Roscoe (3 page)

“Time. Time gets into everything. I’m sick of carrying time around on my back like a bundle of rocks.”

“Time? What are you talking about, time? To hell with time.”

“Pat, don’t worry. We’ll figure it out.”

“Time. Jesus H. Jesus.”

The lives of Roscoe, Patsy McCall, and Elisha Fitzgibbon had been a lock from their shared boyhood on the city streets they would come to own, at the cockpits where their
fathers fought chickens, and on the nine hundred acres of Tivoli, the great Fitzgibbon estate in Loudonville created by Elisha’s grandfather Lyman Fitzgibbon, who in his long life made
several fortunes—in railroads, land speculation, foundries, and steel manufacture. Tivoli was a paradise made for moneyed creatures and small boys. The three walked the virgin woods of oak
and maple and birch and hemlock and white pine, they fished the pristine waters of Elisha’s tiny Lake Tivoli until they outgrew sunfish and perch and went down to the Hudson River for blues,
stripers, shad, and sturgeon. They swam in the Erie Canal and the river, hunted partridge and pheasant on the river flats, wild turkey in the Fitzgibbon woods, and deer up at Tristano,
Elisha’s family’s sumptuous rustic camp in the Adirondacks. The boys brought their river catch and hunters’ quarry to Felix Conway’s table, for neither Patsy’s mother
nor Elisha’s stepmother would give them houseroom. Roscoe organized all their excursions, fished with the eye of a pelican, and could put a bullet between a snake’s fangs at sixty
yards. Felix marveled at his son’s talent, but it was his own doing, for he’d given Roscoe a .22 rifle as soon as the boy reached the age of good reason.

“Remember,” his mother warned Roscoe at age nine, just after Felix had left her and the children to live at the Ten Eyck, “never shoot anybody with that gun unless it’s a
politician.”

But it was the politics of Democracy that cemented the boys’ friendship. Their headquarters, even before they’d begun to drink, was the North End saloon run by Patsy’s father,
Black Jack McCall, the Ninth Ward leader who would become sheriff. The saloon had long been closed, but Patsy reopened it every year to hear the ward leaders predict the vote they would deliver,
and then give them their street money to help it happen. The trio’s mentor in the liabilities of political honesty was Felix, who helped them plan Patsy’s campaign for a city
assessorship in 1919, the year he died. Campaign money came from Elisha, who, along with his siblings, inherited the steel fortune accumulated by his grandfather Lyman (who had helped finance
Grover Cleveland’s first campaign for the presidency). Elisha financed both Patsy’s successful run for the assessorship in 1919, and the Democratic takeover of City Hall in the 1921
election. After that, politics was the mother lode for this trio, and money, for most of the decade, was not a problem.

Roscoe and Elisha were in the Ten Eyck dining room, finishing their second bottle of wine with a dinner of shrimp, bluefish, boiled potatoes, and fresh snowflake rolls. Elisha exuded ruddy good
health, or was it the flush that comes with a summer evening? He was the picture of composure in his buttoned-down Brooks Brothers shirt, his tie tight on his collar, his double-breasted cream
sport jacket impeccably tailored by Joe Amore, his steel-gray hair associated with Men of Distinction in whiskey ads. His age was visible in his receding hairline, but Red the Barber had consoled
him that he would not live long enough to be bald. No one looked more stylishly rich than Elisha, the capitalist at his zenith.

The bells of St. Peter’s Church began ringing up the street and Roscoe said, “So it’s over.”

“Sounds that way.”

“Alex will be coming home.”

“I hope he’s not one of those postwar casualties like that German soldier in
All Quiet on the Western Front.
It’s after the Armistice, and he raises his head up out of
the trench to look at a butterfly, and a sniper who doesn’t know the war is over, or maybe he does, puts one through his brain.”

“Alex is too smart for that,” Roscoe said. “He’ll come home as fit as he went. We’ll give him a parade.”

“I don’t think he’d march in it.”

“You’re probably right. He has that leveling instinct about himself.”

“He’ll be leveled in other ways. He won’t be as rich as he used to be. None of us will.”

“That’s right. The government will cancel your million-dollar contracts.”

“They won’t need my steel for their tanks.”

“You may have to make refrigerators.”

“If I do that, my salesmen will have to uncover the difference between refrigerators and tanks.”

“Does that make you sad?”

“It makes me poor.”

“You’re not poor, Elisha.”

“No, I still have my shoes.”

“You’re a millionaire. You can’t kid me.”

“At times I’m a millionaire,” Elisha said. “But being a millionaire opens you to criticism.”

“Politics also does that.”

“It’s a short walk from politics to hell,” Elisha said.

“Ah. It’s nice to see that winning the war has lightened your mood.”

“I’m tired of the scandalous liabilities of wealth.”

“Which scandalous liabilities, other than the usual, might those be?”

“Nothing I want to talk about. You’ll know soon enough.”

“A mystery. I’ll try to understand,” Roscoe said. “But at no time have I ever been wealthy enough to have such worries, even though I’ve told people
otherwise.”

“I’ve heard you say that.”

“I’m a fraud,” Roscoe said. “I’ve always been a fraud.”

“Nonsense. Nobody ever believes anything you say about yourself.”

“Not even when I’m lying?”

“No, never.”

“What if I said I was quitting the Party?”

Elisha stared at him, inspecting for fraudulence.

“Did you tell Patsy?”

“He wanted to know if I’d told you. Now it’s yes on both counts.”

Elisha’s smile exuded knowledge of Roscoe’s meaning. The man could understand what was unspoken, even unknown. Patsy understood, but could not admit it, for it ran counter to his
plans and outside his control. Elisha knew Roscoe’s thoughts without having to ask questions. Their friendship had gone through storms of trouble, rich men’s poverty, broken love.
Especially that, for Roscoe had been in love with Elisha’s wife since before the two married. It didn’t interfere with the friendship, for Roscoe’s love for Veronica was
impossible and he knew it and mostly let it alone.

“I wonder what you’ll do when you quit,” Elisha said. “You’re not suited for a whole lot of jobs. Will you just loll around spending your money?”

“I haven’t carried it that far yet. But I have to change my life, do something that engages my soul before I die.”

“I’m glad to hear you still have a soul.”

“It surfaces every so often,” Roscoe said.

“You don’t look like a man with a tortured soul. It’s always a surprise how well we dissemble. You’re as good as there is at that game, the way you’ve kept your
feeling for Veronica under lock and key—it’s admirable.”

“I have no choice. I have no choice in most things. All the repetitions, the goddamn investigations that never end, another election coming, and now Patsy wants a third candidate to
dilute the Republican vote. We’ll humiliate the Governor. On top of that, Cutie LaRue told me this afternoon George Scully has increased his surveillance on me. They’re probably
doubling their watch on you, too. You’d make a handsome trophy.”

“Wouldn’t I? Do you think I should worry?”

“Are you worrying right now?”

“No. I’m listening to those bells,” Elisha said. “We should avoid worrying and celebrate peace in the world. They’ll call us Jap-lovers if we
don’t.”

“I loved a Jap once,” Roscoe said. “She was unusually lovely.”

“I hope that wasn’t during the war effort.”

“Much earlier.”

“Then you’re safe.”

“We have to battle the plague of jingoism that’s about to engulf us. Some modest degree of intoxication seems the obvious strategy.”

“We could drink here,” Elisha said.

“Drinking in a hotel dining room at a time of jubilation,” said Roscoe, “is not drinking and not serious and not jubilant. We have to mix with the hoi polloi when we drink. We
have to bend with the amber waves of grain, roil our juices under spacious skies. We have to join the carnival.”

“EP on the bing,” Elisha said emphatically.

They went downstairs to the Ten Eyck’s bar, which was locked and dark. They walked across Chapel Street to Farnham’s and found no customers, only Randall, the
barman, cleaning his sink.

“We’re closed,” he said.

“Closed?”

“The war’s over,” Randall said, taking off his apron. “Alfie says this is no time to drink. Alfie says to me, ‘Close up, Randall. This is a time for prayer and
patriotism.’ ”

“I’ll remember Alfie, and I’ll remember you too, Randall,” Roscoe said. “Patriotism is the last refuge of saboteurs.”

“Right you are, Mr. Conway. O’Connor’s and Keeler’s are also closed.” Randall turned off the bar light. “I’ll be open tomorrow after five.”

On the street they heard bells gonging in several churches, trains whistling down at Union Station, the carillon clanging in the City Hall tower, the air-raid siren wailing for the last time.
They saw trolleys at a standstill, traffic grid locked at State and Pearl, clots of hundreds, soon to be tens of thousands, moving into pandemonium. They walked up State and tried the bar at the
DeWitt Clinton Hotel, but saboteurs had locked it.

“The Kenmore won’t close,” Roscoe said. “The bells of Mahoney’s cash register are the opposite of patriotic.”

They walked back down State Street, the majestic hill of Albany, this very old city in which they both owned uncommon stock and psychic shares. No merchant, no owner of real estate, no peddler
or lawyer or bartender, no bum or pickpocket or bookie or politician in the city, not even a stranger walking the streets for the first time, was aloof from the power of these two men if they chose
to exercise it; their power, of course, deriving from Patsy, the man without whom . . . and we all know the rest.

They walked over Lodge Street past St. Mary’s Catholic Church, past the five-story Albany County Courthouse, whose ninety-seven janitors were all hired on Roscoe’s okay. Cars
clattered by dragging tin cans, grown men marched along pounding dishpans, and Roscoe and Elisha followed them down Columbia Street toward Pearl, where youths were throwing firecrackers at the
antic crowds jamming the intersection.

They entered the side door of the Kenmore Hotel, eternal center of mirth and jazz and women and ready-to-wear myth. Roscoe regularly left his blues here, an uncounted legion of college girls
left their virginity here, Bunny Berigan left his cornet here and Bob Mahoney gave it as a gift to Marcus Gorman, and Jack Diamond left the place an enduringly raffish reputation. In short, life
without the Kenmore was not life; and at this moment it was noisy and overcrowded, the back bar three deep with revelers, every table full in the Rainbo Room nightclub. Roscoe and Elisha shoved
their way toward The Tavern, the Kenmore’s long barroom, where Bob Mahoney was pouring drink as fast as he could move. Roscoe ordered gin and also asked Mahoney to fill his pocket flask for
the long night ahead.

“They been here since noontime waiting for the surrender,” Mahoney said. “Another two hours like this, I’ll be out of beer. I’ve never seen a drinking day like this
ever, and I include Armistice Day, 1918.”

“Nobody drank in Albany on Armistice Day,” Elisha said. “I was here. We all had pork chops and went to bed.”

“Weren’t you in the army?” Mahoney asked.

“I was making too much money. Do you have any ale?”

“I do.”

“Breedy ale don’t kitty or cut pips,” Elisha said.

“What? What’d you say?” Mahoney asked.

“He’ll have gin with an ale chaser,” Roscoe said. “Did you call Stanwix about a beer delivery?”

“I called every brewery in four counties. Either they’re closed or they won’t handle any orders. Imagine no beer with a mob like this in the joint?”

“I’ll call and get you a delivery,” Roscoe said.

“You do and you drink free till Christmas.”

“Mahoney, you know how to touch a man’s heart.”

Glenn Miller was on the jukebox—At Last, my love has come along—and two dozen soldiers and sailors at the bar were randomly kissing and fondling young and not-so-young women.
Civilian males, one flashing his Ruptured Duck, the discharge button that proved he’d also served, stood by for seconds, or thirds. Roscoe recognized a petite woman who worked in his
building, who always offered up a dry little smile in the elevator; and here she stood in a prolonged, sloppy kiss, her arms and a provocative stockinged leg wrapped around a sailor.

“This reminds me,” Roscoe said to Elisha. “Shouldn’t you call your wife?”

“Curb your salacious tongue.”

“I mean no insult, old man, but we mustn’t be without our women amid all this naked lust. You call Veronica, I’ll call Trish, and we’ll carry on elsewhere.”

“No need to call Trish,” Elisha said, pointing to a wooden booth by the front door where two soldiers, their caps in a puddle of beer on the table, were muzzling Trish, taking turns
kissing her. As Roscoe walked toward her table he saw both soldiers’ hands roaming inside her unbuttoned blouse.

“Hello, honey,” Trish said, “I thought I’d find you here.”

Both soldiers removed their hands from her chest and looked up at Roscoe. One soldier looked sixteen.

“I’ll be right with you, Rosky,” Trish said, buttoning up.

“Carry on, soldiers,” Roscoe said. “They’re what you were fighting for,” and he went back to Elisha at the bar.

“Trish is a very patriotic young woman,” Elisha said.

“If sex were bazookas,” Roscoe said, “she could’ve taken Saipan all by herself.”

Roscoe saw Trish coming toward him, her walk a concerto of swivels and jiggles that entertained multitudes in the corridors of the Capitol, where she worked for the Democratic leader of the
Assembly. She lived in an apartment on Dove Street, and Roscoe paid her rent. With her curly brown bangs still intact despite the muzzling, Trish explained everything to Roscoe.