by Bill Rowe
“In a little while, Mom. I’m not hungry now.”
“Your appetite will come back when you start. I’ll reheat it and call you when it’s ready.”
“Okay, Mom, thanks.” I listened to her going back down over the stairs. Dead woman walking.
I shovelled down my supper, the sooner to get back to my room. Mom and Dad sat there saying nothing. When she thought I wasn’t looking, she would gaze upon me with heart-rending pity. Dad drank his cup of tea with closed eyes and a head supported by one index finger to the centre of his forehead, murmuring every so often, “God Almighty!”
I pushed my chair back to leave. Dad opened his eyes. “I get the impression the defence lawyer is a pit bull. I can’t figure out what he wants your mother for. What do you hear?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? Rosie’s lawyer must have mentioned something to her.”
“I’m not supposed to talk about anything to witnesses.”
“So you have heard something but you won’t tell us.”
Mom said, “Lighten up, Joe. This could be a lot worse.”
“How could it be worse, precisely?”
“They could have served the subpoena on you instead of me.”
Dad tried not to laugh, but he had to, and I used the moment to escape upstairs. I walked, half-dazed, to my easy chair and eased myself down. The thought came to me that I was the last sane person in a lunatic universe. That perception would change in a few minutes. I picked up a textbook but, instead of reading, I lay my head back and almost instantly fell asleep. Fragmentary images in a dream featured a male organ entering the bodily orifices of little Pagan. The organ was forensically identified as belonging to either Heathcliff Rothesay or Tom Sharpe, but despite all the photographs of both in circulation, nobody could say which it was, because they were so equal in impressive grandeur. In the dream I knew it was my own and I felt enormous satisfaction.
I jerked awake, dismayed by the dream, only to become appalled by reality. I had ejaculated in my pants. I lurched out of the chair, pulled my clothes off, and dumped them on the floor of my closet. Putting on my pyjamas, I shivered as if the room were cold. In bed I lay on my side to forestall the bad dreams that might come if I lay on my back. I wanted no more dreams. I needn’t have worried. I tossed from side to side all night watching the numbers on my clock moving inexorably towards dreaded daylight.
MISS JANET PRETTY GOT right to the point. At the meeting some four years ago between Dr. and Mrs. Rothesay and the principal and herself, which had been called because Mrs. Gladys Sharpe feared Rosie was being sexually abused, Dr. Rothesay had cajoled and browbeaten everyone by his glibness and veiled threats into letting the matter drop. Back then, the characterization of Rosie by Dr. Rothesay and her own mother as unstable enough to let accusations fly out like a scatter gun, rang sufficiently true to give everyone a self-serving rationalization for waiting rather than acting. And when Rosie did improve, everyone was more than happy, of course, to let the horrible thing drop permanently. In her own case and, she was saddened to realize in retrospect, in Mrs. Gladys Sharpe’s as well, there was timidity if not outright cowardice over the possible involvement, as Rothesay stressed, of teachers or family friends. “We failed Rosie,” Miss Pretty concluded. “We failed that dear, dear child abysmally. Mrs. Sharpe, Mr. Abbott, Mrs. Rothesay—they can speak for themselves, but I will never forgive myself for that.”
My face burned with chagrin at the condemnation of my mother as a self-serving coward. Rosie turned to me, but I could not look at her. Murray Dylan rose to cross-examine: “Miss Pretty, are you a lesbian?”
“Objection,” shouted Lucy Barrett. “Totally irrelevant and extremely prejudicial.”
“Miss Pretty’s sexual orientation is relevant,” said Dylan, “because her particular sexual bias has coloured, twisted, and distorted her view of Dr. Rothesay’s role at that meeting. It goes to her credibility.”
“It would be scandalous,” said the judge, “to allow a witness’s sexuality, heterosexual or homosexual or neutral, to be the basis of his or her credibility. Objection sustained.”
“Let me come at it another way, then,” said Dylan. “Miss Pretty, were you dismissed as a teacher in Vancouver?”
“Suspended, and I was reinstated after arbitration.”
“Why were you suspended?”
“Because of something I said to a group of grade twelve women in an extracurricular course I was giving on feminism.”
“Women? Grade twelve? How old were they?”
“Seventeen, some eighteen, all young women.”
“Well, don’t be shy about it now, all of a sudden. What did you say to these teenage girls?”
“I said that every act of sexual penetration by a man of a woman was a violation of her physical integrity, whether she consented to the particular act or not. It was merely another element in the male sex’s systemic violence against women. Some parents heard about it and complained to the board that I was trying to turn their daughters into man-hating lesbians.”
“And you were suspended. Rather understandably. On what basis were you reinstated to your teaching job?”
“The arbitrator ruled that what I had said was a well-known, if radical, position in the literature of feminism and therefore entirely acceptable for presentation to mature students, but that in the future I must also present other views of the matter, even contrary ones, in order to provide the balance necessary for developing minds.”
“Was what you said to those girls your own personal belief regarding voluntary, consensual sex between a man and a woman?”
“I believe that the physical evolution of the human sexes is stunted and incomplete, which has led to extremely unfair, violent consequences to the female. And I choose not to participate. A comparison would be the case of dolphins whose sexual evolution has reached the point where a group of males will corner a female in a shoal and repeatedly gang-rape her. That is so-called normal sex for dolphins. And perhaps most female dolphins accept it as such. But if I were a female dolphin I would not accept it, even though I might not be able to choose to be a non-participant. As a female human being I can so choose and I choose no.”
“So a woman who consents to or actively invites sexual intercourse with a man is automatically a victim of male violence, even though she may like what she is doing and may even, dare I say it, consider it to be an act of profound love between them?”
“What you just described is exactly what happened to Rosie, isn’t it? As an exploited young girl, she thought Rothesay was committing acts of love, but does she or anyone else now doubt that they were acts of terrible violence against her?”
“I will thank you, Miss Pretty, not to assume for yourself the role of judge and jury. Those alleged acts are by no means established as fact. Answer me this. Do you hate men?”
“I hate what nature requires them to do as men. I would pity them if I did not pity women, who are on the nasty receiving end of their nature, even more.”
“And do you not think that your view of men prejudiced your interpretation of Dr. Rothesay’s role at that meeting?”
“I know what I saw and heard. I am able to be objective.”
“Of course you are. No further questions.”
THE FIRST WITNESS FOR the defence was Gladys Sharpe, my mother. When Murray Dylan called her to the stand, she stood there rather defiantly. His questions established that she considered herself a friend of Rosie and was appearing as witness for the defence, unwillingly and solely because she’d been subpoenaed.
“Mrs. Sharpe, did you ever have suspicions that Rosie O’Dell was being sexually abused by an adult?”
“Yes, when she was twelve.”
“By whom?”
“I suspected Dr. Heathcliff Rothesay.”
“Did you tell anyone of your suspicions?”
“I discussed them with my husband and we decided I should have a meeting with her principal, Mr. Abbott.”
> “Is it possible your son, Rosie’s boyfriend, could have overheard your discussions with your husband?”
“I suppose it’s possible. Anything’s possible.”
“Did you tell Mr. Abbott or Miss Pretty at the meeting?”
“My fears came out during our meeting, yes.”
“Do you know if Dr. Rothesay or Rosie’s mother became aware of your suspicions regarding Dr. Rothesay?”
“Yes, at their later meeting with Mr. Abbott and Miss Pretty. Her mother, Nina, terminated our friendship afterwards, accusing me of going behind her back and betraying her.”
“Mrs. Sharpe, did you tell anyone else of your suspicions at the time?”
“At the hospital where I was a head nurse, I mentioned to some nurses at a coffee break my fears that a daughter of a friend of mine might be being sexually abused. You see, we were trained to watch for such occurrences. Occasionally we came across a young patient who was suffering abuse.”
“How many nurses did you tell?”
“There were five nurses there that day, perhaps six.”
“Did the other nurses present know of your friendship with Rosie’s mother and that she was the wife of Dr. Rothesay?”
“Yes, they did.
“To recap, and tell me if I am incorrect in any particular, Mrs. Sharpe, when Rosie was in grade seven you say you told your suspicions to your husband and to her principal and teacher. And her mother and stepfather learned of your suspicions, as did five or six nurses, all of whom knew of your friendship with the Rothesays, and it’s quite possible your son heard your discussions about the house. At least ten people in all. Is that correct? Let the record show that the witness is nodding in the affirmative. Would you be surprised if as a result of all this awareness in her own home and around town, Rosie herself got wind of your sexual abuse suspicions concerning—?”
“Objection,” said Barrett. “He’s leading his own witness about something she has no direct knowledge of in any event.”
“Sustained,” said the judge. “The jury will ignore all of that last question.” Ignore it? I thought. How could they ignore it? Obviously they had to get Dylan’s point clearly.
“Now, madam, these suspicions of yours that Rosie was being sexually abused, what were they based on?”
“My knowledge of Rosie over many years and my experience as a children’s nurse in a hospital.”
“And with that you zeroed in on Dr. Rothesay?”
“It was an educated intuition based on Rosie’s appalling physical and emotional condition at the time.”
“Kind of a gut-feeling? Based on the look of the girl, you jumped to the conclusion Dr. Rothesay was sexually abusing her?”
“Objection,” said Lucy Barrett. “He is both leading his own witness and cross-examining her all in the one question.”
“Sustained,” said the judge.
“Well, what else besides your educated guess led you to leave the impression with ten or a dozen people that Dr. Rothesay was sexually abusing his own stepchild?”
“It was a suspicion I had, a fear, nothing else. I merely discussed it with several professional persons to try to ascertain what I should do. I didn’t spread it about wholesale.”
“But surely you would not be surprised to learn that, as a result of ten or twelve people being told directly of your suspicions, many other people also might have got wind of them by way of rumour, and that Rosie herself—?”
“Objection. We’ve been through this, My Lady. It’s a leading question and purely speculative and hypothetical.”
“Sustained yet again, Mr. Dylan,” said the judge.
“In more recent times, Mrs. Sharpe, this year, for example, did you tell anyone else of your original suspicions.”
“I told Rosie after she came to me with her allegations.”
“What’s your understanding of why Rosie came to you of all people, her boyfriend’s mother, with her story about Dr. Rothesay?”
“I had offered my son help earlier. I could see clearly that something was wrong from the way he was behaving. But of course mainly there was the other inform—”
“Oh, another of your famous gut-feelings?”
Lucy jumped up. “My Lady, he persists in cross-examining his own witness. If he wants to have her declared a hostile witness, let him be straightforward enough to try. Otherwise let him have the decency to stop sneaking what he’d like her to say through the cellar door of his own mouth.”
“I take it that was an objection, Ms. Barrett,” said Judge Ledrew. “If so, it is sustained. Mr. Dylan, a barrister of your standing knows better than that.”
My mother was determined to finish her point: “It was not just my gut-feeling. There was other information from England that—”
Dylan spoke over her. “I must stop you right there, Mrs. Sharpe. Madam Justice Ledrew has banned all reference to any such information as being utterly prejudicial to Dr. Rothesay’s right to a fair trial.”
Lucy was on her feet again, objecting: “He asked the witness why Rosie came to her, and he won’t let her give the reason why. He can’t have it both ways and—”
Dylan tried to interject, but the judge held up her hands and waved both counsel off. “There will be no reference by anyone to that, ah, foreign information in this trial. Mr. Dylan, please stop asking questions that lead inexorably to it.”
“Thank you, My Lady. Now, Mrs. Sharpe, after your meeting several years ago with Mr. Abbott and Miss Pretty, did you pursue your original suspicions any further at that time?”
“No, except to watch Rosie’s condition.”
“Why not?”
“Mr. Abbott and Mrs. Pretty concluded there was no concrete evidence, but also, they both told me that Dr. Rothesay himself had suggested going to the police if anyone seriously suspected abuse of Rosie, so I decided to suspend my suspicions and see how Rosie did, and she did well.”
“Yet, a few years later, there you were again, encouraging Rosie herself with your ancient suspicions?”
Lucy Barrett let out a roar. “This is disgraceful, My Lady. He knows why she was telling the complainant this year, but she can’t say why in this court because—”
“One more word,” said Dylan, “and I shall move for a mistrial.”
The judge intervened and told them to approach the bench. There, I could tell, all three were arguing about the charges in London, which my poor mother had not been allowed to mention to explain herself. Dylan returned to his place with a little smirk. “Thank you, Mrs. Sharpe. No further questions.”
Lucy Barrett rose to cross-examine: “Mrs. Sharpe, didn’t both Mr. Abbott and Miss Pretty tell you that Dr. Rothesay said, if he went to the police, he would ask for a wide-ranging investigation of teachers and adult friends of Rosie’s to find out who might be abusing her?
“Yes, I was told he mentioned something like that.”
“Did you discuss that with your husband?”
“Yes I did.”
“And what was his reaction?”
“He was somewhat upset, naturally, that even though he was completely innocent, he might be tainted professionally by being drawn into a police investigation.”
“Was he upset at you?”
“Maybe a little. After all, it was my friendship with Rosie’s mother that had brought all this on.”
“Did your husband say anything about your friendship with Rosie’s mother, as it relates to this?”
“He said that my great friend Nina was really making progress with her husbands: First she married a pathological drunk in Joyce O’Dell and now with Heathcliff Rothesay she had advanced to a pathological child molester.”
“Objection!” Murray Dylan was on his feet, bellowing like a gored bull. “My Lady, this is intolerable. The prosecutor is trying to slip in every possible prejudicial characterization of my client in every possible sly way that she can contrive.”
“I don’t know what the witness is going to say, My Lady. She’s not my wi
tness. This is cross-examination, and I’m trying to focus on her frame of mind and considerations at the time she thought the complainant was being sexually abused.”
Dylan replied, “She may not be your witness, but you did interview her with a view to her fitness as a witness for the prosecution, and now you are stooping to using what you gleaned from her to prejudicially undermine Dr. Rothesay’s character in a weasel-like fashion.”
“Objection. Mr. Dylan is abusing this process. I can interview whom I like as prospective witness and he has no right to discuss before the jury who I may or may not—”
“And further to my objection,” shouted Dylan, “this witness is the mother of Thomas Sharpe, the boyfriend of the complainant, and it is becoming obvious from Ms. Barrett’s questions that he has obtained information from his mother contrary to the Bill of Rights and passed it on to the prosecution. Any abuse of process going on here is—”
“Objection!” screeched Lucy Barrett. “Contrary to the Bill of Rights! That is the most ridiculous—”
“Order,” bawled the judge. “Sit down and keep quiet, both of you. Ms. Barrett, I said sit down. This is a pretty pass. An objection to an objection to an objection to an objection. Mr. Dylan, keep quiet, I said. Now, both of you, conduct yourselves like the officers of this Supreme Court you are supposed to be. I assume neither of you wants me to declare a mistrial and force you to do this all over again. Ms. Barrett, draw this line of questioning to a quick conclusion.”
“Mrs. Sharpe, when you told your husband what had gone on in the principal’s office with Dr. Rothesay, did he give you his opinion on what you should do?”
“Yes, he said they were right. Without evidence I had to drop it.”
“And you followed his advice and proceeded no further?”
“I followed my own feelings. My husband’s advice supported my own feelings.”
“Did you have any doubts about dropping it?” asked Lucy.
“I had some lingering doubts, yes, but no one else, all intelligent, concerned people—principal, teacher, wife—seemed to have any real doubts on the matter. I could only assume any lingering doubts I might have had were wrong.”