She spent spring in France. She said she was going to open up a daycare, but for some reason didn’t get a licence.
She came back to Canada. Certain of her acquaintances in Toronto met her at the airport. They were all fraught with worry over her and her family’s repressive tentacles. Some were draft dodgers from the Vietnam War, living out their lives in obscurity in Canada. The men often wore brown leather jackets, and had soft, greying beards that emancipated them from sexuality and embraced class struggle without ever being in a poor man’s house; causes like Palestine and Hamas filled their days. They spoke about the RCMP and the tyranny of the army. John used a contact in Toronto’s 51 Division to find out what she was up to. Her new friends collected around her. They drank in small bars, glasses of pale red wine, and stared out at traffic and spoke of transformation and change—and could she help them.
“Sounds about right,” John said when he heard about her newfound commitments. These were Canadian men doing Canadian things, John supposed, because there was nothing left for them to do.
She later wrote:
“Their democracy came at the pleasure of the United States and most of them were too blind to see their own part in this. They all believed they were under desperate control, when they were freer than 90 percent of humanity, and on their own wouldn’t have lasted as long as a three-minute egg.”
Most of them were just affluent enough to pretend to hate the wealthy, knew enough First Nations celebrities to be concerned about Aboriginal rights. Yes, all of them in some way or the other—those at any rate who found out who she was—wanted to influence her against her own family for their own benefit. That was where the lie really was. They needed her to insinuate themselves into her family and become advocates against it to hold her up as the one they protected. She would stop oil exploration in the North Atlantic; oil tankers from docking in Saint John; freight trains with oil containers, going east. She could be used as a prop not for her life but for their advocacies. Still, they turned up the heat when the wind blew, and had their furnaces checked in the fall.
“Do you understand any of this?” the source asked John.
“Unfortunately yes,” John said.
“Can I ask you one question?”
“Sure.”
“Do you still feel in any way part of the country you were sworn to protect?”
She took some cocaine. She was arrested.
One of the men she hung around with was Ned, the protege of her former friends Mr. and Ms. Cruise.
Ned was an important man now. He had long ago left the shelter. He was being paid a good salary to promote eco-management and be an environmental crisis watchdog and a member in good standing of a certain pro-Palestinian organization.
“I have been there,” he told her.
“You have—where?”
“That’s apocryphal,” he intoned.
“Oh—I see—I have been there too,” she said.
“Apocryphal?”
“No—actually.”
“Environmental crisis watchdog—”
She liked the sound of it, she said—it rolled off her tongue. It was worth, she said, her honourary doctorate.
5.
THAT WAS THE TIME WHEN PERLEY PHONED JOHN, WORRIED about her again, after he and Greg had gone to Toronto and she refused to see them. This was a month or so after John had gone to her cottage demanding to know where she was, and had run slapdab into former prime minister Brian Mulroney and the glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.
“Your family told me not to bother with her,” John said.
“Sorry, John—it wasn’t me. I just want someone to talk some sense into her. Please.”
So John flew up on a beautiful afternoon in summer, took a taxi into downtown, and found her apartment building (that is, the building she not only stayed at but owned) and waited for her in the lobby, with the security guard watching him out of the corner of his eye and pacing with his hands behind his back.
Mary came in late that night. She had two friends with her, one was Ned and one was Ted—those kinds of men who will always want to be called males. Ned carried keys in his hand, his ponytail and partly baldhead oddly complementing his stark blue denims and his thousand-dollar leather jacket.
He looked at John with mildly ironic eyes—the kind that never seem to go out of fashion but never know the truth. Her second friend, Ted, somewhat broader-shouldered, somewhat more exuberant, was a robust leftist of the western Canadian stamp. Which John felt always had a bit of the pedestrian goofball in it. He was in town on a visit, to give a lecture on oil drilling in the western Artic, and Mary Cyr was a name and he had lucked in. Ned and he had met her for a late lunch and it had gone on for hours. How could her family be involved in any of this—did she not understand how they were ruining the habitats of millions of viable entities? (That is what they chose to call animals and plants.)
They ate well, dined well, drank long.
She of course had paid.
When the two men found out that John was the RCMP officer, they looked knowingly at each other.
“He’s the one who loves you?” one of them said.
“Yes—he is the creepy old man who loves me,” Mary said. “And now he has come up here once again to ruin my fun. My family sent him to spy. He most likely has bullets on him.”
John had heard her speak like this before—once every three or four years she had to be wise, in some way that lessened her.
He told her that was not at all true. She was too drunk to care. She spoke of the occult—she spoke of New Orleans—of being in Haiti. Then she was silent. She slumped against the wall as she lit a cigarette. The security guard said there was a No Smoking policy. She ignored him.
John asked her if she would like to come home, said that everyone was worried about her.
“Never again,” she said. “Back to thieves and ruthless cousins—I want nothing to do with them—or with you.”
“Then I am no longer obligated to be your bodyguard—” he said.
“Then you are fired—” she said, “and you won’t get paid.”
He let her in on a little-known secret. He had not been paid in years. He had taken it upon himself, travelled here and there, without being paid a dime. The two men with her thought this entertaining, the idea that John had travelled at his own expense for seven years. In a way John did too. Then Ned said:
“Maybe you better go?”
And John stared at him, this pale forty-year-old boy, with his schooled morality almost deafening, and smiled.
The robust leftist from Edmonton or Saskatoon, one of those places that have by intellectual standards become somewhat burdened by their universities, asked her to marry him. He was that in love with her, that much smitten. He had divorced, remarried and divorced again—always seeking love but never loving enough to be granted it.
He had been in town a week. She knew he would—propose; she had waited for it, to let him down as gently as possible.
They went on this way, she and her friends, always being outraged at the world that held people like them back. They were part of the central casting of a new stratagem of unease. They were forever adopting the correct posture. They in the end never freed anyone, simply themselves from any deep obligation.
She noticed this about them after John had gone. She noticed the sun on their thin wire glasses, their smooth beards and unimpeachable ponytails, all signifying a certain uninvolved academic status. She waited for John to return so she could tell him that she hadn’t meant anything by her slur that she loved him, in fact the only thing she ever did was love—but he did not come back. She remembered too that for the first time Perley had gone to her great apartment in her grand building, had walked in, saw her lying across the bed naked in the middle of the afternoon, and had dragged her to the bathroom, where he threw her into a tubful of cold water. It was the first time he had been furious with her—he too had gone home. Sometimes in the middle of the afterno
on she would look around, hoping they would come back. But they did not. She found herself looking at the phone, hoping it would ring, and when it did, she would pick it up saying:
“John, Perley?”
Yet it was neither.
But then came 9/11. They watched the buildings fall, at the great heady blame cast on the men jumping to their deaths out of those tower windows. Neddy spoke about the attack against the US being a good thing, justified—or perhaps engineered by the CIA. (Which if it was she supposed might have been a bad thing.) One has to know the intellectualized Canadian to know this—which means that on the face of it they never have one position.
“So that is how you think of it all, Ned?” she asked on September 13 of that year.
“It should be how all people think—all people who want a better world.”
“Oh dear me.”
6.
NED BEGAN TO BE NOTICED AND APPEARED ON A TALK SHOW called New Wave, which employed people who had drifted away from the CBC or TVOntario.
“America has no one to blame but America, I am afraid. It’s what I’ve been saying for years.”
He came back to the apartment, telling her of speaking engagements and an op-ed piece. She stared at him quietly, wearing a black dress, sitting on a white sofa in the middle of the September afternoon, drinking a glass of sparkling water. He was somewhat startled at the blackness of that dress, and her quiet features. She simply nodded as he spoke. She wore another black dress the next afternoon. Then she went and bought another one.
The way he spoke of it being his time, the way he announced himself, she felt, looking at his rather Anglican face, might be as bad as the wars now happening.
“Don’t you see—this is my opening—MY TIME,” he said, drinking red wine one evening as dark approached, “It’s my time—my time to tell the world who I am.”
“Oh yes of course—I see,” she said. “It is your time. How fortunate you are. That’s the way it is. I mean it was so many other people’s time as well.”
He did not understand her—Neddy Fillmore.
But she did understand him.
She waited for John to come back. She had it planned; that is, how she would approach him—how she would allow him to talk her into leaving. But he did not come back.
She wore black for some months. Then one day she telephoned John Delano and left a message:
“I’ve figured it out,” she said.
A week or so passed where no one saw her.
Then out of the blue she phoned her Toronto friends.
She was going to have a great, grand party at her two-storey, four-bedroom apartment on the eighth and ninth floors of her apartment building, she told them. She invited them all—even the robust leftist of the western Canadian stamp—to come.
She told them the key to the private elevator would be with the doorman.
They came, almost a hundred of them—to drink and party at the Cyrs’ expense. But the hostess did not show.
Only a picture of her cousin Warren, the Cyr who had died in one of the 9/11 towers, sitting on the big marble table in the foyer. His smile seemed to give him away—a kind of restive yet tender smile, the firstborn son of the important side of the family, the one who was the most secretive and influential. The one who gave over three million dollars a year to charity without ever announcing it to anyone.
She had left bottles and bottles of wine; goat’s cheese and liver pâté.
They waited, and they drank, and then they became aware of something, and almost ashamed. It was simply the weight of this picture with the date of his birth, and the date of his death, September 11, 2001, etched on a silver sleeve below his name, and their hostess not showing up. But the new black dress she had bought hanging alone in the corner. They became aware, silently, all of them. Then they remembered her dressing in black all those days while they preened over those barbican deaths. Her black dress finally seemed to unnerve them all. And they drifted out one at a time, to the private elevator, and all of them stole away, in their fashionable all-weather coats, well after dark.
Ned left her a note:
“Where are you, love—hope your family has not influenced you again unduly—I have worked quite hard to free you of all of that.”
Yes, and free her of the 1.9 million he had asked for to help with his concerns. Grave concerns about the deforestation in Malaysia, the new territorial demands by Israel—the 1.9 million she in fact had taken from her bank to give to him—to spite everyone—just hand it on over, a chuckle-headed thing to do, ho de ho ho ho.
But she did not hand it over after all. If one looked at the phone records, he phoned her more than a dozen times a day:
“Please get it touch. I am desperately concerned about you—we all are—everyone—”
And his note remained on the table in the foyer for three months. For three months she wore black. The apartment was left silent and empty. Silent as a tomb, and as empty as those 9/11 tombs would always be.
7.
SO THEN SHE LEFT, AND NONE COULD FIND HER, OR KNEW WHERE she was. But people surmised. Her family asked John to find her once again. But he could not do so. Not for a long time.
There was a lake the family owned. There was a boat she lived on—or a cottage laid out in the wilds of Quebec. She had taken a helicopter somewhere—her friends said her family had muzzled her because she was too vocal. Something was going on. Months went by—who knew where she was? She sold her apartment in Toronto at a loss within a week for 21.4 million, and came home to New Brunswick, to hide from all the terror of the world. She had enough money to last 230 lifetimes.
Sometimes deep in her lair she would watch television. And once, sitting in the gloom of a giant room, facing the TV with her head in her hands, she watched a BNN interview with her cousin Greg. Every now and again she would reach over and pick up a grape. She waited, even hoped, but he did not ever once mention her.
She rowed out to sea. She took walks in the dark. She once handed five hundred dollars to a boy who was walking alone, along the highway in the cold.
“Bobby?” she said. “Bobby?” But she must have been drunk.
She visited the First Nations reserve, went to a band meeting and apologized. The band council was silent; she had her head down, playing with her fingers. She was trying to apologize for Charlie Francis—if they knew this, she wasn’t sure. Tears came down her cheeks. She was trying to explain she had nothing more than a marshmallow to offer him one day.
“Please, Miss Cyr,” Mrs. Francis said. “Come, dear, and sit with us and have a cup of tea.”
She went into the Oyster River area with her quarter horse, Jaberoo. She spent two days alone near Aggens Pool.
She rode her Harley 883 along the Acadian coast wearing a sleeveless leather vest, moving through the gears as gracefully as anyone in her high leather boots, her hair braided and her arms bronzed. A small tattoo of Bobby above her left breast. She spoke to no one when she paid for gas.
Then she was gone again. Someone said they had seen her in Brussels, looking up documents. Some said she visited Vimy Ridge. Then Sister Alvina received a picture of a very beautiful woman standing near the shrine at Lourdes:
“For old times’ sake,” it said, “I had to visit this blessed place.” Mary Fatima Cyr.
She came home. Lived in Halifax for a while. She had a sense of impending doom; she was quite sure someone would try to destroy her.
She had no idea that Warren had gone to a secret meeting that September morning to start an investigation about Amigo’s dealings.
“My golly,” Warren, who never swore, said. He was looking at what his lawyer had secretly collected about Señor DeRolfo’s partners, and how the mine had remained open all during the time Tarsco had asked that it be shut, and had sold the coal without revealing it to them. Millions in extra profit, from a decrepit grave. And he had just arranged and sent them fourteen million dollars for upgrades to reopen a mine that had never closed but that
was used as a legitimate front for other things.
He discovered that morning that DeRolfo did not control this mine—other people did.
“My golly,” he said.
Ten seconds before the plane hit one floor beneath him. So the money was received and he was gone. All of this would come to light because of Alfonso Bara and the people he had in place in Oathoa, including his biggest asset, Constable Fey.
If it was in time to save Mary Cyr or not, no one knew.
8.
ONE NIGHT AT THE GRAND COTTAGE ON THE MIRAMICHI ALMOST six years after Warren died she woke in a sweat, sweating so badly she had to strip off all of her clothes.
“Yes,” she said, “yes.”
She looked out at the stars—one so far distant it was just a tiny speck in the vastness of space. Beyond the North Star, well it must have been a home to many, many things.
The moonlight came down on her—and two boys drinking in a scow could see her naked in the moonlight.
“That’s the crazy one,” one whispered.
“My god, look—I can see her beautiful breasts.”
She continued to look out at the star.
“Maybe I will go there,” she said.
So she did. That is, she was continually worried that her father’s money had been wasted—why she felt this she did not know. But there was something about money going out near September 11 that always troubled her. Where had that money gone?
So she went to Saint John the next evening.
She walked into the small, utterly nondescript office in Saint John. There was no one there. The pale moon shone down over the harbour, the lights from the bridge glittered. There was not a sound on the street until a bar closed, and then she heard some melancholy singing;
“‘Where have all the flowers gone,’” And then it was quiet once more.
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