But everyone was talking about his cousin.
“Ole Blair himself popped her cherry—what I heard.”
“Ya, an I myself had a chance to bang her one night at a bar, downriver—she even offered me money, but I said no.”
“I woulda taken it.”
“Na, not worth it.”
Perley went outside. He stared at his new boots; his new fifteen-hundred-dollar coat; his thick heavy-rimmed glasses; his big-buckled belt, which he liked. Yes, he thought, he was wearing four thousand dollars on his body and all his life he had been a fool.
He went home shaking and cold. He sat in the sauna for a while with his heavy coat and boots still on.
“I must go down,” he told a reporter—and he was interviewed on television saying so.
“You—what could you ever do?” the reporter asked.
“I could trade places with her,” he said.
Two more weeks would pass, where Perley would threaten to come down, to trade places—two weeks of agony for Mary where she seemed powerless to make him understand. He nor John, nor her former lovers, could ever help her anymore.
And then suddenly a Mexican man came to him, Perley, when he was on his daily walk.
“I can get your wife out of jail,” he said.
“She is not my wife—she is my cousin.”
“Well, I have come here with her blessing—but it is up to you—it is entirely up to you.”
Her blessing.
One payment—cash—American money—and she will be home—I will give you my cell phone number—you let me know—but if you tell anyone, the deal is off—amigo.
Perley did not tell anyone. He forgot about it. For a number of days. He said nothing. Then he realized he couldn’t sleep. He hadn’t eaten a meal in days. Oh, it was not true. It could not be. He was not sure the man was even Mexican. But what would most of us do?
He dialed the number.
PART SEVEN
1.
THE GIRLS THAT SUMMER—RHONDA, BONNIE AND GAIL—SHE called them “Tootsie one,” “Tootsie two” and “Tootsie three”—of course she called them “the little foxes” as well—retaliated. They bided their time but then struck out at the most unfortunate and vulnerable of the Cyrs one windy August day when the east wind blew down along the flattened grasses, and the swings were empty, and the sky too blue.
On that day, so long ago, the three girls accused Perley of “exposing himself” in front of them down at the boathouse. They declared he had yelled at them to look at him at the exact moment he held his towel open. They all ran up the beach traumatized to beat the snot out of Moses, as Mary Cyr later exclaimed, screaming and crying. Their theatrics is what caught the attention of a man mowing his lawn, and a woman lying on her lawn chair just down the beach.
“Those poor dears,” the woman said. “Certainly looked completely distraught!”
“Did you know what they were distraught over?”
“No, but I was clever enough to guess.”
One does not know how well people have been trained all their lives to say just those proper things, to emulate one another’s outrage in a pinch. In fact it was what the girls so unconsciously relied upon; it represented the mimicry of those who have lost their way and wish to scapegoat those they can put on display.
So the police for a second time in a month had to come to the door of the large cottage. For the second time one of the Cyr children had been caught up in scandal. For the second time the family was bruised and subject to ruinous gossip. And what was becoming clear is the Cyr children felt so entitled they simply assumed they could torment other children.
Perley stood on the veranda with his head down, ashamed and unable to look up, even when Garnet told him to. He was told to go to the Rhonda Cottage (this was the name the kids had given it) and apologize, and he was driven in a police car, with kids following behind, shouting and laughing, until the police car stopped and the officer told them to go home.
So the word got around that he had exposed himself in front of girls.
He couldn’t look at the girls when he apologized. (Or in fact any other girls for years.)
He stared at his flat white running shoes and the dust that filtered upward when he moved them. He had not done so, he whispered; he had not even known the girls were there. No one believed him.
Mary Cyr stood up for him. She stood up for him immediately and ferociously, like a queen with a dagger pitched against a thousand men.
“It’s a lie—those girls—Tootsie one especially is a liar—they spied on him to see him in the buff—and then ran to tell—yes, all of them are spies—I know a family of Vanderfluffer people and they are spies—chronic English-hating spies just the kind that we have in Canada—maybe one of the girls—I suspect Tootsie two is a Vanderfluffer—she has all the wiles to be one—insincere, middle-class values—schoolgirl, needs to be attached to people, mouth packed full of braces—has friends, sometimes smells nice—just the type.”
And then she walked away, and spoke of it no more. But it was the middle of summer—days were listless and the shades of trees where hammocks were strung left their shadows across well-manicured lawns and multitudinous flower arrangements in the sun.
Behind those doors of the great cottage, larger than most houses in the province, beyond the smell of oak and wood polish and blinds pulled down to exclude the sun, behind all of this was someone else. He was there when Mary Cyr was peering out the window with her binoculars—he was there when she watched the girls walk up the lane.
Now and then she would turn to him, binoculars still in her hand, and say:
“Do you want to see them, Bobby—all of them will go on diets, and be concerned about equality, enough to make you itch, and will have pleasant-looking faces—rely on CBC news stories about First Nations, have some cause like pro choice, be well known as advocates—they would put someone like you to death, Bobby—do you understand, Bobby, poor Bobby—poor little Bobby, perhaps you don’t.”
Then she would hurriedly look through her binoculars again.
“Ah yes—there they go—look—sand in their shoes, smell of the sea, wind in their hair, their little freckled, blushed faces—pathetic—they will turn on each other—wait and see! And when they do, when that time comes, I hope I am there to witness it all.”
Bobby Cyr was not supposed to be Mary Cyr’s child. He was supposed to be a child of one of the relatives who actually never really existed, a relative who could not take care of him and had given him to Nan and Garnet. (This was Greg’s idea—and Greg’s side of the family was the side of the family.) Bobby was in fact not supposed to live. But he did live. And he was born in a stable, a manger of sorts—the barn out back, near a beautiful 1948 teakwood motorboat that hadn’t been in the water in years. Mary went to the barn because she had successfully hidden her pregnancy. (This was the disgrace Greg was sure had happened at his wedding after she had drunk too much champagne, and acted, as Nan said, “like her mother.” But no one knew for certain. They only knew it had to be her fault.)
Nonetheless Bobby was a child suffering from many “debilitating illnesses,” as was later revealed. The idea that Bobby was a child of incest had started somehow at the moment of his birth, and it did not matter where the rumour came from, or exactly why it came. The rumour manifested itself and became more and more pervasive: Blair Cyr, a horrid Catholic mogul, had impregnated his favourite grandchild; and that is why Bobby was the way he was.
After the RCMP came to the house, people followed Perley calling him many names: pervert, rich pervert, dickless pervert.
Finally, he took to his bed. He lay in the semi-dark room of midday—his eyes half opened to the grey air and the stream of light from the closed window blinds, his huge gut half impaled by a pale light, and the sound of wind now and again just rustling those blinds, and the pervasive scent of sea and dust that filtered through the vents and walls, with shells that he had collected on trips to the small islan
ds and beaches of the bay lying dormant in the corners of bookshelves, painted colours that he thought were special when he was five and six years of age.
“Poor Perley,” she said to Bobby. “He has no one to help him—he is surrounded by traitors—”
He called Mary to him and said—all of nineteen years of age:
“They make so much fun of me—I can’t stand it anymore—I am so unfit, so useless I want to die—if anything else happens, if one more thing happens, I will kill myself. I will drink poison or something—or shoot myself or something.”
She was sitting on the edge of his bed listening to him, her eyes wide and compassionate, and then suddenly she jumped up:
“Shape up—shape the hell up—die—for those people—those giddy girls—with names like Rhonda and Bonnie and Gail, and their wholesome Protestant complexions—what do you think they think of Bobby and me—my Catholic name—Mary Fatima Cyr—they have been taught to hate Catholics, and they always do what they are taught.”
“But they don’t know about Bobby!”
“Of course those people know about Bobby—and they stare at me as if I am some tramp. They are the ones who started the story about my granddad. How dare you say you will kill yourself! Die over a woman named Rhonda who will curl up her nose at any one who does not fit in, tattle on anyone who is down-and-out, be irreverent at only those things she is taught are safe to demean—Christ, Perley, snap out of it—what will happen to me if you go around killing yourself!”
Then she ran downstairs, ordered Mildred, the cook, out of the kitchen, and took to the stove and made him vegetable soup—even though it was thirty degrees Celsius outdoors—and brought it up to him on a plate with crackers and a big glass of milk.
“I hear you have an issue,” Rhonda said to her the very next day. “I hear your issue is a boy, a deformed boy, and you keep him hidden in the house.”
“I have more than one issue,” Mary Cyr said. “And all of them are much greater and less deformed than yours. And will be much greater than yours in times to come.”
But from now on, she would be alone.
Garnet and Nan had tried their best not to expose her to scandal to hide the child everyone knew about, and this was the result. In fact the result would be much worse. It would with time be the harshest result in the world.
2.
JOHN KNEW MARY WAS AND WAS NOT THE ARCHITECTURAL genius of her own demise—as was so often stated after she turned thirty. She had too much genius for that, though it was not genius acknowledged. But John’s was a consummate intelligence too, factored into everything by an X. If Mary Cyr does this, what then is the end result? The end result is either A or B—but it may very well be C, predicated on if X becomes involved or not. X was John Delano. X was involved with her since she was twelve years of age, was the deliverer of warning cries she, and her family, often received and too many times frivolously ignored.
Too drunk, too careless, too flippant.
3.
ANOTHER WEEK PASSED. THE HARSHNESS OF SUNLIGHT increased; the sound of the sea took on a difference, a kind of languid unsettled quality. The old porter said with a smile that he knew there would be a grave storm that would come before Easter Sunday.
John went back to his room with a bottle of water, and took his pills and looked in the mirror at his worn face and haggard eyes. He tried to think. Someone had just tried to run him over—while he was crossing the street. But of course, how could he be completely sure? Perhaps it meant nothing. He drank a beer and paced back and forth. Then he went out.
The sun had disappeared and a breeze blew in from the sea. Now and again clouds formed on the horizon, and moved quickly over the town. He went to the back of Mary’s villa and climbed the stairs. The stairs led up to the patio and back entrance. A deck chair, with Mary’s book on the Sistine Chapel still sitting on it. John noticed a splotch of blood on the tiled roof—almost impossible to see because of the tiles’ rusty colouring. Then, following it back down the stairs, there were small drops of blood. When he crossed the road, he could tell in a second that the boy was thrown here or had fallen. He walked another ten paces and saw where a car had turned and driven off. Then he noticed small sprays of blood on the cement wall. This was where little Victor had been after suffering an injury.
So he walked back across the road and up the stairs again, inspecting the blood. The way the blood had dropped John believed it was from the boy’s nose.
He tried the handle on the door and it opened.
He went inside, went to the bed, and then turned and walked over to the window and looked out on the street.
That night he went back and had a beer with his friends.
The Dutch doctor and her German husband.
They told him they were taking their findings to Mexico City—they would see someone there if they could. They had already spoken to the Dutch ambassador, who knew a lawyer there—perhaps he could help. They were very upset. But frustrated at all the obstacles now in place.
* * *
—
Unknown to John, Fey had conducted the same investigation he had—he had walked the same path to the wall, and he was certain the boy had been almost killed and then thrown from a car. He must have tried to make it to the room, and collapsed. Fey also was certain he knew whose car it was. When he mentioned this to Erappo Pole, he got no response, just a baleful look out the window, as if he, Fey, had turned against his own.
“He was thrown from a car,” Fey said in a slightly singsong voice that seemed to tease Erappo into nodding.
Mary Cyr would not have been able to do that. That and the Dutch doctor’s findings that a small amount of arsenic was in the children she tested made Fey rethink the case. But of course, he did not have to rethink it. He was playing both sides—one for his commanding officer, a devotee of Tallagonga, and one for the greater investigation being conducted in Mexico City.
Victor and Florin had come to him, after their dad was trapped underground. That look of a child, the hope he had of being believed, the fear he had of Mr. DeRolfo, who came up as Fey was speaking to them—all of this concerned him. Then a week or so later Victor was found dead. It was very convenient for certain people.
Fey could not convince Tallagonga of this—she did not want to hear it. Her future depended on her not hearing it. So she had to counter it. And Fey knew she would. And if this went on, this lie would give Mary Cyr twenty years in prison. It would mean the end of her life. There was also the callow glee at giving a foreign woman this much time. It was terrible, but he knew that came into it. But what did Erappo Pole say when Fey said he was concerned?
“Think of the execution in Texas of Raoul Lorta.”
This was a criminal who the Mexican Government had recently unsuccessfully petitioned to have his death sentence commuted.
“But she is a Canadian,” Fey said.
“Uno es el mismo que el otro,” the man answered brashly.
One is the same as the other.
If Lorta could be executed for murder, when he was only a drug dealer and was never proven to have committed murder, Mary Cyr could be convicted of murder if she was a board member of Tarsco. And that was Tallagonga’s reasoning to a T.
All of this would be known by the world, after the fact. And the worst of it was, as a demonstration of the frailty of human nature, those who would be compromised by it all secretly knew this and for the life of them could not stop. They were being pushed along by the very force of these events and the terrible rage it caused. Even DeRolfo sensed he was doomed the longer this went on, the longer Mary Cyr was held, and even his daughter, who had been interviewed by the BBC, CBC and ABC, knew halfway through the ABC interview—halfway through the interviewer asking her a question about police investigation of other suspects, when a chill came over her as she remembered Mary Cyr’s smile—she knew if Mary Cyr was the least innocent, they were doomed. But she too, with a book deal, could not stop.
* * *
They have moved my room. I have my own fridge, Mary Cyr texted John that afternoon.
Do you want to come for my birthday—
I can drink and dance here alone in my cell.
Then she texted:
It is not my birthday, really.
So there will not be many guests.
Then she texted:
Unless we count those outside my window.
Mary at times would dance by herself. She had learned to do that quite well long ago.
4.
IN TORONTO SOME YEARS BEFORE, MARY OWNED AN APARTMENT building near the Annex. She retreated there after her son, Bobby, died. She wanted to be alone—and yet she had always been. And here too, she was alone, surrounded by people.
There were many fine buildings and many tweed-wearing professors and many ideas, and much talk about equality, and many high-end civil servants to run along the pathways with. She joined many causes, and her name was in the paper. She was seen in the company of certain slightly famous men. They were all politic in the right way, hoping for environmental laws, “No Smoking” legislation, and determined to curb military spending. They grew up in the age of those who hated the military. For a time—a small amount of time—she thought this was radical, and they, the people she knew now, were brilliant.
They were in an understated and mostly unspoken way all against her family, its hold on papers and oil, and its great mining company Tarsco. They never said this directly, but they implied it in many ways. And so she knew she was being used.
She went here and there, had dinner with the leader of the provincial New Democratic Party, gave money to charities supported by people she had just been introduced to. She joined Greenpeace, wrote an op-ed article against Greg’s proposed pipeline. She appeared on talk shows. She had met Winnie Mandela. She looked bright and cheerful, wore white shoes buckled at the ankles. She was seen in the company of a man with grey hair. Once in a picture she was standing behind—just over the right shoulder of—Princess Diana, somewhere in England.
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