Roscoe

by William Kennedy

  Elective Affinities

  The newspapers trumpeted Alex’s sex speech and the police raids: “Mayor Cracks Down on Sin and Smut,” “Our GI Mayor Wants Sinless Town for Returning GIs.” Twelve pimps and assorted whores were arrested, but, folks, you pay dues to do business in Albany. The raids outraged bookstores and newsstands, but Night Squad detectives assured them they’d get their merchandise back after election.

  The next day, still courting page one, George Scully, the Governor’s special prosecutor, personally led a State Police raid on three Albany betting parlors, including the central office, from where racing information was sent by phone lines to horse rooms throughout the city. Forty workers and horseplayers were arrested, including Johnny Mack, Patsy’s pal, whose famous White House was padlocked. And Johnny faced a judge for the first time in forty years. Candidate Jay Farley called a press conference to say such open gambling was proof of political collusion with gamblers in this corrupt city.

  In an election-eve rally at Knights of Columbus Hall on Clinton Square, Alex told the Party faithful and the press that “the Governor spent half a million dollars investigating this city, harassed our citizens, pried into our private lives, put fear into the hearts of people who had no connection to politics, and what has he got to show for it? He disturbed the peace of a few gamblers, but he solidified Albany more solidly than ever behind our Democratic Party. I feel sad that our former Lieutenant Governor, my father, Elisha Fitzgibbon, who founded this Party with Patsy McCall and Roscoe Conway, isn’t here to see what’s about to happen in our city. But I spoke to Patsy a minute ago and asked him to make a prediction for us tonight. Will you come up, Patsy?”

  Patsy, who rarely spoke in public but this year saw himself in close combat with the enemy, rose from his front-row chair and stepped onto the small stage. Alex made room at the microphone, then asked, “How do you think we’ll do tomorrow, Pat?” Patsy put his hands in his pants pockets, looked out at the crowd of five hundred that thought he was Jesus Christ in those baggy pants and that wide-brimmed fedora, and told them, “The Governor made our campaign for us. Mayor Fitzgibbon will be re-elected by upward of thirty-five thousand plurality.” And as the cheers, huzzahs, and whistling exploded, Alex ended the meeting by saying into the mike, “You heard the man, now let’s go out and do it!”

  Patsy had wanted to say forty thousand, but Roscoe was dubious. Forty was a nice Biblical number to humiliate the Governor with, but our registration this year is down eight thousand from when Alex won in 1941. That year a single taxi driver registered one hundred and eighty times and voted two hundred and three times. Nobody was looking. This year many servicemen haven’t been home to register, and with the goddamn State Police on our backs, taxi drivers are no longer so intrepid. Roscoe felt the need to pump up the numbers another way, so he decided to put Cutie’s votes into Alex’s column. Cutie might get a few thousand protest votes, and the switch would be done in the courthouse by the six-man presumably bipartisan Election Commission, who were all Democrats. Roscoe would tell Cutie not to protest the election: We’ll let him have a few hundred and a no-show job for his mother. Roscoe also ordered the ward leaders to have all four hundred committeemen do a second canvassing count—No half-assed guesswork this year, we want to shove firm numbers down the Governor’s throat. After the second canvass, Roscoe showed Patsy that forty was too high, he should go with thirty-five.

  Extra desks came into Party headquarters for the election count, half a dozen city accountants manned adding machines, and women volunteers handled the six special phone lines. Joey Manucci went to Keeler’s twice for sandwiches and coffee, and Charlie Foy and Tony Mirabile from the Night Squad sat outside the door to keep out visitors and press. When the polls closed at nine o’clock, the phones jangled and final numbers flowed in from every district. The only real surprise was one district of the Ninth Ward where Republicans got no votes at all; but Bart Merrigan explained to Roscoe that on that voting machine the Republican line was soldered. By nine-fifteen, Jay Farley was conceding at his headquarters and Alex was promising a victory interview at ten in City Hall. At nine-twenty, Bart found a phone message for Patsy that Joey had taken at five-thirty, long before Patsy arrived. The caller asked for Patsy’s home phone, but Joey wouldn’t give it. The caller said he was from the White House, but that didn’t cut Joey’s mustard. Bart chided Joey. “You fucking moron, it was the President. You wouldn’t give Patsy’s number to the President?” Bart called the White House back and connected Patsy to President Truman, whom Patsy first knew through Tom Pendergast. Patsy had been solid with Truman for vice-president at the ’44 convention, when half the New York delegation still backed Henry Wallace. Mr. Truman asked Patsy how Albany Democrats were faring under all that pressure from New York’s Governor. “That fella’s probably gonna run against me on the boss issue in ’48.” And Patsy told him, “We beat him bad, Mr. President. He never laid a glove on us.” And Mr. Truman said, “Nice work, Patsy. You boys know what you’re doing up there.”

  By nine-forty, the absentee ballots were counted, Cutie’s votes were switched, and the official count was Jay Farley 14,747, Cutie LaRue 320, and Alex, as Patsy had called it, upward of 35,000, specifically 35,716.

  After Patsy talked to the President he went into Roscoe’s office and closed the door. “I want you to go see the President,” Patsy said. “I want to send him a Civil War book, let him know how strong we are for him up here.”

  Roscoe made no reply and Patsy looked at him with a cocked eye.

  “Send Alex,” Roscoe said. “Or anybody. I’m all done, Pat. I told you that in August and now I say it again. The returns are in and I’m through.”

  “Goddamn it, Roscoe, don’t start this.”

  “It’s done, Pat. I’m out as of tonight. Bart can handle this office.”

  “You can’t quit politics. That’s like a dog who says he don’t want to be a dog anymore.”

  “Even if I’m a dog, I quit.”

  “Does this have to do with Veronica?”

  “It might. Why do you ask?”

  “Eh,” Patsy said.

  “Eh what?”

  “You living at Tivoli and all that.”

  “All that what?”

  “I talked to Alex. You’re not keeping any secrets.”

  “I haven’t been trying. But, all right, being around her changed my life. But I was ready to change. I doubt I’ll ever have a better life than I’ve had here for twenty-six years. But twenty-six is a long time. You’re my best friend, Patsy, the only best friend I’ve got left. I wouldn’t con you. I can’t handle it anymore.”

  “You really mean it.”

  “Now you got it.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “We won the election, you still own the town, we control all fifty-two cards in the deck. Let’s go celebrate. The party’s at Quinlan’s.”

  When they wrapped up the final count and left Bart to close the office, Patsy said he wasn’t up for Quinlan’s. Alex said he wouldn’t get there right away, had to do those City Hall interviews.

  “But I’ll walk you up the hill, Roscoe,” Alex said, and they rode the elevator down from the eleventh floor in silence. Only when they were walking up State Street did Alex speak. He looked once at Roscoe, then spoke while staring up the hill at the Capitol.

  “I know you and my mother went to Tristano with Gilby,” he said, “and I know something’s going on,” he said. “Roscoe, you may own the best political mind of anybody who ever drew breath in this town. You know how to manipulate power, you know how to win, and politically I’m immensely grateful. You were also a great friend of my father, a guardian to my mother after he died, and wonderful to me when I was growing up. Those were memorable days, and I hung on every word out of your mouth on how to play and gamble and drink and appreciate women. I no longer value that kind of life. But you’ve sunken back into it, worse than ever—punching out a cheap editor in his own office, caught with naked prostitut
es, personally championing that vicious whore, watching your psychopathic friend murder your own brother, and then your insane hypothesis that my father raped Pamela. You won the case, but what a price you paid—a scurrilous false rumor that profanes his memory forever. It’s always the lowest common denominator that you cozy to, Roscoe, and I include your friend Hattie Wilson, landlady for the whorehouses. We’re a big city and we have to deal politically with all kinds, but you’ve brought the lowlife home to my family once too often. I say this with very mixed feelings, but I consider you a negative influence on Gilby, and an unfit suitor for my mother. So here’s the line, Roscoe. From now on, my family’s off limits to you. Do you understand me?”

  They were in front of the Ten Eyck, and as two couples came out of the hotel one of the men called to Alex, “Congratulations, Mr. Mayor. Well deserved.” Alex waved and walked alone up the hill toward City Hall. Roscoe turned his back to the hill and looked down State Street, the street of celebrations. A bonfire burned in front of the Delaware and Hudson Railroad building, kids feeding it, a fire engine on the way with siren wailing. Buzzy Lewis came up from Pearl Street with two dozen first editions of the Times-Union under his arm, just off the truck.

  “Hey, Roscoe, big night. Want a paper? It’s got a picture of the Mayor.”

  “Sure, Buzz,” Roscoe said, and he gave Buzzy a deuce and put the paper in his coat pocket without looking at it. He had made no retort to what Alex said. None was possible. He imagined Alex delivering a similar harangue to Veronica, who would have expected it. Driving up to Tristano, Roscoe concluded she hadn’t told Alex where or for how long they were going, because he might have said don’t go. Roscoe felt the sudden reflux of a dreadful time long gone, negative luck running. What happened at Tristano wasn’t luck. It’s luck only when it’s bad. Roscoe quit luck at a young age. Power, not luck, transforms possibility. You don’t trust things simply to work out, are you serious? You fix them and then they work out. Elisha’s beau geste, his glory march to self-destruction, was now a reality for everyone, even though Roscoe had invented it. Logic so fine it becomes history. Create what doesn’t exist, and the false becomes true through existence alone. Roscoe even invented Elisha’s epitaph: “Stay alive, even if you have to kill yourself.” Everything Roscoe did was to ensure continuity of the Party, of Alex, of the family, of love. Roscoe decided Elisha had intended to restore the lost brotherhood. And, hey, didn’t the man’s will prevail tonight at the polls? Now you know, Governor: cakey action don’t kibble at the Café Newfay.

  Mike Quinlan’s Capitol Grill was imploding with hilarity and the vest-busting effusions of Democrats, who effuse more effectively in victory than Republicans. Roscoe became their target when he walked in—handshook, clapped, kissed, hugged, winked at. He tried to respond to the congrats but could barely make out any words over Tommy Ippolito’s six-piece band playing “Paper Doll” with a beat that made Roscoe’s bones dance. But nobody could dance, the bar and back room both chockablock with bodies. Roscoe waved to Tommy and smiled as he waded through the mob. He knew every second face, could put a name to so many, knew how the ancients here had looked in childhood, how the young people would look at eighty. Phil Fagan, Kenny Pew, Ocky Wolf, all from St. Joseph’s, here they were, parading wrinkled necks, absent hair, crooked backs; and Roscoe corrected their flaws with visionary recall of their adolescent integrity. Not only could he reconstitute them backward into the past, Roscoe controlled their future, which is why they were here. You don’t know this, Ocky, but this is my final night of power over your life. Tomorrow, Roscoe will be powerless in a new life that will owe nothing to coercion. He threaded himself (some thread) toward Hattie, who was at a table for two near the band.

  “Hello, love,” she said. “You did it again, didn’t you?”

  “We did.”

  “Say hello to Ted Pulaski, who lives in my building.”

  “Hey, Ted, that’s a hell of a building to live in,” Roscoe said.

  “Got a great landlady,” Ted said.

  “He loves dogs,” Hattie said.

  “Good for him.”

  “I told him I buried my dog in Washington Park so I could visit his grave, and Ted wants to go see it.”

  “You’ll enjoy the grave, Ted,” Roscoe said.

  “I look forward to it.”

  “That’s convenient. You like Ted, do you, Hat?” Roscoe asked her.

  “I do, Rosky, I do.”

  “You getting into that famous mood again?”

  “Could be,” and she nibbled on the left Pulaski earlobe.

  Roscoe moved toward the bar fielding questions: Is the Mayor coming? Where’s Patsy? At the bar, Cutie LaRue was explaining to several female admirers why he and Jay Farley lost to the McCall machine: “ . . . they know how you vote by how you shift your feet in the voting booth, by the sound of the lever when you pull it. They go in the booth with you, or leave the curtain open, or cut a hole in it, or sandpaper it. ‘How come you split your ticket, my dear? I hope nobody else in the family does that.’ I tell you, they make those machines dance. Some machines got fifty votes in ’em before the polls open, and somebody’ll pull that lever forty times after they close. Jay Farley’s a nice fella for a Republican, and he looks honest, but honesty is no substitute for experience.”

  Adam Whalen, an assistant DA, cut through the crowd to whisper, “A friend of yours wants to see you, Roscoe. Trish Cooney. She was giving a guy a blowjob through her car window when somebody shot him in the back. They think she set him up. We’re charging her with conspiracy and lewd behavior.”

  “Just go for the lewd,” Roscoe said. “She’s not smart enough for conspiracy. Tell Freddie Gold to bail her out and send me the bill.”

  Roscoe found Mike Quinlan being third man behind the bar this frantic night. “Great election, Roscoe. Where’s the Mayor?”

  “City Hall, where he’s supposed to be. Listen, Mike, I’m just passing through. Got some business uptown that won’t wait. But keep an open bar for an hour tonight on me, and don’t bill the Party. Bill me at the hotel.”

  “Hey, you’re a live one, Roscoe.”

  “That’s one possibility,” Roscoe said.

  He threaded himself back out the door, stood in the cold night looking down State Street, full of parked cars but nobody on the street. He truly believed Elisha killed himself for a purpose. Just because you invent it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Roscoe reflected often on his own suicide, but he wasn’t worth killing. No point to it. That, of course, was Roscoe’s old fallacy that everything has a point, when it could have forty points, thirty-five. A man is never single-mindedly wrong or right in such heavy matters. What was said about the Celt applied to Elisha, who certainly was a Celt somewhere in his soul, by osmosis from Patsy and Roscoe if nothing else. The man said that the Celt was melancholy not out of a definite motive but through something unaccountable, defiant, and titanic. An Englishman said that. Roscoe walked down State Street until he found a cab.

  At Tivoli, Roscoe found Veronica sitting alone in the breakfast room, the servants all in bed. Roscoe had to call her name aloud to find her. She was dressed for the victory party, clinging new black sheath, hair that parted in the middle and fell into a large, single yellow curl that surrounded her neck like a lush collar. Her cheekbones seemed more emphatic tonight, nose more aquiline, eyelids the color of rose of Sharon; Christ, what beauty. She sat at the same table, same chair, as on the morning Roscoe brought her Elisha’s final news.

  “You’re back early,” she said. “Didn’t you go to the party?”

  “I left when I figured out you weren’t coming. I saw Cutie LaRue. He thinks Jay Farley lost because honesty is no substitute for experience.”

  “It may be true.”

  “There’s no way to be honest. I’ve always said that.”

  “But we try to be honest, don’t we?”

  “Do we?”

  “I do.”

  “Good. I had a talk with Alex.”
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br />   “I know. He called me.”

  “He thought he was being honest, but of course he wasn’t.”

  “How wasn’t he?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Did he lie? What did he say?”

  “Didn’t he tell you what he said?”

  “I hated what he told me, but it made perfect sense to him.”

  “Perfect sense but not the truth.”

  “What’s the truth, Roscoe?”

  “I never tell the truth.”

  “Tell me, damn it.”

  “I can’t talk about it. Don’t you have things you can’t talk about?”

  “I suppose I do.”

  “There you are. You look glorious. Anything to say to me about tomorrow? Or the next day? Or the next?”

  What Veronica said then was supremely logical. How could she abandon Alex and sacred Gilby, her children? Consider her god-awful loss of Rosemary. You, Roscoe, have been responsible for every beautiful thing that happened to us in these past months. You’re so selfless. You love Gilby, Gilby adores you, you are adorable. But what will happen when Alex sees Gilby adoring you, or you moving in with us, or us with you? It would explode the family. Alex believes you’ll be a negative influence on the boy. I know he’s very wrong. It’s perverse to exile you from us after all the wonderful things you’ve done. But if you’d done them differently, would we now have such a hostile climate for love? As it is, Veronica has only one choice. Perhaps it’s the wrong one, but she can’t evade it. Oh, how much she loves who Roscoe is, her longtime love, and she knows his love for her is as great as Elisha’s was. She loves Roscoe every way possible. Didn’t she make total love to him? She withheld nothing from this man she truly wants. Veronica and Roscoe now desire each other so much that it seems they were destined to be together. But one rarely sorts out desire and destiny satisfactorily. And then Alex rises up and says the unthinkable. And nothing to be done. But you and I don’t know what will happen, my dearest Roscoe. And you do have my heart, my only love. I won’t give it to another.