Roscoe (42 page)

They were in front of the Ten Eyck, and as two couples came out of the hotel one of the men called to Alex, “Congratulations, Mr. Mayor. Well deserved.” Alex waved and walked alone
up the hill toward City Hall. Roscoe turned his back to the hill and looked down State Street, the street of celebrations. A bonfire burned in front of the Delaware and Hudson Railroad building,
kids feeding it, a fire engine on the way with siren wailing. Buzzy Lewis came up from Pearl Street with two dozen first editions of the
Times-Union
under his arm, just off the truck.

“Hey, Roscoe, big night. Want a paper? It’s got a picture of the Mayor.”

“Sure, Buzz,” Roscoe said, and he gave Buzzy a deuce and put the paper in his coat pocket without looking at it. He had made no retort to what Alex said. None was possible. He
imagined Alex delivering a similar harangue to Veronica, who would have expected it. Driving up to Tristano, Roscoe concluded she hadn’t told Alex where or for how long they were going,
because he might have said don’t go. Roscoe felt the sudden reflux of a dreadful time long gone, negative luck running. What happened at Tristano wasn’t luck. It’s luck only when
it’s bad. Roscoe quit luck at a young age. Power, not luck, transforms possibility. You don’t trust things simply to work out, are you serious? You fix them and then they work out.
Elisha’s
beau geste,
his glory march to self-destruction, was now a reality for everyone, even though Roscoe had invented it. Logic so fine it becomes history. Create what
doesn’t exist, and the false becomes true through existence alone. Roscoe even invented Elisha’s epitaph: “Stay alive, even if you have to kill yourself.” Everything Roscoe
did was to ensure continuity of the Party, of Alex, of the family, of love. Roscoe decided Elisha had intended to restore the lost brotherhood. And, hey, didn’t the man’s will prevail
tonight at the polls? Now you know, Governor: cakey action don’t kibble at the Café Newfay.

Mike Quinlan’s Capitol Grill was imploding with hilarity and the vest-busting effusions of Democrats, who effuse more effectively in victory than Republicans. Roscoe became their target
when he walked in—handshook, clapped, kissed, hugged, winked at. He tried to respond to the congrats but could barely make out any words over Tommy Ippolito’s six-piece band playing
“Paper Doll” with a beat that made Roscoe’s bones dance. But nobody could dance, the bar and back room both chockablock with bodies. Roscoe waved to Tommy and smiled as he waded
through the mob. He knew every second face, could put a name to so many, knew how the ancients here had looked in childhood, how the young people would look at eighty. Phil Fagan, Kenny Pew, Ocky
Wolf, all from St. Joseph’s, here they were, parading wrinkled necks, absent hair, crooked backs; and Roscoe corrected their flaws with visionary recall of their adolescent integrity. Not
only could he reconstitute them backward into the past, Roscoe controlled their future, which is why they were here. You don’t know this, Ocky, but this is my final night of power over your
life. Tomorrow, Roscoe will be powerless in a new life that will owe nothing to coercion. He threaded himself (some thread) toward Hattie, who was at a table for two near the band.

“Hello, love,” she said. “You did it again, didn’t you?”

“We did.”

“Say hello to Ted Pulaski, who lives in my building.”

“Hey, Ted, that’s a hell of a building to live in,” Roscoe said.

“Got a great landlady,” Ted said.

“He loves dogs,” Hattie said.

“Good for him.”

“I told him I buried my dog in Washington Park so I could visit his grave, and Ted wants to go see it.”

“You’ll enjoy the grave, Ted,” Roscoe said.

“I look forward to it.”

“That’s convenient. You like Ted, do you, Hat?” Roscoe asked her.

“I do, Rosky, I do.”

“You getting into that famous mood again?”

“Could be,” and she nibbled on the left Pulaski earlobe.

Roscoe moved toward the bar fielding questions: Is the Mayor coming? Where’s Patsy? At the bar, Cutie LaRue was explaining to several female admirers why he and Jay Farley lost to the
McCall machine: “ . . . they know how you vote by how you shift your feet in the voting booth, by the sound of the lever when you pull it. They go in the booth with you, or leave the curtain
open, or cut a hole in it, or sandpaper it. ‘How come you split your ticket, my dear? I hope nobody else in the family does that.’ I tell you, they make those machines dance. Some
machines got fifty votes in ’em before the polls open, and somebody’ll pull that lever forty times after they close. Jay Farley’s a nice fella for a Republican, and he looks
honest, but honesty is no substitute for experience.”

Adam Whalen, an assistant DA, cut through the crowd to whisper, “A friend of yours wants to see you, Roscoe. Trish Cooney. She was giving a guy a blowjob through her car window when
somebody shot him in the back. They think she set him up. We’re charging her with conspiracy and lewd behavior.”

“Just go for the lewd,” Roscoe said. “She’s not smart enough for conspiracy. Tell Freddie Gold to bail her out and send me the bill.”

Roscoe found Mike Quinlan being third man behind the bar this frantic night. “Great election, Roscoe. Where’s the Mayor?”

“City Hall, where he’s supposed to be. Listen, Mike, I’m just passing through. Got some business uptown that won’t wait. But keep an open bar for an hour tonight on me,
and don’t bill the Party. Bill me at the hotel.”

“Hey, you’re a live one, Roscoe.”

“That’s one possibility,” Roscoe said.

He threaded himself back out the door, stood in the cold night looking down State Street, full of parked cars but nobody on the street. He truly believed Elisha killed himself for a purpose.
Just because you invent it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Roscoe reflected often on his own suicide, but he wasn’t worth killing. No point to it. That, of course, was
Roscoe’s old fallacy that everything has a point, when it could have forty points, thirty-five. A man is never single-mindedly wrong or right in such heavy matters. What was said about the
Celt applied to Elisha, who certainly was a Celt somewhere in his soul, by osmosis from Patsy and Roscoe if nothing else. The man said that the Celt was melancholy not out of a definite motive but
through something unaccountable, defiant, and titanic. An Englishman said that. Roscoe walked down State Street until he found a cab.

At Tivoli, Roscoe found Veronica sitting alone in the breakfast room, the servants all in bed. Roscoe had to call her name aloud to find her. She was dressed for the victory
party, clinging new black sheath, hair that parted in the middle and fell into a large, single yellow curl that surrounded her neck like a lush collar. Her cheekbones seemed more emphatic tonight,
nose more aquiline, eyelids the color of rose of Sharon; Christ, what beauty. She sat at the same table, same chair, as on the morning Roscoe brought her Elisha’s final news.

“You’re back early,” she said. “Didn’t you go to the party?”

“I left when I figured out you weren’t coming. I saw Cutie LaRue. He thinks Jay Farley lost because honesty is no substitute for experience.”

“It may be true.”

“There’s no way to be honest. I’ve always said that.”

“But
we
try to be honest, don’t we?”

“Do we?”

“I do.”

“Good. I had a talk with Alex.”

“I know. He called me.”

“He thought he was being honest, but of course he wasn’t.”

“How wasn’t he?”

“You don’t know?”

“Did he lie? What did he say?”

“Didn’t he tell you what he said?”

“I hated what he told me, but it made perfect sense to him.”

“Perfect sense but not the truth.”

“What’s the truth, Roscoe?”

“I never tell the truth.”

“Tell me, damn it.”

“I can’t talk about it. Don’t you have things you can’t talk about?”

“I suppose I do.”

“There you are. You look glorious. Anything to say to me about tomorrow? Or the next day? Or the next?”

What Veronica said then was supremely logical. How could she abandon Alex and sacred Gilby, her children? Consider her god-awful loss of Rosemary. You, Roscoe, have been responsible for every
beautiful thing that happened to us in these past months. You’re so selfless. You love Gilby, Gilby adores you, you are adorable. But what will happen when Alex sees Gilby adoring you, or you
moving in with us, or us with you? It would explode the family. Alex believes you’ll be a negative influence on the boy. I know he’s very wrong. It’s perverse to exile you from us
after all the wonderful things you’ve done. But if you’d done them differently, would we now have such a hostile climate for love? As it is, Veronica has only one choice. Perhaps
it’s the wrong one, but she can’t evade it. Oh, how much she loves who Roscoe is, her longtime love, and she knows his love for her is as great as Elisha’s was. She loves Roscoe
every way possible. Didn’t she make total love to him? She withheld nothing from this man she truly wants. Veronica and Roscoe now desire each other so much that it seems they were destined
to be together. But one rarely sorts out desire and destiny satisfactorily. And then Alex rises up and says the unthinkable. And nothing to be done. But you and I don’t know what will happen,
my dearest Roscoe. And you do have my heart, my only love. I won’t give it to another.

She cried. Her tears would melt steel. She kissed him so many, many times. He cried with her. His tears stained the floor tiles. They kissed and kissed. They fumbled each other. She could not
stop crying as they kissed. He raised her clothing to touch her every where. She did the same with him. Then they put everything back in its proper place. She leaned against the door and slapped it
softly as she cried. He blew his nose and went upstairs for his brown valise with the fifty thousand in cash in the false bottom, quiet wages. Everything else he left in the room. Goodbye, room. He
asked her to call a cab and it came, and when she saw him coming down the stairs she sent it away. They continued to kiss by the door. Love. Oh, love. Such love as this. God help our love. You have
my heart, Roscoe. I won’t give it to another. We don’t know how life will change. We never know the future. You take my heart with you. Our hearts, our hearts, oh, our hearts. We never
know what will happen to our hearts.

On the Night Boat

From where he stood on the promenade deck, Roscoe could hear the first strains of music from the boat’s orchestra: cellos, then oboes, a Wagner overture, with desire
implicit in the music. Just what Roscoe needs. He moved up the deck until he could no longer hear it. As the boat’s motor began to thrum he noticed two lone men on the quay, one prone with
eyes closed, arms outstretched, unmoving. Dead? The other standing at the downed man’s feet looking toward the boat, a
tableau vivant.
The downed man had done something unspeakable;
this Roscoe sensed through his kinship with the fallen. Roscoe called out to him to get up and explain himself, but the man was beyond words, as was Roscoe, who can never utter the words that would
trigger Alex instantly, and forever, into fear and trembling.

He walked the deck, assessing time by the intensity of the flickering shore lights and contemplating the myriad forms deceit takes, how they intersect and magnify, or cancel each other out.
Veronica, the sleeping beauty, will awake to find she is forever wed to a dead man and can never explain why. Does she know why? She may always have known. So much comes down to self-deceit, such
as Roscoe shooting that bear. How could he have convinced himself, or anybody, that he shot that bear? Yet Roscoe believes in his creations: his
beau geste
saved the Party, and won him
Veronica’s love. A lie, after all, is only another way of affirming the desirable. A live lie is better than a dead truth, and there is no ultimate wall that the creative individual cannot
breach through deceit. To repossess Veronica’s love, Roscoe would lie until he forgot how. Any time he chooses, he can see her stunning in her black sheath, naked in her jacket on the bed,
smart in her riding britches and boots, contoured in her black bathing suit, fetching in her slip at the hotel, new at morning in her Chinese dressing gown. He will not lose these visions.

Two chubby nuns walked past him on their way to becoming cherubim and went into one of the boat’s private parlors. Roscoe followed and looked through the parlor window to see nuns and
priests sitting at several card tables, silently exchanging holy pictures and tarot cards. This looked new. He entered to find a luxurious gambling establishment: carpets obviously from Brussels,
an explosion of finely wrought brass railings, brass light fixtures and cuspidors, mahogany chairs, velvet wallpaper, unique décor for a Night Boat. He moved among the gaming tables, stopped
at a corner where five well-dressed gentlemen were playing a dice-and-card game Roscoe could not identify. He studied the blackboards which listed stock prices and odds on ball games, fights,
marriages. He moved to the board with the racing entries, noted a familiar name: Cabala 2, and then coming toward him he saw Johnny Mack, Patsy’s bookie, and the elegance here made
sense. Owner of racehorses, man of taste and fashion, premier gambler, why wouldn’t John furnish this parlor as handsomely as his White House, Albany’s premier chamber of games?

Johnny wore a stylish black-and-gray-checked suit with black piping, his
pince-nez
anchored to his waistcoat by a broad black ribbon.

“I didn’t know you were on the river, Johnny,” Roscoe said to him.

“After the Governor arrested me, I lost faith in cities,” Johnny said.

“I’ve had a similar epiphany,” Roscoe said.

“Epiphanies come when you least expect them.”

“What’s that game in the corner?”

“What would you like it to be?”

“What a question,” Roscoe said. “Who are those players?”

“Who would you like to play against?”

And then Roscoe realized that the world as he knew it had been overthrown while he was in cloister. He would have to move from scratch, like a novice. The very thought of new game strategies
depressed him. Who cares what you bet on now, Roscoe? Do you? What exactly is your legacy, even if you win? Ten years from now, will anybody know you ever gambled on anything, or ever drew
breath?