Authors: Bill Rowe
“Your point being what, exactly?” When I looked away and didn’t answer, Dad
took voice again. “You had nothing to do with anything, did you,
Pontius? Who pushed this whole thing to where it is today? Anyone could tell
that Rosie didn’t want to go forward with this fiasco, and her friend Suzy
certainly didn’t. And who got tangled up in the first place with the
crazy—?”
“Joe, for God’s sake!” said Mom. “You’re out of control. Stop this
total—”
“For God’s sake what? Stop what? Out of control, am I? Out of my life is the
way I want it. Those goddamned O’Dells. I want to hear nothing more about any of
them. I could never stand that maniac Joyce O’Dell from the word go, and I
naively hoped when he perished that there might be some sanity in the family. Oh
yeah, right! Sanity? Christ! Little Pagan— Jesus Christ. Not one bloody word. I
don’t want to hear a word about any of them, her or any others of them, or see
any of them. Do whatever you want yourself with her, my son, but do it out of my
sight and out of my hearing.”
“Shut up,” said my mother to my father. “Shut your bloody big mouth.”
“Shut my bloody big mouth now, is it? This is nice. Now it’s turning my own
wife against me. This gets better and better. They’re all alike, including the
poor little one who swallowed—there’s something wrong with all of them,
including that great buddy of yours, the famous Nina. Any sane wife would have
spotted him as a child diddler a mile away, but she’s so loony she still doesn’t
see it. I rue the day I laid eyes on any of the crazy goddamned tribe.”
I stood up, propelled by an urge to beat my father into a pulp of silence. I
managed to master it, and walked to the door. “
Crazy
?” I bawled back. “If
you added them all together, they’d still be completely fucking sane compared to
you.”
I strode into the hall hearing my mother’s “Tom, please,” as I yanked my wet
jacket off the hook in the closet and bolted out the front door into the driving
rain.
WATCHING CURLY ABBOTT TESTIFY
, I had a
shivering fit. I’d returned home to change my wet clothes after Dad left, and
I’d taken a taxi back to the courthouse and I was now dry and comfortable. So
maybe it was just the sight of the principal from my childhood up there
testifying with frightening self-assurance. Dr. Rothesay himself at that
meeting, he was asserting, had first brought sexual abuse up as one possibility
among many in an attempt to account for Rosie’s condition, and it had been he as
well who most favoured turning the matter over to the authorities.
“I was the one who put a damper on that,” said Abbott, “since it was all based
solely on Mrs. Sharpe’s speculation without a pick of evidence, and I had no
idea where the finger of accusation might point. For example, it was common
knowledge among the staff that Rosie’s homeroom teacher, Miss Janet Pretty, was
not heterosexual. From my knowledge of her, I knew she would never sexually
exploit a child, but I could, nevertheless, see her being dragged into this by
virtue of her sexual orientation alone, and today I make no apology for putting
the lid on that witch’s brew.” Curly Abbott’s smooth pate, gleaming halo-like
under the lights, was hurting my eyes.
Under cross-examination, Abbott maintained that Rosie’s so-called appalling
condition in grade seven had been, in fact, a fleeting thing. By the next year
she had become the best student in the school again. He had since followed with
gratification her phenomenal academic and athletic career and took satisfaction
from the fact, indeed congratulated himself, that level heads had prevailed in
grade seven and that her young life had
not been traumatized by
the horrors of a police investigation based on pure conjecture. I shivered again
as Curly stepped down.
When Murray Dylan next called Nina Rothesay to the stand, I looked at Rosie and
squeezed her hand. The movement of my head made me dizzy. Nina swore she had
never seen or heard a thing, night or day, to give her reason to suspect her
husband of molesting her daughter. As to Rosie’s relationship with her real
father, Joyce O’Dell, they had been very close, perhaps too close for a father
and a ten-year-old daughter. There had been very little they didn’t do together,
including going off for several nights of camping. But Nina’s main concern as a
mother had been the influence on Rosie of her natural father’s poetry. Highly
erotic, indeed frankly sexual in content, she’d tried to keep Rosie from access
to it until she was more mature, but she knew her precocious daughter was
reading it on the sly from an early age, obsessively sneaking the book from her
parents’ bedroom and reading it in the bathroom with the door locked. Her
natural father, the poet himself, used to laugh at that and thought it was
rather cute, and talked Nina out of hiding the book.
A specific poem among many that worried Nina was one entitled, “God’s Fiendish
Fit.” It celebrated the diabolical divineness of a God who had contrived to
hardwire in the human brain a concept of the ideal sexual fit between male and
female genitalia. There were lines in the poem about a young boy’s incredulous
delight upon learning that the spontaneous, dirty fantasies he’d been
experiencing about his own private parts and those he’d glimpsed of the girl
next door were, in fact, what they were actually
for
in real life—a
coincidence of fantasy and function involving those shamefully exquisite bodily
parts almost too good to be true. The “profound” irony of the poem, Nina
testified with more than a touch of contempt, was that this coincidence would
indeed become in real life too good to be true, because the perfect fit in men’s
and women’s minds would inevitably turn out to be unattainable in reality, with
the result that men and women would falsely promise, seduce, hurt, lie, betray,
even die or kill, trying vainly to attain with their bodies that perfect, ideal
mental fit. Nina asked the jury to imagine her dismay as a mother one evening to
hear her daughter, then ten years old, merrily quoting to herself in bed some of
the poem’s most explicit lines.
As for the relationship between Rosie and Dr. Rothesay, Nina said, it had
varied with her daughter’s wide mood swings. At first she didn’t seem to like
him about the house taking her natural father’s place. Then she went through a
phase of flirtatiously vying for his attention, as young girls do.
And six months or so after the marriage, she appeared to resent
his very presence, which Nina ascribed to nothing more mysterious than jealousy
over the closer father-daughter relationship that had developed between Dr.
Rothesay and her younger sister.
On cross-examination, when Lucy Barrett asked her if she really believed as a
mother that Rosie could have brought these charges if they weren’t true, Nina
replied, “This is what I really believe. The rumour mongering by my own best
friend, Gladys Sharpe, and the stories of the sexual abuse of Suzy Martin,
Rosie’s best friend, by her grandfather, and the morbid effect on Rosie of the
traumatic death of her excessively beloved father, and her jealousy regarding
Dr. Rothesay had all combined to put the whole idea into my poor daughter’s
head.”
“You referred to your younger daughter, Pagan. She committed suicide at the age
of thirteen in Toronto, did she not?”
“So say the Toronto police.”
“Did you ever ascertain why she did that?”
“There was no official reason assigned by the investigators, if that’s what you
mean.”
“Did it ever occur to you that the close relationship that you say caused
Rosie’s jealousy might have—”
“Objection,” roared Dylan. “My learned friend is now deliberately trespassing
on forbidden territory.”
“Sustained.”
Nina said, “Depression. I have suffered from clinical depression for years. The
drinking by the girls’ biological father was a cover-up of his own depression.
I’m afraid my two daughters inherited more than their fair share of that. I
believe that Rosie’s bad period, so-called, and Pagan’s death were part of their
tragic genetic heritage.”
Lucy was able to get out of her that her consumption of prescription drugs,
including sleeping pills, perhaps deadened her to some activities going on about
the house, but, Nina said, “I’m old enough to know what sex sounds like and what
it can leave behind on the bed, and I would not have been oblivious to all that,
night and day, no matter what I was taking.”
When Nina stepped down the defence lawyer asked for a recess to greet his next
witness, who had just flown in from the United States. I could hardly stand with
the rest of the room for the judge’s exit. I told Rosie that I felt ill. She
took one look and said I should get a taxi home and go to bed right away.
My first hour in bed I spent fighting off waves of nausea. I
lost the battle and had to run out to the bathroom and vomit in the toilet. The
cool tiled floor invited me to lie down on it, but after a few minutes there I
felt impelled to crawl back to the toilet and sit down for a watery bowel
movement. Then I tottered back to the bedroom and collapsed on the bed.
I woke up in a delirium. My mother was over me shaking a thermometer. Answering
her questions about my symptoms, I stopped to instruct her, “Don’t tell anyone I
was throwing up and had diarrhea, because I’d have to say it wasn’t caused by
sexual abuse, and that might undermine Rosie’s case.”
“Don’t you worry, my man. Nobody will find that out from me. Here. Keep this
under your tongue for a minute.” She took my pulse before removing the
thermometer. “You have a high temperature. Think you can keep down an ibuprofen
capsule with a drop of ginger ale?”
I nodded and she left. I heard Dad saying to her downstairs, “What the hell was
I thinking of when I drove him out into that rain? I should be shot.”
“He picked up a virus and his immune system may be stressed by everything he’s
going through. You didn’t cause it, Joe.”
Dad muttered something else self-deprecatory and Mom replied as she started up
the stairs, “It is not your fault, sweetheart. He’ll be okay in a few days.” A
few days! What about the trial?
When I woke up again, Rosie was over by the wall sitting in my chair. “Jesus,
how’d you get up here,” I blurted, “past Mom and Dad?”
She laughed. “They’re a bit pissed off at me, I gather. Your mother told me you
had a fever when I called, and I asked if I could come over and she said sure,
as long as I stay back from you. So here I am, across the room.”
Rosie sat there till ten-thirty, studying by the little lamp on my table when I
was asleep and chatting with me whenever I came to. Oddly, she never once
mentioned her mother or her testimony, a refraining which I took, even in my
befuddled state, as a measure of Rosie’s heightened suffering. I told her I was
going to the trial in the morning no matter what, and she told me I definitely
was not, I was staying right there in bed. My health meant more to her than a
hundred frigging old trials. Leaving, she said she’d call in the morning and
drop in to see me during lunch break.
I listened for the extent of the interaction downstairs: a “good night,”
rather terse, between Rosie and Mom, but no response at all from Dad. That did
it! Here was a woman who had risked her life in the icy atmo
sphere of this house to show her love, only to get short shrift from that
bastard. I’d show him. Next time he skulked down the hall for a look into the
bedroom, as he’d done earlier, I would ignore him and pretend to be asleep
again. Serve him right. He was only a prick anyway.
I gleaned from Rosie and media reports what Dylan’s next witness had to say.
His name was Dr. Johnnie von Himmel from Loma Linda, California. Hailing
originally from Vienna, the birthplace of modern psychology, he said “with a
smile that set dazzlingly white teeth against tanned features” that he
encouraged people to call him simply “Dr. Johnnie,” as he had no desire to
impose on the egalitarian Americas the aristocratic surname one was saddled with
by ancient European history. His credentials showed degrees in psychology from
Geneva, Oxford, and Berkeley, with a specialty in human memory, and he had
testified in hundreds of trials on questions pertaining to adult recall of
events from childhood. He had acted as witness for the defence, for the
prosecution, for husbands and for wives, for parents and for children, for
plaintiffs and for defendants, all with scientific impartiality in the cause of
truth.
“In other words,” Lucy Barrett said, objecting to his being sworn as an expert
witness, “you are a hired gun prepared to shoot down anyone on behalf of the
highest bidder.”
Dr. Johnnie replied, “I assure you, madame, I am neither a slave to any dogma
nor a toady to any person. Though I rub shoulders daily with world-famous
celebrities, my sole mandate is scientific truth.”
“How much are you paid to testify as expert to the stars?”
“Extremely well paid indeed: six thousand dollars a day plus expenses. I
command that fee every day, two hundred days a year throughout the US, Canada,
and Europe, with a ten-month waiting list, indicating, I must modestly concede,
credibility as an expert witness before impartial tribunals such as this, based
solidly on scientific objectivity.”
“Credibility?” said Barrett. “You say you are originally from Vienna, but I can
still hear remnants of your New Jersey accent.”
“Thank you for the compliment, madame. Ever since arriving in the States at a
very young age, I have been striving to attain a local accent.”
Prosecutor and defence counsel argued the matter of expert status before the
judge, with Ms. Barrett calling Dr. Johnnie von Himmel “a witch doctor
trafficking in this newfangled false memory syndrome as the latest cultic,
pseudo-scientific fad from La La Land tricked out in fake medical research garb
and on a par with womb memory and return-from-death
memory.”
Judge Ledrew, sighing that she had to give every possible leeway to an accused
who was in the difficult position of trying to establish a negative, had him
sworn in as expert witness for the defence.
No one who had survived the onset of puberty, Dr. Johnnie testified, would be
astounded to hear that it was a bewildering time. And hey, what would anyone
expect with all those strange new hormones spurting and colliding? Nor was it
altogether surprising that researchers had oftentimes observed arising from that
emotion-inciting hormonal soup a false memory of sexual abuse. The literature
was replete with instances of the false memory syndrome doing its insidious
work. He would give a random example: A young girl approaching puberty might be
jealous of the attentions paid to a sibling, her sister, say, by a father
figure. Unconsciously the pubescent girl might be experiencing sexual yearnings
towards the father figure, a phenomenon accepted by modern researchers as wholly
natural and normal in these more enlightened days. Ordinarily such yearnings
would never be acted out but simply rest there in the young girl’s mind as
painful unrequited love. However, the traumatic hurt of this young jealousy and
this unrequited love has been observed to transform those sexual yearnings, by
some form of mental alchemy not yet fully understood, into a conscious memory of
actual sexual activity. Other traumatic experiences during those swiftly
changing developmental years could have a delusional effect on the memory as
well. Grief could very well play a role. As a random example of that, the death
of a beloved parent under shocking circumstances has been noted as an actuating
force responsible for transmuting fantasy sex in a young girl’s mind to a memory
of actual sex. Furthermore, guilt might well enter the picture at this point,
and play a huge role in the further mutating of the girl’s sexual memories.
Sexual activity with that father figure, recalled in her memory years later as
actual
rather than imagined, would give rise to guilt because, of
course, voluntary sexual activity by the young girl in such circumstances would
be considered by her as morally wrong. Thus, of necessity, in order to rid
herself of her intolerable burden of guilt, the sexual activity must be
misremembered by her mind as either forced or as exploitation of her as a
helpless victim. Moreover, research had shown that the more intelligent and
sensitive and well-read and educated and exposed to fiction and poetry a person
might have been, the more likely she would be to create a fantasy world and a
delusional remembrance and a false memory of sexual events that never, in fact,
occurred.