Rosie O'Dell (50 page)

“Was back?” I stood up with the agony of truth already in me. “What do you
mean?”

“She was back for less than a day. Her mother didn’t even know she was coming.
Nina thought she was arriving next week.”

“That’s what you said Nina told you, yes, next week, Thursday, on the
two o’clock flight.” I kept my voice at a monotone in the
hope it wouldn’t break.

“She told Nina not to let anyone know she was back, not even me. She didn’t
have time to visit with anyone at the moment, was the way she put it. She was
here, she said, just to pick up a few documents and some of her things and say
goodbye to Nina.”

“Where is she gone?”

“Montreal. She has transferred to McGill.”

“Does she have an apartment there? You must have her number because of the
trustee thing.”

“I do. But I was given it on the condition that I would not give it to anyone
else without Rosie’s explicit permission.”

“Jesus, my own mother can’t give me… Okay, I’ll get it from Suzy.”

“Suzy is gone with her.”

I sat down again and looked out my window. Down in the backyard, nodding in the
breeze, was the same riot of daisies that had grown in Brent’s parents’ garden
in Twillingate that I used to love to look at from their kitchen window when
Brent and I were eating breakfast and planning our summer day. In fact, Brent’s
mother had dug some up and given them to Mom when my parents were picking me up
one time. “Tom adores them,” said Brent’s mother. Mom had transplanted them
here. I felt similar now to the time a few seconds after I had looked out the
window as an eleven-year-old when I’d thought Rosie was drowned. My throat felt
the ghost of the pain. I controlled myself. This was not hopeless yet. I’d get
her address from her zonked-out mother if necessary and take a flight to
Montreal tomorrow. She had to see reason. She had to accept my love. Now I
became aware of my mother’s body right next to me.

“She’s with someone up there, Tom. Seriously involved with someone else.”

“Who is it, do you know?”

“No, I don’t. I only know Rosie told her mother it’s genuine and permanent, and
that she’d never allow herself to be let down by anyone ever again. I’m sorry,
but I’m only telling you so that you can govern yourself accordingly.”

I did govern myself accordingly. I ended my immediate hopes. But there was
nothing I could do to end the terrible yearning and regret.

I GOT A DEGREE
in Political Science from Memorial and went on to
law school at Dalhousie. Meanwhile, Brent had given up his promising
hockey career because of the cracked skull and studied for a
Bachelor of Commerce. He never finished his degree because all the reading gave
him headaches. Instead, he was forced to do what he’d sworn he’d never do—go to
work in his father’s businesses. Working with the old man was not very
satisfactory, Brent told me, but it was too good an opportunity to pass up. The
deal was that he would slog his way up to president of the holding company while
his father became chairman of the board, and then when he retired, Brent would
take over entirely. Even as we talked about it, I sensed from Brent that he
didn’t really believe it would work out that way.

He and I remained close while I was at Memorial. These days our relationship
seemed to be based on relationships with women—inevitably unsatisfying for both
of us, except, maybe, in the satisfaction of lust. In England I had let my
competitive swimming lapse, and back home I gave it up for good. I told Brent
that if I never smelled chlorine wafting off a pool again it would be too soon.
Brent lamented the unfairness of life: he loved hockey and was good at it and
wanted to play it, but was not allowed to; I was allowed to swim and was
encouraged to do it and was good at it, but couldn’t be bothered to. And what
had happened to Rosie’s tennis? He never heard of her involved in high-ranking
tournaments these days. Had I? No, I hadn’t, but I phoned Nina once to find out.
She was vague, but she thought that Rosie only played it now recreationally. She
recalled asking her about it a few years ago and receiving Rosie’s reply that
life was too short to invest all that time in another project that might only
bring frustration and dissatisfaction. “We had such athletic promise, the three
of us,” said Brent. “And it all came to nothing.” That, among other things, I
said. Brent looked at me and nodded.

THE SUMMER I FINISHED
law school and moved into my own apartment
and started articling with a law firm in St. John’s, my mother told me something
about Rosie that revived hope in me. Mom was not close to Nina, and when Rosie
had reached the age of majority, Mom couldn’t pass over the trusteeship of
Rothesay’s estate to her fast enough. She’d only taken it on for Rosie’s sake
and was not eager to spend any time beyond necessity with her old friend, who
was a constant reminder of everyone’s negligent, if not wilful, blindness over
Rosie and Pagan. But occasionally Nina would call Mom for a chat. This time she
told her that Rosie was thinking about applying for a teaching position at
Memorial University in St. John’s.

After McGill University, Rosie had moved to the University
of Toronto for her master’s and her Ph. D., which she had just received. From
what I could gather from Mom, her master’s and her doctorate were in dead
languages. Her theses, Mom had learned from Nina, had to do with comparisons and
contrasts between the Indo-European languages Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, on the
one hand, with the Semitic languages ancient Hebrew and ancient Arabic on the
other. Rosie had made it clear to Nina that she was only content immersed in
those beautiful old classical tongues and their literature, and the further away
she was from modern realities, the better she liked it.

I’d started going through the Memorial University calendar to see what
possibilities might exist for Rosie’s esoteric line of work when Suzy Martin
telephoned Mom to say that Nina had been rushed to the hospital with a stroke.
Rosie was on another line to the hospital trying to find out how serious it was.
I had the cruel wish that it was serious enough to force Rosie’s hand on coming
home to teach.

Mom told me that Nina’s stroke was minor, and had been caused by a blood clot
in a small vessel rather than a rupture. Its effects could be mostly reversed,
and the recurrence prevented with blood thinners. Suzy flew down from Toronto
for a week to find out about the administering of the anticoagulants and to
decide what to do. I called Suzy for a chat and asked why Rosie hadn’t come
down. Because, Suzy replied, she couldn’t stand the thought of coming back here
to this hell of nightmares. Suzy had come with Rosie’s request that, if Nina
died, she was to have the body flown to Toronto for burial.

“I thought Rosie was interested in teaching at Memorial,” I said.

“That was just her mother’s wishful thinking. We’re going to move her to an
apartment of her own in whatever city Rosie might be living in from time to
time.”

“Suzy, is Rosie involved with someone now?”

“She has a close friend.”

“Suzy, I love Rosie. I never stopped loving her after all these years. I’d
gladly move to Toronto and join a law firm and start practising there.”

“She has received offers from several universities in Canada and the States. I
know—
Sanskrit
? But her thesis was considered brilliant. She has
accepted a position with the University of British Columbia. She’ll be moving to
Vancouver in a couple of months.”

“I’d move there in a flash. I need your advice on how I should proceed
to get back just her friendship, even. The rest will follow
or not, as she sees fit.”

Suzy said, “Rosie only wants to be left alone to teach and do her research,
Tom. If I were you, I’d back off. It’s no use. You’d only be wasting your time
and hers.”

I DID BACK OFF
until I found out that Suzy, who had been
teaching in a Toronto school, had now moved to Vancouver at the same time as
Rosie. I experienced the epiphany that all this time Suzy had kept a hidden
agenda. I’d been moronically slow to appreciate it. Obviously, she and Rosie
were involved in an intimate relationship. What had impeded my realization was
my memory of how sexually passionate Rosie had been with me during our teens.
One time in bed when we had talked about homosexuality—specifically lesbianism—I
asked her if she ever wondered about it in herself. She had replied, “Yes, and I
have concluded that I am heterosexual.” With a laugh, she grabbed me by the
penis with both hands. “
Extremely
heterosexual.”

I recalled now, though, how sometimes—for variety, she said, or when she was
menstruating—she might rub her pelvis against mine for many minutes, bringing
herself to orgasm without resort to any of my appendages. Climbing off me, she
used to giggle, “You’re on your own.” I grasped in hindsight that she and Suzy
had practised that technique together as they learned to control their
spontaneous sexual urges resulting from their exploitation, which she had
testified about during the Rothesay trial. And equally obviously, I thought now,
it had been an artificial, stopgap device back then with Suzy, just as her
sexual intimacy with her was today.

There was no way, in light of that realization, that I was going to follow
Suzy’s self-serving advice to back off. I wrote Rosie a letter in BC intimating
my desire to re-establish contact with her, at least by correspondence. I waited
in apprehension, but not for long. Her reply came so swiftly she must have
answered as soon as she’d opened the envelope: She addressed me as “Dear sir” in
the typewritten letter and said I was kind to get in touch, but that her work
obligations precluded additional personal correspondence for the foreseeable
future, though she did wish to convey her very best regards. It ended with,
“Dictated but not read by Dr. Rosie O’Dell and signed in her absence by her
secretary.”

THE LAW FIRM I
articled with was headed by
senior partner Samuel Squires, Q. C., the doyen of corporate lawyers in the
city. He called me into his office to say he was impressed by my credentials,
but that it also helped that one of his biggest clients, Anstey Holdings, owned
by Brent’s father, had suggested they approach me to join them.

I suspected Brent’s handiwork there, but when I asked him about it, he said it
was the first he’d heard of it. He didn’t think, he said, that this early in my
career I’d want to receive unilateral favours from friends. Maybe later, when it
was a matter of reciprocity, we could have a good lawyer-client relationship,
but right now he thought I’d want to make my own way professionally, carve out a
legal swath based on my own proven merits. I appreciated Brent’s attitude, I
told him, but like him when he’d dubiously gone into business with his old man,
I judged this too good an opportunity to pass up.

Samuel Squires, Q. C. mentored me daily. One of the many pieces of wisdom he
imparted was this: never allow your client to lie to anyone in authority; in
fact, always advise your client in writing, if possible, against such activity.
I thanked him and said it was reassuring as a young lawyer to hear such guidance
from such an experienced lawyer based on high standards of professional
ethics.

“It’s got nothing to do with ethics,” he replied. “It’s got to do with the fact
that when your client gets caught in his lie, he will turn on you like a rat,
and say his lawyer told him to do it.” It would not be long before Brent’s
father would force on me a test of this marriage of morality and practical
survival.

First, though, at Mr. Anstey’s request, I was brought in on a meeting of senior
members of the law firm with him and Brent. He wanted a discussion on how to
thwart an attempt by a union to sign up and unionize some of his employees. The
union was essentially a public service body representing employees of various
branches of the provincial government. Recently it had expanded into some
private service industries and now wanted to sign up the employees of a
medium-sized hotel recently acquired by Brent’s father. The executive director
of the union was a man from the highlands of Scotland in the United Kingdom,
where the labour movement, said Anstey, “has reduced Britain—the formerly
Great
Britain—to third-world status.” Brent’s father kept ridiculing
the man’s accent by saying he was from the “Hee-lunds of Scut-lund” and called
him, not by name, but by the term “Shit-dick.” Mr. Anstey had evidence, he said,
that our enemy had vamoosed out of Scotland and come over
here because he was reliably suspected of screwing sheep on the slopes of the
Scuttish Hee-lunds.