Rosie O'Dell (14 page)

Suzy whispered into my ear, “Everyone kind of knows that, Tom.”

Brent said to me later on our ride back home, “Hold back on the drowning
tragedies for a while and get into mining disasters or something for
variety.”

It stung because I knew his sarcasm was right. So I lashed out. “You’re
starting to sound just like your old man.”

It worked. “
Fu-uck,
” said Brent, and shut up. But I still knew he was
right.

I pedalled my bike over next to Rosie’s to see what kind of a moron I was in
her eyes. She said to me, “This was a lovely day, Tommy. We should come out here
again soon, whenever you’re free.”

Our next time at Bowring Park, the day was sunny and warm and calm—the one
absolutely glorious day a year that our ancestors must have encountered the day
they arrived, my father always said on a dozen similar days a year, or else they
never would have stayed. We four had our picnic on the grass beside the flower
beds in front of the Bungalow. Rosie said to me as we finished up, “You must be
working out on weights for your swimming, are you? You look like you’re in
pretty good shape.”

“A little,” I said, and, without a word, Rosie moved in front of me and lay on
her stomach facing me and rested her right elbow on the grass, forearm up to arm
wrestle. I was practically shaking with fear of defeat as I clasped her hand. It
didn’t help that Suzy and Brent exchanged a grin of pleasure at the coming
spectacle. We went at it. Rosie’s face turned pink from our hard and earnest
struggle as I gradually forced her arm to the side until finally her hand
touched the grass and she spun over on her back and lay there quietly. I sat
back on my haunches.

“You do realize that that was my right hand,” she spoke up into the air, “and
that I’m left-handed. So I bet I can still beat you at a real wrestle, just like
when we were eight.” Suddenly she was on her knees, grasping my upper arms and
twisting, trying to tip me over onto my back. I grabbed her shoulders and lunged
forward, pushing her onto her back with her feet still under her. I moved my
hands up her arms and grasped her hands, held them down beside her head and
straddled her, sitting on her stomach. She moved her feet out and straightened
her legs and pushed against my hands strenuously for ten seconds.
Unsuccessfully. Then she relaxed completely and looked up at me. The shy little
smile on her lovely face, her eyes hold
ing mine, her hands
tranquil in my grasp, she looked as if she was actually joyful to be lying under
me, had chosen to surrender herself to me, as if she was saying, “I am yours, my
love.” I would not have been able to describe to save my life the novel current
of blissful pleasure that flowed through my entire thirteen-year-old body. I had
never experienced anything remotely like the sensation before. It would be
months later when I had completed puberty that I would be able to describe it to
myself as the melding of absolute love and intense physical desire for one
person.

Quickly I moved off Rosie, hearing her say as I did so, “I think we were wrong,
Suzy: he might not be a ninety-seven-pound weakling after all.”

Suzy replied, “Be good, Rosie. We never said any such thing.”

“Just joking. Tom, you’re some strong. You should take up gymnastics or
wrestling or something, along with your swimming.”

“You think I’m strong,” I said. “You should see Brent when he gets
going.”

“I’m not all that strong,” said Brent, modestly. “That’s only the hockey.” I
noticed that his T-shirt was tight enough to accentuate every obscure ripple in
his torso.

For the rest of the day, as we strolled around the paths of Bowring Park, Rosie
and I stayed close enough to each other that sometimes the sides of our hands
would touch. We didn’t let on that we knew it was happening, but I liked it a
lot when it did. Brent and Suzy stayed apart, though, never walking side by side
as Rosie and I did whenever the path allowed, but always moving single file.
Suzy was very attractive, just as pretty as Rosie, and her body was far more
developed than Rosie’s at this point, rather voluptuous, in fact, but there
seemed to be no chemistry between her and Brent, at least not from Brent’s side.
He was usually the one who kept the distance between them.

“Where’s Pagan all the time?” I asked Rosie. “Why doesn’t she come with us
sometimes on our rides?’

“She’s not exactly the outdoorsy type these days,” said Rosie. “I asked her
to, but she’d rather stay home. Sometimes she has a friend or two over.”

“Does she like the idea of going to school on the mainland?”

“Seems to. Hard to get much out of her. She seems to be happy enough. Pagan is
in a world of her own.”

This wonderful day in the park turned out to be the last time Rosie and I saw
each other that summer. The next two days were rainy and unseasonably cold. No
rides on our bikes. I called Rosie’s home and Pagan answered.
We
exchanged our hi’s but not much else. Yes, she was fine and school away looked
great when they visited—she couldn’t wait to go there in September, really—and
how was I getting on? Great, great. No, Rosie wasn’t home. She was at her
friend’s house. No, Pagan didn’t have the number. Hang on for a sec, maybe Mom
did. No, Mom didn’t seem to have it either. Yes, she’d give Rosie my message I’d
called.

The next day Rosie telephoned to wish me a good trip to London. She was glad
she hadn’t missed me before I left.

“Didn’t Pagan give you the message I called yesterday?”

“No, I haven’t seen Pagan since. I stayed at Suzy’s last night. When do you
leave?”

“The day after tomorrow, from Gander. We should—”

“I envy you.”

“You should get Dr. Rothesay and your mother to take you over sometime,” I
said, forgetting for the moment Rothesay’s pledge never to set foot back there
again. “He could show you all the sights.”

“How long did you say you’ll be gone?” she replied.

“Nearly three weeks. I wish you were coming.”

“School will just about be starting when you get back. I’ll miss our bike
rides.”

“Why don’t you come over to my place tonight, Rosie? Or I could go over to your
house if that’s better for you. We could—”

“I wish I could, Tommy. But Suzy and I have a project we’re working on. I’ll
see you when you get back. Bye.”

I kept from my parents my desire not to leave. The day of the flight over, I
thought of pretending I’d come down with something and was too sick to fly. It
would astonish me in later years, thinking back, what I was prepared to resort
to, how thoughtless I could be about ruining Mom’s pleasure and Dad’s pride, in
order to be near Rosie. Fortunately, even back then, I occasionally showed a
small pick of sense, and I made myself stop that nonsense, and I feigned
excitement about the trip.

It was my second day in London before I decided that Dr. Rothesay was nuts. The
first morning as we walked around its streets for a couple of hours because we’d
arrived too early in the day for our room to be ready, I thought his negative
comments to Dad earlier were dead-on, finding the noise and stifling stench of
traffic, the dirt, and the summer crowds that practically forced us off the
sidewalks, appalling. But that had been my exhaustion, after flying from St.
John’s to Gander in the afternoon, hanging
around that airport
for hours, then flying the Atlantic overnight to Prestwick, Scotland, and taking
an early morning flight to Heathrow, yielding only two or three hours for naps.
Dad railed against the petty politics on both ends that forced the use of
regional airports and needless hours of waiting and flying rather than a direct
flight of just a few hours from St. John’s to Heathrow.

The international firm Dad was associated with had put us up at the Savoy
Hotel. The next morning, after my solid night’s sleep on a fancy camp cot in our
room, everything looked different, as Winston Churchill used to say about the
effect of a snooze. He had been a familiar sight at the Savoy, according to Dad.
I loved London thereafter.

This was a business trip for Dad and he had to spend a lot of time at the
offices, but Mom and I beat around the metropolis non-stop. She had spent a year
at a hospital here on her nursing training before she married Dad, and she knew
the place intimately. Constantly in my mind as we visited all the sights was the
thought that one day Rosie and I would relive all this together and, as good as
it was now, it would be a hundred times better then. Mom even said that one of
these days I would enjoy guiding a special person about these streets
myself.

One night at dinner in the Savoy Grill, Dad said. “My God, there’s Ed
Sullivan.”

“So it is,” said Mom, half standing for a better look at a neckless zombie
coming in the door.

My parents had watched his show religiously every Sunday night before it
recently went off the air, but no one cool in my age group had watched. That
choir of angels latterly heard belting out “ED SULLIVAN” at the top of their
lungs in the TV promotions, as if the name was equivalent to “Lord God Almighty,”
added to our ridicule, so I affected nonchalance tonight. His entourage went
by our table. My father said, “Good evening, Mr. Sullivan. We all miss you.
We’re looking forward to your anniversary special.”

“Thank you,” said Sullivan, walking by without a smile, a face chipped out of
granite, a chin reposing on his chest. Then he saw me and stopped. “And what
about you, young man? Do you miss me, too?”

“I certainly do,” I said. “I wish you were back on TV for good.” I felt my
parents’ surprise.

A crescent moon opened at the bottom of his face somewhere around shoulder
level, and strangely prominent top teeth dominated his smile. The
whole composite of head and trunk became the closest thing to a grinning sack
that I had ever seen. He twisted his body around from the knees and said
delightedly to his group, “And they told me that I wasn’t attracting the
youngsters.” He turned back to me like a cardboard cut-out: “Where are you from,
young man? Your accent is not English.”

“Canada.”

“Then you would know Wayne and Shuster. I had them on my shew sixty-seven
times. Give them my best wishes when you see them.”

“I will, sir.” I couldn’t stand the blatant slapstick and buffoonery of most of
their so-called humour, but I replied, “You really put them on the map. They’re
great.”

He gave my hair a boxer’s jab, saying to my parents, “A fine, decent, smart
young man,” and went on his way to his table.

“Those were really nice things to say to him,” said my mother.

“I didn’t think you liked his show,” whispered my father.

“I didn’t,” I said. “And if he was still on, riding high and polluting the
airways, I would have told him so. But now that he’s gone, what’s the harm in
telling him how good he was?”

Mom and Dad looked at each other. They didn’t quite know what to make of my
methodology. “Offend the high and mighty with the blunt truth, and flatter the
powerless and useless with lies,” said Dad. He didn’t go on to ask where that
would get me in life except nowhere. He did seem perplexed, though, even
alarmed. “We’ll have to talk about that heavy subject one of these days when
you’re not on a holiday,” he added. “In the meantime, consider this. In either
case, sometimes, it may be the moral thing to do, and best for all concerned,
including yourself, just to restrict yourself to a pleasantry or two.”

I thought that, in my thirteen years of developing a profound philosophy of
life, this attitude of Dad’s was the usual lily-livered bullshit. But I let it
go rather than get his back up on this great trip. Instead we talked about
London. Mom suggested that as I went through high school I should give some
thought to going to university over here when I graduated. I figured that was a
good plan, but wouldn’t it be very expensive with board and lodging on top of
tuition fees? Dad replied that he and Mom were contributing to an educational
trust fund for just such a purpose. I was delighted. The only problem in my mind
was how Rosie and I would contrive to overcome Dr. Rothesay’s prejudice against
the place to send her over here at the same time.

After dinner, I told Mom and Dad I wanted to buy a book in the
shop while they went up to the room. I went in and saw immediately a paperback
copy of
The Day of the Jackal
by Frederick Forsyth and bought it. Then I
headed to the elevator just as the door closed on my parents. I took the next
one and walked down the corridor to see them going into the room. As I
approached the room, they had not yet closed the door. I heard Mom saying, “The
General Medical Council person said they had no record of a Heathcliff Rothesay
registered with them as a medical practitioner.” I held back and listened.

Closing the door, Dad said, “Maybe they missed it or maybe he’s there under a
different variation of the name. There are tens of thousands of doctors in this
country.”

I knocked on the door. Going in, I asked Mom, “Did I just hear you say Dr.
Rothesay is not a real doctor or something?”

“My goodness, no, Tom, I said no such thing.”

“What were you checking up on him for, anyway?”

“I wasn’t checking up on him. He told us he had family here in London, and on a
whim yesterday when you and Dad visited the office, I thought I’d try to find
out what his last address over here was and perhaps make contact with one of
them just to say hello as someone who knows him in Canada, that’s all.”