by Bill Rowe
“And so you joined the conspiracy to do nothing.”
“Conspiracy! No. I had to make a judgment call as a result of having no concrete evidence to support me.”
“But as a friend and an experienced nurse, you still had fears and suspicions derived from your observations, correct?”
“I still had some, yes.”
“As you have testified, your fears were strong and worrisome enough to cause you to discuss them with ten or a dozen people. I put it to you that you didn’t continue to pursue your fears because of a greater fear, the fear of your husband’s wrath.”
“That is absolutely wrong. I had no fear of my husband whatsoever. I had no evidence.”
“I worded my question too vaguely, perhaps. Because of your husband’s own fear that he might be implicated by the machinations of a clever manipulator, correct?”
“That may have been a small part of it, but mainly—”
“A large part of it, I put to you.”
“How much is large? I’m telling you it was a small part.”
“Large or small may be semantics, but the fact is that because of your husband’s concerns for his professional reputation, you did not report your strong suspicions of sexual abuse of the twelve-year-old daughter of your very best friend to the authorities who might have uncovered the necessary evidence.”
“That’s totally unfair. You weren’t there. You’re the big genius in hindsight. I’d like to see you in the same circumstances. Everyone knows in these cases that when mud is thrown at a professional person, some of it sticks, and I—”
“Thank you, Mrs. Sharpe, no further questions.”
Dylan rose for redirect. “Assuming, Mrs. Sharpe, that you and your husband, two professional persons of impeccable character, reputation, and strength, were quivering in your boots—as presented by Ms. Barrett in her best TV courtroom style—assume that ridiculous notion for a moment and tell us of your perception of the mental health of Rosie O’Dell at the time. Would you characterize it as stable or unstable?”
“Objection,” said Lucy Barrett. “She is not a psychiatrist.”
“No, but we’re not talking about a clinical diagnosis of Rosie, we are talking about the state of mind of Mrs. Sharpe herself at the time she made certain decisions, which is what Ms. Barrett kept trotting out before this court.”
“You may answer the question on that basis,” said the judge.
“Rosie seemed extremely unstable at that time. That was part of my fears for her, that she was ill emotionally and not able to cope with whatever might be happening to her.”
“How would you characterize her imagination during the twelve years you were close to her?”
“Rosie was very intelligent and always had an active and fertile imagination. I had the feeling after her father’s death that she may have been in the grip of morbid imaginings, confusing fantasy with reality, and extremely vulnerable.”
“Your slight fears for your husband, which Ms. Barrett just had a field day with—did your knowledge of Rosie’s fertile imagination and of her confusing of fantasy and reality have any effect on those fears?”
“Yes, I have to confess that one of my concerns was the possibility of false allegations from Rosie concerning my husband. We used to be very close. She was our godchild. She called me Aunt Gladys. She spent a lot of time at our place. My husband was an obvious target, especially if, in her frame of mind, she were to be manipulated. It was a concern.”
“So, Mrs. Sharpe, tell me if I have this right or not. Far from leaving the daughter of your best friend twisting in the wind of sexual abuse because of your own selfish concerns and your cowardice, as so nobly portrayed by the prosecution, you felt you had a well-grounded fear of false accusation from the complainant herself against your husband if you continued to press this matter?”
“That would be correct.”
AT THE LUNCH BREAK, I walked out of the courtroom into the lobby, stunned. My girlfriend’s lawyer had just called my mother and father yellow, self-serving cowards. My mother had just pronounced my girlfriend off her rocker.
“Hi, Tom.” It was Dad, waiting for me. “Your mother seems to think Rosie’s lawyer threw a few curves at her.”
“Why, what’d she say?”
“She said, ‘Ask Tom.’ How’d you figure it went?”
“Hard to say.” I looked around. “Where is she?”
“She’s gone out to the car. She didn’t want to stick around here. She was livid.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Your mother wanted me to pick her up afterwards because it’s so hard to find parking. We’d better go. I don’t want your mother out there by herself too long.”
“Dad, I’m waiting for Rosie. You go on.”
“Oh. Okay. I just thought that since I was here we could… Anyway, I’ll see you later. I want to talk to you about what happened in there, get another perspective. Nobody’s too happy after a cross-examination, so your mother might—”
“Hello, Uncle Joe.” Rosie was approaching.
“Hello, Rosie.” Dad walked away. “I’ll see you later today, Tom.”
Rosie looked at his retreating back, her brow furrowed. Then she turned to me. “I had no idea your mother was going to be subjected to questions like that. If I’d known—”
“Tom, Rosie asked me to explain something to you.” Lucy Barrett was coming up behind me. “We operate under an adversarial system of justice. I must exercise my professional duty to do everything legitimate to advance the case for the prosecution. You see, it’s not just Rosie’s case, it is society’s, and therefore I am unable to protect any private person’s sensibilities, or pull any punches in that regard.”
Unable to pull any punches? I thought. The defence guy just clobbered you across the head with a crowbar because you didn’t pull any punches. But I didn’t speak, not wanting Rosie to know I believed my mother had badly hurt her case.
“Your mother’s characterization of Rosie as unstable,” said Lucy Barrett, “and capable of false accusations, came as a complete surprise to me. She never mentioned it when I was interviewing her. Did she ever say anything like that to you?”
“No, not that I can remem—”
“That’s what I thought. She must have made it up on the spot to cover her tracks. It did some damage to our case. Tom, I’m going to ask the judge for leave to call you as a witness to give rebuttal evidence that your mother never, ever spoke to you of—”
“What?” said Rosie. “Wait now, Lucy. You and I are going to have to talk about that first.”
“Well, we’ll have to do it fast, over sandwiches at the office. I have to ask the judge at the first opportunity this afternoon. So let’s go. Tom, you too.”
“I said I want to talk to you about that first,” Rosie snapped.
“All right, Rosie. We all need to relax. Tom, you’ll understand it if I don’t have time to drop you off at your house.”
“We’ll make time,” said Rosie. “It’s raining out.”
“It’s okay.” I headed out into the downpour, pulling away from Rosie’s resistance on my arm. “I want to walk.”
At home I towelled off my head in the bathroom and entered the kitchen. Mom and Dad were sitting there seething, eating sandwiches next to their emptied soup bowls. “Brent called,” muttered Mom, pointing to the Post-it on the fridge. “Said he wants to speak to you right away.” I grabbed the message and went up to my room and dialled.
“I nipped it in the bud,” said Brent. “Someone put the cock-measuring story from the newspaper on the bulletin board in the gym, and a little graffiti contest took place.”
“Like what?”
“Stuff like, ‘No wonder his name is Sharpe, he’s got a needle dick.’ And, ‘Tom can swim so fast because he’s got nothing dragging him back.’ That sort of a thing. Real clever stuff. I only called before someone else told you and blew it out of proportion. How’s it going in court?”
“Great. Great.”
“Don’t let it get to you.” Brent sounded as if he was encouraging a player who’d got a bad call on the ice.
I forced myself back down to the kitchen. My mother was saying to my father, “Yes, it was stupid, damned stupid. Painting me and you as cowards forced me to make Rosie look like a loose cannon capable of accusing anyone, which of course she probably was. But it only made me side against her.” By way of response to this, Dad glared at me.
“These things get out of hand,” I said, “when you have two lawyers willing to do anything to win their case.”
“I can’t believe Rosie would allow that to happen after all we’ve tried to do for her,” said Mom. “She only cut off her nose to spite her face.”
“She didn’t expect the questions you were asked.” When Mom glanced at me skeptically, I added, “Or the answers you gave, probably.”
“The answers I gave?” she whispered. Then she shouted to the kitchen at large, “The answers I gave! I only gave those goddamn answers because her lawyer asked those goddamn questions.”
“Barrett is not her lawyer, Mom, she’s the Crown prosecutor representing the whole of society.”
Mom responded to that argument with, “Oh, for the love of bloody Jesus goddamned Christ!”
“Tom?” asked my father in a reasonable tone. “Wasn’t there some way you could have alerted us to the angle Rosie’s lawyer was going to take with your mother on the stand?”
“I had no idea what angle she was going to take, and even if I did, I couldn’t violate a confidence by saying anything?”
“You couldn’t what? Violate a confidence? What’s all this about the defence lawyer saying you were feeding Rosie’s lawyer with ammo you got here at home?”
“Keep quiet, Joe. I told you that was probably all crap.”
“It is all crap,” I shouted. “That lawyer is not on our side. He’s the enemy in all this.”
“If he’s the enemy, what the Christ is Rosie’s lawyer?”
“Come on, Joe. Leave it alone.”
“Come on, leave it alone?” said Dad. He rose from the table and snarled, “Like hell I’ll leave it alone! Making us look like yellow curs who would throw a little girl to the wolves to save our own cowardly hides from a little hint of scandal!” He began to pace the kitchen floor. “Or maybe we were afraid of what an investigation might turn up about us. I can hear the tongues wagging now. It casts us in a beautiful light, doesn’t it?”
I sat there muted momentarily by my father’s wrong-headed rant, staring at him in disbelief. “What are you saying all this for?” I asked. “I had nothing to do with what you did or didn’t do years ago or the questions being asked about it in court now.”
“Your point being what, exactly?” When I looked away and didn’t answer, Dad took voice again. “You had nothing to do with anything, did you, Pontius? Who pushed this whole thing to where it is today? Anyone could tell that Rosie didn’t want to go forward with this fiasco, and her friend Suzy certainly didn’t. And who got tangled up in the first place with the crazy—?”
“Joe, for God’s sake!” said Mom. “You’re out of control. Stop this total—”
“For God’s sake what? Stop what? Out of control, am I? Out of my life is the way I want it. Those goddamned O’Dells. I want to hear nothing more about any of them. I could never stand that maniac Joyce O’Dell from the word go, and I naively hoped when he perished that there might be some sanity in the family. Oh yeah, right! Sanity? Christ! Little Pagan— Jesus Christ. Not one bloody word. I don’t want to hear a word about any of them, her or any others of them, or see any of them. Do whatever you want yourself with her, my son, but do it out of my sight and out of my hearing.”
“Shut up,” said my mother to my father. “Shut your bloody big mouth.”
“Shut my bloody big mouth now, is it? This is nice. Now it’s turning my own wife against me. This gets better and better. They’re all alike, including the poor little one who swallowed—there’s something wrong with all of them, including that great buddy of yours, the famous Nina. Any sane wife would have spotted him as a child diddler a mile away, but she’s so loony she still doesn’t see it. I rue the day I laid eyes on any of the crazy goddamned tribe.”
I stood up, propelled by an urge to beat my father into a pulp of silence. I managed to master it, and walked to the door. “Crazy?” I bawled back. “If you added them all together, they’d still be completely fucking sane compared to you.”
I strode into the hall hearing my mother’s “Tom, please,” as I yanked my wet jacket off the hook in the closet and bolted out the front door into the driving rain.
Chapter 12
WATCHING CURLY ABBOTT TESTIFY, I had a shivering fit. I’d returned home to change my wet clothes after Dad left, and I’d taken a taxi back to the courthouse and I was now dry and comfortable. So maybe it was just the sight of the principal from my childhood up there testifying with frightening self-assurance. Dr. Rothesay himself at that meeting, he was asserting, had first brought sexual abuse up as one possibility among many in an attempt to account for Rosie’s condition, and it had been he as well who most favoured turning the matter over to the authorities.
“I was the one who put a damper on that,” said Abbott, “since it was all based solely on Mrs. Sharpe’s speculation without a pick of evidence, and I had no idea where the finger of accusation might point. For example, it was common knowledge among the staff that Rosie’s homeroom teacher, Miss Janet Pretty, was not heterosexual. From my knowledge of her, I knew she would never sexually exploit a child, but I could, nevertheless, see her being dragged into this by virtue of her sexual orientation alone, and today I make no apology for putting the lid on that witch’s brew.” Curly Abbott’s smooth pate, gleaming halo-like under the lights, was hurting my eyes.
Under cross-examination, Abbott maintained that Rosie’s so-called appalling condition in grade seven had been, in fact, a fleeting thing. By the next year she had become the best student in the school again. He had since followed with gratification her phenomenal academic and athletic career and took satisfaction from the fact, indeed congratulated himself, that level heads had prevailed in grade seven and that her young life had not been traumatized by the horrors of a police investigation based on pure conjecture. I shivered again as Curly stepped down.
When Murray Dylan next called Nina Rothesay to the stand, I looked at Rosie and squeezed her hand. The movement of my head made me dizzy. Nina swore she had never seen or heard a thing, night or day, to give her reason to suspect her husband of molesting her daughter. As to Rosie’s relationship with her real father, Joyce O’Dell, they had been very close, perhaps too close for a father and a ten-year-old daughter. There had been very little they didn’t do together, including going off for several nights of camping. But Nina’s main concern as a mother had been the influence on Rosie of her natural father’s poetry. Highly erotic, indeed frankly sexual in content, she’d tried to keep Rosie from access to it until she was more mature, but she knew her precocious daughter was reading it on the sly from an early age, obsessively sneaking the book from her parents’ bedroom and reading it in the bathroom with the door locked. Her natural father, the poet himself, used to laugh at that and thought it was rather cute, and talked Nina out of hiding the book.
A specific poem among many that worried Nina was one entitled, “God’s Fiendish Fit.” It celebrated the diabolical divineness of a God who had contrived to hardwire in the human brain a concept of the ideal sexual fit between male and female genitalia. There were lines in the poem about a young boy’s incredulous delight upon learning that the spontaneous, dirty fantasies he’d been experiencing about his own private parts and those he’d glimpsed of the girl next door were, in fact, what they were actually for in real life—a coincidence of fantasy and function involving those shamefully exquisite bodily parts almost too good to be true. The “profound” irony of the poem, Nina testified with more than a touch of
contempt, was that this coincidence would indeed become in real life too good to be true, because the perfect fit in men’s and women’s minds would inevitably turn out to be unattainable in reality, with the result that men and women would falsely promise, seduce, hurt, lie, betray, even die or kill, trying vainly to attain with their bodies that perfect, ideal mental fit. Nina asked the jury to imagine her dismay as a mother one evening to hear her daughter, then ten years old, merrily quoting to herself in bed some of the poem’s most explicit lines.
As for the relationship between Rosie and Dr. Rothesay, Nina said, it had varied with her daughter’s wide mood swings. At first she didn’t seem to like him about the house taking her natural father’s place. Then she went through a phase of flirtatiously vying for his attention, as young girls do. And six months or so after the marriage, she appeared to resent his very presence, which Nina ascribed to nothing more mysterious than jealousy over the closer father-daughter relationship that had developed between Dr. Rothesay and her younger sister.
On cross-examination, when Lucy Barrett asked her if she really believed as a mother that Rosie could have brought these charges if they weren’t true, Nina replied, “This is what I really believe. The rumour mongering by my own best friend, Gladys Sharpe, and the stories of the sexual abuse of Suzy Martin, Rosie’s best friend, by her grandfather, and the morbid effect on Rosie of the traumatic death of her excessively beloved father, and her jealousy regarding Dr. Rothesay had all combined to put the whole idea into my poor daughter’s head.”
“You referred to your younger daughter, Pagan. She committed suicide at the age of thirteen in Toronto, did she not?”
“So say the Toronto police.”
“Did you ever ascertain why she did that?”
“There was no official reason assigned by the investigators, if that’s what you mean.”
“Did it ever occur to you that the close relationship that you say caused Rosie’s jealousy might have—”