Roscoe (14 page)

“You hear any rumors?”

“Pina said the troopers were talking to South End pimps, and she mentioned they’re interested in Division Street.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“They’re also talking to the Dutchman, and Pina says they know a beat cop taking payoffs, eight dollars a week.”

“Eight dollars. A fantastic specific, but not quite grounds for a raid. Who told Pina that?”

“I didn’t take it serious,” Mame said.

“Who could it have been? When was it?”

“Last night. Could’ve been anybody.”

“You and Pina worked last night?”

“We never close.”

“Everybody else closed,” Roscoe said.

“So I heard.”

“Patsy sent the word out yesterday to shut down.”

“Patsy, Patsy, Patsy. Fuck Patsy. We’re using the peephole. Only people we know get in.”

“Did you say fuck Patsy?” Hattie asked her.

“I did. He came to our place years ago, then all of a sudden he stays home and says his Rosary. What I think is his dick fell off. I hope it did.”

“Oh, Mame, Mame,” Hattie said. “You’ve gone bedbugs.”

“What you’re saying is Bindy
won’t
close? All eight places are running?”

“Just the Notchery,” Mame said. “You know how much money we’re losing with seven places dark? How are people supposed to live?”

“You know the money it’d take to get you and your girls out of jail? Lawyers, bail, greasing judges we don’t own, appeals if anybody’s convicted? This is happening at the
state level, sweetheart, and the election is coming.”

“We’ve had raids before,” Mame said. “Nothing changes and then we go back to work. God, Hattie, I can’t stand this heat.” Mame opened her front burtons and
slipped off her blouse. She wore a corselette that put much of her chest on exhibit.

“Lookin’ good, Mame,” Joey said.

“I don’t overeat,” Mame said.

“Wanna go in the bedroom?”

“Thanks, Joe, but I never fuck before lunch.”

“So,” said Roscoe, “you’re saying Bindy’s now in business for himself?”

“Wasn’t he always?” Mame said.

“I’ll think about that,” Roscoe said. “In the meantime, madam, I suggest you guard your peephole very vigorously.”

Roscoe walked slowly down the hallway toward Supreme Court at one minute to ten, Veronica and Gilby beside him. Photographers from the local papers were ahead of them,
shooting, walking backward as they reloaded their Speed Graphics. You’re on tomorrow’s front page, Ros. Suck in your gut.

As they entered the courtroom, Roscoe moved Gilby a step ahead, then he and Veronica walked down the aisle together, maybe his only chance to do this. Pamela and Marcus Gorman had not arrived,
but the courtroom was half filled, mostly with women who had come to see the socially notorious Pamela. The
Times-Union
this morning carried a capsule history of her marriages and scandals,
her liaisons with millionaires, royal exiles, and Caribbean gigolos, and it highlighted the night she spent in jail for smashing a woman’s face with a champagne glass, thirty-two stitches,
because the woman had insulted President Roosevelt. Give the devil her due. She’s still a Democrat.

“She’s not here yet,” Roscoe said to Veronica. “Have you figured out what you’ll say to her?”

“That I’ll cut out her heart and throw it to my dogs the way she bounced hard-boiled eggs to her poodle.”

“Splendid,” Roscoe said.

He settled his clients at the defense table and checked on the press: Frank Merola, who covered courts for the
Times-Union,
a friendly face, another way of saying he was on the
Party’s payroll and would not be hostile to a Roscoe client, especially Elisha’s widow; Bill Cooley of the
Knickerbocker News,
who was also on the payroll but whose story might
be less friendly, for one of his editors was born and would die a Republican; and also Vic Fenster from the goddamn
Sentinel
.

Roscoe heard Pamela before he saw her, her volume announcing the grand dame’s arrival. She wore a lavender picture hat, more suitable for the racetrack than the courtroom, a matching
lavender dress, and red shoes. Her nylon stockings had a rare sheen, unlike any Roscoe had seen when he shopped with Trish, these surely from the
haute-couture
black market.

“I feel so secure with you on the case,” Pamela was saying as she entered, smiling up at Marcus Gorman, who was beamish beside her. They came toward the bench, Marcus nodding a
restrained collegial greeting to Roscoe. Pamela paused to stare at Gilby, who sat at the defense table beside Veronica. She walked to him.

“Oh, Gilby, sweet boy, how handsome you look.” She grasped his hand and squeezed it.

“Leave him alone,” Veronica said. Pamela ignored her and went to the table where Marcus was waiting. A court bailiff entered the judge’s chambers, and then George Quinn, the
court crier, announced that court was in session, the honorable Francis Finn presiding, all rise. Finn was a young question mark, for, although he owed his presence on the bench to Patsy’s
endorsement, it was Marcus who had used his influence to get him into Albany Law School right out of high school, without an intervening college education.

“I’ve read your petition, Mr. Gorman, and your response, Mr. Conway,” Judge Finn said, “and it seems to me there are issues of fact to be determined here. Do you
agree?” He looked to Marcus, a formal figure in dark-blue suit and subdued red tie, who stood and spoke with unusual restraint—flamboyance, not understatement, was Marcus’s
trademark.

“No, Your Honor,” Marcus said, “for we are dealing here with the biological right of a mother, under law, to possess her own child. There was no legal adoption of this boy by
Veronica Fitzgibbon, only a temporary custody arrangement agreed to by a deeply troubled mother whose circumstances would not allow her to raise the child as she wanted him raised. But she has
triumphed over adversity and now reclaims her right to cherish her own flesh and blood, to give him the upbringing he deserves from his true mother. And we ask that immediate custody of her only
son be granted to her—today.” And he sat down.

“What do you say to this, counsel?” the judge asked Roscoe.

And Roscoe stood and recounted the Gilby prenatal adoption plan, noted the absence of contact between biological mother and child for three years after the birth, and only eight mother–son
meetings during the next nine years.

“And so Pamela Yusupov,” said Roscoe, “who gave her child away with a great expression of relief
before he was born,
has seen the boy only ten times in his entire life,
including the day of his birth and this sighting today. Yet she wants to take him from the mother who, while cradling him as her own when he was only hours out of the womb, heard Pamela Yusupov
say, ‘Thank God, thank God I’m no longer a mother.’ Now this unnatural mother seeks to wrench that child out of the only mother’s arms he’s ever known. The boy does
not want to leave, and it would be tragic to place him, against his will, in custody of this stranger. What’s more, this stranger’s sole purpose here is to obtain money from the estate
of her late ex-husband, who disowned her five years ago, who was father to this boy but never saw him—not once—in his entire life. Should the profoundest of human bonds, between mother
and son, ever be measured by the financial gain it will bring? Your respondents ask that this mischievous suit be dismissed.”

Judge Finn shook his head and said, “Let’s not waste the court’s time here, Mr. Gorman, Mr. Conway. The way to resolve this is through sworn testimony, and we must hear from
the infant.”

“Then we request that testimony be taken in chambers,” said Roscoe, “to make the environment less frightening for the boy.”

“We will reconvene here, in my chambers, two weeks from today,” the judge said.

To Roscoe, Veronica had been a savvy childhood goddess, creature of heavenly body to which he had modest privilege; but then she became, oh yes, high priestess of betrayal and
venal dreams, human after all. Pamela was Veronica manquée, savvy and single-minded, the vulvaceous creature of devilish body and venturesome sin. Roscoe loved the blood that flowed in the
young sisters’ bodies, loved their vitality and, of course, their beauty. That both were beautiful no one disagreed. When Veronica was nineteen and about to marry Elisha, she was photographed
in a white parlor of her home, wearing a white, off-the-shoulder evening dress with no trace of vulgarity in her bare shoulders, standing in a smoky light that obscured her right hand and gave her
an aura of ethereality. The photo was everybody’s favorite when it appeared in magazines and rotogravures, and so Pamela, at nineteen and about to marry Roscoe, had an identical photo taken to
prove Veronica’s image was not a singular phenomenon, and proved the reverse. Pamela’s photo accented her shoulder bones and her curiously inelegant posture, and Roscoe concluded that,
though she tried to stand upright for the portrait, her crooked soul betrayed her. Now, twenty-nine years later, here she was in court, still getting even for genetic inequities.

When he married Pamela, Roscoe had a modest income from his father’s Stanwix brewery, an enterprise that dated to 1886, when Felix bought it from John Malley, who gave up making beer in
order to sell it retail in what his sons would develop into the city’s largest saloon. Two years later, Felix was elected Albany’s first mayor of Irish extraction, and the day after his
election he led a parade of twelve Stanwix wagons, each drawn by a double team through the entire city, to let it be known that good things would happen to saloonkeepers who served Stanwix beer and
Shamrock ale, the Democratic Party’s new official beverages. The brews remained such even after Felix was removed from office for fraud, for he continued as a figure of power in the Party,
and the brewery made him a fortune. It also kept his wife, Blanche’s regal standing in the First Irish Families, that elite social unit with which Felix would have nothing to do, for, as all
know, elevated social status turns the Irish into Republicans.

When the Democrats lost City Hall in 1899, Stanwix beer had a sheer falling off. But its quality kept it popular and, by 1914 its profits gave Roscoe enough income to travel comfortably in the
Fitzgibbon social circle, which included the Morgan sisters. And it was these sisters, not money, or politics, that focused Roscoe’s mind. He had proposed to Veronica Morgan when he finished
Albany Law School, but she married Elisha and his fortune.

Then came Pamela.

Roscoe studied Pamela the plaintiff, who remained photogenic for the newspapers, her essential blond hair durably bottled in bond. But her smile had changed: two of her incisors gone crooked.
And that tantalizing body he had pressed against so often, on sleigh rides, at dances, even when pursuing Veronica, had developed into one of Pamela’s worst fears: the thickening middle.
Together at Veronica’s wedding reception at the Albany Country Club, Roscoe and Pamela had watched thick-middled Honey Mills, fiftyish, hair like straw dyed black, talking with three men
sitting on chairs across from her, and offering them all a prolonged revelation of her thigh. Pamela said an ugly, shapeless woman doing such a needy thing was pathetic, but then she and Roscoe
went off to the shadowy cloakroom, where Pammy kissed him and gave him exploration rights. Divested of one sister, Roscoe took the other. He courted Pamela, went with her downtown, even to Fifth
Avenue on the New York train, shopping for hats, coats, dresses. He kept her company when she was blue, took her to Dr. Warner’s office when she had the stomach pains, sometimes associated
with her monthlies, took her to dinner at Keeler’s, to dances at the Yacht Club and the Hampton Roof Garden, and went with her on vacation to Tristano, the great Adirondack camp Lyman had
started building in 1873. It was both Ariel’s and Elisha’s favored retreat. Elisha always invited Roscoe, and Roscoe always went, for Veronica would be there.

But Pamela became his primary interest during this visit to Tristano, where social fantasia pervaded the air like the scent of pine trees. Accessible from the railhead at North Creek only by
horse-drawn carriage and then by steamer across the lake, Tristano was isolated amid the loons and raccoons, the foxes, eagles, and great horned owls, and surrounded by alders, spruces, cedars,
white pine, and hemlocks. Its twenty-four buildings along the shoreline seemed on first approach to be the edge of a small city that extended infinitely backward into the estate’s two thousand
wooded acres. And indeed it bustled like a city when family friends and servants put it to full use. Life amid this animated isolation, this log-cabin luxury of the uncommonly rich, offered the
visitor a transformation of expectation. What happened here seemed a charade played out among real people by unreal rules with improbable consequences—Roscoe, for instance, alone on the
floor with Pamela on two raccoon coats at four in the morning, proposing marriage, being accepted, then bringing her back here as a bride.

Their honeymoon was romantic solitude in front of open fireplaces, long walks in the pineydown woods, cool swims in the lake’s morning stillness, and pointed talk, never about tomorrow,
but about how they would spend the abundance that was today. Looking at Pamela in the courtroom, Roscoe remembers that vivid yellow hair when the yellowness was real, can see her in a shimmering
blue summer evening gown, then slipping effortlessly out of it, remembers how she walked or provocatively sat, and how much he loved her. But he now knows this love was independent of Pamela, a
consequence of his own unruly capacity for love.

After Veronica married Elisha, Roscoe could no longer love her as before; and so loved Pamela instead, and she loved him, and they married, made love, and made love again, half a dozen times the
first day. In between they ate what the Tristano servants cooked for them: fresh fish from the lake, a pheasant shot by Kendrick, Ariel’s resident woodsman. They drank lightly to keep love at
a sharp edge, took the boat out on the lake to find a place where there was no sound. Their lives became elemental, centering on the forest, the water, the bed, and the belief that life was
purposeful, even though its only discernible purpose was love, effortless love that Roscoe could give and receive at will. And he loved it, loved Pamela, loved that he loved her, loved women,
loved love.