Roscoe by William Kennedy
Roscoe rarely dwelled on his own death: too many other things to think about. But now that he’s staring it down, is he as ready for it as Elisha was? Doubtful. Roscoe wants to get away but not that far, wants to make a move but is still asking questions: What didn’t he do that he should have? What did he do that he shouldn’t have? No, never mind that last question, Ros, we don’t have time. Keep in mind that if you die on the operating table you won’t have to protect Veronica anymore, won’t have to figure out Gilby and Pamela, or get Alex re-elected in a tough year, or decide why Elisha killed himself. No matter what logic you summon, Elisha’s suicide doesn’t make sense simply as the end of something. Roscoe remembers Elisha saying in a black moment that everything eventually comes to nothing. “That’s the secret you don’t tell the children,” he said, “and even if you did, they wouldn’t accept it.” But Roscoe now believes that Elisha, at the end, overruled his own conclusion on nothing. A suicidal getaway is usually flight from the unbearable, which wasn’t Elisha’s condition, was it? Or it’s a form of cowardly escape, or maybe delusory innocence descending; and Elisha was neither coward nor innocent, and rarely deluded. He was a cunning and courageous man with multiple reasons for everything he did, and he would not design his death on the basis of fear or insubstantiality Roscoe has almost convinced himself that Elisha, sliding into the inevitable, decided to do a bit of posthumous combat with the enemy, who was closing in. And who else would it be but Pamela and the hyenas she drags in her wake? And on whom could they close in? Not Elisha, who has slipped away on them; which leaves Veronica, Alex, Gilby.
The Candidate
The idea of Elisha’s making a cowardly getaway was absurd. You should have seen him when he really had enemies: when we ran him for governor. When we all lined up behind Patsy in 1919, nobody knew that so much would come of it. We loved the game and we were in on change. Al Smith was a key player then. Everybody in Albany knew Al, east side, west side, for he’d lived here on and off since Tammany first elected him to the Assembly in 1904. He went on to serve six terms and become Assembly Speaker, then Governor. When he ran for governor in ’22 and ’24, we saw to it that he won Albany with fat pluralities. After his ’26 victory, Al made Elisha Democratic State Committee chairman, and Eli roamed the state as advance man for Al’s presidential bandwagon. While Al ogled the White House, we ogled his chair in the Capitol, and our Mayor Goddard was a fine fit.
Goddard, a Baptist banker with great public appeal, had run up such impressive totals as mayor in ’21, ’23, and ’25 that people were saying he was unbeatable, a real candidate to succeed Al in ’28. Upstaters are always a long shot, but the front-runner, FDR, was out of the race, down in Warm Springs trying to regain use of his legs after his polio attack. Tammany Hall, under Charlie Murphy and then George Olvany, had always looked on us as upstate family, and so had John McCooey, the boss of Brooklyn Democrats. Their numbers dominated state Democratic conventions, and they were with us, so we truly had a chance to nominate Goddard for governor.
Mayor Goddard, Roscoe, and Elisha were always welcome at the Governor’s Mansion when Al lived there, but Patsy, who didn’t get along with Al, had never set foot in the place. As early as ’23, Al frowned on Patsy’s direct dealing in bootleg beer, and in ’27, as pressure mounted on Al to close down the Albany baseball pool, he asked Patsy and Roscoe to come to the Eagle Street Mansion for a private talk. Al was waiting for them on the veranda as they came up the steps. He pointed them to a prearranged pair of rocking chairs and sat in a third rocker, facing them.
“The Republicans are making noise about this pool again,” Al said. He was in shirtsleeves with arm garters, and he also wore a cigar. “And federal men are nosing around about the sale of plays across state lines.”
“What the hell am I supposed to do about that?” said Patsy.
“Shut down,” said Al.
“No,” said Pat. “No. And also no.”
“Then why don’t you let somebody win once in a while?” Al said.
“Where do you suppose the Party gets its money?” Patsy said. “You think we carry the city and county for you by passing the hat on Pearl Street?”
“How much can you need? Why don’t you share some of the wealth? Even the communists do that.”
“I always knew you were a red,” Patsy said.
Al stood up and walked into the Mansion, slamming and bolting the door against intruders.
“Well, you won that one,” Roscoe told Patsy.
In spite of Al, it still seemed that Patsy’s dream of throwing a party for his own Governor in the Mansion might be taking shape. But then Goddard, on vacation in Havana early in ’28, fell out of an open limo, injured his head, developed toxemic erysipelas, and there was death, sitting on the front porch of Patsy’s Mansion dream. Hesitating not, Patsy picked Elisha as Goddard’s replacement for the nomination.
“I don’t want it,” Elisha said.
“You’re a natural for it,” Patsy said.
“I’m state chairman. That’s enough.”
“If we elect you we’ll own the goddamn state.”
“Who says you can elect me?”
“I do,” said Patsy.
“I don’t want it.”
“You’ll take it.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re throwing us all in?”
“Why don’t you run Roscoe?”
“And who’d run Albany if I did?”
“You.”
“I’m not smart enough,” Patsy said.
“Get somebody else to be Governor.”
“I got who I want.”
“I don’t want it.”
“You’ll get to like it.”
Al accepted Elisha as his successor, for a Protestant out of Yale would balance his major liability—his Roman Catholicism—in the presidential race. Also, Elisha had all the credentials. He was a prenatal Democrat, esteemed at all proper business and social levels, superb at running our Albany finances. As state chairman he was intimate with political leaders from Yonkers to Buffalo, heavily connected to old and new money everywhere. He and Al both had six million friends, both were known as honest men, Al with a somewhat saintly reputation despite his Tammany backing, Elisha considered too rich to be personally dishonest, and the two were pals even before the war: socialized with wives, sang in Mike Quinlan’s saloon together. For months we believed that Elisha, backed by Al, could make it.
These were heady developments for Elisha: roving state chairman, potential Governor. At the same time, Fitzgibbon Steel, with a flood of orders, was becoming another bright horizon. In 1927, Elisha and the Krupp Works of Germany had agreed to pool their patents for making new case-hardened alloy steel, with Fitzgibbon Steel holding sole U.S. rights. Elisha put a triumvirate—a cost accountant, his chief metallurgist, and the hustling Kyle Glockner—in charge of the busy mill and kept in touch with the business by remote control.
Elisha was focused on politics and living with a recklessness that was not entirely new, but more expansive than ever; and Roscoe sensed that for the first time in his marriage he was dabbling, beyond flirtation, in other women. Elisha confessed nothing to Roscoe, but affectionate ladies dogged his trail, and Roscoe now thinks that if he had carried on with Pamela, this was when it began. His luck was running very fast in all directions during this era of fabulous prosperity, and Elisha then did what gamblers and people with too much money usually do: try to make more.
He became a partner in Burdett and Company, a group of bankers and industrial toffs like himself, who created an investment trust that owned nothing except stock in varied corporations (Fitzgibbon Steel among them) on the stock exchange. You could buy into Burdett for ten dollars a share, and when the trust’s portfolio made money, so did you. In less than a year, Burdett’s shares were worth three times the stocks on which they were based. It was the purest kind of speculation, and Roscoe likened it to watching the profits compound from Patsy’s plugged baseball poo
Then, in the summer of 1928, Tammany and Al decided it was going to be a tough election year for Democrats, and they pressed FDR, the Party’s best candidate, who’d been the vice-presidential candidate in 1920, to give up his polio therapy and go for the governorship. And there FDR came, galloping into the home stretch without a leg to walk on; and that was that for Elisha and the rest of us. Elisha shed no tears. He’d said yes only because he didn’t know how to say no to Patsy, who was furious at Al. But it wasn’t Al. It was the age defining itself at Elisha’s and Al’s expense. Al won the greatest popular vote in Democratic presidential history, but the anti-Catholic vote did him in. He lost New York State to Hoover by more than a hundred thousand votes, while FDR won it by twenty-five thousand.
That year the ill wind blew through Elisha’s life. His five-year-old daughter, Rosemary, complained of a stomach ache and Veronica, as usual, gave her milk of magnesia. The child vomited for four hours, and when Dr. Deacy came to Tivoli he diagnosed appendicitis and said a laxative was a very wrong remedy. He arranged for immediate surgery at Albany Hospital. Six hours after the onset of her pain the child’s burst appendix was removed, and Elisha and Veronica took up a vigil at her bedside and waited for her to be comforted by the ministrations of doctors and nurses. But they could give her no comfort. Veronica sat at her side and watched the nurse come with a bottle that dripped new medication into Rosemary’s vein. On the next afternoon the child vomited blood, and her blood pressure plummeted. They put tubes in her stomach to wash out the blood, and gave her a transfusion. Her pressure returned to normal, her color came back, but her pain persisted.
Roscoe visited twice, but could find no function for himself beyond being here with a readiness to do anything. But there was nothing to be done. He went to Farnham’s and bought everybody turkey sandwiches with the homemade mayonnaise Veronica loved; but nobody ate them.
Dr. Deacy examined Rosemary and confirmed the fear: she had peritonitis, a toxic invasion of her system by its own poisons. She was in constant pain, with effortless vomiting and distended stomach; and when Roscoe heard the doctor whisper to a nurse that the child was critical and asked him what medicines were used to fight peritonitis, the doctor said there were many but none of them worked.
On the early morning of the third day, when Veronica could no longer sustain wakefulness, she closed her eyes against her will. Elisha had been catnapping for ten- and twenty-minute stretches, but Veronica could nap only a few minutes and would then burst back into wakeful vigil. This time she slept two hours, during which her daughter was released from relentless pain into shock.
Roscoe arrived to find a nurse scurrying out and Elisha weeping at the foot of the bed, staring at the shallow breathing of his unconscious daughter. The nurse returned with an intern and prepared new injections. Veronica, curled on a leather sofa too small for her body, was wakened by the frenzy of the doctor and nurse, and then realized she’d slept through the fading of her child’s consciousness. She threw herself down at the side of the bed, the crack of her knees on the floor a genuflection in hell, batted her head twice against the iron leg of the bed, raised her face and buried it in the bedsheet, and wailed and wept for her baby and cursed her husband.
“Goddamn you for letting me sleep.”
“You couldn’t stay awake.”
“You tricked me.”
“You couldn’t have done anything.”
“I could have. She’s leaving me.”
“The doctors can’t do anything. And she isn’t gone.”
“She can’t hear me.”
“She may rally.”
“She’s dying and I can’t even say goodbye. You cheated me.”
She stood and waved her arms in a sobbing frenzy and struck Elisha across the face, not an intentional blow, but she did not apologize. Roscoe saw in her face a bitterness he didn’t recognize, a wildness beyond grief. She slumped again to her knees, and Elisha could not comfort her. Roscoe stood witness to the tableau of estrangement, and the changing yet again of intravenous medications that had no effect on the child. Elisha’s sisters came to the waiting room, and Elisha’s brother, Gordon, brought an Episcopal priest who came to deliver the last rites. Veronica refused to let him into the room. “She’s not dying,” she told the priest, “and even if she were, she’s too innocent to need any prayers.”
On the early morning that began the fourth day of the vigil, Rosemary died without regaining consciousness. Veronica cursed Elisha anew: “Bastard, you took her away from me, goddamn you for it.” She wailed and refused Elisha’s touch. Only her howls assuaged her loss and her guilt over the laxative and the failure of her own body, how dare it demand sleep? She cried herself out and stared at the deathbed. Elisha knelt at the foot of the bed but later told Roscoe he could not remember one prayer. He could think of only one sensible thing to say to Veronica: “All you see is loss. Does that wipe out all the joy she gave us while she was alive?”
After half an hour, two nurses came to take Rosemary, but Veronica sent them away. The vigil continued another hour, until two interns came back with the head nurse, who apologized but said she would have to restrain Veronica if necessary. Roscoe told her that if she did it would be her last act as an employee of this or any other hospital in Albany. He took hold of Veronica’s arm and said to her, “I’ll take you both back to Tivoli, where your daughter will live forever.”
Roscoe then walked Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgibbon down to the hospital parking lot. They sat together in the back seat of Roscoe’s new Studebaker, and he then drove them home to their very empty mansion.
Two days after the funeral, Veronica entered the Beth El Jacob synagogue on Herkimer Street as the cantor was singing with his four sons, three wearing hats. The sons had no worldliness in their faces, but much piety. Veronica stood by the door listening. The singing ended and Rabbi Horwitz began to speak to the congregation of bankruptcy, then equated it with moral bankruptcy. “People spend out of control, but then comes the reckoning and we can’t pay,” he said, and Veronica said aloud, “You are absolutely correct,” and walked toward the rabbi and sat among the men of the congregation. Rabbi Horwitz stopped speaking, and a man arose from his seat and told Veronica that she must sit upstairs with the women.
“I can’t do that,” she said. “It’s not my fault that I’m a mother.”
“I’m sorry, but you must move,” the man said.
Veronica stood up and left the synagogue. She drove to Sacred Heart Church in the North End, where her Catholic mother had worshipped. She lit all three hundred votive candles, then knelt at the rail and stared at the white marble altar. Will Logan, the sexton, sweeping the floor at the back of the church, saw her open the marble gates and go up the steps to the altar, take the tabernacle key from under the altar cloth, open the tabernacle door, take out a ciborium half full of the Eucharistic wafers, eat a handful, then begin to eat another. Will came on the run and took the ciborium from her. He put it back in the tabernacle and told her, “You better leave, missus. You can’t do this.”
Later that week, Veronica went to her first session with Nadia the mystic, who swiftly put her in conversation with her dead daughter.
Sale
Elisha left politics in late 1928, two weeks after Rosemary died. He retreated into solitude, refusing all condolences or conversation about the child, seeing no one socially; and Roscoe sensed that any carousing had run its course. Acting once again as the mill’s true chief executive, Elisha moved through some months of prosperity. But the wind again blew from Black Thursday to Black Tuesday, the week the stock market betrayed everybody. Margin calls that Burdett and Company and its investors couldn’t meet consumed Elisha’s personal paper fortune, a
By the spring of 1930, Elisha was looking at debts the mill could not cover, and he confided this to Roscoe while they were in his library at Tivoli. They were sunken in sumptuous leather armchairs, drinking bootleg Scotch whisky, Eli, in tailored shirt and diamond pinky ring, saying that if he did not find money someplace he would lose the pinky ring, the Scotch, the furniture, the library, and maybe his shirt, the first Fitzgibbon in two centuries to be poor. “The banks could, and might, take the mill away,” he said, “and they’d come for Tivoli next. Bankers are bastards, and I say this because I’m on the board of three banks.”
“You seem to be saying you need money,” Roscoe said.
“Very acute.”
“Patsy already knows this. He has a hundred thousand for you in his safe.”
“That would pay a few creditors.”
“There’s more when you need more,” Roscoe said.
“Patsy gives away money, but never this much.”
“Who said he’s giving it away?”
“He wants it back, of course. And he’ll get it.”
“Who said he wants it back?”
“What does he want?”
“FDR going for the White House makes him a lame-duck governor, and that gives Patsy another chance to put you in the Governor’s Mansion.”