Rosie O'Dell

by Bill Rowe

  This was the first time in my life I had heard anything from Rosie but praise for a point of view of her father’s and I could only reply, “You are beautiful.”

  She laughed. “Three years ago we had a big fight at my house because you said I was ugly as sin. Now, all of a sudden I’m beautiful. Thank you, Tom. Now I know we really are good friends.” She pressed close to my side, and we remained silent, our eyes on the ocean horizon. But inside my head her words “good friends” echoed. I didn’t like the sound of them. They felt as if they were drawing a line, excluding something better from the future.

  Rosie went on, “And saying that I need to be careful if he’s not around. At first I was afraid to even think about what he meant by that, after he ended up in the river a few hours later. I thought he was talking about himself. But now I know what he meant. He was just being protective about me and he was wrong. Just as wrong about me as he was about himself when one minute he swore that in the years ahead he would reach true poetic greatness, and a couple of hours later he was dead as a stone in the river. No one has to protect me from anyone or anything, as if I were a child, a silly girl child. I know I can take care of myself with any… in any situation.”

  “But that’s only the way fathers are, Rosie. I’m a boy, sure, and look what Dad is always saying to me. God!”

  “I know how to describe impassioned love now.”

  “What? Oh yeah, right. How?”

  She walked a few steps away and looked down towards Cuckold’s Cove from where I could just hear the regular roar of breakers on the rocks, a rhythm formed out of the chaos of a windstorm two days ago. “It is the emotion,” she said, “shared with the strong, brilliant, beautiful lover who miraculously enters her life, who has arrived with his heart beating in his broad deep chest in his adoration for her, who will take her hand and kiss it, and, with her demure but encouraging signals, put his manly but gentle arms around her and hold her to him in a warm embrace, and lift her face to his and tenderly kiss her and proclaim his pure eternal love and desire to be with her, and her alone, forever.”

  What in the name of God was she babbling on about? The “her” in her description seemed to be her own self as if she were a character in a fairy tale. But who was the “him,” the “lover,” who had her in raptures? Until this afternoon I would have regarded myself as filling the role. But some of the attributes she had given the receiver of her impassioned love— “manly,” “broad deep chest,” “lift her face to his”—kind of precluded me at the moment.

  “Thus, and only thus,” she mused on, “will impassioned love save her from death by grief and yearning.” She continued to stare in a trance down towards the surf breaking on the rocks. She had a little smile on her lips. She was somewhere else, smiling at someone else.

  “What are you talking about, Rosie?” I burst out. “I thought me and you are going to get married when we grow up. Remember how we said that?”

  “What?” She came out of her state with a little start and looked at me as if she’d suddenly become aware I was there. “Oh, we are, Tommy,” she said as she walked back to me with a big friendly smile and hugged me with one arm. “Don’t mind me. I was just thinking about… about something else.”

  Chapter 3

  TO THE SHY GRUNTS from boys and the tearful hugs from girls that greeted Rosie on the first morning of school, Curly Abbott added some chin-lifters at the opening assembly. The students called the principal “Curly” because his smooth bald pate was his chief feature. It always glowed. Whether the high shine resulted from a radioactive skull after his visit to the Nevada desert during the fifties or from phosphorescent Day-Glo polish he applied secretly at home, was a matter of speculation among the kids. The emanation from his head, the closest thing to a halo I ever expected to see, gave Curly Abbott stature and authority. And when he said he could not conclude his remarks of condolence without asserting his own personal admiration for Miss Rosie O’Dell’s composure and strength so soon after the tragedy, his ringing words and gleaming crown up there behind the podium brought the teachers on the stage to their feet applauding as one, and the students immediately rose from their seats as well in a minute-long standing ovation.

  Rosie stood and whispered “thank you” in ten directions around the auditorium, feeling, she would tell me that night on the phone, like Andromache in Troy, smiling through her tears. She’d almost spoken out in response to Mr. Abbott that she was able to stay strong and in control of herself, she said, only because of Tom Sharpe’s support. My heart swelled with love at the thought of being indispensable to her, and I advised that she should make herself very busy with activities in the coming months to keep deadening the grief. Rosie agreed and we went over a list of the student organizations she should join. But there were two activities, one daily and one weekly, she told me, which she hoped we could do together all year no matter how busy we both got.

  Our daily activity saw Rosie coming through the back door of my house every school morning at eight just as I was buckling my bookbag in the kitchen, and then, sun or wind or rain, we’d set off together to walk to Smearies. I lived three-quarters of a mile from the school and her house was another third of a mile beyond that, but nothing short of a hurricane that September and October could have forced us to accept a lift to school.

  “I love beating along through the rain and wind with you,” she said as we trudged to school one morning, leaning into the diagonal downpour. “I can’t wait for the snow. I hope we have lots this year.” She had all the gear for staying dry and warm from her father’s day and she had advised me on what I should buy for rainy or snowy weather. A couple of times on nice days little Pagan turned up at the door with Rosie. But she soon stopped that. When I asked her in school why she didn’t walk with us anymore, since Rosie and I wanted her to, she replied, “I would if it was just you, Tom, but Rosie hogs all the conversation with you, just like when Heathcliff drops in.”

  Nina drove Pagan to school most days in September, but during October I saw her being dropped off a few minutes before the bell by a classy Land Rover. I asked Rosie, “Is that Dr. Rothesay?”

  “Oh yes. Oh yes. He told Mom he wants to chip in as a friend and help her with some of her burdens as a single mother. Can you believe it? So he’s going to come by every morning he can on his way to his clinic to pick up Pagan. And guess who fell for it hook, line, and sinker?” Rosie rolled her eyes and shook her head and breathed out in exasperation.

  Our weekly activity together took place on Sundays. Rosie would come to my house after lunch and we’d listen to records in my room. Because of my parents’ presence downstairs, she didn’t lie on my bed as she’d done last summer. They might misunderstand, she said, if they surprised us together like that. But whenever Mom and Dad went out for a walk, leaving us alone for half an hour—they trusted us as two intelligent kids, they said, not to touch or do anything dangerous—we’d hop up on the bed, put our arms around each other, and press our closed lips together. Once, in late October, with Mom and Dad gone to an auction of Persian carpets for an hour at the Newfoundland Hotel, I put my arms around Rosie as she sat on the side of my bed and gently pressed her back. She resisted my pressure and kissed my cheek and kept reading the notes on the jacket of the album she was holding. She really liked that song that was playing, she said, and she wanted to listen to it carefully. Then early in November Rosie changed everything.

  “I’ve got so much on my plate these days,” she said on our walk to school, “that I’m not getting enough sleep. I need to sleep in a little longer every morning and get a ride to school. So this’ll be the last day I’ll be walking for a while.”

  I was stunned. “But you’re never sleepy or tired. You never even fell asleep watching the game on TV at the hockey party last week like half the girls did.”

  “That’s probably just nervous energy, and I’m overdoing things and courting a bad attack of the flu or even pneumonia this winter by lowering my resistance, Heat
hcliff says.”

  “Who says? Oh. Dr. Rothesay.”

  “Yes, Dr. Rothesay. Heathcliff. You know what else he says?”

  “What?” I snapped.

  “Don’t get mad, boy, Tommy. Other people besides you can have half decent ideas too, you know. And I think this is a pretty good one. Heathcliff says that most people are doing too many things they really want to do, and it leads to discontentment and stress. For health and happiness, he says, give up one of the things you’re doing that you really want to do.”

  “Give up what you want to do! I don’t think that’s pretty good. I think it’s pretty stupid. Why would you give up walking to school if you really want to? Give up something that’s a pain in the butt, like that cafeteria cleanup committee.”

  “Because all the things you don’t want to do, you’re only doing in the first place because they need to be done. And if not me, then who? So I can’t give up any of them. That’d be a cop-out.”

  “Then give up one of the things you want to do, but that you don’t want to do as much as this.”

  She didn’t reply for a moment and I had the strange feeling that this walk every morning with me had fallen into the category of things she didn’t want to do as much as something else. But Rosie put it this way: “No, Tom, for this idea to work, I have to give up something I really, really want to do.”

  Every morning after that, a few minutes before the school bell rang, a vehicle dropped off Rosie and Pagan. Now and then it would be Nina’s Ford. Usually it was Dr. Rothesay’s Land Rover.

  By this time Brent and I were heading back to being best friends again. He had tried to be standoffish for a few weeks but couldn’t quite manage it in the face of my constant approaches to him and never letting myself be put off by his attempted aloofness. In the end, it was Rosie who completed the rapprochement by always pulling one of us towards the other for a three-way chat in the corridors.

  The Saturday night Brent and I spent our first Hockey Night in Canada together in front of the TV at my house that fall, he asked me during a commercial if Rosie and I were broken up.

  “What do you mean, broken up?”

  “Well, not walking to school anymore like you used to, for instance, like the two of you were joined at the hip.”

  “She needed the extra time. We’re the same as we always were since her father died—good friends. When we grow up, though, we’re going to get married. And tomorrow afternoon, she’s coming over, the same as usual.”

  On cue, the phone rang. It was her. “Hi, Rosie,” I said, keeping my eyes off Brent so as not to indicate how pleased I was he was here when she called me.

  “Hi, Tommy. Ah, listen, Tommy, I can’t come over tomorrow. I’m up to my ears.”

  “That’s okay, we’ll do it next week. I’ve got a new tape. It’s a surprise.”

  “I’ll get back to you on that. My schedule has become absolutely backbreaking. Listen, Tommy, gotta run. See you in school on Monday.” She hung up and I had to say goodbye into a dead phone for the sake of form in front of Brent.

  “She’s not coming over tomorrow, is she?” said Brent. “I told you you guys were broken up.”

  “How could we be broken up? We were never going steady.”

  “Tell that one to the rest of grade six,” he said, “because you had them all fooled.”

  I found Rosie’s new attitude towards me puzzling—both heartwarming and hurtful. She seemed to like me as much as ever, judging by her big smile and wave whenever she saw me at school, often going out of her way to chat with me, sometimes even leaving the group of girls she was with to come over to me to exchange a few words. But she seemed to have lost all interest in spending any time with me outside school. When I chided her for not leaving more time for just hanging out and having fun, like listening to records at my place on Sundays, she laughed. “You’re getting as bad as Mom.” Then she picked up my hand and held it between two of hers and looked into my eyes. I would have sworn to God that she loved me, by that look alone. Miss Drodge, the nice grade five teacher going by, glanced at each of us in turn and smiled sweetly to herself. “But I’ve found I need my life to be like this right now, Tommy,” said Rosie. “I don’t want to have too much time to think about or to talk about certain things these days.” This from the girl who had always said how much she loved just to talk with me, how much it helped her.

  One Friday afternoon after school late in November, I went down to Fred’s Records on Duckworth Street and bought the Beatles’ album Let It Be. Irresistible. Rosie loved every song on it, especially the title track. Back home, I telephoned and invited her over that night to listen to it a few times.

  “Can’t, Tommy. Heathcliff is taking me and Mom to see The Seventh Seal at the university film society. Ingmar Bergman. Very thought-provoking, at both the intellectual and emotional levels.”

  “Yes, I remember how much you liked her in Casablanca.”

  She didn’t snort at me in derision as she would have done a year ago, I’ll give her that. She said, “Oh, Tom. Not Ingrid Bergman. Ingmar. The world-famous director.” She paused and I felt mortified by my stupidity. But she went on gently, a little like she was talking to a cutely striving child who just needed some direction, “But I bet Pagan’d love to listen to that record with you. She adores the Beatles. She’s going to be here with the babysitter. Want me to put her on?”

  I was too flabbergasted to answer with anything but “No, that’s okay.” Then I started to say, “Sometime tomorrow or Sunday would be good too—”

  Rosie burst out, “Oh. He’s here. I have to go. Bye.”

  My consolations were that she continued to be as warm to me at school as before and that she showed absolutely no interest in any other boy there. Brent confirmed the latter. When she turned down an invitation to a sock hop in the school gym from the top gun in grade seven, the grade above, the shocked hotshot asked Brent, his pee-wee hockey colleague, about his friend, Rosie: “She said no to me—what is she anyway, a shaggin’ dyke?”

  Besides, my own days had become crowded. On top of everything else, I’d joined the school’s first competitive swimming team that had started training at the Memorial University pool. That forced me up at five in the morning to make the six o’clock practices, which meant I was going up to bed so early that, with Dad at the office, I was starting to overhear some interesting evening chit-chat from the kitchen between my mother and her friends.

  It began with this question from one of Mom’s nursing colleagues: “What’s all this, Glad, about that English doctor Rothesay trying to get cozy with Nina O’Dell?”

  “You’ll have to ask Nina any questions about her private life.”

  “A bit coy, aren’t we, Gladys, for a nurse who gave the surgeon shit in the O. R. this morning? But I notice you’re not denying it. Dr. Rothesay! Christ, that is amazing.”

  Over the weeks of listening to similar astonishment from Mom’s friends below, I gathered that it resulted from three major considerations. First, only a few months had gone by since Joyce O’Dell’s death. Second, Nina was older than Dr. Rothesay, and while opinions varied, the consensus was that she had a good four years on him. Third, there was a drastic contrast between Nina now and Nina six months ago: “How the hell,” I heard a colleague from the hospital, noted for her fiercely accurate diagnoses, demand from Mom, “can any man be interested in Nina these days—no, seriously, Gladys, I know she’s your best friend—the way the woman has let herself go?”

  I’d noticed the decline in her beauty and sharpness myself. Before the widowhood of Nina O’Dell, her physical and mental attributes had caused this fuss: A female instructor in the English Department, from her office next to Professor Joyce O’Dell’s, had written in a review of his poetry in the Newfoundland Quarterly that Nina Russell (O’Dell) was so bright, lively, engaged, and lovely, compared to her husband, that all credit should go to her for any good poetry attributed to him, because it was clear from “this enormous disparity in t
heir intelligence and personality and physical aesthetics that yet again the male of the duo has simply appropriated the fruit of the female partner’s creativity as his own.” Right now, though, nothing about Nina, which had made that review credible in the eyes of many when Joyce had been alive, remained. Whenever I saw her with Mom, I was struck by how Rosie’s mother had become thick, flabby, and dull in body and mind.

  I knew Mom was pushing Nina all fall to resume her hikes with their friends along the trails of Signal Hill and Quidi Vidi Lake and Rennie’s River, but Nina kept telling her she couldn’t be bothered with that old stuff anymore. When Mom argued that at her age she could not give up on life, Nina agreed, but only because of her daughters. She had no intention of cluttering up her barely tolerable existence, she replied, with any more crap. She was perfectly content to continue punching in her days immured between the stacks of the university library ordering books and cataloguing new arrivals, and to spend the rest of her time at home puttering around in her ratty housecoat, keeping an eye on the girls, and happily going to seed. Think of the money she’d save from Joyce’s charmingly inadequate insurance and her own pittance by never buying any new clothes or having her hair professionally done ever again.

  I heard Mom tell Nina over coffee in the kitchen one Saturday morning that although it was still early in her grief, she had to be prepared, as the pain subsided, for the return of the old physical urges. Mom had seen it happen a few times as a nurse, and she was only mentioning it now because some women felt guilty about it, thinking they were being disloyal to their late husbands to have such feelings, when in reality it was only evidence of healing, of a return to normality after a brutal trauma to the psyche. A woman could not and should not give up the physical side of her life forever simply because she had lost a good man.