PERHAPS IT WAS FATE, FORTITUDE OR DESIGN, BUT MARY CYR had one friend, someone as picked on as she—a girl with blond eyelashes and blond thin hair, weak eyes and a sad comical little grin, who came there by way of Caraquet. A girl who liked and dreamed of a boy named Lucien DeCoussy.
“Et il est si mignon et spécial,” she would say—many times a day.
But unfortunately no one thought little Denise was.
One might see her picture in a thousand Canadian yearbooks from mid-century on, the girls who walk with bleak-coloured sweaters along rows of grey lockers, carrying books with a kind of hopeful plea, through the storms of our oddly quaint villages and vicious sub-zero winters.
Mary promised her a donkey—or a horse, whatever it was—if she would be her friend—yet Denise Albert would have been her friend anyway. So being outcasts, the two of them were put together in a small back bedroom, away from the others.
This idea that the English wanted to destroy them, and Mary should not only realize this but her soul should respond to it, was a matter of great and subtle concern in those long corridors the nuns walked, silent and determined to wrest out of these children spontaneity and love. (Of course not all of them, and even those who did could be at times kind to those in their care.)
But Mary’s soul rebelled against this idea, and she could not join the insults fired at the maudits anglais. And Denise would not, because of Mary.
That this has been played out two hundred thousand times in our country on either side of the spectrum, with little leeway for self-blame is something unspoken. And this formed Mary Cyr’s philosophy: get back at those who from the vantage of victimization attacked the grandchildren of their supposed victimizers without confronting themselves.
And she saw this, in the sweet-smelling Acadian girls and in a western Canadian named Ernest Vanderflutin, who had as far as Mary Cyr was concerned the audacity to speak against her mother.
It became her philosophy—to fight them to the death—but it took some time to develop.
With Denise as her only friend they were put out of the way.
Mary Cyr once said, later on:
“Away from the pure ones—they are after French purity like others cherished certain Germanic qualities. Oh, they won’t say that, but their politicians will demonstrate it. Someday I bet they will have laws in Quebec against having English on signs—and call it progress.”
(This of course was one of the many things she said that came to haunt her later. And she would say as many things about the English over the years: You can always tell an Englishman, but you can’t tell him much!)
But their punishment came because Mary refused to learn, or attempt to learn French—the real trouble was Mary had a hard time concentrating on anything the year after her father’s death and should have been excused—and Denise could not comprehend why other students disliked Mary. Mary’s marks that year ranged from 35 to 65. Most of her marks fell between 50 and 60. In the distilled afternoon light through the great, elongated windows of classrooms they sat side by side—separated from the others.
Sister Alvina had warned them, had strapped them, and then sanctioned them.
They locked the door on them at eight at night. That is, not only Mary and Denise but all the students.
Their window was three storeys up and had double-pane glass, and the window itself was nailed shut. The main dorms were off to their left; the nuns slept on the right—something that Mary Cyr often seemed confused about when speaking with Denise.
They were locked in after evening prayers. And that is where the two planned their escape. In the lingering smells of supper and chapel and Lenten monotony.
And to that end Mary deliberated and plotted. For two weeks at night she sewed rags together while little Denise slept, Mary sitting up until three making arms and feet and fashioning heads, and hiding it all under her mattress.
“C’est quoi ça?” Denise asked one evening.
“Dummys.”
“Pour quoi faire? Mettre dans nos lits?”
“Sure,” Mary Cyr answered
“Nos lits?” Denise asked again.
“Sure,” Mary Cyr conceded without knowing what was being asked—for she had not been able to make much headway with the language of love; and Denise looked up at her in a kind of strange, hopeful awe, with her little chest bones visible under her blue nightgown.
“Okay then, two donkeys,” Mary said. And she winked in affection and went back to her sewing.
It was March 26, late, dark in the long hallway, and Mary arose, put her feet on the cold floor and woke her friend. Moonlight came in and she could just sense now how late it had become. The old nun down the end of the hall coughed in her sleep, and the downstairs clock gonged.
The wind blew steadily over the bay, and Mary Cyr had keys in her pocket that she had stolen from Mother Superior’s desk while she was on her knees. These keys would open their bedroom door and the front door as well.
“Maintenant?”
“Sure, buttercup,” Mary said.
The little girl—that is, Denise Albert—had no idea where they were going or what they were exactly running away from. But she sat up, smiled and began to dress. That in fact was what was so sorrowful—her childlike trust.
Under the grey blankets of their beds they put the two dummies Mary had managed to sew—something that would fool no one, especially Sister Alvina, but which Mary Cyr believed was more than pure genius—and left at 1:29 in the morning, Mary carrying a pillowcase filled with crackers and cheese and a lettuce-and-tomato sandwich, and Denise clutching the rosary she had almost forgotten but had remembered just in time.
Now and again moonlight shone through the large back window on their little bodies as they made their way down the three flights of stairs and out the door, Mary taking Denise by the hand.
“There is only one problem,” Mary Cyr whispered. “The river.”
“L’hiver?” Denise asked.
“No—the river—rivière,” she whispered.
And they walked along, both alike in size and disposition, their bodies making shadows on the side of the convent walls.
Then they had to slide down a short, steep, snow-covered hill. And then walk through a field of fire-red alders, picking their way through so the branches would not sting or cut their faces.
They got to the river and walked back and forth. Mary looked it over, walked out three metres and walked back.
“It is as solid as a training bra,” she said. And little Denise stepped out as well, her eyes filled with hope, and fear.
They were trying to cross the river to get to the village of St. Clair. That would save them a five-kilometre walk to the bridge. Mary Cyr was intending to phone her grandfather to take her home; or to some island where, she told Denise, they could smoke cigarettes and live on a sailboat.
The convent was on the west side, surrounded by a brick wall, with the elongated penitentiary sadness of iced-over, naked trees, branches bent in elongated despair.
And the sound of a late-night plow in the village streets. Mary did not know, nor would she have been expected to, that the river mouth was opened halfway across and you must stay to your right to have a chance at living any longer.
Denise, with her white eyelashes and her ears that poked out under her woollen cap, did not make it to the other side.
But how had it happened? It was one of the many tragedies to happen in Mary Cyr’s life. She bravely went first, to mark the way, and made it across the ice; saw little Denise hesitate and start to crawl on her knees. So Mary Cyr yelled:
“Go to your right!”
Or that is what she believed she was yelling.
In actual fact Mary Cyr got two simple French words mixed up: droite and gauche.
“Allez gauche,” is what she actually said.
And the girl simply crawled as quickly as she could into the open water, holding her wooden prayer beads. Mary heard the splash, a kind of small cry and then silence. She bravely ran out onto the ice to help, swishing her arm frantically in the water. But she wasn’t able to touch her.
Then suddenly it became horrifyingly clear, in the soft sudden luxuriant moonlight.
The little girl had slipped under the crystal-clear ice, and was looking straight up at Mary as Mary looked down at her. In the light of the great spring moon little Denise, holding her breath, staring into Mary’s face—and then she simply sank away, with her arms outstretched, as if wanting a hug. The prayer beads sank with her, disappearing into the dark rum-like water.
Denise’s body was not discovered until the following spring, the prayer beads still clutched in her hand. Mary was whisked away—that she was even on the river was mentioned only briefly in the papers. The local priest, because of the connection with the convent, was outraged for a while but then said nothing more about it. People said he had been paid off by the Catholic hypocrite, Blair Cyr. No worse kind in the mind of the secular. But in actual fact Mary Cyr went to confession, and the priest could and would not say anything more. He did feel terrible that he could not. For he learned in that confessional that she and Denise had been bullied and tormented, had run away. And in fact he believed her.
It was the second disaster in her life. So what would all this mean—now? You see, Mary Cyr was made controversial by design—she always became the story rather than the story itself. And her enemies took delight in this. And when she fought back, they could and did say:
“She hit her head, you know, when she was young. Terrible, but it left her bonkers. Do you see she walks with a strange little limp and lisps at times? That’s her head injury acting up.”
This was in fact true; she did lisp over certain words, and she did walk strangely at times. And she did have a head injury, which made her very unpredictable in her anger.
She now told him that she had given Victor twenty dollars and he had bought Florin a toy truck, yellow and orange. She had helped him pick it out. It was called Maxwell the truck.
“Please see if it is at my villa—perhaps Florin was there,” she whispered.
She then sat in her hot cell making a list of names, of people who might say something mean against her. The list got so long, she ran out of paper.