Authors: Bill Rowe
I knew Mom was pushing Nina all fall to resume her hikes with their friends
along the trails of Signal Hill and Quidi Vidi Lake and Rennie’s River, but Nina
kept telling her she couldn’t be bothered with that old stuff anymore. When Mom
argued that at her age she could not give up on life,
Nina
agreed, but only because of her daughters. She had no intention of cluttering up
her barely tolerable existence, she replied, with any more crap. She was
perfectly content to continue punching in her days immured between the stacks of
the university library ordering books and cataloguing new arrivals, and to spend
the rest of her time at home puttering around in her ratty housecoat, keeping an
eye on the girls, and happily going to seed. Think of the money she’d save from
Joyce’s charmingly inadequate insurance and her own pittance by never buying any
new clothes or having her hair professionally done ever again.
I heard Mom tell Nina over coffee in the kitchen one Saturday morning that
although it was still early in her grief, she had to be prepared, as the pain
subsided, for the return of the old physical urges. Mom had seen it happen a few
times as a nurse, and she was only mentioning it now because some women felt
guilty about it, thinking they were being disloyal to their late husbands to
have such feelings, when in reality it was only evidence of healing, of a return
to normality after a brutal trauma to the psyche. A woman could not and should
not give up the physical side of her life forever simply because she had lost a
good man.
Nina replied that in her own case the man she had lost was the best there ever
was, and she had decided conclusively to remain celibate for the rest of her
life. And she just didn’t care, she laughed, how many movie-idol types with big
fat doctors’ incomes pestered her like gadflies.
I could remember from the encounter in the funeral home and the couple of
glimpses in the church and graveyard that he was tall and handsome and, in
Rosie’s mocking term for him, “imperially slim.” I also learned now from
listening about the house that Dr. Rothesay’s medical practice was flourishing
and that he was still miraculously single well into his thirties. Nevertheless,
Nina O’Dell kept politely putting the good doctor off. She had no interest in
any man, no matter how gorgeous or financially secure he might be, she kept
telling my mother. Besides, little touches that were endearing as a friend had
started to strike her as peculiar behaviour. For example, he had visited her at
the library during the workday to give her fair notice that once her year of
mourning had expired he intended to profess himself a suitor. “Gladys, imagine!
A doctor! Wasting his time like that at ten-thirty in the morning, and him with
patients stacked up back at his office.” Nina’s incensed words did not accord
with the smile I could hear in her tone.
On another of his library visits, Nina recounted to Mom how she’d
been forced to get short with the silly man: “‘Why in God’s name, ’ I asked
him behind the stacks, ‘would you want me of all people? Come on, Heathcliff,
get bloody serious, ’ I said. ‘Why would a doctor who has been able to establish
one of the best family practices in St. John’s, who is famous for his charming
manner in the examining room, who could have his pick of freshly nubile young
maidens with no children, be wooing the frumpy Widow O’Dell with her two
prepubescent girls approaching the troublesome years?’”
“Gentle Jesus, Nina,” said Mom, “I’ve heard of playing hard to get, but that
takes the cake. What’d he say?”
“He told me my question was a fair one and he would give me an honest answer.
If I had been like this, dowdy and depressed, when he had seen me first, he
wouldn’t have wanted me, or even given me a second thought. But he’d first seen
me with my children at that university function honouring my wonderful husband a
few months after he’d first arrived here and he remembered me from then as
extraordinarily vivacious and lovely. The sight of me had taken him out of his
own broken-hearted sorrow—his reason for leaving England—and he had secretly
and, he’d thought then, hopelessly, loved me ever since. And he now knew in his
heart that I would go back to being the exceptional human being I had been
before my devastating tragedy, under the beneficial influence of his
love.”
“He said that? That’s what the man said?”
“Word for word, Glad. When it comes to certain things, I have a photographic
memory.”
Both women laughed and Mom said, “Holy moly, Nine, you’ve got to admit that’s a
pretty good speech.”
“Academically speaking, yup, maybe. But I have to tell you, his fancy talk
leaves me cold. I find him a bit smarmy.”
SEEING ROSIE LEAVING HER
classroom one
afternoon, I waved and she swerved away from her gang to come over to me with a
big friendly smile to say, “Mark down December the nineteenth on your dance
card, Tommy. I’m having a Christmas party at our house that night.”
I told her I’d be there, and then, based on everything I’d been hearing, I
asked her if Dr. Rothesay seemed to be hanging around her house much these
days.
She frowned at me. “Hanging around?” she replied somewhat haughtily. “I
wouldn’t call it that. Heathcliff, as you know, has become rather”—she
was pronouncing it “rawther” all of a sudden— “good friends of
the family. Why?”
“Well, from what I hear, it sounds like he wants your mother to be more than
just a friend.”
Rosie’s eyes bored into mine. “Who says that?”
“Well, I hear your mother talking to my mother at my house and stuff.”
“Oh God,” said Rosie as she rolled her eyes heavenwards and turned to walk
away. “That woman!”
Childishly believing Nina’s protestations to be as genuine as they sounded, I
considered her renewed attention to her hair and clothing to be her natural
resiliency in recovering from bereavement. But the Wednesday night in December
that Mom’s turn came to hold the poker septet’s weekly game at our house was an
eye-opener to me. I responded to the call from the women downstairs to make my
mandatory visit to the table before they began to play. Nina O’Dell’s face
jumped at me as I entered the room, not just because hers was the most familiar
of my mother’s friends, but also because she looked so animated and, yes, so
beautiful, again. Handed around the table by the women, I was hugged, kissed on
the cheek, stared at with frank admiration, and told how handsome I was and what
a treasure Gladys had in a son so smart-looking, whose arms felt so strong, who
was growing so tall, who was going to be such a heartbreaker in a few years—in
short, all the things that would have mortified me if someone my own age had
been present, but which, in the absence of all but my smiling mother and the six
other adoring women, sent me upstairs, body and mind tingling in pleasure as
usual from the ten minutes of physical and mental caresses. But this night my
good feeling did not last.
Doing my homework at my desk in the bedroom, I kept hearing, between antes and
bets and sees and raises and calls and peals of laughter and whoops of
jubilation— “read ’em and weep”—and exclamations of disgust— “a hand like a
frigging foot”—and clinks of wine glasses, a lot of talk about Heathcliff and
Nina. Soon it had become the sole subject of conversation and its tenor more and
more disquieting.
“Nina, girl, don’t you be so foolish,” my mother’s closest colleague at the
hospital, heretofore etched in my mind as a solid rock of sense, stated flatly.
“A man three or four years younger than a woman is bugger-all these days.” I
tried vainly to imagine myself having a girlfriend four years older than me. To
hear the chorus of agreement from five other women down there, including my own
mother, stunned me.
“Playing hard to get is a tightrope, baby,” someone else said.
“And if you fall off there’s no safety net between you and the rocks.”
That brought concurrence, but nothing like the cheers and yeas that followed
this: “Now I know this is not a consideration at all when it comes to true love,
Nina, but somewhere in the back burner of your mind, say to yourself from time
to time: ‘I am left with a widow’s mite and two orphan daughters, and here’s
this hunky dude who wants me and… he’s
a freaking doctor
.’”
“Everyone, stop it!” Nina giggled. “Yes, being desired by a virile young man
does kind of make the old juices flow, but only in theory not practice, for my
memory of Joyce will keep me from ever desiring in return any desirer no matter
how desirable.”
“Are you labouring under the delusion, Nina, that what you just said makes some
sort of sense?” asked someone. “Now you listen here. Don’t shilly-shally. Grab
him. It’s only what Joyce himself would have wanted for you and the
girls.”
“Yes, don’t wait for some bimbo,” said another, “to lure him with her big hair
and her big boobs while she snags him in her tight little trap.” That provoked
laughter and a scattered
shhh
.
But the loudest laughs and yeas of the evening my own mother brought on in
answer to a question from Nina. I simply could not believe Mom would ever in her
life say what she did. Nina had asked, “What do
you
think, Glad? Really,
now. If you were me.”
The dining room went silent as Mom replied slowly with studied consideration:
“If I thought for one minute that Dr. Heathcliff Rothesay would show half the
interest in me as a widow that he’s showering on you, Nina my ducky, I’d put
arsenic in my Joe’s hot chocolate this very night.”
In the ensuing uproar of guffaws from below, I sat there appalled. My mother
knew, she darned well knew, there were certain things you just didn’t joke
about. I got up from my desk and closed my door—I would have slammed it in
disgust but for giving away my listening post—and refused to eavesdrop any
longer on the sickening talk down there. Then I lay on my bed hardly able to
wait till I got a chance to tell Rosie about the conspiracy afoot to replace the
loving memory of husband and father in the O’Dell hearts.
The morning after in school, I managed to get a few seconds alone with Rosie by
her locker. I gave her a quick synopsis of the women’s scheming intrigue last
night, and Rosie listened casually as she worked at the con
tents
of her locker. Before I finished, two other girls joined her and started talking
about their big basketball game that weekend. As they moved off, Rosie turned to
me and smiled. “We’ll talk about it later.” She didn’t seem very concerned by my
intelligence.
The next week Dr. Rothesay invited Mom and Dad to lunch with him and Nina at
Bally Haly Golf and Curling Club. Dad balked at going, owing to pressure of work
as the end of the calendar year approached. He added, “Gladys, my sweet love,
what advice could I possibly give to a woman who thought that Joyce O’Dell was
the catch of a lifetime? But I’ll go if you really want me to.”
“No, I’ll go by myself,” said Mom. “Then I won’t be distracted by the
scintillating conversation when your golfing buddies come over. I need to size
this guy up.”
That night Mom told Dad she had asked Heathcliff how a young English doctor of
obviously good professional expectations in London had ended up over here in St.
John’s. And he’d answered that a personal relationship had terminated painfully
over there. He had meant to stay “on” Newfoundland for only a summer and autumn
medical locum when he had first arrived, but he’d straightaway fallen in love
with this quaint and cut-off, yet scenic and dynamic, place, and as a result of
remaining over here his recovery from emotional trauma was complete. “At which
point,” Mom said to Dad, “he turned and gazed at Nina with, honest to heavens,
Joe, you could only call it love.”
“
De gustibus
,” sighed Dad, “
non disputandum est
.” I knew what
that meant from his frequent pained usage of it about the house: There was no
disputing taste. But taste was not the problem here, for God’s sake! The problem
here was disloyalty and betrayal. At eleven years old, I could not imagine being
married to someone—Rosie, say—and then after I was dead, she going to bed with,
being naked with, engaging in sexual intercourse with, some other guy—that
hockey hotshot shagger in grade seven, for instance.
I called up Rosie to use my knowledge as bait to ask her over on Saturday night
and listen to some more new records I’d bought, and “talk, you know, about what
I mentioned to you.”
“Oh, Tom, I wish I could, but I’m having a sleepover at my house this weekend,”
she said. “I would ask you to come too but the other girls wouldn’t want to
have a boy there. That’s the problem with having a boy as one of your good
friends. Sometimes it doesn’t fit in with the girl stuff very
well. But I’ll see you at my Christmas party.” The notion that Rosie had
relegated me in her heart to that rather large place containing her good friends
did not make my own heart soar. And I could not fathom why she wasn’t eager to
discuss the crucial topic of her mother and Heathcliff. But I would soon find
out.
BRENT AND I WENT
to Rosie’s party and shared the living
room with twenty-five other kids. Half an hour after we arrived, I was sitting
in the big chair like I owned the place, when I heard a man’s voice from the
hall. The doorbell hadn’t rung and there’d been no knock on the door. Obviously,
the man had felt free just to walk in. “Is Mums upstairs?”
Rosie, who was sitting on the carpet not far from me, leapt to her feet and
sprinted out to the hall as Pagan, who was already there, called upstairs, “He’s
here, Mom.” Through the door, I could see Pagan tugging at a man’s hand with
both of hers. Leaning to the side a little, I saw Rosie being hugged by the
other arm and pecked on the cheek.