Roscoe

by William Kennedy

  “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” Roscoe said.

  Bart Merrigan moved in. “What happened to the music?”

  “Gimme a beer, Sammy,” Cody said, and when Sam Malley, the co-owner of the saloon, poured him a very short beer, Cody told Roscoe and Bart about his wife, Absinthe, also a midget. “She ran off this morning with a little dink of a dancer to go back into vaudeville.” Absinthe and Cody had been part of a song-and-dance troupe playing Albany’s Empire Theater when they decided to settle here. Their jobs now gone with the new dry law, Absinthe wanted no more of Albany. But Cody liked the town.

  “No saloons to work in,” Cody said. “You think Patsy’ll get me a job?”

  “What kind of job?” Roscoe asked.

  “Anything small.” Cody quaffed his baby beer, asked for another. “That little bitch,” he said, “she was my queen. I loved her like a slave.”

  Little jilted guy, where would he find another Absinthe’s size in Albany? Roscoe, fearful of laughing or weeping, left Bart to cope with Cody. His eye found Hattie and he went to her.

  “I’m here for my appointment,” he said.

  “We don’t have an appointment.”

  “I’m making one now.”

  “For when?”

  “Two minutes from now.”

  “Where?”

  “In the back room.”

  “What do we do at this appointment?”

  “You could show me the color of your money.”

  “You sent Louie away.”

  “Wasn’t that clever?”

  “The back room’s not a good place for an appointment.”

  “Is there anybody back there?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s a fine place. Come and see me.”

  And Roscoe went to the back room, which was stacked with beer kegs and several crates of whiskey. The Malleys also kept mops, brooms, the ice chest, an old woodstove, and trash barrels for the empties back here. Roscoe lit a wall sconce and drew the shade on the single window, then stood behind the kegs waiting, thrilled to his bones by what might be about to happen. But it seemed too easy. She would not come. Why should she yield to such a direct request? He had not uttered one courting line, not one word of affection, nothing but eyes and innuendo. She won’t come. But she didn’t say she wouldn’t. Roscoe had imagined this encounter before he went to war, then came home to find her a widow, and everything seemed possible. She’s a woman of substance. She knows who she is. She won’t come if she doesn’t feel anything for you, Ros. If she comes, that alone is a triumph, unless she comes in to say, Never do this to me again, who do you think I am? But Roscoe had seen reciprocation in her eye, hadn’t he? The back room of a saloon full of people, there must be a better place. Yes, but not now.

  Hattie entered the room with a key in hand. She locked the door and came directly to Roscoe, and, without a word, he embraced and kissed her. They lingered over it, brand-new sweetness, and his possession of her face, the amplitude of her body, his hand on the small of her back moving downward and not repulsed, it was all so fine. She fits you, Ros, and he stopped kissing her so she could look at his face, see what she was doing to him.

  “The color of your money,” he said.

  “I don’t know how you talked me into this. We wouldn’t be here if Patsy hadn’t won the election.” And she unbuttoned one of four buttons on her shirtwaist.

  “Then this must be political, like everything else in life,” said Roscoe, undoing a second button.

  She undid the rest and opened the shirtwaist, revealing the lace shoulder straps and lace bodice of her white chemise, the splendid depth of her cleavage, and the northern hemisphere of her sumptuous breasts. Here were the partial but exquisite spoils of political war.

  “Do you like the color of my money?”

  “Beyond words.” And he kissed her in the latitude of Mexico. She raised his head and rebuttoned the shirtwaist.

  “So soon?” he asked.

  “It’s a beginning. Now you know what I look like. Why do you want to start with me, Roscoe?”

  “I wanted to start before I went in the army. You know that.”

  “You never said so.”

  “I don’t always act in my own best interests. You’re a full woman, Hattie. You thrill my heart.”

  “I have a feeling for you, Roscoe. You’re honest, outside politics. A man should have that.”

  “I won’t contradict you.”

  “And I like the way you kiss me. You have a knack. That’s a sign a man has paid attention.” And she kissed him again, but would not linger.

  “When do I see you?” he asked as she broke the embrace.

  “I’ll try to think about that,” she said.

  “Do you suppose we’ll get past the chemise next time?”

  “It’s been known to happen.” And she unlocked the door and went back to the party.

  What did it mean? A certain measure of adventure, and Hattie did find value in him. Something rare seemed to be happening to Roscoe. His life was moving in an upward spiral: political victory, a new Democracy in the offing, restoration of his income, and now the blossoming of something like love. It was too soon to love Hattie, wasn’t it? But this certainly was something akin, and it was coming to him despite his fears, his fraudulence, his profound flaws. He was part of something that wouldn’t be the same without him, whatever it was: Triumvirate? Group? Party? Fusion of patrician and hoi polloi? All were in forward motion with the promise of fruition, a new brotherhood out of the old fatherhood, all, as Roscoe now saw it, an oblique creation of the dead Felix, who said Roscoe was a splendid son, not worth an old man’s piddle; and, in this spirit, Felix was everywhere here tonight, pushing Roscoe into an alliance with bootleggers, making him privy to the twisted glories of politics, and, through political consequence, forcing him to seduce a lovely woman away from his own brewmaster, leaving Roscoe awash in guilt, which he doesn’t accept. Life made me do it, he concluded. I’m innocent. I would never do such things on my own. It’s a trick. It’s a trap to make me powerful, rich, and happy. I don’t trust it.

  Et Cetera

  On Election Day, 1921, precisely two years after Patsy’s party, the McCall Democrats elected a new mayor of Albany, Henry J. Goddard, an Episcopal banker (Albany City Savings, founded by Lyman Fitzgibbon) who had gone to Albany Academy with Elisha. Patsy’s legend was by this time growing wild in the streets, but he had refused re-election as assessor and retired from public office forever to tend to patronage and, with Bindy, the care and feeding of the city’s drinkers and gamblers. Mush Trainor had proved himself a valuable personal connection for Bindy, who, having drunkenly shot out the lights of a ceiling fixture in a 55th Street speakeasy in Manhattan, a fixture that demanded to be shot out, and having then been blackjacked and trussed with clothesline by bouncers prior to being dumped in an alley who knows how dead, said to his trussers, “Mush Trainor’s my partner,” and off came the clothesline, out came a fresh bottle and glass, and the apology: “You shoulda said so.” And Bindy thereafter smiled inwardly whenever Mush’s name surfaced. A dozen or more people had died in Albany from drinking poison wine and beer, and a pair of Italian immigrant undertakers were convicted of mixing embalming fluid with dago red. Home brew laced with wood alcohol had killed or maimed the innards of numerous indiscreet drinkers, and from this had come the drinker’s test: Pour a little on the sidewalk and light it. If it gives a blue flame, drink it. If it’s yellow, sell it and run. Stanwix continued to produce near beer, and Mush kept pressing Roscoe to up the alcohol content—not a whole lot, Ros. But Ros said no, and the argument continued. Federal agents found barrels of Stanwix stored in cellars and back rooms of thirty presumably defunct Albany saloons, but because the beer was 0.5 percent alcohol, no one was prosecuted.

  Cody Gilpin, drinking with Bart Merrigan at the dead end of Patsy’s party, fell off the bar in a stupor and didn’t move. Sam Malley said to Bart, “You don’t leave him here,” a
nd so Bart stood Cody up and walked the wobbly midget to State and Pearl Streets, where they boarded the West Albany trolley for Central and Lexington Avenues, Cody’s stop. But Cody was comatose at Lexington, and Bart the Samaritan sat him on his shoulder when they reached the Watervliet Avenue stop and carried him to his own home, where Bart lived with his mother and maiden aunt, deposited him on the parlor couch, covered him with a blanket, and went to bed. Bart awoke to his mother’s scream and rose from bed to find her hysterical at having found, on her way to the seven o’clock mass, which she had not missed in twenty years, a naked midget asleep on her sofa, snoring, with his little hand clutching his erected little member. Bart, furious with Cody, bundled his clothing and pushed him, and it, out the front door onto the stoop (’What’d I do wrong?” Cody was asking) and was shutting the front door when Roy Osterhout, the beat policeman, seeing the midget emerge onto the stoop naked followed by flying clothing, stopped dead at the vision, trying to understand it, then said to Bart, “You put that whatever it is back in the house, or wherever the hell else it came from.”

  Bart then monitored Cody as he dressed in the parlor, walked him to Central Avenue, put him on the West Albany trolley going east toward Lexington, and thought that that was that for Cody Gilpin forever. But Roscoe, responding to Cody’s request for a small job, talked Patsy, later in the week, into hiring Cody to train his young chickens.

  Patsy would, before long, marry Flora Pender, and not Mabel Maloy as he thought he would, in the same way Roscoe married Pamela and not Veronica, and Hattie married Louie and not Roscoe. Roscoe confirmed a rendezvous with Hattie at the Malleys’, her choice of location, on the morning after Patsy’s victory party, when she was tidying up the saloon. Together they re-entered the back room, where she had spread a quilt on the floor, and there the chemise barrier fell away. Hattie and Roscoe would continue the affair for twenty-five years, during which Hattie and Louie would marry, cohabit, and separate; she would thereafter marry her third—Jabez Vogel, an engineer on the Delaware and Hudson–also her fourth—Benny (the) Behr, a veterinarian who brought her puppies to play with—and Floyd, the fifth, all without ever defaulting on her ripening love for Roscoe, who loved her in return. Roscoe watched her build her rooming-house empire, which he would find ways to merge with the work of the McCall political machine, in which he had become a key player. Neither he nor Hattie made demands of the other, only affirming from time to time that their love still waxed strong, and that neither of them cared to do without it.

  First it was 1921, then 1923, and so on, a serious decade for the development of power, money, eminence, the high life, major trouble, and love, just the beginning.

  As he walked along the river road, Roscoe saw the Pope riding the Papal bicycle up from the quay, and he said, “Hello, Pope, where are you headed?” The Pope explained that Patsy had invited him to judge a fox-trot contest at the Armory, a fundraiser for the Little Sisters of the Poor.

  “I was rereading Habakkuk, Your Holiness,” Roscoe said, “and I wonder, as Habakkuk did, how can God remain silent while the wicked prosper?”

  “Remember, my son, that God reassured Habakkuk that the divine way will prevail over wickedness. But it takes a while.”

  “How can he let the arrogant and the rapacious survive, while the innocent suffer?” Roscoe asked.

  “God did say he would subdue the drought god Mot and the sea god Yam,” said the Pope.

  “Mot and Yam, it’s a beginning,” Roscoe said. “But what about the damn Governor?”

  “Woe to him,” said the Pope, “who builds a town with blood, and founds a city on iniquity.”

  “Are you talking about any town I know?” Roscoe asked.

  But the Pope was already cycling on to the dance.

  There is nothing like the back room of a dimly lit bar on a summer afternoon when the heat is smothering the city’s life; and so Roscoe has come to a half-walled private corner in Mike Quinlan’s dark dungeon of drink to triumph over this unseasonable heat, a ninety-eight-degree day when summer should be spent. A cold beer in a short glass, and then another, cures the heat in Roscoe’s heart, and the sweat of the glass cools the palm of his hand. Slowly the sweet placenta overgrows his brain, and the afternoon moves weightlessly along, as he waits for whatever comes next in his scheme to unleash the new Roscoe.

  He has lost fifteen pounds since they stuck the needle in him, has recovered provisionally, is not out of the woods, but out of the wheelchair, and has sought retreat in Quinlan’s (proper name the Capitol Grill), across State Street from the Capitol, a spa for lawmakers, politicians, and newsmen, where Roscoe has been palming beer glasses since Mike Quinlan opened the place two days before repeal. It is where political winners host banquets in the large back room, and it’s a consolation pit for losers: piano music nightly (Al Smith often sang with this piano). Its walls are dense with photos of major, minor, and less-than-minor pols—FDR, Wendell Willkie, Jim Farley, Thomas E. Dewey, Patsy, Elisha, and Roscoe, among many—also with cartoon images of governors, senators, presidents in Napoleonic hats, dunce caps, admiral’s uniforms, Santa Claus suits, Roman togas, and underwear, riding donkeys, elephants, and dead horses, commanding sinking ships. Wherever you look you see images of yesterday’s politics fading away.

  But the place has also given Roscoe pleasure, song, blue romance, and, in off hours, peace and solitude, which is what he is now seeking: an hour alone before Mac arrives with his difficult news. Mac had called headquarters asking Roscoe to meet him, a first for this exemplar of self-reliance, and when Roscoe asked, “What’s the problem?” Mac answered, “Chickens,” and Roscoe understood that the Patsy-Bindy feud was heating up.

  What the hell ails Bindy? Why would he con Patsy after all these years? Well, there’s the usual rub of money, never enough, plus the brothel shutdown reminding him again he’s only a second banana in this town, which Mame often tells him. Patsy gives the orders, Patsy controls the wealth, Patsy has the famous chickens; and so Bindy needs to win. But he usually does: eight winners in eight races at his favorite trotting track last July, when Roscoe went with him; nine winners with his own trotters at nine different tracks the same season. He can’t gamble in Albany, because everybody knows he can’t lose—his dice, his cards, his dealers, his joints, his town—and players drop out when he drops in. Even when the game is straight, Bindy wins. So he leaves town to gamble, goes maybe to Troy, to Fogarty’s.

  “Bindy always does exactly what he wants to do,” Patsy once said. Well, yes, but how could he think he could con not only Patsy but also the unconnable Tommy Fogarty? It seems to be in the man’s nature to believe the con will prevail, for he learned it early. Hawking newspapers at age ten, he also worked as lookout (for strolling cops) for young Midge Kresser as Midge worked his three-card monte game in front of the Broadway hotels. Bindy grew up among grifters and gamblers who liked sure things—Mush, for one, who taught him that stuffing a sponge up the nostril of a racehorse enhances its ability to lose. He and Mush subsidized card thieves who worked the trains and the night boats. He won twenty thousand at a crap game one night in Saratoga and was then arrested for using slugs to make calls on a public phone.

  Yet Bindy is no miser, just a man who delights in deceit. He was always cheerful, a right guy, yes, generous, paid his debts, good company in joints like this, bought drinks for the crowd, gave losers taxi money home, always good for a touch, if you paid it back. Roscoe drank many a night with Bindy, always liked him, still does. But then he turned sour, grew farter after the Thorpe gang broke in on Mush, still Bindy’s partner, and burned his testicles with a candle to get the combination to his safe, which Mush yielded in exchange for medium-rare testes.

  The Thorpes also brought in Lorenzo Scarpelli from Newark to kill Bindy over beer, for he and Mush (Patsy the true power, but always in the background) managed its total flow into Albany, and the Thorpes could not enter the market. Scarpelli fired three shots at Bindy on his front porch, all near misses. Bin
dy leaped into the bushes, betrayed by his spaniel, which wagged its tail at the bush. Scarpelli shot the bush and missed again, Bindy returned fire with the pistol he kept in his milk-bottle box, and Scarpelli sped away. Starved for action, Scarpelli crossed the river to Rensselaer, held up a bank, killed a guard, and was sentenced to the chair. Mush, Bindy, and Roscoe, all close to the warden at Sing Sing (who came to Albany to straighten himself out with gin after every execution), drove down to watch the Scarp sizzle.

  The afternoon was so quiet that Roscoe could hear Georgie Moisedes open the tap and let the beer, still Stanwix, flow into one glass, then another. Cutie LaRue and Eddie Brodie had been sitting at the bar when Roscoe came in, and now he heard them talking.

  “Let’s go tell Roscoe the campaign plan,” Cutie said.

  “You don’t want to be seen talking to Roscoe,” Brodie said. “You’re supposed to be the enemy.”

  “Yeah, don’t bother Roscoe back there,” Georgie said. “He wants company he’ll come out here.”

  “He wants to be alone,” Cutie said.

  “He’s figuring it out,” Georgie said.

  “Figuring what out?”

  “Whatever it takes.”

  Smart. Georgie is smart; but not entirely; finally got enough money to open his own poolroom and card game, then bet it with Mush against Billy Phelan in a nine-ball match. When Billy won, Georgie handed Mush the door key, and went back to drawing beer for pols like Roscoe, whose glass is empty. Ros got up and walked to the bar, stood next to Cutie. Is this a free country? Cutie can’t talk to me? What will they accuse us of, conspiracy to confuse the election process? Cutie can’t win, can’t begin to win, so why is he running? Must be a Democratic trick—I saw him talking to Roscoe. Republicans already saying such things.

  “Mr. Brodie, Mr. LaRue,” Roscoe said, pushing his glass toward Georgie with another in his eye.

  “Glad to see you out and about, Roscoe,” Brodie said. “You had a siege of it.”

  “A martyr to the caprice of automobile travel,” Roscoe said.