Mary Cyr

by David Adams Richards

9.

  THAT SAME NIGHT, RORY TOLD HER HUSBAND WHAT WAS happening with his former student. It was on the front page of the Globe. It was now all a disaster.

  “Good god,” Cruise said, astonished, looking over her shoulder at the picture in the centre of the front page.

  “I feel responsible I didn’t help. I mean, I should have seen the signs—yes, seen the signs.”

  Rory looked at him and nodded, just at the dining-room table, just at dark. Cruise left the room, walked up the stairs toward his study.

  But Cruise was fortunate. He was extremely fortunate that the instincts of his wife, of his sister-in-law, of their protege Ned, as well as everyone he spoke to and most who were interviewed on the many CBC programs that worried over this case, that their instincts were entirely misguided. The great fortune for Nigel was that people who had very well-known CBC Radio talk shows never looked beyond the fashionable way to take the moral higher ground by pretending concern over the Cyr dynasty. In fact Nigel’s whole life and the lives of his colleagues had been filled with misguided ambition and misplaced admiration. And this is what allowed them to protest their tenure, to go on strike while their students at the university, who had paid their money, were hostage to their demands; to look miffed when people did not see their worth, to become parasites on First Nations causes that would gain them attention, and to prey on the naïveté and idealism of the young.

  Professor Nigel Cruise often thought back to those days at Rothesay and that night—or was it two nights? Yes, he thought he took her good and hard the last of those two nights. Then he began to realize what he had done, became frightened and ran away. That is, he realized (and there was no other way to say this) when he screwed her good the second night (because it was too difficult to enter her the first so he made sure she was very drunk the second) that he was violating a little girl who wanted to talk to him about her mom and dad. A beautiful child. He became aware of it after he came inside her—

  “Ouuooo—Ohhh—it hurts,” she said as a terrible plea, and she looked up at him in pain—looking just like who she was, a tiny little girl and nothing more. If he had been brighter and nobler, he would have said:

  Please, please, Mary, I beg you and God to forgive me!

  But he had never been that bright.

  At any rate, tonight he went into his study. The wind whined and whaled. He was still trying to quit smoking, but he snuck one later. He walked to his desk to find where he had hidden the matches, and pulled things out of the drawer, while putting his head down trying to see where they might be.

  They were stuffed at the very back, but when he pulled them forward, something else came out: an old, yellowed sheet. He turned it over to look at what was written on it. Surprised, he dropped it. The wind blew and the light dimmed in his study. He picked it up again as the light returned, and he read it, his lips moving:

  “‘I said goodbye to thee at night.’”

  It was the poem little Mary Cyr had written to him—the one he told her he would publish someday in Tickle Lace. He had never done that. In fact he had never done anything for any woman, except use them whenever he could to promote himself, as the rather enervated feminist he chose to be. Not once in his life did he ever have to deal with people John Delano dealt with to keep people like him safe. And that was fine for him.

  He looked at the clock on the shelf, wondering what time it was in Mexico.

  PART NINE

  1.

  MARY CYR WOULD STAND AT HER CELL WINDOW SOME NIGHTS and she would remember bits and pieces of poems—trademarks on the road of life she had once thought was a destiny. She was unsure now of any destiny. Even Shakespeare’s soliloquys did seem to leave her now. But whenever she remembered a poem, she would yell it out the window at the donkey:

  “I wander thro’ each charter’d street

  Near where the charter’d Thames doth flow

  A mark in every face I meet

  Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

  “In every cry of every man

  In every Infants cry of fear

  In every voice, in every ban

  The mind-forg’d manacles I hear!”

  Not many knew what it was she was shouting. But she shouted to the donkey anyway, and was content. The poems made her raise in the air, above all the town, above all the people, almost to the stars she saw the night she realized she would always be alone.

  Mary and everyone she had known were in all the papers now. Some in one paper or some in another but all of them somewhere. More and more gossip, from her life in Canada, was coming in to confirm her guilt. And this pleased everyone. Especially the stories of her and her abuse of children and how because of this she was refused permission to adopt.

  “Yes, they are right—they are all right—I am a disaster waiting to happen to the world,” she once remarked, after being turned down, hoping against hope to adopt a child she would call Denise, a child she would love.

  Mary stared at the opaque picture of Denise Albert published just that day. The snow must have been really falling when it was taken—it must have been the week before the big escape. Oh yes, the aluminum shovel, the faint lights shining through the window, the sky turning toward night—there Denise was standing on a small patch of desolate earth.

  Mary herself had been too busy making little dummies to pay much attention to all Denise’s sad lively talk about her grandmother and how she missed her house, and Denise had the sniffles—yes, she remembered that. They had become very close because of their planned escape. Because of the hatred of those teenaged boys who had signalled them both out.

  “They put smmow down my underpants,” Denise said.

  “Smmow? Oh yes, neige—” Mary said. “The snowy kind. They called me an English twat—ho hum to all that.” She remembered one, with his little toothpick-like beard, rushing after her, trying to run her down with a block of white snow.

  Mary Cyr had fought back. If people were going to call her anglaise and bigoted, she would return the favour without batting an eye. She did this all her life, with the French, the First Nations, the Irish—and when in Europe, the Dutch and Swedes—not to mention the French again, and the Swiss, the Scots, the Poles, some Chinese, and of course the English too, after a while.

  Perhaps it started at the convent. You take a person and put her where she does not belong because you believe she must acquiesce to your will, as Nanesse did, and you will start a rebellion. And no one could rebel like Mary Cyr.

  “I am supposed to write about victims? My god, the Acadians are always victims—especially down around Dieppe,” Mary wrote in an essay. “But they are no less bigots than the English—”

  That essay allowed her to fail her Canadian history course (she was supposed to write upon the Expulsion of the Acadians)—but it also allowed her a last trip to Mother Superior’s office, where she was able to lift the keys. Mary in her sweet Machiavellian way knew as much. And of course as John maintained, a hater as fine as Mary Cyr never in her life actually hated anyone. In fact at the end, she could not hate a soul. Not even Nigel and Rory, or those dozen men and women who wrote against her. Not one.

  “Merci de m’enseigner à danser,” Denise had said, rubbing her nose.

  Thank you for teaching me to dance.

  The little lights were dim and the little room was warm, and the corkboard had that very picture of Denise that was now famous—and also a picture of her small dog looking up at the camera.

  Sometimes Denise would smile. Sometimes she would simply start weeping.

  Mary Cyr kept working.

  “I tell you, Denise—two donkeys and we will live in Bermuda.” Mary was almost sure of it. All she had to do, she said, was telephone the international number for her grandfather and he would send a ship to get them. She was sure of it as she led Denise by the hand down the cold stairway under that moonlight so long ago. It wasn’t until she was outside and the great door closed with a gentle thud, and she felt the night cold on he
r face, that she remembered: the river. They had left the keys on the inside, and the door was locked.

  “Perhaps if I had told her to dress warmer,” she had said to the priest. “Or fit her with water wings, blew up a tire with some air. But she must have sunk like a stone anyway—a poor little Acadian stone. a coulé comme une pierre—or some such.

  I only heard one cry, then not another peep. Maybe I should have jumped in after her. What’s gurglup in Acadian?”

  She now stared at the picture and the caption under it:

  “Un grito que debe ser escuchado.”

  A cry that must be heard!

  Then the line “Los ricos confunden privilegio y ética.”

  The rich confuse privilege and ethics.

  “Poor little Denise—your picture that you had kept in that small little room of ours now gone all around the world. I made you famous and you didn’t even thank me.”

  Then she thought of other things.

  Other things in her life just as traumatic that were now being used against her.

  She thought of Sharon DeRolfo, as Sharon walked backward snapping pictures. Her eyes were dark and steady, the stud in her nose gleamed in the light from the street, her short spiked hair gleamed as well. She possessed in her beauty a universe filled with zealotry and determination; and she strode backward in front of Mary as if she knew her. She was, however, insecure, and hoped Mary would not have read what they had written. Even for Sharon DeRolfo, who took all those pictures now floating here and there about the world—one of which would appear on the cover of the book—it was a little too cruel.

  But Mary read—Mary insisted she be allowed to read whatever was said. Her lawyer Xavier secured this for her from English papers. But she collected all the others. Even from Latvia.

  “I wonder what the Latvians are saying. Surely to god I’d get a reprieve from the Latvians—Grampie was very nice to a majority of Latvians.”

  Day upon day upon day. She ate alone at her little table—with a candle—and a big napkin tucked under her chin. Writing down nations she could trust on one side—three—and nations she could not trust on the other—thirty-seven. Then rubbing out the three, and making it two, and then adding that one to the other pile, making it thirty-eight. Then she spoke to herself about the problem of roving reporters:

  “The trouble is, if a country has roving reporters—that’s what’s so good about the Balkans, so few of their reporters could be called roving reporters. They are much better at staying home.”

  And:

  “At some point you have to realize the United Nations is just not for you.”

  And:

  “It’s always worse when the reporter is a sissy.”

  She put down an article and lay back on her bunk.

  “Well, I didn’t batter or kill anybody—it must be a poor translation,” she decided. “And who in hell is EL?”

  That afternoon the little female guard came to the cell and said, in a happy cheerful voice:

  “María ¿tienes un cigarillo?”

  Mary threw her the pack.

  “No, no—keep them, mucho gusto,” Mary said when the woman tried to hand them back.

  She put her hands behind her head, sniffed and tried to think. What was in her bones, in her blood, in her very brain, was an absolute revulsion for the world. Nothing they were saying about her was true, and yet she had manoeuvred herself into this horrid position. And now those who existed on scandal and insult, on harm and hate, were making the most of it for themselves.

  2.

  DEBBY DORMEY TOOK SICK, SOMETHING IN HER DELICATE LITTLE bones. Much too much picking blueberries in the hot August sun, probably.

  Mary heard she was ill so she drove up from Halifax and went to see her.

  When she visited her, she initially thought they would have a grand old time talking and reminiscing. She saw a frail little girl in bed, with some orange juice beside her, the blind closed but the sun still able to come through its torn fabric, with the noise of giant trucks on the highway. She telephoned Montreal, and sat beside her friend.

  “Wait, the plane is coming,” she remembered saying as she held Debby’s hand. “I am taking you to Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children—”

  What happened? Yes, Debby could not wait—she promised Mary she would—but she could not.

  “I will just close my eyes,” she said. “I will open them when the plane gets here—okay?”

  She drove her pink Jaguar along the third-rate road toward the airport, and after swerving into the chain link fence, jumped out, and ran to the plane, and fired the captain—who had been in the family’s employ for nineteen years—who had never failed them before.

  As she slapped him across the face, he stared above her head, hat high on his forehead and his tie flapping in the wind.

  Then she sat down on the cold asphalt and wept, her skirt covering her like the petals of a flower and snow wisping across her face.

  Tried later without success to hire him back.

  3.

  THE WOMEN OUTSIDE HAD BEEN THERE ALL AFTERNOON, SOME of them eating watermelon and trying to spit the seeds at her bare feet. They had made a game out of trying to hit her toes with the seeds. The big toe got them a hundred pesos.

  “Golpeé el dedo gordo del pie,” one would shout.

  I got her big toe.

  “No, no hizo,” Mary would stand up at the bars and yell out.

  No, you didn’t.

  She realized—yes, just like the girls at the Rhonda Cottage so long ago—she was in a fight with three women.

  She had never bribed anyone—well, bribed them with a donkey here or there—but if she was to get out of Mexico, she knew she must bribe the right person now. And she had not thought of the prosecutor or the police—or Señor Gabel, the judge—all of them justifiably outraged, or pretending to be justifiably outraged, at her—because that did bring themselves a great deal of attention—no, she thought of the three women who taunted her—and turned her sights toward them. After watching them for weeks, Mary knew a lot more than people might think. She knew Principia knew the truth about Victor but was frightened. She felt this because of the way Principia did not want to look at her when the others called her a murderess. Did not join in the exultation. Why was this? Mary had watched her for weeks now and knew her well. She saw, a crack in the armour of sisterhood. That is, she knew too she would sooner or later have to play them one against the other.

  Then there was Lucretia—yes. She was the one who above anything and anyone wanted to be Mary. And Mary knew this—so she gave her things—but she distrusted her, and would never ask her for help. For Mary, honour was implicit, and her character was such that she would go hungry rather than ask for help from those who tried to undermine her.

  Who, as she said:

  “Pissed in my face and called it rain.”

  Nor did it matter at this time if she lived. But in her fury, she wanted the truth. She wanted Principia to finally admit something. That is, she wanted to get back at Lucretia Rapone, for her sneering. If it was revenge—well, Mary was human too.

  “Ver que ella no salirse,” Lucretia yelled whenever she took a break.

  The guard, always helpful, smiled and translated:

  See that she doesn’t get away.

  “How kind everyone has been,” Mary said.

  She had lost weight, had diarrhea and was worried about a sore on her hand. But not overly—that is, Mary did not worry so much anymore.

  Mary Cyr at moments of tension or fear had learned to do one unnerving thing: smile. She smiled now at the old scratch on the wall:

  “¡Viva Cristo!”

  Did she even believe in that anymore? Oddly enough she did not know. Maybe Christ lived, maybe his great grace still lit the world; but where was it? Not for her—but where was it for those Mexican miners buried alive?

  She stood and looked out at the stars, so far away in the purple sky—and the moon over the sad little donk
ey in the old field beyond her. The donkey for the past three weeks had been left alone. Now no one came to see it anymore except little Gabriella.

  “Maybe they will eat you,” she said to the donkey.

  Yesterday Sharon came, to ask for another picture. Mary complied. She stood, in a simple white smock and a pair of shorts, and Sharon started to snap her photos.

  “Una mujer muy bonita,” she whispered. Then she looked up over the camera and then focused once more and snapped the shutter again. Yes, and Mary saw in those nervous, temperamental artistic movements money and privilege—private lessons and schooled leftism, concern about the world taught by unworldly professors. Suddenly Sharon stopped snapping, and lowered the camera, and stared at her, pensively, her own face white. And she knew that Mary Cyr suddenly understood that her own family had money and power, that she was the daughter of Carlos DeRolfo, former governor of the state, and what she was doing was probably inexcusable, deplorable and a lie.

  That is, her photography, like Ned’s activism, was nothing much more than a fashion statement in a world where fashion statements mattered more and more, and more.

  And quite suddenly Sharon’s arms began to shake. Mary smiled, the very same way she had at Ned Filmore once long ago.

  4.

  THIS EVENING MARY STARED OUT AT THE SKY, STILL SMELLING the night air and the warm breeze, with some money in her hand, wondering what to do—wondering what John was doing—wondering if anyone back home even cared for her anymore. So Mary watched the women for over two hours—two long hours she did not move a muscle. Finally, she saw Lucretia. Mary got the wooden crate that she had been sitting on, and stood on it. She wanted to talk to Principia, so she had to get rid of Lucretia.

  “Lucretia, cigarillo, por favor,” she said, holding the money out. “Cigarillo—Voy a compartirlos.” She was calling trying to look as pathetic as she could possibly be.

  We will share them.