Mary Cyr

by David Adams Richards

  He too was suddenly outraged.

  “¡Ella vino a México para hacer eso!”

  She came to Mexico to do that!

  “It looks it.”

  He was relieved that this came out. For in so many other ways he had not done his job with the moral certainty he was supposed to exhibit. And he knew as a judge that for seven years now he was a moral coward. He kept buying himself expensive shirts and ties to quell the disaster underneath. Yet, he often thought, who could blame him for that! In fact hardly a man here would have done his job in the same position. A man named Hernández, who was called “the Hulk” by kids, brought in expensive stolen motor parts and stolen cars for the influential men in town—selling Mercedes and Porsches at one-fifth the price. He was also, they said, inspector of mines, which everyone knew was ludicrous. But one day Judge Gabel came to the office and saw a beautiful black Saab sitting in his parking spot. No one told him who had left it there or who left the keys to it for him. He was not a bad man. Never. But there it was.

  So this case, this case of Mary Cyr, was the one where Gabel could look authoritative and firm—going against, as he was, such an important family, and have the blessing of everyone.

  “This puts a whole new perspective on the evil of money,” Judge Gabel said.

  * * *

  —

  “Cyr to be sued for one billion.”

  That same day in the great sprawling metropolis of Mexico City, on one of the dozens upon dozens of squares, in an office of justice department on the third floor, Alfonso Bara read this. He decided it was time to begin to act. But not to really act—not yet. That is, Mary Fatima Cyr had to go to trial. Tallagonga must try for a conviction—and then Bara would come out with the fact that her department was withholding evidence. He would then start an investigation, would do a recovery at the mine.

  Carlos DeRolfo would be charged, his wife would be charged, Hulk would be arrested.

  Mary Cyr would go free.

  That was the scenario Bara wanted. Tallagonga for all her brilliance would be no longer a threat to his own career.

  He was one of those people, so rare, who could wait things out, and seem to watch from the sidelines. But seem was the word. All of this was fine. But his friend—an important judge in Mexico City—told him he should start the excavation of the mine now—now—so things could begin. It would be harsh if they found out he waited.

  “Sí,” he said.

  So he got a court order and was going to start the process now.

  PART ELEVEN

  1.

  SHE FLED IN THE NIGHT TO SWITZERLAND SOMETIME IN 1984. The year she was waiting to read George Orwell.

  She was still young—very young. She had the child by herself in the barn—so when she realized she might even by proxy in some remote way be called Lady Mary, Mary Cyr took it. For wasn’t Churchill born in a washroom—in 1874—in Blenheim Palace, of course—so “Lady Mary” sounded like some positive reinforcement.

  Of course it was years later. That is, going to Switzerland, being known as Lady Cyr, was many years after she sank her fists into the earth and pushed out as much as her body allowed. Years after she covered up the placenta with rocks and drifted into the house in bare feet, her nightgown covered in blood with the baby wrapped in her Plu.

  It took them a week to find it—that is, that she had it. They kept looking for the source of the sound. When Nan found it, she screamed and ran out of the room, waving her arms on either side of her body and screeching. By that time Mary had been up at night with it feeding it, sneaking to the store to buy Pampers.

  “There is something in her room,” Nan said, screeching and running about the large living room, her eyes wide in a kind of terror, her white nightgown on and a boa around her throat, the small dog called Mugs looking up at her and yapping playfully. Joyous it was to everyone.

  Garnet climbed the stairs with the 1900 double-barrelled shotgun given to his father as a present by Clement Atlee after the election in 1945. The shotgun Clement had used on a hunt with Neville Chamberlain in 1935 when they conspired to keep Churchill quiet.

  “Quite,” Lord Halifax had said.

  And as Mary Cyr would say later:

  “Quite the arseholes.”

  So Garnet carried that same shotgun to dispatch with a merciless blast whatever animal she had hidden in her room.

  Perley walked behind him with a broom.

  Still, it was not a weasel, as Nan said it must be.

  It was Mary Cyr’s child. Bobby Blair Cyr. They tried to take it from her, but she refused. She refused help, nannies, day nurses—she refused it all. She knew they wouldn’t take her to court over it. They knew she would take them. And they had to keep it as quiet as possible.

  “It’s a monster,” Nan said, and Mary overheard.

  * * *

  —

  From the age of six months Mary Cyr’s child was getting old, his body was frail, his bones were weak and small. There was at first no sign—but that was because the sign was always there—then a kind of strange pallor to the skin, which suggested something not quite right. She would hold him in front of her, looking at him, trying to understand what it was that was at odds, what was wrong. No one could see him without Mary being present, without her shielding him. The room smelled of antiseptic and a kind of soft mist and medicine, which she had read about in a book.

  You see, they tried to sneak the child away from her. That was late in her sixteenth year—so she turned against them—hated the idea of abortion all her life because this marred life was so precious to her. Even in this Catholic household she was alone in that regard—except for Perley, who simply thought that people did not have that right.

  Mary screened Bobby’s visitors and visitors to the house.

  “I think you should leave,” she said to more than one person just entering the house.

  “Pardon?”

  “You heard me—you are a spy for Shell Oil.”

  “I am not.”

  “Well—you are still a spy—you look Swiss.”

  “I’m Irish.”

  “So you sided with the Nazis—you had the devilish notion that you could make a deal with Hitler—so drink your Irish pint and pretend innocence.”

  “Mary, be quiet. Father Dolan will stay here if he wants.”

  * * *

  —

  Upstairs along the hallway and in those great back rooms no one saw she made a fairyland—which is what she called it—a childhood land with swings and rocking ponies and a small merry-go-round; a giant train set, in which he could sit on the engine and ring a bell, wearing an engineer’s hat. His body turning older as the days rolled away. They went together out onto the bay in the small sailboat, laughing and singing. She wrapped him in a blanket when they came in. Then he began to falter when he tried to walk—and then at times it was hard for him to crawl. The trouble was he was very bright—and knew his condition before she did—knew something in his blood was wrong.

  And then as all of this was happening, oh yes, Debby Dormey took sick.

  One night some months after little Debby Dormey died she came home to find Bobby alone in his room, looking into the mirror as if for the first time understanding that he had been for some godawful reason hunchbacked into the world. He looked up at her when she walked toward him, startled, profound and silent, his eyes large, his nose hooking and his head bald. She tried to touch him and he moved away as if he did not want her to have to care for him anymore.

  “Mom,” he said.

  His lips trembled as if he wanted to speak some great profound thought, but he could not find the words. He looked like a troll hidden under some particular bridge.

  “I love you, Bobby Blair Cyr,” she whispered, hugging him. “I will never let you go.”

  2.

  SHE BUNDLED THE CHILD UP AND FLEW HIM TO SWITZERLAND. She stayed in a five-star star hotel near the Brunswick Monument, and visited palaces and museums to the Red Cross, and
a Dr. Leath, who spoke English with his slight French and German accent, had a wise small face, a moustache that did not go to the end of his lips, grey and white, which made him look pedestrian; like she thought, a bus driver, or a man on European holiday riding a bicycle.

  Progeria was what it was called, he told her. There were experimental drugs, and one must realize it was fatal—but that prolongation of life was what they were after. There was some protein that damaged the arteries—that was all. It was, he said, in the blood. The child was simply a child after all.

  In her diary at this time she mentioned Lake Geneva, a visit to some shops and restaurants. She had thought her twenty-first birthday would be spent differently, she wrote.

  She spent it at the Hôpital des enfants, on the Avenue de la Roseraie, wearing a blue skirt and simple white blouse, and a small gold charm bracelet on her wrist. That only had three charms—one for her son, one for Debby Dormey, one for little Denise Albert. There was one aside to this. A woman from Belgium came in, certain of her privilege, and barged ahead of Mary Fatima Cyr. That is, she still looked something like a girl—and the woman’s husband was a magistrate and they had a small chateau in the Swiss Alps.

  The receptionist, however, whispered to this impetuous woman in French, and told her to stand aside.

  “Qui est-elle? Qu’est-ce qu’elle fait ici?” the woman said, looking behind her at Mary in annoyance.

  “Non, vous êtes le premier,” Mary said. And she went back to the corner and sat down, completely unfazed by the insult.

  For unlike that woman from Belgium, she had always been exactly sure of where she stood.

  * * *

  —

  Then, strangely enough the other world—the world of other concerns—came back. She did not want them to. But it was as if it was somehow preordained. She had almost forgotten about this world or one might assume she had. But really it had never left her, and in some way it never would.

  She had a meeting. It was just mentioned in her diary as a meeting, at two at Les Armures with a man for lunch. “He kept bugging me,” she wrote. Was that true? John did not know. She wore grey pants, with a button-up white jacket with black pearl buttons. Her soft hair was short; her eyes were dark, under dark sunglasses. She wrote too that she wore silver high-heeled felt boots—much like, she said, Cinderella.

  In 2002 John discovered it was Vanderflutin. The money he had made in Canada—or his father had made—was reclaimed by his family’s victims in the late seventies. His father had blackmailed certain Jewish families, took paintings and jewellery from them. It was simply the time—he got caught up in the excitement of it all dealing with important Germans in Rotterdam. Certain of those Jewish families were transported into concentration camps and Dug Vanderflutin had campaigned to join the Waffen-SS. There were Dutch who had done so, who had made that leap, and he was one of them. He stole away after the war, and was mistaken for the other Dug Vanderflutin, who had been lost and forgotten.

  His son, Ernest, knew not about it, as Mary was wont to say.

  She wrote in her diary that Ernest was:

  “A sad man, as much an accident of history as I am. Perhaps his father fought bravely for the other side, until there was no other side left. Then he simply fudged who he was—and got away with it for a long time. I am almost sorry I saw his picture. I wonder if he would be as sorry if it was me.”

  After his book was published in Europe, Ernest was at the height of his power. Yes, she had followed his career carefully for a number of years.

  He went on speaking tours with this book. For a while he travelled far and wide. He spoke about the Cree of the North. He did certain First Nations chants. He had never fished or hunted. He had never lived in a wigwam. He never had a First Nations friend in his life. But the people of Europe never knew this.

  Still, a year or two before she went to Switzerland something happened at the university during a talk. A Canadian man was there. He had lived most of his life in the rural area of northern New Brunswick alongside First Nations people. He had come over on a grant to talk about development in rural areas. So he went to this talk about Canada. And then, he went back again, to the little auditorium at the university. So he stood and asked if Ernest himself had once done anything he wrote about—it didn’t seem that he had. But Ernest wouldn’t answer.

  He asked him had he been on a trapline, did he know how to hunt moose—take the hide off a deer, had he once fished a stream.

  No answer.

  Some said this man was in fact Packet Terri and Mary Cyr had asked him to go, and he had done so as a favour. And over the years John Delano felt this a more likely scenario.

  The man then introduced his wife, who was a Micmac woman, to the audience. It was as if they were being introduced to a splendid mythical creature. They asked for her autograph—a few asked for a piece of her hair.

  Then they simply filed out, and Ernest was left alone.

  Three months later Ernest discovered something about his own family while visiting an art gallery. It was strange. He almost did not visit—had no real reason to. But at the last moment he thought of one of his dad’s paintings that he discovered was now housed there.

  A longing came over him, to remember his childhood, his father’s kindness to him. So he went inside.

  There, looking at the painting, a Monet, he became very nostalgic for his father, and tears came to his eyes. But suddenly he looked closely at the work, and got a terrible surprise:

  CONFISCATED FROM THE DUTCH NAZI OFFICER

  DUG VANDERFLUTIN, RETURNED TO THE FAMILY EIDER

  BY MARY CYR AND DONATED TO

  NUSSBAUM ART GALLERY IN 1982.

  He stared at the inscription in utter amazement.

  Anxious, almost stricken with fear, he started to leave quickly, but before he could get to the door, he was pulled aside by the Jewish curator.

  Again Ernest tried to leave, but the curator held him back.

  “You are his son—Ernest?” he said gently. “Then you perhaps did not know this.”

  But what was more startling to him was that Mary Cyr had known this from the time she had befriended the little Van Haut child, and had said nothing.

  She simply was silent, waiting for him to find out about it.

  She was, you see, that bright—that excruciatingly bright. In fact no one in Mary’s own family had believed her, and she had remained steadfast in her belief that one day the truth would come out.

  That is why she had the little Dutch girl as a pen pal and that is the reason she went to The Hague.

  Ernest’s wife left him. It was not just because of his father. There were other problems, but it all did come crashing down.

  Now grey and in his forties, he owned a senior citizens facility, called Holunder Mannich. It was an austere place, where people lived in antiseptic rooms, and watched TV mid-afternoon, ate dinner at quarter to five at night.

  After a while, after the curator revealed it all, they began to recognize who he was, those Altlich—those Swiss and some Dutch seniors with their lacklustre eyes staring at him as he entered the room, and whispering to one another.

  “Was sagst du?” he would yell at them, and they would look over at him and turn away.

  They were saying:

  “Er ist der Sohn.”

  He is the son.

  He would stand in the hallway in the waning light of afternoon, begging them to stay.

  He drove a small Volvo, and had a two-bedroom townhouse outside Geneva, with one and a half baths.

  “But you see,” he said now to Mary Cyr, “we Dutch really wanted no part in the blasted war.” And he smiled as if it was his last moral victory.

  “Yes—of course no part in the war.”

  “It was not our choice to fight,” Vanderflutin said.

  In a letter sent to Mary Cyr at her hotel in Geneva he wrote:

  “I have over these past few years discovered things about my father. It is pretty hard for a co
nscientious person to swallow.”

  “Yes,” Mary Cyr wrote back. “It must be at that. For a conscientious person.”

  So she went to the meeting. She was sorry for him. His suit was wrinkled, his eyes haggard, his face grey. Most of his business was now falling away, and he had the pedestrian habit of keeping his wallet snapped and looking through it before he ordered anything.

  She smiled. Then point-blank she asked him why had he written such things against them? Saying that her mother was a frivolous British woman. For that was the only person Mary Cyr was trying to protect—she never really gave a damn about herself.

  “Oh,” he said, diplomatically. “Sorry you felt that way, Mary dear. I thought I was being quite fair. And you know as well as me—Acadians are still suffering from British neglect.”

  She nodded.

  “Oh yes of course,” she said. That was something, almost admirable. Like his father he was in some way still fighting the British.

  There was a picture of Ernest’s mother carrying him through a jeering crowd after they had shaved her head for collaborating with the Germans. She looked something like a lonely little bird. In fact, Mary had that very picture on her when she met Ernest that day. She did not show it to him. Later she destroyed it—

  All trace of the mother, the boy, the father, was lost for a long time. Until a young woman began to make inquiries when she was fourteen to a young girl named Norma van Haut, both of them treating it like a kind of Nancy Drew mystery. So now Ernest was caught too, as much as anyone.

  Yet she felt empty and full of sorrow for him.

  Forever.

  He needed money. And he smiled at her with that old mirthful look he had had long ago when she had waited all day to meet him because she believed he was going to be her new friend. That he would see her not as other people, like Nan and Garnet did, but as she was, precocious and brilliant and full of love. But all that was long ago, and gone away. And for the life of her, she had never been able to figure out why.