by Bill Rowe
I often asked myself afterwards why I was so indifferent and uncaring, negligent, even, about myself. These traits applied to relationships—I couldn’t be bothered, essentially, to make the effort to develop a long-term loving connection with a woman. It was all short-term sexual flash. I had no interest in developing male friendships, being satisfied to drop into the Ship Inn or the Duke pub every second Friday or so for an hour after work for a beer and a random chat with acquaintances I would run into. And although I would force myself to attend assiduously to the needs of clients, I had no real interest in the practice of law or the scutwork required to run a law firm. Basically, it was forced labour with absolutely no meaning for me outside paying my electricity bill and putting essential foodstuffs in the fridge. I wrapped up my self-analysis with the conclusion that what Rosie and I had been through together as teenagers, and then my abandonment of her, had removed from my psyche or my soul whatever was required of a human being to see beyond the absolute futility of everything. I simply did not care about anything. I performed at a high, but self-coerced, personal level when it came to paying attention to my aging parents, especially my poor mother, and I performed at a high, but unloved, professional level when it came to the needs of my clients. But that was it. For the rest, I just could not see the point. Although I could force myself to perform, I could not force myself to feel anything or to give a good goddamn about what else was happening around me. Therefore, I was slow to see that my partner was going mad.
Ed Howlett had received, like all the rest of us in the human race, one of those early scam letters with an urgent plea for help to move ill-gotten gains out of some godforsaken country. In his case, the letter came from the widow of a highly placed minister in the Ugandan government. She had obtained my partner’s name, she wrote, by diligent research into skilled lawyers with a profound knowledge of criminal law in Canada, the most reputable and stable member of the British Commonwealth, which, like Uganda and neighbouring Kenya, had a background in the English common law. Her husband, she wrote, had received wholly legitimate gifts by way of campaign funds during his tenure of office, which amounted to some seventeen million dollars. Before he died, unfortunately, he failed to transfer the funds to her or to her thirty-seven-year-old son, who wished to avail himself of the money for his own political career. And now the legitimacy of the funds was being questioned. The funds were in a bank in Kenya, another member of the commonwealth. She wanted my partner, Ed Howlett, to attend to all the legal work and to other delicate transactions. There would be a need to compensate some officials on both sides of the border, for example. That would amount to several hundred thousand dollars. She and her son could raise two hundred thousand. The lawyer who helped them would need to have access to no more than a hundred thousand more. When the funds were recovered and moved back under the control of herself and her lawyer, the lawyer, my partner Ed, would receive a contingency fee of one-third of the funds, or approximately five million dollars clear, after all expenses.
I became aware of this only when I got back from a two-week vacation in London and went to check on a real estate transaction for a client who had purchased a four hundred thousand dollar house. I discovered that neither the three hundred thousand dollar mortgage funds from the bank, nor the client’s equity of one hundred thousand, were in the firm’s trust fund and that the closing, which my partner was supposed to attend to three days before, had not taken place. Instead, the four hundred thousand dollars had been transferred to our operating account and from there to a bank in Kenya, and my partner had gone AWOL.
The police tracked his air flights from St. John’s to Paris to Nairobi. In his lunacy he had avoided the better flight through London for fear of bumping into me at Heathrow. It took a week for the police in the Kenyan capital to zero in on this white man with no identification papers wandering around, beaten, apparently mugged, and babbling incoherently. A hotel notified the police of a briefcase, left in a room which had been rented by Ed Howlett, containing a file detailing my partner’s activities following receipt of the nice Ugandan widow’s letter.
My partner had now been in the Waterford Hospital for mental and nervous diseases in St. John’s undergoing tests for a month to ascertain if he was fit to stand trial. He wasn’t. The Law Society insurance fund was pursuing me for the nearly one-half million dollar payout they’d been obliged to make to the bank, and to my bilked client, and for expenses. Didn’t I see something like this coming, they asked me, especially with my familiarity with the symptoms of mental illness presented by my own mother? No, I replied, I did not. Well, you should have, legally as well as morally, they countered, and they were going to have their money back. Every damned cent of it.
That was my deserved dismal state when the undeserved miracle I was waiting for happened, finally, in its own good time.
Chapter 17
ON THIS SUNNY, WARM summer day, which I’d been oblivious of till now, I went to answer the knock on my front door, enveloped in a fog of thought about the writing on the wall of the school toilets: “Rosie O’Dell, go back to hell.” “And take Tommy, your little dildo on feet, with you.” I was reflecting half upon our teenage psychic traumas together and half on the current catastrophe of my life, and pondering a direct straight-line cause-and-effect connection between the two when I opened the door. Through the doorway, in the soft air and the gentle tree-dappled sunlight, I beheld a vision of my first and last love herself. Naturally, I could not at once believe the sight. She had to be an apparition. I hadn’t seen the woman in thirty years, and she looked the same as she had back then. It took me a moment to accept the truth that she was, indeed, right there before me, my exquisite Rosie O’Dell.
And within seconds I’d confirmed to myself my love for her, and for her beauty and intelligence, even more appealing to me now in their maturity. Our exchange of mild sarcastic banter, reminiscent of our adolescence, revealed that we still thought about each other often after all these years and that she had been spying on me here for over a week. She’d been gearing herself up to talking to me about a problem she needed my help on, she said. Her hubby had come back with her.
I told her we could talk in the house now if she’d like, but she replied, “How about after we go and see your mother?”
“We? I don’t know if you want to do that, Rosie. I should tell you that she has severe mental deterioration. I’d be very surprised if she even recognizes you. And God knows what she’ll remember from long ago when I mention your name.”
“I have to go anyway, whether with you or by myself. I promised my mother I would.”
“Didn’t your mother die years ago? Up on the mainland somewhere?” I knew exactly where and when. “Don’t I recall seeing a local death notice in the Telegram?” I had a clipping of it in my files.
“Nine years ago. She was living with us in Vancouver by then. She made me promise I’d go and see your mother for her if I ever got back here. She kept talking about what great friends they were. This is the first time I’ve been back since.”
“Great friends? My memory differs slightly. I seem to recall that my mother resented her for letting you and your sister down so badly.” Right away I regretted saying that. Anguish flitted across Rosie’s face at the memory of her little sister. I’d seen it so many times long ago, I should have known better.
“My mother only let herself remember the friendship they had before all that, when my father was still alive.”
“Right. Okay then, Rosie, your wish is my command. I’ll get my keys.” I grabbed them off the little table in the hall and came out again. “Let’s go to the cognitive dysfunction ward and kick some butt.” I was trying to be nonchalant and breezy now, and failing piteously.
But Rosie was a still good sport. She shook her head at me with a grin, feigning censure of my boyish incorrigibility. We walked over to my seven-year-old BMW and I held the car door open for her. “Nice car,” she said. “Vintage.”
“Again wi
th the sarcasm.” But getting aboard, I thanked heaven that I’d had the sense to buy out the residual on this car three years ago rather than leasing that new one I coveted. With the recession and my partner’s fraud hitting me so hard, the new fancy car would probably be facing repossession now for default on the monthly payments.
Settling in our seats, I asked, “What hotel are you staying at?”
“We’re not. We’re staying at his father’s house.”
I drove out onto the street. “Really? I thought he and the old guy were on the outs. Is that what you two are doing back here now, after all this time, effecting a reconciliation?”
“His father was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis about a year ago. Barring a lung transplant—highly unlikely—the doctors figure he’s got a year left. We’re back here to help him get through to the end. By the way, we’re saying publicly that he’s got emphysema, serious but manageable. He doesn’t want a death watch.”
Or crowds dancing in the street outside his sickroom window. The old prick. It was high time he croaked and left the world a better place. “I’m sorry to hear that. It’s not a very pleasant way for anyone to go, basically suffocating to death slowly.” She turned and looked right at me. I swear she glanced down at my mouth to see if I was suppressing a schadenfreude smirk. “How old is he, Rosie, seventy-five?”
“Seventy-three.”
“That’s young to die these days, especially with his money. And the last time I saw him, a year ago, admittedly at a good distance, he looked as healthy as a horse. I hope this doesn’t sound too brutal, but at least—”
“We won’t start holding back on the brutal at this late stage.”
“Okay. At least you two stand to come in for a lot of money much sooner than expected.” Rosie didn’t respond. She stared out her side window. I added, “Unless he’s leaving it all to a fascist think tank or a Las Vegas call girl or something.”
“Good guesses—but no, neither of those. It’s a bit tangled and snarly. But you’re zeroing in on what I need to talk to you about.”
“Ah, any reason why hubsy is not in on our mysterious discussion?”
“It’s his idea that I talk to you first this afternoon, and if you’re interested, the three of us can get together.” She put her hand on my arm. “I’m a very loyal wife, you should know, no matter what ancient inner urges I might harbour.” She smiled at me with deliberately exaggerated sweetness. “And he’s really looking forward to seeing you, apart from all this. You know he always thought you were great.”
“Jesus, I take it he’s heard of the telephone. He’s only been here a week.”
“You’ll understand later. You won’t be so hard on him then.”
“When are you going back to Vancouver—no—where is it you live now?”
“New Mexico. Between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. We’re not going back. We’re staying here, at least for a while.”
So much for his always wanting to stay in Canada. Or was that only Vancouver when Rosie happened to be there? “Is he taking over the old man’s business or something? He told me years ago that he couldn’t, quote, ‘stand the thought of being in business with the effing old bastard.’”
“Their animosity is mostly papered over now. They made a deal. But it’s hit a snag on our end and might come unravelled.”
I pulled the car in at the nursing home. We had driven across town and neither of us had used Brent’s name. “This has certainly got my curiosity piqued. We can talk here now, if you like. We don’t have to go in right away, or even today, for that matter.”
“Let’s get this over with, Tom. It’s one of Mother’s last wishes, and it’ll be the last nail for me in that coffin full of shitty memories.”
“Okay. Dad’ll be in there. He spends nearly every waking hour with her.”
“Uncle Joe. That’s one good thing I remember—how much Uncle Joe and Aunt Gladys loved each other and supported each other through everything. How come that gene didn’t get passed on? Just joking.”
I chuckled at the question. “Yeah, they certainly did. And just to show how compassionate Mother Nature is, Dad was the first casualty when Mom stopped recognizing people. A couple of months after we brought her here, she came up to me with Dad by her side and said, ‘Tom, this place is full of crazies. Please tell this pest to stop saying he’s my husband. I never married that old fart.’”
“Your poor father,” Rosie said. “Her mind was back to when they were young and beautiful.”
“Dad deludes himself that she’s only joking when she says something like that. You know what he bases it on? The first week she was in the home here, he and I were sitting in her room, while she was outside issuing orders to the nurses at the desk. He said to me, ‘If I ever start to get like your mother, please shoot me.’ Then we realized Mom was back standing in the door listening to him. She had heard every word. He was absolutely mortified. But Mom burst out laughing, whoops of laughter, just like when she and your mother and the other women would be playing one of their poker games when we were kids—big belly laughs coming out of her at the idea that someone would rather be shot than end up like her. Dad uses that to convince himself that her sense of humour is still intact.”
“He did make her laugh,” said Rosie, “and that’s not nothing in this life. Does she recognize you at all now?”
“I was the last to go. A few weeks ago we took her out for a drive up Signal Hill and she said to me, ‘You used to love to walk up here to Cabot Tower and Ladies Lookout when you were young.’ And I said, ‘Yes I did, Mom, you have a great memory.’ Then the next minute she was staring at me and saying, ‘You’re going to find this funny, Tom, but I don’t know who the hell you are.’”
“She could call you by name, but she didn’t know who you were. Oh my.”
“Even before that, she had stopped recognizing herself. She’d be standing in front of the mirror putting on her lipstick, and she’d say, ‘Give that back to me, that’s mine.’ And she’d complain to everyone that a woman had stolen her lipstick from her. When the nurses would ask her who, she’d say she didn’t know, some strange woman. She recognized the tube of lipstick in the mirror as her own, but she wasn’t able to recognize her own face.”
“How long did it take for her to reach that stage? When did it start?”
“About two years ago, so you’d notice. She was seventy-one.”
“It’s not what you’d call early onset, is it, but it still seems kind of young.”
“Goddamn scary. If it’s genetic, I’ve got about twenty years left. I’d better get moving.”
“And look at me. My mother died when she was sixty-four. She abused herself with prescription drugs, of course, but God only knows what’s in my DNA along those lines. And Dad with the booze. Jeez.”
“I’d say if you’ve reached this point unscathed, after what you survived, you’re okay there.”
“What we survived, you and I—two cute little idiots. But it does go to show that you have to grab life while you can, before it’s too late.”
“No argument from me.”
Rosie put her hand on mine again. “Let’s go into the cognitively challenged ward and get our intellectual butts kicked.” How could I not love this woman?
We walked into the nursing home and went to the wing with the locked doors. I buzzed us in, said hello to the nurse at the desk, and looked around for Mom. We soon encountered her. She was ambling along arm in arm with a male resident who looked eighty-five, wizened and halting and about a foot shorter than her. Twenty feet behind them, hiding his misery except about the eyes, walked my father. Mom was listening intently to the man on her arm. Abruptly, she cut him short: “I certainly will not go to bed with you. I wouldn’t dream of going to bed with anyone but my husband.” She flung his arm away and stalked off in a huff.
Rosie and I caught each other’s eye and then transferred our smiles to Dad as he came up. He was startled to see Rosie, and then gushy with de
light. Rosie told him she had to say hello to Auntie Gladys and left to go after her. Dad and I trailed behind. She caught up with Mom down the corridor and walked beside her, taking her hand. “Hello, Auntie Gladys,” she said, “remember me? I’m Rosie O’Dell, Nina’s daughter. Nina asked me to bring you her love.”
Mom stopped and looked at her blankly. “I am pleased to meet you, my dear,” she said, looking around. “Where is Nina? It’s her turn this Wednesday night.”
“She passed away a few years ago, but her last thoughts were of you.”
“My goodness, this is getting exceedingly complicated. Well, nice meeting you, my dear.” She began to walk on. But then she stopped again and turned back and said, “Rosie O’Dell? Yes, I know Rosie really well. She’s the one who killed her father.”
Before Rosie could speak, I jumped in. I’d been expecting something spooky. “No, Mom. Rosie didn’t kill her father. That’s not true. You shouldn’t say that ever again.”
Mom grew visibly angry and raised her voice. “Well, I’m only going by what Joe told me, and my own husband wouldn’t lie to me. Sure, my son was tangled up in it too.”
Dad’s face was bright red and brackish-looking with sweat. “I didn’t tell you that, Gladys. You must have misund—”
“Who the fuck are you, butting in every time I turn around?” shouted Mom. “I didn’t say you told me. I said Joe, my husband, told me.”
A female nurse and a male orderly were walking fast towards us. Rosie put her arm around Mom and said, “It’s okay, Auntie Gladys. I’m Rosie. That was nothing.”