Rosie O'Dell Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  DANNY WILLIAMS:

  THE WAR WITH OTTAWA

  “[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

  DANNY WILLIAMS,

  PLEASE COME BACK

  “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.

  FLANKER PRESS LTD.

  PO BOX 2522, STATION C

  ST. JOHN’S, NL CANADA

  TELEPHONE: (709) 739-44777 FAX: (709) 739-4420 TOLL-FREE: 1-866-739-4420

  WWW. FLANKERPRESS. COM

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  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.

  Author’s Note on the Source

  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

  Chapter 1

  “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 eno
ugh, 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.