Mary Cyr

by David Adams Richards

  That evening walking back from the store, the Oshawa girls came up beside her on their bicycles, asking her who she was. She did not answer.

  “You work picking berries?” they asked.

  She did not answer.

  “How many can you pick in a day?”

  She did not answer.

  Then they asked who Perley was; however, they did not know his name.

  “You know the ugly fat boy—who goes down to that boathouse to swim,” they said. “Is he your boyfriend?”

  “Do you go out with him? He has such a big fat belly,” one said.

  “And such a small dick,” the second said. “We saw him change.”

  They all began to laugh hilariously, mimicking to make her cousin the scapegoat they could all transgress; drove ahead on their bikes and then came back. She watched as they pedalled in slow circles around her.

  “He’s her boyfriend!” one shouted, and then all shouted in gregarious unison.

  “He is. With his small pecker.”

  Mary studied them for a long moment as they surrounded her. Then she smiled.

  “Whatever he has—I guarantee it is more than any of you three deserve,” she said quite politely.

  “Pardon?” the one Mary disliked the most said; the one who was middle class enough to forever contrive to lead a group of girls just like this, the other two wickedly devoted to her, as sycophantic as beavers.

  And Mary continued:

  “I said he has much more than the likes of you will ever deserve—besides which not one of you is as good as you’re CRACKED up to be, something that your poor husbands will someday find out. In fact—”

  “In fact what?”

  “In fact in ten years all of you will be at each other’s throats—nawing at each other like beavers on birch, can’t you just feel it.”

  “No, we can’t,” Rhonda said. And she drawled out, “Not ever.”

  “I saw you down at the beach picking up crabs—I would never pick up a stinking crab.” The second girl grinned.

  “Oh, I am sure you will pick up crabs sooner or later,” Mary said.

  9.

  FROM NOW ON THESE WERE THE THREE GIRLS WHO WOULD always be the three girls she compared herself to—the ones who needed a book club or a group to join; the kind who required a leader, and a leader weak enough to need followers, and to follow the trends, who would never be able to deal with life without compatriots or discussions. Mary would in private call them the three tight-assed, well-oiled twats.

  They drove away on their bikes ringing their bells, like jubilant hallelujahs. Then the night became silent. And Mary Cyr at that moment rejoiced in the fact that her own life, such as it was, would somehow be disastrous. She saw it in the distant star now appearing in the white sky. She looked up and breathed the life-giving salty air.

  The girls from Oshawa did not know who she was—or who Perley was—but they had made a lifelong enemy in her. They had made fun of her orphaned friend, who carried her lunch to school in a paper bag, who thought she could make a fortune picking blueberries to buy a new outfit for school, and her poor hopeless cousin, who would be hopelessly devoted to her his entire life.

  She did not know much—or people thought she did not know much—but she knew it was shameful to torment the poor, or those outside the world looking in, like Perley was.

  Then for a while they did not bother her. They played golf and croquet and snap on the porch of their generous cottage and didn’t think of her at all. They wore bright summer clothes and had reasonably well-groomed dispositions.

  But the night that she found her name in the RCMP files for the first time, she and little Debby Dormey were caught with a bear trap. Or at least leaving a bear trap. She explained she was not going to set it—she did not know how. It was there simply as a warning:

  Be-W-ar was written and taped to its giant legs. And then they ran away when a cottage porch light came on. So she was reading a book about Sir Ulrich when the RCMP came to the door, the heat pulsing off her body, her bare brown stomach heaving with the weight of exertion and, as John Delano knew, little Debby Dormey hiding in the beach towel closet off the inside porch.

  It was the first time she was in the RCMP register, as she would describe it—and it would be the first of twenty-seven times.

  “In the register—and not once did one of them ask me to dance—not even John Delano—too chicken, I suppose.”

  And the misdemeanours would culminate—culminate in many things, John supposed, until her son, Bobby.

  10.

  IT WAS THE BEGINNING OF HER WAR AGAINST CONFORMITY—but of a very specialized sort of war—a kind of clandestine one. One where she was the silent observer of the disastrous world. That is, from then on, she distrusted women as much as men—she disliked their easy acceptance of role-playing, of bogus sisterhood and victimhood that university courses not only taught but encouraged—found them just as shameful in their pettiness and malevolence toward those who were cast aside. And worse they had tormented Perley, a woebegone who believed he could never measure up, and only wanted to befriend them. Who still in this modern, progressive day went to church and believed in someone called God. So she defended him, and therefore she would be alone. But she knew too how men used women like these, pandered to them in politics and literature in the way the middle class had to always coddle their own. And she hated the men for their lies every bit as much. She hated those who used the First Nations as well, for they formed the same kind of manufactured pieties. She realized listening to First Nations leaders speak that too many of them expected this and needed it, so both they and whites could use the tragedy of the past to embellish their pretenses—and if you stared them in the face and told them so, told them that their victimhood was now obscenely corporate, they would counter with the plight of those reserves they themselves had never been to, and declare you a racist. It was on the tip of their tongues to call her a racist, and she finally said:

  “So what. If they call me one, it cannot be true, because so little in their life is.”

  Even in her tragedy she would give more than she received and find herself solitary. Even in her rages against others she would be kinder. And the men, many of them boasting, and ignorant of her greatness—or at least her potential for greatness—would come and go from her life. As John read her diary, her past became like a crystal stone, a golden moment in the sun. Yes, he thought, in spite of it all, there were golden moments in the sun.

  Then there were these entries in the diary, which placed it about 1994:

  September 28

  I took off to go around the world—I was going to visit John Delano, who is attached to the UN (he doesn’t know, but I got him the job), but I didn’t have the nerve. That is, I didn’t want him to see me all lonesome as a Buck Owens song, looking like a complete ghost—and bemoaning my fate. All my plans are broken apart—like a shattered mirror that you walk across by accident in a dark room—I must take stock of myself before something bad happens—and I will—yes, I know I will! First things first—I have to get my past straightened out. I saw him one time, you know—at an airport—I had taken a flight into Montreal. I was trying to find the pilot I had fired, to hire back—to tell him I was sorry. As I walked into the terminal, my first love was sitting there alone—in a hard-back plastic seat, reading a book, I’m sure it was some very smart avant-garde thing—and I was too frightened to go near him, and I went into the washroom, shaking all to bits, and I wept.

  October 5

  I’ve decided to take the plane to Newfoundland and visit Nigel Cruise. I am not sure why.

  Oct 6

  I took a car and drove along some potholed highway and then three back roads. Lots of big moose loading themselves up on munchies. And there he was in the place he owns. The place I had never forgotten and never been to, called Harbor Shore. I came up to this gaunt man sitting in a wicker chair. He shaded his eyes to get a better look at me—and then the years bled away
, and he recognized whom I was. He must have been startled that I had come here.

  He stood and came forward, gave me a slight fatherly hug—you know the kind that most men use to imply modesty with still the faint hope of getting you in bed, done with pretty sister-in-laws or favourite co-workers. So I sat with him. And looked at him, and his face, which had become cynical from playing the cynic. Boyish from always being just a boy. You know fighting the system and up the revolution.

  Nigel Cruise didn’t publish my poem in Tickle Lace or anywhere else in the entire world (I checked up on it, even in Sinapore when I was there; thinking perhaps he had sent it to Singapore) and I had believed—maybe hoped—that he was always wanting to ask my pardon. That is all it would have taken. He could have said, “Sorry I didn’t publish your rather magnificent poem, had a devil of a time—tried to convince the editor of its worth—but well, there you have it!”

  I would have said, “Sure,” like that.

  But when I sat there, I realized his mind was such that maybe he did not think of me too much. Or the athletic fund. He escaped at night to Annapolis Royal, where another school wanted his services. I was forgotten. That is, until the day I arrived in a rented car at his door. I remembered how much my hero he once was with his talk of literature, and brave Mary Wollstonecraft and all that jazz. How true that all must still be for certain fashionable people. He had not published his book. I had it rejected at my grandfather’s publishing house.

  So I said to his wife:

  “Mr. Cruise did not get his book publishd, but maybe his strength lay elsewhere. You see, he taught me about the metrical purposes of Chaucer, the world of meter and rhyme—positively goose bumps, when april with its shouers soote. And then of course—the forceful ideas he stressed too in modern film—cinéma politique, I believe he called it. Before that (ha ha ha) I had only watched movies—Mr. Cruise spoke only of films. We digested them like vitamins.”

  Dear diary, I have discovered this horrible truth: it is against my nature to turn people in or out. Don’t get me wrong—I suppose I do think certain people should be turned in—but I could not do it to he who in a way had become so like the priests he mocked and hated, childless, frustrated and menopausal, willing to blame everyone he once loved.

  Besides, who isn’t charged with ill treatment these days? I was with cruelty to Bobby by people exactly like Mr. Cruise’s wife. She too a writer of some estimantion. So I said to her:

  “I have just read your book on abuse within the halls walls and stalls of the Catholic Church.” And I got her to sign a copy.

  Of course I hadn’t read a fucking word of it—but Rory maintained that women were free to lie. It fact it was a duty, to confound men. Men were so gullible.

  Then to be polite I spoke about his book, that he was still labouring over.

  “Are you still?” I asked.

  He nodded a little, but didn’t seem to want to speak about it anymore. He was jealous of her book the detectives had told me. Hers had seemed to hit the mark.

  “It is on our Newfoundland politics too,” he said.

  “Well, you can’t ply me with enough of that,” I answered.

  “Yes,” he said. “Now movie talk is definitely in the works—but I am thinking, does it destroy the product—”

  “That is so admirable.” I said.

  “What?” he asked.

  “To use a word like product.”

  For a while we were silent. I felt sorry for it all. All of it. For her much more than she ever knew.

  Rory pointed out a bird of some kind, on some bush of some kind, and I smiled in some way and said:

  “Oh dear me.”

  She knew all kinds of birds—different types of pluffers, I suppose. It’s a part of the new language of social advocacy now. To speak of flavouring vegan dishes and pointing hummingbirds out. To forgo God and church for a yoga mat.

  She told me she had published her book with an Ottawa publisher. I looked very surprised.

  “Ottawa—I thought it was published here.”

  “Oh no—Ottawa, my dear.” She smiled.

  So she had published her book on child abuse among us Catholics. That’s almost like every second book from the Atlantic provinces these days. Didn’t know, however, that it was my family’s publishing house. Didn’t know I advised the board on it without reading it. She who had put up with him and his dreams. I realized looking at her, at her wrinkled hands and saddened unenlightened face, I would never reach her age. I had deep sympathy for the betrayals she had suffered.

  We then had lemonade that tasted far too much like lemonade. We had dried bananas, and sliced apple and cheese. Then she put down a plate of orange slices and chocolate and said:

  “These are really to die for.” In that middle-class way I find that always exalts too much over the mundane, that proves she is part of a sorority somewhere, has girlfriends—lifelong and all that jazz. If only I could have something—one true friend, lifelong and all that jazz.

  I asked him if he had ever heard of a man named Vanderflutin.

  “Oh,” he said, “heard of him. But you see, the problem with Vanderflutin,” he said, “was—well, for a while he was all the rage because of the Cree—was it the Cree?—yes, did good work—admirable to take up for them, the First Nations—yes, well—we need more of that—go against the Brits, and all of that.”

  “But do we need much more?” I asked. “Or do we have enough people trying to gain instant virtue and coin off the past—using today’s wiles to draw and quarter those poor sons of bitches who lived in another time and bourn us?”

  He was startled. He looked at me in apprehension—my beau who I wanted to dance with that time there—against some great shrubbery of love. Now they had no transpassing signs out so they wouldn’t be bothered by the local children, the snotty ragamuffins—those children advocates that they were.

  Little by little I had him excluded from one job and then another. I had no choice. I couldn’t allow him to do it again. Every place he applied to I would contact:

  ‘Its all in the letter’ I told them. ‘But it’s all quite confidential.’ I would say. I never had to send the letter. I never even wrote it.

  They both of them had nowhere left to go. He had left her twice the daring man and come back home. But it was her I felt desperately sorry for, for it was her I had betrayed. No matter how much I said I played no part, I had.

  “Now, the book on child abuse,” I said to Rory. “It is a real eye-popper. Abortion saves the child from pain and protects the woman. Yes, I can see it all now. Sometimes I half wish I too hadn’t been born. That they in their Catholic charity had ridded me of my desperate self. Of course, who among the poor or unwanted would give up a moment of their life for your inestimable opinion of its worth!”

  They stared at me in amazement, and I shrugged and played with my fingers.

  Trying to think, I closed my eyes tightly. Remembering little Denise Albert and her prayer beads, so happy she had had them blessed. And how there was something so sacred in her smile when she took the Host at church, and how she tried to defend me by picking up a snowball against all the boys and girls chasing me one day, and how they knocked her down. She was one of thirteen children, given thirteen years of life.

  But then we were all embarrassed, for no one knew why the fuck I was there, and neither did I. All of a sudden, after almost twenty years, I come traipsing along in a rented car. There was a pause that lasted about a minute or more—which seemed like an hour.

  “You are strikingly beautiful,” she suddenly said.

  Mr. Cruise nodded slightly, knowing that was a truth unbearable to him now. So I looked at him, and he gave a start and put his head back a tad, but I was probably as terrified as he was. My hands shook, and I rapidly tried to light a cigarette with my silver lighter—and then blew smoke in a daze and then dropped the cigarette at my feet. They both looked at me then looked at each other, realizing now I was in an awful state.


  Still and all, he did not know he had knocked me the fuck up—and I had come to ask—well, not for child support—but for some kind of acknowledgement. You know of it all. Just a brief handshake at the end of the drive and a whisper to say, “I am sorry.”

  They did have a young man named Ned they called a nephew, who lived in Toronto and worked at a homeless shelter, handing out sheets.

  I began to laugh gaily when they told me this, laugh sweetly like a meadowlark, so frightened of them both that I was. So terrified now I was here. So worried I would spill the beans. I scratched my knee and looked up at them as if guilty of some monsterous knee-scratching crime.

  Finally I got up to go, but Rory held me back, asked me if I had something revealing to tell. She smiled as if she wanted me to confide.

  “I do have something important to say,” I said.

  I felt him go ridged—right ridged, as they say, right before me fuggin’ eyes—as was want to be in the papers for the poetry meself—but I did something very strange—you know what it were that I done—I done what me fadder bred inta me.

  I opened me purse, took out my embroidered chequebook, my gold ballpoint pen, and wrote dem up a cheque for twenty-five hundred dollars, to be used to help some fuggin’ child or other, maybe grab up a bortion with all that Protestant middle-class sincerity, or buddy like that there—money Christ boy—no problem—

  In fact I did it because I wanted to. I wanted them to have the money because I knew how much they needed it. There is something uneering about how the progressives seem to fail. But I gave the money strangely because the last time I went to confession (which was five years ago, before midnight Mass in Bartibog New Brunswick), the priest said: “Maybe you could do something for someone you dislike, begin to put your ghosts to rest.”

  Well, dear diary, I might not have believed him, but I was all for putting my ghosts to rest. Nor did I dislike them—not really at all.

  “Here ya r,” I said, handing the cheque over, right across his lap, to his wife sitting on her sensible Adirondack. Then I snapped the top of my pen and smiled. The snap of the pen registered almost like a Supreme Court decision; the kind that echoes slightly at midday and is sad.