Roscoe (13 page)

“Roscoe. I understand I’ll see you later this morning.”

“You will indeed.”

“Wellllllll,
bonne chance,
my boy.”

Boy? Two years younger than your own creaking bones, you arrogant Republican bastard. And we almost made you a congressman; but proximity to Jack Diamond killed that. And so Gorman the Grand
rose another way: becoming Albany’s Demosthenes, Albany’s own Great Mouthpiece for a continuing line of criminals after Diamond: Dutch Schultz, Vincent Coll, Pittsburgh Phil Straus,
Pamela Yusupov.

Watching the stirrings of these myriad creatures of significance in the city—even the robotic repetitions of Ikey Finkel, the fifty-year-old newsboy, hawking his papers,
“Mawnin’ pape, mawnin’ pape”—shot Roscoe through with depression. He would, in an hour, make his way to headquarters for another day of Party rituals that would
perpetuate the bleeding of his soul.

Joey stopped the car at the corner, and Roscoe, with difficulty, climbed in beside him. Joey, six six and two fifty, barely fit behind the wheel. Roscoe was wide but not so tall. Ordinary
automobiles were not made for their like, especially for Joey, a
genuine
giant, the kind of giant you wish you were, Ros, an authentic military hero for pushing forward alone after the rest
of his squad had been killed, seeing four Nazis putting a machine gun into place, killing them all with his pistol, then holding the position until reinforcements arrived and forty more Nazis were
captured, all of which won Joey the Congressional Medal of Honor. Now Patsy’s running him for the State Senate. What will Joey do with a stack of legislative bills when he can’t even
understand the Ten Eyck lunch menu and Roscoe has to read it to him? You think people want an illiterate senator? And Patsy: You think anybody’ll vote against the Medal of Honor?

Medals? Roscoe has medals. The same Senate seat Joey will soon occupy was Roscoe’s for the asking in the early years, after the Democrats took City Hall; and it would have moved him one
step closer to matching his father’s political achievements. For a few minutes, back then, Roscoe felt safe as a hero, for not even Patsy knew that after Ros rejoined the Engineer Train he
worked in company headquarters and wrote, in the dead captain’s name, and forged, in the dead captain’s hand, the citation lauding Roscoe Conway’s bravery in drawing enemy fire, a
prize-winning work of fiction that earned Roscoe the Distinguished Service Cross. Fraudulent? Perhaps. But he
was
in the heavy action, he
was
under direct fire at the German line, and
his own buddies
shot and damn near killed him. Must we quibble about motives? When is a hero not a hero? If a hero falls alone in a trench does he make a heroic sound? Take a guess.

Patsy was convinced the DSC would easily win Roscoe the Senate seat, but Ros said, Thanks, Pat, but I would prefer not to. For by then the malaise had set in, and Roscoe was just another time
bomb waiting to explode with shameful publicity for everybody. The Party didn’t need that.

“You sick?” Joey asked.

“Do I look sick?”

“I would never say so, and don’t hold me to it, but you look like a dying dog.”

“I am sick but not that sick. Stop talking about it and let’s go to Hattie’s.”

And Joey drove to Lancaster Street, to the modest brownstone from which Hattie Wilson managed her real-estate empire: forty-six three- and four-story rooming houses, four hundred and forty tenants
whose rents Hattie collected personally, except for the eight buildings that functioned as brothels, and for those rentals Hattie received monthly cash payments in person from Mame Ray, Bindy
McCall’s woman, and the supervising madam of all eight thriving whorehouses. Dark history had been made by some of Hattie’s tenants: Mrs. Falcone, who brought home two drifters to stab
her husband fifty-seven times and who then moved from Hattie’s basement to Death Row in Sing Sing; history made also by visitors to Jack Diamond, who was in bed in a Hattie house on Dove
Street—Hattie herself was actually in the basement to stoke the furnace that very early December morning—when the boys went upstairs and put Jack into deep cool.

Roscoe’s mission this morning was to talk to Mame Ray, but he couldn’t use the phone and, with the spies watching him, he couldn’t pull up to her whorehouse in daylight,
especially before breakfast. Hattie’s place was safe, and Hattie was a storehouse of gossip herself, for her tenants were a cross-section of The Gut, Albany’s night city: bartenders and
waitresses, burglars on relief, family outcasts and runaways, semiaffluent winos who could still pay rent, motherless queens, hula dancers, B-girls and strippers, horseplayers doing their best to
die broke, dishwashers aspiring to be short-order cooks, good-time girls learning what it takes to go pro, and all the flakes, flacks, and flukes who got around to putting their heads on their
greasy pillows just as the sun was also rising on the rooftops of The Gut. A famous question in the neighborhood was: Are you married or do you pay rent to Hattie Wilson?

The word on the street was that Hattie hoarded cash in her walls, but the last burglar who checked that one out turned up mostly dead in a ditch, courtesy of the Night Squad, which protected
Hattie and her empire not only because she was O.B.’s wife, but because she was a prime snitch for the cops and a treasure to the Party for two decades, a compelling force in getting four
hundred and forty people to the polls on Election Day—no relief checks, no mail, no heat or water in the joint until you vote the right way, the Democratic way, and we do know how you
vote.

Joey parked and Roscoe went up Hattie’s stoop slowly.

“You even walk sick,” Joey said, and he hit the doorbell.

“Just shut up and open the door,” Roscoe said.

They went into the hallway and Roscoe knocked at Hattie’s inner door.

“Open up,” he said. “It’s a raid.”

“At this hour it couldn’t be social,” Hattie said from the other side of the door, and then she opened it to Roscoe and Joey, with Bridget, her Irish setter, at her heel.
Hattie was fifty-one, wearing a flowered housedress, her hair both prematurely white and unchangingly bobbed since the mid-1920s, smoking a Camel, as usual, moving into a bit of broadness at the
hips but still with that hourglass waist, and, to Roscoe, even at raw morning, a woman worth looking at, as she had been since he first intersected with her at Patsy’s victory party in 1919.
He would have married her if he wasn’t so down on marriage and she wasn’t already married; and she was always married, except for brief pauses between the “I do”s: the
perpetual bride, outthinking or outliving her husbands, or leaving them behind and finding another, always eager for that ring, because it meant a focus on the hearth and not just the bed. It also
meant she had not another breadwinner, for she’d already won all the bread she’d ever need, but another cohabiting love slave, a focus on one man, even though she always had her eye on
half a dozen, couldn’t help it, the poor thing, always such a magnet for men, such a triumph when they won her, had her, not knowing that it was she who had them, that they could never win
her if she hadn’t first singled them out of the crowd, faithful to each in her own way, never trespassing on the previous or the current one, no matter how many mounted up on her scorecard;
and Roscoe always in on her action, whatever, whom ever she did.

“You’re right again, old Hat,” Roscoe said, and Hattie stepped aside to let him and Joey into her parlor, whose furnishings, like much in her life, like Roscoe, were secondhand
and at least a generation out of fashion.

“Turn on your fans,” Roscoe said. “A day like this, even dogs leave town and head for water. Why aren’t you out at the lake, Bridget?” And the dog licked his hand.
Hattie was as intense about dogs as about husbands, and visited some of her neighbors only to talk to their dogs. Roscoe draped his suit coat over a chair back and sat on the sofa facing one of
Hattie’s electric fans, waiting for air.

“You don’t look like yourself, Rosky,” Hattie said, and she switched on both her fans.

“I told him he looked sickly,” Joey said.

“You got any iced tea?” Roscoe asked.

“In the kitchen. You go make it, Joey,” Hattie said, and Joey left the room. “What’s wrong with you, Rosky? Your color is off. And you’re puffing.”

“The hell with that. You hear about anybody making a move on the whorehouses?”

“Anybody who?”

“The troopers, the Governor.”

“I thought you got the Governor off your backs last year.”

“He won’t quit. Election’s coming.”

“All I hear is that business is great since V-J Day. Now that the war’s over, people can think about something else.”

“They didn’t think about it during the war?”

“Don’t get on me. You want me to call a doctor?”

“No doctors. I’ve got too much to do.”

“Somebody else to punch out? You’re in the papers again.”

“Some people need punching out for their own good.”

“You never change, Rosky.”

“I change like an emanation of nature, my dear. I change like an oak tree developing acorns. I change like churned milk, I change like a turnip growing ever larger, ever rounder, and
palatable only when seriously boiled.”

“You still look like the boy I got to know in Malley’s back room.”

“That billygoat. You knew so many like him. You ever keep count?”

“I can’t count that high, love.”

“If we’d gotten married, I’d be dead and gone like your first five husbands. You’re a lethal woman, Hattie.”

“Floyd is still alive, out west. He sends me postcards. And O.B. is holding his own.”

“O.B. is alive because he sees you in moderation. Smart man, O.B. Floyd I never understood.”

“Floyd made me laugh, read me poems, played the harp. I bought him a lovely big one and he played it every night.”

“But you never screwed him.”

“I never had to.”

“Not his preference.”

“I couldn’t take him serious after I caught him parading around in my stockings and garters. He took a drawerful when he left. The harp too.”

“Your figure still makes me giddy. I’m feeling the need to take it in hand again.”

“In your condition it might do you in.”

“What better way to go? Better than Elisha. Are you ready if I come by some night?”

“If you promise not to die on me, I’ll love you like a husband.”

“Good. Now I need a favor.”

“Of course you do.”

“Call Mame and ask her to come over. So many politicians move through her place, and she does loosen their tongues. Don’t mention me on the phone.”

“You’re worried about this.”

“I’m paid for what I know about this town, and what I don’t know will eat my gizzard.”

Hattie went to her telephone table and called Mame, out of Roscoe’s earshot. Joey came in from the kitchen with a pitcher of tea, three glasses, a cut lemon, ice cubes, and the sugar bowl.
No spoons, but otherwise a wonderful achievement. Roscoe would not ask anything more of him today.

Mame Ray was forty, child of a whore, raised in a whorehouse, a practitioner at puberty, a madam at twenty-five, who brought to whoring an attitude which her man, Bindy McCall,
articulated to Roscoe early on in his relationship to her: “She’s a degenerate broad, but all broad.”

Roscoe could agree, having known Mame on and off for three months before Bindy took her over, a wild trimester of melodramatic sex that curdled when Mame invited paying spectators to watch them
through peepholes. Roscoe now avoided Mame unless he had a reason to see her. He considered her a narcissistic cauldron of spite, a felonious virago if crossed; but an acute manager of business and
people, effective scavenger in grocery marts and ten-cent stores for poor but shapely salesgirls ready to be rented, a wizard concerning the textures of desire, and at turning even casual customers
into slaves of their own sexuality. In her early twenties she was a roving freelancer, and then princess of whichever house she settled into—in New York, Hudson, and finally Albany in 1930,
when Roscoe found her. Bindy, after he took her over, saw to it that she spent less time on her back, more time counting revenue from the eight houses he gave her to supervise, all eight in
Hattie’s buildings.

Mame’s main brothel, Hattie’s only building outside the rooming-house district, was an old Prohibition roadhouse in the city’s West End, known first as the Come On Inn, now
called the Notchery, and it was all gold. Its first two floors were luxuriously furnished for a whorehouse, and Mame lived amid high-fashion décor on the third floor. It was also the
collection depot for payoffs to Bindy from all city brothels, and these sums he passed on to Roscoe three times a week at Party headquarters after he took his cut, which Patsy suspected was getting
larger lately, a point of contention between the brothers.

When Hattie saw Mame step out of the taxicab, she opened the inner door for her and went back to her chair. Roscoe, sipping his second glass of iced tea, watched Joey playing solitaire on the
coffee table. Joey was cheating, yet losing. What kind of a senator is this? Mame flounced through the open door, her hair a new shade of auburn since Roscoe last saw her, her seductive amplitude
unchanged, and wearing a tan linen skirt and white blouse. Mame’s face was not her fortune: her nose was a bump, her eyes too small, her cheekbones lost in the puff of her cheeks, but her
mouth and its savvy smile offered serious intimacy.

“My God, Hattie,” she said, leaving the door ajar, “it’s hotter here than outside. Pour me one of those teas, Roscoe.”

“Glad to see you, too, Mame,” Roscoe said.

Hattie closed the door, then poured an iced tea for Mame, who sat on the other end of the sofa from Joey.

“Hiya, Mame,” Joey said.

“How’s it hangin’, Joe?”

“Down to my knees.”

“Send my regards,” Mame said.

“Never mind the shoptalk,” Roscoe said. “We hear the Governor may make a surprise raid on some of the girls.”

“How could that happen?” Mame asked. “We pay off everybody, including one of the Governor’s lawyers, and a couple of the very best state legislators.”