (John had been informed of this for some reason. He asked in a halting voice—feeling like a snoop—how much this money, her inheritance, was to come to. And the lawyer said: “Perhaps seventy-eight or eighty million.”)

  * * *

  —

  “Who is she?” one of the bony porters at Los Marinas had asked him, an elderly man with emaciated wrists and a boyish, hopeful smile, a smile that lit up his ancient face, as if he was just about to skip school, or at its worst learn an unsavoury secret about a teacher, and who pointed at that day’s paper. “People say she is from the United States.” He smiled as if being from the United States was part of the scandal.

  “No, she is from someplace else. How long have you been carrying bags for people?” John asked, pulling out some bills the value of which he did not know, and handing them to him.

  “Sixty-four years.” The man’s smile changed to indicate a kind of jubilation at his longevity.

  “Did you know her?” John asked.

  He nodded.

  “And did she do the least thing scandalous?”

  The porter shook his head. “But,” he said, “she is the coal lady—so we can’t let her go.”

  Mary Cyr did not know this yet—or if she did, she did not let on. She attracted attention even when she was trying not to. And now this attention was the worst of all. It was her great crisis, the public eye. The family had hired a lawyer. A brilliant young lawyer named Xavier Santez. The cynics would say it was just for family honour. No, it was much more. It was in spite of her dishonour. That is, no matter what this present charge was, Mary would say she was guiltless, and just might be guilty.

  But if the old porter called her “the coal lady,” everyone in Mexico already knew who she was.

  4.

  JOHN KNEW THAT PHOTOGRAPHERS HAD COME TO THE JAIL TO take pictures. One was from the local paper; a young woman with her head shaved and a nose ring. That was already four or five nights ago, John realized. He studied the paper—just to get the date, not understanding anything but the picture of Mary Cyr. No, of course he understood more. After the recent trouble at the mine, this was going to be a real problem.

  They had just started to discover the enormity of exactly who she was. And this boded very poorly for her.

  Mary Cyr was both wealthy and spoiled; and worse, thought to be English, even with a French name. She had cursed everyone—had laughed at everything—had stolen husbands. Or so they said. That is, the reporters and certain writers who once were her friends. There was a picture of her tossing a gold necklace over Niagara Falls while a young woman looked on in disbelief. (But she could, she said, explain it all. And John had discovered years ago that it was not gold, anyway.)

  * * *

  —

  Stifling in the background, filled with soot and dust and the tapping of tin cups in the hope of rescue that did not come, were the miners who some few weeks before had worked for Amigo Mining and Coal.

  John was told this by Perley as he was being driven to the plane a few days before.

  “There might be something to that,” Perley said, looking at him with a kind of knowing and bewildered, shocked face.

  The thing about Perley is that once in his mid-thirties he too had taken up the Oak Island mystery and tried to find the gold. One of his partners told him that the secret of Oak Island could be discovered by reading Shakespeare—so now Perley had read almost everything Shakespeare had written, and could quote whole sections of plays, off the top of his head, but had never discovered the gold. Mary Cyr never went on a trip without coming back carrying something written by Shakespeare or on Shakespeare to give to her troubled cousin.

  Now she was in jail, and there was a book coming on her.

  “A book?” John said.

  “A book,” Garnet’s lawyer had told him before he left. “A book about Mary Cyr—that someone she knows is going to write for some publisher—perhaps it is already written. Well, you know.”

  “No,” John said. “You tell me.”

  “Well, it could be about anything, but it might be about Bobby—but there are things on the internet as well. Pictures and things—one or two of her half naked—and you know with something in her hand—people can be cruel.”

  “I will go down tomorrow,” he said. “And try to help if I can.”

  “Good—look for Perley to drop by and drive you—you of course will be flown by us to Phoenix—and we have another plane waiting—”

  “It is easy to talk about us,” Perley said, whispering to him as he shook his hand. “So much of what you might hear about her—is like a mirage, it has not really happened. It is like a gigantic fantasy.”

  “I know,” John said, almost hopefully. But then he knew her uncles fired men at their pulp and paper mill for lighting a cigarette at the wrong time of day.

  * * *

  —

  He thought of better things on the flight down.

  One where Blair Cyr openly took on Bernard Shaw and his obsequious trip to Stalinist Russia when Cyr was a young reporter.

  One when Blair Cyr insisted that Beaverbrook still publish Winston C
hurchill in the Evening Standard in 1938—something that Beaverbrook fired him over, and then rehired him.

  No, these things would be forgotten.

  He thought about Blair moving with the Canadian troops into the Netherlands and coming under fire and delivering shoes to children; fighting against German and Dutch SS officers. He thought Blair Cyr’s heroics would not come into play. His money, his takeover of papers, his lumber assets, his steel assets, his ship-building contracts with the military would.

  Blair had made it a point to rescue people from the Netherlands after the war. Mary, when she began to feel like an out-and-out outcast, often claimed that one was Garnet’s mother. That is, Mary Cyr was sure she had seen a picture that for the life of her she could no longer find. She had it confused, of course, but what she was remembering was not completely untrue. It simply was not Uncle Garnet or his mother. That, however, did not deter her from saying it was.

  But John knew some of it was true. There was a family named Vanderflutin—in the end it is why they owned part of Amigo Mining. The elder Vanderflutin had helped ship art to America early in the war—before the US entered combat. He supposedly did not do it for himself, but after the war he claimed it for himself. For years no one—except little Mary—questioned it.

  The elder Vanderflutin always hoped Mary would warm up to him, but she did not.

  Then she got a bump on the head, in her grandfather’s library one day—and people said it changed her personality. She was never quite the same after. Some said it made her crazy; others said it made her brilliant.

  Afterwards Mary maintained she had seen a picture in a book of Dug Vanderflutin in a German uniform, standing beside Kurt Meyer. No one ever believed her. (Because she was a child, and would not have known who Kurt Meyer was at that moment—yet she said his name and was adamant it was both he and Vanderflutin.)