Roscoe (19 page)

“He did that for other people,” Roscoe said.

“Which other people?”

“You. And the boys.”

“How can you say that?”

“I’m eliminating possibilities.”

“Killing himself for me. You’re crazy, Roscoe.”

“He also may have done it because he owed me.”

“What did he owe you?”

“You. He took you away from me. Maybe he’s trying to give you back. I’m not sure it’s working, but so far, so good. You’re saving my life, and we’re together
in this beautiful place.”

“I don’t think it’s wise to talk about this. Elisha would want us to be wise.”

“You think that’s all he’d want us to be?”

As he watched her across the table he thought: This is the most sublime woman ever put on this earth; perhaps I exaggerate. But all Roscoe wanted from the world right now was to look at her,
talk to her, love her, have lunch with her, right here, forever. Was that asking so much? Also, once in a while, he’d like to kiss her, fuck her, forever, here, anyplace, on the table, once
in a while. Was that asking so much?

The Soldier Boys Campaign

Roscoe in his wheelchair looked like a wounded old soldier, which he was, as he stared out from under the umbrella he held to fend off the foglike drizzle. Beside him stood
Veronica, with Gilby holding an umbrella over her. Gilby had decided that even if Alex was only his brother-cousin he was more brother than cousin.

“He looks wonderful,” Veronica said to Roscoe. “I see so much Elisha in him. His gauntness makes him more of a man. Don’t you think, Roscoe?”

“He’s very like his father was at that age.”

“We’ll leave after his speech,” she said. “Gilby has to be at the dentist.”

“I’ll see you for dinner,” Roscoe said. “It’s years since I’ve gotten emotional about dinner.”

The block had been closed to traffic, and on the lawn in front of School Twenty, with the army, navy, and Marine color guard behind him, the soldier-boy Mayor was on the platform dedicating the
communion of names of sailors, soldiers, and Marines who spent their young years fighting Japs, Nazis, and Italian Fascists, as a crowd of four hundred in the middle of the street listened. The
names on the Roll were a stark listing of alphabetical love, a scroll of blessedness. Several names were separated out, writ larger. The Mayor pointed to one.

“Charley Becker, a Marine private from Walter Street—I used to play tennis with him,” the Mayor said, “and I could never return his serve. He was cut down in the first
wave at Saipan. Bobby (Shadow) Valentino, an army corporal from Mohawk Street who could outrun my dog, was killed in the battle for Salerno. Captain Ray Ergott from Bonheim Street, a bomber pilot
who played real good banjo, was shot down by Nazi anti-aircraft fire over Berlin. I saw other men, some of my great pals, killed on the battlefields of France. I won’t forget them. Neither
will you, my friends, and neither will this city. Their names here will be revered as long as we . . .”

He stopped speaking. He took off his overseas cap and looked up at the sky and let the rain hit his face.

“I hate talking about this,” he said. “I hate it that they’re dead. We live on and we leave them behind. How
can
we remember them? They fade. I already forget the
name of the soldier who was shot a few yards away from me. I’m not sure I ever knew his name. Maybe it was Dave. He fell and the rest of us kept running until a shell hit Dave directly and
the blast knocked me over. I was stunned, not hurt, but Dave’s blood was on my field jacket, my hands, my rifle. And that blood was all that was left of him. We couldn’t even find his
dogtags. He died and I didn’t and I don’t know why I didn’t, but I know I consecrate his blood here today, and the blood of Charley Becker and Shadow Valentino and Ray Ergott. And
I’m going to try to keep that blood of their short lives flowing in my memory until I’m not here anymore. That’s not very much to do for those fellows, and it sure won’t
help them. But that’s all I can do. That’s all anybody can do. Now I’ll stop talking. I’m sick of words.”

Nobody moved, nobody applauded. It’d be like applauding a funeral mass. Alex stood the laurel wreath on its end on the Honor Roll’s pedestal. Then he put his cap on and saluted as
the bugler played taps and the newspaper photographers took pictures. People waited in the rain to welcome Alex home, shake his hand, women he knew kissing his cheek, tears in their eyes, what a
wonderful speech, don’t you look grand, we were worried about you. Veronica was right. In his voice, his inflection, Roscoe heard the echo of Elisha’s clear intelligence, but laced with
the ease of a workingman’s speech pattern. Alex had been exposed to plainspoken language all his life by his father and Patsy and Roscoe, who took him to Party meetings, and ball games, and
cockfights, and saloons, but the boy’s elite education had fortified his resistance to anything of a common order, and he spoke publicly with the unbendable rhetoric of a patrician. Today he
spoke as a peer of those working-class dead men he’d known, no longer just Patsy’s boyish Mayor but now his own man, a personage: a rich man’s son with a common man’s heart.
Goddamn it, Alex, that is an unbeatable combination. You can be Mayor forever.

The crowd broke up and Roscoe spotted Townsend Blair, bent over and staring at the ground, looking for money, people said, but that wasn’t it. He carried a burden. He’d been the
Democratic candidate for mayor in 1919, our breakout year. He raised his head and looked at Alex, then turned to face Roscoe. Their eyes met and Roscoe nodded, but Blair’s face was a frown,
and then he walked off with his bent back, the old anger still there.

Pop O’Rourke, diabetic, florid, and spiffy as always, whispered to Roscoe, “How do you like this turnout, Roscoe? And on a dreadfully stormy day like this. I’m exceptionally
happy how we got our people out.”

“The Mayor must be happy, too, Pop,” Roscoe said, smiling at the loyalty of it all. “I see Townsend came out for the ceremony.”

“A rarity, indeed,” said Pop. “I never see him. Poor fellow, he still talks about it, collars people at the ballpark and says, ‘You know what happened to me in 1919? You
know what they did to me?”’

“He still does that?”

“He does.”

Win Clark stood in the rain behind Pop, waiting to greet Roscoe, thank him again for his job as sidewalk inspector: tell us which flagstones need fixing, Win, and stay off the sauce, the ruin of
Win, who drank the inheritance from his wife’s death. Only the sidewalk job put him back on his feet. But why shouldn’t we help a loyal committeeman, a stalwart for twenty years till he
tipped over sucking the bottle. Win would want to tell Roscoe his bladder joke.

“Hiya, Roscoe,” he said. “What’s this with the wheelchair?”

“The old bladder’s acting up, Win.”

“I had a bladder stone once. You know how I got rid of it?”

“Tell me.”

“Like everything else, I pissed it away.”

“Stay dry, Win.”

Roscoe waved to Father Fearey, the assistant pastor at Sacred Heart and everybody’s favorite priest after Bing Crosby. Wally Kilmartin, the current Ninth Ward alderman, gave Roscoe the high
sign, ready for a chat, but Dinny Rhatigan beat him to the wheelchair. Dinny was pushing eighty-five, and had been in on the election of Patsy in 1919. Patsy made him leader of the Ninth Ward when
we took City Hall.

“You ailin’, Roscoe?” Dinny asked.

“I’m resting up for the football season,” Roscoe said.

“I hear Patsy got chickenswoggled.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“He called me.”

“Well, if he says so.”

“My God, is he pissed at Bindy.”

“So I understand.”

“I wouldn’t want to be Bindy.”

“Bindy won’t want to be Bindy if Patsy catches up with him.”

“The Mayor survived the war well.”

“He did.”

“It reminds me of 1919, Roscoe, after the war, and so many were against us.”

“It does exactly, Dinny. It does exactly.”

“But we’ll do fine this year.”

“I think we will, Din.”

“How long are they keeping you in that chair?”

“Till I get out of it.”

“I remember Felix in a chair like that. At the Phoenix Club.”

“I remember it too,” Roscoe said.

“It was 1919,” Dinny said. “That same year.”

“That very same year,” said Roscoe. “A musical year.”

“Musical?” Dinny said.

“I always remember it that way,” Roscoe said.

Opus One: Overture, 1919

The Phoenix Club, a one-story brick building with a step-gabled roof, Dutch-style, was a leftover from the days when the North End was part of the demesne of the patroons of the
Van Rensselaer family, a tract forty-eight miles long and twenty-four miles wide, seven hundred thousand acres on both sides of the river, with sixty to eighty thousand tenant farmers living on it
under feudal conditions. The building had been an office of the patroon’s manor, but in the late nineteenth century it became the Phoenix, the
sanctum sanctorum
of North Albany
Democracy. Dinny Rhatigan, who owned the ice house on Erie Street, and thirty or so other men—Black Jack McCall the saloonkeeper-sheriff; Judge Brady, a hero when he ruled against that
damned cleric who tried to stop Sunday baseball; Jack Maloney, the paving contractor, whose son Bunter held the city speed record for laying red bricks, 5,545 in forty-five minutes; Iron Joe
Farrell, who ran The Wheelbarrow, the little Main Street saloon with the cockpit out back where Patsy sometimes fought his chickens; Emmett Daugherty, the old Fenian and labor radical; Pat
McDonald, leader of the Eighth Ward, who rode his bicycle with the North Albany Wheelmen—these good fellows, and more, were keepers of the covenant in the old club: two rooms, two card
tables, a pool table, six spittoons, and two heavily curtained windows nobody could see into or out of. In the great blizzard of ’88, six of them were playing cards when it started to snow.
They raised the curtains to watch it fall, saw it get so deep that they decided not to go out. It snowed four days, and those snowbound fellas would’ve starved to death if their wives
hadn’t come down with baskets of food.

It was a hot July day when Roscoe brought Felix to the Phoenix. Felix was sixty-seven and in the wheelchair with troubled lungs, wrapped in his blanket and trying to forestall pneumonia, the
ailment that he feared would kill him and which, in three months, would. He had been coming to the club after the eleven o’clock mass every Sunday during all the twenty years the Republicans
ran the town. It was a political haven, for, with Phoenix dominance, the ward had gone two-to-one Democrat, even in Republican landslides. For this reason also, Patsy had come along today with
Roscoe and Felix to announce his candidacy for city assessor.

Felix instantly responded to Patsy’s plan: “Yessir, that assessor’s a good choice, it’s their Achilles’ heel. Same as it was ours thirty years ago.”

Assessment was a perpetual issue: high tax assessments on the property of political enemies, low assessments for loyalists and friendly corporations. Everybody did it if they were in, nobody
liked it if they were out.

“What makes you think you can win?” Dinny asked Patsy.

“I’m up against Straney,” Patsy said, “and he wasn’t in the war. I’ll campaign in uniform, and I got a team ready to work with me, knockin’ on front
doors till we drop. Elisha Fitzgibbon’s financing me, and Roscoe’ll manage me. They’re both smarter than me, so we can’t lose on brains.”

“Don’t matter how many brains you got,” Dinny said. “The Barnes organization can steal more votes than you can count.”

“I know that,” Patsy said. “Why the hell do you think I’m here?”

And in the laughter and then the silence that followed that brash remark, Roscoe saw that Patsy had transformed himself in the eyes of these veterans: had become not the fresh, ambitious pup he
might seem at first, but a young fellow with a savvy that came from early exposure to politics at Black Jack’s knee, and then as bartender at Jack’s saloon, where politics was as
important as the ale. Patsy talked the lingo and was ready for anything, even speaking the unspoken. He had a sharp, squinty eye, and an aggressive chin, ready for an argument. People knew him as
fullback for the Arbor Hill Spartans, the team nobody could beat. He tilted his chair back until it leaned against the wall, his legs dangling in his high shoes.

“The Ninth Ward always goes two to one,” Patsy said. “Am I right?”

“Usually,” said Dinny.

“Can it go three to one? Four to one?”

Heads shook. Four to one? The fellow is crazy.

“It’s been done,” Patsy said. “Right, Felix?”

“That was when we had total control. Now it’s not so easy.”

“Can that control be organized? Can we buy it?”

“We can price it out,” Dinny said, “if we know the money is there.”

“It’s there,” said Patsy. “This is the year to move. We can win. McCabe is running Townsend Blair for mayor, and he’s definitely got a shot.” Packy McCabe was
the longtime ineffectual boss of Albany Democrats.

“Who said they’re running Blair?” Felix asked.

“McCabe. I told him we had a candidate for mayor, and he laughed and said it was taken, that Blair had it. ‘Captain Blair of the 51st Pioneers,’ he says. ‘All right,
Packy,’ I say to him, ‘then how about Roscoe Conway for district attorney?’ He says that’s taken too.”

“You never told me this,” Roscoe said.

“You don’t wanna run, but you could win. You got that medal. So I say to Packy, ‘Are you tellin’ me there’s no room on the ticket for anybody from the Eighth,
Ninth, and Twelfth Wards? Are you sayin’ we’re outsiders, the lot of us, the gang of us that won the war?’ And Packy says, ‘No, no, my boy, not at all.’ ‘All
right,’ I say, ‘then I’ll run for assessor.’ He says, ‘Let me think about that,’ and I say, ‘Don’t think too long or you’re gonna lose us.
We’re big and gettin’ bigger, and it’s a new day. We got the vets and their families, and I got a whole lot of friends who won’t go your way if I don’t, and
we’re ready to primary if we’re not on your ticket.’ ‘Let me think about that,’ he says again, and I say, ‘Okay, I’ll see you in church.’ That was
yesterday, and I saw him at St. Joseph’s an hour ago, and he says he’ll back me for assessor.”