Mary Cyr

by David Adams Richards

  “But you are saying bad, bad things about—my mommy in a way—I mean—my ear here is all plugged up a bit—but in a way, so if you do, I will not like you And from eight this morning I waited to meet you and like you because my mother wanted to meet you and like you, because she said, what is that word—big word, hmm—no, no—the word—made her excited last night to tell me you were coming—the word—INTELLECTUAL—and she wanted to talk to you, because you had your degree or what it was called—and now—look what it has become.”

  She gave her head another pound or two while she said this.

  “Elle a été touchée à la tête et elle est souvent confondue,” Nan said, with a severe look toward Mary’s mother.

  “Ah.” Vanderflutin nodded and smiled. Of course that had to be it! He smiled as if he had finally caught on. That’s why she was pounding her head. That’s why she laughed about his rifle. She was an idiot.

  “Well, I certainly want you and your mom to like me,” Ernest said, and looked at Nanesse and winked.

  “We are not making fun of your mom,” Nanesse said. “And Mary, dear, you are part French.” Then she looked at her husband. “Mon Dieu, elle est partie française.” And she gave a look of slight mortification.

  “Well, we are not making fun of the French, are we—are we? And what may I ask—just to ask—is Mr. Vanderflutter?”

  “I am Dutch, dear.”

  “Ah. I see,” Mary said mysteriously. “Well I suppose being Dutch is fine!”

  Then she was silent and the meal continued. And Ernest reached over and patted Mary’s head and smiled at Nanesse again, to show he knew she was something of an invalid, a “special person,” as he was taught to call them.

  “And what do you do?” Mary asked after a certain amount of time.

  “I am a writer.”

  “A good one?”

  “I hope so.”

  Everyone laughed at this, and Mary laughed as well, became giddy and got the hiccups, took a drink of milk to calm herself.

  “There there there,” Ernest said, patting her gently on the back.

  But he would envy little Mary Cyr from this moment on—and be determined to both destroy her and impress her. And he would never manage to do either.

  “Tell us about yourself, Mr. Vanderflutin,” Nan said, and she reached over and squeezed his hand a moment.

  He began to speak about his doctorate and his supervisor and how he wanted to have his book about a criminal English raid on a First Nations tribe published by “the Canadian publisher.”

  Nan nodded, and then said she proposed a toast to Vanderflutin and his caring and concern.

  “It is so good to have a man who bravely tells the truth at our table, who will stand up for what must be said and say it. I am delighted that you have come here tonight!” Nanesse said, adding as she stood, “Let us toast Mr. Vanderflutin!”

  So they all did this. Elaine picked up her gin and drank, and then had the maid get her another gin. Mary watched her mom carefully, and then studied Nan and Vanderflutin closely. She knew something was desperately wrong with the evening. Later she was to see it in university, among academics and civil servants. She would never find an answer to them. She would also at times fall for it herself.

  Now, however, she began to question whatever it was he said. Rarely had a mother so defenceless been defended so well by a little girl. And Elaine was by turns mortified and honoured by her.

  Mary seemed to be in a certain state where she couldn’t stop herself. Her face looked red and hot, and her eyes looked from one person to the other in complete defiance. It was the defiance of a person who would always find her best courage when backed into a corner. People did become concerned about her. But she realized now, she did not have a friend at the table. Most just thought she was being a saucy child, very ordinary at dinner parties with the spoiled. They tried to ignore her.

  “Mary,” Nanesse said, snapping her fingers in front of her face.

  Twice they said the discussion was over, but twice Mary continued on. That is, she would be silent—everyone would hear the embarassed clink of forks or spoons, and then she would say:

  “But—just a minute—wait a minute—so I am thinking it couldn’t be like that—I mean making her feel bad, why should you, you see, Mommy wasn’t even born yet—and besides why was the raid just by the English—the man you mentioned sounds Irish to me—or Scottish—and you said the fort was called Macleod, so perhaps you really do not know the difference between one country and another—you yourself have a house out there—was that on Native land, I wonder, at any time in the past maybe three hundred years—then if you think the English took land, you should up and give yours back too? Sorry, I got a bunch of hiccups. Forgive me while I begin to hiccup.”

  Hic

  “Mary.”

  “I am only thinking of something.”

  A long pause.

  A hiccup.

  “Wall Street—” Mary shouted, suddenly, and looked from one to the other. “Yes, I heard it at school—just last month—Mrs. Fletcher—Fletcher the Wretcher because she has morning sickness someone said, which whatever that is—anyway, she says one day—the Dutch—and you say you are—” (here she pointed one little finger at him) “put up Wall Street in New Amsterdam to keep the dirty natives out—that’s how much they loved their good ole Indian pals.”

  “Mary, stop.”

  “I am done—”

  Silence.

  “Done like this dinner.”

  Silence.

  The polite scrapping of forks and a small mention of the weather.

  Hic

  Silence

  Then—yelling:

  “What is that word—word—that word everyone is always looking for—oh, just a minute, I dropped my fork here—there—ha—got it. No—that word—word—oh yes—well, I was hit in the head, you know, which is what everyone always tells me—you can’t be right about Nazi uniforms because you had one hell of a wack in the noggin—oh—yes—FRAUD.”

  “Elle est hors de son esprit,” Nan said, and then in English to Mrs. Cyr, “She is out of her mind.”

  “Mary. Stop this instant!”

  But Mary had gone into a trance, lolling her head back and forth.

  “The Canadian publisher—yes, yes, how great that must be! I bet you if they ever did have a truly great writer there, they would scorn him, and ridicule his greatest books. And lie about him. So I guess you will have no fear of being ridiculed by them.”

  “Mary.”

  “Okay—I will.”

  Silence.

  “Become a writer too—and show you all—maybe do up some poems:

  “‘There was a wobbly Dutch boy

  Who had a great big plan

  To blame the good old English

  While living on Indian land.’”

  “Mary that is enough.”

  The scraping of forks and knives.

  Then silence. Then once again, suddenly furiously:

  “I don’t think you have a clue about the woods or the rivers, like my father or my friends’ fathers—oh, I have a rifle, but I never fired it—like the French in the war!”

  “Mary, leave the table.”

  She took off her napkin, left the table, walked all the way around it, and came back to her seat, picked up her napkin and tucked it under her chin again.

  Nanesse spoke while looking at Mary and then slowly looking down the table toward Mary’s mother: “She is a confused young girl and a very saucy one—she has learned things from someone about the Second World war—and certain things that are incorrect, but she has yet to learn about her Acadian culture, unfortunately.”

  The former teacher from St. Stephen, the one who had inadvertently started this debacle but mentioning the charm of Acadian houses, looked far down the table at this little girl and was overcome by her, realizing that all her splendid fury, her bright eyes and the expressive movements of her hands, were because she was Acadian, and that
she was valiantly protected her mother, who was not. He felt he was seeing the traits of a very brave child. He knew something of her father, also an Acadian, who had gallantly flown a spitfire with 292 Squadron in Britain, and thought of that man’s genes now conducting the fury in Mary Cyr. He would remember her forever, having met her this once. He would remember her as an Acadian child protecting her British mother, and taking on all comers.

  There was a long silence. Nan began to converse in French—which was a clue about what the rest of the night should involve. It should not involve the deranged young daughter of the frivolous Englishwoman, who had married the son who was in competition with her own husband over the business.

  “J’adore les orchidées, mais ma peau est pâle,” she said out of the blue, looking across at the orchids on the table.

  “Oh, mais votre peau est belle,” said Ernest Vanderflutin.

  “Auparavant, il y a longtemps,” Nan said, smiling. She looked at Mary’s mother to join in, knowing she could not speak French. It was a way she had of maintaining an upper hand while pretending to offer help.

  Mary listened to this quite politely and then, with her head down, looking at her pie, spoke:

  “Daddy said to me just the other week or so that my mother was in England watching the battles over her head between Spitfires and those damn Messerschmitts—how many of us here were doing so?”

  “Mary!”

  And then she said more petulantly:

  “Running with buckets to put out fires—up on ladders—while Nan was somewhere snoozing in Quebec—keeping her skin on. I don’t know what the Dutch were doing, but I can bet it wasn’t that much.”

  And then as she chewed her pie like you would bubble gum, and sat back as if suddenly exhausted; and full, she continued as she pushed her plate aside and gave a small belch:

  “I am going to tell the table this—all of you!! You should realize you should be nice—to British people—and even to the French people, like Aunt Nan, who is certainly hard to be nice to.”

  “Mary,” her mother said. “I am not at all upset—so dear, don’t you be.”

  Then her mother said, as if to mollify the tension:

  “Yes, well, some of the British were real bastards!” Everyone laughed and agreed with her that they were.

  Vanderflutin smiled and suddenly lighted a cigarette, patting Mary on the back and looking up at exhaled smoke as he did so. There was again a painful silence. Except the man from St. Stephen asked quite politely for another butter roll. Vanderflutin drawing on his smoke, holding it in long nervous fingers was content to now discuss his love of libraries. His trips to the Sorbonne and his time spent in Italy. He mentioned his genuine love of François Villon.

  So Mary paused, bent forward and tried to pick up the last piece of her pie with her fork. It fell to her plate and she looked up quickly, hoping Vanderflutin did not see it fall. Then she tried to fix the bow in her hair. Then she suddenly whispered while looking at her plate:

  “Some of the British were real bastards. And I am sure some of the Dutch were not.”

  “Mary!” her mother cautioned. And she stood up to take her away from the table.

  Suddenly her father came into the room. He stood at the door, smiling at her. He had come back from a five-night visit to camps in the woods. She felt her heart lift—she looked at Vanderflutin, who nodded, looked grave and ashen-faced and said nothing for the rest of the meal. Nor did Nan, who was intimidated by her younger brother-in-law. If Mary or her mother had just once mentioned what Nan and Ernest Vanderflutin were saying, her father would have been enraged. He had flown a Spitfire in the war, and later brought his bride home from England—he loved her like he loved no one except Mary, and he hated two things: demeaning a person because of nationality or because of religion. In fact he would never do so to the Dutch, who he knew had suffered much during the war. But Mary—Mary Cyr could not bring herself to speak.

  Her mother was a beauty then, with wonderful brown eyes, and Mary was quite right—she had seen much terror in the skies. She had tried to save her own father, who had been trapped in a burning building. She held his hand while he died. Her right hand had been scarred by the fire. It was “whittled down,” as Mary sometimes said. She covered it with a glove most times, and at other times left it under her shawl when she sat by the evening fire.

  Sadly it is what caused little Mary Cyr to begin a life of nightmares. It is what caused her mother to be an alcoholic.

  An old woman a distant member of the family—one of Nan’s aunts, who lived in some part of one of their houses—shouted at Mary Cyr one day because she was making too much noise, pointing at her as if she was frightened:

  “You will burn up just like your English granddaddy—” and laughed loudly and spit.

  Mary could never get that out of her mind.

  However, this particular dinner party was written about in her diary only years after it had occurred—so had she really said all this? Or had she made it up? Had she really recited that poem, or, more likely, had she just included it as an afterthought? Much of it may have been imagined. John did not know. He, however, did know this: she would always take on whom she had to, no matter what the cost to herself.

  4.

  AFTER SUPPER, IN THE BIG SQUARE MAHOGANY WOOD STUDY where Garnet and the foreman of the woodlot operations—and her father—met, Mr. Vanderflutin sat there expecting their rather handsome offer to be made with appeals to him to accept.

  Mary sat outside the room, and watched his shadow. It was a very tall shadow, for he was very tall, and a thin shadow, for he was thin, and it was, as Mary once said, a very thoughtful shadow, for Vanderflutin was thoughtful.

  He was thinking of three million dollars. What he got was accounts overdrawn, the amount of ore brought out, the need to sink a new shaft, make a new rail line out to town; bank notices that the Cyr family had overseen to keep the mine going. He got to see his father’s intemperate spending, his fly-by-night schemes to become a great Dutch merchant. What Blair Cyr thought at this time was that Dug Vanderflutin had been a hero in the Dutch resistance—he had certainly invented himself as one—and at this moment no one had any idea that this was not the case. And so there was a good deal of sympathy for his son.

  What Ernest Vanderflutin got was an offer of $201,000 in a certified cheque, and as Mary’s father said:

  “Take it or leave it, Ernie—but it is the best we can do at the moment. Really there is nothing more.”

  He sat there fidgeting with his hat, and Mary felt sorry for him. In fact, she ran to him suddenly and handed him a stick of Doublemint gum.

  He took the gum, and smiled wanly. And he took the offer.

  This would give them controlling shares of a mine they did not really want, and because of what they had already invested from 1959 on, controlling foreign shares of a coal mine in Mexico. But the New Brunswick iron ore mine needed upgrades.

  “We must go to see if number three shaft will be flooded,” Garnet said to her father later.

  It was a day’s drive by car, an hour by plane.

  “Sure, we can fly over tomorrow morning, because I promised Mary I would be home tomorrow night,” her father said, while he held Mary in his left arm.

  Just off the cuff—like that. Nary a thought that it would cost him his life.

  Just before her father put her to bed that night, she made him promise that when he came back, they would look for the picture of Dug Vanderflutin that she had seen in a book.

  “Well, when I come back, we will look for it—you and I,” he said.

  But he did not come home.

  As for Nan, she would tell her elderly aunt a week later that:

  “Elle va étudier dans un couvent afin de maintenir son français.”

  Mary Cyr was to go to a convent and study French. She would become French.

  As she was supposed to be. And those terrible outbursts had something to do with it.

  So everything was set
in motion at that crucial moment in Mary Cyr’s life. All because of a Dutch boy who hid behind a Native prowess he himself could never share, and Mary was too stubborn to let him pretend he could.

  Later she would be proposed to by another western boy of the same stamp. She kept running into them wherever she went, so there must have been many of them around.

  * * *

  —

  Later Mary Cyr told John in dribs and drabs many of these stories. And after her mother died, she hated—or pretended to—those “neutral bastards,” who did not take a stand in the Second World War. Especially the Dutch and the Irish. And most especially Quebec. Ernest was Dutch; Nanesse spent her childhood in Quebec; she threw the Irish in for good measure after she had, she said, “Read up on the pricks” like De Valera and Stephen Hayes.

  “Irish. Who could ever kick who was down in the teeth with more glee than the fuckin’ Irish?” she asked him once. “For all their St. Paddy’s Day bull.”

  “I am partly Irish and so are you.”

  “I got so many people packed into me I don’t even notice them squirming around in there,” she said.

  She had a list. A list, she said, “As long as your arm.”

  That started, she said, with brave men basking in Harvard while Canadian boys in Spitfires roared up to the clouds to tip the wings of V1 rockets so they would fall into the sea. One youngster who did that was her father.

  “But you know how much the Dutch suffered,” he said once.

  “Yes,” she said quickly. “I know. And so did Anne Frank, having to climb those stairs, up and up to the last attic in the fuckin’ world she would ever see.”

  In fact he had just found out that for years Mary had a Dutch pen pal she called “My dear, dear little Dutch friend.”

  He also learned over time that she called the English to task over those very Acadians she had rebelled against and those Irish too. That was later, when she was in England with the very rich and important.

  In the end she didn’t even have a cross thing to say about Mr. Vanderflutin. In fact her last three entries about him were full of guilt and love.

  Once she showed John a big glossy picture book called The German Soldier as Paris Tourist from 1940–44.