Roscoe by William Kennedy
“I still don’t want it.”
“It’s so little to ask in return for saving the mill and Tivoli. All you have to do is sell Patsy your soul.”
“Didn’t I do that a long time ago?”
“A soul as big as yours, you get to sell it more than once.”
In November 1930, during Artie Flinn’s federal trial on charges of running the Albany baseball pool, Warren Skaggs, the man Patsy took the pool away from, testified that he heard Artie say pool profits were cut up among Patsy, Bindy, and Roscoe, and that “we also figure Fitzgibbon into it.” Skaggs’s volunteering, with great enthusiasm and without being asked, the Fitzgibbon name—could it be the ex-Democratic state chairman and the almost candidate of 1928 to succeed Al Smith as governor?—came as a public shocker. Elisha issued a statement stoutly denying involvement, and jurists and clergy rushed to his support. Roscoe and Bindy also made public denials, which nobody believed. The positive news was that Artie always distributed the profits in cash, either in Roscoe’s Ten Eyck suite or at Patsy’s garage, and there were never any witnesses. Roscoe always took Elisha’s share and delivered it at a later moment. With only hearsay evidence (Artie testified he could not remember ever hearing the name Fitzgibbon mentioned), no gambling charges were brought against Elisha, Patsy, Roscoe, or Bindy. Patsy was convicted of contempt of court for his creative answers before the grand jury and was sentenced to federal prison for six months.
Elisha packed his trunks and sailed to Barcelona with Veronica and stayed two months in quiet isolation, even from the English language, identifying with hubristic martyrs and victims of too much opportunity. He returned only when the baseball pool had receded from the headlines, and a crisis of indolence had arisen at the mill: roofs leaking, machines rusting from nonuse, shops frequently broken into, and tools, supplies, even small machinery stolen. Also, there was one successful suicide, one unsuccessful suicide attempt among former mill employees, both of whom Elisha knew well, and whose financial sorrows he blamed on himself for having committed crimes for which there was no redemption.
Patsy was sent to the Federal House of Detention in Greenwich Village, in Manhattan, but not before Roscoe arranged, with Tammany’s influence over the jailers, for Patsy to spend afternoons down the block at the home of Philly McQuaid, a bucket-shop operator and Patsy’s close friend for years, and to return to his fourteen-bed dormitory for lights-out anytime before nine-thirty. On weekends when the weather was good, Mush Trainor, who also lost millions in the market crash, drove Patsy to his summer place in the Helderbergs in a Willys sedan Mush had stolen and repainted for Patsy’s incognito travel. Patsy did five of his six months and earned a month off for good behavior. He came home in late April 1931, a notable year for crime and punishment in Albany.
Roscoe at the Apex
While Roscoe lay on the operating table having his heart invaded, the surgeon found, nestling near the heart’s traveling bag, a sliver of one of the bullets that had pierced Roscoe during his heroic desertion from the French battlefield in 1918. When told he’d been harboring a piece of the reality that had wounded him twenty-seven years earlier, Roscoe said the discovery proved some wounds never heal because they belong to primordial human trauma: the wrong choice. And he was thrust backward to early 1931, when Elisha was licking his wounds in Spain, Patsy was sleeping under a federal roof, and Roscoe alone was running the Albany Democracy. In those months, Democratic headquarters was never busier, visitors arriving without end—Party regulars bringing the temporary Caesar news, whispers, beseechings, money, and votive offerings, and also wondering: By the way, Roscoe, has the world changed? Is Patsy gone forever? Has Eli moved to Spain? You look good at the top, Ros.
Such obeisance Roscoe had been accepting for years, never on his own behalf, and now that the power was his alone, however temporarily, he didn’t like it or want it. It did not improve the climate of his spirit. Serious meaning did not inhere in his power to transform the life of anybody who walked through his door. An entire society structured on extortion and subordination: what a way to live. Roscoe never coveted that, but never wanted to be subordinate, either; and yet knows he is (and isn’t when you look in the opposite direction). So why, then, has he inhabited this place for so long? Not power? Then maybe the lush life, or access to love and beauty? A major side dish, said Roscoe, but how do you live on love alone? Only in the song. Going for the main chance is it? Possibly. But Roscoe is still trying to define that one. He had goals once: merchant-politician like Felix, no; scholar and teacher, historian perhaps, using your brain appeals, reading books for a living, but no; constitutional lawyer—now, there was an aspiration, but you had to practice law first—egad, no; maybe the theater, you’re a great actor, Roscoe, with a hell of a voice, and everybody’s known that about you since school days and the Elks Club minstrels; but no, no thanks.
The truth is that Roscoe would’ve had to take too many time risks, give up too much life-at-hand, to pursue such long-distance goals. So he gave up the goals: rational cowardice his basic survival tactic while he kept chasing that elusive main chance, where the hell was it? When would it turn up? Meantime, there was the communal motive: to live equal among revelers in conquest. Yes, that’s what we were about, why we went into politics. Yes, indeed, conquest, yes, yes, that surely must be the motive. We’ll work to elevate the people, our people, and any others out there who need a leg up into equality: generic Democrats who couldn’t get jobs for twenty years. Right. The poor, the working class, that’s us. Anybody with more than five thousand dollars should be a Republican. We don’t want people starving because they’re Democrats. Not nice to live and die in hungry silence. Patsy, Roscoe, Elisha couldn’t bear such silence. Manic life, the gamble, game chickens, high action, the campaign, that’s the stuff. Patsy, the redeemer, replaces every failure (a form of death) with success. Yesterday’s defeat has got to become tomorrow’s plurality, which is Patsy’s formula as a relentless winner, and that’s how he redeems. When Pat walks down the street a crowd follows, you’d think he was Jesus passing out the loaves and fishes, primitive patronage, but that’s how it’s still done.
Now, as Roscoe lies on the operating table with his heart sliced open, he ponders dying like Elisha, really dying this time, you can’t live without a heart. He senses that he is being commanded to survive, so he makes a forcible point to himself—Don’t die, Roscoe, survive—which some may say begs the question. But as the survival word sibilates on his tongue, Roscoe hears it as a eureka truth built into the fabric of the being, and he sees that it’s the cause of all wars, of every argument for and against the Empire, the Nazis, the Fascists, the Japs, the reason we convert the infidels and save the pagans, the reason we subdue the aborigines, the barbarians, the Republicans; it’s why kings have that divine right and why we absolutely must win the Ninth Ward; it’s at the heart of Manifest Destiny and the lemming society, of the mad oligarchs, the killer hordes, the holy despots, and also Dracula, who certainly knows how to preserve his soul. How? You get the money. How do you get the money? Oh my Jesus. Money is blood. Get it any way you can. Money buys survival. Too bad about that stock market. Those fellows should’ve tried politics, which is the real stock market. Roscoe, with his heart wide open and susceptible to scalpel slashings and invasions of the blood by unholy elements, knows that Elisha and Patsy, and then he himself in his brief time at the apex, all stepped out of the crowd; and not only did they survive, they achieved pre-eminence, and forever after have been forced to live like lions among hares, arguing at the council of beasts that laws cannot be made for them both. “Where are your claws and teeth?” the lions asked the hares. Demigods, mud gods, gods on a stick, but gods with the power of obliteration are what this triumvirate looks like from below. Shoot them in the chest, put them in jail, make them drink poison, they will refuse to die, even after they are dead. Equals in the revel, yes, and the revel will now continue if they can only put Roscoe’s heart back the way they found it. And then he
When Roscoe came back to Tivoli at Veronica’s insistence, purged of dead blood, healed in invisible ways, Veronica kissed him sweetly, possibly a bit of the old passion there, but that’s subject to interpretation. She coddled him with steamed clams, prime ribs with a mountain of mashed potatoes, and a dish he had once professed love for and forgotten he loved, chicken-liver-and-mushroom pie. Veronica had not forgotten. Alex offered restrained good wishes, with no hostility, and it seemed that heart trouble, for the moment, had liberated Roscoe from tension within this family, the only one to which he felt he belonged; for his only surviving sister, the sweet Cress, was as distant as a fifth cousin, and O.B. less a brother than a plenipotentiary of the Party, blood not necessarily thicker than politics.
Then Roscoe’s fading tension flared anew when Gladys came to visit. He sat with her in the garden room with all the wicker and heard her say, with a tremolo in her voice, that O.B. had put Mac on departmental leave and told him to turn in his badge and pistol; and when Mac refused, O.B. punched him, breaking his partial denture and splintering his jaw. O.B. was still furious that Mac had gone to Roscoe and thwarted his Notchery raid, never mind Roscoe’s quick-witted salvation of the harebrained disaster that didn’t quite happen, that’s irrelevant. The grave issue before us is O.B.’s authority affronted. Gladys also said O.B. asked her to go to New York with him for a weekend. When she refused him he retaliated, telling her the infamous Pina had been Mac’s personal whore “all the years he’s been sleeping with you.”
“I beg your pardon,” Gladys said. “I haven’t been sleeping with him.”
“Having chocolates and port wine, listening to Claude Thornhill and Mozart,” O.B. said. “Mac told me all about it. He said he slept with you twice a week.”
“Then he’s not an honorable man,” Gladys said.
She telephoned and screamed at Mac, who went silent, then left the receiver off the hook. “And it’s still off,” Gladys told Roscoe. She had already gone twice to Mac’s house on Walter Street, afternoon and evening, but no one answered his bell, the place was dark, and Mac’s sister downstairs didn’t know where he was.
“What do you want me to do?” Roscoe asked her.
“Find him and tell him I don’t care what he said to O.B. or did with that woman.”
“That morning Elisha died, O.B. took you home from the mill.”
“Yes.”
“You were seeing them both.”
“I only visited with O.B.,” she said. “He never stayed over.”
“Mac suspected.”
“Yes.”
“You’re a femme fatale, Gladys. Two cops on the hook.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“It was something like that.”
“I never betrayed Mac. I was always true to him.”
“In your fashion.”
“What do you know about it? Did you listen to O.B.’s lies?”
“I’m just reading between your hesitations.”
“I never let O.B. touch me.”
“But he kept trying for a breakthrough.”
“I’m sorry I asked you anything,” Gladys said, and she stood up.
“I’ll try to find him,” Roscoe said.
He sent Joey Manucci to all the bars and lunchrooms Mac frequented, checked Hattie to see if he’d sought sanctuary with her, no, then called O.B., feeling the rage he’d felt in childhood when O.B. tattled on him to Felix. O.B. knew intimately the power of the stool pigeon, indispensable ally in delivering justice to the miscreant. And justice for miscreant Mac was precisely what O.B. wanted.
“I hear you’ve gone crazy,” Roscoe said to him on the phone, “persecuting the best cop you’ve got.”
“I’d expect you to stand up for him.”
“Your ego is ridiculous, O.B. You look like a self-serving sap.”
“Patsy doesn’t think so. He likes people to obey his orders.”
“Patsy won’t back you when he hears what you told Gladys.”
“She been talking to you?”
“You run down Mac to her, you think she’ll say, Thanks a lot, honey, let’s go to bed? She loves the man, O.B.”
“She oughta know the kind of guy she’s screwing.”
“Thank you, Monsignor. Your moral stance is exemplary.”
“Keep out of this, Roscoe. This is my show.”
Discursive Critique, with Gin
Joey found Mac at the Elite Club, a onetime speakeasy on Hudson Avenue, drinking gin with Morty Besch, the ex-bootlegger who was one of the last people to see Jack Diamond alive. Until the war ended, Morty was bleaching dollar bills to print counterfeit gasoline-ration stamps on the paper, was also the Elite Club’s silent partner with his brother, Herman; for Morty, a felon, could not legally own a bar. Herman, with a withered leg, was a slave to the place. Morty’s function was to drag in customers and see that they kept drinking. Mac had known Morty for years, moonlighted with him during Prohibition, riding shotgun on his days off: pistol, rifle, and sawed-off at the ready on the Canadian booze run in Morty’s seven-passenger, armor-plated Buick. The run was up to the border for the pickup, fill the Buick’s undercarriage full of whiskey out of Montreal, then head back down to Chestertown, where the booze was offloaded into two other cars to be taken to sanctioned drops in Troy and Albany Mac got off at Chestertown, drove home in his own car, and resumed being an Albany cop noted for collaring bootleggers operating without sanction.
Joey drove Roscoe to the Elite Club and waited for him in the car. The Elite was two rooms, modest bar, pendulum clock, a calendar with a naked woman bending over the engine of an automobile, and a wall menu noting the cheese and crackers and oxtail soup you might, on one of his good days, persuade Herman to serve you. When a customer passed on the cheese and crackers and insisted on the oxtail soup, Morty sold him the unopened can. Mac and Morty were at a table in the back, a bottle of gin between them. Mac never drank gin.
“How’s your teeth?” Roscoe asked. Mac’s jaw was still swollen, two days after the fact. He needed a shave, his shirt collar soiled, two or three days in the same clothes.
“No good,” Mac said. He barely moved his mouth when he spoke.
“You go to the dentist?”
“The city gets the bill. Jawbone’s broken.”
“He can’t chew,” Morty said, “but he can drink,” and he poured gin into Mac’s glass and topped it with a splash of Vichy water. “Gin, Roscoe?”
“Make it a double. You talk to O.B. today?”
“What do you think?” Mac said.
“I think no.”
“Bong. Give the man a prize.”
Roscoe popped his gin. “You been telling Morty your life story?”
“Morty knows it all.”
“No secrets at this table,” Roscoe said.
“None.”
“I was talking to Gladys.”
“O.B., the bastard, told her about me and Pina,” Mac said. “She says she’s all through with me.”
“That’s not what I hear,” Roscoe said.
“O.B. is also hot for Pina, am I right?” said Morty. “I don’t ask this for any reason. Some things you just hear.”
“No question you could hear that,” Mac said.
“But that’s all done with.”
“Isn’t it,” Mac said.
“If you say it’s all done, it’s all done.”
“If I say it.”
“Why did he hit you?” Roscoe asked.
“His stupid Notchery plan. I told him if he’d only been a little bit smarter he coulda been a first-class moron.”
“I’ll bet he liked that.”
“Bong. And there goes the jaw. The gin helps the pain,
“That Gladys,” Morty said. “What’s her name?”
“You should call Gladys,” Roscoe said to Mac. “She wants to talk.”
“Meehan, Gladys Meehan,” Mac said.
“Right. Her boss is whatsisname Fitzgibbon, right?”
“Elisha Fitzgibbon,” Mac said. “He’s dead.”
“He bought my gin,” Morty said, “and Gladys always told me when and where to deliver it. That was Jack Diamond’s gin.”
“Another thing,” Mac said. “He tells the Diamond story and it’s all him.”
“Outside of his cab driver,” Morty said, “I was the last one to see Diamond.”
“You weren’t the last,” Mac said.
“You mean Dove Street. I didn’t see any of that, none,” Morty said. “They shot him right between the head. I heard it was coming.”
“Some people knew,” Mac said. “The newspaper set the headline before it happened.”
“They say he was told to leave town,” Roscoe said.
“I heard that,” Morty said. “Some cockamamie beer deal with the Thorpe brothers. Mush told me. The Thorpes tried to shoot Bindy, bring their beer into Albany over his dead body. They brought whatsisname in to do the job.”
“Scarpelli,” Roscoe said.
“Scarpelli, a mistake,” Mac said.
“The Thorpes weren’t intelligent,” Morty said.
“They were born short,” Mac said.
“Mush comes in here,” Morty said. “He don’t have money anymore. He ran outa luck. He had it all fixed to get Louie Lepke into the French Foreign Legion and then Lepke surrendered to the FBI through Winchell and they fried him. Mush woulda made a bundle on that Foreign Legion bit.”
“Diamond died broke,” Mac said.
“He shouldn’ta mixed up with the Thorpes,” Morty said.
“I liked Jack one way,” Mac said.
“He could make you laugh,” Morty said. “He lived upstairs when you people were looking for him. Ate his meals here.”
“Cheese and crackers,” said Roscoe.