Rosie O'Dell (52 page)

“Please forgive me for hurting you, Jenny,” I’d whispered, clinging to her as
she wept. “Please forgive me.” That marriage lasted ten months.

No more poor little Jennys, I vowed to myself, would hear my vows of
commitment. But I was wrong. Driven by a need, after a couple more decades of
unattached sex, to settle quietly and comfortably down, I felt mature enough to
marry again. Sally was thirteen years younger than me and her list of positive
attributes would have cost a fortune to describe in a lonely hearts column. But
after nine months of cohabitation, this conversation took place:

“Sweetie,” said Sally, “I’ve gone off the pill.”

“I didn’t know you were on the pill. Why were you on it?”

“Sweetie! You must have known I was on the pill before we were married. I
didn’t want to risk getting pregnant then.”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“Well, I’ve been off it for about six months now, and I can’t seem to get
pregnant.”

“Why would you want to get pregnant? I told you before we got married there
weren’t going to be any children. And you said you were okay with that.”

“I know that’s what we said, hun, but everyone, deep down, wants
children.”

“You’ve been off the pill for six months? How come you didn’t tell me before
now?”

“Oh, I was kind of afraid to tell you, sweetie, because, like you said, no
children.”

“That’s right, Sal, but you didn’t need to be on the pill.”

“That’s exactly what I figured when I went off it. I knew that, really, you
want us to have a cute little baby of our own.”

“But I didn’t want any cute little babies of our own, I told you. That’s why I
had a vasectomy.”

“You had a what! When the Christ did you have a vasectomy?”

“About ten years ago, after I knew definitely I didn’t want children.”

“Ten years! Why didn’t you tell me before we got married?”

“Why didn’t you tell me, after I said no children, that you did, in fact, want
children when we got married?”

“Goddamned Jesus fucking Christ. I didn’t say I wanted to eat or breathe after
we were married either. I didn’t say I wanted to screw after we got married
either, but you managed to figure that one out all by yourself every jeesly
night of the week. You idiot! How did you ever become a lawyer? Even a moron
knows a woman wants babies. A fucking vasectomy! I could kill—”

“Take it easy, Sal. It’s not the end of the world.”

“Night after night you invaded my body under false pretenses. You squirted that
disgusting spunk, with not one live sperm in it, into my body, into my hoping,
yearning body. You violated my fundamental integrity as a human being. Get the
fuck out of my sight, you prick.”

I was getting worse at this marriage business, not better. That second marriage
terminated after only nine months. Since then, I had sometimes been driven by
self-disgust at loveless sex—not joyless or passionless sex, just hopeless and
loveless sex—to contemplate another matrimonial attempt. But common decency
prevented me from following through. I
knew my inability to
love fully any woman I married, and my indifference to her love for me, gave me
too much power to hurt. Against my will, fruitlessly, unavailingly,
pathetically—no doubt psychotically—all my love was still reserved for Rosie
O’Dell.

MY YEARS WITH THE
Department of Justice were challenging and
satisfying. But then my unsettled domestic life started to frustrate my
advancement in the department. Lucy Barrett, a few years from retirement, had
been promoted from assistant deputy minister to deputy minister. She told me how
delighted she was to be able to go out of the public service at the top. And the
ADM’s job entailed too much humdrum administration and conflict resolution
between excellent staff lawyers whose egos, regrettably, were just as big as
their abilities. But I was ready for advancement and change and coveted her
vacant position. I heard through my secretary’s grapevine that Lucy had
recommended me, based on my knowledge of the law, good judgment, and
reliability, as her successor. But my political masters were balking. The
premier and the current minister of justice were afraid, the word was, that if
they appointed me, my footloose and fancy-free ways in private life would
reflect immorality on them. I myself traced my
persona non grata
status
to something more specific.

Three years before, the then minister of justice and I had travelled to New
York on a government bond issue. When he had practised law, he had insisted on
being referred to as
William
Best. Now that he was in politics, he
insisted on being called
Billy
Best. After our legal briefing on
contingent liabilities to the Wall Street underwriters, I returned to the Plaza
Hotel with Minister Billy Best, who asked me into the Oyster Bar for a drink.
There, my political boss congratulated me on my masterful summary of complicated
legal documents, told me to stop calling him “Minister” in private like this,
but to call him “Billy.” He could remember, he said, when we were buddies and
would have a beer after work at the Ship. Then he added, “I am advised that you
would still screw a pile of rocks if you thought there was a snake under it.” He
reminded me of my teenaged mates that long-ago summer in the new Gros Morne
Park.

Now, my Minister Billy was well-known for his nimble thought processes, but
that leap was too non-linear for me altogether and I reacted with some hauteur:
“Minister, you have been advised incorrectly.”

“What, you mean you don’t even need a snake under it?” said Minister Billy with
a friendly grin as I started to slide off my bar stool. “Don’t take
me wrong,” he whispered, placing his hand on my arm. “I’m
not criticizing.” He bent his head closer to my ear. “I want you to get me in on
some of the action.”

Flashing back to the minister’s wife and three young children kissing him
goodbye at the St. John’s airport, I said, “Minister, my duties with the
Department of Justice do not include pimping for you.” I slipped to the floor.
“With your leave, sir, I shall retire to my room.” Without waiting for the
minister’s leave or thanking Billy for the drink, I walked out of the bar.

Upstairs, I wondered why I had done that. I had expressed an outraged morality
I did not feel. Then I realized my reaction had been caused by disgust at
myself. On the plane home the next morning, the minister looked as highly
offended by the cut from his underling as he had last night in the bar. He never
spoke a non-official word to me again.

“What the hell did you do on that trip,” Lucy asked me a few days after we got
back, “that has the minister so dubious about your abilities? I thought you knew
your stuff.” When I told her, she responded, “I wish you’d get married and stay
married and stop raising false hopes in our political sleazoids.”

When my minister of justice ran for the leadership of his political party at a
convention and got elected and became
Premier
Billy Best, I figured I’d
better abandon all hope of advancement to an executive position in the public
service. My sense of being a prisoner locked in a downward trajectory was
intensified by my mother’s growing illness. When she was finally placed in a
personal care home in a closed ward reserved for sufferers from dementia, it
came to me that she was only twenty-five years older than I was now.

I LEFT THE DEPARTMENT
of Justice and put out feelers to various
law firms. A hotshot criminal lawyer named Ed Howlett, who had been a partner of
my old lawyer Leonard Barry before he was elevated to the Supreme Court,
approached me and suggested we join forces. He’d been practising solo for a
couple of years and had no wish to become a cog in the administration of a big
law firm. But he’d found that being a sole practitioner had its strains and
inconveniences as well. For example, it was hard to recover from the flu or take
a stress-free vacation—he was likely to get calls in bed at home or on a beach
in Sarasota from distraught clients. A two-man firm was the optimal, he thought,
with each partner watching the other’s back and covering for each other when one
was off. Ed Howlett
was in the news a lot on high-profile
criminal cases—domestic murders, rip-offs of municipal funds by town clerks,
drug-trafficking punks—but I knew that most of his income came from legal aid,
and we could not expect to get rich together. I did need a backup, though, and
there were not many other offers. We formed a partnership, a purely working
relationship, and it bumped along for a few years. We never saw each other after
hours, because I didn’t like him very much, and seldom small-talked in the
office, but we shared the overhead, divided the barely adequate income, and
allowed each other to take a week off from time to time. I hardly knew the man,
and it was this lack of knowledge that kept me from seeing what was about to
happen.

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.