Rosie O'Dell (32 page)

“Yes, she mentioned that and I advised against it. I think it would be better
for all concerned if she stayed with Suzy till the trial is over. Getting back
to the strain Rosie will be under if we go ahead, his lawyer will try to turn
her into a liar or a demented person. He will try to muddy the waters with a
pseudo-scientific expert witness on the fallibility of pubescent memory and the
latest fads in false memory syndrome. Although no names will be made public that
can identify Rosie as the complainant, the
trial itself will be
public and word of mouth will connect her to the news reports of the testimony,
especially among people who already know her, in school for instance. My point
is that she is going to need all the help and support that you and Suzy and your
mother and I can provide her with to get through this. She has great love for
you, Tom, and great consideration for your feelings. If she thought that
anything to come out at a trial would cause intolerable hurt to you, I don’t
think she would proceed with it. Similarly, if during the trial she believed
that anything she had to say about what happened to her was unbearable to you,
it would undermine her determination and her strength. So, I think she should
divulge all the details to you before we go any further. She is frankly not
eager to do that, but I have to know how strong you will be on this.”

“I am not eager to make her relive any of it, either. She has to do that at the
trial, and I think that’s enough without forcing her to do it with me as well,
and unnecessarily.”

“Well, I have to know that you will not collapse on us at crucial moments. I
need your commitment and your promise, your
guarantee
, really, that no
matter what you hear about Rosie, about what she did or had done to her, you
will stay strong and supportive of her throughout a long nightmarish
trial.”

Now it was my turn to gaze coolly at Lucy Barrett. Her presumption that I might
weaken irritated me. This woman obviously had no idea of the strength of my
love. “Ms. Barrett,” I asserted testily. “You need have no misgivings on that
score. You have my commitment, my promise, my absolute guarantee, that I will
support and solace Rosie throughout this process to its very culmination.” A
cocky, clever little fifteen-year-old with a vocabulary bigger than his brain.
No wonder she seemed to suppress a grin.

ENDLESS MONTHS WENT BY
before the case against Rothesay finally
went to trial. Rosie and I were well past our sixteenth birthdays. The
preparation and the waiting disrupted everything in our lives. Someone actually
beat Rosie in an indoor tennis tournament. Her coach blamed her lack of focus
and her cutback on practice time. I missed a swim meet in Halifax because, I
told the team, I was ill, but it was really because I knew I’d probably come
third or fourth in the hundred metre owing to lack of aerobic
conditioning.

Rosie and I sat together late into the night at my place, trying to study, but
mostly talking or trancing or watching repeats on television. Almost
every conversation would ultimately and inexorably lead to
Nina. How could her mother side with Rothesay? Why didn’t she believe her own
daughter, especially with the terrible illumination of Pagan’s suicide? Her
mother’s abandonment—her betrayal—seemed to have frozen Rosie’s affections and
desires. We hardly ever made love.

THE FIRST MORNING OF
the trial, the crowd in the
lobby of the Supreme Court consisted mainly of men growling their
disappointment. I pushed through them towards the door marked Courtroom Number
One. Rosie and Suzy followed close behind. A man near the door said to us, “No
sense going in there, the seats are all gone.” I opened the door and ushered the
two girls through. “Shag that!” I heard the man say. “That must’ve been her and
I never got a good look.”

The spectators in the packed galleries were as quiet as worshippers in church.
At a table near the front, studying papers and looking sharp in her lawyer’s
duds, stood Lucy Barrett. She noticed us at once, greeted us, and led us to our
reserved seats. Sitting down, before taking Rosie’s hand I wiped my palm on my
thigh. I needn’t have bothered. Hers was sweatier than mine. This courtroom was
one intimidating place.

All along, despite my father’s attitude upon learning Rosie was pressing
charges, I’d been confident the jury would accept her story. “Having cajoled me
into that debacle in London against my better judgment,” I’d heard Dad say to
Mom downstairs, “I would have thought they’d do me the elementary courtesy of
seeking my advice first. Surely they don’t think she can actually win. That’s
the problem with this TV generation. They all believe from watching lawyer shows
that goodness, justice, and love always win out in the end. They’ll find out
that in real life, up against a real psychopath, it’s more likely that evil,
injustice, and hate will win out in the end.” I could just see him shaking his
head at the moronism rampant around him.

Then, last night I had heard a whispered bellow out of him from their bedroom.
“I will not shush, Gladys. I see disaster looming here. My Jesus, Rothesay
already has her own mother convinced he was framed in England. What are you and
I going to come out of this looking like?” I had restrained myself from marching
out and barging in and telling him to shut the Christ up and stop being such a
defeatist. But this morning in Courtroom Number One I didn’t feel so powerfully
certain that my father was a spineless wimp.

To keep myself from transmitting anxiety to Rosie, I studied the me
dia table, crammed with reporters writing intently, their eyes
darting from their notebooks to Rosie, Suzy, myself, and Lucy Barrett. Realizing
that one woman was shamelessly gawking at my face so closely she must have been
sketching it, I felt a sense of violation. Then all the eyes at the table moved
to the door and the scribbling became furious. The accused had entered with his
lawyer.

A murmur of “Dr. Rothesay” floated in the air, heedless of the publication ban
on names. His lawyer spoke a few words into his ear and squeezed his shoulder.
Rothesay replied with confidence and sat down in the prisoner’s box and remained
motionless and elegant and distinguished-looking. No one here but Rosie’s team
and Rothesay’s lawyer knew of the former criminal charges against him in
England. Rothesay’s nieces, one in London, one in South Africa, and two in
Australia, now leading settled lives, one with children of her own, had
responded to Lucy Barrett’s overtures with a flat no. They wanted nothing to do
with any trial involving their disgusting uncle of long deleted memory. Any
mention of the unproved English charges in courtroom or media, the judge here
had told the lawyers after a battle royal
in camera
, would be so
prejudicial as to result in an immediate mistrial. I put my hand to my forehead
and was surprised to find a bead of sweat trickling down. I tried to capture it
surreptitiously, but Rosie was attracted by the movement of my hand and looked
at me. Her face was sombre.

The defence lawyer, exuding great command of his milieu, methodically arranged
the contents of his briefcase on a table. Physically, he didn’t look impressive,
but as soon as the media had learned that Rothesay had retained Murray Dylan, Q.
C. from Toronto, they never mentioned his name without a tag: “best known
criminal lawyer in Canada,” or “legendary defence lawyer,” or “celebrated
criminal counsel.”

“A jury of local people, in my experience,” Lucy Barrett had said to Rosie,
“is seldom dazzled by a hotshot from T. O.”

The remark had maintained my confidence high till I saw this Murray Dylan
character interviewed on television in front of the courthouse the day Rothesay
had pleaded not guilty to all charges. “I shall ask the jury one simple
question,” he’d said to the camera, oozing sincerity and righteous anger. “Are
they, as twelve intelligent and mature men and women, prepared to
destroy
an esteemed medical doctor’s reputation and
life
without a shred of
objective evidence, on the mere say-so of one troubled teenager?” I had passed a
sleepless night.

Sitting in court looking at the defence lawyer’s narrow
shoulders and plump backside, I recalled Rosie’s words after he had waived the
preliminary inquiry: “Lucy says he’s not as confident as he sounds. If he really
thought we didn’t have a case, he would have tried to have the charges thrown
out at a preliminary inquiry instead of going directly to trial.” I turned to
Rosie now and smiled. She smiled back and squeezed my hand. Her frank and open
face chased my misgivings away.

The court crier announced Madam Justice Oona Ledrew. She entered from the front
and ascended the steps, casting her eyes, alert and kindly, around the courtroom
as she took her place on high. My comfort level ratcheted up a notch. The judge
was female, seven of the twelve jurors were female, the victim and prosecutor
were female. The two enemies were male.

IN THE WITNESS BOX
Rosie looked as courageous, intelligent,
and honest as Lucy Barrett had described her in her opening address. Taking her
oath to tell the truth, she rested her eyes on Rothesay for a moment. I wanted
to shout, “Don’t look at him.” But that was only my own anxiety. She appeared
calm and determined.

As Rosie answered Lucy Barrett’s questions, the jurors’ faces stayed impassive,
except for when eyes would now and then slide without head movement towards
Rothesay and grimace. But if some jurors were appalled at what they were
hearing, their emotions were trivial compared to mine as I listened to her
relate graphically in public what she and Rothesay had actually done.

The previous night my mother had come to my room for a heart-to-heart.
“Everyone realizes that a sexual abuse trial is very hard for the victim, but it
is never easy for a loved one either. I’ve seen the same truth that makes
justice triumph strain to the breaking point a relationship with a husband or
boyfriend. I don’t know how much Rosie has told you about what happened to her,
but you should be prepared for a dreadful shock to your system as the details
are pried out in court.”

“When you love someone as much as Rosie and I love each other, Mom, you are
prepared for whatever lies ahead.”

Mom had turned her face away and wiped her eyes with thumb and forefinger.
Looking back again, she smiled and put her hand on mine: “Whatever happens,
remember you have that.”

This morning I perceived how right my mother had been. Here, in
this public place, among scores of strangers, the girl I loved was filling in
my sketchy mental outline with explicit images of acts involving the naked
bodies and the intimate parts of herself and the man right there in front of me.
“Late in the summer that I became twelve years old,” Rosie replied to Lucy
Barrett’s question on the nature of her relationship with the accused, “what
started out as girlish love on my part reached the point where, almost every
night or day for nearly five months, my stepfather, Dr. Heathcliff Godolphin
Rothesay, the man sitting right there, committed sexual acts on me.”

Before getting into the details of those acts, Lucy said, would she describe
how the relationship had reached that point? Rosie told of how, after her real
father’s accidental death when she was eleven, Dr. Rothesay visited her house to
see her mother. She’d only met him once before, at the funeral home earlier that
week. While she was waiting with him in the hall of her house for her mother to
come down from her room, he told Rosie he knew of only one remedy for grief and
bereavement, and that was love, the love her late great father used to write
about in his poetry, passionate, powerful love that transcended everything else
in the universe. “When you feel devastating grief coming on, beautiful,
sensitive Rosie O’Dell,” he’d said, “meditate on love.” And that was exactly
what she did do, she said. She supplanted the pain of grief in her heart with a
feeling of love. And she became consumed with the idea that Heathcliff Rothesay,
who was suddenly developing a friendship with her mother, was the fulfilment of
that love. Not only was he a doctor saving lives, he was
everything
:
handsome, strong, tall, intelligent, sensitive. In her dreams, he was the prince
and she was the princess. She kept everything to herself, naturally, since she
knew her feelings were pure fantasy and outside of reality. But as time went on
it began to dawn on her from his words, gestures, and looks that, in fact, he
must be secretly in love with her too and that he’d only been spending so much
time with her mother in order to be near Rosie herself.

Everything began happening in earnest after Rothesay married her mother and
took her and her sister Pagan with them on their honeymoon trip to California.
One rainy afternoon in San Francisco, while her mother and Pagan were down in
the hotel boutiques, he and she stayed in the suite and watched a movie from the
fifties on TV,
Picnic
, with Kim Novak and William Holden. Just as she was
hoping he would, he came over and sat by her on the sofa. He was sitting so
close his thigh was touching hers. She did the boldest thing she’d ever done in
her life. She picked up his hand and
held it in her lap. Her
heart was beating out of her chest and she was too shy to look at him, but she
heard him sighing, and then he leaned across her and put his other arm around
her and kissed her on the temple and then on the cheek and then on the lips. He
placed his hand on her chest and whispered in her ear that his heart was beating
the same way hers was. She was shaking and nearly fainted from all the emotions
she was experiencing. Then he bent over her and kissed her on the lips again,
this time passionately, breathing hard, forcing her lips open. She had to cling
to him with both hands or she would have died of love right there and then. “I
love you, I love you, my Rosie,” he kept whispering in her ear, “I have always
loved you. I’ve loved you since I first saw you.” Everything she had thought
about him secretly in her own mind was coming true. Then he asked, “Do you love
me, too, my love?” “Yes,” she managed to breathe, “yes, yes, I love you too.”
“I knew it,” he cried, “I could feel the love coming from you in waves of
passion. It was love at first sight, just like Romeo and Juliet.” Then he sat
back and groaned, “Oh, stop, please stop, Rosie, you have made me love you too
much. We cannot do this. It is forbidden, just like Romeo and Juliet. We must
stop now, before it goes any farther.” “I would gladly die for love of you, like
Juliet,” she said to him. “No, no, no,” he said, “we have to stop this. Never
again must we speak of this. And it must remain our secret, our secret
impossible love. We must never mention a word of this to anyone.” “They could
torture me,” she said, “and I would never tell a single soul.” He actually
began to weep now, rocking back and forth with his head in his hands, and she
said, “Don’t cry, my love, our love will find a way.” He said that he was crying
tears of passionate anguish, of a happiness heretofore unknown, of utterly
heavenly bliss. He had only married her mother, he said, to be near Rosie. He
was only here on this honeymoon because he loved Rosie. “This is really
our
honeymoon,” he said. “Yours and mine.” They agreed to keep all
this their secret and he said they had to compose themselves for when her mother
and Pagan got back, so he tore himself reluctantly away and went into his
bedroom off the sitting room and closed the door, and she went into hers and
Pagan’s and pretended to be reading when her sister came in. It was like that
for the rest of “our” honeymoon, as he kept calling it—a distance between them
when others were around, but kissing and hugging and love talk whenever they
were alone. Then they’d all come back home to St. John’s.