Rosie O'Dell

PRAISE FOR

“[One of] three of this year's most controversial and talked about political
books.”

— 
THE HOUSE
, CBC RADIO

“An exciting read.” — 
NEWFOUNDLAND QUARTERLY

“Interesting book about a successful Canadian politician . . .”

— 
GLOBE AND MAIL

“Captivating. [Bill Rowe] spares no punches.” — 
THE COMPASS

“A fascinating and frequently funny read.” — 
DOWNHOME
MAGAZINE

“Rowe's Ottawa chronicle is absorbing, humorous.” — 
THE TELEGRAM

“Bill Rowe has a lot to say. There are dozens of interesting stories told, and
comments passed on . . .”— 
THE NORTHEAST AVALON TIMES

“Bill Rowe's
Danny Williams: The War with Ottawa
is an enjoyable
read.”

— TIM POWERS

“The most interesting political book to be released in Canada in some time . .
.”

— 
THE BUSINESS POST

“Rowe has a more humanistic side to politics. It is as if a citizen managed to
be a fly on the wall while Danny Williams fought.” — 
CURRENT
MAGAZINE

“An eye-opening, often hilariously funny, account of life among Ottawa power
brokers and civil servants.” — 
CANADIAN LAWYER
MAGAZINE

“I quickly realized that this was not going to be a dry political
memoir. To the contrary, not only is the book interesting and revealing of this
contentious time, it is very funny in places.” — 
THE CHRONICLE
HERALD

“Written with the knowledge and insight that only an insider could possess,
this book (subtitled ‘The Inside Story of a Hired Gun') is a timely reminder of
the duplicity of far too many of our elected leaders—no matter what their
political stripe.” — 
ATLANTIC BOOKS TODAY

PRAISE FOR

“A brisk read and a fine book to have in your personal library.”

— 
THE COMPASS

“Like any columnist worth his salt Rowe is provocative and a number of the
columns deal with topics whose lessons are still relevant.”

— 
NEWFOUNDLAND QUARTERLY

“[Rowe] does it all, of course, with his usual blend of droll good humour and
common sense.” — 
GLOBE AND MAIL

“Rowe's columns on Williams's persona, bellicose manner and political antics
truly shine. What Danny Should Do in the Crab War? (May 7, 2005) puts a
delightful Shakespearian twist on Williams's strategic positioning; Is Danny a
Dictator? (June 25, 2005) will stand as a classic.” — 
THE CHRONICLE
HERALD

“With a mind – and a pen – as sharp as a paper cut, the elegant, affable Rowe
remains Newfoundland's literary agent provocateur, provoking, teasing, sometimes
coddling his subjects, but all the time digging towards truths that cause
discomfort for the province's Who's Who and everyman alike.” — 
THE BUSINESS
POST

Also by Bill Rowe

DANNY WILLIAMS, PLEASE COME BACK

DANNY WILLIAMS: THE WAR WITH OTTAWA

IS THAT YOU, BILL?

THE TEMPTATION OF VICTOR GALANTI

CLAPP'S ROCK

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Rowe, William N. (William Neil), 1942-

Rosie O’Dell: a novel / Bill Rowe.

Electronic monograph.

Issued also in print format.

ISBN 978-1-77117-021-5 (EPUB).--ISBN 978-1-77117-022-2 (Kindle).--

ISBN 978-1-77117-023-9 (PDF)

I. Title.

PS8585.O8955R68 2012       C813’.54       C2012-905016-4

© 2012 by Bill Rowe

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
. No part of the work covered by the
copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic,
electronic or mechanical—without the written permission of the publisher. Any
request for photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and
retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed to Access
Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 800,
Toronto, ON M5E 1E5. This applies to classroom use as well.

Cover Design: Adam Freake

Cover photo by Peter Hanes

Edited by Annamarie Beckel

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious.

Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Pennywell Books is an imprint of Flanker Press.

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PO B
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16 15 14 13 12     1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing
activities; the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested
$24.3 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada; the Government of
Newfoundland and Labrador, Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation.

When we were students, a young woman I cherished confided to me that, at twelve
years old, she had been the “willing” sexual partner of a man linked to her
family by marriage. The resulting quagmire of suppressed emotions—her guilt for
betraying a family member, her festering sense of stolen innocence, her bitter
hatred, her obsession with revenge—still tortured her, she told me, and she
would need all my help to regain her wholeness and make sound decisions. I found
myself in an emotional morass deeper than my emotional strength. Our
relationship did not survive. Her story has haunted me all my life. The places,
characters, and events herein are fictional, but her experience and its
consequences caused this novel.

Yet have I something in me dangerous

Which let thy wisdom fear.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
,
Hamlet

“
ROSIE O’DELL, GO BACK
to hell,” a poet had penned on the
washroom wall. Beneath that rhyming couplet, a more prosaic hand had scrawled,
“And take Tommy, your little dildo on feet, with you.”

The aforesaid Tommy would be me. I was standing there in the boys’ lavatory
beside some smirking fellow students. They scanned my face for vexation or hurt
over the portrayal of my Rosie as lower than angelic and our love as less than
sublime. But I stayed stoic. I’d endured worse before and, moreover, I knew in
my heart there was truth in this writing on the toilet wall. Rosie was as good a
devil as she was an angel, and I was a willing mate in both her incarnations.
Those were the days when together we inflicted our brutal adolescent revenge on
her childhood predator, and we knew our love could never end…

THAT REMEMBRANCE CAME BACK
today, decades into the future when
all had been lost and long hopeless between us. But unlike my other random
memories of Rosie—images of our ardent love that still flashed in my head every
day and promptly evaporated—that one remained lodged there and made me ponder
our teenage trauma and its straight-line connection over the years to the
present catastrophe of my life.

I was still in that fog of memory and reflection on this sunny summer day when
I answered the knock on my front door. I opened it and through the doorway, in
the soft air and the gentle tree-dappled sunlight, I beheld an astonishing
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 now as she had back then. It took me a
moment to accept that she was indeed there in front of me, my exquisite Rosie
O’Dell.

She had stepped back on the ochre bricks and was leaning towards a former
wife’s rhododendron bush, touching a luxuriant deep-pink bloom with four spread
fingers. She was in jeans and blouse, not body-hugging, but close-fitting
enough, as had always been her wont, to confirm the splendid construction
beneath, and her posture had the effect of accentuating her comely rump. I heard
in my head the remark from her high school coach that got him suspended: “Rosie
O’Dell is such a good athlete because she’s high-assed like a coloured girl.” I
felt in this moment as if I’d been transported back over the decades to that
day.

Rosie turned her face away from the rhododendron now and fixed those eyes on
mine, smiling at me, or maybe at my startled lurch backwards. I felt the normal
court-hardened calm leaving my face while my heart bounced about my rib cage as
if I was that lovestruck and horny stripling again. What was she doing here? Was
she here to say that she had forgiven my thoughtless, insensitive, callous
behaviour, was finally accepting my apologies, and wanted to take up again where
we had left off? Wait now. What the hell was I blithering on about? The woman
was long married. A broad deep gulf of time and experience divided us. There was
no hope of that. Yet, Jesus, Jesus, I cannot lie: the hope rose in me.

“Hello, Tom,” she said as she turned and walked my way. “It’s me.”

“I know,” I murmured. If an intelligent designer in the universe was
responsible for engineering those hips and thighs to move like that, he ought to
be taken out and bloody-well shot. “Hi, Rosie. I was just thinking about
you.”

“What? My goodness, that’s an amazing coincidence after all this time.”

Why hold back? “Not as amazing as it seems. I think about you every day.”

“Oh God, Tommy, is that still true?” She could have added, “after what you
did?” But she only said, “Well, you’ve got one up on me there. You only pop into
my
head four or five times a week.”

We smiled at that and I said, “Besides, as you used to say, there are no
coincidences, only cosmic jokes.”

“I was so wise when I was fifteen,” she said. “What the hell happened to it?”
She rested her hand on my arm and pecked my cheek with her lips, her eyes wide
open. She was examining me up close. And up close herself,
she
did not, in fact, look the same as back then. There were fine lines of maturity
on her face and neck which made her look even more attractive and intelligent
now than in her adorable and brilliant youth. My arms encircled her waist on
their own and hugged, the action entering an old accustomed groove, as it used
to do ten times a day over a thousand days, when she would melt into my embrace
and push her pelvis and breasts against me the way she knew I liked, cockteasing
me silly for later. However, she still knew how to destroy a mood too. Today she
pulled her head and shoulders and hips back, studied my face for a couple of
seconds—it felt flushed and tense—and said with a playful grin but way too loud:
“Don’t look so anxious, Tommy. You’d swear we were planning to kill
someone.”

My arms dropped right off her, and my eyes swept up and down the sidewalk
nearby. Not a soul. But still an old dread swept through me with the same urge
to bolt that I’d had three decades ago. I took a step back, wanting to hiss,
“Shut up, Rosie, for Christ’s sake.” Instead I mumbled gently, “That’s risky.
Someone might hear you.”

“Sorry, I was just trying to break the ice with a little foolishness—Tom,
there’s no one around to hear anything.”

“There could have been someone right behind me in the house.” I pulled the door
shut for emphasis.

“There’s no one in your house but you.”

“Huh? What have you been doing, Rosie, spying on my place of residence?”

“Yes. And your law office. I’ve been secretly observing your habits and mode of
life.”

“What? How long have you been in town?”

“Oh—eight days? This being Saturday afternoon, I’d say you’re on your way to
visit your mother at Agnes Pratt Home.”

“You know, you could have telephoned or dropped by when you first got here. You
didn’t have to go undercover for a week.”

“Yeah, I know. I was a bit timid about approaching.”

“That doesn’t sound like the Rosie O’Dell we all knew and loved.”

“Well, there’s something else too. I wanted to have a private talk with you
about a problem. I had to steel myself to it. It’s kind of delicate. I had to
see what was going on in your life before I asked. I need your help on an
informal basis if possible.”

This was starting to sound hazardous to health and sanity. I’d moseyed onto the
minefield of informally helping Rosie on a delicate problem once
before. That was all I needed now on top of everything else. “Where’s the
hubby?” I asked. “Did he come back with you?”

“Yes. But I need to talk to you before you and he get together.”

I pretended to hesitate before responding in absurd professional tones: “By all
means, telephone my office at your first opportunity on Monday and I’ll
endeavour to grant you an appointment at our earliest mutual convenience wherein
we can discuss your area of concern and ascertain whether it would be
appropriate for me to become involved on your behalf.”

Rosie laughed. “That was impressive. I feel easier about everything
already.”

“Oh, a little sarcasm, now, is it?” I laughed too. “Didn’t I tell you back in
high school that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit?”

“Yes, and I said that when I’m with you I couldn’t help it. I don’t suppose it
had something to do with the quality of my audience—no-o-o.”

We both laughed again, gazing straight into each other’s faces, just as we used
to do back in the days of wonder and awe. “You’re looking great, Rosie. You
haven’t changed a bit.”

“You too, Tom. Still the handsomest guy in grade ten. A few more cute laugh
lines, that’s all.”

“I don’t know where the hell they came from. Because I can assure
you—
nothing
has been that funny.” We giggled once more but I had to
look away. I’d felt a tear, maybe of laughter but more likely of loss, welling
in my eye.

And talk that day we did, she and I and then her husband and I. We talked the
afternoon away, dovetailing their dire need for help with a possible solution to
my desperate money problem. But that night alone, as I contemplated the nasty
scheme they’d pitched for unblocking our access to some riches and brooded on
reviving her love for me, both notions grew in my mind as more and more prone to
disaster. I forced myself to recall hard-headedly, not romantically, not
mushily, but ruthlessly, how dangerously rash our love used to make me. And I
had to remember without soppy music in the background what she and I had been
truly like together…

I SAW HER GLOWERING
at me in defiance when we were youngsters. I
had just remarked how weird it was that her father’s first name was a girl’s
name,
Joyce
. “Daddy is not named after a girl,” she was saying to me.
“Daddy is named after the grooviest writer in the world, James Augustine
Aloysius Joyce. See? You little know-all. A man, not a girl. Everyone knows
the great James Joyce was a man except you. You never know
anything. I bet you don’t even know Daddy is a famous poet?”

“Yes, I do. Because I’m a poet too. Just listen: ‘Do your balls hang low? Do
they wobble to and fro? Can you tie them in a knot? Can you tie them in a bow?
Can you—’”

“Oh don’t be so dirty all the time, Tommy. And you’re saying it all wrong
anyway. It’s ‘Do your
boobs
hang low?’ Not ‘balls.’ God! You weren’t so
smart-alecky at soccer last week when Brent made your nose bleed. I heard that
everybody was reciting
their
favourite poem, ‘Tommy, Tommy, wants his
mommy, ’ because you turned into a little crybaby.”

“They were not. And that was an accident. Brent is my best friend. You can’t
stop your eyes from watering when you get it in the nose.” I dearly wanted to
give it to her in the nose, but too short an interval had gone by since the last
time our mothers had come running in to pull us off each other. I looked away
from her.

She leaned in front of me and stared me full in the face. “You’re not going
sooky baby again, are you? Because I’ll have to recite that poem again, ‘Tommy,
Tommy, needs his mommy.’” She kept staring into my eyes with that tormenting
saucy face on her.

“I am not going sooky baby,” I yelled, feeling the giveaway tears of rage
forming, and I roundhoused a punch to her stomach which she evaded with an
infuriating quick twist, and ten seconds later when our mothers rushed in again
to quell the mayhem, Rosie was astride my chest and had all but succeeded in
pinning my hands back to the floor.

My mother and Rosie’s mother Nina were great buddies from their university
days, and that’s what used to place me in the O’Dell house often. Mr. Joyce
O’Dell always made a point of chatting with me when he was home and I felt open
and comfortable with him. One day when he was in the kitchen with Rosie and her
younger sister, I said, “You must be awful disappointed to have only two
daughters and no son.”

He gave his chuckle and put his arm around my shoulders, but before he could
reply, Rosie butted right in as usual: “What’s wrong with having two daughters
and no son? You should ask your own father why he only has one son and no one
else. Ask him if it’s because he gets stomach sick at the thought of more of the
same.”

Mr. O’Dell coughed a couple of times and said gravely, “You’re all priceless,
all three of you. Any parent would feel blessed to have either one of you.” He
put his other arm around Rosie and squeezed us both. Then
he
walked out of the kitchen, shoulders shaking, probably angry, I figured, despite
having hugged her, at his daughter’s rudeness. But he looked back and I saw his
eyes meeting Rosie’s. She was grinning gleefully and he was in fact shaking in
laughter. A bizarre pang of jealousy went through me. These two were best
friends in a conspiracy, and I was the outsider.

At home that evening, I asked Dad, “Was it because you didn’t want any more
like me that you and Mom didn’t have any more kids?”

“My God, we would have loved to have two or three more like you,” said Dad,
dropping the
Evening Telegram
in his lap in shock. And he explained that
Mom had had a miscarriage a year after I was born and had been advised that it
would be too risky to her health to try to have any more children. “We were very
lucky to have you.” He frowned. “How come you’re asking about all that right
now, my man?”

“I was just wondering.”

That night in bed I heard sharp words between Dad and Mom downstairs when they
thought I was asleep. My mother’s voice, raised unusually high, had awakened me:
“Joe, you’ve
got
to go with me to Nina’s birthday party for heaven’s
sake.”

Dad growled back, “I’m not going, I said. That husband of hers has got their
daughter poisoning our son’s mind with anxiety over being an only child
now.”

“Oh that’s just silly, my love. They’re two smart little kids who dream that
stuff up themselves to try to one-up each other.”

“No nine-year-old is that smart. Or that asinine. You know damn well where she
gets it. I’m having nothing else to do with that sick prick.”

“How did this animosity start between you and Joyce O’Dell anyway? Didn’t you
start it by calling him our prize-winning poet of modern porn?”

“What the hell are you talking about, Gladys? I never said a thing about his
perverted poetry till he called me a bean-counter with an adding machine’s
concept of literature.”