Roscoe by William Kennedy
Roscoe stopped at the Morris Diner in North Albany to get just-baked French crullers and coffee for Veronica. She loved those crullers (so did Roscoe), and with the coffee and sugar they’d give her a rush so she wouldn’t nauseate in front of dead Elisha. He then drove up the hill to Van Rensselaer Boulevard, where the great estate of Tivoli—Veronica suddenly its sovereign—had stood since Lyman built it, a landscape of dream for Albanians of the last century. The estate’s mansion was sited on the plateau that ran along the crest of the river valley, giving a vista of the serene and turbulent Hudson, the green heights of Rensselaer, and the Berkshire Hills beyond. But vista was secondary to the builder, who wanted solitude, isolation above the crowd, a desire that belonged to yesterday. Now Roscoe moved along the boulevard past a row of new and boxy little houses owned by Italian grocers and German plumbers, past Wolfert’s Roost Country Club, founded by newsmen and politicians, then drove through the open wrought-iron gates and up the long, winding driveway to Tivoli, his second home.
“Why are you here at this hour?” Veronica asked him over coffee in her breakfast room. “The last time you brought breakfast you and Elisha were going fishing.”
The sight of her in a Chinese dressing gown, her golden hair loose and only slightly mussed from sleep, quickened Roscoe’s heart, but he told it to behave itself.
“I need your help,” he said. “Eat a cruller.”
“You need my help?” She bit into a cruller.
“Elisha.”
“He didn’t come home last night,” she said. “He stayed at the office.”
“I know that.”
“Were you with him?”
“I was.”
“Is he in trouble?”
“No.”
“Is it the head injury? He was fine when he called.”
“He’s in the office. In his chair. Now, don’t hold me to this, Vee, but I think he killed himself.”
She squeezed her bitten cruller between fingers and palm, rolling it into a wad of dough as she looked at Roscoe.
“No,” she said, and shook her head, “he wouldn’t do that.”
“Maybe he didn’t do it. I could be wrong.”
“You’re certain he’s dead.”
“I’m certain.” And he put Elisha’s wallet on the table.
“That bastard. That bastard!”
“Atta girl. You tell him.”
She dropped the wadded cruller and it rolled across the table to Roscoe. She picked up the wallet and put it against her face.
“He wasn’t ready to die,” she said, and the tears were coming now. Roscoe couldn’t look at them.
“Go get dressed, Vee. I’ll take you down to the mill.”
When she was dressed and they were in the car she asked Roscoe, “Why do you say suicide?”
“He burned papers and files he didn’t want anybody to see. It was a methodical ending.”
“How did he do it?”
“I don’t know. Not with a gun.”
“Why didn’t he come home and do it?”
“Maybe he didn’t want to make a mess for you. Maybe he didn’t want anybody saving him. Or maybe the idea of death arrived in such a perfect state that he had to act instantly, a fatal muse descending, and there was only submission, no alternative.”
“Something’s very wrong with me. I never saw it coming.”
“None of us did,” Roscoe said.
“It’s me he left. He was through with me.”
“Nonsense. Who’d ever leave you?”
“He ran away from something, or somebody. Who else is there to run away from?”
“There was no cowardice in him,” Roscoe said. “He’d face anything.”
“You’re so loyal. To both of us.”
“I’m not loyal,” Roscoe said. “I’m a traitor.”
“Of course you are. God should give the world more traitors like you.”
When he drove into the office parking lot at the mill, Roscoe saw men already at work in the traffic manager’s office, so, rather than subject Veronica to their scrutiny, he parked at the side entrance. They went briskly in past the security cubicle, where Roscoe saw Frank Maynard and two of his guards whispering—The word is out—and up the back stairs to Elisha’s office. Joe Spivak sat by the door, guarding the integrity of the death room. Nothing had been taken away or added, but as Roscoe entered, the room became an antechamber where he sensed he had to begin. Begin what? Not courting the widow. He might get to that. Might. This was something else, and he knew it wouldn’t easily be defined. He also knew he now could not quit the Party; and he knew Elisha had known that would happen.
Veronica walked to the dead Elisha and looked down at him, shaking her head no, no, no. “Oh Lord, Roscoe, it’s true.” And she crumpled in front of Elisha.
Roscoe gestured to Joe Spivak to get out, then lifted Veronica into the large leather chair where Gladys had also sat to stare at her dead love. “Slow, now, Vee. Take it slow.”
“He doesn’t even look a little bit sick,” Veronica said, her eyes wet again.
“Maybe he wasn’t sick.”
“He had to be.”
She stood up and walked to Elisha, hiked her skirt and straddled his lap, ran her hands through his hair.
“Were you sick, Elisha? How could you be that sick without my knowing it? You’re already a chunk of rubber.” She gave him a weeping kiss. “What went so wrong you had to quit everything in such a hurry? You couldn’t wait to see your son come home from winning the war? Whatever it was we could’ve fixed it.” She lifted his left hand and studied it, then took his diamond ring and gold watch from the dead finger and wrist. Lacking pockets, she put them inside her brassiere. She stared at Elisha, then kissed him and sat back. “Look at you. Look what you’ve done to yourself. Bastard.” She slapped his face.
“Veronica,” Roscoe said. “Get a grip.”
He helped her stand and she tried to stop weeping.
“I thought I knew him. He’s a dead stranger.”
“Staying alive isn’t anybody’s obligation,” Roscoe said. “I’m betting he had a reason.”
Veronica let Roscoe put his arms around her while she wept—spasmic, throaty crying. Roscoe held grief in his arms and knew he could die of happiness, a traitor, embracing his best friend’s wife. Yes, it’s true, Elisha, old pal. You’re dead and we’re not. Then Veronica stabbed him in the heart with her breast, a wound that meant nothing to her. Sweet Roscoe, comfort me, let me fail in your arms, hold me close, feel how soft I am. But this is all you get, and don’t think this counts. You’re a wonderful fellow, Roscoe. Don’t crowd me.
“It’s okay, Vee,” he said to her. “Let it out.”
“Oh, Roscoe, Roscoe,” she said. “What is going on here?”
“A temporary mystery. We’ll figure it out.”
“I loved him so.”
“Sure you did.”
She raised her head off his shoulder, trying to stop crying, and he saw she was abashed by their embrace. What a surprise. She smiled and stepped back from him, walked to the desk, and picked up the photo of Elisha, Roscoe, and herself in the winner’s circle with Pleasure Power the day he won the Travers at Saratoga.
“I want to take this home,” she said.
“I’ll get an envelope.”
She picked up the photo of Alex in his army uniform. “We have to tell Alex,” she said.
“We’ll call the army, have them cable him. I’ll do that.”
Roscoe would do it all. And Alex would come home safely from the war to find that his father, not he, was the post-armistice casualty. Roscoe slid the Saratoga picture into a large envelope and sealed its clasp. He walked Veronica down the stairs and toward the line of men arriving for work in the machine shop. They had all heard about Elisha, and Roscoe answered their condolences with nods and salutes as he and Veronica passed them.
Sorry, Missus Fitz.
The sunlight was making intensely black shadows of the men as
Sorry, sorry, Missus Fitz. Sorry, sorry. Really sorry.
“Good morning, men, and thank you,” Veronica said in a sharp, recovering voice, raising her head to meet their eyes. “Good morning, yes, good morning, men, and thank you. Thank you so much. Such a beautiful day to die.”
Roscoe moved silently into the theater with the crowd, the seats filling quickly. When the curtain rose, ten men and ten women were in two lines on stage, all in white tie and tails, tap-dancing and singing, with brio, “Somebody Else Is Taking My Place.” As the performers danced, the heads of one man and one woman flew off and sailed across the stage to land atop the headless torsos of another man, another woman, whose heads were flying to the dancing torsos of yet another man, another woman, and so it went until all twenty singing heads were flying to and fro across the stage, perfectly synchronized in the labyrinthine choreography of their arcs.
Roscoe, sitting in the balcony, saw Elisha pushed onto the stage from the wings, obviously confused to find himself in the midst of this performance. But as the singing heads crisscrossed in air, Elisha seemed to realize this was a command performance for him, and he moved his own head from side to side in rhythm with the music and the dancing torsos.
“Yes, I do understand the question that’s being asked,” Elisha said aloud. “It’s the music of the spheres.”
The audience applauded his remark and Roscoe ran down from the balcony to ask Elisha: What question is being asked? Why the spheres? But the theater was now dark, and the audience, dancers, and Elisha were gone.
When you are three, as in that 1921 photo on the wall of Roscoe’s hotel room, and one of the three is subtracted, the sum is less than you’d expect; for the mathematics of the spirit are complex. Now, at Elisha’s wake, they were two, Roscoe and Patsy, both feeling like leftovers after the banquet. Patsy, in politics since he was old enough to deface Republican ballots, was at his first wake since his brother Matt died (Patsy did not like the dead), looking bumptious, the only way he knew how to look, even in his new blue suit. Roscoe had combed and gracefully parted his beard, draped his corpulence stylishly in a white Palm Beach suit, and stood somberly dapper by the bier with white shoes, black pocket handkerchief, black tie.
The wake sprawled over the vast, pampered lawn of Tivoli, with its upper and lower mansions, its sculpted gardens, surrounding woods. Servants’ quarters stood behind the upper mansion, and beyond that the barns, stables, and racetrack that Lyman had built in the 1870s for his trotters, and which Ariel, and later Elisha, modified for their Thoroughbreds. It was a day full of sun and small breezes, and under a broad white canopy, Roscoe, Patsy, and O.B., a late arrival, stood watch alongside Elisha, the enigma in the open coffin, who looked great dead, in his gray linen suit and white tie, his head wound cosmetically banished.
“What do you know that I don’t?” Patsy asked when Roscoe arrived at his side.
“Alex is on the way home. He was already a day out on the troopship when he got the news. Bart or Joey will pick him up when he docks.”
“I’m talking about Eli’s autopsy.”
“Mac’s bringing that over.”
“He’s on the way,” O.B. said, looking authoritative in his police chief’s uniform, buttons polished and gleaming in the sunlight. “We did two autopsies, one real, one fake.”
“But we don’t know why he did it,” said Patsy.
“We will,” Roscoe said. “He can’t just kill himself like this and get away with it.”
“He took a hell of a lot with him,” Patsy said. “We’ll need six guys to take his place.”
“Six is nowhere near enough,” Roscoe said.
Elisha’s coffin lay on a pedestal beneath the canopy, halfway between the gatehouse and Veronica’s swimming pool. Shiny green smilax leaves covered the bottom half of the coffin, which was ringed with orchids from the Fitzgibbon hothouses. On the lawn’s very long slope perhaps a thousand floral arrangements, far more than anyone could ever recall seeing in one place, lay as a crescent-shaped blanket of regret that Elisha had gone away.
He had five official mourners: Veronica, and their twelve-year-old adopted son, Gilby, who looked sticklike and bored in black linen suit and black tie, his hair brushed flat, his acne getting serious; Elisha’s two sisters, Emily and Antonia, and his brother, Gordon, the banker, who were already crowding Veronica for control of the mill. Roscoe, Patsy, and O.B. stood as unofficial mourners at the head of the coffin, close to Veronica but away from contact with the endless line of wakegoers.
And here they came, into their third hour: wealthy lawyers, doctors, bankers, and businessmen, the financial peerage with whom Elisha had lunched almost daily at the Fort Orange Club; also the blue-book women, lady golfers, legislative wives, garden-club matrons whom he courted socially and won politically; several Catholic priests and rabbis, and all the Episcopal clerics in town; countless steelworkers and secretaries from the Fitzgibbon mill; and all three rings and sideshow of the Democratic circus: pomaded ward leaders, aldermen and committeemen, underpaid undersheriffs, jailers, lawyers and clerks, bloated contractors, philanthropic slumlords, nervous bookmakers unaccustomed to sunlight.
Happy McGraw, no known occupation, ever, edged out of line to shake hands with the rumpled boss who ran the town: Hello, Patsy, how’s yourself, what a loss, Pat, you and Eli were friends a long time, he was such a good fellow, keep well, Pat, you’re looking grand, can you spare five? And Patsy: Not here, Hap, button your pants before they fall off and see me Sunday after mass, not saying which mass or which church, he’ll find me. Ah, God love ya, Pat, Hap said, fading away with a smile.
Ex-Governor Herbert Lehman, who fought Elisha for the gubernatorial nomination in ’32, held Veronica’s hand, and Walter Foley, ex-editor of the Times-Union, the first paper to support Patsy’s run for assessor in 1919, kissed her on the cheek, as did Marcus Gorman. Patsy’s brother was in line, Benjamin (Bindy) McCall, who’d gained a hundred and fifty pounds in the six years since the Thorpe brothers hired Lorenzo Scarpelli to kill him; and, behind Bindy, Joe Colfels, who, because he went to school with Elisha, was now a Supreme Court judge; and Moishe (Mush) Trainor, who made seven million running beer with Patsy in Prohibition and blew it gambling; and Deputy Mayor Karl Weingarten, who took over as mayor when Alex joined the army. They’d all come for a last look at the dead leader who had helped create their politics, their livelihood, their city, came also to prove publicly their personal loyalty to the leaders who weren’t dead, Roscoe and Patsy.
The harmony of the Episcopal boys’ choir signaled the advent of the ceremonial moment, and the end of personal contact with the mourners, though two hundred were still in line. Seventy incumbent state senators and assemblymen walked toward the coffin, paying collegial homage to the erstwhile Lieutenant Governor, who had presided over the New York State Senate during the 1933–34 sessions.
Roscoe moved to Veronica’s side before the legislators reached the canopy. He could not resist the urge to touch her, for she was solemnly but irresistibly seductive in her elegant black chiffon mourning gown and strand of pearls, a gift from Elisha. Her eyes, without tears, were brilliant with rapt obligation to public grief.
“How are you holding up?” He touched her shoulder.
“I’m a zombie,” she said.
Most beautiful zombie Roscoe ever saw. “How are you doing, Gilby?” Gilby was staring at Elisha in his coffin.
“He didn’t say goodbye, Roscoe.”
“That’s true. He went very suddenly But we’re saying goodbye now.”
“Everybody should say goodbye to him.”
“You’re right. And everybody is here.”
“Not everybody,” Gilby said, and he looked at his mother.
“Who’s missing?” Roscoe asked. But Gilby was running across the lawn toward the stables.
“You gave him permission to get the dogs,” Veronica said. “He wan
Roscoe saw Gilby open the stable door as the dean of the Episcopal Cathedral began reading the funeral service, the lesson from St. John: “Jesus saith, let not your heart be troubled,” which is easy to say. And then followed a hymn of comfort, “The Strife Is O’er; the Battle Done,” a wrong message, for the battle hadn’t even begun. How can you do battle if you don’t know the point of the war, or who the enemy is?
Roscoe broke away from the hymn singing when he saw Mac crossing the lawn, and went to meet him. They went to the far end of the east portico, where no one could eavesdrop. Mac, full name Jeremiah McEvoy, wearing a blue-and-white seersucker suit, blue tie, and coconut straw hat with a blue-and-white band, ficey little well-dressed cop, handed Roscoe two autopsy reports, one for publication on Elisha, dead of coronary occlusion; and one on Abner Sprule, an alias the Party used instead of John Doe when it suited them. Chloral hydrate killed Sprule, enough to put away two people.
“Is there a body that goes with the Sprule autopsy?” Roscoe asked.
“We got a wino out of the river we can use.”
Elisha had obviously gambled that Roscoe, Patsy, and O.B. would find a way to cover up his death. They’d done it for others. Yet it was sloppy; and Roscoe concluded Elisha ran out of time for punctiliousness, sudden death his only pressing issue.
“A whole lot of chloral hydrate,” Roscoe said.
“You’re gonna do it, do it so it gets done,” Mac said.
“You know that, all right.” And Roscoe remembered when Mac, tipped by an informer, went to Union Station to meet a gunman coming to town on a train to either collect a gambling debt from Roscoe or shoot him in the knee. Mac disarmed the visitor, put him in the back of his detective car and shoved a pistol under his rump, explaining that Albany was a city of law and order, shot him through both buttocks, and drove him to see Dr. Johnny (The Butcher) Merola, the designated abortionist for and inspector general of Albany’s prostitutes, to have his wounds treated. Johnny doped up the visitor, and Mac and his partner put him in a Pullman compartment on the train back to Buffalo so he could suffer in private when he woke up. Roscoe, knees still intact, thanks you, Mac.