by Bill Rowe
If this had been my father talking again on this subject, I would have stopped him dead right here, embarrassed and wiped out though I felt, but I simply had no heart for taking on my mother tonight. And she kept going:
“You haven’t had many serious relationships with girls for a boy your age. Two or three minor ones in high school, Helen Hayes and maybe a couple of others”—she had a better memory for the name of the Christmas Princess than I had— “and you’ve really had only one serious girlfriend in your life—Rosie. The relationship with Helen I’d call normal. The one with Rosie I’d characterize as abnormal in the circumstances that evolved. Ordinarily, it might have been great and it might be great in the future, but up to now the reality is that it has been abnormal. One or two short little normal romantic relationships in a young man’s life are not enough, Tom. You need more experience. You need a wider and deeper basis for comparison before you settle in with a life partner. Now, you no doubt believe that you and Rosie are in fact the best in the world for each other, and all I’m saying to you is test it and confirm it. Use the courage the two of you have shown to test it and confirm it. With all that’s happened, you both owe it to yourselves.”
Dad jumped in. “And I think you should have some damned fun for a change. You’ve had some pretty serious and sombre things in the past couple of years. Rosie is a wonderful woman, and when you come back you will know if settling down with her one of these days is truly what is best for you and her and truly what you want.”
“It certainly is what I want, Dad. Christ!”
“And I’m not saying it shouldn’t be, by any means. But you have both been through a gruelling time together. That has made you like old comrades-at-arms who have served in the wars together. Old war comrades love each other, are friends for life, feel they have everything in common, when all they may have in common is the war experience. You need the time and distance to decide whether your relationship, after everything that has happened, is based on more than the camaraderie of war together.” Dad smiled, pleased with himself over his insightful analogy.
“That’s just effing stupid,” I said. “We were in love with each other long before any of that broke. Our love has nothing to do with that. What you just said is too shagging idiotic to talk about.”
Dad’s colour rose, but he remained calm. “It may be stupid, Tom, and it may be idiotic. I hope it is. All I’m saying is, take the time to look at your relationship, for your own good and hers, with a sliver of ice in your heart.”
“You got that sliver of ice quote from Graham Greene,” I said. “You heard Joyce O’Dell quoting it at the Christmas party at our house when he was saying that Graham Greene would have won the Nobel Prize long ago if he weren’t a Catholic.”
“Oh for Christ’s… Now that’s what’s idiotic. Joyce O’Dell—”
“He was joking, Dad.”
“Joking, was he? How could anyone ever tell? I’ll tell you what’s no joke, though. Joyce O’Dell’s serious mental problem and what that means for—”
“What are you talking about—mental problem! The man was a world-famous poet.”
“What the hell is a world-famous poet doing killing himself in a river in the middle of the night in the middle of a crap a few feet away from his own—”
“Joe,” said Mom.
“—daughter? And old Mrs. O’Dell at the graveyard—I suppose that was sensible. And then all that with Pagan. Not to mention Nina—”
“Joe.”
“—heading for the Mental. My son—”
“Joe!”
“—everything in that family points to a serious strain of mental—”
“JOE!”
“What, Gladys? What? What? What?”
“Tom, please come back and sit down. Joe, let me, please. Your father’s doubts about much of what has happened have proved true all along. He had doubts about investigating Rothesay in London, and sure enough that fell apart. He had doubts about Rosie pressing charges, and look what happened there. He has had doubts about certain characters in our lives and he proved to be right. Your father is wise and has good judgment, but you don’t see it because it is in the nature of fathers and sons to take exception to each other’s opinions. That is nature’s way. But I am telling you his doubts about you staying here this summer are right, too. So please sit down again for a minute and listen.”
At the doorway, I wanted to fling back, “And his doubts about nailing Rothesay years ago proved true, too, I suppose. It’s not that his doubts turn out to be right, it’s that he’s so faint-hearted he never does anything, so he’s never wrong.” I held my tongue, though, and that was a good thing, because she demolished my thought with, “He has put you in the hands of a top lawyer, prematurely, some might have argued, but I believe you will agree that his action there was sound.” I walked to my chair, and listened to my mother again.
“Backpack around the continent like a lot of other kids are doing, staying at student hostels… Spend time in London, stay as long as you want at the Royal Overseas Club where we have a membership. Then in the fall, start a year of study in whatever you want to do at the famous London School of Economics… Dad and I will pay the whole shot for everything… See if you like it. Continue after one year, or not, as you see fit. You’re only young. You have all the time in the world. A year of study away at this point will be excellent for you and exactly what you need.” Mom rose from her chair and stood over me, looming, her face grim and resolute. “Now you think about all that good and hard, sonny boy, while we’re trying to get you out from under the charges and other consequences of your barroom brawl, on top of the suspicions from Rothesay’s death, all of which, by the way, are going to start looking like small potatoes compared to what’s likely to happen to you in weeks to come if you stick around here.”
All told, my love for Rosie would have served me better if, under the strains of this past hideous year, it had just died. But it didn’t die. Worse, it merely went unconscious for a time. When I woke up the morning after I had tried to sever a man’s jugular with jagged glass, my mother’s plan had jelled into the one and only option in my life. I knew I had to abandon this place. At least for the summer, and I’d wait and see about the fall. I longed to leave right now, this very morning. The idea that I had to visit my lawyer again first, and probably stay here for a while yet to await the final outcome of the two police investigations, caused me intense anxiety. I vaulted out of bed. I couldn’t wait to crawl out from under the pile of crap I was up to my eyebrows in. Oh Jesus, oh Christ, I couldn’t wait to board a plane and head across the Atlantic out of here.
Mid-morning, after I had seen lawyer Barry, Rosie and I met for a coffee. I spared her no detail. She stared at me without a word. When I finished, she put her hand on my arm and said, “You’re saying you might have killed Moose Mercer if Brent…?”
“No might about it. I would have. I intended to kill him. I had it in my head to kill him. I was trying with everything I had in me to kill him. I lost it completely.”
“What does Mr. Barry think the police are going to do?”
“He talked to them last night to let them know right off the bat I still have high-powered legal help. They told him it’s pretty hard for the police to ignore a broken nose from a head-butt, an ear yanked nearly off, two teeth knocked out from a kick in the mouth, and cheek laid open like a piece of raw meat by some sharp lethal weapon. We’re hoping Brent sticks to his story that Cory started it and I defended him, although that might be hard for anyone to find credible. The cops think my reaction was overkill even if they believe Brent’s story. But they don’t have my weapon, thanks to Brent. So we’ll see where it goes. By the way, nobody but you and Brent knows about the broken glass I used, and no one but you knows for sure that I had every intention of killing the bastard.”
“We’ll have to get married immediately so that I can’t be forced to testify against you.” Rosie laughed and leaned closer to me. “Tom, I love yo
u so much. Ever since we were eleven years old you’ve been there for me. You were there for me at the trial and… afterwards. And last night you nearly killed another man, defending me. Jesus. That is really something. I wish none of it had happened. Don’t get me wrong. But it is all very gratifying to me.”
She was gratified, when what she should have been saying was that she was sorry she’d turned me into Frankenstein’s Monster. “But I could have defended you just as well by walking out of the bar, Rosie. You weren’t even there to need defending. My violent reaction was only an attempt to avenge the slight to my own dignity. And I can tell you, I’m not gratified, I’m disgusted at myself.”
“Don’t be, my love. We’ll get through this too. Everything will soon be over. Then it’ll just be you and me. I was thinking last night in bed what we should do. I’ve decided I’m going to move out of Suzy’s into a little basement apartment of my own, right away. I can manage it with my scholarship and working this summer and with what Mom is getting from his estate and the sale of the big house. Then you and I can be together by ourselves whenever we want, with time and privacy in our lives for each other at last.”
She was planning our year ahead. I couldn’t hold off any longer on my other bit of news. I told her of my parents’ offer of the summer of European travel and maybe an academic year in London. Rosie studied my face as if she were trying to discern something crucial to her very life in a blurred photograph. After I finished, she nodded slowly for ten seconds and said, “All because of your fight with Moose?”
“No. Dad offered it before because he thought I needed to spend a little time away from here. I turned it all down flat then without a thought. But last night was the last straw for both of them, and it really shook me, too.”
Rosie swallowed. “You’ve decided to take them up on it.” Her voice was dry and barely audible. “You could be away for nearly a year.”
“I was thinking what I might do is go to Europe this summer, if I’m not in jail, that is, and then come back here for a couple of weeks before perhaps starting a year over there. Meanwhile, we could plan on how the two of us might go over in the fall or next year.”
Rosie brightened. “We could plan something together. You know, looking beyond my selfish desire to have you here, your trip this summer is a good idea. We’ve been cooped up together with this thing for too long. And I really wouldn’t be able to leave poor Mother at this stage anyway, even if I could afford it. She needs help too badly. When would you be back?”
“Oh, August, I would say.” I wasn’t lying, but I could feel as I said it a sense of relief over the mere prospect of perhaps spending the next academic year on a campus in a city where no one knew me.
“August is not long,” said Rosie. “Meanwhile, we would phone each other every week or so and write each other every day or two, and the time would fly by for us, knowing that we love each other and are committed to each other, and then, if you decide to study in London, you’d be back again at Christmas or I could fly over then for your break.”
“Right. That sounds like a plan.”
“It’s a deal, then,” she said. “Back together in August and Christmas, and then when I have everything figured out here, we can arrange to get together forever.”
I leaned towards her and kissed her lips. “It’s a deal,” I said.
Chapter 15
I PHONED HOME TO tell my parents about the new university digs I’d moved into off the Kingsway in London, and told them of my two new friends, Sian and Morton, who lived in the same building, and how Morton and I had gone to a jazz club the other night in Soho, and how Sian had managed to get cheap tickets to the Kirov Ballet on its visit to London and had asked me to go.
Dad interjected: “Uh, this Shawn who likes ballet so much, how, exactly, has he begun to uh… fit into your life?”
“Dad, it’s spelled S-i-a-n. It’s Welsh for Jane.”
“Jane. Oh, he’s a she. Oh, all right then. Okay. Good. Good.”
That evening, when I recounted the conversation to Morton and Sian over a plastic magnum of something labelled Albanian Burgundy, Morton said, “You must send your Da a snap of Sian as proof. Mere words can’t describe how the function of that sweater and denims so superbly follows form.” I agreed, while Sian displayed two superb rows of teeth in unladylike belly laughs and protested our foolishness.
Near the bottom of the bottle, though, her big brown eyes displayed tears. Morton had just told her that those eyes and matching hair framing her fair oval face projected a Pre-Raphaelite’s very idea of a lovely Celtic princess. This led half-drunk me to outline the story of another girl who had also looked like a lovely Celtic princess, and who had died so tragically at thirteen from a heart broken by abusive love.
“The poor little thing,” said Sian. “How was it that you were so close to her story?”
“She was the baby sister of my girlfriend back in Canada.”
“Is her sister still your girlfriend? I mean now that you’re so far away?”
“Yes.”
“Oh,” said Sian and dried her eyes.
The previous spring, Rosie and my parents had seen me off from St. John’s airport. Before boarding the plane for Heathrow, I’d drawn Rosie aside and said, “Now that I’m leaving, I don’t want to go.”
“I’ll really miss you too, but three months won’t be long going by.”
I hugged her. “Stay safe and sound while I’m gone.”
“I will. And you come back safe and sound, and we’ll begin again, everything better than ever.”
“I’ll write you from everywhere I go. I’d better say goodbye to Mom and Dad and get through security. See you in a few months, my love.”
Rosie had raised a clenched fist and whispered fervently as we’d come together for a kiss, “August in St. John’s!”
But now it was October in London, and if Sian got her way, I wouldn’t be spending Christmas in St. John’s, either. She was so persistently trying to sign me up for the Oxford, Cambridge, and London University student cruise up the Nile over the Christmas vacation, I wondered aloud to Morton if she was competing for a prize for highest ticket sales.
“She has not been killing herself trying to sell me a ticket, old boy.”
But I had made a fresh commitment to Rosie that I was returning home in December, and my intention of doing so was absolutely firm. Apart from all else, I needed to find out in her presence how I truly felt about her. During my summer of travel I’d discovered I was not the least bit lonely or at all homesick. I did miss Rosie, but it seemed to consist simply of regret that she wasn’t with me to see this or that sight. I wondered sincerely more than once if I could not go on indefinitely without ever seeing her again. Moreover, temptations arose to be untrue to her.
One morning in Florence, at a student hostel not far from Il Duomo, I’d fallen in with two girls from Norway travelling Europe together. Sigrid and Ingrid. That night, having toured the usual museums all day and dined together in the piazza, Sigrid—Siggy by now—knocked on my bedroom door to say she had to settle an argument with Ingrid. I let her in and she told me that both girls regarded the body on Michelangelo’s David as super, but Ingrid thought Tom’s body would turn out on close examination to be just as nice as the statue’s, not to mention warmer. Siggy was less sure, she said, and had undertaken to check Ingrid’s hypothesis out for her. She pulled the long dress off over her head, her single garment, and to show I bore her no resentment over her doubts, I compared her body favourably to that of Botticelli’s Venus on the clamshell, feeling a joyful surge of virility and lust far removed from the numbness I had felt during the last year at home. Siggy straddled me, undid my jeans, and tried to pull down my underwear. Reluctantly, I resisted, explaining I had a loved one back home I was determined to remain faithful to. Siggy laughed, “Silly Tom, we all have a loved one back home we’re determined to remain faithful to,” and tried again. But I twisted away, and Sigrid rose with a playful slap at t
he distended front of my underwear, saying with a rueful shake of her head, “Such a waste,” and pulled on her dress, kissed me, and left. I passed the time before sleep writing Rosie a long letter, describing the sights since I’d written her from Monaco and finishing it off with my love. In the morning there was no regret in me. I knew how lousy I’d be feeling now if I’d given in to lust with Siggy.
At the poste restante in Rome, a letter was waiting from Rosie. Amidst the details of her daily life and her mother’s condition and the invaluable friendship and help of my own mother, was a reference to Moose, the object of my attempted murder. Rosie thought the development promising, but I considered it alarming. She had met Brent by chance at the supermarket, she wrote, and he had mentioned that he and Cory Mercer were good friends again, so much so that Brent had taken Cory into a spare room in his house to help him get back on his feet. Brent hadn’t said a word to her about the incident in the bar, and she hadn’t pursued it then, but she’d try to find out more about his renewed relationship with Cory.
That paragraph of the letter, read on the Spanish steps surrounded by chattering, laughing students, had brought back the words of Mr. Barry, my lawyer: “Europe? Splendid idea. The farther you are away from this sword of Damocles hanging over your head, the better. But don’t spread it around. Just go. If the police find out beforehand, it may galvanize them into some untoward action like obtaining a court order to confiscate your passport to keep you in the jurisdiction as a person of interest. Remain in constant contact with home so that you can return forthwith if proceedings are commenced against you. Meanwhile, I’ll endeavour to wiggle and squirm you out of this mess, like the other, by the skin of your teeth.”