Mary Cyr

by David Adams Richards

  “How much did she bring down—fifty thousand?”

  “One point nine million.”

  “One point nine,” John repeated, his face suddenly becoming ashen. “Dollars?”

  “Sí, dollars.”

  This changed everything—that is, it was in the prosecution’s favour, and something they did not tell the defence until after the papers had reported it. Now Xavier had to not only admit that she had brought this money but make excuses as to why she did.

  Why had she brought so much money down on a private plane if she did not want to do something underhanded? Xavier asked. Not that he believed, ever, that she intended to, but the justice system would make certain that the public thought this. The prosecutor made it clear she believed Mary Cyr came down to bribe some mining official. Xavier said he knew she didn’t, but it made everything more complicated now.

  “People have known it since the beginning,” he said. “They kept it from me until they could make something of it—they know the public is becoming more and more incensed. Whenever I try to counteract that, they have another tidbit—now it is the money, she brought, as a bribe from Tarsco. Your picture is also in the paper, as having been sent down by the family to try to get the charges dropped. It puts you in a dangerous position.”

  “Well, I am more interested in the position she is in,” John said.

  But the money allowed certain people at Amigo the opportunity to put this tragedy behind them and blame her.

  “You and I both know that is insane. What happened at the mine was criminal—the search was suspended because something criminal was happening,” John said.

  Xavier looked at him, with a peculiar gaze, as if to say: How did you hear that?

  John then said:

  “Why did she say she brought the money? Not to shop, I hope.”

  “No—not to shop—but to start an orphanage. To help people.”

  “I see,” John said. “Of course.”

  “But the prosecution tells us that that is impossible to believe. She was here to bribe someone at Amigo, so they would not reveal things.”

  “Except,” John said, “I believe her, and so do you, And I do not think Amigo wants anything revealed—because if anything has been criminal, we will find out that they are the ones at fault.”

  “The fact is not that they are at fault but that this will now be used to establish her guilt,” Xavier said.

  “You know and I know, and Señorita Tallagonga knows—she is innocent,” John said. “Everyone knows she is innocent—”

  “¿Por qué no habló del dinero?” said Xavier.

  Then he repeated it in English: “Why wasn’t I told about the money? It makes my job very difficult.”

  He seemed hurt. His face had the look a person has after a certain kind of infidelity, one by a tradesman who broke a promise or took you for too much money.

  5.

  TALLAGONGA WAS NOW FOCUSED ON THE MINE, SINCE EVERYONE else was as well. If she could get Mary Cyr convicted of being criminally responsible, as a representative of Tarsco, it would make Tallagonga a national figure. Blaming an English-speaking international would show the prejudiced predilections of certain kinds of people. None of this, however, could be said in this way, but it could be understood, in the way all things were understood these days. And the campaign to promote Mary Cyr as an example of the last vestiges of colonial thought was pronounced within the very jurisdiction Tallagonga worked. Of course it was the French and the Spanish who had dominated them before, but one colonial power was as good as another. This is what John was beginning to sense. It was in the drafts of air from the sea, and from the roadway dust. The charge of murder had got her into jail, but now this was even bigger, much more international. And indeed bigger was better for the world audience.

  * * *

  —

  But then something slightly more favourable happened. The German-Dutch couple spoke to him again. At first they were not going to get involved. However, given his wife’s connection with “the woman in the cell”—as the tabloids in Mexico called her—the Dutch doctor, Norma van Haut, decided she must help. So they did something clandestine, to prove to themselves that Mary Cyr was innocent.

  After people were declaring Mary had poisoned a child, Norma van Haut took samples of children’s hair, indiscriminately—those kids who hung around selling them lotto tickets, or worked setting up umbrellas on the beach. Each child whose hair they snipped they gave five euros to. They sent the hair to a friend who worked in Phoenix.

  Yesterday he phoned them. The doctor told John that all of these children—just as she suspected—had traces of arsenic, because of the poor ground water—which meant that so many of the people here would have had the same amount as Victor. That alone would be a cause to discredit the charge of poison. And they would make sure the findings were presented at the trial. The Dutch doctor said she would testify that she had seen bruising on the body around and about the neck, which Señor DeRolfo for some reason overlooked. That along with the disproving of the arsenic theory might help.

  She was also sure that Ángel Gloton had seen these marks as well—for he stood beside her for a moment.

  The German then told John he had sent these findings to Constable Fey, who seemed to be heading the investigation.

  But they did not get an answer back. They did not know what Fey might be up to, or if he had any preconceived notions. That was the trouble with the world, the Dutch doctor affirmed.

  “So wie wir vermuteten,” the German said.

  Just as we suspected.

  The Dutch doctor, tall and blond and beautiful, believed nothing was farther from the truth than the charges escalating against this Canadian woman. And it was years ago, and people certainly transform or change—and Mary Cyr was nothing like the young girl who wrote to her in all her innocence—but when she went to visit her, she still felt they were connected in some remarkable way.

  “Die ganze Welt will sie schuldig machen,” the German said.

  “The whole world wants her guilty,” the doctor translated.

  “It seems that way now,” John Delano said.

  “We will see to it the world hears another story!” the Dutch doctor said. And she smiled. “We have to, don’t we.”

  “But you see they will make her an offer—and it’s an offer she can’t refuse.”

  They asked what that would be.

  “They will offer her a deal—admit either to the murder, or to criminal responsibility in Amigo,” John said. “I feel it in my bones. They will tell her that if she admits to Amigo, then they will blame her family, and she can go free—if she admits to the murder of the boy, then she will do hard time.”

  6.

  MARY READ DOZENS, IF NOT SCORES, OF BOOKS, STARTING FROM when she was fifteen. That is, parts of books, a line here, a paragraph there. History and philosophy, mainly. Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, the works of Plutarch—the rise and fall of Hitler. The rise and fall of American gangsters.

  She wanted to learn about America, she wanted to learn all she might about England (which she could criticize every bit as easily as she did France or the Netherlands); the rise of facism in Italy, Japan in the Second World War, the plight of colonial India, the Indian wars in the USA, the plight of Jews in Hungary, the plight of Anne Frank.

  She picked them out of the large library in her grandfather’s cottage at random (a library that needed a ladder to climb to the top row of shelves) and would sit on the beach with them, like giant props, her sunglasses hiding her eyes.

  She might carry to the beach Kant, Schiller, Descartes, Jung, and raise her sunglasses as people walked by, as if to say: Pretty impressive stuff, ain’t it!

  She read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and two books on Churchill.

  She read a book on the secret life of insects published in 1895.

  But then she forgot a text on the beach, and it was washed away. Her footprints leading back to the cottage lighter by
the weight of one copy of the Epistemology of Phycology than they had been when walking down to the shore.

  Two days later a First Nations boy came by with it, it weighing much more because of the water and twice as large, the pages wrinkled and thickened by salt.

  “Here is your book, miss,” he said.

  “Thank God,” Mary said. “I couldn’t sleep without finding out what was going to happen.”

  Then she ran about, trying to find him some money—woke Perley and asked him to empty his pockets.

  “Can’t you do anything right,” she screeched when she discovered his pants pockets empty. “Where is all your cash?”

  She ran back downstairs and opened the oak cupboard, and found a marshmallow and handed it to him.

  “I don’t need anything, Miss Cyr—”

  “I know, but I insist—and there’s a lot more where that came from.”

  The youngster was the unfortunate Charlie Francis, who like everyone else had a secret crush on her.

  However, in August that same year, on a particular windy warm night, just after dark, she was seen carrying a huge bear trap toward her enemies’ house.

  They came to her cottage—the RCMP.

  She had three girls, who she did not get along with, and planned her attack to maim them—but really it was not an attack—at its very sharp point it might be called a warning. She had only warned them. When the RCMP came to the door, Mary had devised to look busy by grabbing a book off the bookshelf and sitting with it—poring over its contents, glancing up at them as they came in. It was a book on the life of Sir Ulrich von Liechtenstein, the German poet of the Middle Ages. She seemed to be immersed in it—and did not seem to notice them. They asked her if she had been out.

  She looked up at them, wearing brand-new pleated white shorts, a crisp yellow blouse, tied at her stomach, new white sneakers—and told them that:

  “I have been here all night reading about—” here she paused to look at the cover of the book “—poor Sir Ulrich—the love poet of the Middle Ages, who passed away quite suddenly January 26, 1275.”

  “Elle est très perturbée,” Nan said to them. “Elle est très perturbée—elle prend des médicaments.”

  She is very disturbed—she is on medication.

  The RCMP said they understood. But they needed to speak to her nonetheless. Did she put down the tome on Sir Ulrich long enough to devise an attack?

  As far as the RCMP report went, and John Delano had read it, she was planning to set this bear trap and leave it on the steps two cottages away, in order to get the “rich” girls who’d made fun of her friend Debby Dormey’s stutter—a little girl who lived on the upper road, near the highway; lived her life in three rooms with a small bathroom in the hall; a girl Mary Cyr had suddenly befriended, and treasured. (Did she befriend her because her mother was an English war bride like her mom? And both of their moms were dead? Very likely that is where the impetus came from. Yes, John knew it had to be that.)

  7.

  “DEBBY DORMEY” WAS IN MARY CYR’S GREAT DIARY—one-eighth of the way in—on a page that contained a house, and snowflakes falling down: a Christmas scene without a Christmas tree, drawn quite well in Mary’s hand.

  “My friend Debby Dormey lives here—someday we are going to travel,” was written under it. “The only one I need in my life is Debby Dormey and that’s a fact. We will go somewhere—maybe Istanbul—then we can both sing that great old song ‘Istanbul’—‘Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople’—ta da da.”

  But John knew that did not happen. Debby was a youngster who would die before the age of nineteen. She would simply get sick and die, and Mary would be sitting at her bedside holding a pineapple that she had picked up at the market in order to make her feel better. It was a terrible and tragic little house, and Mary Cyr’s brand-new Jaguar would be pulled up outside of it, near the half cord of hard rock maple in the muddy yard. Some trees would wave, some crow would call. Mary Cyr would be clutching the girl’s hand and saying:

  “Hang on now—we are transporting you to Toronto—I have a plane flying in—please hang on. Look, I got you a pineapple—”

  Debby would whisper:

  “Oh boy—you are so kind—I’ve never been in a plane.”

  Mary Cyr of course did not know any of this when she took the time to draw and shade in that lonely picture on a blank page of an almost forgotten diary, with the words we will be happier in Constantinople. But John realized it told something about her. Not only about her tragic closeness to death but something about her boundless life.

  Each Sunday afternoon that summer, she and Debby went and placed flowers on Mrs. Dormey’s grave.

  FROM MANCHESTER was engraved on it. She had wanted to be buried back in Manchester—that did not happen. Her husband had no money for that. He gave her a small plot near the woods she hated. She had been a war bride just like Mary’s mother—and she never got to see England again. For the last four years of her life she simply stared out at the great fields of snow beyond her house. Her husband had promised her a grand life in Canada—and he perhaps thought he had given her one. He worked as a fisherman in the summer and a pulp cutter in the winter. He bought an old second-hand truck, which his wife hated to be seen in but did not say so. She embraced everything he tried to do, made the best of it as much as she could. She was in the Irish downriver community, many who still carried wounds left over from the time of the potato famine. She tried to fit in, but she was as solitary as Mrs. Cyr.

  Everything Debby’s father tried to do did not turn out. Debby’s mother spent the last of her money helping him open a garage up on the corner, and a spark ignited a fire there. Mary remembered passing by that garage on an evening in August and seeing the sign that advertised a free Coke with each fill up. Then passing it the next morning and seeing its blackened timbers after it had burned down. To a crisp. Only the sign advertising free Coke remained prestine. Mary did not know Debby Dormey at all then.

  However that was the last of Mrs. Dormey’s money. Afterwards Mrs. Dormey wrote letters home, lying, and sending pictures of her daughter standing on the steps of the Old Manse Library when she was five, pretending the library was their house. (It was once the childhood home of Lord Beaverbrook.)

  When her husband found out one night, he laughed loudly, and told all his friends at the community centre.

  She learned to laugh at it herself, and then laugh at herself. And then she pretended she had never taken the picture.

  One day, when Debby was nine or ten, her mother stopped eating—but she did not tell anyone. Her husband was working in a camp some miles away, and she was alone. Each day when Debby came home from school, her mom would be in the same chair. The television would be turned on, but the only station would be blurred and extremely snowy.

  Sometimes Mrs. Dormey would stare at it all night.

  Debby became the mother—began to cook and clean. She would put supper in front of her mom.

  “Oh, Debby—I’ve already eaten too much today!”

  When she began to lose weight, she stuffed her clothes with old copies of the Cyrs’ Morning Telegraph and cardboard from the back shed. She lived like that, in a state of slow starvation for over three months.

  She died longing for an England she would never again see. And perhaps it did not exist anymore.

  Debby was finally sent to her aunt to live. And that brought her closer to Mary Cyr. They became for a while inseparable. Mary told her she would never leave her.

  8.

  MARY BECAME AWARE OVER THAT PARTICULAR SUMMER THAT rich girls from Oshawa thought they were much more sophisticated than the girls and boys here. They had made fun of Debby’s stutter. So that is why Mary had the bear trap—the details of which were filed away in an RCMP office.

  Mary, John knew, could be overwhelmingly kind, and there were times when she would not be.

  The day Mary Cyr heard about someone making fun of her friend’s stutter she walked down to the
shore to see these three rich girls whose families were renting a cottage near hers. The cottage was much like theirs, yet with extra asphalt shingles near the chimney instead of flash—which is how it was picked out when you were out on the bay in a sailboat. Poor Debby’s stutter had come when she realized her mother had tricked her—that when they took her clothes away, she weighed less than seventy pounds. Suddenly all those months overwhelmed her and she could not speak without an impediment again. And it seemed that in that impediment all her love, hobbled out against the air, against the warm sunlight or a winter scowl—but always it was love, tormented and crippled.

  “What’s up?” Mary Cyr asked those girls.

  “What’s up?” one of them imitated.

  “They are three rich girls,” Debby whispered. “So we have to be careful.”

  For some reason Debby did not consider that their wealth and the wealth of everyone they knew, would not compare to a stipend of what Mary Cyr’s own family was worth. Actually, at that moment neither did Mary Cyr. To her they were rich girls as well.

  That is, she was as open to strangers as most New Brunswickers are, and therefore just as open to insult.

  After this Mary became silent in their presence and watched them carefully for about a week. She would get up early and wait for Debby at her house, with a pail to pick blueberries carried in her arm. Debby wanted to pick enough quarts to sell, so she could get new clothes for school in the fall—they made $21.95 one day.

  “My god—I never thought we could earn so much,” Mary said. “Now let’s go buy something special.”

  Debby pondered, counted on her fingers and said:

  “But I am saving for my new clothes.”

  “Ah. You know what—you save for them—because I have a few extra pennies on me—so I will treat you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes—I think I can manage it.”