THERE WAS THE SON OF A PAINTER SHE MET ONCE, ONE OF THOSE painter’s sons—the type of man who was invited to a party only because he was the son of an artist, and made a point of being a radical because it was in vogue to act like Jesus (though he dismissed Jesus for more revolutionary principles) and save the world; who after his usual amount of rum bragged about how well he knew the poor, so began to needle her about who she was, and how much damage her family did with their monopoly on so much. You know, how much money and ruin and trees they had cut down—how many lives they had ruined. (Not the twenty thousand families they put to work.)
“We will expose your family sooner or later,” he said. “You will be exposed.”
She sat there, at fifteen years old, politely listening to him. She had dressed up for the party and had begged to be allowed to go—and there were grown-ups there, she pleaded with Nan. And she would come home by eleven. It was two nights after she had been officially adopted, and Nan did love her. So did Garnet. So did Perley. Though she would be reticent to take the adoption seriously, she loved them for trying.
And finally, our painter’s son said, sneering:
“You and your bloody family with your Lear jet.”
There was so much of that, defending herself against boys she did not know, boys who would be boys all their lives, and who did not know her.
Mary Cyr held up her hands, timidly showing four fingers.
“Four—Lear jets—at last count,” she said.
Later, after everything else failed, he was studying to be a social worker, in a building her father had donated to the university.
When she was fourteen, her family sent her to boarding school. She packed her Plu, some cookies to share, a transistor radio to listen to the be bop a loo bop of the day, and eye liner.
In boarding school they talked about dropping acid and who might do it, and about a certain Mr. Cruise, who had nice buns. He spoke to them about marijuana, how it was easy to grow. He was subversive in a very noncommittal, intelligently theoretical and comfortable way. He was a man from the United States who had moved to Newfoundland because he had protested the Vietnam War; a man who had his degree from Memorial University and now taught English. He said the people there were very backward. He could imitate the premier of New Brunswick or Newfoundland and did it so successfully that everyone, even Mary, whose godfather was her father’s friend Premier Hatfield, also laughed. He knew how to fix the problems of unemployment and poverty, and said he had devoted his life to doing so. He said he was going to change the system.
“I am subversive in all my tendencies and I want my children to be as well.” (He called the students his “children,” although he had none and would never have any of his own.) “But being subversive in this place is very trying on my nerves.”
“Well, you be subversive and I’ll be subversiver,” Mary told him one day. She was intrigued by the idea of subversion, at least for a little while. Until she saw what it was.
That autumn she was fourteen she stood beside Cruise in the warm gummy gymnasium when he was speaking and the back of his jacket was covered in chalk dust, and he was saying something. He was so brilliant. As brilliant as a scientist. Some even whispered that he was a Chaucer Scholar, who shouldn’t be here—he was wasting his talent in this boarding school for young heifers. He was a Chaucer Scholar from Newfoundland, which made it all the more romantic—romantically serious.
So after she met Cruise, she was going to be a rebel, and rebel against the system—and in fact, John knew, she did do this, in a way Cruise could never manage.
The idea was, especially for people like Cruise, that if you were any good, you shouldn’t be here. But he was writing a long epic poem—about the poor:
On the draught of land the poor come out
And in their misery look about
And looking about do they spy
Grey, grim, grim grey assaults their eye.
Of couse it wasn’t quite like that, but it was unfortunately something like that. Mary Cyr had memorized it. It stuck in her head so that even years later she could recite whole lines of it—seven or eight lines. This is what she started to recite to her third husband, Lucien, in Spain, after she poured the wine, and there was wind in the palm trees, and a German man was walking his dog, and there was a long lonely song playing, and someone clicking castanets and then things went silent.
“A man quite a bit like Chaucer wrote that,” she said, looking at her poor befuddled bridegroom. And then shrugging, she said:
“Well, what do you want to do—let’s see—I bet you a thousand I can pee standing up!”
She got no reaction from either declaration.