Roscoe by William Kennedy
The Second Movement
The Argus reported on election morning that Republicans were spreading the word not to vote for Abner Straney, the incumbent assessor. Voters were confused as to why his own Party would cut Straney, and so was Straney. Republican bosses said it wasn’t true they were cutting him.
Roscoe and Patsy were not confused. As Blair’s popularity soared and Republicans foresaw the loss of City Hall for the first time in twenty years, Patsy had an idea: Tell Billy Barnes, the Republican boss, if he cuts Straney, we’ll cut Blair in the three wards where our troops are in place. We can probably guarantee a cut of eight hundred in just the Ninth Ward.
Roscoe took the plan to lunch with Edgar Wills, Billy Barnes’s lawyer, and after lunch the word came back: Done. The Straney rumor was on the street in every ward as soon as the polls opened, and the cut-Blair advisory ran wild among Democrats in select wards.
The Third Movement
Just as the polls were closing on election evening, in the front of Joey Corelli’s barbershop on Broadway, which was the polling place of the third district of the Ninth Ward, Fortune Micelli turned up with twelve Italian veterans who wanted to vote. They all roomed in the ward, in Micelli’s rooming house on Broadway, which had six cots and sixty-two registered voters. The vets had U.S. Army honorable discharges in hand, but no naturalization papers, and spoke little English. Micelli, a high-school classmate of Roscoe’s, demanded that these war heroes, who had risked their lives for America, be allowed to vote, but Republicans argued it was illegal; and bilingual shouting and pushing turned into a rolling battle of ethnic pride, patriotism, and bigotry. Roscoe interpreted their constitutional rights for the pushing and screaming Italians, but he agreed with the Republicans that they couldn’t vote and had to move their chaos out of the polling place and into the street, that the voting day was now at an end. And while workers of both parties and the volunteer poll-watchers formed a human blockade to prevent the Italians from assaulting the polls, the barbershop door was locked. Inside, Eddie Pfister, a plumbing-supply salesman who worked the voting table for the Republicans, and Bart Merrigan, his Democratic counterpart, alone at the table, unlocked the ballot box and quickly separated out all ballots marked for Straney. They drew an “x” next to Patsy’s name on each ballot, thus invalidating it with a second vote, then put all ballots back in the box and locked it.
Patsy carried the ward, 1,196 to 458, and defeated Straney city-wide for the assessorship by 145 votes. Straney demanded a police probe of Ninth Ward vote tampering, but it was denied.
Townsend Blair carried ten of the city’s nineteen wards but lost the Ninth Ward to Mayor Watt by 850 votes, and lost the election by 1,200 votes. Three days after the election, Blair, meeting with newspapermen immediately following the recount that he and Straney had demanded, spoke aloud for the first time the loser’s lament he would repeat for the rest of his life: “They counted me out. They counted me out.”
Getting Wet
On the night of the recount, Patsy’s victory party in the Malley brothers’ Beaver Street saloon, the largest in town, was a mob scene, easily three hundred on hand to celebrate the election. All saloons in the state, Malley’s included, had closed October 28, after the Senate passed the Volstead Act over President Wilson’s veto, but this was a private party and no one would be dry tonight, everything free, the Stanwix kegs, courtesy of Roscoe, stacked in the Malleys’ back room, the last beer made before the brewery went dark. Giving beer away was as illegal as selling it, but Roscoe had Bart check with the federal enforcers, and they would not be enforcing tonight. Too soon.
Roscoe saw Patsy, surrounded by neighbors, ward pols, and women who touched him when they smiled up into his face. “Oh, Patsy, they can’t stop you now,” this from Mabel Maloy, an Arbor Hill beauty who’d worked as a poll-watcher for him. Flora Pender beside her, a neighbor who’d had Patsy’s attention for years, plus three women Roscoe didn’t recognize, all found the new city assessor irresistible.
Roscoe intruded to ask Patsy, “How do you like your party?”
“Better than gettin’ hit with a potato.”
“Do you want to make a victory speech?”
“Didn’t you hear about the politician who made a speech and lost the election?”
“You won the election.”
“That’s because I didn’t make a speech.”
Roscoe saw Elisha in the crowd with Veronica, a permanent, walking glory, and he lost her and still can’t shed the pain after five years. He waved to Elisha, nodded hello to Veronica, and turned away. Craig Leland and Frank Rice were edging toward Patsy, a pair of young bankers who’d backed Townsend Blair and longed to break Barnes’s City Hall tie to old-line banks, and could Patsy be the way? He could, which gave this night an importance beyond the winning of a simple assessorship. People were starting to believe this was the hole in the dike and next would come the flood. Corbett Atterby, a young lawyer with a moneyed pedigree who’d soured on the Barnes machine and came to work for Patsy, stood at the hero’s elbow, exploring one of Patsy’s spillovers: an open-minded blonde who worked as a secretary in the law office of Patsy’s brother Matt, the reclusive lawyer whose firm would become the leading law group in the city in five years; and Matt was here with Liza, his beautiful wife nobody liked. Tim Wiley, whose Molders Union backed Patsy, was here, and there was Louie Glatz, assistant brewmaster at Stanwix, who took over after Felix’s longtime brewmaster, Franz Prediger, saw Prohibition coming and found work in Argentina.
Roscoe searched faces, found uncountable strangers. Who brought them? Who cares? Join the Party, folks, the new Party. He saw Hattie Wilson and went toward her. She had organized this celebration, cooked the corned beef, chicken, ham, the works, raised the victory banner over the bar—PATSY DID IT!—brought in dishes and silver—she also did picnics and clambakes-the most organized woman in town, and a tantalizing eyeful to Roscoe’s eye: that full bosom, covered to the neck tonight, with matching hips and slender waist, proportions definitely not made in heaven. You couldn’t call her pretty—her face was too full of experience for such a delicate term—but its soft, full, not fleshy contours held a promise of pleasure, a wish for it, or was Roscoe imagining this? He would find out one of these days. Her first husband had died in the Argonne, and now she was seeing Louie Glatz, who, Roscoe decided, was wrong for her. Roscoe asked her, “Did you cook enough to feed this mob?”
“Even you won’t be able to eat all the leftovers,” she said.
“You look too good to be a cook,” he said.
“I do other things too.”
“Those are things I’d like to see.”
“I’ll bet you would.”
“How much’ll you bet? I want to see the color of your money.”
“You’ll have to make an appointment.”
“All right. Tonight. Here.”
“Here where?”
“I’ll figure it out,” Roscoe said.
“Here?”
“Here.”
She cocked an eye at him and moved away toward the food. Was that a yes? He threaded through the crowd toward Bindy and a stranger who, if he was Moishe (Mush) Trainor from New Jersey, was about to bring money back into Roscoe’s life. With the brewery closed, Roscoe’s income had vanished overnight. He could carry on as counsel for Elisha’s steel mill, but it bored the bejesus out of him, just as the mill often bored Elisha’s bejesus, both of them preferring the new vice of political excitement, the rush of blood during the campaign, the vital hangover from all that creative fraudulence, and the anticipation of power according to Patsy McCall, who would insist Packy McCabe put Elisha and Roscoe on the Party committee that would control the next election. Here we come, Packy, and we can see daylight. Also, as a politician, Roscoe gets to use his wits, of which he has several. And although all know how smart Patsy is, he can’t run this rump faction alone. He has the desire, the talent for making friends, and profound savvy about the human proclivity for deceit, but
Money: it suddenly seemed available to Roscoe, if the scheme conjured by Bindy, with Patsy and Mush Trainor as his partners, worked out. Roscoe’s dead brewery, his peculiar bequest from Felix, had new reason to exist, perhaps even thrive in these dry times. Felix had moved back home from the Ten Eyck when his pneumonia worsened and he was unable to take care of himself, came back after almost twenty years to his old brass bed in the Ten Broeck Street brownstone, and Blanche welcomed him as if he’d only been gone for the weekend. Why did she do this?
“It was peaceful when he was gone,” she said, “no spittoons or politicians. He was no use around the house and he’d never go anywhere with me. But he did come to visit. He’d give us anything we asked, and never ask a thing from us, just to live alone in that drafty hotel. Then, one day, he says to me, ‘Could I come home to die, Blanche?’ And wouldn’t I be a fine one to say he couldn’t?”
Blanche and the Conway girls—Cress, Marianne, and Libby—monitored his breathing to see if he was still here or gone up, and O.B., Dr. Lynch, and Roscoe kept him company part of the day. But he lingered, refusing to die until he was sure Patsy had been elected and Blair hadn’t. Roscoe gave him the news as soon as he heard it, and explained the Blair and Straney cuts.
“You fixed both sides?” Felix asked.
“We did,” Roscoe said.
“How delicious. I’m proud of you. And proud of Patsy.”
“We had a good teacher.”
“Next stop City Hall.”
“That could be.”
“Do that for your father,” Felix said, beaming at having given this boy the proper upbringing, and also at the prospect of a vicarious, posthumous return to the Mayor’s office, the only form of redemption left to him. He’d raised this boy right. He stopped talking and smiled up at Father Loonan from St. Joseph’s, who had come to forgive Felix his political sins. The priest began with redemption through Jesus, but Felix raised a hand to protest.
“Jesus was a nice fellow, Father,” Felix said, “but he was a con man.”
The priest nodded and forgave him his blasphemy, and Felix said, “Remember Satan offering him that deal? ‘Fall down and worship me and I’ll give you the kingdoms of the world’? The poor devil never had a chance, Father. The fix was in upstairs. Jesus conned hell out of him, just like his father and that apple. You think he didn’t know what Adam would do once he got a look at that apple? Of course he did. A con from the get-go, Father, a con from the get-go.”
Father Loonan was forgiving this further blasphemy when Felix said, “I’m nothing, Father, and never was, and the same goes for this splendid son of mine, and for you too. None of us is worth an old man’s piddle and we never could be, because the whole world is fixed against us, Father. The whole damn world is fixed.”
As the priest forgave his insults and profanity, Felix closed his eyes and lapsed into sleep. When he awoke he said nothing more of equivalent eloquence, and then he died, leaving the bulk of his estate, nearly a million, to his wife and daughters. To O.B. and Roscoe he left the Stanwix Brewery, controlling interest to Roscoe, plus a few hundred thousand for the boys to split, which would keep them respectable but hardly affluent, his reasoning being that women had it hard and men should make their own way; and Roscoe and O.B. surely could find some use for the brewery, even if beer was illegal. Be willful, boys, was his verbal bequest, which was why Roscoe was moving toward Bindy and Mush Trainor, entrepreneurs of the new age descending, in which the illusion of beer would replace beer, the illusion of gin would replace gin, and the illusion of jurisprudence and justice would transform the populace into hoodlums, chronic lawbreakers, professional hypocrites, defiant drunks, and political wizards, the grand exalted whizzer being Patsy. Roscoe had already had an opportunity to sell his brewery for a very decent price to the new consortium—Patsy, Bindy, Mush, and God knows who else—and let them do what they would with it. What they wanted to do was make near beer, 0.5 percent alcohol, and people would drink it and think they were getting drunk. The consortium would soon make it easier for them to think that by infusing alcohol into the beer, then selling it for twice, maybe triple, what a half of beer had sold for last week. Take it or leave it, folks. Roscoe considered this offer and decided for sentimental reasons that he would not sell his father’s brewery but would himself become keeper of the golden vats—vats that brought wondrous ease to all those defiant drinkers, and serious profit to their owner.
He touched Bindy’s arm and Bindy said, “All right, Roscoe. Mush, I told you about.”
“Hello, Mush. Do people really call you Mush?”
“Don’t you like it?”
“It’s fine with me. I never heard the name.”
“Some heard it,” Mush said.
Mush was slight of build, a bit of a dude, with pocket handkerchief, silk vest, and gold watch and chain. He had a scratchy voice and a face scarred by an old pox, his small blue eyes his chief agent of analysis. As Roscoe talked, Mush seemed to listen less than he scrutinized Roscoe’s face for strength, weakness, venality, stupidity.
“You decide what you wanna do with the brewery?” Bindy asked.
“I’ll hold on to it.”
“We can raise the offer.”
“Not for sale, Bin. If it runs, I run it.”
“You ready to do business?” Mush asked.
“You’re handling the beer for Bindy,” Roscoe said.
“That’s my job.”
“You’ll pick it up, find the customers, deliver it.”
“I’ll do that. You ready to do business?”
“I am.”
“I’d like to see the place.”
“I don’t go to the brewery,” Roscoe said.
“Why not?”
“I only went there to see my father. He never wanted me selling beer. Then he gave me the brewery.”
“How do you run it?”
“With a bookkeeper, and Louie Glatz the brewmaster. My brother, O.B., will be around when you need somebody, and we’ll rehire whatever crew we need to keep your trucks rolling. How much beer will you need?”
“How much can you make?”
“That much, eh?”
“People want beer.”
“It won’t be beer. It’ll be oh-point-five.”
“That’s right.”
“Any stronger, they’ll padlock the place and me with it.”
“How does it taste?”
“The best in town. But when we run it over the heat to get the alcohol out, I don’t know.”
“Nobody’ll complain. We’ll fix it so it does what it’s supposed to do.”
“What do you know about beer, Mush?”
“Nothin’. I just move it.”
“How long you been moving it?”
“Two weeks.”
“An old hand.”
“I moved other stuff.”
Mush was known as a swagman, a dealer in stolen jewelry—his gold watch and chain were probably hot—and as a domestic smuggler of heroin wrapped in cigars and sealed inside Christmas candles. By repute he now had close ties to a Jersey brewery that had been preparing to go clandestine ever since Prohibition became a sure thing, which was why Bindy brought him to Albany, a major market for which the McCall brothers were anxious to compete. Six months earlier Patsy had bought an empty soap factory that covered half a city block in the North End to garage his trucks for hauling the beer, and to sell car and truck tires as a front. Bindy had set up stills in half a dozen city neighborhoods for making home brew, and was building a major still on Westerlo Island in the river. These would only begin to cover the demand.
“You plan to bring in the real goods, I hear,” Roscoe said to Mush.
“Right. As soon as we control some roads and trains. Where’s this brewmaster guy? Can he show me the layout?”
“I’ll have him do that.”
Roscoe fou
Roscoe made rounds of the celebrants and drank a little Stanwix with many: Neil Tilton and Rob Cooper, a pair of young Fort Orange Club lawyers who were close to Elisha, and Will Smith and Mike Rea gan, who were jubilant over their re-election as alderman and supervisor of the stalwart Ninth Ward, and Cody Gilpin, the midget emcee for Malleys’ entertainers, when the saloon was running. Cody was on the small stage at the end of the bar playing very well a string of slow, sad tunes on his baby piano, “You Made Me Love You, (I didn’t want to do it),” “Come to Me, My Melancholy Baby,” and so on.
“Can’t you play something lively, Cody?” Roscoe said. “This is a celebration, not a wake.”
Cody banged a double-handed discord and got up from his stool. “Nuts to music,” he said, and he climbed up the barstool and sat cross-legged on top of the bar. He was in shirtsleeves, with his trademark derby.