Mary simply did what she did so well. She wrote a cheque. Perhaps it was as much as twenty-five thousand dollars.
She had it hand-delivered by her driver to the hotel the next afternoon. The driver walked up to him, and handed him the envelope. She had written on it:
“To the Dutchman’s boy.”
But she never ever mentioned his name again.
3.
SHE TOOK TIME PLAYING THE PIANO. IT WAS HER AUNT’S SIXTEETH birthday. She remembered it now in Mexico, in somewhat of a daze. Yes, it was long ago. And so many people were there. The lieutenant governor of New Brunswick, the wife of the local United Church minister, Bishop Fronlu from the Catholic diocese. Two other sneaky-looking, pleasant-enough priests. Two Maritime senators and their troubled alcoholic wives. The all-inclusive obsequious president of Saint Michaels University. Many people they had known and loved over the years—but most were people her aunt liked, and who Mary Cyr disdained. Some of them—most of them—had been at the dinner party that night—the night of the knives, as Mary Cyr called it. They had sat there silently while her mother’s culture and history were being defamed—and Mary Cyr remembered their silence.
Nan wanted her to play. Perhaps Chopin or Mozart—who knew.
“Some little classical ditty, I suppose,” Mary had written in her diary.
She was upstairs with Bobby, sitting far in the corner, near the rocking horse. It had been, this party, supposedly arranged for months, but she had been away in Switzerland.
“D. H. Lawrence wrote a macabre story about a rocking horse—and then he went to Mexico—maybe someday we will go to Mexico, Bobby—and just live as recluses—I don’t want to go downstairs and play—why should I need to do so if they do not want or need you there?”
Because Nan wanted her to.
“The Anglican minister is coming,” Nan had said.
(She’d said this because of Mary Cyr’s Englishness.) But Nan, yesterday in her most diplomatic way, told her she did not want Bobby present. Mary had shown her the boy’s new jumpsuit she had bought in Switzerland, with the blue hat and shorts she wanted to show him off in. But after Nan held it and smiled, Nan said:
“Maybe he will get tired or cranky.”
And then:
“Maybe he wouldn’t want to be around all those grown-up people.”
And then:
“We have to think of his condition.”
And then:
Mary interjected.
“Why, Nan, maybe you are ashamed of us?”
“Ashamed? How can you say that—” But then she said, in French, as she turned away in a huff: “I just thought if he is a boy who is ill, maybe he is better off with those who can take care of him, and not a temperamentally unstable young girl who got pregnant when she was fifteen—Quelle honte, une honte.”
What a disgrace—a disgrace.
And added: “I have tried my best to hire the best people—”
“There is no one better to take care of him than me,” Mary said, getting enough of the French to understand enough to answer, and secretly reeling from the word honte—disgrace.
Then Nan said:
“Well, Bobby is certainly welcome—and you can be certain you have all our support.”
Then she closed the door to the side room, and began to sing.
So the day progressed as Mary sat upstairs, in the room beyond his bedroom where his rocking horse and model train set were. She held his jumpsuit. She looked about at all the expensive clothes she had bought him in Switzerland and Paris. And she too had duped him—trying to get him to look ordinary—so she could present him.
“Forgive me, Bobby,” she said. “But look how pretty this is—let’s get it on so we can go downstairs.”
All his diagnoses, all the results of his tests about bone density, were on charts in her adjoining room. All the plans for him made in secret between him and her, both giggling like children during a bedtime story.
“No, Mommy,” he said. “No, Mommy. I don’t want to go.”
He smiled at her as if to ask forgiveness for something he could not help.
She kissed him, held him, put his jumpsuit away.
* * *
—
The baby grand piano had a key that sounded tinny, as far as Mary was concerned. Which is perhaps the only thing she had written about the event in her diary.
She wore a little black skirt, a white blouse with long sleeves. The day was hot, and the piano sat in front of the large window, where the sun beat down. The blouse she wore was complemented by a small black bow tie. She wore her charm bracelet. John realized that this was the bracelet she tossed over Niagara Falls—there was no gold on it. It was simply a charm bracelet of sad memories—
She played Mozart’s piano concerto no. 23. It was too long and involved, she said, didn’t they think? But they told her she played wonderfully. She looked over at Nan and smiled. She drank down her champagne.
She said:
“Then you must know this one.”
She played Chopin’s Nocturne op. 9, no. 2. It was in a way—at least in part, even with that tinny key—spellbinding. People clapped. She had drunk a little too much beforehand and she knew it. She wanted to go back to Mozart but did not know which one she should go to. So she said, after her third glass of champagne:
“How about old Scott?”
“Scott who?” Nan asked.
Mary jumped up, and became almost, as people said, another Mary. She played Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.” She stood up as she played it, looking up at everyone and smiling.
“Here I am, doing the old Jerry Lee,” she said.
People began to tap their feet when she played it. They clapped loudly and said, “Let’s have the Beatles.”
This request came from the sides of the great room, toward the end where the piano was.
“Okay, here’s one,” she said. “‘Love, love me do—You know I love you—’” She still stood at the piano.
“My soul,” Nan said, looking at the United Church minister.
Mary unbuttoned the sleeves of her blouse, and two top buttons. She tossed her bow tie aside. She was hot. It was the gin she had drunk upstairs before she came down. (She had given Bobby a little slurp of gin as well.)
The top of her white breasts were glistening with sweat. The sun had made her dizzy.
“Give me some more champagne,” she said.
The maid in her white dress came over with another glass.
Perley, who had kept his eye on her, running to check on Bobby every ten minutes and then walking down the stairs hearing the piano becoming more and more loud, and her speech more and more erratic, asked her if she would like to stop and go upstairs.
“No,” she said, glaring at him, downing the glass in a swig and wiping her mouth. “I’m just getting started—Perl.”
She still stood. She knocked the piano bench away from her, so she could move to the music.
She yelled at the maid to make sure everyone’s glass was full.
“Yes—fill them glasses to the brim and pace them old cards around,” she said. Nan and Garnet smiled tensely.
Mary put her hands down on the keys with a climatic tone. Then she lifted her head and smiled ruefully, and said:
“One more—it’s about a girl and a guy—just one more—come on now, we can all sing along—you must know this one—he is a fisherman and shy—she is a young girl who loves him—maybe someday I will marry a fisherman.”
Everyone laughed.
“Okay, here we go—Nan must know this one growing up in Tracadie—I am certain of it!”
Then she sang:
“‘My shy young boy, you fish da peer.’
“Come on now,” she encouraged.
So some of them sang:
“‘My shy young boy, you fish da peer.’”
“Yes,” Mary said.
“‘On lonely nights I’m real lonely here.’”
“‘On lonely nigh
ts I’m real lonely here—’” they shouted.
“‘You know me good.’”
“‘You know me good,’” they laughed.
“‘I wish not to be blunt.’”
“‘I wish not to be blunt,’” everyone sang.
Mary came down on the keys brazenly, suspending time for a moment.
“‘I do not wish to be so blunt,’” she repeated,
“‘I do not wish to be so blunt,’” they rejoined.
She paused, then put her head down and crashed the keys.
“‘But I’d love your finger up my cunt.’”
“‘Ta da!’” she said. “Sing it, Nan!” she said.
“‘Don’t want to be blunt—But I’d love your finger up my cunt—Ta da,’” she said. She waited. “Sing it, Nan—‘Ta—da’?”
She fell back, slid off the piano chair and onto her bum.
4.
AND THEN QUITE, QUITE SUDDENLY, SHE SAID SHE WAS GETTING married.
They had a wedding of two hundred guests, under a tent in the backyard. She walked about with pieces of cake.
His name was Doc. He was her mother’s former boyfriend. John always felt she had done this to get back at him. But perhaps he was giving himself too much credit. All of a sudden Doc was a link to her past, and her mother. That is what she really wanted, her mother. So they got married.
All that gauze and all that giddy celebration for six and a half months. For that skinny little yob. He begged her, so she put him up in a business in Chatham, and he ran it into the ground, stealing from it. Later he was seen with another woman at the Low Tide. It seemed that she didn’t care, only wanted one thing from him. He promised to tell her about her mother in Spain—and she waited at night for him, compiling a list of questions. The questions were so innocent, and so full of hope—and she sat on the edge of the couch waiting for him to come home, so she could ask him these—and each day she changed them—tried to think of something more to ask:
“Was she sorrowful?”
“Did they hurt her?”
“Did she ask for me?”
“Did she miss me?”
“Do you know why—you know she wanted to die?”
That is, she knew from the first that it must have been a kind of coercion of some kind, a sad and whimsical, set-in-the-sunlight kind, that made a dalliance out of shame—the kind her mother did not want but that was, perhaps, with her luckless life and her artificial gaiety, the only kind she could arrive at.
The question then that was asked, which made him stop in his tracks, and turn beet red, was:
“Why in God’s name did she ever have anything to do with you?”
Questions he always put off answering, until such time as she would sleep with him. But she continually put it off—as if it would be a disgrace to sleep with him. But John wondered now if she ever had.
“Tell me about her days in Spain. What was she doing there—twice she gave you money to go away.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because of her letters written to me—because I know what so many think I do not know—so you blackmailed her, that is why she took pills—that is why—you put her on those pills—she was so pilled up—such a pill popper she had no chance to escape you—so do not lie, do not lie, tell me tell me true!”
“It was nothing like that.”
“Then tell me—” Holding on to him, “Then tell me—” And again and again, and again, “Then tell me tell me tell me—true—tell me true and I will—I will do a strip act for you—a kind of hoochie hoochie coo.”
“Someday I will tell you about her—about a man named Paco who ruined her. Because unlike me he was a gigolo. He took money off of her—and talked her into buying that farmhouse. That’s when she betrayed me—so—anyways—that was why I took a hammer to her car—well, someday I will tell you.”
“What farmhouse—which one.”
“I don’t know which one—some farmhouse in Dénia, Spain.” (“Paco,” she wrote in her diary. “I have to go to Spain and find a man named Paco—there can’t be too many of those.”)
But the days passed into spring and rain, and dreary hours waiting for him. He knew he wasn’t welcome, and he could no longer stomach her insatiable questions, so he went out with friends who were involved in schemes. One was to rob Perley of a fifteen-thousand-dollar watch. These two men he was with would later—with Doc’s involvement—get involved in a scheme to take Perley for money over the rescue attempt that Markus Paul discovered.
But that as we know was far away.
5.
“SCHEMES,” SHE WROTE. “HE HAS A WHOLE BUCKETFUL OF schemes. He destroyed my mother, in some petty way he had some kind of pettiness on her—I know, I can see by the way he looks.”
Doc would sit at the large table at supper—she and Doc, and the boy, and Perley. There the clinking of forks and knives, there the white wine, there the sad smell of flowers outside. There the taste of salt in whispers from the bay. There the portrait of her grandfather. Doc loved to tease Perley, question him. Because there was a secret girl Perley knew, the girl of his dreams. So one night in a buoyant mood Doc convinced Perley to show them a picture of his girl, Caroline. Finally Perley said, “Okay, I will”—and he ran upstairs and got the picture, and brought it to them. He was holding it against his chest as he walked into the room.
“This isn’t the best picture of her—she is prettier in person, I will tell you that. The glasses make her look like she has buck teeth, but she doesn’t,” he said, shyly. And he finally handed it to his cousin’s husband.
Doc looked at it, sniffed, rubbed his nose and shrugged.
“The one who teaches grade school?”
“Yes—”
“The one with the red hair?”
“Yes—Caroline—yes.”
“Hell yes, Bucky Four Eyes.” Doc smiled. “I know her too.”
“Oh—you do not know her—not that Caroline—” Perley looked at Mary for some explanation, and then he smiled timidly and said: “It must be another Caroline.”
Doc picked the picture up again and looked closely at it. He took the glasses out of his pocket and put them on. Then he picked at a tooth. Then he sniffed and shook his head quickly. Then he tapped the picture and handed it back.
“No—that’s Caroline, the one who teaches grade school—yes, I know her—” He took a long drink of white wine and kept his eyes on Perley as he drank.
“You do not.”
“Don’t get angry—don’t get angry, Perley—why, is she your girl?”
“Yes—she is nice—she is my girl—she is my first girlfriend.”
“Well, she was many people’s last girlfriend,” Doc said. “Why, she’s had more pricks in her than a second-hand dartboard, Perley—”
“No—you are saying a LIE—I know—it’s a lie—I’ve never even kissed her.”
“That must be refreshing for her—her lips are worn thin with kisses—why, the boys in grade nine history class are lining up to do her one at a time. She just wants money, Perley—get over it. Mark my words.”
Doc laughed at this, and Perley began to shake. He was shaking so bad that Mary went over to hold him, but he upset the table. He roared at the top of his lungs, and left the room. He went out and walked along the beach. You could hear him crying for some time.
Doc began to laugh, with the three of them still sitting there and the table upside down. What was funnier was the tiny dog was sitting in a chair by himself. So they were all sitting there and the table was turned completely over, with Caroline’s picture lying there, and Doc found this hilarious.
So then he stood and yawned, looked at the busted plates and glasses and walked into the far room. He took the keys from the cup on the desk and started toward the door.
He was about to take the Jag, and Mary ran in to the room and said no. Until he went to Perley and apologized to him.
“Apologize—no goddamn way.”
“Then you c
an’t have the car.”
One must realize that Mary was frightened to challenge him because she might not then discover what had happened to her mother in Spain. And Doc was arrogant enough to think he owned the family.
But still he must apologize.
“No no no no no.”
“Then you won’t have the Jag,” she said.
“I’ll take it if I want,” he said.
Then he made fun of her child.
The little boy who was told to call him Father.
Doc smiled at her—as if this was the weapon he was waiting to use, and told her the child should have been an abortion, she being too young to take care of it—
She went to grab the keys, but he slapped her. She looked at him. Her nose was bloody. She wiped it with her hand. There were tears in her eyes. She smiled.
“Oh look,” she said, “you bruised your hand hitting my face, I am sorry.”
He was trembling, and grabbed his jacket to go out.
“You are not going out to see her—whoever she is.”
“I’ll go where I damn well want. I can’t stand all the questions you ask, I can’t stand it anymore—not one more question.”
“Then here’s the answer—you murdered my MOMMY.”
That is when she jumped on his back and bit his ear. That is when he threw her down, right over his shoulder.
And then he saw the child looking at him, a look of sad horror on his face, yet a look a child has that everything is fine and he doesn’t quite understand. What the look said was I trusted you, you are my father. The look in fact was that innocent.
“Go,” Mary screamed. “Get out and never come back!”
“Okay, I will!” he said.
Yet something came over him—this sudden idea—one might not even call it an idea but a feeling—an impulsive sensation—and he said:
“Okay—if that’s what you want—calling me a murderer—we will just see about that!”
And he walked across the hall, through the large kitchen and into the back shed. When he came out, he had his lighter, and some gas. He picked the small dog up in one hand, the dog looking around the room in befuddled confusion, as he poured gasoline over it. When the dog wagged its tail, some small little driblets of gas flew in the air, much like water from a water sprinkler. Then Doc took his hand and massaged the gas into its fur.
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