2.

THE FIGHT OVER MARY CYR AND WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN TO HER began when she was about twelve years of age.

Mary became the orphan of the family. She loitered in the great smoky rooms of her grandfather or uncle, sat in chairs in huge offices in downtown Toronto at midday, was left in the huge cottage on the Miramichi. Sometimes by herself. She was forgotten. When she was thirteen, she set out on her own with a picnic lunch to find her mother, and made it all the way to the main highway before she was spotted. She was picked up and taken to the RCMP headquarters, and sat on a hard bench in the midnight humid air, trying to look at the bottom of her big left toe, which was cut. It was the first of many calls that came to John Delano because of her.

‘’That young rich girl you know—Mary Cyr is here—should we put her in a cell, or take her home? I am not sure?”

“For God sake don’t put the child in the cell—I will come and get her, and take her home.”

People believed she was daft because she had been hit in the head by a book and had fallen off a ladder in her family’s library. But John believed, if no one else did, that she was far closer to brilliant than stupid, and knew every nuance of what they did say concerning her and realized she was a burden to others by the time she was thirteen. Her eyes would brighten when she heard her name, and she would stop running or walking—at times remaining in the curious position of motion without moving, clandestinely waiting just beyond view to hear what was being said. Then she would continue as if she had not heard a thing. What they were trying to decide is what part of the fortune would be hers without ever saying it.

It was not that they did not care for her—they did. Perhaps as much as anyone. She knew that someday come what may she would have much money at her disposal. So she refused to speak to them. She took to disliking Garnet, and saying he had killed her father.

Garnet never answered these assaults. But Mary Cyr believed she had good reason for saying what she did. It had all started, she felt, at a dinner party the night before her father died. Everything that would happen to her that was bad had started then. Certainly something traumatic had happened. The death of her father came the night after.

John discovered that that was the night she decided to side with her English mother rather than the Irish or French sides of her family. That is what it came down to.

In a clumsy way she told John why that had to be, a few years after that night—the summer she was sixteen.

“Why? Well, simply because you do not make fun of my mother,” she said. “I hardly remember it—but Daddy was away, and my mother was being made fun of because she was British. She had been before this, but this was a bigger case. A Dutchman came into our house thinking us French and Irish, so he started to insult the English, yet when he made light of my English mother—I became British at that moment to protect her.” She shrugged, looked at him, sighed, and her shoulders sank. “And I would do it for anyone I cared for. Even if they were Dutch.”

“Who was this man?”

“Ernest Vanderflutin, the lanky, bony, skinny son of the other fatter, flabbier Vanderflutin—the one we bought the mine from.”

“Who?”

“The older Vanderflutin—and I found out.”

“You found out?”

“When I was seven or eight—I told them I had seen a picture of the older Vanderflutin—no one paid me the least bit of attention—but he—the older Vanderflutin did—he paid attention. You could see he was worried. I saw a picture of him at a Nazi rally.”

“You are sure of this, Mary.”

She simply looked away.

So John waited a moment—not knowing whether to believe her, and then asked:

“And that’s what happened? I mean between you and the family?” He did not know if she was delusional or not, for so many people simply assumed she was.

“Yes. Then my daddy died, then my mommy died last year—and I guess I will have to fight them all!”

John felt that she took solace in the fact that she was alone, and believed she would be alone always, and by this loneliness would sooner or later—she did not know when—come virtue. She did not know how she would live life until this virtue came, or in what way it would show itself—but she felt it as a second layer under her thought—that someday even for one brief moment she would be virtuous, and this came primarily because she was as she was, alone. She was always alone—or nearly always alone—except for that one thing in her upstairs rooms that everyone told her she should never have had.

The idea that she was delusional, or as the girls on the beach often said, “a wack job” because she had fallen and hit her head when in the library that day, infested the thoughts of dozens of people who had to deal with her. But it also made John want and need to protect her.