Mary Bastien; known, loved for salty tongue

MARY BASTIEN

Mary Bastien was late for her funeral yesterday, and if she could have, she would have planned it that way. She liked to make sure she was the center of attention, friends said, and sometimes that is best accomplished by being the last to arrive.

Because the hearse carrying her casket rolled into Fairview Cemetery in Hyde Park a half hour past the scheduled start of her service, the 25 people who stood waiting in the sunshine had one more chance to swap stories (some unprintable) about Ms. Bastien and the loud comments she liked to make (most unprintable).

Homeless for many years, Ms. Bastien died March 21 in the Anna Bissonnette House of complications of a stroke. She was 72 and since 1997 had lived in the South End residence for elderly people who formerly were homeless.

For several decades, she had spent most of her waking hours on Boston's streets, where her colorful turbans made her a familiar sight. With the sweetness of a child, she loved and cared for feral cats, feeding them behind Rosie's Place, a Roxbury agency that provides food, shelter, and emergency assistance to poor and homeless women.

She also amassed a collection of stuffed animals that, at her insistence, were donated after she died to the Home for Little Wanderers on Huntington Avenue.

Nevertheless, friends said, Ms. Bastien was a master of the creative curse, making it difficult for anyone she met to forget her. Stories abounded, in conversations yesterday and in e-mailed recollections, about her ability to turn slang and expletives into a form of instant theater that could make passersby burst out laughing.

In the early 1990s, she was panhandling when a man, sharply dressed, placed $5 in her cup while striding past.

"Hey, thanks for being so generous," she called out as he kept walking.

Then, voice booming, she added an earthy phrase, saying she hoped he enjoyed good fortune in bed that night.

"She knew every policeman and every firefighter, because she had a mouth on her," Dr. Roseanna Means, an associate clinical professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who treated Ms. Bastien over the years, said at the cemetery while awaiting the service.

"She said what the rest of us wanted to say, but didn't," Sister Katherine Green, administrator of the women's inn at the Pine Street Inn shelter, said as she stood nearby.

No stranger to politicians who visit social service agencies or attend fund-raisers, Ms. Bastien once danced with Mayor Thomas M. Menino, her friends said, and as the end of her life neared, she considered calling in a political favor.

"One day she'd say she wanted to be cremated and forgotten," said Melissa Russo, program social worker at the Anna Bissonnette House, "and the next she'd say, 'I want you to shut down the whole South End and have the mayor come to deliver the eulogy.' "

Other politicians were not as welcome. Friends laughed at the cemetery as they recalled the time Ms. Bastien met William F. Weld when he was governor. Using an expletive, she greeted him with a two-word phrase and left it at that.

As with many who are homeless, Ms. Bastien provided few specifics about her past. She told some people that she and her sister were placed in an orphanage and that she had run away at 12.

"Mary was mildly retarded, and as a child she was a little pudgy," Means wrote about Ms. Bastien in an e-mail. "These two qualities made her a mark for teasing and cruel comments and permanently scarred her from ever feeling worthy or lovable. Her harsh words and criticisms were actually a foil: She made sure that she rejected everyone else before they rejected her."

In her late 30s, Ms. Bastien was among the first guests to visit Rosie's Place when it opened Easter Sunday in 1974, said Kip Tiernan, who founded the agency.

In the 35 years since then, Ms. Bastien formed a family of friends among the poor and homeless who go to the Women's Lunch Place in the Back Bay, the Pine Street Inn, and Rosie's Place.

"Mary had so many characteristics that were unlovable," Means, who founded the nonprofit Women of Means to provide healthcare for women in shelters, said at the cemetery. "But this is a crowd of people who looked beyond that. She was a little child who was broken."

"She knew she was going," Tiernan said of Ms. Bastien's final days, "so I brought up a teddy bear for her. Roseanna said she was hugging the bear when she died."

During the graveside service, Means read from "When I Am Dead," a poem by James Edward Wilson that includes the stanzas:

I do not want a gaping crowd To come with lamentations loud, When my life has fled I only want a chosen few Who stood through good and evil, too True friendship's test

The 25 people who emerged, midafternoon on a sunny weekday, from the procession of cars that snaked through Fairview Cemetery to the grave might have formed a bigger crowd than Ms. Bastien expected at her funeral.

"She was irascible and difficult," Tiernan said, "but adorable."

"And everyone loved her," Green said.

When the service ended, Tiernan, who met Ms. Bastien 35 years ago, tucked her Rosie's Place baseball cap under the bouquets of roses that friends had placed atop the casket.

"Mary always wore a hat," she said.