Mary Cyr

by David Adams Richards

  Before he could so it again became a big phrase for her.

  But that was later. Now was now.

  “Now, what I want you to realize is my book deals with political freedom for backward women, women who must be taught by progressive people—when I publish it, it will be looked upon as quite subversive—do you understand?”

  “Oh yes—of course,” she said. “Sub-ver-sive—yes I think I understand.”

  “Good—I want my brightest and favourite student to understand. My brightest and prettiest student. My prettiest and most grown up student. Now, get out of here. I have work to do. But I will see you later—I will meet you—”

  “Where?”

  “By the big tree.”

  And she smiled gaily and ran back to her dorm.

  Then that very night in the corner by the big tree, wearing his three-quarter-length leather jacket with his big tan cowboy boots crossed at the ankles, he said:

  “No, you have to hold it in—take it into your lungs and hold it—let me show you—like—thi-sss.”

  She held the smoke in until her head got very dizzy. She leaned her head for a moment on his arm and closed her eyes.

  “Pure genius—” she whispered, feeling faint and then giddy. She smelled hash and tabacco and the waxy smell of his leather coat. He helped her back to the room, his arm around her back so she wouldn’t stumble.

  “Imagine my dear we are arm-in-arm on a pilgrimage to rescue young women from the snares of orthodoxy—can you imagine it?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, “snares of Orthodoxy—gotcha.”

  He turned and hugged her, and said:

  “My sweet girl.”

  Her diary entry had these words:

  “I’m as high as the sky. It is like I am floating with no clothes. Shhhh—don’t tell Captain Constable Delano—he would never understand a man as smart as Mr. Cruise, saving us all from Orthodoxy—so he’ll be mad.”

  And then:

  “Oh—look. Snow.”

  * * *

  —

  Her diary said that Mr. Cruise was all for the poor, and imbibed only on the better class of wine, that he held up in his wineglass to the light in his office and then would look at her and wink. They would be there together after English class at four o’clock. His tie would be loosened, his jacket opened. And he would pour a little.

  “I take this easy—almost twenty dollars a bottle,” he would say. Then he would take a drink, look at it and say, “Nineteen ninety-five.”

  Garnet did not drink. Nan drank only sherry—but her mom, when she drank wine—Mary was certain it cost more—but of course she was far too polite to say so. That was something else about the rich Cruise didn’t know: they could be so politely silent when the middle class thought they knew.

  But she took a drink too out of the same glass, and he spoke to her about Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the vindication of the rights of women. Here she felt safe away from all the torment, and he showed her his books, taking some of them off the shelf. Little did he know that she, Mary Cyr, would read much of Ms. Wollstonecraft in the coming years, in order to attempt to rid herself of a memory of him.

  “If my little Denise had not died, I do not think this would have happened,” she wrote sometime later in her life.

  He was her first—that is, the first one she chose to hold up to John as an example of what a working-class hero should be. (There were tons of them after.) John, however, did not fight her views at that time. He simply met the man at a basketball game, and shook his hand.

  “Isn’t he great?” she said. Her face flushed. The smell of basketball and sweat. The November snowflakes falling outside the black window.

  John drove back home thinking of her; of her exuberance over this teacher, a crush like so many schoolgirls had—and feeling sorry for her, and perhaps beginning to love her. He looked into Cruise at that time, discovered there was an incident with a girl in another school somewhere. But John, if he remembered it, did not find anything when he followed it up.

  She wrote in her diary:

  “I’m in love.”

  She loved Cruise. He was her protector. Nothing bad would happen to her now. She walked along the cold corridors of the penitentiary like stillness of mid-afternoon with the snow falling, waiting for a letter from her mother, who was visiting Spain with her man named Doc. The family had a large villa there—she had been to it once. Her mother’s letters had become more—how did you say that word—more—more what—like a hippie—no—like a what was it—she was more:

  “Out of her damn mind. A complete loon. Saying I had done her in. I was in cahoots,” Mary wrote in her diary.

  She showed John those letters she had received. She did not dare show them to her uncle or aunt—or to anyone else.

  “I think she is hopped up on some regular grade A pills—more highfalutin’ than regular aspirin,” Mary told John.

  Her mother wrote letters about the Germans in the villa above them—who were all Nazi sympathizers who looked like Mengele—and how many bottles of wine were missing. Letters that young Mary Cyr struggled to decipher. She would sit at the desk in her room and open the envelope—with a characteristic blush of happiness that the letter had come along into the mailbox, with a big stamp of Franco on it—and the stamp stamped over with black ribbon-like official ink—and here it was, in front of her little face. But then sometimes Dear Mary would be right in the middle of the page—and paragraphs would be driven across the pages every which way.

  “I am preparing to buy a farmhouse outside Dénia—called ¡Dios mío!” She said she would move there—it had an olive tree or two, some oranges in the piteous sun.

  Mary would soon have tears running down her cheeks.

  Elaine Cyr had lost a fight with her brother-in-law; and was now looked upon as an upstart in the family circle—a wanton renegade of some sort. That is what they told Mary—Nanesse told her that her mother was something of a renegade.

  “The British have lost their empire—and are now floundering about—your mother is one of the flounderers—she’ll be crossing the sea in a bathtub next.”

  She went up to her room late that night with big sock slippers on her feet.

  She wanted to run away and be a renegade too. Just like Mary Shelley.

  “You be a renegade and I’ll be renegadier than you. Just you wait and see!” she wrote her mother, and then put “with love.” Yes, the British have lost their empire—well, at least they had one.

  She put the note not into a bathtub—she couldn’t find one. She put it into a bottle and later that month on a trip to St. Andrews threw it into the sea.

  8.

  HER MOTHER WROTE:

  “Wait by the gate with your suitcase—the big overblown white one—fill it to the brim—and bring your black shoes. I am coming to get you.”

  But before Elaine could, there was this lousy fight with Doc that made all the papers, over a 1975 sky-blue Mercedes. She was locked in jail in Spain. Later it was all hushed up. But after that Nan maintained she could not come back and claim Mary.

  Mary went back to Rothesay and went to school. That moment—the short ride to Netherwood—was done on a dark November evening. She remembered a leaf falling down against the windshield of the chauffeur-driven car.

  Two weeks later her mother came to Saint John.

  “I want to take my child back to Spain,” she begged them. “I have enrolled her in the American school there.”

  “You can see her, you can hold her—you can live with her here—but, my dear, you cannot take her,” Nanesse said.

  Poor Elaine began to break some small things—a porclain vase with the filmy shadow of a dancing girl from Egypt on it.

  “My vase,” Nanesse said.

  Nanesse sat in the front room—not the living room, or even close to it—but in the front room, wearing a silver dress, with a pale oyster necklace, and her very soft white, white hair covered in a simple silk scarf, and gave
the order for her mother to be evicted from the house, ten minutes before Mary was supposed to arrive.

  She spoke in her most matronly French:

  “Nous n’avons ni envie ni besoin de vous ici.”

  We neither want nor need you here.

  And in English:

  “Go back to Spain and no one will stop you from breaking vases.”

  Her mother was forced from the property. She stood at the gate, and looked like a derelict in her high boots and fur, a cigarette in her gob. A little sideshow among many sideshows, so, so long ago.

  Mary shivered sitting alone in her room. It was true that Nanesse and her mother had been in a power struggle. It was true too that her mother lost. The lawyers had taken care of it. It had to be.

  After this Nan showered Mary with presents, made a point of calling her a daughter—tried as best she could to be a mother. She had always wanted a little girl. It is not that she didn’t try, and it is not that Mary secretly did not love her. She knew in fact she couldn’t be with her mother. But her mother left her in empty anguish, and Nan couldn’t fill it.

  Mary saved this anguish up until some years later on Nan’s behalf she was speaking to a group of Acadians on August 15. She sat most of the day in silence and heat. And then a memory jarred her and she thought of her mom’s faint smile. So she got into an argument with one of the organizers.

  “How delightful,” she said to the organizers, “that you New Brunswick Acadians were invited to visit France by Charles de Gaulle when he visited you here in 1967—and how much better it might have been if more of your fathers had gone there to support him in the spring of 1940. Well, my father was Acadian, and he did go! So, shame on you!”

  * * *

  —

  She spent eighty-five thousand looking for her father the summer of 1990. It was kind of like looking for gold. In fact, she once followed a rainbow across the bay, in her sailboat to look.

  Didn’t pan out.

  9.

  SO THEN SHE WAS ALONE AND HAD A PENSIVE WORRIED FACE, kept written notes about her plans to go away; and other girls did not seem to like her and someone talked about her mother, said she read that Mary’s mommie was a big fat drunk and someone said Mary had stolen her hat. (She had not stolen it; she had, however, hidden it—very well.) You see the secret was, for some of these girls, Mary Cyr was just a Frenchie from the other side of the province, no matter who her family was. And they delighted in telling themselves so. It proved to these sweet English-speaking children they could still be superior after all.

  Mr. Cruise then spoke about Chaucer, and he was saying:

  “There is considerable inconsistency in the spelling of vowels and diphthongs. Vowels are commonly but not regularly doubled to indicate length.”

  If you missed that, he said with an intoxicating grimace, why, you missed Chaucer himself.

  He lit his pipe and looked at them through his big owl-like eyes.

  “Chaucer’s language then, my girls—my dear little pickannnies—is Late Middle English of the southeast Midland type—”

  And he smiled, showing yellow, straight and well-established teeth.

  Yes, and he had them all scared to death of vowels, and of other Chaucer practices, about which he said:

  “Oh, if only the language had remained—so the Wife of Bath could now today feel at home, in some amenable, understandable dialect.”

  Then he said to her, in one of those silly motions of his right hand:

  “Follow me, my little protege—”

  That’s what he called her, his little protege. He liked her more than he liked anyone else!

  And she walked back to his study, thinking these Noble thoughts. Reclining before her, he spoke of suffering. He spoke of many people in history who tried to do the right thing, like Mary Wollstonecraft. And what he was taking on was something that was always insidious and power hungry.

  And then he said:

  “Why here, let me show you.”

  And the snow fell and made them feel tweedy and warm, and comfortable with the soft fire burning in the fireplace, and the butt end of wood turning to ash, glowing out in the late day. Little by little burning like a soft smell of smoke and a sweet heartache.

  She stood there in his study. She was the first to arrive, but the rest of the girls came too, and gathered round him there.

  “‘O scathful harm, condition of poverte!’”

  It was growing dark. But Mr. Cruise’s voice was soothing. It made her feel like he was a superior person to everyone there—who knew so much. He now told them about Ho Chi Ming, and the Ho Chi Ming Trail. He talked about suffering. He showed them a horrible picture of the child in Vietnam running with her clothes off. He frowned, against the embers of coming dark the soft table lamp.

  “People like me were trying to stop this. I went and protested—” he said. His voice was now guttural and far away.

  All of them by now had gathered around the desk. She stood as close to Mr. Cruise as she could. She manoeuvred to stand beside him as he spoke. She was his favourite in the whole wide world, and she was now so alone. She felt her stomach go like jelly when he stood and his hand somehow touched her right breast. He left it there. His hand hidden from the others, from the sound of a whistle, hidden from the lights of the hall, hidden under his tweed jacket with the expensive patches, lingered just there. There was a smell of facial hair, and suddenly a dead crispy laugh.

  “Oh oh,” she said, and blushed. It was the first time she had been that close to a boy—and it was a man over forty, who was married to the most wholesome woman, an activist too who fought for abortion rights (ho de ho ho ho)—but his hand remained, silent and still. No one else could see where it was. He was Cruise, who knew how to say all the right things about people in distress. He was now looking over her shoulder, talking to a girl they had nicknamed Beeswax, a girl who walked clumsily and had huge legs, a sad girl who Mary liked, and as he left his hand where it was, he closed it slightly—just slightly over her breast. But his eyes were distant and he was now speaking so passionately about America not standing up, damn it, for human rights of any kind—and I mean any kind. He said this as his hand dropped slightly and moved down her stomach and then just before the secret spot was taken away. No one else saw this hand move. She became as weak as a kitten.

  He would now begin to write his great novel he told them about brave women who were the real oracles. Only the best women became them. That is what he wished them to become!

  And everyone was silent and sad—and he said they must become the new force for change. That change must come, damn it all, and it must come now.

  “What’s an oracle?” Mary asked.

  She went back to her room. It was dark and cold, and Beeswax came and sat beside her. But Mary was in a daze. She was in a daze because of what had happened, and how she still felt his hand upon her—his fingers touching through the fabric of her blouse and bra the nipple of her right breast. Beeswax whispered that she knew Mary had taken the hat, and they might get a ransom for it—perhaps extra chocolate pudding at supper. And Mary nodded. The window was iced over, and Beeswax said:

  “People think you stole the athletic fund—did you?”

  “Why in the world would I do so?” Mary asked.

  “They just think because your family is so important you think you can take it.”

  “I would never do so!”

  “Mary, I have some cheese and crackers.” And opened up her secret stash and smiled. Mary had few friends, but those she had, smiled.

  Afterwards, after Beeswax had left, and the day was drowsy and slipping into night, with now and again the sound of laughter from far down the corridor, Mary lay down in the dark on the top of the bed, with her clothes on, her legs tucked up, and she closed her eyes, remembering that Mr. Cruise had slapped her behind on the way to the beach, when they were alone and the earth tasted of decay. She remembered how he had touched her right breast. For the first time she sudde
nly felt damp and hot between her legs.

  At eleven that night she went to the window, wearing her pyjamas, and looked across the cement common, looking out almost in pensive distress, and saw his light on, on the third floor, glowing softly, like a Chaucer Scholar, way up there.

  10.

  LATER, AFTER HER MOTHER WAS REMOVED FROM THE HOUSE, and she had rushed home to see the mother who was no longer there—she imagined Mr. Cruise coming to her deathbed, and reading her a poem. She would be lying there, in her pyjamas, the top would be unbuttoned just enough, and he would sit beside her. Nan would enter, crying, and NC would stand and say:

  “Abdicate!” Or some word that was just as special.

  The next time she went to the office, there were only two or three other girls. He spoke to them about Vladimir Lenin—he had a picture of Lenin and Che on his office door, with the smoked glass so you couldn’t see in. All his walls were lined with seditious books. He took down a book called Chaucer’s Rebellious Certainty in the Pardoner’s Tale.

  Chaucer, he said, was a literary hero of a traditional radical disposition. Then he said:

  “He was murdered by the pope—you think that strange?”

  Then he added, in an even more angered voice:

  ‘“Damn it all it does frustrate to know that at this present time, in this province, children are willy-nilly going hungry to bed.” The excruitiating passion he displayed was of course false, but she did not catch it then. And she felt sorrow.

  “Willy-nilly? Hungry to bed?” Mary said sadly. Suddenly tears came to her eyes. Tears seemed to bless her at this moment. And he smiled tenderly and wiped her tears away with his thumb. As if that is all he would ever have to do to stop those tears from falling down, or to erase the memory of poor little Denise Albert.