Mary Cyr

by David Adams Richards

  Then she added:

  “And the Montreal Canadiens.”

  In her diary she said the terrible old farmhouse was a place of last refuge for her mommy. And so she wanted to see it, the one Paco had asked her to buy. It was still for sale, for 1.6 million pesetas. Or $160,000. That is how she knew the men she met named Paco were not the one her mother knew—they knew nothing much about this farmhouse beyond the town, in a small olive grove, overgrown and windswept in the hills. A place that Paco thought he could seduce some rich widow into buying for him, somewhere along the line. And gosh almighty, Mary Cyr was a rich widow as well.

  They went inside. They lit matches and moved along up the flight of lonely stairs to the top attic, where looking out they could see the town of Dénia so far, far away, and all her dreams, that is, all her mom’s dreams, seemed to crash against the shore in waves.

  “Splendid,” Mary Cyr said. She wondered if her mother had looked out this same attic window, on those days, when Mary was at Rothesay. And then came to the conclusion in her heart that she had, and that it was all, in space and time, only a second ago.

  “Let’s stay a minute here—and listen to the wind,” she said to him. They sat for a moment and the night was sweet, sweet in the gentle breeze.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Ask and you shall receive,” she said.

  “Are you rich?”

  “Do you know I am almost certain I am?”

  “How rich?” he asked. He was trembling a little.

  “Oh—” she said, looking at him and then looking away, “very rich, I think.”

  And so they went back down those narrow attic stairs and across the living room, with its huge old fireplace filled with debris; and an old, unhooked stove in the centre of the kitchen; a fridge that was unhooked, with a tattered, electrical cord. And then they opened the hatch to the basement, to see the foundation.

  “I don’t think we should go down there,” she said.

  “No—come on—come—” he insisted.

  He went ahead of her, and lit his lighter.

  “Come along,” he said again, and reached out to hold her hand.

  She took his hand, and their fingers touched, and she smiled at him in a kind of sorrow—perhaps mixed with a bit of her own stupid-ass self-pity. And then he took another step and disappeared.

  He had fallen into the cellar’s open well.

  Harsh—impossible—terrible—but true. But the harsher moment was this: she held on to his arm for an hour, on her belly, begging him to lift himself out. But he could not. A car passed by on the road; she yelled from the cellar, but no one heard. She kept screaming for help, as every few minutes he would try to place his feet on the slippery stones and lift himself—but the broken stones gave way one at a time, and he would lurch downward.

  “Oh don’t do that,” she would plead.

  She could not see his face—except for a small sliver of it, when the moonlight came across the back cellar window and seemed for an instant or two to reflect in his handsome eyes.

  A black rat crawled over her back, then crawled up and stared at her face, but she still held on to him.

  “Ah—Mary Cyr,” he said. “Je suis fatigué—je suis fatigué.”

  And he fell. She heard his body hit the bottom with a kind of thud, and light splash.

  Fifty feet into some black, filthy water seven feet deep. He called feebly.

  Only then did she run to get help.

  Again she had drowned someone, the rumour was.

  But the great report came by way of the Mexican press about this. The drowning of Lucien DeCoussy—except, they spelled his last name wrong. There was an interview with the woman Marianne Gaudet, now married with two children, who spoke of the hellish woman who had bewitched her fiancé and carried him to his death on a broom.

  5.

  AND THEN TEN MORE DAYS PASSED. LISTLESS AND HOT, BORING and tempestuous.

  People came and went, passing by her cell window. Women and men. Lucretia always came two or three times a day. Mary would be attentive with her. Once, she took off her silver watch and handed it over.

  “Para mi hermana,” Mary Cyr said, and smiled.

  Lucretia had become more and more important. She said she wanted to find Florin, but she spent more time near the jail than searching.

  Mary herself watched her with a rather penetrating gaze. A newspaper picture had been taken with Lucretia looking into the cell window, the caption: “A mother searches for the source of her pain.”

  In the morning Lucretia would wake with a start, as if something important would happen this very day. She would remember who she spoke to the day before—she would look at the date—the resort usually had the New York papers on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday—and three times her picture was in the paper.

  How glorious was that?

  Principia took her aside and told her she knew who Florin and Victor’s mother really was, and it was not right for the memory of her or Pedro Sonora to speak like this and take over their lives. But Lucretia gazed past her as she spoke, and then stood and went through the beaded-curtain partition into her little section of the apartamento. For days they did not see much of her.

  Lucretia would dress in mourning and head to the church, and ask Principia to go with her.

  Once when Lucretia asked Mary if it was true that there would be a great reward given to anyone who found out the truth, Mary had said, “No.”

  “No?” Lucretia asked. “I could find the truth out for you—I could if you got me the reward.”

  “No,” Mary said. “Nada—nada. La recompensa no es para ti.”

  The reward is not for you.

  She smiled. “Ya tienes tu recompensa.”

  You have had your reward already.

  And she turned away.

  “Then I will dispose of you!” Lucretia had said.

  “Only God can do so,” Mary answered.

  * * *

  —

  Mary was no longer well. Now after all this time in jail she was to the other prisoners just another one, who was not so special as to warrant special attention. But the young women still came up and asked her favours, and she would comply.

  “Could you get me to Canada?”

  “Yes, I will try.”

  “Are you going to order out today?

  “Yes, if you want and they let me.”

  “I need bus fare so my mother and son can visit—por favor—I have not seen my son in two months—he is a bebe.”

  “Sí. No mas problemo.”

  And she would tell Principia to take the money and make sure the bus station knew a ticket was bought, at this end—and that it would be a return ticket. Then she would with the other women stand in line with her toothbrush, her towel and face cloth, waiting to wash. The women she once thought were so foreign to her were now her only companions. The women who once thought she was so foreign to them looked upon her as a somewhat endearing oddity. But they kept coming and going—some only for a few nights. She was the only one who seemed to stay.

  Then she would be taken back to her cell and locked in. She wouldn’t go to the window much anymore. She would sit in the corner in the dark with her knees up, her chin on her knees; staring out at nothing.

  Lucretia would come to the cell window and look in. Mary could see her peering one way and then the other, shading her eyes.

  “Es de noche. No puedo decir,” Lucretia would say to someone.

  It is dark. I can’t tell.

  “Hey, Mary,” she would call. “Hey, Mary, mi amiga—por favor—mi amiga—”

  But little Mary Cyr no longer answered her.

  6.

  THERE WAS A GREAT AMOUNT OF GRACIOUSNESS THE FAMOUS Mary Cyr could spend, and she had spent it willingly all of her life—but that was over now. And they did not even know.

  How is it that I am alive? she would think. Why is it that I lived? Whatever was the purpose of me?

  But t
hings continued on, outside, to show finally why she had lived. That she had lived to show the falseness and tragedy of scapegoats, and that she had not known it, until now—and that others would recognize this in her, and then once again, as they had with so many through the ages, from Joan of Arc to Anne Frank, and with so many in camps and prisons and dark places of the soul, and with so many of our prophets to whom they would wail and beg forgiveness and forget they had ever played a part in their fate.

  Then they would reduce these lives to irony and absurdity, like our favourite writers, and laugh.

  Once, but only once, the women got into a fight over the money Mary had—and she saw two of them kicking and punching each other over a few coins that she had dropped. She had never known poverty like they had, but many who had known poverty would not have done this. Little Debby Dormey would never have done that, nor Gabriella or Victor or Florin.

  The women grabbed at each other’s hair and kicked, and one tried to rip the other’s shirt off. And others stood around laughing at this, while an older prisoner yelled: “¡Silencio! Ustedes dejarán de luchar.”

  Quiet, stop fighting.

  Mary never knew what they called the peso—lana, varos, plata—a lot of names she could not keep straight. But she ran to her bed, lifted the sheet, ran back to the bars and handed them both a two-hundred-dollar Mexican bank note.

  “Hay no lucha,” she said. She smiled, tenderly, like a mother. Like the mother she wanted to be, and to have.

  “No lucha,” she said with such sadness that the two fighting stopped and looked at her a little spellbound.

  “Su culpa tuya la hemos hecho triste,” one said to the other.

  It’s your fault we made her sad.

  “No—no problema,” Mary Cyr said.

  And then she went back and sat on her crate.

  Two days after Doc advertised he was giving an interview to SCREW magazine about his “two women” from the Cyr family and was to appear nude, Mary issued a statement that said:

  “I don’t think that is very nice.”

  John remembered that statement now. And the hilarity that accompanied it. Yet it was a profound statement—concise and kind, and whimsical.

  The next day she was brought to court. There was a great deal of press from the United States and Britain, Canada and Japan. The sirens wailed and she sat in between two officers.

  There was not a second where there was not a flash of a camera.

  They handcuffed her hands behind her and led her into the courthouse. She was weak, and strangely, she found it difficult to take the steps. The courtroom of course was packed.

  It was all in Spanish, and she kept looking around. John was there, and Mr. Xavier, and the Dutch doctor, Norma van Haut, and her husband, the big German, who had jostled people out of the way to make room for her. The Dutchwoman told the press in Amsterdam the night before:

  “Ze is geheel onschuldige, God helpen degenen die doen het niet zien.”

  She is entirely innocent. God help those who do not see it.

  Then she told the story of her long association with Mary Cyr, a woman she had actually never met. She had wanted a pen pal, long ago when she was fifteen, and some young girl from Canada answered. She was thinking, Norma van Haut said, she would have a pen pal from New York or somewhere very special—but this young girl named Mary Cyr became the first to answer her. She lived in a small province far off in Canada. Norma van Haut was conditioned to like Canadians because of their helping to liberate the Netherlands. But it seemed for a while this girl Mary Cyr did not like the Dutch, and Norma said it took a while to convince her that the Dutch were not much like that man who insulted her mother. Once she convinced her of that, Mary became:

  “Ze was zo licht en zo vriendelijk is als een bloem.”

  As light and as sweet as a flower.

  But Norma van Haut said it became obvious that she wanted to find something out about that man’s father—“And I spent my first year in university rushing about for her.”

  “Je het erg,” they asked. Did you mind?

  “Nee.”

  But, Norma said, the strange thing was, when she found all of this out, and could have brought it forward against the man who had attacked her family in Der Spiegel, Mary Cyr said:

  “Let it be.”

  “Let it be?” Norma asked.

  He will have to find out about it himself.

  So you see, Norma van Haut said, “She can’t be guilty—she just can’t be.”

  “What else do you know about her?” the newspaper reporter asked.

  “Oh, zette ze me via medische school,” Norma van Haut said. “Oh—she put me through medical school—she does not know that I know.”

  “And what do you think of the coincidence of meeting her now?”

  “It is the will of God,” she said. “And I did not believe in God until just now.”

  7.

  NORMA SMILED WHEN SHE SAW MS. CYR, HANDCUFFED BETWEEN two large guards, walking into the courtroom, and Mary smiled a little back.

  She was formally charged with murder and indecency to a body, and the kidnapping of Florin Sonora.

  Judge Entenda Jesus de Oliva Gabel looked very business-like, and matter of fact. As if this was simply his duty and he was not at all overwhelmed by the press, or the photographers or the television cameras from around the world, which meant he was trying his best not to be completely overwhelmed. But he was sweating and looked uneasy, and his voice shook just a little when he spoke—a tremor filled his voice, a kind of echo surfaced along the courtroom walls, a sound that dissipated in coughing and shuffling of feet.

  Isabella Tallagonga did not look Mary Cyr’s way at all. Tallagonga long knew there was a great deal of interest in this trial everywhere, and everywhere she now looked foreign correspondents witnessed the proceedings—so she had to appear very stern. And when she turned sideways, her eyes locked on those of a little Japanese woman reporter, who seemed terrified of her, so that is who she seemed to be speaking about:

  “Asesina, loca,” she said. And the young Japanese woman shook slightly.

  And the evidence was of course irrefutable. In fact she did think: Bara will never trump this! And she knew that this is what it was all about. This trial meant her entire career, one way or the other.

  This in fact was the one thing this trial was actually about: the fight between her and Alfonso Bara. She was worried for one other reason—something one of her friends in Mexico City had told her, that Bara had something spectacular that he was going to unload on the public within the next few days—a week at the most—that might trump her.

  What would he be cooking up—just something to try to spoil her great national debut? And this is what she was thinking—but that thought drifted away, and she looked—glanced, really, toward the back of the room—and saw Principia, and her daughter, Gabriella, and son, Ángel, all staring at her with rather fixed expressions, Ángel’s mouth moving just slightly as if a mute was trying to speak.

  Estoy Bien no te preocupes por mí

  I am fine, do not worry about me, Mary had learned to say whenever people said she looked ill.

  They finally asked her what she would plead, guilty or not guilty.

  “No. Yo no soy culpable,” Mary said, but you could hardly hear her.

  No. I am not guilty.

  Tallagonga was worried.

  Xavier remained firm, and told the family in New Brunswick it would be a plea of innocence.

  “No,” John said to Nan, who asked him if a guilty plea might be best. “She does not want to plead guilty. People have called her guilty all of her life—she will not plead guilty now. Not anymore!”

  “Mon Dieu, c’est à vous, un servant,” Nan said, with artificial outrage.

  “Yes,” John said. “It is up to me, a servant.”

  Tallagonga also had some shocking news about the case just hours ago. The defence would ask that the body be exhumed. Erappo made it clear that Tallagon
ga should try to stop this. But Tallagonga knew trying to stop it would cause greater suspicion internationally than she ever wanted to.

  Erappo shrugged as he shed his bulletproof jacket, and sat down.

  “What can you do with all this nonsense?” he said.

  But there was something worse—something was wrong with Mary Cyr herself. She did not look well—she looked listless and uninterested and certainly unafraid. And Tallagonga had heard that Erappo Pole had been tormenting her—and this came to a head one night in an argument with the little guard—Constable Fey’s fiancée.

  So all of this had to be settled, and it all had to settle down. It was like a toothache—you let it go, let it go, and finally half your mouth is sore and infected.

  “¡No se atreve a tocar a esa chica otra vez!” she said to him, as she left the big office and walked down the hall to the small cafeteria that almost no one used.

  Do not dare touch that girl again.

  They called Isabella Tallagonga “the spider”—because of the web she could weave around luckless people, but she was now casting a web that might swallow her.

  8.

  THE PICTURE IN THE GLOBE THE NEXT MORNING DID SHOW Tallagonga on those steps. It also showed Cyr getting out of the police car, while policemen with assault rifles flanked her.

  “Mary Cyr goes on trial,” it read.

  After the not guilty plea Mary Cyr was led back to her cell. She was hobbling on her left side. The little guard, just as many others, did not notice, for she sometimes walked strangely since she was hit on the head as a child. She was, for a while, taken to be mentally disabled. Nor did she ever mind. That is, that they once thought she was backward. Today as she left the courtroom, she handed a note to Xavier; it read:

  “Get him out of Mexico or lock him up until you can.”

  She was referring to John. It was too dangerous for him and nothing now could be done.

  Besides, he knew her too well, and if he visited her again, he might find out that which she did not want him to know. So if he was out of Mexico, it would be better for her plans.