Roscoe (33 page)

When O.B. saw the way the pistol was rising in Mac’s hand, he moved his head away from it, and so Mac’s bullet did not enter the front of his jaw as Mac had intended, but his left
temple, which sent O.B. to a new place. Mac then handed his pistol to Roscoe.

“Lunatic. You goddamn lunatic,” Roscoe said. “You’re as dead as he is.” He stared at O.B.’s head on the desk. “He’s my brother.”

“He was the best friend I ever had,” Mac said.

The walls of O.B.’s office were the same pale blue as Elisha’s final face.

When Elisha stepped off the train and stood alone on the platform, Roscoe called to him through the train window. But Elisha only tapped his right foot as the train pulled
away. Now Roscoe entered the barn where the Communion of Saints was sponsoring its perennial flea market. Crowds moved from stall to stall, buying St. Teresa’s eyelashes, chips off St.
Peter’s shinbone, St. Sebastian’s arrowheads, and, new this year, the curly toenails of St. Anthony’s demon temptress. Roscoe asked to see Elisha.

“We have no one by that name,” the Registrar said.

“He got off the train here.”

“Has he performed any posthumous miracles?”

“He’s working on that.”

“Many are called, sir, but even the holiest of men rarely qualify, because of the severe demands of the moral law.”

“Elisha wasn’t up on the moral law. He wasn’t even a Catholic.”

“Ignorance of the moral law is no excuse.”

“No, but it’s a living.”

Roscoe wanted to tell this fellow that not morality but fraudulence is the necessary modality for human existence. Nothing is, or ever was, what it seems. Thou shalt not commit honesty. Elisha
died a martyr to this creed.

“Those thoughts,” the Registrar said, “are unacceptable here.”

“I’m glad we agree on something,” Roscoe said.

There was Roscoe all over page one again: lofty pol, whorehouse lawyer, now intermediary for the killer-cop who killed his brother. What he must be going through. See Roscoe in
mourning with his sister Cress, see widow Hattie in her weeds, see the police honor guard standing at the hero’s grave.

“I never thought he’d die in bed,” said Hattie. “But to have my little Mac do him. And I put them together.”

O.B.’s death put her in tears at first, weep, stop, weep again. Then she was over it. O.B. was an erratic, mediocre husband, not such a bad lover, a pal who made her feel like an insider,
told her everything that wasn’t an official secret, brought her fresh bread and cake from the Jewish bakeries, roasts and chops from the Armenian butcher, never came by empty-handed before or
after they were married. And why did they ever marry? Well, he made her feel safe, and he chased her, as he chased so many, but probably he married her for more reasons than her enduring nubility:
one, because it would—oh, sibling treachery—one-up Roscoe, whom, two, Hattie loved in her way-premarital blockade. But Hattie also had her reasons: one, Ros wasn’t available to her, the way
Veronica wasn’t available to Ros, who therefore married Pamela, as Hattie therefore married O.B.; and, two, Hattie, invincibly lonely, always has to marry somebody.

Mac immediately pleaded guilty when charged with first-degree murder. I did it, he said, give me the chair. Sorry, Mac, you can’t plead to the capital crime. You need a lawyer, and
don’t ask Roscoe for any more favors. Mac stopped eating in jail, wanted to die; so many maniacs in this suicide roundelay: Jack and Elisha, and then O.B. deciding that stealing Mac’s
women and ending his career as a cop were mere amusements, and Mac assuming a jaw-shot would be judged as tit-for-tat, all of them lying to themselves as they designed their own finales. From his
car on the curving road to O.B.’s new grave in St. Agnes Cemetery, Roscoe saw where Hattie’s fourth husband, Benny (the) Behr, another one, was buried: Benny, who blew a hole in his
head with a shotgun when he couldn’t stand the pain in his spine. No hallowed ground for you, Ben, your place is with the suicidal trees. But Hattie wouldn’t hear of that, and confessed
to the chancellor of the Albany Catholic Diocese that she was the one who blew that hole in Benny’s pain. Bless me, Father, I did murder. Punish me, not him, such a good man, how could I sit
there and watch him suffer and do nothing to help him? The chancellor believed Hattie, and so Benny joined the hallowable dead in the St. Agnes underworld. The chancellor also said Hattie should
tell the police what she did, but she told only Roscoe, and nobody prosecuted St. Hat—after all, she didn’t do it. The chancellor kept Hattie’s confession to himself, as did Roscoe, and
it remained secret even to Benny.

O.B.’s fresh grave lay alongside Felix’s obelisk, which rested on a pedestal into which the name Conway was engraved; and the pedestal was losing ground to the encroaching sod.

“You see that?” he said to Cress.

“Of course I see it,” she said. “Mama’s and Papa’s graves.”

“I mean the sod. Look at the sod.”

“Yes, the sod. They’re under it.”

“I mean we should come back up and cut away that sod. It’s overgrowing the stone.”

“If you cut away the sod the grass dies, and then it comes back as clover and dandelions.”

Forget it. Roscoe would come alone. Cress had been a lovable sister, but grew into a dotty spinster with selectively skewed memories: all the celebratory minutiae of Felix’s history as
mayor, but not a whit of recollection of his removal from office, and no acknowledgment that he had lived half his later life in hotel exile from the family. It was not seemly to have such
memories.

Mayor Alex, the fire chief, half the city government, police chiefs from other cities, and a hundred friends circled the grave for O.B.’s ceremonial descent to the eighth floor, no more
worry about Albany’s evildoers. No evil down there, either; only pain. Get ready for the boiling pitch, brother barrator, and I may be along presently. Look among the trees for Elisha when
you get down there and tell him I’m on the verge of decoding his scheme. But he’s probably elsewhere, you don’t know where in hell to look for that man. And tell him I’ve
decided the windshield head-bump injured his prefrontal cortex, which brought on all that anxiety and chloral hydrate, my fault. I hit the brakes, another oblique homicide. Send my regrets.

Monsignor Tooher from St. Joseph’s gave O.B. a full Jesus sendoff, and Roscoe came close to weeping when he remembered the adolescent O.B., for, since Felix was usually on family leave,
Roscoe half-raised his brother in those years, Rozzie and Ozzie inseparable: trapping yellow birds with George Quinn, running on top of freight cars; O.B., learning the hard way, fell and broke his
arm. Roscoe taught him about Patsy’s chickens and Eli’s horses, took him to the burlesque at the Gayety to see Millie DeLeon shake herself and throw her garters to the audience; also
introduced him to a community of reluctant virgins who tested their own limits with Roscoe and then with O.B., who became an apt student of their restraint. To civilize him, Roscoe took him
regularly to Harmanus Bleecker Hall to see Chauncey Olcott, Lew Docksteader’s minstrels, Lillian Russell, the Barrymores, even a Shakespeare, was it
Twelfth Night
? But the theater
never penetrated O.B.’s brain. He had no use for abstract or imposed pleasure, unless it was a woman sitting on his lap. He lived for women, God bless them every one. He also kept on rolling
beer kegs for Felix until the brewery closed, then signed on as Patsy’s beer protector. From the McCall brothers he learned truculence as a survival trait; learned so well that Roscoe talked
Patsy into letting him exercise it on the force so he wouldn’t turn into a hoodlum. And then O.B. rose, and fell. The newspapers thought they loved him: “Farewell to the Doctor, Who
Kept Gangsters out of Albany.” They know about Jack: the
sotto-voce
legacy that’s now his epitaph. And there you go, O.B., never a bad brother, just a remote one: Roz and Oz,
fraternal strangers after adolescence. But he was a blood presence, and now isn’t. First Roscoe without Elisha, now without O.B., a pair without whom Roscoe would be somebody else. He looks
into the grave as he gives O.B. the okay to move on, and he knows another small lobe of his soul is atrophying.

“We should talk,” Alex said to him as they walked away from the grave. Roscoe saw Veronica in the moving crowd and returned her nod.

“Now?” he said to Alex.

“As soon as possible, privately.”

Roscoe gestured toward a slope with more illustrious obelisks and statues of angels. “No eavesdroppers up there,” he said.

“Fine.” Alex gestured for Roscoe to lead the way up the grassy incline.

Roscoe and Alex (2)

“I worry about you,” Alex said, a marble cherub hovering behind him. He stood tall, sharp in his black tie on gray collar, getting his old weight back. “This
is almost too much to bear. Witnessing it, arranging it yourself. God, Roscoe, I’m so sorry. I wanted to say this at the wake.”

Weary Roscoe sat on the marble sarcophagus of Ebel Campion, the North End undertaker, a good fellow. Ebel would not consider the sitting an imposition. Probably glad for the visit. And Roscoe
said to Alex, “It’s good of you, my boy. I’m in a bad place. O.B. was a decent brother, a foolish man. I’m trying to understand him.”

“I’m trying to understand
you,
” Alex said. “You’re central to every disaster—my father, the Patsy-Bindy thing, beating up editors, the Notchery scandal, the
Dutchman and that murderous whore, now poor O.B. and mad Mac. What’s next for you, Roscoe, wholesaling opium? White slavery? I wouldn’t sell you an insurance policy. You’re a bad
risk.”

“I do seem to ride the lightning,” Roscoe said.

“I worry. I worry about Gilby’s case. These are not good omens.”

Ah yes, Gilby’s case.

“It’s two days away. The judge may decide you’re a villain yourself, to be such a friend to villainy.”

“Only a judicial villain could make such a ruling, and we have none so injudicious in Albany.”

“Are you ready for Marcus Gorman? He’s a great trickster.”

“God and natural motherhood are on his side. We can’t lose.”

“I don’t think I follow.”

“Righteousness doesn’t stand a chance against the imagination, Alex.”

“I’d like to believe that. But if Mother loses Gilby, she’ll fall apart.”

“I won’t let that happen.”

“That goddamned cunt.”

“The expressive word. I tell you, Alex, Roscoe is ready for whatever she offers, and you’ll see that not only is he capable of change, Roscoe is capable of changing the world. I
am
a lonely man, but I am a crowd. I grow old. But ancient salt is the best packing.”

“You talk riddles.”

“The poetry of the giants, my boy. You see before you a transfiguration, a man so chastened by experience that he has shunted all his old faults into the brotherly grave. He is awash in
mortification. He’s bought several new hair shirts, and he may even go to church.”

“Don’t go too far, old fellow. Lightning may light the church.”

“A new day is rising up from the fresh earth, and a new Roscoe stands astride it.”

“You sound like an old lush taking the pledge,” said Alex.

“Your tongue has a talent for brutish truth.”

“Isn’t all truth brutish?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Roscoe. “I rarely encounter any.”

Isn’t It Romantic?

As Roscoe walked down the cemetery slope he decided that derision is not healthy behavior, a defense mechanism, really, and that he must get Alex beyond this attitude. A sour
mouth is not becoming in a candidate. Also, Alex evoked Pamela, and, against Roscoe’s will, there she is in memory at the Ten Eyck, why? And there’s Elisha with her, and Veronica, ah,
now he sees the day clearly, Patsy is at a peak, O.B. and Mac are ten months past Diamond, Alex the youth is spectating, and Jimmy Walker, Al Smith, and FDR are in crisis. Thirteen years gone, but
it’s yesterday, and Roscoe must have his reasons for this.

It’s Tuesday afternoon, October 4,1932, the day Elisha, the reluctant gladiator, is on the road to glory. Pamela is striding into Elisha’s busy headquarters on the second floor of
the Ten Eyck, just off the train, right out of
Vogue
in her maroon silk Schiaparelli dress with the emphatic bustline, complaining the front desk won’t give her a room. Roscoe, no
longer regretting he ever knew Pamela, now thinking of her as his principal mentor in lousy love, explains that all twenty-five hundred rooms in the town’s ten main hotels have been
overbooked for a month; the
Trojan,
the night boat that brought five hundred Tammanyites up from New York for the Democratic state convention, is a floating hotel this weekend; the New York
Central is renting berths in Pullman cars on sidings; and even Al Smith had no room until Tammany boss John Curry dispossessed a delegate to give Al a bed in the DeWitt Clinton Hotel, headquarters
for both Tammany and John McCooey’s Brooklyn organization, Tammany’s Siamese twin.