Roscoe (4 page)

“Those soldiers were in the Battle of the Bulge,” she said. “Poor babies. I gave them little pecks and they got very excited. Are you angry at Trishie?”

“Trishie, Trishie, would I get angry if my rabbit carnalized another rabbit? Fornication is God’s fault, not yours.”

“I feel the same way,” she said.

“I know you do, sweetness. Now, go be kind to those soldiers.”

“You mean it?”

“Of course. They may have battle wounds.”

“Where will you go?” she asked.

“Where the night wind takes me. Try not to get the clap.”

“Bye, honey,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek.

“Goodbye forever, little ding-ding,” he said, but she didn’t hear, was already on her way back to the soldiers.

“You really mean that goodbye forever?” Elisha asked.

“As my sainted father used to say, Irish girls either fuck everybody or nobody. Which category do you think suits Trish?”

Someone turned up the jukebox and a stupefyingly loud Latin tune blasted through The Tavern.

“Let this farce end,” Elisha said. “The gin isn’t worth it.”

“I concur,” Roscoe said, and they downed their drinks and moved toward the door.

“I had a thought about Cutie LaRue,” Elisha said. “Why not run him as the wild-card candidate?”

“Cutie for mayor?”

“He’s such a clown, and he can make a speech. He’d love the attention. People would vote for him just to say they did. And he’d get the liberals and goo-goos who hate us
but can’t pull that Republican lever.”

“By God, Elisha, that’s brilliant. Cutie, the crackpot candidate!”

“Have I helped you stop worrying?”

“No, but now I can smile while I worry.”

A vandal had opened a hydrant on Pearl Street near Sheridan Avenue. A roaming vendor was hawking V-J buttons, flags had blossomed in lighted store windows and dangled everywhere from light poles
and roofs, the mob filling every part of the street. As Roscoe and Elisha debated their move, The Tavern’s door flew open and a conga line burst into the street, led by a sailor, with Trish
holding his hips, one of her soldiers holding hers, and a dozen others snaking along behind them to the Latin music from the bar.

Roscoe and Elisha pushed through the sidewalk mobs, and at State and Pearl they could see a patriotic bonfire blazing down by the Plaza. Roscoe remembered the ambivalent
tensions of patriotism invading this block on the April day in 1943 when Alex went to war. Patsy had ordered up a parade with flags, bugles, drums, and an Albany Academy color guard marching the
twenty-seven-year-old Mayor into a giltedged political future. Alex, off to serve his country as a buck private, marched with a platoon of other young bucks, proles mostly, none out of Albany
Academy, Groton, and Yale like him, and none with the boneheaded insistence on rolling dice for his life. Roscoe, titular head of the local Draft Board, could easily have found an ailment to defer
Alex, let him continue as Albany’s boyish wartime mayor. But Patsy had given Alex the word: “Son, if you don’t serve, you’re all done in politics. They’ll call you a
slacker, and I won’t run you for re-election. Go down and join the navy and we’ll get you a commission.” But Alex joined the army, asked for the infantry, and got it. And Elisha
and Roscoe could not change his mind.

There he came that day, down the middle of State Street, Roscoe and Elisha right here beaming at their boy on his way to becoming food for powder—Elisha, elated by his son’s
political success, and Roscoe, the exulting mentor: Wasn’t it I taught you to hold your whiskey, lad? Wasn’t it I instructed you in the survival tactics of the carouse, at which you
excelled early? Come back safe and soon, and we’ll all rekindle the festive fire.

At Lodge Street they heard the organ music, and Elisha walked toward it through the open doors of St. Peter’s. Roscoe arched an eyebrow but followed him into the old French Gothic
bluestone church, an Episcopal parish well into its third century. The church was fully lit and half full of silent people staring at the altar, where seven candles burned in each of two silver
candelabra, the pair a gift from Elisha’s father, Ariel Fitzgibbon. Women were weeping, some in a state of rapture. Elderly couples were holding hands, young people whispering excitedly. A
soldier knelt with head down on the back of the pew. A woman in mourning entered and instantly knelt in the middle aisle.

Pews were filling as Roscoe and Elisha stood at the back of the church, Roscoe bemused by Elisha’s odd smile. Smiling that Alex would come back alive from Europe? Whatever was inside that
stately head, Roscoe could not read it clearly. Elisha was scanning the church as if he were a tourist; but he was surely summoned here by what those familiar bells meant to his encrusted
Episcopal soul. One stained-glass window through which the day’s waning light was entering had been the gift, in the late 1870s, of Lyman Fitzgibbon. Designed by Burne-Jones, it bore a legend
that read, “
Per industria nil sine Numine
”—Nothing through diligence without the Divine Will—which Roscoe translated as, “Don’t make a serious move
without the political okay.”

An organist moved through a five-noted chant and then a glissando of the first two bars of “America,” pausing on a long note, and then he began a second chant. Elisha interrupted the
organist, returning to the anthem. “My country, ’tis of thee,” he sang, with might in his voice, and every head turned to see this intruder continue with “Sweet land of
liberty, / Of thee I sing . . .” The organist followed Elisha, and the solemnizers of peace joined him, the familiar music and words stirring their souls as the splendid pipes of this chorister from nowhere arced into the vault of the nave; and when the verse ended and the silence longed to explode into applause, Elisha continued with a little-known verse: “Let music swell the
breeze, / And ring from all the trees / Sweet freedom’s song . . .”

People applauded with simple nods and uncontrollably weepy smiles, all of them climbing down from the ramparts, linked by the newness of this peace that also needed leadership, affirming that
Elisha had spoken aloud the very prayer they’d all been seeking in silence, the marrow of patriotic holiness achingly evoked by this saloon tenor whom Roscoe had never before known to sing
solo in church, or sing so well in any saloon anywhere.

“Bravura performance,” Roscoe said as they went out onto State Street.

“Cheap chauvinism,” said Elisha. “I couldn’t help myself. It was like having holy hiccups.”

“You underrate your achievement. My blood cells turned red, white, and blue.”

“Don’t hold it against me. Remember that the kamikazes are still out there, and the war criminals will cut themselves in two rather than face the music.”

“Kamikazes? War criminals?”

“Don’t forget I said this.”

They walked to the Albany Garage, where Roscoe housed his two-door 1941 Plymouth, and they headed for Tivoli to rendezvous with Veronica, an upgrading of life for Roscoe just
to see her. But as he drove, distracted, perhaps, by the gin, or by seeing Trish as a soldier-and-sailor sandwich, or relief at being rid of her, or by going public with his plan to quit politics,
he began playing eye games with moving vehicles, blanking them out with his right eye, then his left, eliminating them entirely by closing both eyes.

“Why are you closing your eyes while you drive?” Elisha asked.

“I’m playing Albany roulette.”

“Let me out.”

“You’ll be home in ten minutes.”

“Playing games with death. You really are in trouble.”

“I’m all right.” But he kept closing one eye, then the other.

“This is a form of suicide,” Elisha said. “Is that your plan?”

“No. Not my style.”

“It’s everybody’s style at some point. And if you kill me while you’re at it, that’s murder.”

“Not at all my style,” Roscoe said.

“Open your eyes and listen to me. I’m the one who’s quitting, not you.”

Roscoe braked instantly and swerved to avoid sideswiping an oncoming trolley car, then climbed a curb and struck a small tree. The impact was light, but it drove the steering wheel into the deep
folds of Roscoe’s abdomen and threw Elisha into the windshield. Blood instantly gushed, and Elisha pressed his pocket handkerchief onto his forehead.

“Let me see that,” Roscoe said, and when he saw the wound he said, “Stitches.”

He backed the car onto the street and drove to Albany Hospital. They both could walk to the emergency room, which was accumulating assorted brawling louts and burn victims and skewed drivers
like Roscoe, all celebrating peace with blood and fire and pain. As a nurse started to take Elisha off to stanch his bleeding, Roscoe asked, “What’s this quitting stuff?”

“Believe me, it’s real,” Elisha said. “Unless you want to give Patsy a heart attack, don’t you run off just yet.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m doing a fadeaway,” Elisha said. “Time’s up.”

“Suddenly there’s a retirement epidemic,” Roscoe said. “Do you suppose the Japs put something in our drinking water?”

He felt new pain in his stomach, and his head ached from the resurrection of old doubt. You think you’ve done something radical and it turns out you’ve done nothing at all.

Roscoe recognized a nun sitting in the next bay of the emergency room, Arlene Flinn from Arbor Hill, a Sister of the Sacred Heart, hundred and one pounds, tiny, dark-haired,
sharp-nosed beauty in adolescence, when Roscoe had a crush on her. Those once-spunky eyes were now reshaped behind spectacles, her hair hidden under her starched wimple.

“Arlene?” he said. “Is that you?”

“Oh, Roscoe,” she said. “Roscoe Conway.”

Her tone of voice suggested to Roscoe that she remembered the day he caught her in his arms and kissed her by the holy-water fountain in St. Joseph’s Church. Two days later she went off to
the nunnery—the beginning of your control over women, Ros.

“Are you ill, Arlene?” he asked her.

“A toothache,” she said. “The pain is horrible.” She was humming something that sounded like a Benediction—hymn—“O Salutaris,” was it?

“How’s your father?” he asked.

“Oh dear, my father,” Arlene said. “He died six months ago.”

“I didn’t know. I never saw it in the paper.”

“He died in Poughkeepsie. My brother didn’t want it publicized.”

“I knew he was down there. I’m sorry, Arlene.”

“He hated all you politicians,” she said. “Especially Patsy McCall.”

“We offered him anything he wanted when he came out of jail. He wouldn’t talk to us.”

“Could you blame him?”

Roscoe chose not to answer. Arlene’s father, Artie Flinn, had been the chief plugger for the Albany baseball pool, which Patsy ran. The federal DA indicted Artie when he was caught with
plugged pool sheets and heavy money, and he got six years, the scapegoat. Patsy took care of Artie’s wife and family while Artie was inside, but Artie came out Patsy’s enemy. Also, he
went strange, took to jumping off tall buildings into the river, holding the pet pigeon he brought home from jail, and letting the pigeon go before he hit the water. People told him he could fly
like his pigeon, but in one jump a piece of sunken metal sliced off part of his left leg. He believed the leg would grow back, and when it didn’t, he punched holes in it with an ice pick and
had to be put away.

“I see your brother Roy from time to time,” Roscoe said.

“I don’t see him,” Arlene said. “I don’t approve of that newspaper he runs. It’s scandalous. Roscoe, where’s that dentist? I can’t stand this
pain.”

“Have a swig of this and hold it on the tooth.” He handed her his flask of compassionate gin.

She held the gin, then swallowed it, took a second, squidged her cheek and held it, swallowed it, “Sweet Mother, Roscoe, this doesn’t help a bit,” then a third gin, and he told
her to keep the flask as they took him for X-rays of his rib cage.

“When are you going to get this holy woman a dentist?” Roscoe asked the nurse.

“He’s on the way,” the nurse said.

Roscoe’s X-rays were negative, and a young intern suggested an ice bag for his stomach and gave him a packet of pills for his blood pressure. “You’ll be sore, but
nothing’s broken and we don’t see any bleeding.”

Roscoe saw Veronica standing by a half-open curtain in the bay where Elisha lay on a stretcher. Her long blond hair was wrapped into a quick knot at the back of her head, she wore no makeup and
was barelegged in low heels and a candy-striped summer dress. Roscoe thought she looked sublime.

“What’s the verdict?” he asked her.

She kissed his cheek. “They’re taking him upstairs for the stitches. How are your bruises?”

Roscoe parted his gut. “With this padding it takes quite a whack to do me any damage.”

“If Elisha has a concussion,” Veronica said, “they’ll keep him overnight.”

A nurse came to wheel Elisha out.

“Are you all right?” Elisha asked Roscoe.

“Better than you,” Roscoe said. “Artie Flinn’s daughter, Arlene, is here with a toothache. She’s a nun.”

“Is that Artie Flinn from the baseball pool?” Veronica asked.

“It is.”

“Artie was not one of our finest hours,” Elisha said. “What’s he doing?”

“He died in Poughkeepsie six months ago,” Roscoe said.

“Tragic,” Elisha said. “We couldn’t protect him. I never knew his daughter.”

“I had a crush on her in school,” Roscoe said. “My behavior drove her into the nunnery.”

“He’s bragging again,” Veronica said.

“I’ll catch up with you two after your stitches,” Roscoe said.

In the waiting room Arlene was walking in circles, waving Roscoe’s flask, still singing her hymn, very loud: “
. . . Quae coeli pandis ostium; Bella premunt hostilia . . .
” She
was off balance from the drink, and a nurse was about to take her in hand when she whirled away and backhanded the nurse’s jaw with Roscoe’s flask. “Where are you, Jesus?”
she called out. “I’m in pain.
Quae coeli pandis ostium.
..”

An intern moved to help the nurse subdue the wild nun, but Roscoe stepped in and said, “I’ll take care of her, Doctor. I’m her cousin, and my brother is a dentist. Tell
your
dentist to go to hell for his next patient.”