Yes, now you know—I have a bit of money—not too much—somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred or so million. My family has about nine billion. I think—not really that sure.
She placed her feet flat on the floor. And wiggled her two big toes.
What was toe in Spanish—she hadn’t the foggiest. Puntera, was that it?
There was the sound of the Mediterranean against the night’s black shore. And some people were making too much noise on the beach, with a patio light shining. There was a loud Spanish curse, and a slovenly inebriated woman walked by.
“Hell—where’s Franco when you need him,” Mary said.
“Pardon?” he asked.
“Infierno—¿dónde es Franco cuando lo necesitas?” she said.
She looked at him and gave a plaintive little smile—a little whimsical dash of teeth, her hair falling over her bright face. And then she went and got herself a glass of wine. Would this marriage last? She was praying it would last the night.
He could not say anything—he had lost his voice. He was petrified. She opened the bottle, with her back to him. It made a glorious pop. Then silence.
“When it is silent in a villa, you can sense the cold on your feet,” she whispered.
The night was filled with the scent of glory and wine, and deep darkness down on the stone steps that led to the shore.
Oh God, if this could only last, she thought.
In her diary she wrote that she wasn’t talking about her marriage.
Only about the night.
* * *
—
Her first husband was different. John drove down the highway, in his own car, with his .38 on the seat. Walked into the house, grabbed him by the neck, put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
It wasn’t loaded.
It was, as far as he could think, perhaps the worst thing he would ever do. He told no one about it—not even himself.
“I’ll sue—I’ll sue—I’ll sue the whole family for every cent they have—” the man said.
John went back to his house, and sat in the corner shaking.
“I did not do that,” he told himself.
That is, if you asked him tomorrow to swear on a Bible that he had not done this, he would. Sometimes you just cannot admit to what you turned into, even if it was only for a second.
That’s why Mary ended up forgiving them all. Perhaps even herself.
5.
THERE WAS THE SON OF A PAINTER SHE MET ONCE, ONE OF THOSE painter’s sons—the type of man who was invited to a party only because he was the son of an artist, and made a point of being a radical because it was in vogue to act like Jesus (though he dismissed Jesus for more revolutionary principles) and save the world; who after his usual amount of rum bragged about how well he knew the poor, so began to needle her about who she was, and how much damage her family did with their monopoly on so much. You know, how much money and ruin and trees they had cut down—how many lives they had ruined. (Not the twenty thousand families they put to work.)
“We will expose your family sooner or later,” he said. “You will be exposed.”
She sat there, at fifteen years old, politely listening to him. She had dressed up for the party and had begged to be allowed to go—and there were grown-ups there, she pleaded with Nan. And she would come home by eleven. It was two nights after she had been officially adopted, and Nan did love her. So did Garnet. So did Perley. Though she would be reticent to take the adoption seriously, she loved them for trying.
And finally, our painter’s son said, sneering:
“You and your bloody family with your Lear jet.”
There was so much of that, defending herself against boys she did not know, boys who would be boys all their lives, and who did not know her.
Mary Cyr held up her hands, timidly showing four fingers.
“Four—Lear jets—at last count,” she said.
Later, after everything else failed, he was studying to be a social worker, in a building her father had donated to the university.
* * *
—
When she was fourteen, her family sent her to boarding school. She packed her Plu, some cookies to share, a transistor radio to listen to the be bop a loo bop of the day, and eye liner.
In boarding school they talked about dropping acid and who might do it, and about a certain Mr. Cruise, who had nice buns. He spoke to them about marijuana, how it was easy to grow. He was subversive in a very noncommittal, intelligently theoretical and comfortable way. He was a man from the United States who had moved to Newfoundland because he had protested the Vietnam War; a man who had his degree from Memorial University and now taught English. He said the people there were very backward. He could imitate the premier of New Brunswick or Newfoundland and did it so successfully that everyone, even Mary, whose godfather was her father’s friend Premier Hatfield, also laughed. He knew how to fix the problems of unemployment and poverty, and said he had devoted his life to doing so. He said he was going to change the system.
“I am subversive in all my tendencies and I want my children to be as well.” (He called the students his “children,” although he had none and would never have any of his own.) “But being subversive in this place is very trying on my nerves.”
“Well, you be subversive and I’ll be subversiver,” Mary told him one day. She was intrigued by the idea of subversion, at least for a little while. Until she saw what it was.
That autumn she was fourteen she stood beside Cruise in the warm gummy gymnasium when he was speaking and the back of his jacket was covered in chalk dust, and he was saying something. He was so brilliant. As brilliant as a scientist. Some even whispered that he was a Chaucer Scholar, who shouldn’t be here—he was wasting his talent in this boarding school for young heifers. He was a Chaucer Scholar from Newfoundland, which made it all the more romantic—romantically serious.
So after she met Cruise, she was going to be a rebel, and rebel against the system—and in fact, John knew, she did do this, in a way Cruise could never manage.
The idea was, especially for people like Cruise, that if you were any good, you shouldn’t be here. But he was writing a long epic poem—about the poor:
On the draught of land the poor come out
And in their misery look about
And looking about do they spy
Grey, grim, grim grey assaults their eye.
Of couse it wasn’t quite like that, but it was unfortunately something like that. Mary Cyr had memorized it. It stuck in her head so that even years later she could recite whole lines of it—seven or eight lines. This is what she started to recite to her third husband, Lucien, in Spain, after she poured the wine, and there was wind in the palm trees, and a German man was walking his dog, and there was a long lonely song playing, and someone clicking castanets and then things went silent.
“A man quite a bit like Chaucer wrote that,” she said, looking at her poor befuddled bridegroom. And then shrugging, she said:
“Well, what do you want to do—let’s see—I bet you a thousand I can pee standing up!”
She got no reaction from either declaration.
6.
MANY OF THE GIRLS SAID MR. CRUISE WAS DEVOTED TO THE underprivileged, and even fed them at a soup kitchen. This made her angry at herself and her own family’s wealth. She told Mr. Cruise, about how sorry she was that her family had money.
“You are the only one to understand!” she said, blushing and hoping he not dislike her.
That is, her family had millions; owned papers, oil, shipping—all those things that ended with et cetera.
Especially when she heard of how many millions. Like, it wasn’t a million—her mother had along with her brother-in-law the Cyr fortune—and their part—not the greatest part by any means (that was owned by the other, more stable, side of the family, mind you) but still a nice healthy wad of it—was somewhere near the vicinity of 380 million.
But Cruise was here to teach them
—to:
“Teach these rich young ladybugs what the world is all about.”
And the silly man had actually read enough required literature to think he knew about the very world his job had allowed him to hide from. He had joined enough protests, he had caused his parents enough grief. Yet Mary knew at fourteen, or at least suspected, something was wrong with certain planks on his socialist platform. She did not quite know what—but something. She was, you see, that smart. But she was in awe of him, and how he could say:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour.
Yes, it was true—she was in awe of him. She knew that. She needed someone to like her and she wanted it so much to be him. To be liked by this fresh-faced tow-headed radical to young ladies (and it seemed young ladies only), with his blond hair a tad longer than most, and parted to one side, wearing owlish glasses and smoking a pipe. And on occasion wearing leather cowboy boots. And speaking of the problems that faced in the world, which it seemed only certain liberated people could solve. He did not know that he, too, was a product of his time.
Sometimes she followed him and him not knowing she was there—and she was thinking, that she wanted to prove to him something, and she thought often of him, in the long melancholy days when she was alone:
A knyght ther was, and that a worthy man,
That fro the tyme that he first bigan
To riden out, he loved chivalrie.
Chivalry, he told her—all along any watchtower that was the required thing for men. If men did not have chivalry toward women—God help them!
And this is what he had taped to the front of his office desk:
“O scathful harm, condition of poverte”—Chaucer!
And she said to him sitting on a bench beside the gymnasium when all the world was covered in an inch of snow and her right knee was itchy:
“I cannot find my father.”
And she looked up at him, almost terrified.
“I dream, you see—like Daddy is there—and I well, go there, and then he has his back turned and is walking away—” she paused and gulped a tiny tad “—you see?”
But then quite as out of the blue as her father’s death, she suddenly heard one night when she was following him:
“Mary Cyr—perky little ass on her,” Mr. Cruise say. “In her little school uniform with those gorgeous, beautifully pointed little titties—my my. That’s the girl who should be taught with her white panties slowly taken down.”
He laughed a guffaw and guffawed again, once or twice all the way up the street. She assumed she was not supposed to hear this; she had been walking on the other side of the long, interconnected rows of hedges and it was close to ten in the evening, and he was talking to someone from the tavern down the street.
The very next day he lit a cigarette and gave her a puff in secret; he said he would show her a marijuana plant—but not to tell. He moved his blond hair out of his eyes as he spoke, and sunlight came through the large rectangular window.
“Oh no,” she said, blushing. “I wouldn’t tell.”
“You promise you won’t—for the secrets are just between us?” And he touched her back. She flushed and he guffawed and later they walked down the wonderful road.
“You take the high road and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll have a guffaw before ya!” she said like the child she was. So he spoke to her about going to Edinburgh on sabbatical.
“Maybe if you want and it all goes well, we can go together?”
“Oh wow,” she said, and again she blushed and smiled.
Scottish too—yes, learning Gallic—that was a big thing for Mary. She knew eight words. But Cruise was for the poor. Poor little driblets. Little Celtic driblets. So she was for the poor too—and asked John when she was home to take her to some poor people. (In fact John knew this was a façade—because she knew poor people—she always had—.)
To her Cruise was sensitive. That’s what Mary and so many other girls thought. Sensitive—a beacon of light to young ladies. She was like a moth. That’s what she thought one night—a splendid little moth-like creature flitting toward him. And she knew if she could impress him, perhaps others would be impressed as well.
For this is what Mary hoped to convince people of, even though she had like, about, around, somewhere, the fact was, 380 million in her arse pocket. She needed to prove once and for all that she too was understanding. It was a very great thing back then, and as time passed, to be understanding. So many loud obnoxious and overbearing men and women told her she must be. And so for a little while she tried.
Cruise’s first name started with an N—Nigel—so she called him NC, and they sang when they walked down to the beach to see the marijuana plant. He slapped her little bum—like that, a tiny slap—just a momentary blush on her white buttock. It made her feel strangely wonderful—as if—well she couldn’t describe it really—even now she couldn’t describe how that first touch made her feel—that blush.
“Oh my dear me.”
It was done so quickly he pretended he never had done so—he was like that.
Years and years later, she saw a young woman run down the road naked in a protest against some fur-bearing millionaires, and she said, “Oh my dear me,” almost with the same intonation, the same self-depreciating plea to the world. She could see the small triangle of dark hair between her legs before the policeman wrestled her to the ground.
“Oh my dear me!”
They were protesting against her, against her money and some new frigate her family was building.
It was a plea that always came when people laughed about her lisp or staggered walk, or adoption into the family she already belonged to. Or when she herself filed papers to adopt a child in 1994 and was refused because of Bobby. And the papers got wind of it—and wrote about her the way they did.
At night in the gloom of her room she would wrestle with all of this. All of this old sorrow, like small stones in a broken bottle. She knew quite well of the fathers or mothers who refused to claim children so other imperfect, deeply flawed but willing men and women willingly would. Would care for them when they were ill, carry them through the streets of foreign countries to find them medicine in a world whose language they didn’t know. Love them, be willing to die for them in a second. How could someone ever put their noses to the pain of that? She found out after a dreadful time, that Nigel Cruise and his wife, both childless, both committed to the betterment of the awful world always did. And when she found out, once and for all that this is how they thought, she could only say:
“Oh my—dear me.”
She was like that. But that was later—it was in some distant time.
7.
CRUISE TOLD HER HE HAD A BOOK—A GREAT BOOK HE WAS WRITING.
So for a while as a young girl she was enthralled by this book. People around the school spoke about it. Because it was the first time many of them had ever met a real writer. This book had wizards and goblins—and he told her that the wizards were women, and the goblins were men—usually people in politics or the church who tried to dominate and subjugate women. She read twenty pages of it. He told her it was very risqué. The bishops would certainly be against it.
“Very risqué,” he said when he gave her a few chapters. She held the pages close to her heart and ran down the hall.
That night under the glow of lamplight she read how the goblins impregnated young women—and the wizards always used their great powers to terminate the pregnancy. Once that happened women gained power over the goblins in the legislature and banished them. Then freedom reigned. That’s about all she could make out. The words were far too big, words like “perpetuate gendered violence in a heteronormative, patriarchal, goblinized society.”
Or something as brilliant and special.
“Risqué,” she said when she handed the pages back. “Pure genius.”
“
Yes—but what does it remind you of?”
“I am not sure.”
He frowned just slightly then moved back toward his desk. And she felt scared that she wasn’t grown-up enough. So she quickly added:
“I got the pages mixed up—here let me—unscramble the pages!!” And she took the Manuscript and tried to make it as neat as she could. Her hands were shaking and she felt her eyes water.
He smiled, came back, bent down and kissed her on the forehead. And then suddenly gave her a tiny little peck on the lips—just a tiny brush. At this moment was the moment of deep moral crisis in his life. But it almost always happened, and later she would discover through certain channels that it happened at private schools, in Cape Breton, Ontario and Connecticut, and it always concerned a young student—it almost always included private instruction and lectures in his office about his attempts to free the young female. It almost always promised something—willingness to publish an essay or a story. It almost always happened just before he resigned and went somewhere else. In fact, he already had put feelers out to go somewhere else. He snubbed and ignored girls who had boyfriends, snubbed and ignored girls who had happy homes. That was a secret. He had not much use for young children, toddlers or babies. In fact he had never looked a young child’s way. He would never be seen put out by one. He would always find a way to gain sympathy for his deep selfishness. But all of this was somehow special to her then.
She would discover all of this, of course—discover over time by the detectives she hired to find out where he had gone, that she was neither the first nor the last. Somewhere in-between. She would keep it to herself. She discovered over time that he was not from Newfoundland, he only preyed off their dreams, he was not a Chaucer Scholar he only wished he was, and he did not have a PHD. She would keep it all to herself. Partly because she was ashamed. But wherever he went later on, she used whatever influence she had (and she did have much) to have him dismissed before he could do it again.
Mary Cyr Page 14
