by Bill Rowe
Sitting in court looking at the defence lawyer’s narrow shoulders and plump backside, I recalled Rosie’s words after he had waived the preliminary inquiry: “Lucy says he’s not as confident as he sounds. If he really thought we didn’t have a case, he would have tried to have the charges thrown out at a preliminary inquiry instead of going directly to trial.” I turned to Rosie now and smiled. She smiled back and squeezed my hand. Her frank and open face chased my misgivings away.
The court crier announced Madam Justice Oona Ledrew. She entered from the front and ascended the steps, casting her eyes, alert and kindly, around the courtroom as she took her place on high. My comfort level ratcheted up a notch. The judge was female, seven of the twelve jurors were female, the victim and prosecutor were female. The two enemies were male.
IN THE WITNESS BOX Rosie looked as courageous, intelligent, and honest as Lucy Barrett had described her in her opening address. Taking her oath to tell the truth, she rested her eyes on Rothesay for a moment. I wanted to shout, “Don’t look at him.” But that was only my own anxiety. She appeared calm and determined.
As Rosie answered Lucy Barrett’s questions, the jurors’ faces stayed impassive, except for when eyes would now and then slide without head movement towards Rothesay and grimace. But if some jurors were appalled at what they were hearing, their emotions were trivial compared to mine as I listened to her relate graphically in public what she and Rothesay had actually done.
The previous night my mother had come to my room for a heart-to-heart. “Everyone realizes that a sexual abuse trial is very hard for the victim, but it is never easy for a loved one either. I’ve seen the same truth that makes justice triumph strain to the breaking point a relationship with a husband or boyfriend. I don’t know how much Rosie has told you about what happened to her, but you should be prepared for a dreadful shock to your system as the details are pried out in court.”
“When you love someone as much as Rosie and I love each other, Mom, you are prepared for whatever lies ahead.”
Mom had turned her face away and wiped her eyes with thumb and forefinger. Looking back again, she smiled and put her hand on mine: “Whatever happens, remember you have that.”
This morning I perceived how right my mother had been. Here, in this public place, among scores of strangers, the girl I loved was filling in my sketchy mental outline with explicit images of acts involving the naked bodies and the intimate parts of herself and the man right there in front of me. “Late in the summer that I became twelve years old,” Rosie replied to Lucy Barrett’s question on the nature of her relationship with the accused, “what started out as girlish love on my part reached the point where, almost every night or day for nearly five months, my stepfather, Dr. Heathcliff Godolphin Rothesay, the man sitting right there, committed sexual acts on me.”
Before getting into the details of those acts, Lucy said, would she describe how the relationship had reached that point? Rosie told of how, after her real father’s accidental death when she was eleven, Dr. Rothesay visited her house to see her mother. She’d only met him once before, at the funeral home earlier that week. While she was waiting with him in the hall of her house for her mother to come down from her room, he told Rosie he knew of only one remedy for grief and bereavement, and that was love, the love her late great father used to write about in his poetry, passionate, powerful love that transcended everything else in the universe. “When you feel devastating grief coming on, beautiful, sensitive Rosie O’Dell,” he’d said, “meditate on love.” And that was exactly what she did do, she said. She supplanted the pain of grief in her heart with a feeling of love. And she became consumed with the idea that Heathcliff Rothesay, who was suddenly developing a friendship with her mother, was the fulfilment of that love. Not only was he a doctor saving lives, he was everything: handsome, strong, tall, intelligent, sensitive. In her dreams, he was the prince and she was the princess. She kept everything to herself, naturally, since she knew her feelings were pure fantasy and outside of reality. But as time went on it began to dawn on her from his words, gestures, and looks that, in fact, he must be secretly in love with her too and that he’d only been spending so much time with her mother in order to be near Rosie herself.
Everything began happening in earnest after Rothesay married her mother and took her and her sister Pagan with them on their honeymoon trip to California. One rainy afternoon in San Francisco, while her mother and Pagan were down in the hotel boutiques, he and she stayed in the suite and watched a movie from the fifties on TV, Picnic, with Kim Novak and William Holden. Just as she was hoping he would, he came over and sat by her on the sofa. He was sitting so close his thigh was touching hers. She did the boldest thing she’d ever done in her life. She picked up his hand and held it in her lap. Her heart was beating out of her chest and she was too shy to look at him, but she heard him sighing, and then he leaned across her and put his other arm around her and kissed her on the temple and then on the cheek and then on the lips. He placed his hand on her chest and whispered in her ear that his heart was beating the same way hers was. She was shaking and nearly fainted from all the emotions she was experiencing. Then he bent over her and kissed her on the lips again, this time passionately, breathing hard, forcing her lips open. She had to cling to him with both hands or she would have died of love right there and then. “I love you, I love you, my Rosie,” he kept whispering in her ear, “I have always loved you. I’ve loved you since I first saw you.” Everything she had thought about him secretly in her own mind was coming true. Then he asked, “Do you love me, too, my love?” “Yes,” she managed to breathe, “yes, yes, I love you too.” “I knew it,” he cried, “I could feel the love coming from you in waves of passion. It was love at first sight, just like Romeo and Juliet.” Then he sat back and groaned, “Oh, stop, please stop, Rosie, you have made me love you too much. We cannot do this. It is forbidden, just like Romeo and Juliet. We must stop now, before it goes any farther.” “I would gladly die for love of you, like Juliet,” she said to him. “No, no, no,” he said, “we have to stop this. Never again must we speak of this. And it must remain our secret, our secret impossible love. We must never mention a word of this to anyone.” “They could torture me,” she said, “and I would never tell a single soul.” He actually began to weep now, rocking back and forth with his head in his hands, and she said, “Don’t cry, my love, our love will find a way.” He said that he was crying tears of passionate anguish, of a happiness heretofore unknown, of utterly heavenly bliss. He had only married her mother, he said, to be near Rosie. He was only here on this honeymoon because he loved Rosie. “This is really our honeymoon,” he said. “Yours and mine.” They agreed to keep all this their secret and he said they had to compose themselves for when her mother and Pagan got back, so he tore himself reluctantly away and went into his bedroom off the sitting room and closed the door, and she went into hers and Pagan’s and pretended to be reading when her sister came in. It was like that for the rest of “our” honeymoon, as he kept calling it—a distance between them when others were around, but kissing and hugging and love talk whenever they were alone. Then they’d all come back home to St. John’s.
Here Rosie stopped her narrative and cast her eyes down at the courtroom floor. Lucy Barrett asked her to please go on and describe how the sexual relationship she’d mentioned had started. Rosie began again in a low voice, audible only because of the hush in the courtroom.
“The first evening back from California, he told my mother that I’d asked him to drive me to the Avalon Mall to do some shopping for school. He’d gladly do it, he said. My younger sister just wanted to go to bed, she was so tired, and my mother would stay home with her. We set off in his Land Rover and he drove, not to the Avalon Mall, but out Logy Bay Road, onto the Marine Drive and then up the road to Red Cliff. He knew the way as if he was very familiar with it. He had explored many off roads in his Land Rover, he told me. There, near the cliff, he parked and kissed me passionately
and said that tonight in my bed at home he wanted to consummate our love for life, if I was willing. I told him I was. I wanted to show my love to him very much. But what about Mom and Pagan? Wouldn’t they hear us? He said that was why we had come out here, to be alone so that we could plan the beginning of our wonderful adventure together. We didn’t have to worry about the other two, because they would be sound asleep. But he said we had to be very quiet, not make a sound. Could I promise that? Yes, I said, I promise. Because, he said, that was another reason he had driven us out here. To show me this cliff. If we ever got found out, he would have no choice but to drive himself over this cliff and end his life, not only because he would not be able to bear it if our love had to end, but he would not be able to bear his own shame and my shame at people knowing that I as well as he had betrayed my mother. In the light of all that, did I still want to consummate our love tonight? Yes, I said, I wanted to more than anything else in the entire world. He kissed me and we drove home. Mom and Pagan were already in bed sound asleep. I got ready for bed immediately and he gave me an intense passionate look before he kissed me good night on the forehead in his study.
“I lay awake in my bed thinking of our love and how one day we would fly away together to Camelot or the Forest of Arden, when a soundless shadow loomed in the moonlight from my half-open curtain. My heart gave a beat of joy. It was him! He sat on the bed and whispered that he had come to say a final good night because he had decided after thinking about it that our love was in fact hopeless. I couldn’t see his face clearly, but I heard a catch in his voice. He was silently weeping. Boldly I took his familiar, smooth, doctor’s hand in both of mine and told him not to be sad, a day would come when our love could truly express itself. I wanted to express it right now, I said, but I could wait—forever if necessary. He lay back on the bed and pulled me to him and kissed me and caressed my hands and arms. As I was lying there in his arms in a heavenly daze I felt his hands going down over my back and hips, and then one of his hands was inside my nightdress and between my legs. I felt very uncomfortable. This feeling was different from what was in my heart about consummating our love. I didn’t have a clear idea about what that consummation was, but this did not feel right. It was as if this had nothing to do with our love. This was something alien, an invasion.
“Everything I felt for him was in my heart, but now his fingers were intruding inside me down there as he whispered a constant stream of words of love. Then he took a container of lubricant, of K-Y Jelly, out of the pocket of his bathrobe and squeezed it onto his fingers and my pelvis. I couldn’t speak, even in a whisper. I tried to sit up in bed, but he pressed me back and whispered we had to be quiet or my mother would hear what I was doing out here. He forced my legs apart with one hand and rubbed the lubricant all over everything down there and inside me. I remember thinking I had to stop him and get out of the bed, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I stayed there and I said nothing. Then he put his hand over my mouth and got on top of me and pushed his penis inside me while he whispered in my ear how much he loved me. He knew what he was doing when he put his hand over my mouth, because even with the lubrication, I would not have been able to keep from screaming from the pain. After a while—I don’t know how long, it could have been a minute or twenty minutes—he rolled off, saying he loved me and he knew I loved him and how happy he was I’d let him know I wanted him in that way. Then he said he was going to take his hand off my mouth and I was not to say anything, just as I’d promised, since he didn’t want my mother to find out what I had been doing with her husband.
“I lay there silently, crying as he comforted me and assured me of his everlasting love, how glad he was I had told him of my love because he would never have done that, he would never have come near me if I hadn’t signalled to him my passionate love. He whispered to me that if my mother ever found out, she would think I had betrayed her by leading her husband on, but that I was not to worry because he would never tell her, and he knew I would never tell her either, because if she ever found out, if anyone ever found out, we would be separated, and he would be arrested and would have to kill himself to keep from going to jail and it would be the end of our love forever. I lay there weeping to myself, both over what we had done and at the thought of losing him. I desperately did not want to lose him. No matter what he had done to me that night, I did not want our love to ever end.”
Rosie paused and there was a collective intake of breath in the courtroom. I was numb. And I remained sitting there, senseless to everything but Rosie’s words as she continued to answer Lucy Barrett’s questions. I couldn’t have imagined then that Murray Dylan’s cross-examination had worse blows in store.
The defence counsel questioned gently at first. His voice, even low, had a penetrating and paced quality that made every word strike home. Rosie conceded that her sister Pagan, then ten years old, had been in her own bedroom next to hers on the nights she said Dr. Rothesay was sexually assaulting her, and that Pagan had never once come to Rosie’s room or indicated she’d heard sounds from there. “Now, Miss O’Dell, are you seriously asking us to believe,” Dylan went on, “that if all the gross and painful and lustful sexual activity, which you say happened, actually did take place in the room next to your sister’s in the silent dead of night, she would not have heard it?”
“It’s too bad you can’t ask her yourself, but she is dead. My sister committed suicide at the age of thirteen.”
“Simply answer my question, please.”
“You make it sound as if he and I were making a big racket,” Rosie replied. “But we weren’t. He always insisted we be very quiet. ‘As quiet as two little love doves, ’ he always whispered to me. Besides that, when I used to sleep in the same room with my sister for years before this, she often complained that I talked in my sleep. If sounds came from my own room later, she might have thought that’s what she was hearing. It was Dr. Rothesay, incidentally, who persuaded Mother just before they got married to give up her study so that my sister and I could have separate rooms. It was healthier, he said.”
“I see. Uh huh. Your mother, then—”
“My healthy sister, whose dead body was found by Dr. Roth—”
“Objection,” said Dylan. “My Lady, it was clearly understood at our pretrial conference that there would be no connection made between that unfortunate discovery and the subject matter of this trial, as being absolutely irrelevant and extremely prejudicial to the accused.”
“The witness was not trying to make any connection,” said Lucy. “She was merely explaining why it is not possible to find out the answer to defence counsel’s question from her dead sister at this stage.”
“Now, Ms. Barrett,” said the judge, “you know better than that. The jury will please ignore any reference to who found the body.”
“Miss O’Dell, where would your mother be when you were enjoying—having sex with her husband in your own bed nearly every night for months?”
“In her own bedroom about twenty feet down the hall.”
“So you are also asking us to believe that every night Dr. Rothesay would leave his wife in their marital bed, proceed to your bedroom a few feet away, have sex with you, and then blithely return to his marital bed beside her, all without his wife, your mother, hearing anything or suspecting anything?”
“If Mother had suspected anything, she would have done something. Yes, that is exactly what I’m asking you to believe.”
“Do you believe it yourself?”
Lucy Barrett jumped up. “Objection, My Lady. The question is offensive. If Mr. Dylan wishes to accuse the complainant of perjury, he should be straightforward about it and not try to weasel through the back door.”
“Ms. Barrett’s characterization of me is what is offensive, My Lady. I am accusing nobody of perjury. I am perfectly prepared to accept the notion that Miss O’Dell does believe her own story, however incredible it may be. When the defence presents its case, I shall be proffering evidence of how false memories c
an arise in such cases, and my question was preparatory to that.”
The judge said, “The witness will answer the question.”
“Yes, I believe it myself. I am here accusing my stepfather of unspeakable acts and ripping an unhealable wound in my relationship with my mother because I believe it myself. I believe it, unfortunately, because it happened. He would tell me that if we were quiet my mother would not come in. I assumed it was because she was still taking the sleeping pill she began to take after my father’s death.”
“Your sister would think the sounds of gross sexual activity from your room were you talking in your sleep and your mother would be knocked out on sleeping pills. How very convenient for your story! Come, come, Miss O’Dell, we can do better than that. How long would these nightly encounters last?”
“At night, only a few minutes. He would come in, whisper that he loved me, do whatever he had in mind that night, whisper how much he loved me again, and leave. If we happened to be in the house alone together, he would take longer. Some Saturday afternoons, when my mother and sister were out shopping, he would take his time and do everything and anything that might occur to him for an hour or more. It was during those encounters that I found out for the first time that he always wore a condom.”
“Did you ever say no or stop or that you were not going to do it anymore?”
“Objection,” said Lucy Barrett. “Whether she ever said no or yes or stop or go is entirely irrelevant. He was a thirty-six-year-old, six foot two, two-hundred-pound adult male physician in a position of care and trust and parenthood over her, and she was a twelve-year-old, five foot one, ninety-six-pound female child in his care and trust and under his custody and control. Consent does not enter into the matter except to show that if she did consent it was because he criminally abused his trust and power over her to exploit her.”