Authors: Bill Rowe
AFTER BREAKFAST EVERY DAY
during my week at the
O’Dells’ house Rosie and I went up to the girls’ bedroom and gabbed a couple of
hours away. Then we’d go for long walks and bicycle rides before returning to
the bedroom for more engrossing chats. Pagan mostly stayed downstairs in the
kitchen with her mother. Sometimes she would come up and we would try to bring
her into the conversation. But our talk would turn esoteric on her and she would
leave, often without our noticing, so deep would we plunge into each other’s
thoughts. Before the week was out, Pagan was complaining she had no privacy in
her own bedroom. So, when my parents came back, Rosie started visiting my house
where we could talk undisturbed upstairs in my room, lying side by side on my
bed.
Most days, with Dad at the office and Mom at the hospital, we would have the
house to ourselves, except for the elderly housekeeper downstairs whose
supervision entailed calling out to us during the commercials in her favourite
game shows and soaps to ask if we wanted milk or hot chocolate and brownies or
date crumbles.
“I really like your name,” Rosie said one morning. “Tom Sharpe. I like the way
it sounds.”
“Even though you said last year my name suited me because my head was
pointy.”
“I was only teasing you because you were bugging me about something. I’ve
always loved it. It sounds like the hero in a novel, like someone who won a
medal—the Victoria Cross—in a war.”
“That reminds me of something I was thinking on the way back from Twillingate.
Every single time you ever said something mean to me it was because I had
already started it by saying something mean to you first. I’m sorry about that,
Rosie.”
“I always tried not to say mean stuff to you, but something
would happen and next thing you know I was saying it. I’m sorry too, Tom.” Our
faces were inches apart on the bed and we kissed for the first time on the
lips.
Often after that Rosie would turn over and put her arms around me and we would
press our closed lips together in a chaste kiss, hugging each other for minutes
on end. Rosie would murmur, “I love the feeling of this.”
“I do too.”
Rosie dwelt on her father. She would always think of her memories of him, she
said, as “exquisite.” She’d taken the word from one of his poems entitled
“Paradoxes of Passion,” which, at
her
age—she rolled her eyes—she was
not even supposed to have read yet. We laughed at how stupid adults were, trying
to hide from kids what kids knew more about than adults did anyway, and she
recited for me the lines containing her favourite word: “Today’s exquisite
memory of/ Tonight’s forgotten gush of love.”
“Beautiful,” I said. “What do you figure it’s all about?”
“Oh, sexual intercourse,” said Rosie.
I concealed my shock and nodded gravely: “That’s what I was thinking.”
“How the desire for sexual intercourse,” she went on, “is a more powerful
emotion than sexual satisfaction itself, how memory of the feeling is forgotten
after satisfaction and is remembered again only when desire for the feelings
arises again. I think that’s it.”
“That sounds right,” I said.
“I heard Daddy and his friends saying that at a party at our house. That was
the same night I heard one woman tell him that the sexual imagery in his poems
was erotically powerful enough to make women swoon orgasmically at his public
readings.”
“Hmm,” I responded sagely. “Interesting.”
“Very.” But getting back to the word “exquisite,” Rosie continued, what was
important to her now were the years she’d had with her father when she had
discovered from him the three exquisite things she would always treasure most in
life: exquisite action to excite the body and brain, exquisite books to engross
the mind and spirit, and exquisite love to swell the heart and soul.
Her need for exciting action had come from being with her father in his canoe
on a river, happily frightened out of her wits cascading from the mountains down
to the sea.
Her esteem for engrossing books had begun with her father’s bedtime
readings to her and Pagan. He’d make them squirm with pleasure
in their side-by-side beds by starting with, “All right then, ladies, let’s see
if I can put you to sleep with this story, because if I can, that’s all the
proof we’ll need that it’s a flop as literature.” He never put them to
sleep.
Her fascination with love had formed during the months before his death, after
she’d been secretly rummaging in the bookcase in her parents’ bedroom and came
across a volume of his poetry. She used to lock herself in the bathroom every
day and sit on the laundry hamper and read and reread and learn by heart another
of his poems before peeping out to make sure no one was upstairs so that she
could sneak the book back to its shelf. It was this third treasured exquisite
thing of Rosie’s that occupied her thoughts most that summer, and would agitate
me for years ahead.
She told me she could not stop herself from imagining that she would be
grief-stricken unto death unless she was saved by impassioned love. What I
wanted to know was what did she mean by impassioned love? To take one example, I
asked, did she think our love for each other was impassioned love? Our love was
wonderful, she said, really, really great. It had saved her from going around
the bend. But we did have to realize that so far in life we were just kids. So
what was she talking about, I demanded— sex? No, no, she replied, it had nothing
whatever to do with physical sex. Like me, she had long had an academic concept,
of course, of physical mating between men and women learned from prescribed
books at home and in school, augmented by dirty discussions and speculations
with friends, but none of her knowledge in that area comprised what she meant by
impassioned love now. In fact, all that physical stuff seemed to belong to a
different race on a different planet that she had merely read about.
Her mother had confirmed to her that when she entered puberty in months to come
she would be experiencing novel feelings that she should talk to her about, but
all that was irrelevant for the present, stored in a part of her mind separate
from present reality, for the distant future when she and I would be grown up
and married and living together with our children in a house of our own. I liked
the sound of that, until she went on that she could not really say, at least not
right now, what she actually meant by impassioned love. She only knew that she
had a feeling inside her which identified it perfectly, but she did not
understand it enough yet to put it into words. Well, I said, raising my voice
and getting up from beside her, when she got around to putting it into words,
would she mind letting me in on the big secret?
Rosie jumped up herself and put her arms around me. “Don’t get
mad, Tommy,” she said. “That’s just me—a weird feeling I have that’s got
nothing to do with me and you. I love you more than anything in this world.
Would you like to go for a ride to Bowring Park on the bikes?”
ONE EVENING A FEW
weeks after Joyce O’Dell’s death, I
went to Rosie’s with the Janis Joplin album I’d bought as a present. I knew she
loved “Me and Bobby McGee.” From the porch where she met me I saw a huge bouquet
of flowers on the table in the hall. Rosie took the record with a distracted
thank you and less delight than I’d anticipated. She seemed unsettled. Then, as
if remembering something important, she left me in the porch abruptly and
stalked down the hall to the kitchen. I heard her lighting into her mother,
obviously continuing an interrupted argument. A quarrel between this mother and
daughter was not rare enough to make me wonder much about it so, as the voices
ranged back and forth, I wandered into the hall and admired the flowers. There
must have been a dozen varieties: roses, yellow and pink; carnations, white and
red; yellow mums; some sort of a delicate iris, white with a purplish tinge; and
the rest, though familiar, I’d never learned the names of.
Rosie flounced back out of the kitchen still carrying the record album. “Sorry
about that,” she said, “but I had to get my point across to the poor thing.
Want to go upstairs?”
“Okay. Those flowers are some nice.”
“Way too nice if you ask me. I was just telling dear Mother in there that it is
very bizarre for her to accept them at this point: every flower known to
humankind.” She reeled off names as we went up, including those I hadn’t
known.
“Why, who gave them to her?”
“Oh the famous Dr. Heathcliff Godolphin Rothesay,” she said, almost spitting
out the name. “They must have cost a hundred bucks. And for what purpose, you
may ask, so soon after the funeral when the funeral notice said clearly, No
flowers by request?”
“He’s from England. Maybe they—”
“It is creepy, I told the poor woman. He hardly even knew Daddy. Friendship
with his family? Nearly three years he’s been here and he never came within a
country mile of us until the funeral. What’s he trying to prove giving a
grieving widow something like that right now out of the blue? It is absolutely
bizarre.”
In her bedroom she put the record on her player and I felt so
uncomfortable, for a reason I could not fathom, from her over-the-top reaction
to the flowers, that I changed the subject. Did she want to go to the Regatta
with me down at Quidi Vidi Lake in a couple of days? I had to ask her twice
before she came out of the thoughts absorbing her and nodded, but with scant
enthusiasm for the delightful mob scene that heretofore she’d professed to
love.
When Rosie’s mother dropped in to see Mom a day or two later, I heard them in
the kitchen from my room upstairs, talking about Dr. Heathcliff Rothesay. “He
says he wants to be friends, Gladys, and that’s all,” said Nina. “And of course
it goes without saying that’s all I’d be interested in from any man from now
till the day I croak. I made all that clear enough to him. Rosie calls his
attentions weird, bizarre, and creepy. What’s weird, bizarre, and creepy is the
very thought in her head that it might be anything beyond pure
friendship—acquaintanceship, really, because I don’t ever expect him to be my
good friend, or want him to be, for that matter. ‘Look, Rosie, ’ I told her,
‘he’s a cultivated man who admired your deceased father’s widely acclaimed
poetry and he’s interested in the friendship of his family. What do you find so
damned strange about that?’ ‘Oh, Mother, Mother, Mother, ’ she says in that
insufferable superior manner she can put on, ‘don’t try to play dumb with me.’ I
think the girl is pathologically jealous.”
“Jealous?” said Mom. “Of what?”
“Everything, just about. Of Joyce’s memory, worried someone will replace him in
my affections. Of me, any attention some man like Heathcliff may pay to me. Of
Pagan, even, or more accurately, Pagan’s name.”
“Jealous of Pagan’s
name
?”
“Remember that first day at the funeral parlour when Heathcliff came in and
talked to us all? Well, Pagan told us later at home that that nice man said she
had a beautiful name.”
“Yes, he did say it was a beautiful, imaginative, evocative name,” said Mom.
“I was there with her and it struck me a bit funny that he would talk in such
highfalutin language to a nine-year-old.”
“He does seem unusual like that. Anyway, not long afterwards, when Rosie and I
were having one of our arguments, she asks out of the blue, why did we give
Pagan that name? Why didn’t we give Rosie the name ‘Pagan’ instead of the silly
name we did give her? The beautiful, romantic name ‘Pagan, ’ she said, was
wasted on someone as dull and ordinary as Pagan. I told her to stop being
ridiculous and to never let me hear her say anything
insulting
like that about her sister again, and she stomped out of the room in what I
could only call a jealous rage.”
“Hmm,” said Mom. There was a silence before she went on. “She’s been through a
lot, Nine. She was right there when it happened, remember. I’m glad she and Tom
have become good friends. It seems to be a great help in getting her through
this.”
“Tom,” said Nina, “is a sweetheart. Rosie feels closer to Tom than anyone else
in this world.”
I stood up and went to my door. I wanted to hear more of this and to hear it
better. But Mom asked Nina now what she was doing to fill in her time at home
and she replied that she was mostly reading. She had just reread
The Old Man
and the Sea
because Joyce loved Hemingway and there was the coincidence
of the anniversary of Hemingway’s death with the day her husband died. But,
short though the novel was, Nina said, she found it endlessly boring. Mom
responded that when she had first read the book, after hearing it was what
Hemingway had won his Nobel Prize for, she’d thought: Only a man could find
catching a stupid old fish, and then towing home its shark-eaten remnants,
interesting enough to fill a book as a transcendent experience. The two women
laughed.
“When I think of the contrast,” Nina said, “between my Joyce’s sensitive,
insightful poetry and Hemingway’s macho, eye-glazing prose, I am at a loss to
understand how anyone, let alone his own intelligent daughter, could believe for
one minute that someone else might ever replace that lovely, lovely man in my
heart or my mind!”
I stopped listening and walked back to my chair, irked at my mother. She had
deliberately moved Nina off how close Rosie felt to me and on to a total
irrelevancy.