Rosie O'Dell

by Bill Rowe

  Nina replied that in her own case the man she had lost was the best there ever was, and she had decided conclusively to remain celibate for the rest of her life. And she just didn’t care, she laughed, how many movie-idol types with big fat doctors’ incomes pestered her like gadflies.

  I could remember from the encounter in the funeral home and the couple of glimpses in the church and graveyard that he was tall and handsome and, in Rosie’s mocking term for him, “imperially slim.” I also learned now from listening about the house that Dr. Rothesay’s medical practice was flourishing and that he was still miraculously single well into his thirties. Nevertheless, Nina O’Dell kept politely putting the good doctor off. She had no interest in any man, no matter how gorgeous or financially secure he might be, she kept telling my mother. Besides, little touches that were endearing as a friend had started to strike her as peculiar behaviour. For example, he had visited her at the library during the workday to give her fair notice that once her year of mourning had expired he intended to profess himself a suitor. “Gladys, imagine! A doctor! Wasting his time like that at ten-thirty in the morning, and him with patients stacked up back at his office.” Nina’s incensed words did not accord with the smile I could hear in her tone.

  On another of his library visits, Nina recounted to Mom how she’d been forced to get short with the silly man: “‘Why in God’s name, ’ I asked him behind the stacks, ‘would you want me of all people? Come on, Heathcliff, get bloody serious, ’ I said. ‘Why would a doctor who has been able to establish one of the best family practices in St. John’s, who is famous for his charming manner in the examining room, who could have his pick of freshly nubile young maidens with no children, be wooing the frumpy Widow O’Dell with her two prepubescent girls approaching the troublesome years?’”

  “Gentle Jesus, Nina,” said Mom, “I’ve heard of playing hard to get, but that takes the cake. What’d he say?”

  “He told me my question was a fair one and he would give me an honest answer. If I had been like this, dowdy and depressed, when he had seen me first, he wouldn’t have wanted me, or even given me a second thought. But he’d first seen me with my children at that university function honouring my wonderful husband a few months after he’d first arrived here and he remembered me from then as extraordinarily vivacious and lovely. The sight of me had taken him out of his own broken-hearted sorrow—his reason for leaving England—and he had secretly and, he’d thought then, hopelessly, loved me ever since. And he now knew in his heart that I would go back to being the exceptional human being I had been before my devastating tragedy, under the beneficial influence of his love.”

  “He said that? That’s what the man said?”

  “Word for word, Glad. When it comes to certain things, I have a photographic memory.”

  Both women laughed and Mom said, “Holy moly, Nine, you’ve got to admit that’s a pretty good speech.”

  “Academically speaking, yup, maybe. But I have to tell you, his fancy talk leaves me cold. I find him a bit smarmy.”

  SEEING ROSIE LEAVING HER classroom one afternoon, I waved and she swerved away from her gang to come over to me with a big friendly smile to say, “Mark down December the nineteenth on your dance card, Tommy. I’m having a Christmas party at our house that night.”

  I told her I’d be there, and then, based on everything I’d been hearing, I asked her if Dr. Rothesay seemed to be hanging around her house much these days.

  She frowned at me. “Hanging around?” she replied somewhat haughtily. “I wouldn’t call it that. Heathcliff, as you know, has become rather”—she was pronouncing it “rawther” all of a sudden— “good friends of the family. Why?”

  “Well, from what I hear, it sounds like he wants your mother to be more than just a friend.”

  Rosie’s eyes bored into mine. “Who says that?”

  “Well, I hear your mother talking to my mother at my house and stuff.”

  “Oh God,” said Rosie as she rolled her eyes heavenwards and turned to walk away. “That woman!”

  Childishly believing Nina’s protestations to be as genuine as they sounded, I considered her renewed attention to her hair and clothing to be her natural resiliency in recovering from bereavement. But the Wednesday night in December that Mom’s turn came to hold the poker septet’s weekly game at our house was an eye-opener to me. I responded to the call from the women downstairs to make my mandatory visit to the table before they began to play. Nina O’Dell’s face jumped at me as I entered the room, not just because hers was the most familiar of my mother’s friends, but also because she looked so animated and, yes, so beautiful, again. Handed around the table by the women, I was hugged, kissed on the cheek, stared at with frank admiration, and told how handsome I was and what a treasure Gladys had in a son so smart-looking, whose arms felt so strong, who was growing so tall, who was going to be such a heartbreaker in a few years—in short, all the things that would have mortified me if someone my own age had been present, but which, in the absence of all but my smiling mother and the six other adoring women, sent me upstairs, body and mind tingling in pleasure as usual from the ten minutes of physical and mental caresses. But this night my good feeling did not last.

  Doing my homework at my desk in the bedroom, I kept hearing, between antes and bets and sees and raises and calls and peals of laughter and whoops of jubilation— “read ’em and weep”—and exclamations of disgust— “a hand like a frigging foot”—and clinks of wine glasses, a lot of talk about Heathcliff and Nina. Soon it had become the sole subject of conversation and its tenor more and more disquieting.

  “Nina, girl, don’t you be so foolish,” my mother’s closest colleague at the hospital, heretofore etched in my mind as a solid rock of sense, stated flatly. “A man three or four years younger than a woman is bugger-all these days.” I tried vainly to imagine myself having a girlfriend four years older than me. To hear the chorus of agreement from five other women down there, including my own mother, stunned me.

  “Playing hard to get is a tightrope, baby,” someone else said. “And if you fall off there’s no safety net between you and the rocks.”

  That brought concurrence, but nothing like the cheers and yeas that followed this: “Now I know this is not a consideration at all when it comes to true love, Nina, but somewhere in the back burner of your mind, say to yourself from time to time: ‘I am left with a widow’s mite and two orphan daughters, and here’s this hunky dude who wants me and… he’s a freaking doctor.’”

  “Everyone, stop it!” Nina giggled. “Yes, being desired by a virile young man does kind of make the old juices flow, but only in theory not practice, for my memory of Joyce will keep me from ever desiring in return any desirer no matter how desirable.”

  “Are you labouring under the delusion, Nina, that what you just said makes some sort of sense?” asked someone. “Now you listen here. Don’t shilly-shally. Grab him. It’s only what Joyce himself would have wanted for you and the girls.”

  “Yes, don’t wait for some bimbo,” said another, “to lure him with her big hair and her big boobs while she snags him in her tight little trap.” That provoked laughter and a scattered shhh.

  But the loudest laughs and yeas of the evening my own mother brought on in answer to a question from Nina. I simply could not believe Mom would ever in her life say what she did. Nina had asked, “What do you think, Glad? Really, now. If you were me.”

  The dining room went silent as Mom replied slowly with studied consideration: “If I thought for one minute that Dr. Heathcliff Rothesay would show half the interest in me as a widow that he’s showering on you, Nina my ducky, I’d put arsenic in my Joe’s hot chocolate this very night.”

  In the ensuing uproar of guffaws from below, I sat there appalled. My mother knew, she darned well knew, there were certain things you just didn’t joke about. I got up from my desk and closed my door—I would have slammed it in disgust but for giving away my listening post—and refused to eavesdr
op any longer on the sickening talk down there. Then I lay on my bed hardly able to wait till I got a chance to tell Rosie about the conspiracy afoot to replace the loving memory of husband and father in the O’Dell hearts.

  The morning after in school, I managed to get a few seconds alone with Rosie by her locker. I gave her a quick synopsis of the women’s scheming intrigue last night, and Rosie listened casually as she worked at the contents of her locker. Before I finished, two other girls joined her and started talking about their big basketball game that weekend. As they moved off, Rosie turned to me and smiled. “We’ll talk about it later.” She didn’t seem very concerned by my intelligence.

  The next week Dr. Rothesay invited Mom and Dad to lunch with him and Nina at Bally Haly Golf and Curling Club. Dad balked at going, owing to pressure of work as the end of the calendar year approached. He added, “Gladys, my sweet love, what advice could I possibly give to a woman who thought that Joyce O’Dell was the catch of a lifetime? But I’ll go if you really want me to.”

  “No, I’ll go by myself,” said Mom. “Then I won’t be distracted by the scintillating conversation when your golfing buddies come over. I need to size this guy up.”

  That night Mom told Dad she had asked Heathcliff how a young English doctor of obviously good professional expectations in London had ended up over here in St. John’s. And he’d answered that a personal relationship had terminated painfully over there. He had meant to stay “on” Newfoundland for only a summer and autumn medical locum when he had first arrived, but he’d straightaway fallen in love with this quaint and cut-off, yet scenic and dynamic, place, and as a result of remaining over here his recovery from emotional trauma was complete. “At which point,” Mom said to Dad, “he turned and gazed at Nina with, honest to heavens, Joe, you could only call it love.”

  “De gustibus,” sighed Dad, “non disputandum est.” I knew what that meant from his frequent pained usage of it about the house: There was no disputing taste. But taste was not the problem here, for God’s sake! The problem here was disloyalty and betrayal. At eleven years old, I could not imagine being married to someone—Rosie, say—and then after I was dead, she going to bed with, being naked with, engaging in sexual intercourse with, some other guy—that hockey hotshot shagger in grade seven, for instance.

  I called up Rosie to use my knowledge as bait to ask her over on Saturday night and listen to some more new records I’d bought, and “talk, you know, about what I mentioned to you.”

  “Oh, Tom, I wish I could, but I’m having a sleepover at my house this weekend,” she said. “I would ask you to come too but the other girls wouldn’t want to have a boy there. That’s the problem with having a boy as one of your good friends. Sometimes it doesn’t fit in with the girl stuff very well. But I’ll see you at my Christmas party.” The notion that Rosie had relegated me in her heart to that rather large place containing her good friends did not make my own heart soar. And I could not fathom why she wasn’t eager to discuss the crucial topic of her mother and Heathcliff. But I would soon find out.

  BRENT AND I WENT to Rosie’s party and shared the living room with twenty-five other kids. Half an hour after we arrived, I was sitting in the big chair like I owned the place, when I heard a man’s voice from the hall. The doorbell hadn’t rung and there’d been no knock on the door. Obviously, the man had felt free just to walk in. “Is Mums upstairs?”

  Rosie, who was sitting on the carpet not far from me, leapt to her feet and sprinted out to the hall as Pagan, who was already there, called upstairs, “He’s here, Mom.” Through the door, I could see Pagan tugging at a man’s hand with both of hers. Leaning to the side a little, I saw Rosie being hugged by the other arm and pecked on the cheek.

  From the head of the stairs Nina said, “Hi, Heathcliff. Get a Guinness in the kitchen and come on up.”

  “I’ll get it for you, Heathcliff,” said Rosie, heading for the kitchen with a smile back. “I know the stein you like.”

  “Jolly good,” said Dr. Rothesay. “You’re going to spoil me absolutely rotten, Rosie.”

  “What about me?” asked Pagan, feigning a cute pout.

  “You can spoil me too, dear Pagan,” laughed Heathcliff, “as much as you like.”

  No wonder Rosie had not been interested in my evil conspiracy theory. She was actively in on it.

  “I’m watching A Christmas Carol on my new television set up here, Heathcliff,” said Nina, her voice joyful. “Remember that wonderful old black-and-white version? It’s just started.”

  “The British film with old what’s-his-name as Scrooge, you mean? Oh what fun! I’ll come right up.”

  As Dr. Rothesay took the beer and the stein from Rosie, he glanced through the door and around the living room from face to face. His eyes stopped at me and stayed. Walking into the room, he said, “An early Merry Christmas to you all, kids, since I shan’t see you again before the big day.” He still eyed me while he spoke and approached. It felt almost spine-chilling. Some kids said Merry Christmas back to him as he stopped over me. “Hello, Tom,” he said, smiling. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.” I was so surprised I jumped to my feet. We’d met once briefly at the funeral home five months before. He transferred the Guinness to his left hand where he easily held it with the beer mug, and he offered his right hand to me to shake. Doing so, he spoke softly, bending down to be close to my face, “Rosie thinks the world of you, Tom. Please don’t tell her I said so, but she truly believes you saved her sanity, if not her very life, after the tragedy, and she envisions a grand future for you together when you grow older.” I stood there speechless with shock. “I must join Nina now,” he said, giving my hand a good squeeze before he turned to go out. “But I trust I’ll see you a great deal in the future, Tom.”

  As I stood there, Brent came over. “Who was buddy?” he asked. “Rosie’s doctor guy?”

  “Yes, Dr. Rothesay.” By now I was feeling proud of being singled out and chatted to by the eminent man. “He wanted to say hello.”

  “He seemed awful gabby. I didn’t even think you knew him that much.”

  “Rosie’s been telling him about me.”

  That night, as Rosie organized games, and put on records, and dished out pizza and pie and ice cream to her friends, and ran up the stairs to include her mother and Heathcliff in the servings, I was reminded by the doctor’s words of her fear last summer that she was going to go mad or die of grief. She looked to be safely past all that tonight in her happiness. And no romantic lover with ardent and passionate love in his manly breast had come to save her either, I thought.

  ON A FRIDAY NIGHT in mid-January, Nina and Dr. Rothesay and Mom and Dad and a partner at his accounting firm and his wife came to dinner at our house. Nina and Heathcliff arrived together. I met them at the door and took their coats. They were a big item now for sure, he carrying the bag containing her shoes and she opening her purse for him to drop his car keys in for safekeeping.

  Two conversations from that night would leap out of my memory in later years. One took place between the men in the sitting room when Dad mentioned that his accounting office was associated with an international firm with offices in New York and London but that neither he nor his partners often got a chance to go to London, unfortunately. To which Dr. Rothesay replied that he wouldn’t shed any tears over that if he were they: New York was fine, but London was a dreadful city, what with its rigid social and professional strata. If anyone wondered why, that was the reason he himself could not be bothered going back to England since his arrival here in Canada. But, asked Dad, didn’t he have family over there to visit? Yes, but he would have them visit him when he was thoroughly settled here. He doubted that he’d ever travel to England again.

  The other conversation occurred between the women in the kitchen when Nina, acknowledging that she and Heathcliff were very close friends, though of the purely platonic variety just yet, stated that a lot of the attraction of the friendship for her was how well Rosie and Pagan, who
had always been used to a strong male presence around, related to Heathcliff. The three of them got along like a house afire. He loved the girls as if they were his very own nieces. He was so incredibly sensitive to their young needs, she said, you’d think his specialty was children.

  During the rest of that winter no one wondered in the least why Dr. Rothesay loved the O’Dell girls. Good gracious, everybody gushed, why wouldn’t he? All other adults found them entirely lovable. With minds that cracked like whips, humorous dispositions, and generous natures, they were also gladdening to look upon. Pagan was growing utterly beautiful. All who saw her remarked how hard it was to take your eyes off her. Many predicted she was going to be a movie star or a supermodel when she grew up.

  Rosie was spared such expectations. She was better known for her personality. Oh she was very pretty indeed in a fresh-faced, even saucy-faced way, especially with that head topped off by the wild mane of hair—russet or auburn or flaming ginger, its true colour had always been the subject of debate as the hours and seasons revolved and its exposure to light and the sun varied its hue. Her friends’ mothers, who never had to deal with it on thoroughly unruly days, when Rosie described it as “like fighting your way through a thicket of blasty boughs,” called it a natural marvel, and said they would sell their souls to have their heads crowned with hair that thick and that colour. Smitten boys, of whom I always observed too many about, made jibes at it for its refusal ever to be wholly tamed by ribbons or pins.

  Another wonderful trait teachers and adult friends remarked about Rosie during this grade six school year was the lighthearted and positive outlook she had regained despite last summer’s tragedy. She was never at a loss for a creative suggestion, had an answer for anything or anyone, and a ready laugh—a bit boisterous and outspoken perhaps, for a girl, some clucked amiably, but she’d outgrow that as she approached her ladyhood.