Mary Cyr

by David Adams Richards

  “Oh dear me,” Mary said.

  She had written him a poem, and hoped he would read it, and see her love for him:

  I said goodbye to thee at night

  O my angel desperate bright,

  You fight for the poor with all your might;

  If you leave me I might die of fright—

  Something like that. She practised it in front of the mirror—she even touched her right breast with her left hand to remember. She snuck out along the masterful hallways and left the poem in his essay box. When she turned away from his door, to sneak back quietly along the hall, her beautiful young face was filled with fear and terror and joy.

  She wore her school uniform, her little plaid top; and skirt, and high white socks, and sat on a bench on one side of the common, under a hazel tree, and watched his window.

  Girls passed by in the dusk, and where would she be in seven years, she thought—and startlingly enough she thought: Where will I be in thirty whole years from now.

  Then she took out a small penknife she had brought from her room, just to carve her name in the bench.

  “I like Mr. C.—Mary Cyr.”

  It is still there, faded, and painted green, against the sky. Many people who come to the school will sit on that bench just to say they sat on the bench where Mary Cyr signed her name. The name acquired over those thirty years, the whimsical and even olfactory sense of charm and grace, dabbed every school generation with new warm green paint, but never covering the name that was written—being that name was Mary Cyr.

  That is what John had gleaned from her life before she was fifteen—and then she was just short of fifteen, and her mother died.

  11.

  MARY CYR ALSO KNEW THIS:

  The attacks on her family were fairly constant; especially when the New World of the baby boomers became vocal, against cutting of wood and shipping of oil, and pumping of gas. To say the attacks started at any one place is to miss the analogue of its source. The Cyrs were moneyed so they were attacked. By professors for the most part—one visiting professor from Ohio who couldn’t comprehend how one family made so much money, and therefore believed that he was sent, as Mary Cyr once said, goateed and bucktoothed, as a saviour to the province. Yes, he in his combed beard was going to show us, on his tenured salary and his mean disposition, where we had all gone wrong. The only time Mary met him, he was carrying books back to the library and had chalk on his arm.

  John read these attacks on them from the time he himself was nineteen, so Mary Cyr must have been well aware of them. For the most part the Cyrs could not, and did not, answer back.

  The family was attacked gleefully, because of what wasn’t spoken about. You see, the Cyrs were moneyed but from the Maritimes, and this supposed anomaly caused a great deal of consternation among people who had never had money or were not from the Maritimes and had never been able to think for themselves; that is, their money was not Upper Canadian so it must be coarse or vulgar or exploitive—it dealt in gas and oil and lumber and papers. It had a monopoly on things that the moneyed from Ottawa or Toronto never seemed to grasp, but things that were absolutely essential to keep everyone alive, which were of course not looked upon by the art crowd as needed. There was something so lacking refinement in it. Supposedly. And there was a good deal of gloating about who they were. This was really the reason for the harangue against them. And John had discovered this, and that is why he went to work as Mary Cyr’s sometime bodyguard. He felt he would protect her. Why? What was the secret?

  It was simply this: Mary Cyr’s father had given John Delano a job in his woodlot when the mill refused to hire him. One day, as John walked the logging road back to the truck that would take him to town, Mr. Cyr picked him up. They talked about what John might want to do.

  “I want to be in the police—I want to be an RCMP—but with how I was as a kid, I doubt if they will look my way.”

  Mr. Cyr said nothing. Ten days later John was called for an interview. Seven months later he was in Regina. Nothing was said, but he knew Mary’s father had enabled him to be accepted.

  John knew from the time Mary was six or seven her family was a completely easy target. Of course he knew too some of it they richly deserved.

  Some of it, however, they did not. Although they were noted as one of the richest families in the country, they were the epitome of what one shouldn’t do with money. Although if you asked anyone what they did with their money, nine of ten people would never be able to say. The professor from Ohio did not know that he sat in a building donated by the family, to level his attack upon them with curious professorial fair-mindedness.

  What was unforgivable was that Mary herself was attacked from the time she was thirteen.

  Early on Mary Cyr developed a sixth sense about all of this. She knew what magazines to avoid, what books not to pick up. She could tell by a headline in a rival paper if her family was about to be pilloried. Sometimes she was told not to read certain things: about oil spills or satirical jibes against them. It became a joke that her family was oily, gassy and greasy.

  But so much of her life was spent in discovering things that they had tried to hide. So over time she picked out what was happening.

  Over time she discovered that someone who was attacking them most from the time her mother left to the time Mary Cyr travelled to The Hague was Ernest Vanderflutin. He had become a well-known commentator in Europe. In the late seventies they had dealings in Europe, and people were interested in who these Cyrs might be.

  So he had been hired to do an article on them for Der Spiegel. He was called in Europe, for a time, an authority on Canada—so his articles often appeared about Trudeau, or NATO, or Canadian economic policy, or on a few occasions Canadian commitment to peacekeeping roles.

  He called his article on the Cyr dynasty “Masters of the Fiefdom.”

  Some said these articles, when they were republished in English by Canadian or British magazines (the British, Mary realizing, not giving a damn about them, the mongrels that they were), helped drive Mary’s mother to her death.

  Whether that was true was really impossible to tell. Mary knew what store in Saint John sold copies, and read most of them, as she sat alone on a bench in the corner of an upstairs room. The magazine would be opened on her lap, her face was pensive, her eyes would blink slowly reading:

  The grossness of what they call Canadian culture and money is now in Argentina with her boyfriend. Sometimes she turns up at a benefit drunk. Her family, which exclude her, has no idea what to do with her—she is a British woman, of course, with all the baggage that entails. Her husband, the brightest of a not-too-bright lot, is dead; her daughter lives somewhere within the family enclave and goes to a private school. They want to adopt her as their own. Of course one must not mistake this adoption as love. The family is really quite incapable of that. As for the daughter, to say she is a ‘spoiled child’ is to lessen the very term. A little girl named Denise died in her presence—no mention of that was made in their so-called papers—I guess it is a Maritime thing. MC, as she is sometimes called, is both privileged and spoiled, but of course has no family left to speak of. As for her grandfather Blair Cyr himself, he is a man with ultraconservative—even militarist—views, who has made an empire on the backs of the New Brunswick Acadian worker and now lives out his days in the Bahamas, much like his mentor, another ghastly New Brunswicker, Lord Beaverbrook, once did. New Brunswick is a place about as minimally in the scope of world affairs as a backward place can be. It is amazing that such ruthless newspaper barons grow from its soil. Or is it? Still, the grossness of this Canadian money and supposed culture wants to buy into German property, industrial sites, mining operations, and Swiss papers now—I am simply saying don’t be deceived—everyone sooner or later gets what they pay for. Ask the average New Brunswicker who toils in the woods and mines, or on the docks for this empire.

  It was so gleefully dismissive it revealed all the artifice it pretended to expose. As Mary
read, she would try to breathe slowly. She would set the apple down and turn the page, and pick the apple back up, and take a nibble without closing her eyes. Far away on another continent her nemesis sat down to supper amused at his own glandular verbosity, with his wife, who for the moment cherished him, and made a long-distance call home to her family in Canada to read parts of his essay. In fact, Mary could see them at this moment in her mind’s eye. And she suddenly understood that everything she was—British, Catholic, rich, even now adopted—came under the umbrella of available target to those who shunned kindness. And she realized this by the time she was fourteen. She was quite a bit on the outside of any side there was. She could succumb and be like the Kennedy children—take on the world in the predictable way the privileged left often have—but she had far too much integrity to do that.

  So she picked up her apple again and continued to read:

  The British, as false as this is to thinking people, still believe in empire—sometimes simply for the sake of it. Yes, they have meddled themselves out of Europe finally, but still have small pockets of the Queen’s Devoted Subjects at various rocky corners of the world. You might as a thinking man or woman find that difficult to believe. Still, I have seen it. Speak to the French in that province and you will know. One would think living in Loyalist New Brunswick you were travelling back in time, where British soldiers of foot still marched in the streets keeping the proud noble savage, the only good thing Canada has created, down. This family will not be stopped any time soon. They have created a bubble of respectability around their odious doings and have at their disposal billions of dollars while filling the air with deposits of dirty oil, dirty pulp and paper and dirty coal! They own a coal mine in Mexico—the workers there toil in unbelievable horror—the horror, ladies and gentleman, like all horror, is real.

  She scanned the article five times to find out. He had neglected to mention his father had once owned the same coal mine. And he had neglected to mention that Mary Cyr’s family was Acadian as well as British. But that must have been a mistake.

  Ernest Vanderflutin was written large; PHD was written large as well. And that was the flaw—

  In fact this article would start her quest—and it would not end until The Hague and three European private detectives who would discover for her who his father, Dug Vanderflutin, had really been. That he had run away from the rubber plantation and left people who had been loyal to him all his life to die under the Japanese.

  Sin—yes, we all do it; she wondered if he knew it.

  Still and all, the terrible things said about her mother and even her aunt and uncle were about to leave a very permanent scar on Mary Cyr; and someday in the future—when you looked closely—it was as if this scar was visible, even though not a mark showed on her beautiful and tortured face. That, and how people were later to say that she destroyed her own son.

  She would finish reading the article and then burn the pages. Then she would lie in bed trying to think of what to do with her own life.

  Hence her trip eight years later to The Hague to find out about Vanderflutin’s father, which she knew about from the time she was ten. The strange thing was, Ernest Vanderflutin did not. That is where the little Dutch girl, her friend came in. She lived in the same town Mr. Vanderflutin came from. She knew about Jewish boys and girls being sent somewhere because their fathers couldn’t pay enough to a man named Vanderflutin. This pen pal’s aunt, Linda van Haut, ran to one of them, handing him a pear, and said:

  “Plooi dit in uw zak.”

  Tuck this in your pocket.

  And then the truck clattered away.

  That was the only good thing that had happened during her stay at the convent. They were allowed to have a Catholic pen pal from a foreign town. She picked Norma van Haut. So over time she discovered—well, there were others who discovered it as well—what Ernest himself would come to know one bleak day sitting in a restaurant in Geneva.

  12.

  SHE DECIDED AT THE AGE OF FOURTEEN TO GET HER MOTHER’S fortune for her. So she tried to have meetings with Garnet about the business. She would stand in his upstairs office, looking at the far corner of the rug, as she spoke. Still, she was only a little girl, uncertain of what she was saying exactly—but trying to direct the great business in a way that her father might have wanted it, with a scribbler or a notepad in her hand, some scrawl written down that she was sure would solve things, if only she could manage to make Garnet listen. She got nowhere.

  So she tried to take it out on Garnet’s son, Perley, who had done nothing in his life except to try to be accepted by her.

  “Nanesse wanted a girl, Perley—and she got you—you play croquet like a little fairy. That’s why Nan wants me. How can you blame her?”

  And: “You were all in it together,” she would whisper to Perley at night when they were at the cottage at Burnt Church. You could hardly hear her voice—it came and went like the wind drifting through the trees. “Spending my money on an iron ore mine—I don’t even know what iron ore is, but I know one thing—it’s not something I would wear—unless in a pinch. And you don’t like my mother, well then, I don’t like you—if you liked my mother, I would make a concerted—is it concerted? I think its ‘concerted’; Perley, is it ‘concerted’—effort to like you—but fair is fair, so beware! I hate you and the Vanderflutin and the Irish, and the Frenchies and the—who are those people who live in that country—you know—”

  Silence.

  “Who are those people who live in that country way over somewhere, you know—you know—they gave Ernest Vanderflutin a job?”

  Silence.

  “The SWISS—that’s it—I hate the SWISS.”

  So after a time Perley would strain to hear what it was someone was saying, and he would hear the almost melancholy, yet sharp and forceful whisper, coming to him through the naked summer wind, the trees outside waving in the sweet darkness and lights far away down the shore road.

  “You were all in it together,” her voice would be suddenly heard saying amid the storm blowing across the yard.

  “In what?”

  Again silence.

  Silence and sadness and hurt and silence.

  “You all had a hand in killing my father and sending my mother back to England,” came the voice, peppered through the wind, like the pellets from a shotgun.

  “We did?” Perley would ask, shocked and confused, as he lay in his bed, and she lay in hers in the room across the hall.

  “Yes—you all had a hand in killing him, and driving my mother insane, and making her go out with someone named Doc, and now I am certain you want to kill me.”

  “I don’t think that is true, Mary.”

  “Something has gone on, and I am about to find out what, and then the heads will roll. And—”

  “And what?”

  “And I want my money—it’s my money—and the whole lot of you have it stuffed in your big fat pockets!”

  Perley would get out of bed, in his pyjamas, would walk across the hall in his large woolly slippers, and standing at the door of her room, he would try to explain:

  “But you get your allowance just like I do.”

  “I bet you have thousands wadded away in your pockets—”

  “I have fifty-five cents in my drawer—”

  “Well, thirty-five cents of it is mine!”

  He would stare at her. The blankets pulled up to her neck, her head quite still, her dark hair ribboned out against the white pillow. Her beautiful full eyes would be staring straight at him, emotionless. The wind would whisper and moan over the bay.

  “I want my money because it is my mom and daddy’s—besides that, I need it to travel with the only person who cares about me—and he said he is going to publish my poem—so wait and see!”

  “What poem—what person?”

  “Never you mind—never you mind—traitor!”

  The large cottage had a long upstairs hallway that led to the balcony, and Mary Cyr most often sa
t in the small room off of it, painting her nails, and watching the boats out in the water or staring with brooding intensity at something unspecific, a First Nations boy walking along the beach, and then go back to her bedroom. Sometimes she would bring binoculars to the window, and people would notice this young girl staring out at them with a pair of binoculars, disquieting their walk.

  “Is that the Cyr girl—”

  “Yes—people say she’s not right in the head. She is dangerous, so they try to keep her inside. That’s the curse of being rich—there is always one or two of them that are completely insane. They screw themselves, you see—since they trust no one else to screw.”

  “Is she the one—you know, who pushed that young French girl into the water? You know who held the little French girl’s head under the water until she drowned?”

  “That’s what they say. Ever since she decided to be English.”

  She heard them, and said nothing. She sat at the dinner table and was silent.

  She began to read all she could about the Second World War. After a time she began to slip notes under Perley’s door. Handwritten notes that said:

  “The reason you have no friends is that you are not friendly. In the Second World War you would be the first one shot.”

  “I would be your friend, but what’s the use—you’re not a fighting man.”

  And: “You will never be kissed—and if you are, it will never be with a tongue.”

  Still at fourteen she was already a wonderful hater. She knew very much about the war, and her grandfather’s part in it. Except, she did exaggerate how many people he had saved.

  Still by the time she was nineteen she could argue very convincingly why she thought Hitler lost the war in the east—sending Army Group Centre to Kiev to support Army Group South, when the road to Moscow lay open, and then deciding to attack the non-strategic city of Stalingrad:

  Just, she said, because it had a nice name.