SHE DECIDED AT THE AGE OF FOURTEEN TO GET HER MOTHER’S fortune for her. So she tried to have meetings with Garnet about the business. She would stand in his upstairs office, looking at the far corner of the rug, as she spoke. Still, she was only a little girl, uncertain of what she was saying exactly—but trying to direct the great business in a way that her father might have wanted it, with a scribbler or a notepad in her hand, some scrawl written down that she was sure would solve things, if only she could manage to make Garnet listen. She got nowhere.
So she tried to take it out on Garnet’s son, Perley, who had done nothing in his life except to try to be accepted by her.
“Nanesse wanted a girl, Perley—and she got you—you play croquet like a little fairy. That’s why Nan wants me. How can you blame her?”
And: “You were all in it together,” she would whisper to Perley at night when they were at the cottage at Burnt Church. You could hardly hear her voice—it came and went like the wind drifting through the trees. “Spending my money on an iron ore mine—I don’t even know what iron ore is, but I know one thing—it’s not something I would wear—unless in a pinch. And you don’t like my mother, well then, I don’t like you—if you liked my mother, I would make a concerted—is it concerted? I think its ‘concerted’; Perley, is it ‘concerted’—effort to like you—but fair is fair, so beware! I hate you and the Vanderflutin and the Irish, and the Frenchies and the—who are those people who live in that country—you know—”
Silence.
“Who are those people who live in that country way over somewhere, you know—you know—they gave Ernest Vanderflutin a job?”
Silence.
“The SWISS—that’s it—I hate the SWISS.”
So after a time Perley would strain to hear what it was someone was saying, and he would hear the almost melancholy, yet sharp and forceful whisper, coming to him through the naked summer wind, the trees outside waving in the sweet darkness and lights far away down the shore road.
“You were all in it together,” her voice would be suddenly heard saying amid the storm blowing across the yard.
“In what?”
Again silence.
Silence and sadness and hurt and silence.
“You all had a hand in killing my father and sending my mother back to England,” came the voice, peppered through the wind, like the pellets from a shotgun.
“We did?” Perley would ask, shocked and confused, as he lay in his bed, and she lay in hers in the room across the hall.
“Yes—you all had a hand in killing him, and driving my mother insane, and making her go out with someone named Doc, and now I am certain you want to kill me.”
“I don’t think that is true, Mary.”
“Something has gone on, and I am about to find out what, and then the heads will roll. And—”
“And what?”
“And I want my money—it’s my money—and the whole lot of you have it stuffed in your big fat pockets!”
Perley would get out of bed, in his pyjamas, would walk across the hall in his large woolly slippers, and standing at the door of her room, he would try to explain:
“But you get your allowance just like I do.”
“I bet you have thousands wadded away in your pockets—”
“I have fifty-five cents in my drawer—”
“Well, thirty-five cents of it is mine!”
He would stare at her. The blankets pulled up to her neck, her head quite still, her dark hair ribboned out against the white pillow. Her beautiful full eyes would be staring straight at him, emotionless. The wind would whisper and moan over the bay.
“I want my money because it is my mom and daddy’s—besides that, I need it to travel with the only person who cares about me—and he said he is going to publish my poem—so wait and see!”
“What poem—what person?”
“Never you mind—never you mind—traitor!”
The large cottage had a long upstairs hallway that led to the balcony, and Mary Cyr most often sat in the small room off of it, painting her nails, and watching the boats out in the water or staring with brooding intensity at something unspecific, a First Nations boy walking along the beach, and then go back to her bedroom. Sometimes she would bring binoculars to the window, and people would notice this young girl staring out at them with a pair of binoculars, disquieting their walk.
“Is that the Cyr girl—”
“Yes—people say she’s not right in the head. She is dangerous, so they try to keep her inside. That’s the curse of being rich—there is always one or two of them that are completely insane. They screw themselves, you see—since they trust no one else to screw.”
“Is she the one—you know, who pushed that young French girl into the water? You know who held the little French girl’s head under the water until she drowned?”
“That’s what they say. Ever since she decided to be English.”
She heard them, and said nothing. She sat at the dinner table and was silent.
She began to read all she could about the Second World War. After a time she began to slip notes under Perley’s door. Handwritten notes that said:
“The reason you have no friends is that you are not friendly. In the Second World War you would be the first one shot.”
“I would be your friend, but what’s the use—you’re not a fighting man.”
And: “You will never be kissed—and if you are, it will never be with a tongue.”
Still at fourteen she was already a wonderful hater. She knew very much about the war, and her grandfather’s part in it. Except, she did exaggerate how many people he had saved.
Still by the time she was nineteen she could argue very convincingly why she thought Hitler lost the war in the east—sending Army Group Centre to Kiev to support Army Group South, when the road to Moscow lay open, and then deciding to attack the non-strategic city of Stalingrad:
Just, she said, because it had a nice name.
She spoke of these things to people who would visit—when she got the chance to speak. But often if she didn’t care or approve of them, she would talk about astrology and the alignment of the stars, things that Nan was interested in. She could be self-interested, and frivolous, and turn against someone for no apparent reason. Some days she loved Nan; some days she didn’t. There was all of that too that John knew about her.
But interjected into this, almost out of the blue, was:
“What Aunt Nan will never admit, going on like a soothsayer about the cosmos, is one relevant fact: none in her family picked up a gun against the Germans. But in my family it was almost second nature. Even Garnet—yes, even he—was stationed in Britain during the Blitz. So now you know. But give it to the Germans they fought all the way, now the Soviet T-34 had a problem—it had to lower its gun to reload—so that was the only chance the Tigers had against it—but then—well, the Canadian boys in Italy had to fight against those Tigers with Shermans—still, they found out they could take them out by firing not at the armour-plated front—but at the tracks. Slow them down with smoke missiles and then fire at them when they appeared in the mist. The Canadians fought like bastards all the way to Rome, and then the Americans got the trip through the Eternal City first—not really fair, is it?”
She told this to the former governor of Vermont. She just stood up and recited it. Then she left the room.
“Elle est très perturbée,” Nan would explain, because French seemed always able to say it better, looking after her as she walked up the stairs dragging a beach towel. “Maladie d’esprit—maladie d’esprit.”
“Ah,” the former governor said, confused at it all.
But that was in a future time.
Now she was just a girl who tormented Perley with notes, most of them untrue. And many things about the Dutch, Garnet, Nan and the business that were also untrue.
When Perley approached her about these notes, Mary said she did not write them and knew nothing much about them. But they were written in pink ink and she had three pink-ink pens on her desk.
PP, as she called him, tried to help her in family matters. He tried to include her. In fact, that day she was left in the outside room at Christmas, buttoning and unbuttoning her coat buttons, Perley was the one who said:
“We have forgotten Mary,” and ran to open the door. There she was, sitting on the bench with her suitcase beside her and Plu folded on top of it.