Roscoe by William Kennedy
Watching the stirrings of these myriad creatures of significance in the city—even the robotic repetitions of Ikey Finkel, the fifty-year-old newsboy, hawking his papers, “Mawnin’ pape, mawnin’ pape”—shot Roscoe through with depression. He would, in an hour, make his way to headquarters for another day of Party rituals that would perpetuate the bleeding of his soul.
Joey stopped the car at the corner, and Roscoe, with difficulty, climbed in beside him. Joey, six six and two fifty, barely fit behind the wheel. Roscoe was wide but not so tall. Ordinary automobiles were not made for their like, especially for Joey, a genuine giant, the kind of giant you wish you were, Ros, an authentic military hero for pushing forward alone after the rest of his squad had been killed, seeing four Nazis putting a machine gun into place, killing them all with his pistol, then holding the position until reinforcements arrived and forty more Nazis were captured, all of which won Joey the Congressional Medal of Honor. Now Patsy’s running him for the State Senate. What will Joey do with a stack of legislative bills when he can’t even understand the Ten Eyck lunch menu and Roscoe has to read it to him? You think people want an illiterate senator? And Patsy: You think anybody’ll vote against the Medal of Honor?
Medals? Roscoe has medals. The same Senate seat Joey will soon occupy was Roscoe’s for the asking in the early years, after the Democrats took City Hall; and it would have moved him one step closer to matching his father’s political achievements. For a few minutes, back then, Roscoe felt safe as a hero, for not even Patsy knew that after Ros rejoined the Engineer Train he worked in company headquarters and wrote, in the dead captain’s name, and forged, in the dead captain’s hand, the citation lauding Roscoe Conway’s bravery in drawing enemy fire, a prize-winning work of fiction that earned Roscoe the Distinguished Service Cross. Fraudulent? Perhaps. But he was in the heavy action, he was under direct fire at the German line, and his own buddies shot and damn near killed him. Must we quibble about motives? When is a hero not a hero? If a hero falls alone in a trench does he make a heroic sound? Take a guess.
Patsy was convinced the DSC would easily win Roscoe the Senate seat, but Ros said, Thanks, Pat, but I would prefer not to. For by then the malaise had set in, and Roscoe was just another time bomb waiting to explode with shameful publicity for everybody. The Party didn’t need that.
“You sick?” Joey asked.
“Do I look sick?”
“I would never say so, and don’t hold me to it, but you look like a dying dog.”
“I am sick but not that sick. Stop talking about it and let’s go to Hattie’s.”
And Joey drove to Lancaster Street, to the modest brownstone from which Hattie Wilson managed her real-estate empire: forty-six three- and four-story rooming houses, four hundred and forty tenants whose rents Hattie collected personally, except for the eight buildings that functioned as brothels, and for those rentals Hattie received monthly cash payments in person from Mame Ray, Bindy McCall’s woman, and the supervising madam of all eight thriving whorehouses. Dark history had been made by some of Hattie’s tenants: Mrs. Falcone, who brought home two drifters to stab her husband fifty-seven times and who then moved from Hattie’s basement to Death Row in Sing Sing; history made also by visitors to Jack Diamond, who was in bed in a Hattie house on Dove Street—Hattie herself was actually in the basement to stoke the furnace that very early December morning—when the boys went upstairs and put Jack into deep cool.
Roscoe’s mission this morning was to talk to Mame Ray, but he couldn’t use the phone and, with the spies watching him, he couldn’t pull up to her whorehouse in daylight, especially before breakfast. Hattie’s place was safe, and Hattie was a storehouse of gossip herself, for her tenants were a cross-section of The Gut, Albany’s night city: bartenders and waitresses, burglars on relief, family outcasts and runaways, semiaffluent winos who could still pay rent, motherless queens, hula dancers, B-girls and strippers, horseplayers doing their best to die broke, dishwashers aspiring to be short-order cooks, good-time girls learning what it takes to go pro, and all the flakes, flacks, and flukes who got around to putting their heads on their greasy pillows just as the sun was also rising on the rooftops of The Gut. A famous question in the neighborhood was: Are you married or do you pay rent to Hattie Wilson?
The word on the street was that Hattie hoarded cash in her walls, but the last burglar who checked that one out turned up mostly dead in a ditch, courtesy of the Night Squad, which protected Hattie and her empire not only because she was O.B.’s wife, but because she was a prime snitch for the cops and a treasure to the Party for two decades, a compelling force in getting four hundred and forty people to the polls on Election Day—no relief checks, no mail, no heat or water in the joint until you vote the right way, the Democratic way, and we do know how you vote.
Joey parked and Roscoe went up Hattie’s stoop slowly.
“You even walk sick,” Joey said, and he hit the doorbell.
“Just shut up and open the door,” Roscoe said.
They went into the hallway and Roscoe knocked at Hattie’s inner door.
“Open up,” he said. “It’s a raid.”
“At this hour it couldn’t be social,” Hattie said from the other side of the door, and then she opened it to Roscoe and Joey, with Bridget, her Irish setter, at her heel. Hattie was fifty-one, wearing a flowered housedress, her hair both prematurely white and unchangingly bobbed since the mid-1920s, smoking a Camel, as usual, moving into a bit of broadness at the hips but still with that hourglass waist, and, to Roscoe, even at raw morning, a woman worth looking at, as she had been since he first intersected with her at Patsy’s victory party in 1919. He would have married her if he wasn’t so down on marriage and she wasn’t already married; and she was always married, except for brief pauses between the “I do”s: the perpetual bride, outthinking or outliving her husbands, or leaving them behind and finding another, always eager for that ring, because it meant a focus on the hearth and not just the bed. It also meant she had not another breadwinner, for she’d already won all the bread she’d ever need, but another cohabiting love slave, a focus on one man, even though she always had her eye on half a dozen, couldn’t help it, the poor thing, always such a magnet for men, such a triumph when they won her, had her, not knowing that it was she who had them, that they could never win her if she hadn’t first singled them out of the crowd, faithful to each in her own way, never trespassing on the previous or the current one, no matter how many mounted up on her scorecard; and Roscoe always in on her action, whatever, whom ever she did.
“You’re right again, old Hat,” Roscoe said, and Hattie stepped aside to let him and Joey into her parlor, whose furnishings, like much in her life, like Roscoe, were secondhand and at least a generation out of fashion.
“Turn on your fans,” Roscoe said. “A day like this, even dogs leave town and head for water. Why aren’t you out at the lake, Bridget?” And the dog licked his hand. Hattie was as intense about dogs as about husbands, and visited some of her neighbors only to talk to their dogs. Roscoe draped his suit coat over a chair back and sat on the sofa facing one of Hattie’s electric fans, waiting for air.
“You don’t look like yourself, Rosky,” Hattie said, and she switched on both her fans.
“I told him he looked sickly,” Joey said.
“You got any iced tea?” Roscoe asked.
“In the kitchen. You go make it, Joey,” Hattie said, and Joey left the room. “What’s wrong with you, Rosky? Your color is off. And you’re puffing.”
“The hell with that. You hear about anybody making a move on the whorehouses?”
“Anybody who?”
“The troopers, the Governor.”
“I thought you got the Governor off your backs last year.”
“He won’t quit. Election’s coming.”
“All I hear is that business is great since V-J Day. Now that the war’s over, people can think about something else.”
“They didn’t think about i
“Don’t get on me. You want me to call a doctor?”
“No doctors. I’ve got too much to do.”
“Somebody else to punch out? You’re in the papers again.”
“Some people need punching out for their own good.”
“You never change, Rosky.”
“I change like an emanation of nature, my dear. I change like an oak tree developing acorns. I change like churned milk, I change like a turnip growing ever larger, ever rounder, and palatable only when seriously boiled.”
“You still look like the boy I got to know in Malley’s back room.”
“That billygoat. You knew so many like him. You ever keep count?”
“I can’t count that high, love.”
“If we’d gotten married, I’d be dead and gone like your first five husbands. You’re a lethal woman, Hattie.”
“Floyd is still alive, out west. He sends me postcards. And O.B. is holding his own.”
“O.B. is alive because he sees you in moderation. Smart man, O.B. Floyd I never understood.”
“Floyd made me laugh, read me poems, played the harp. I bought him a lovely big one and he played it every night.”
“But you never screwed him.”
“I never had to.”
“Not his preference.”
“I couldn’t take him serious after I caught him parading around in my stockings and garters. He took a drawerful when he left. The harp too.”
“Your figure still makes me giddy. I’m feeling the need to take it in hand again.”
“In your condition it might do you in.”
“What better way to go? Better than Elisha. Are you ready if I come by some night?”
“If you promise not to die on me, I’ll love you like a husband.”
“Good. Now I need a favor.”
“Of course you do.”
“Call Mame and ask her to come over. So many politicians move through her place, and she does loosen their tongues. Don’t mention me on the phone.”
“You’re worried about this.”
“I’m paid for what I know about this town, and what I don’t know will eat my gizzard.”
Hattie went to her telephone table and called Mame, out of Roscoe’s earshot. Joey came in from the kitchen with a pitcher of tea, three glasses, a cut lemon, ice cubes, and the sugar bowl. No spoons, but otherwise a wonderful achievement. Roscoe would not ask anything more of him today.
Mame Ray was forty, child of a whore, raised in a whorehouse, a practitioner at puberty, a madam at twenty-five, who brought to whoring an attitude which her man, Bindy McCall, articulated to Roscoe early on in his relationship to her: “She’s a degenerate broad, but all broad.”
Roscoe could agree, having known Mame on and off for three months before Bindy took her over, a wild trimester of melodramatic sex that curdled when Mame invited paying spectators to watch them through peepholes. Roscoe now avoided Mame unless he had a reason to see her. He considered her a narcissistic cauldron of spite, a felonious virago if crossed; but an acute manager of business and people, effective scavenger in grocery marts and ten-cent stores for poor but shapely salesgirls ready to be rented, a wizard concerning the textures of desire, and at turning even casual customers into slaves of their own sexuality. In her early twenties she was a roving freelancer, and then princess of whichever house she settled into—in New York, Hudson, and finally Albany in 1930, when Roscoe found her. Bindy, after he took her over, saw to it that she spent less time on her back, more time counting revenue from the eight houses he gave her to supervise, all eight in Hattie’s buildings.
Mame’s main brothel, Hattie’s only building outside the rooming-house district, was an old Prohibition roadhouse in the city’s West End, known first as the Come On Inn, now called the Notchery, and it was all gold. Its first two floors were luxuriously furnished for a whorehouse, and Mame lived amid high-fashion décor on the third floor. It was also the collection depot for payoffs to Bindy from all city brothels, and these sums he passed on to Roscoe three times a week at Party headquarters after he took his cut, which Patsy suspected was getting larger lately, a point of contention between the brothers.
When Hattie saw Mame step out of the taxicab, she opened the inner door for her and went back to her chair. Roscoe, sipping his second glass of iced tea, watched Joey playing solitaire on the coffee table. Joey was cheating, yet losing. What kind of a senator is this? Mame flounced through the open door, her hair a new shade of auburn since Roscoe last saw her, her seductive amplitude unchanged, and wearing a tan linen skirt and white blouse. Mame’s face was not her fortune: her nose was a bump, her eyes too small, her cheekbones lost in the puff of her cheeks, but her mouth and its savvy smile offered serious intimacy.
“My God, Hattie,” she said, leaving the door ajar, “it’s hotter here than outside. Pour me one of those teas, Roscoe.”
“Glad to see you, too, Mame,” Roscoe said.
Hattie closed the door, then poured an iced tea for Mame, who sat on the other end of the sofa from Joey.
“Hiya, Mame,” Joey said.
“How’s it hangin’, Joe?”
“Down to my knees.”
“Send my regards,” Mame said.
“Never mind the shoptalk,” Roscoe said. “We hear the Governor may make a surprise raid on some of the girls.”
“How could that happen?” Mame asked. “We pay off everybody, including one of the Governor’s lawyers, and a couple of the very best state legislators.”
“You hear any rumors?”
“Pina said the troopers were talking to South End pimps, and she mentioned they’re interested in Division Street.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“They’re also talking to the Dutchman, and Pina says they know a beat cop taking payoffs, eight dollars a week.”
“Eight dollars. A fantastic specific, but not quite grounds for a raid. Who told Pina that?”
“I didn’t take it serious,” Mame said.
“Who could it have been? When was it?”
“Last night. Could’ve been anybody.”
“You and Pina worked last night?”
“We never close.”
“Everybody else closed,” Roscoe said.
“So I heard.”
“Patsy sent the word out yesterday to shut down.”
“Patsy, Patsy, Patsy. Fuck Patsy. We’re using the peephole. Only people we know get in.”
“Did you say fuck Patsy?” Hattie asked her.
“I did. He came to our place years ago, then all of a sudden he stays home and says his Rosary. What I think is his dick fell off. I hope it did.”
“Oh, Mame, Mame,” Hattie said. “You’ve gone bedbugs.”
“What you’re saying is Bindy won’t close? All eight places are running?”
“Just the Notchery,” Mame said. “You know how much money we’re losing with seven places dark? How are people supposed to live?”
“You know the money it’d take to get you and your girls out of jail? Lawyers, bail, greasing judges we don’t own, appeals if anybody’s convicted? This is happening at the state level, sweetheart, and the election is coming.”
“We’ve had raids before,” Mame said. “Nothing changes and then we go back to work. God, Hattie, I can’t stand this heat.” Mame opened her front burtons and slipped off her blouse. She wore a corselette that put much of her chest on exhibit.
“Lookin’ good, Mame,” Joey said.
“I don’t overeat,” Mame said.
“Wanna go in the bedroom?”
“Thanks, Joe, but I never fuck before lunch.”
“So,” said Roscoe, “you’re saying Bindy’s now in business for himself?”
“Wasn’t he always?” Mame said.
“I’ll think about that,” Roscoe said. “In the meantime, madam, I suggest you guard your peephole very vigorously.”
Roscoe walked slowly down the hallway toward Su
As they entered the courtroom, Roscoe moved Gilby a step ahead, then he and Veronica walked down the aisle together, maybe his only chance to do this. Pamela and Marcus Gorman had not arrived, but the courtroom was half filled, mostly with women who had come to see the socially notorious Pamela. The Times-Union this morning carried a capsule history of her marriages and scandals, her liaisons with millionaires, royal exiles, and Caribbean gigolos, and it highlighted the night she spent in jail for smashing a woman’s face with a champagne glass, thirty-two stitches, because the woman had insulted President Roosevelt. Give the devil her due. She’s still a Democrat.
“She’s not here yet,” Roscoe said to Veronica. “Have you figured out what you’ll say to her?”
“That I’ll cut out her heart and throw it to my dogs the way she bounced hard-boiled eggs to her poodle.”
“Splendid,” Roscoe said.
He settled his clients at the defense table and checked on the press: Frank Merola, who covered courts for the Times-Union, a friendly face, another way of saying he was on the Party’s payroll and would not be hostile to a Roscoe client, especially Elisha’s widow; Bill Cooley of the Knickerbocker News, who was also on the payroll but whose story might be less friendly, for one of his editors was born and would die a Republican; and also Vic Fenster from the goddamn Sentinel.
Roscoe heard Pamela before he saw her, her volume announcing the grand dame’s arrival. She wore a lavender picture hat, more suitable for the racetrack than the courtroom, a matching lavender dress, and red shoes. Her nylon stockings had a rare sheen, unlike any Roscoe had seen when he shopped with Trish, these surely from the haute-couture black market.
“I feel so secure with you on the case,” Pamela was saying as she entered, smiling up at Marcus Gorman, who was beamish beside her. They came toward the bench, Marcus nodding a restrained collegial greeting to Roscoe. Pamela paused to stare at Gilby, who sat at the defense table beside Veronica. She walked to him.