Roscoe by William Kennedy
“Me either,” said Roscoe, who was trying to sit in a way that controlled his pain. “Now, you take my father. He created a big family and then he left us to live in a hotel. When he lived home he never let me into his bedroom, and if he caught me there he’d lock me in the attic. So I’d stay in my room, reading atlases, memorizing poems and songs and countries and cities, and my brain got so crowded there was no room for the baseball scores. But I liked it so much they took me to the doctor, who talked to me for a week and then said nothing was wrong with my head and all I needed was to go up and see those ghosts again, the ones your father and I saw when we were kids up at Tristano—two old men who came out in the middle of the night and sat by the fireplace in the Trophy House and drank brandy and talked and looked out at the moon until the sun came up on the lake, and then they got up and went away.”
Gilby stared at Roscoe and said, “You saw ghosts?”
“Absolutely.”
“You talked to them?”
“We could hear them whispering. They’d say to one another, ‘Wisha-wisha-wisha-wisha-wisha.’ ”
“What’s that mean?”
“It’s ghost talk.”
“My father never told me about that.”
“He was saving it till you were old enough to appreciate ghosts.”
“I’m old enough.”
“Then I’ll tell you what. I’m of the opinion that your father could very well be up there at Tristano with those ghosts. It’s the sort of place fathers go when they die, especially a father like yours, who liked to talk and fish and was very fond of ghosts. We’ll both go up there one of these days and wait till the ghosts come out, and then we’ll sit and watch them and listen to what they say. And when the sun comes up and the ghosts go to bed, we might even do some fishing. Sound all right?”
“All right,” Gilby said. “All right.”
Ticky was nodding, and as Roscoe stood up, in obvious pain, Veronica handed the witch doctor his hat and coat. She felt blackly excited by his presence, a new thing that hinted there would come a day when her marriage to Elisha would be over. She couldn’t tell Roscoe about this feeling, because she didn’t understand it herself. It was new and unwelcome and she felt guilty for having it. Roscoe had made Gilby’s smile steadfast, but the boy wasn’t out of danger just because his mood had changed. It was possible to lose him, as she’d lost her sweet baby Rosemary.
She put her arm around Gilby and squeezed him as they walked toward the house. Roscoe walked very slowly behind her, his coat slung over his shoulder, his hat on the back of his head, always close in her life, always a puzzle, so gifted, so audacious, so shy Sometimes she decided Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory. She looked at him and saw a man of immense spirit, a man for loss, just as she was a woman for loss. She reached back and took his hand.
When they were in the main parlor of the house and Gilby had gone upstairs, she took both Roscoe’s hands in hers and, standing in the burnished light of this rare Tivoli afternoon, she raised her face to his and kissed him on the mouth in a way she had kissed no other man since the Elisha of a sensual yesterday. Roscoe, suddenly transformed into six feet two and a half inches of tapioca pudding, tried to firm himself; and he grew bold.
“Will you spend one day alone with me?” he asked.
“A day alone? Where?”
“Tristano. I’m asking for a day, not a night.”
“It takes half a day just to get there.”
“We can leave early, come home late. A long day. Or we can stay over if you want to, but that’s not what I’m asking.”
“We wouldn’t be alone. There are caretakers at Tristano.”
“We’ll blindfold them. Are you creating impediments to avoid an answer?”
“I have an answer.”
“What is it?”
“Perhaps.”
“You crush me,” Roscoe said, “under the burden of hope. I pray I can survive it.”
As he walked to his car, Roscoe saw a crow, blacker and larger than crows he had known, and female, which he deduced after she landed on an upper branch of an oak tree and was immediately set upon by another large, black crow, which mounted her; and they lay sideways on the branch and copulated. Roscoe stopped the car to watch and became convinced the female crow was smiling. Roscoe might have taken this to be a good omen, but it was too proximate to his kiss, the crows were black as sin, and they were crows enthralled by passion. They were the crows of fornication.
What did you expect, Roscoe, the bluebirds of happiness?
On the road, Roscoe met the women who died of love, some naked, some garbed as when love took them, a legion stretching to the horizon.
“Roscoe, Roscoe,” one warned as they passed, “love is a form of war.”
“I always knew that,” he said.
“Keep yourself chaste for your beloved,” said a woman dressed as a bride, “and if you want love, avoid lies and avarice.”
“I have no beloved, lies are my business, and without avarice we’d have chaos in City Hall,” Roscoe told her.
“Do not lust for every woman,” said a naked siren, still voluptuous in death, “for that turns a man into a shameless dog. Seek love where nubile women are found: the horse races, the theater, the law courts.”
“I’ve looked in all those places, but I’ve yet to find one for me. You have a nubile look about you. What are you doing tonight?”
“Nice try,” said the dead siren. “Just keep remembering that the pursuit of love makes an ugly man handsome, a fat man thin, that love transforms shame into glory, and falsity into truth. And if you fail with love, your only consolation is food and drink.”
Then she passed on, and Roscoe was enveloped by hunger, thirst, desire, and gloom.
Picture Roscoe: he is wearing his blue-and-white-vertical-striped pajamas; his stomach pain from the accident seems worse, though he is trying to ignore it, trying to sleep in the double bed of his suite in the Ten Eyck. He is a hotel-dweller and probably will remain so for the rest of his days. He has no yen to live the landed life of Patsy of the mountain, or Elisha of the manor, though Veronica could talk him into the manor if she played her cards right. He is by nature a guest, not a host, though he usually picks up the check. He has never craved the permanence so many others desire, but he does seem permanent here, at least in open-ended continuity; for in these rooms his father lived the last years of his life: in this very same bedroom, bath, and sitting room, though the rug is new.
His father’s influence is every where in Roscoe, even in those names of his: Rosky, Ros, Rah-Rah (what Gilby used to call him), diminutives of Roscius, from Quintus Roscius, the Roman comic actor and friend of Cicero, “so you wouldn’t be typed as an Irishman,” Felix told him. Roscoe is a lawyer because Felix read law in Peter Coogan’s office but never finished law school. He’s in politics because it was in his bones; and Felix, before he died in 1919, counseled Patsy, Elisha, and Roscoe regularly on how to invent themselves as the saviors of Albany Democracy. It’s true Roscoe has gone beyond his father by becoming a lawyer, but, no, he’ll never match his father’s political fame, indeed has never held a public office.
Roscoe, unable to sleep any more this morning, rises from his bed and stands amid his possessions, almost all he has in the world—an overflowing bookcase, overflowing desk, overflowing closet, overflowing bar, plus the evidence that he exists amid a population outside his mind: photos on the walls of himself with Al Smith, FDR, Jimmy Walker, Harry Truman, Bing Crosby, Connie Boswell, Jock Whitney, Earl Sande, Sophie Tucker, Patsy, Elisha, and Veronica; above the mantel the cockfighting painting Patsy gave him after Flora wouldn’t let it hang in his own house; over the sofa, a Falstaff poster heralding a London production of Henry IV, Part One, a gift from Elisha.
Roscoe’s pain, he discovers as he moves, is worsening. It comes but no longer goes, and he realizes that, once freed of today?
In the past when he’s said this, the pain has diminished, then vanished; but not now. He speculates that this pain may be rising from powerful forces of fraudulence far beneath the shallow hysteria that usually creates Roscoe’s phantom pain, then banishes it when it’s recognized. This could be a new element in his soul that is resistant to unconscious reason. An alternative explanation is that the pain is genuine, and so weird that it may be fatal.
Fatal.
The endgame of the immense life that lives in Roscoe’s brain? What will the unfinished world do without him? He asked himself this in 1918, when his first blunt trauma was imposed upon him—The one that should have killed you, Ros. Now you’ve got another chance to do yourself.
How Roscoe’s First Wound Came to Pass
Roscoe and Patsy join all-volunteer 102nd Engineer Train, 27th Division, of New York National Guard, at Albany in the summer of 1917, mustered into federal service, leave Albany for Manhattan, Spartanburg, Newport News for training through April 1918, board one of six transports in convoy with ten destroyers, cruiser, sub chaser, shot at by German subs, one sub blown out of the water, staging camp at Noyalles-sur-Mer, then Agenville and Candas, where Jerry’s bombs kill seventeen horses of the Engineer Train, Roscoe and Patsy together on the same wagon in the Train, but not hurt, four horses at each end of their new wagon, four men in the middle, each man controlling two horses, Roscoe in the saddle on left horse of lead team as they move, Patsy riding with rear team, moving from nightfall to daybreak on bombed-out roads, through towns in ruins, Saint-Argues, Saint-Omer, German planes always overhead as they near front with ammo and rations, to Cassel, heading for Belgium, Engineers gassed by a long wave, don’t lose that gas mask, no civilians in ruined towns, rain is constant, feet and clothes never dry, water flowing into tents, mud the mattress whose ooze you settle into, Jerry overhead, then with Patsy in a French church for high mass said by Father Skelley from Cohoes, chaplain for the 27th, Train bringing tools and trench irons to infantry to shore up trench walls, plus equipment to Engineers repairing roads so the heavy artillery can pass, battlefield laid out in lines of trenches, front-line trenches, then the approach trenches, and reserve trenches in rear, infantry in each trench, first line pushes forward to the objective, second follows to mop up wounded or straggling Germans and bring back our own wounded, the boys are driving Jerry backward and he’s moving fast, so Train returns to reload and heads up to the line again, hip boots issued, Train shelled by pilot who personally tosses bombs from his cockpit, Roscoe and Patsy meet John McIntyre from Albany, halfback with Patsy on the Arbor Hill Spartans, who’s retrieving dead and wounded, dangerous duty, for the corpses may be booby-trapped, back again to load up ammo, trench irons, rations, barbed wire, sand bags, gravel for trench work, all trenches infested but don’t try to get rid of cooties with creosote, then a break and there’s a big crowd at mass and we move up again, fearing gas more than anything, animal loss heavy, road so badly bombed it’s not a road, sudden shell burst and Patsy’s leg is hit with shrapnel, he’s carried to the rear, barrage from 1 to 4 a.m and it’s as bright as under the electric lights at State and Pearl Streets, everybody waiting for an attack by the Huns, too quiet, we ride all night in cold rain, no food and almost no sleep, our troops massing on front line, 106th Regiment of our 27th doing the main push, so we’re in for overtime, Train is up the line as far as possible and it’s a slaughterhouse, except in a slaughterhouse they kill the cows and here some boys are only half killed, fields covered with so many English, German, Yank dead you walk on them, drive your wagon over their faces, we’re 50 percent dead but others are worse off, and a shell blasts all four of our horses and wagon, Dumas knocked senseless, Weeper Walters blown off his horse and the wagon runs over his arm and hand, horse returns with dead Dumas lying across his back, Sammy Jones’s horse cut in two by a shell, another horse dosed badly with gas, everybody got a whiff, Sammy puked in his gas mask and took it off, God knows what’ll become of him, everybody’s half blind and you don’t move because that spreads the gas in your lungs, only two on the wagon now, Roscoe and Mike Ahearn from Worcester, roads are mined and we’re moving ammo, taking it as far forward as wagons can go, no way to turn back in this rain, this mud, so Roscoe and Mike dig a hole three feet deep beside roofless barn walls, sink four posts with corrugated iron as a roof, a large can for a stove, keep those shoes on or the rats will steal them, enemy planes upstairs so the 106th isn’t budging yet, but the word is that a great drive by Yanks, French, English, and Aussies is about to begin, and here comes the British artillery with its rolling barrage to soften up Jerry, our shells carrying shrapnel, smoke, mustard gas, the first time we’ve used the gas, and then the 106th moves out, heading toward the outworks of the Hindenburg Line, which the Germans think is unbreakable, and maybe it is, one Yank unit moves beyond the point it was supposed to hold and those Yanks are bottled up by a Hun machine-gun nest and waiting, Aussie regiment coming up to help them, and Roscoe thinks of his pals blown apart, shot, gassed, dead of fright or exhausted hearts, and he lies down in the mud and closes his eyes so he can stay awake and, by a mundane miracle, sleeps, or seems to, until a shell explodes the barn wall and Mike Ahearn wakes screaming for his mother, he and Roscoe overrun by a colony of black rats from the blasted barn floor, half a dozen rats crawling on Roscoe, one sucking blood from his neck, and he screams, rolls over, and shakes himself and the rats fall away but not the one on his neck, a goddamn snapping-turtle rat, and Roscoe reels, never having known terror like this, not even from the mustard gas, pure rat terror, and he tries to smack the rat with his rifle but still it clutches his shoulder and his neck, a goddamn warrior rat, don’t shoot it, Roscoe, or you’ll shoot yourself, and Roscoe stands and whirls in a circular frenzy, drops his rifle, squeezes the rat to death, but not before he’s bitten on both hands, and then he runs, done with this war, runs toward the rear, bleeding at the neck, poisoned with rat plague and surely dying, he’ll run to Albany to get well, fuck all rats, double-fuck this army and this war, and he runs, oh how he runs, but without his rat and without his rifle, Roscoe lost in the night, and he turns back toward the barn-that-was—is this the way back?—but all is blackness until a star shell lights up the field and he sees he’s in no man’s land, running toward the German barbed wire, and he’ll get there if he keeps going, and he leaps into a shell hole, drawing fire from a machine gun, probably that goddamn nest everybody wants, and in another star shell’s light he heaves a grenade toward the gun and it blasts back at him, no cigar, Ros, but an Aussie one-pounder finds the nest and that’s that for those Hun sonsabitches, and Roscoe is up again and running low toward his own line, yes, go back and get that rifle, he’s got the direction right this time and the boys see him coming, but what they really see is crazy Jerry coming after them single-handed—Hey, hey! it’s not Jerry, for God’s sake, don’t shoot, it’s only The Roscoe!—but Roscoe in the dark is Jerry on the attack and they shoot Roscoe and he falls at his own line, speaks, and is recognized, and they pull him bleeding into the trench and ask him, Roscoe, what the hell you doin’ out there, tryin’ to get ’em all by yourself? What guts this guy’s got, drawin’ their fire like that, sorry we shot you, buddy, Roscoe bleeding under his tunic and he feels a nonspecific pain in chest and stomach—ratness and a bullet transformed into the malaise of the heroic deserter.
It was 8:04 a.m. and Joey Manucci would be making Roscoe’s coffee at headquarters. But Roscoe was not up for coffee, or even for walking across the street this morning, and so he told Joey by phone to get the car and pick him up at the hotel. Roscoe brewed a Bromo-Seltzer for his stomach, ate the two Hershey almond bars he’d bought last night, all the breakfast he c
The heat was already unbearable, a day to sleep in some lakeside shade or loll about in a tub of ice. Roscoe, tie open, cord sport coat on his arm, asked doorman Wally Condon for his report on the state of Albany this morning (“Going to hell, Roscoe, be there by noon”), then he went out and stood at State and Chapel Streets to wait for Joey and to watch the city opening its doors: jewelers, cafeteria workers, newsboys, cigar dealers lowering awnings, sweeping sidewalks, washing windows, stacking papers, all dressing their corner of the universe for another day of significant puttering. Lights were on in Malley’s, across the street, begun by the Malley brothers as a saloon, then a speakeasy, now grown into a major restaurant. Here came Jake Berman, up from the South End on his way to his Sheridan Avenue walkup, where, with staunch backbone, he defends, for pennies, every socialist caught in the hostile legal system, admirable penury. And Morgan Hillis going into the State Bank, a man born with an outdoor privy, now a vice-president handling Democratic accounts in the modest millions. And Glenda Barry, Mush Trainor’s girlfriend, manicurist at the Ten Eyck barbershop, who, when she cuts your cuticles, wears a white, freshly starched, skintight, wraparound smock, removable for special occasions. And, ah me, coming down State Street with that aggressive stride of his, Marcus Gorman, Pamela’s barrister, clear the way for Mighty Marcus, who won Jack (Legs) Diamond two acquittals and never got a nickel for it. Stiffed by the stiff. But you coasted miles on those acquittals, old man.
“Morning, counselor,” Roscoe said to Marcus.
“Roscoe. I understand I’ll see you later this morning.”
“You will indeed.”
“Wellllllll, bonne chance, my boy.”
Boy? Two years younger than your own creaking bones, you arrogant Republican bastard. And we almost made you a congressman; but proximity to Jack Diamond killed that. And so Gorman the Grand rose another way: becoming Albany’s Demosthenes, Albany’s own Great Mouthpiece for a continuing line of criminals after Diamond: Dutch Schultz, Vincent Coll, Pittsburgh Phil Straus, Pamela Yusupov.