Mary Cyr

by David Adams Richards

  He was there when the Canadians disarmed the Germans, and the Dutch celebrated their liberation by piously shaving the heads of women collaborators they had caught and blamed. He brought Dutch men and women out to Canada. Just as Lord Beaverbrook had done for the Dutch queen in 1940. One was a Dutchman named Dug Vanderflutin. He had a wife and young son, named Ernest. Cyr was very fond of the older Vanderflutin, because he had been an adventurer in his younger years. He had been in the Far East as part of the merchant class of Dutchmen.

  Twice Dug had to be bailed out by Cyr because of financial difficulty. Then he took a trip with a Micmac man to find the treasure at Oak Island. A scheme that was very in vogue at the time, among dreamers and schemers. But he came back alone some weeks later—and only months after he came home did the truth come out: that this Micmac man was lost in an attempt to dig a parallel shaft to where they believed the great treasure was. The RCMP questioned Vanderflutin—and during this questioning and subsequent investigation a little-known fact emerged. There was, or had been, another Dug Vanderflutin from the same town in the Netherlands. There was some conflicting information about their identities, which was left unresolved.

  All of this happened about the time Mary Cyr herself was born, and Vanderflutin hoped to be her godfather, which Mary discovered in a letter written to her family in early December 1963.

  When Vanderflutin died, the Cyrs had to decide what to do with the mine, which they had floated for a long time. Mary was about nine or ten at that time, John thought. Did they want it or not—not really—but then, they decided to buy it all as they said, lock, stock and barrel.

  The man’s son, Ernest, who had studied political science at the university and wrote articles mainly about the dispossessed First Nations, wanted to sell it. Though he lived on a cattle farm out west, he wrote about the dispossessed natives; though he had never been in the woods, he wrote about their prowess. In fact at this time, this was quite fashionable for middle-class boys who had attended university to do.

  So he came east to sell the mine.

  Then this happened: Mary’s own father died in a plane crash at the age of forty-nine, flying to inspect the shafts of the New Brunswick mine to see if they should remain open or be flooded.

  After all was said and done, they ended up with the iron ore mine, and incidentally the major part of Amigo, the coal mine Dug Vanderflutin had bought while in Mexico. It was just a small part of their financial empire, and Amigo was almost never thought of. It was shut down and reopened on a variety of occasions, and ownership changed hands. Finally it was owned in part by a former top government official, Carlos DeRolfo, and on two or three occasions Tarsco fed it money to keep it afloat.

  But back to Mary.

  After her father died, her mother was alone. She travelled. She drank—she was celebrated as a worldly socialite. She died.

  For some reason, putting it all together, with the premature deaths of both parents, Mary hated the mine, and decided it was a very good idea to hate the Dutch. And just maybe everyone else. And she did so for a long, long time.

  2.

  THE FIGHT OVER MARY CYR AND WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN TO HER began when she was about twelve years of age.

  Mary became the orphan of the family. She loitered in the great smoky rooms of her grandfather or uncle, sat in chairs in huge offices in downtown Toronto at midday, was left in the huge cottage on the Miramichi. Sometimes by herself. She was forgotten. When she was thirteen, she set out on her own with a picnic lunch to find her mother, and made it all the way to the main highway before she was spotted. She was picked up and taken to the RCMP headquarters, and sat on a hard bench in the midnight humid air, trying to look at the bottom of her big left toe, which was cut. It was the first of many calls that came to John Delano because of her.

  ‘’That young rich girl you know—Mary Cyr is here—should we put her in a cell, or take her home? I am not sure?”

  “For God sake don’t put the child in the cell—I will come and get her, and take her home.”

  People believed she was daft because she had been hit in the head by a book and had fallen off a ladder in her family’s library. But John believed, if no one else did, that she was far closer to brilliant than stupid, and knew every nuance of what they did say concerning her and realized she was a burden to others by the time she was thirteen. Her eyes would brighten when she heard her name, and she would stop running or walking—at times remaining in the curious position of motion without moving, clandestinely waiting just beyond view to hear what was being said. Then she would continue as if she had not heard a thing. What they were trying to decide is what part of the fortune would be hers without ever saying it.

  It was not that they did not care for her—they did. Perhaps as much as anyone. She knew that someday come what may she would have much money at her disposal. So she refused to speak to them. She took to disliking Garnet, and saying he had killed her father.

  Garnet never answered these assaults. But Mary Cyr believed she had good reason for saying what she did. It had all started, she felt, at a dinner party the night before her father died. Everything that would happen to her that was bad had started then. Certainly something traumatic had happened. The death of her father came the night after.

  John discovered that that was the night she decided to side with her English mother rather than the Irish or French sides of her family. That is what it came down to.

  In a clumsy way she told John why that had to be, a few years after that night—the summer she was sixteen.

  “Why? Well, simply because you do not make fun of my mother,” she said. “I hardly remember it—but Daddy was away, and my mother was being made fun of because she was British. She had been before this, but this was a bigger case. A Dutchman came into our house thinking us French and Irish, so he started to insult the English, yet when he made light of my English mother—I became British at that moment to protect her.” She shrugged, looked at him, sighed, and her shoulders sank. “And I would do it for anyone I cared for. Even if they were Dutch.”

  “Who was this man?”

  “Ernest Vanderflutin, the lanky, bony, skinny son of the other fatter, flabbier Vanderflutin—the one we bought the mine from.”

  “Who?”

  “The older Vanderflutin—and I found out.”

  “You found out?”

  “When I was seven or eight—I told them I had seen a picture of the older Vanderflutin—no one paid me the least bit of attention—but he—the older Vanderflutin did—he paid attention. You could see he was worried. I saw a picture of him at a Nazi rally.”

  “You are sure of this, Mary.”

  She simply looked away.

  So John waited a moment—not knowing whether to believe her, and then asked:

  “And that’s what happened? I mean between you and the family?” He did not know if she was delusional or not, for so many people simply assumed she was.

  “Yes. Then my daddy died, then my mommy died last year—and I guess I will have to fight them all!”

  John felt that she took solace in the fact that she was alone, and believed she would be alone always, and by this loneliness would sooner or later—she did not know when—come virtue. She did not know how she would live life until this virtue came, or in what way it would show itself—but she felt it as a second layer under her thought—that someday even for one brief moment she would be virtuous, and this came primarily because she was as she was, alone. She was always alone—or nearly always alone—except for that one thing in her upstairs rooms that everyone told her she should never have had.

  The idea that she was delusional, or as the girls on the beach often said, “a wack job” because she had fallen and hit her head when in the library that day, infested the thoughts of dozens of people who had to deal with her. But it also made John want and need to protect her.

  3.

  SOMETIME AFTER HER DAD DIED, AND HER MOTHER HAD travelled alone to Dénia, Spain, Garnet�
�on the urging of his wife, Nan, who was six years his senior, bolder and more brazen, and hated the wealthy, and therefore took it out on her niece (conveniently forgetting she had married into improbable wealth)—sent Mary to a convent in northern New Brunswick to study with the nuns of Notre Dame. Nan decided that Mary could be drawn to religious orders—and she was prepared to help her do so. It would, Mary thought later, be advantageous for Nan to have the heiress who was worth more than Perley in a convent taking the oath of poverty. (Or this was the reason Mary later believed.) But there was even a more insidious reason. Mary Cyr had proclaimed herself as English to protect her mother; Nan insisted that the Cyr girl be French. She was partly French—Mary never denied it. She simply chose her mother’s identity as a choice of loyalty.

  Mary at first seemed ambivalent about going. Her father had died and her mother, never comfortable in the family, had gone, believing at least for a time that Mary would be better off with her father’s family. When she changed her mind, she was too drunk and it was too late.

  So Mary Cyr went to the convent at the age of thirteen, packing her lipstick, her rouge, high-heel shoes, her Plu and some arrowroot biscuits. The lipstick, rouge and high-heel shoes were taken away. Her Plu was allowed; the arrowroot biscuits were shared.

  As winter came, she felt more and more trapped. Especially in the cafeteria, among all the other girls.

  “The nuns,” Mary Cyr wrote John, “they act so strange they must be religious—besides, all their heroes have been chopped up or boiled in oil—one was even roasted on a grill—please confirm to them that I don’t even like a toothache.”

  These pleas were written in childlike handwriting and had the ache of loneliness and childhood in them. But the idea of being roasted on a grill gave her horrific nightmares for years. The idea of fire terrified her.

  And then a week later she wrote:

  “I want to come home. Mr. Delano Captain, Sir, you are my only friend and I really, really like you—”

  John took his own money and time and visited her. The convent was off the beaten path—behind a small village near the open bay. In the frigid months, a blue icy haze surrounded the third storey, and wind echoed and moaned—the trees’ icy branches snapped, and in a gale sounded like a vise was being closed on a head. There was the smell of soup and darkness and porridge all at once. She was forced to converse in a language that up until the first semester she had never spoken and did not know.

  She was suffering under the agony of being an English girl—even though her name was Cyr—in an unfriendly French school. They called her anglaise and teased her about it—about her wealth. It was all done on the sly—a note here, a pinch there, a kick under the table. A heavy crosscheck during floor hockey. And a smile when she fought back and got caught.

  Pretty little Acadian girls whose boyfriends were just starting to grow their inestimable goatees.

  She made a phone call to him, collect from a pay phone at Pizza Delight.

  “Is that you, Mr. Captain Constable—is that you? You’ve got to save me, Sergeant Captain Delano—you have to kidnap me, and take me away. I am restive.”

  “You are restive?”

  “Well, you pick the word—that’s what I’ve become.”

  You could tell she was holding her mittened hand up to the phone and whispering into it.

  “Are you still there—are you, Sergeant, my best friend? Well—” she whispered gravely. “Listen up!! Whatever I mean, it’s what I am. I am living in Mother Superior’s office—” (pause) “—because I am sent there at least three times a day—and three times a day—” (pause, coughing) “—Mother leaves me there kneeling in the corner, praying, while she makes her rounds—my knees are getting all red and rubbed off. Besides, she delights in speaking French—so there is definitely something wrong with her.”

  Time and again she told him she was brought to the Mother Superior because it was said she, Mary, started fights. She had a bruise on her face—up near her eye. But she would not tell who did it. She was in fact honour-bound, as her grandfather had taught her to be. She would sit in the principal’s office on a chair with her hands folded, staring glumly and silently ahead, and refraining from speaking against the accusations piling up against her.

  Knowing the insufferable ethnic wars that at times happened in the small towns that dotted the highway, he petitioned Garnet to bring her out of there. But Garnet and Nan said no—it was impossible to do that—and it was for her own good. The money was paid, and everything was sufficient.

  Garnet had the peculiar strain of being implacable in small matters. Nan felt Mary must stay where she was—it was imperative that Mary be taught in French, by the French and for the French. The Englishwoman was a discredited member of the family. And she was gone. Enough of this English nonsense—she was betraying her own culture. As always in Canada, one is not caught between two worlds but between three or four—not between two competing interests but a multitude. That is, the convent was not as bad as Mary would let on, or as life-affirming as Nan often suggested to those who sometimes questioned the wisdom of having sent Mary Cyr there. Not all the Acadians were mean to her—but enough of them were silent when she was being treated meanly. And she would be disgusted by this in her lifetime—the silence that allowed bigotry toward the Catholics when she was in university was the silence that allowed the same thing against her Englishness by these pretty little girls who said she must be a Protestant.

  She could have switched sides easily, given up her mother—if she had been less a person. She could have chosen a different side, and be welcomed. But she decided to stand and fight.

  And John hoped for her but could do nothing about it.

  John now wondered down in Mexico if it would be known. That is, if her final two months at the convent would become known—and if this would become part of the indictment against her. That is, Facebook and the internet would play their parts like those juvenile boys once did. She had become a figure of fun on the internet. But she had been before, in the convent, and after trying to make friends she tried to fight back, but was hopelessly outnumbered. Here she was on the edge of the frozen bay, wherein the Tracadie River flowed—plunked down in the midst of them.

  So she wrote home and asked for a small pistol, to protect herself:

  “Only if need be—I will use it sparingly.”

  Of course that did not happen.

  4.

  PERHAPS IT WAS FATE, FORTITUDE OR DESIGN, BUT MARY CYR had one friend, someone as picked on as she—a girl with blond eyelashes and blond thin hair, weak eyes and a sad comical little grin, who came there by way of Caraquet. A girl who liked and dreamed of a boy named Lucien DeCoussy.

  “Et il est si mignon et spécial,” she would say—many times a day.

  But unfortunately no one thought little Denise was.

  One might see her picture in a thousand Canadian yearbooks from mid-century on, the girls who walk with bleak-coloured sweaters along rows of grey lockers, carrying books with a kind of hopeful plea, through the storms of our oddly quaint villages and vicious sub-zero winters.

  Mary promised her a donkey—or a horse, whatever it was—if she would be her friend—yet Denise Albert would have been her friend anyway. So being outcasts, the two of them were put together in a small back bedroom, away from the others.

  This idea that the English wanted to destroy them, and Mary should not only realize this but her soul should respond to it, was a matter of great and subtle concern in those long corridors the nuns walked, silent and determined to wrest out of these children spontaneity and love. (Of course not all of them, and even those who did could be at times kind to those in their care.)

  But Mary’s soul rebelled against this idea, and she could not join the insults fired at the maudits anglais. And Denise would not, because of Mary.

  That this has been played out two hundred thousand times in our country on either side of the spectrum, with little leeway for self-blame is somethi
ng unspoken. And this formed Mary Cyr’s philosophy: get back at those who from the vantage of victimization attacked the grandchildren of their supposed victimizers without confronting themselves.

  And she saw this, in the sweet-smelling Acadian girls and in a western Canadian named Ernest Vanderflutin, who had as far as Mary Cyr was concerned the audacity to speak against her mother.

  It became her philosophy—to fight them to the death—but it took some time to develop.

  With Denise as her only friend they were put out of the way.

  Mary Cyr once said, later on:

  “Away from the pure ones—they are after French purity like others cherished certain Germanic qualities. Oh, they won’t say that, but their politicians will demonstrate it. Someday I bet they will have laws in Quebec against having English on signs—and call it progress.”

  (This of course was one of the many things she said that came to haunt her later. And she would say as many things about the English over the years: You can always tell an Englishman, but you can’t tell him much!)

  But their punishment came because Mary refused to learn, or attempt to learn French—the real trouble was Mary had a hard time concentrating on anything the year after her father’s death and should have been excused—and Denise could not comprehend why other students disliked Mary. Mary’s marks that year ranged from 35 to 65. Most of her marks fell between 50 and 60. In the distilled afternoon light through the great, elongated windows of classrooms they sat side by side—separated from the others.

  Sister Alvina had warned them, had strapped them, and then sanctioned them.

  They locked the door on them at eight at night. That is, not only Mary and Denise but all the students.

  Their window was three storeys up and had double-pane glass, and the window itself was nailed shut. The main dorms were off to their left; the nuns slept on the right—something that Mary Cyr often seemed confused about when speaking with Denise.