Roscoe

Some People Just Have to Go

At mid-afternoon Bart Merrigan came to Hattie’s to find Roscoe and make sure he had not died of rhetoric and heat. He also brought news that Elisha’s will had surfaced for probate in Surrogate Court, Elisha’s siblings had seen it, and their lawyer wanted to talk. Roscoe was exhausted from the Notchery-Pina debacle and his worsening chest pain. He had napped at Hattie’s for two hours, not enough, and now wanted only to retreat to the tranquillity of his Tivoli rooms until the world changed. But, as usual, he lost out to his rage for duty, and would have to forgo that elegant peace and go to his office to cope with Elisha’s brother and sisters.

Elisha, on the night of his death, had shown Gladys the document naming Roscoe executor of his estate, and told her that if anything ever happened to him a family feud would erupt, but Roscoe would find “the key” to solving it. Gladys assumed he meant Roscoe would be fair with all parties in settling control of the mill. But Roscoe decided “the key” related not to fairness but to the protection of Veronica. How could Elisha assume Roscoe would be fair? Roscoe had never been fair, and who knew that better than Elisha?

Elisha’s siblings — brother Gordon, the banker, and sisters Antonia and Emily — even before Elisha’s death, had aimed to control the mill and stop what they saw as its downward slide. Their plan was to replace the inattentive, dollar-a-year Elisha with Kyle Glockner, a bright man who had risen from the rolling mill to become a superior salesman, sales manager, eventually vice-president, a man the siblings believed they could control. When Elisha died, Glockner did move into the breach, and chaos did not erupt as Gladys had feared. After the funeral, the siblings pressed Veronica to agree to joint control, with Glockner as titular head.

Veronica, with Elisha’s holdings, controlled the mill with 50 percent of common voting stock. The siblings had 45, but with Glockner’s 5 percent, given to him when he became Elisha’s vice-president, a standoff was possible. Glockner, however, a protégé of Elisha, was neither as malleable nor as friendly to the siblings as they expected, and as their dream of control faded and the mill’s postwar slide continued, the siblings urged Veronica to sell it before everybody slid into bankruptcy.

Bart drove Roscoe to Party headquarters, which was also Roscoe’s law office, one cabinet drawer holding his entire practice: the Elisha and Gilby files. The day was crisp and sunny, and a breeze had blown away the heavy heat. Roscoe, in wilted clothing, felt soiled in the shining afternoon.

“Everybody loved your speech on Pina the whore,” Bart said.

“I like to think of her as a singer,” Roscoe said.

“She gonna do any time?”

“Of course not. Have you no morality? The woman was a victim, not a murderess.”

“I hear the Dutchman’s still dead.”

“Has anybody complained about that?”

At headquarters, Roscoe reviewed the files on Elisha’s estate, then called in Mrs. Pringle, his secretary-on-call, and dictated a letter to the Fitzgibbon siblings’ lawyer, setting out estate specifics: only half a million in Elisha’s personal assets, plus Tivoli, worth another million or so, to be appraised; six hundred thousand to Veronica from Elisha’s life insurance, none of these legacies involving the siblings. The mill’s value, which did involve them, required detailed appraising. Roscoe advised them that monthly fees for himself as counsel and executor would be fifteen thousand, plus five thousand for Bart Merrigan as appraiser. Also, the mill’s holdings in other states would necessitate hiring additional lawyers and appraisers. “Sad to say,” concluded Roscoe, “the Surrogate Courts of this nation are exceedingly dilatory, and we should not expect final resolution before three to five years. Some notorious cases have continued for twenty-eight, even thirty-five years.”

Roscoe sent Joey Manucci to hand-deliver the letter to the siblings’ lawyer, Murray Fish, an old hand at probate who was well aware that Surrogate Harry Crowley was married to Patsy’s niece. Bart then drove Roscoe to Tivoli. A taxi was at the front entrance as they pulled in, and Roscoe recognized the woman getting into it: Nadia, the spiritualist with only one name. Bart helped him out of the car and up the front steps and Roscoe then went in under his own waning power. He looked for Veronica in the front parlors, but she was elsewhere. One step at a time, so difficult to catch a breath, he climbed the staircase to his second-floor suite, then stripped and dropped his foul clothing into a hamper. He soaped and showered slowly, sat on the bed and painfully pulled on a clean pair of boxer shorts, and at five o’clock on this afternoon of sublime sanctuary, he eased his transient self between the sheets of his four-poster double bed. Alexander Hamilton had once owned this bed, so went the Fitzgibbon family legend. All his life Roscoe had been linked to this family, and because of it, because of Veronica, he’d remained in Albany and in politics. So was this new illness another fraud to keep him in the same house with her? He’s equal to the idea, but no, Roscoe would not withhold breath from himself for any reason. But he loves being here. Even when he married Pamela and, as the groom, kissed bridesmaid Veronica, he told her she should’ve been the bride. What would it have been like not being near her all his life? Who would be his love? Could he have endured politics without her presence? He buried his face in the pillow and imagined Nadia at the séance in her darkened parlor saying she could see Rosemary, Veronica’s five-year-old daughter, coming through the clouds, and that the child looked beautiful and happy in her pink dress and pink bow. This thrilled Veronica, who said, “That’s exactly what she was wearing the day before she died.” Nadia’s snout came up the sewer drainpipe into the sink, but Roscoe ran the water and down she went. Up again she came, so Roscoe opened both faucets and let them run, and there went Nadia: down the pipe, into the river, and bobbing out to sea, no longer a threat to Veronica. And Roscoe could sleep.

He awoke in sunshine, the pain bearable only if he didn’t move. Nine o’clock on the bedside table clock. He felt as if he’d slept a week, but it was only sixteen hours. Veronica was watching him from the heavy oak rocker by the fireplace. Beside her on a four-wheeled oak serving wagon lay mystery food under two silver-covered serving dishes. Veronica at morning: scoop-neck white blouse with pink roses on the bodice, tan riding britches and brown boots, a vague suggestion of lipstick, hair in a tie at the back of her neck, smiling.

“Somebody killed me and I went to heaven,” Roscoe said.

“You went someplace. I came to call you for dinner three times last night, but you were comatose.”

“You’re looking out for me.”

“People know you’re not entirely well, don’t they?”

“Some people. Is that really nine o’clock?”

“What do you care what time it is?”

“I have to place myself in the cosmos. Time is important. So is food. I’m starving to death and you sit there quizzing me about time, hoarding mysterious food under silver covers.”

“I can’t believe you’re hungry. Not you.”

“I haven’t eaten for weeks. People refuse to feed me.”

“Can you sit up?”

“I can try.” And, as he did, the pain stabbed him in the stomach, the chest, the heart. He fell back. “It hurts,” he said.

“All right, I’ll feed you.” She wheeled the tray to his bedside and uncovered lox and cream cheese and capers and onions and sour cream and applesauce. “There’s coffee in the thermos pitcher, and bagels and blintzes in the warmer, if you want any.”

“Of course. I want it all.”

She took a bagel and a blintz from the warmer in the bottom of the wagon, which was heated by two flaming cans of Sterno. She poured him a cup of coffee.

“You’re serving me a Jewish breakfast.”

“It was my father’s favorite.”

“I remind you of your father, is that your point?”

“You take care of me the way he did. Gordon’s lawyer called. He got your letter and they want to settle. Whatever did you say that made them so agreeable?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. I want a bagel.”

She sat on the bed and ripped half a bagel, spread cream cheese on a fragment, piled it with capers, onions, a slice of lox, and put it to his mouth. He bit and chewed, stared at her, swallowed, sipped the coffee, waited for another bite, chewed it, stared.

“Press your breasts against my arm while you feed me,” he said.

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“It’s brazen.”

“It’s not brazen. It’s a friendly gesture.”

“It’s more than friendly.”

“We’re more than friends. I’m no stranger to your breasts. I remember them well.”

“Then you don’t need them pressed against you.”

“Memory only goes so far. I need full-rounded reality.”

“You’re very fresh.”

“Just like your bagels.”

She cut a blintz and dabbed it with sour cream and applesauce. She put it into his mouth, and a spot of applesauce stayed on his chin. She leaned close to him and licked it away. He pulled her close and kissed her, her arms over his shoulders, her breasts against him, and it was years gone, years since she had yielded her soft mouth so totally, everything unbelievably sharp to Roscoe. But are these real responses, Ros, or ritualized emotions you turn on like the radio? Is this even the same woman you fell in love with? Well, she still responds the same way in your arms, so the real question is, will she stay there? Don’t ruin it. Don’t go too far. If it’s going to happen it could happen at Tristano, if we ever get there. Also, you couldn’t do anything, anyway. You can barely move. He licked the top of her chest.

“Be careful there,” she said.

“You licked me. I’m getting even.”

“I’m in your debt again.”

Gratitude. Is that what this is about? Gratitude is cheap. True, but if that started it, don’t knock it. And that worshipful-slave routine, so grateful for her handouts — get past it. No woman is that perfect. She’s got the venal streak of the rich, money tunes in her music. Didn’t the phone call on the mill settlement bring on this affection? And somewhere in that beautiful head she’s still a bit of a nutcake, believing a con artist like Nadia has answers. Don’t call her a nutcake.

He put both arms around her and squeezed her, his cheek on hers, and she squeezed him, hurting him, breathless pain he could love. They held this intimate clinch, the closest moment of their lives, at least since 1932, another year that made Roscoe crazy, and this would do it again, no doubt about that either, this embrace that was setting off alarm bells in both of them. You can feel that in her, can’t you, Ros? She squeezed him again. He kissed her hair. He would kiss her soul if he could only find it.

“You are a wonderful man,” she whispered.

He was about to say something excessive and fatuous when he saw Alex in the doorway, a civilian in a gray suit, white shirt, blue necktie, his suit coat folded over his left arm. No smile.

“Alex,” Roscoe said. “Where the hell did you come from?”

“I got in last night,” Alex said, coming into the room.

Veronica stood up and faced Alex. “I was keeping him as a surprise,” she said to Roscoe. “That’s why I kept coming up to get you.”

“How are you feeling?” Alex asked. “Mother says you’re not well.”

“I’m in trouble. I should see the doctor.”

“I’ll call and have him come over. Can you walk?”

“I don’t think so,” Roscoe said. “I can hardly breathe, and the pain got worse overnight.”

“I’ll get on it,” Alex said. He went out of the room and down the stairs.

“I think we may have shocked him,” Roscoe said.

“He knows we’re close friends,” Veronica said.

“We looked like more than that.”

“We did absolutely nothing wrong. Nothing.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Quit it.”

“Why was that fortune-teller here?”

“Oh. Nadia?”

“Nadia.”

“Yes, she came by. We visit now and then.”

“You already spent a small fortune with that fraud. Are you paying her again?”

“Why would I pay her? We just talk.”

“You talk to your dead daughter?”

“I’m over that, Roscoe. You know that.”

“But something’s going on. She’s reading the future for you.”

“If you must know.”

“You want to find out how the hearing will go. You’re afraid of losing Gilby after losing Rosemary.”

“You are clever.”

“Why didn’t you ask me about the future? I’d have told you we’re going to win.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because Yusupov wasn’t Gilby’s father. I have a blood test to prove it.”

“No. Where did you get a blood test on him?”

“I’m a resourceful citizen.”

“But what does it mean?”

“Everything points to Elisha as his father.”

“Shhhh.”

Then, in whispers, he said, “Elisha had to have known it wasn’t Yusupov, and why wouldn’t he? Pamela was blackmailing him.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“What else would she mean when she says, ‘It’s a wise child that knows its father’?”

“You’re really the cleverest man alive. That’s exactly true. First she wanted money or she’d sue for custody. We offered her five thousand dollars, but it wasn’t enough. And she said if we didn’t pay she’d name him as the father and scandalize the family. He laughed at her, so she sued.”

“What she didn’t foresee,” said Roscoe, “was Elisha removing himself as her target. He aced her. It must have enraged her.”

“I can’t believe he’d kill himself over that,” Veronica said.

“A sick man trying to protect you and Gilby, and looking at the short odds on himself? Those could be two very good reasons.”

Roscoe watched her trying to absorb the theory, offering no resistance at all to Elisha as father of Gilby. It had hovered for years with her as an idea, and now here it was as logic on the hoof from Roscoe, to explain the meaning of the Yusupov blood test. The blood-test part was genuine. The rest, well, Roscoe is a lawyer. He could believe his own theory, or he could believe some of it, or none at all. It was his theory. Whatever Roscoe decided, he would take direction from Elisha. Already he was decoding what seemed like an urgent message, one that Elisha could not write down or even speak about. Roscoe understood that Elisha, for good reason, could only point to the core of its mystery with this silent code, full of faith that Roscoe and Patsy would know what he meant; for weren’t they the translators and keepers of all secrets?

“His death is still a mystery,” Roscoe said to her, “but the mystery isn’t quite as dense as it was a few weeks ago. Just do me a favor and stay away from that fortune-teller. If you want to know about things to come, ask me. And say nothing about the blood test. That’s my surprise.”

She nodded and kissed him on the lips.

“I’ll see what’s going on with the doctor,” she said.

Roscoe and Alex

Roscoe heard the footsteps, and now would come Alex of the censorious eye. What are you doing with my mother? He would not say that, but he would watch Roscoe’s every gesture. Well, so be it. He’s a willful young man and always has been. Roscoe knew him as a bright and charming child, then as the seldom seen Alex-away-at-school: Groton first, then Yale, home on the holidays, off to Tristano for the summer, only twenty or so days a year spent totally with the family. But he was much loved, and reared in politics. When he was four, Elisha, Roscoe, and Patsy took the Democratic Party away from Packy McCabe. When he was six, they took the city away from the Republicans. His father sent him clippings of Party triumphs throughout his school days, and as he accumulated scholastic honors, he also lived a vicarious political life through Elisha, who told people: Alex is smarter than I’ll ever be. In his last year at Groton, a wealthy classmate’s uncle, a Democrat, was heavily favored for election to the State Senate. Alex heard Roscoe tell Elisha that the uncle would be sued for divorce and that this would sink him with the voters. Alex and his classmate took all their own best clothing, plus the classmate’s sister’s fox coat and his father’s winter chesterfield, the lot worth thousands, from closets in the family’s Fifth Avenue townhouse, carried it all in a taxi to an East Side pawnshop, hocked it for seven hundred dollars, found a bookmaker and bet the seven on the uncle’s Republican opponent, saw the uncle sued and beaten as Roscoe had predicted, collected at four to one, redeemed the clothes from the pawnshop, had them back in their closets before anybody knew they were gone, and spent their fresh money roistering in Manhattan over the Christmas break.

Alex took time off from Yale in early October 1932 to come home for the Democratic convention in Albany when his father was on track to be nominated for governor. He sat with the Albany delegates, too young to be one, but learning how it was done. Patsy promised to, and did, make him a genuine delegate to the ’36 convention, the year he finished Yale (history major, Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude), then Pat ran him for the Assembly in ’37, and the Senate in ’38.

In those early days Roscoe began advising Alex in the proper way to carouse, but he found he was also Phi Beta Kappa in carousing. In 1939, at age twenty-four, Alex married Marnie Herzog, daughter of a coal merchant of means, and moved into the mansion Elisha had built for him at Tivoli, the lower farm, where Marnie kept show horses, and Alex, in the family tradition, kept racehorses. He was elected America’s youngest mayor in ’41, grew stellar as the GI mayor who refused a deferment, declined officers’ candidate school, and volunteered for the infantry: the raw material for his myth.

He entered Roscoe’s bedroom exuding a vigorous presence, every trace of youth gone from that face, in full manhood now, with the tailored good looks of a matinee idol and the self-assurance of a princely heir to power over the future. Roscoe remembered that condition. He’d once owned a bit of it.

“The doctor’s on the way with an ambulance,” Alex said. “He thinks you’ll need one.”

“He’s probably right,” Roscoe said.

“This means surgery, I gather.”

“I won’t resist. I can’t live this way.”

“How did you let it get so bad?”

“I got busy.”

“You surely did. What happens to Gilby’s hearing? This week, isn’t it?”

“We’ll get a postponement.”

“Do you want another lawyer to step in for you?”

“Only if I’m dead and buried. If I’m just dead I’ll be there.”

“Are there any developments? Any new bitchiness from slutty Aunt Pamela?”

“I don’t expect much else from her.”

“And you? Anything new on the legal front?”

“I have plans. Nothing to talk about.”

“I hope you’re making a strong case.”

“I like to think I am.”

“One thing I can’t understand, Roscoe. How in the hell did you ever get sucked into the Notchery? I’ve heard the story, but why would you set foot in that place? This publicity is a disaster. It’s made all the New York papers.”

“I think we avoided a civil war in the party. I’m glad I was there.”

“Glad? Arrested with whores? Your reputation is a shambles.”

“I haven’t had a reputation since I was seven years old, Alex. And if Patsy had arrested Bindy, there’s a very good chance one of them would now be dead.”

“Patsy wouldn’t have ordered that raid. He told me last night he just wanted to make a point. Ask him yourself.”

Roscoe nodded, understanding Patsy’s reversal of unbearable history. The man could not stand to be wrong. Situational truth. Roscoe understood also that Patsy’s new version of his Bindy plan downgraded Roscoe’s achievement. Nice going, Ros. What you did was miraculous, more or less, but not really necessary Now get off stage and stop making me look stupid.

“Roscoe, I know turning the tables on the raiders the way you did was brilliant, and I congratulate you. But people just don’t believe you were there only as a lawyer. You’ve got to reverse your image.”

“If they reverse my pain and fix my breathing, my image will take care of itself. Look, Alex, forget about me. I’m not important. Pay attention to your campaign.”

“I’ve got a rally and two radio speeches coming up.”

“Good. Take the limelight back from Cutie. The clown is stealing the show. Two days ago he turned up as Abe Lincoln. He read the Gettysburg Address and dedicated it to the Battle of the Bulge.”

Roscoe judged Alex’s aggressive tone as probably a learned response to living among redneck sergeants; also, he doesn’t want your arms around his mother. But what put an edge to this for Roscoe was Alex’s misreading of Patsy’s dissembling, and that virtuous worrying over Roscoe’s reputation; which gave his discontent another dimension.

Veronica brought Dr. Toussaint to Roscoe’s bedside, then she and Alex waited in the hallway during the examination. Roscoe’s internal bleeding had obviously continued, its buildup of pressure worsening the pain, his blood pressure dangerously low. “Into the hospital immediately, Roscoe,” Dr. Toussaint concluded.

“I’m not fighting it,” Roscoe said, “but I’m beginning to feel like that fellow with the wound that never heals.”

“There’s a lot of those fellows out there,” the doctor said.

“The brotherhood of the open wound,” Roscoe said.

The doctor sent Alex for the ambulance attendants, a burly pair who lifted Roscoe out of bed onto the stretcher, twisting his pain.

“I’ll follow Roscoe to the hospital, get him settled in,” Veronica said, which did not thrill Alex.

Roscoe Muses on Politics and Death While Having His Heart Cut Out

It’s true, Rozzie, we’re going to slice you from hell to breakfast and then saw your chest, crank open your sternum like an oyster, go in and get at that heart of yours, and slit a corner of the sack it comes in to let loose all the dammed-up blood. We’ll sew up any little nick to your heart where you hurt yourself, suck out the old clotty stuff, and let any fresh blood ooze out for a while. Can’t sew up the sack or we’d just be damming it back up and have to go in again. So we leave it open and it’ll either figure out how to fix itself or it won’t. Then we sew up with catgut wherever we cut you going in, we wire that sternum back together, stitch up the chest and there you have it, another one of the old thor acotomies, another one of the old pericardiotomies. Your blood won’t leak no more and you’ll be good as new if you don’t die, always a possibility, this is not easy what we do, stuff can go wrong and we just might slit the heart wrong and set off a little arrhythmia, or you could have a stroke or a heart attack or a blood clot with the last word. But just maybe it’ll be sweet sailing, like on your favorite boat up at Tristano. Think about that boat.

Roscoe rarely dwelled on his own death: too many other things to think about. But now that he’s staring it down, is he as ready for it as Elisha was? Doubtful. Roscoe wants to get away but not that far, wants to make a move but is still asking questions: What didn’t he do that he should have? What did he do that he shouldn’t have? No, never mind that last question, Ros, we don’t have time. Keep in mind that if you die on the operating table you won’t have to protect Veronica anymore, won’t have to figure out Gilby and Pamela, or get Alex re-elected in a tough year, or decide why Elisha killed himself. No matter what logic you summon, Elisha’s suicide doesn’t make sense simply as the end of something. Roscoe remembers Elisha saying in a black moment that everything eventually comes to nothing. “That’s the secret you don’t tell the children,” he said, “and even if you did, they wouldn’t accept it.” But Roscoe now believes that Elisha, at the end, overruled his own conclusion on nothing. A suicidal getaway is usually flight from the unbearable, which wasn’t Elisha’s condition, was it? Or it’s a form of cowardly escape, or maybe delusory innocence descending; and Elisha was neither coward nor innocent, and rarely deluded. He was a cunning and courageous man with multiple reasons for everything he did, and he would not design his death on the basis of fear or insubstantiality Roscoe has almost convinced himself that Elisha, sliding into the inevitable, decided to do a bit of posthumous combat with the enemy, who was closing in. And who else would it be but Pamela and the hyenas she drags in her wake? And on whom could they close in? Not Elisha, who has slipped away on them; which leaves Veronica, Alex, Gilby.

The Candidate

The idea of Elisha’s making a cowardly getaway was absurd. You should have seen him when he really had enemies: when we ran him for governor. When we all lined up behind Patsy in 1919, nobody knew that so much would come of it. We loved the game and we were in on change. Al Smith was a key player then. Everybody in Albany knew Al, east side, west side, for he’d lived here on and off since Tammany first elected him to the Assembly in 1904. He went on to serve six terms and become Assembly Speaker, then Governor. When he ran for governor in ’22 and ’24, we saw to it that he won Albany with fat pluralities. After his ’26 victory, Al made Elisha Democratic State Committee chairman, and Eli roamed the state as advance man for Al’s presidential bandwagon. While Al ogled the White House, we ogled his chair in the Capitol, and our Mayor Goddard was a fine fit.

Goddard, a Baptist banker with great public appeal, had run up such impressive totals as mayor in ’21, ’23, and ’25 that people were saying he was unbeatable, a real candidate to succeed Al in ’28. Upstaters are always a long shot, but the front-runner, FDR, was out of the race, down in Warm Springs trying to regain use of his legs after his polio attack. Tammany Hall, under Charlie Murphy and then George Olvany, had always looked on us as upstate family, and so had John McCooey, the boss of Brooklyn Democrats. Their numbers dominated state Democratic conventions, and they were with us, so we truly had a chance to nominate Goddard for governor.

Mayor Goddard, Roscoe, and Elisha were always welcome at the Governor’s Mansion when Al lived there, but Patsy, who didn’t get along with Al, had never set foot in the place. As early as ’23, Al frowned on Patsy’s direct dealing in bootleg beer, and in ’27, as pressure mounted on Al to close down the Albany baseball pool, he asked Patsy and Roscoe to come to the Eagle Street Mansion for a private talk. Al was waiting for them on the veranda as they came up the steps. He pointed them to a prearranged pair of rocking chairs and sat in a third rocker, facing them.

“The Republicans are making noise about this pool again,” Al said. He was in shirtsleeves with arm garters, and he also wore a cigar. “And federal men are nosing around about the sale of plays across state lines.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do about that?” said Patsy.

“Shut down,” said Al.

“No,” said Pat. “No. And also no.”

“Then why don’t you let somebody win once in a while?” Al said.

“Where do you suppose the Party gets its money?” Patsy said. “You think we carry the city and county for you by passing the hat on Pearl Street?”

“How much can you need? Why don’t you share some of the wealth? Even the communists do that.”

“I always knew you were a red,” Patsy said.

Al stood up and walked into the Mansion, slamming and bolting the door against intruders.

“Well, you won that one,” Roscoe told Patsy.

In spite of Al, it still seemed that Patsy’s dream of throwing a party for his own Governor in the Mansion might be taking shape. But then Goddard, on vacation in Havana early in ’28, fell out of an open limo, injured his head, developed toxemic erysipelas, and there was death, sitting on the front porch of Patsy’s Mansion dream. Hesitating not, Patsy picked Elisha as Goddard’s replacement for the nomination.

“I don’t want it,” Elisha said.

“You’re a natural for it,” Patsy said.

“I’m state chairman. That’s enough.”

“If we elect you we’ll own the goddamn state.”

“Who says you can elect me?”

“I do,” said Patsy.

“I don’t want it.”

“You’ll take it.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re throwing us all in?”

“Why don’t you run Roscoe?”

“And who’d run Albany if I did?”

“You.”

“I’m not smart enough,” Patsy said.

“Get somebody else to be Governor.”

“I got who I want.”

“I don’t want it.”

“You’ll get to like it.”

Al accepted Elisha as his successor, for a Protestant out of Yale would balance his major liability — his Roman Catholicism — in the presidential race. Also, Elisha had all the credentials. He was a prenatal Democrat, esteemed at all proper business and social levels, superb at running our Albany finances. As state chairman he was intimate with political leaders from Yonkers to Buffalo, heavily connected to old and new money everywhere. He and Al both had six million friends, both were known as honest men, Al with a somewhat saintly reputation despite his Tammany backing, Elisha considered too rich to be personally dishonest, and the two were pals even before the war: socialized with wives, sang in Mike Quinlan’s saloon together. For months we believed that Elisha, backed by Al, could make it.

These were heady developments for Elisha: roving state chairman, potential Governor. At the same time, Fitzgibbon Steel, with a flood of orders, was becoming another bright horizon. In 1927, Elisha and the Krupp Works of Germany had agreed to pool their patents for making new case-hardened alloy steel, with Fitzgibbon Steel holding sole U.S. rights. Elisha put a triumvirate — a cost accountant, his chief metallurgist, and the hustling Kyle Glockner — in charge of the busy mill and kept in touch with the business by remote control.

Elisha was focused on politics and living with a recklessness that was not entirely new, but more expansive than ever; and Roscoe sensed that for the first time in his marriage he was dabbling, beyond flirtation, in other women. Elisha confessed nothing to Roscoe, but affectionate ladies dogged his trail, and Roscoe now thinks that if he had carried on with Pamela, this was when it began. His luck was running very fast in all directions during this era of fabulous prosperity, and Elisha then did what gamblers and people with too much money usually do: try to make more.

He became a partner in Burdett and Company, a group of bankers and industrial toffs like himself, who created an investment trust that owned nothing except stock in varied corporations (Fitzgibbon Steel among them) on the stock exchange. You could buy into Burdett for ten dollars a share, and when the trust’s portfolio made money, so did you. In less than a year, Burdett’s shares were worth three times the stocks on which they were based. It was the purest kind of speculation, and Roscoe likened it to watching the profits compound from Patsy’s plugged baseball pool: another sure thing, blue-sky also, but with a difference; this was all legal, which is nice, and next year you’ll be as safely rich as your friends. We’re talking here about investing in the faith of people who believe that God, luck, and money go together. You can sell those folks anything.

Then, in the summer of 1928, Tammany and Al decided it was going to be a tough election year for Democrats, and they pressed FDR, the Party’s best candidate, who’d been the vice-presidential candidate in 1920, to give up his polio therapy and go for the governorship. And there FDR came, galloping into the home stretch without a leg to walk on; and that was that for Elisha and the rest of us. Elisha shed no tears. He’d said yes only because he didn’t know how to say no to Patsy, who was furious at Al. But it wasn’t Al. It was the age defining itself at Elisha’s and Al’s expense. Al won the greatest popular vote in Democratic presidential history, but the anti-Catholic vote did him in. He lost New York State to Hoover by more than a hundred thousand votes, while FDR won it by twenty-five thousand.

That year the ill wind blew through Elisha’s life. His five-year-old daughter, Rosemary, complained of a stomach ache and Veronica, as usual, gave her milk of magnesia. The child vomited for four hours, and when Dr. Deacy came to Tivoli he diagnosed appendicitis and said a laxative was a very wrong remedy. He arranged for immediate surgery at Albany Hospital. Six hours after the onset of her pain the child’s burst appendix was removed, and Elisha and Veronica took up a vigil at her bedside and waited for her to be comforted by the ministrations of doctors and nurses. But they could give her no comfort. Veronica sat at her side and watched the nurse come with a bottle that dripped new medication into Rosemary’s vein. On the next afternoon the child vomited blood, and her blood pressure plummeted. They put tubes in her stomach to wash out the blood, and gave her a transfusion. Her pressure returned to normal, her color came back, but her pain persisted.

Roscoe visited twice, but could find no function for himself beyond being here with a readiness to do anything. But there was nothing to be done. He went to Farnham’s and bought everybody turkey sandwiches with the homemade mayonnaise Veronica loved; but nobody ate them.

Dr. Deacy examined Rosemary and confirmed the fear: she had peritonitis, a toxic invasion of her system by its own poisons. She was in constant pain, with effortless vomiting and distended stomach; and when Roscoe heard the doctor whisper to a nurse that the child was critical and asked him what medicines were used to fight peritonitis, the doctor said there were many but none of them worked.

On the early morning of the third day, when Veronica could no longer sustain wakefulness, she closed her eyes against her will. Elisha had been catnapping for ten- and twenty-minute stretches, but Veronica could nap only a few minutes and would then burst back into wakeful vigil. This time she slept two hours, during which her daughter was released from relentless pain into shock.

Roscoe arrived to find a nurse scurrying out and Elisha weeping at the foot of the bed, staring at the shallow breathing of his unconscious daughter. The nurse returned with an intern and prepared new injections. Veronica, curled on a leather sofa too small for her body, was wakened by the frenzy of the doctor and nurse, and then realized she’d slept through the fading of her child’s consciousness. She threw herself down at the side of the bed, the crack of her knees on the floor a genuflection in hell, batted her head twice against the iron leg of the bed, raised her face and buried it in the bedsheet, and wailed and wept for her baby and cursed her husband.

“Goddamn you for letting me sleep.”

“You couldn’t stay awake.”

“You tricked me.”

“You couldn’t have done anything.”

“I could have. She’s leaving me.”

“The doctors can’t do anything. And she isn’t gone.”

“She can’t hear me.”

“She may rally.”

“She’s dying and I can’t even say goodbye. You cheated me.”

She stood and waved her arms in a sobbing frenzy and struck Elisha across the face, not an intentional blow, but she did not apologize. Roscoe saw in her face a bitterness he didn’t recognize, a wildness beyond grief. She slumped again to her knees, and Elisha could not comfort her. Roscoe stood witness to the tableau of estrangement, and the changing yet again of intravenous medications that had no effect on the child. Elisha’s sisters came to the waiting room, and Elisha’s brother, Gordon, brought an Episcopal priest who came to deliver the last rites. Veronica refused to let him into the room. “She’s not dying,” she told the priest, “and even if she were, she’s too innocent to need any prayers.”

On the early morning that began the fourth day of the vigil, Rosemary died without regaining consciousness. Veronica cursed Elisha anew: “Bastard, you took her away from me, goddamn you for it.” She wailed and refused Elisha’s touch. Only her howls assuaged her loss and her guilt over the laxative and the failure of her own body, how dare it demand sleep? She cried herself out and stared at the deathbed. Elisha knelt at the foot of the bed but later told Roscoe he could not remember one prayer. He could think of only one sensible thing to say to Veronica: “All you see is loss. Does that wipe out all the joy she gave us while she was alive?”

After half an hour, two nurses came to take Rosemary, but Veronica sent them away. The vigil continued another hour, until two interns came back with the head nurse, who apologized but said she would have to restrain Veronica if necessary. Roscoe told her that if she did it would be her last act as an employee of this or any other hospital in Albany. He took hold of Veronica’s arm and said to her, “I’ll take you both back to Tivoli, where your daughter will live forever.”

Roscoe then walked Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgibbon down to the hospital parking lot. They sat together in the back seat of Roscoe’s new Studebaker, and he then drove them home to their very empty mansion.

Two days after the funeral, Veronica entered the Beth El Jacob synagogue on Herkimer Street as the cantor was singing with his four sons, three wearing hats. The sons had no worldliness in their faces, but much piety. Veronica stood by the door listening. The singing ended and Rabbi Horwitz began to speak to the congregation of bankruptcy, then equated it with moral bankruptcy. “People spend out of control, but then comes the reckoning and we can’t pay,” he said, and Veronica said aloud, “You are absolutely correct,” and walked toward the rabbi and sat among the men of the congregation. Rabbi Horwitz stopped speaking, and a man arose from his seat and told Veronica that she must sit upstairs with the women.

“I can’t do that,” she said. “It’s not my fault that I’m a mother.”

“I’m sorry, but you must move,” the man said.

Veronica stood up and left the synagogue. She drove to Sacred Heart Church in the North End, where her Catholic mother had worshipped. She lit all three hundred votive candles, then knelt at the rail and stared at the white marble altar. Will Logan, the sexton, sweeping the floor at the back of the church, saw her open the marble gates and go up the steps to the altar, take the tabernacle key from under the altar cloth, open the tabernacle door, take out a ciborium half full of the Eucharistic wafers, eat a handful, then begin to eat another. Will came on the run and took the ciborium from her. He put it back in the tabernacle and told her, “You better leave, missus. You can’t do this.”

Later that week, Veronica went to her first session with Nadia the mystic, who swiftly put her in conversation with her dead daughter.

Sale

Elisha left politics in late 1928, two weeks after Rosemary died. He retreated into solitude, refusing all condolences or conversation about the child, seeing no one socially; and Roscoe sensed that any carousing had run its course. Acting once again as the mill’s true chief executive, Elisha moved through some months of prosperity. But the wind again blew from Black Thursday to Black Tuesday, the week the stock market betrayed everybody. Margin calls that Burdett and Company and its investors couldn’t meet consumed Elisha’s personal paper fortune, and also the considerable Fitzgibbon Steel money he had invested in his own sucker trap. Burdett not only blew away in the black wind of burned-out pipe dreams, it was also expelled from the New York Stock Exchange; and Fitzgibbon Steel stock fell from 21 to 4 to 1/8 Orders for steel were canceled and new orders stopped coming as the nation’s business shut down out of fear. Layoffs followed, and the mill grew skeletal.

By the spring of 1930, Elisha was looking at debts the mill could not cover, and he confided this to Roscoe while they were in his library at Tivoli. They were sunken in sumptuous leather armchairs, drinking bootleg Scotch whisky, Eli, in tailored shirt and diamond pinky ring, saying that if he did not find money someplace he would lose the pinky ring, the Scotch, the furniture, the library, and maybe his shirt, the first Fitzgibbon in two centuries to be poor. “The banks could, and might, take the mill away,” he said, “and they’d come for Tivoli next. Bankers are bastards, and I say this because I’m on the board of three banks.”

“You seem to be saying you need money,” Roscoe said.

“Very acute.”

“Patsy already knows this. He has a hundred thousand for you in his safe.”

“That would pay a few creditors.”

“There’s more when you need more,” Roscoe said.

“Patsy gives away money, but never this much.”

“Who said he’s giving it away?”

“He wants it back, of course. And he’ll get it.”

“Who said he wants it back?”

“What does he want?”

“FDR going for the White House makes him a lame-duck governor, and that gives Patsy another chance to put you in the Governor’s Mansion.”

“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 will continue with new clarity, for wisdom has descended and Roscoe has circled his malaise all the way back to first cause, which turns out to be just like that sliver in the heart: the consequence of the wrong choice. So very simple, Ros, but it raises another question. Which wrong choice are we talking about?

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, if you don’t swallow it. Also if you do.”

“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.

“He was afraid of cops,” Mac said.

“He took bad beatings from cops,” Morty said.

“He stood up for his rights, and a few lefts,” Mac said. “He was a rat bastard, but I liked him. Almost nobody knows how to like.”

“You liked him?” Roscoe said.

“I saw him at the Parody Club singing with the piano, pretty good voice, skinny little runt, looked like my brother Joey fightin’ lightweight.”

This made sense to Roscoe, the Mac-and-Jack affinity. They even look alike, now that he thinks about their faces: cheerful, crooked smile that goes away and here comes a deadeyed chilblain of a grin. Two sides of the same coin would be stretching it, but consider that they both weighed, in good health, which Jack seldom was, about a hundred and thirty-five, stood five seven, knew how to dude up, loved women and supported several at a time, thrived on crime, shot people when necessary and sometimes when not, both of them notorious and feared — twinned, you might say, but as if separated at birth, and then found their separate ways to the same time, same place: Jack, the mythic ragamuffin of an evil calling, dead at thirty-four when Mac was twenty-five, and Mac, thirty-nine now, scourge of hoodlums, fearless assassin, a political secret, stable as quicksilver, likes Mozart and Claude Thornhill, now fuming at O.B.’s historical revisionism.

You Can Imagine How Mac Felt

Mac heard it from Jack McQuilty, the ex-sheriff who was talking to Patsy and O.B. at a clambake. When the subject of Legs Diamond came up, Patsy said, “O.B. finished Legs,” and O.B. smiled a big one.

But, hey, what about Mac’s contribution?

Does Patsy really know the crime and punishment that went on in the second-floor front at 67 Dove Street that very early morning in December 1931? Mac never talked to Patsy about it, never told anybody the details. Patsy couldn’t begin to know what Jack looked like with two flashlights in his face, illuminating him and the asters, roses, and swirling tendrils of his wallpaper as he sat up in his double bed, not sure what was happening, then sure, but never figuring it would come to this: alone, no pistol, nobody to help him out; nor could he know how his image related vividly in Mac’s mind to the van Gogh painting on Gladys’s parlor wall, the postman in his hat and long, curly beard (Jack was clean-shaven, his hat on the floor) looking out from a floral design of blossoms and swirling tendrils on a field of green from which five hundred black-oval, white-dotted leaves stare like the eyes of the dangerous night. A floral postman is eccentric, but is he more so than Jack against a wall of roses and asters with tendrils, onto which he casts his large shadow, and into which three bullets are about to be fired?

“We told you not to come back,” Mac said.

“Gimme a break, fellas, I’ll get out.”

“Lotta guys asked you for a break and didn’t get it,” O.B. said.

Mac still remembers O.B. putting his pistol against Jack’s forehead. Deferential to O.B.’s senior pistol, Mac lowered his own.

“Five minutes I’m across the city line,” Jack said, turning his head away from O.B.’s barrel.

Nothing. No bang.

“Just five minutes, boys.”

Still no bang. He’s not going to do it.

Mac shines the light on O.B. and sees those eyes, huge like the postman’s white-dotted black ovals, and blank. Mac wonders if he’s even looking where he’s pointing.

He can’t do it.

“Thanks, fellas,” Jack says and moves a leg to get out of bed.

No bang.

Mac raises his arm and fires three shots from the pearl-handled.38 that O.B. gave him after the Polka Dot Gang shootout, and Jack Diamond ceases to be. The papers will get it wrong at first, but the autopsy will show that all three shots entered the left side of the face (Mac’s side of the bed), one into the left cheek, one in front of the left ear, a third forward of that, but upward, because Jack’s head was falling back. After Mac’s three shots, O.B. fires three, but they all go into the wall over fallen Jack. O.B. shoots to miss.

“You think that’s enough?” O.B. says. “I waited a long time for this.”

“Hell, that’s enough for him,” Mac says.

In the front room of the first-floor flat directly below Jack’s room, the landlady, Laura Woods, and the owner of the house, Hattie, who had come by on her predawn rounds of tending the furnaces in her rooming houses, sat in darkness listening to the voices, to the gunshots that sounded like cannons, and to the rapidly descending footsteps. By the light of the street lamp Hattie saw Mac and O.B. get into their red Packard. Mac drove.

Two.38-caliber pistols were found on nearby streets the next day, one with a wooden handle, neither of them Mac’s or O.B.’s, which went into the river. Much was made of the pistols by police and press, and within a few days a Manhattan ballistics expert consulted by Albany Police Chief Dan Spurling would say unequivocally that the woodenhandled pistol was the death weapon. The chief believed the finding would lead to Jack’s gangland assassins. Within six months, Mac would be promoted to detective sergeant, O.B. to captain. O.B. bought Mac a new pearl-handled.38, and they went back out into the night that they ruled, a legendary pair now, more feared than ever as the tale ran in whispers through the streets: Yeah, those two pulled off the killing of the century in this town, one bad bastard gone.

Hitch your.38 to a star. Mac didn’t expect stardom, but began to think he just might live forever on the basis of being the man who put Legs away, solo. But Mac couldn’t say that out loud. So he wrote it in the kid’s composition book where he kept a record of his deeds. Only when the Governor began investigating Albany in 1943 did Mac burn the book, but until then, for twelve years, he and Jack were there on the page, to reconfirm the things that had happened, and that he had not hallucinated them after a binge: “Followed Diamond two days. Execution at Dove Street. Solo. Dead meat.” Mac called it an execution, not a murder, for he had served the highest order of his society, the assignment awesome by itself, nothing like it in his life as a cop. Proud Mac basked in the enormity of the growing legend, until he learned his role in it had been stolen, that he’d been eliminated from a most significant moment in American history: he, the man without whom there wouldn’t even be a moment, eliminated. You can imagine how Mac felt.

The Call

Herman Besch came to the table where Roscoe sat with Morty and Mac to say O.B. was on the line for Mac, the second time he’d called today.

“Tell him I went to Troy to get my laundry,” Mac said.

“He said he’s got people in cars outside and he wants you to go to his office the easy way.”

“Tell him I went up on the roof for a suntan.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Roscoe said. And he did. When he came back to the table he told Mac, “I said I’d try to persuade you to come in.”

“Not going.”

“He said he’s only kidding about turning in your badge.”

“Always a joker.”

“I think I calmed him down,” Roscoe said. “And I’ll fix it with Patsy. When O.B. sees he can’t win, he won’t fight it. I’ve seen this in him all his life.”

“I don’t turn in the badge, I don’t turn in the gun.”

“He wants to talk. I’ll go in with you.”

Roscoe called Patsy from Herman’s phone booth, and Patsy said O.B. was making too much of it and he’d cool him down. Roscoe told this to Mac. Joey Manucci drove Roscoe and Mac to police headquarters at Eagle and Beaver Streets, and Roscoe led the way into the chief’s inner office, where, Roscoe decided, O.B. had truly arrived. This was the place O.B. had moved toward as soon as he knew it existed, a true believer in authority. Half their lives the Conway brothers worked the same territory, O.B. after the dominance, Roscoe not interested. O.B. called himself the Doctor: “You had a problem? Why didn’t you call the Doctor?” On his desk he kept a small sign: “The Doctor is in.” The Doctor possesses the arcane knowledge that eludes you. The Doctor sees what ails you and can prescribe a cure. And Mac, walking beside Roscoe, is another of the arrived: quirky Mac, maker of dead meat. He had a calling, knew how it was done. O.B. didn’t have that assassin’s ease, but he and Mac both knew how to become, and they became; both knew how to be, and they are: final versions of themselves. It was a lesson to Roscoe.

O.B. was at his desk, sleeves rolled, red-and-ocher tie on a white shirt open at the collar, wearing his bifocals to read a complaint sheet. Roscoe and Mac stood in front of the desk. O.B. took off his glasses.

“So we’re here,” Roscoe said.

“You goddamn ingrate,” O.B. said to Mac, “after all I did for you.”

“Ingrate? You broke my jaw,” Mac said.

“Put your pistol on the desk,” O.B. said, his middle right knuckle a scab.

“Wait a minute,” Roscoe said.

But Mac took his pearl-handled pistol out of his back-pocket holster and, standing to the right of the desk as he had at Jack’s bed, told O.B., “I’m gonna break your jaw.”

When O.B. saw the way the pistol was rising in Mac’s hand, he moved his head away from it, and so Mac’s bullet did not enter the front of his jaw as Mac had intended, but his left temple, which sent O.B. to a new place. Mac then handed his pistol to Roscoe.

“Lunatic. You goddamn lunatic,” Roscoe said. “You’re as dead as he is.” He stared at O.B.’s head on the desk. “He’s my brother.”

“He was the best friend I ever had,” Mac said.

The walls of O.B.’s office were the same pale blue as Elisha’s final face.