Roscoe

The Beau Geste Revealed

There was Roscoe all over page one again: lofty pol, whorehouse lawyer, now intermediary for the killer-cop who killed his brother. What he must be going through. See Roscoe in mourning with his sister Cress, see widow Hattie in her weeds, see the police honor guard standing at the hero’s grave.

“I never thought he’d die in bed,” said Hattie. “But to have my little Mac do him. And I put them together.”

O.B.’s death put her in tears at first, weep, stop, weep again. Then she was over it. O.B. was an erratic, mediocre husband, not such a bad lover, a pal who made her feel like an insider, told her everything that wasn’t an official secret, brought her fresh bread and cake from the Jewish bakeries, roasts and chops from the Armenian butcher, never came by empty-handed before or after they were married. And why did they ever marry? Well, he made her feel safe, and he chased her, as he chased so many, but probably he married her for more reasons than her enduring nubility: one, because it would — oh, sibling treachery — one-up Roscoe, whom, two, Hattie loved in her way-premarital blockade. But Hattie also had her reasons: one, Ros wasn’t available to her, the way Veronica wasn’t available to Ros, who therefore married Pamela, as Hattie therefore married O.B.; and, two, Hattie, invincibly lonely, always has to marry somebody.

Mac immediately pleaded guilty when charged with first-degree murder. I did it, he said, give me the chair. Sorry, Mac, you can’t plead to the capital crime. You need a lawyer, and don’t ask Roscoe for any more favors. Mac stopped eating in jail, wanted to die; so many maniacs in this suicide roundelay: Jack and Elisha, and then O.B. deciding that stealing Mac’s women and ending his career as a cop were mere amusements, and Mac assuming a jaw-shot would be judged as tit-for-tat, all of them lying to themselves as they designed their own finales. From his car on the curving road to O.B.’s new grave in St. Agnes Cemetery, Roscoe saw where Hattie’s fourth husband, Benny (the) Behr, another one, was buried: Benny, who blew a hole in his head with a shotgun when he couldn’t stand the pain in his spine. No hallowed ground for you, Ben, your place is with the suicidal trees. But Hattie wouldn’t hear of that, and confessed to the chancellor of the Albany Catholic Diocese that she was the one who blew that hole in Benny’s pain. Bless me, Father, I did murder. Punish me, not him, such a good man, how could I sit there and watch him suffer and do nothing to help him? The chancellor believed Hattie, and so Benny joined the hallowable dead in the St. Agnes underworld. The chancellor also said Hattie should tell the police what she did, but she told only Roscoe, and nobody prosecuted St. Hat — after all, she didn’t do it. The chancellor kept Hattie’s confession to himself, as did Roscoe, and it remained secret even to Benny.

O.B.’s fresh grave lay alongside Felix’s obelisk, which rested on a pedestal into which the name Conway was engraved; and the pedestal was losing ground to the encroaching sod.

“You see that?” he said to Cress.

“Of course I see it,” she said. “Mama’s and Papa’s graves.”

“I mean the sod. Look at the sod.”

“Yes, the sod. They’re under it.”

“I mean we should come back up and cut away that sod. It’s overgrowing the stone.”

“If you cut away the sod the grass dies, and then it comes back as clover and dandelions.”

Forget it. Roscoe would come alone. Cress had been a lovable sister, but grew into a dotty spinster with selectively skewed memories: all the celebratory minutiae of Felix’s history as mayor, but not a whit of recollection of his removal from office, and no acknowledgment that he had lived half his later life in hotel exile from the family. It was not seemly to have such memories.

Mayor Alex, the fire chief, half the city government, police chiefs from other cities, and a hundred friends circled the grave for O.B.’s ceremonial descent to the eighth floor, no more worry about Albany’s evildoers. No evil down there, either; only pain. Get ready for the boiling pitch, brother barrator, and I may be along presently. Look among the trees for Elisha when you get down there and tell him I’m on the verge of decoding his scheme. But he’s probably elsewhere, you don’t know where in hell to look for that man. And tell him I’ve decided the windshield head-bump injured his prefrontal cortex, which brought on all that anxiety and chloral hydrate, my fault. I hit the brakes, another oblique homicide. Send my regrets.

Monsignor Tooher from St. Joseph’s gave O.B. a full Jesus sendoff, and Roscoe came close to weeping when he remembered the adolescent O.B., for, since Felix was usually on family leave, Roscoe half-raised his brother in those years, Rozzie and Ozzie inseparable: trapping yellow birds with George Quinn, running on top of freight cars; O.B., learning the hard way, fell and broke his arm. Roscoe taught him about Patsy’s chickens and Eli’s horses, took him to the burlesque at the Gayety to see Millie DeLeon shake herself and throw her garters to the audience; also introduced him to a community of reluctant virgins who tested their own limits with Roscoe and then with O.B., who became an apt student of their restraint. To civilize him, Roscoe took him regularly to Harmanus Bleecker Hall to see Chauncey Olcott, Lew Docksteader’s minstrels, Lillian Russell, the Barrymores, even a Shakespeare, was it Twelfth Night? But the theater never penetrated O.B.’s brain. He had no use for abstract or imposed pleasure, unless it was a woman sitting on his lap. He lived for women, God bless them every one. He also kept on rolling beer kegs for Felix until the brewery closed, then signed on as Patsy’s beer protector. From the McCall brothers he learned truculence as a survival trait; learned so well that Roscoe talked Patsy into letting him exercise it on the force so he wouldn’t turn into a hoodlum. And then O.B. rose, and fell. The newspapers thought they loved him: “Farewell to the Doctor, Who Kept Gangsters out of Albany.” They know about Jack: the sotto-voce legacy that’s now his epitaph. And there you go, O.B., never a bad brother, just a remote one: Roz and Oz, fraternal strangers after adolescence. But he was a blood presence, and now isn’t. First Roscoe without Elisha, now without O.B., a pair without whom Roscoe would be somebody else. He looks into the grave as he gives O.B. the okay to move on, and he knows another small lobe of his soul is atrophying.

“We should talk,” Alex said to him as they walked away from the grave. Roscoe saw Veronica in the moving crowd and returned her nod.

“Now?” he said to Alex.

“As soon as possible, privately.”

Roscoe gestured toward a slope with more illustrious obelisks and statues of angels. “No eavesdroppers up there,” he said.

“Fine.” Alex gestured for Roscoe to lead the way up the grassy incline.

Roscoe and Alex (2)

“I worry about you,” Alex said, a marble cherub hovering behind him. He stood tall, sharp in his black tie on gray collar, getting his old weight back. “This is almost too much to bear. Witnessing it, arranging it yourself. God, Roscoe, I’m so sorry. I wanted to say this at the wake.”

Weary Roscoe sat on the marble sarcophagus of Ebel Campion, the North End undertaker, a good fellow. Ebel would not consider the sitting an imposition. Probably glad for the visit. And Roscoe said to Alex, “It’s good of you, my boy. I’m in a bad place. O.B. was a decent brother, a foolish man. I’m trying to understand him.”

“I’m trying to understand you,” Alex said. “You’re central to every disaster — my father, the Patsy-Bindy thing, beating up editors, the Notchery scandal, the Dutchman and that murderous whore, now poor O.B. and mad Mac. What’s next for you, Roscoe, wholesaling opium? White slavery? I wouldn’t sell you an insurance policy. You’re a bad risk.”

“I do seem to ride the lightning,” Roscoe said.

“I worry. I worry about Gilby’s case. These are not good omens.”

Ah yes, Gilby’s case.

“It’s two days away. The judge may decide you’re a villain yourself, to be such a friend to villainy.”

“Only a judicial villain could make such a ruling, and we have none so injudicious in Albany.”

“Are you ready for Marcus Gorman? He’s a great trickster.”

“God and natural motherhood are on his side. We can’t lose.”

“I don’t think I follow.”

“Righteousness doesn’t stand a chance against the imagination, Alex.”

“I’d like to believe that. But if Mother loses Gilby, she’ll fall apart.”

“I won’t let that happen.”

“That goddamned cunt.”

“The expressive word. I tell you, Alex, Roscoe is ready for whatever she offers, and you’ll see that not only is he capable of change, Roscoe is capable of changing the world. I am a lonely man, but I am a crowd. I grow old. But ancient salt is the best packing.”

“You talk riddles.”

“The poetry of the giants, my boy. You see before you a transfiguration, a man so chastened by experience that he has shunted all his old faults into the brotherly grave. He is awash in mortification. He’s bought several new hair shirts, and he may even go to church.”

“Don’t go too far, old fellow. Lightning may light the church.”

“A new day is rising up from the fresh earth, and a new Roscoe stands astride it.”

“You sound like an old lush taking the pledge,” said Alex.

“Your tongue has a talent for brutish truth.”

“Isn’t all truth brutish?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Roscoe. “I rarely encounter any.”

Isn’t It Romantic?

As Roscoe walked down the cemetery slope he decided that derision is not healthy behavior, a defense mechanism, really, and that he must get Alex beyond this attitude. A sour mouth is not becoming in a candidate. Also, Alex evoked Pamela, and, against Roscoe’s will, there she is in memory at the Ten Eyck, why? And there’s Elisha with her, and Veronica, ah, now he sees the day clearly, Patsy is at a peak, O.B. and Mac are ten months past Diamond, Alex the youth is spectating, and Jimmy Walker, Al Smith, and FDR are in crisis. Thirteen years gone, but it’s yesterday, and Roscoe must have his reasons for this.

It’s Tuesday afternoon, October 4,1932, the day Elisha, the reluctant gladiator, is on the road to glory. Pamela is striding into Elisha’s busy headquarters on the second floor of the Ten Eyck, just off the train, right out of Vogue in her maroon silk Schiaparelli dress with the emphatic bustline, complaining the front desk won’t give her a room. Roscoe, no longer regretting he ever knew Pamela, now thinking of her as his principal mentor in lousy love, explains that all twenty-five hundred rooms in the town’s ten main hotels have been overbooked for a month; the Trojan, the night boat that brought five hundred Tammanyites up from New York for the Democratic state convention, is a floating hotel this weekend; the New York Central is renting berths in Pullman cars on sidings; and even Al Smith had no room until Tammany boss John Curry dispossessed a delegate to give Al a bed in the DeWitt Clinton Hotel, headquarters for both Tammany and John McCooey’s Brooklyn organization, Tammany’s Siamese twin.

“Right now the town has about ten thousand too many people,” Roscoe says to Pamela.

“My brother-in-law’s going to be Governor,” she says. “I want a room.”

“Why don’t you stay out at Tivoli?”

“I want to be where things are happening.”

“Tivoli’s a fifteen-minute ride, including stoplights.”

“Goddamn it, Roscoe, I want a goddamn room. Release one you’re holding out for your goddamn thieving political celebrities.”

“How could I resist such a charming request?”

He sends her down the hall to see Hattie, who is in charge of spillover: placing people in her own rooming houses, or in one of the six hundred private homes that their owners have opened to visitors, sixteen hundred already placed. Ten minutes later, Hattie comes to see him.

“Don’t send me any more like her,” she says.

“There are no more like her,” Roscoe says.

“What a bitch. She didn’t want anybody’s house, didn’t want a room without a sitting room, didn’t want a ground floor, and it couldn’t be more than five blocks from here. I told her I had one house I wasn’t going to rent but she could have it, a third-floor walkup on Jay Street, take it or leave it.”

“She took it?” asks Roscoe.

“Yes. I didn’t tell her it used to be a whorehouse.”

The city has been ablaze with political firelight since Saturday, when Democrats began arriving to nominate a governor to succeed FDR, now the presidential candidate. They face two choices: incumbent Lieutenant Governor Herbert H. Lehman, FDR’s choice, the heavy favorite; and Elisha, Patsy’s choice, the underdog who doesn’t even want the job. It will take 464 votes to win, and on Sunday Lehman claimed 480 and Elisha 469, both sides lying, even to themselves. Neither can win without New York City’s vote, which isn’t quite what it used to be since the death of Tammany leader Charlie Murphy in 1924 splintered the boroughs. The Bronx has been in FDR’s pocket since he appointed its leader, Ed Flynn, his secretary of state, a ploy to make the Tammany splinter permanent. Queens and Richmond will still follow Tammany’s lead, Tammany’s own 154 votes are solid for Elisha, and Brooklyn’s 159 are on the fence. Now it is Tuesday, and despite three days of argument and horse-trading future patronage among big and little city bosses, neither candidate has a majority; but the odds on Elisha are dropping. Johnny Mack, dean of Albany bookmakers, is offering even money pick one; and the FDR-Lehman camp is baffled by the Albany upstart’s strength.

The Ten Eyck lobby is a crossroads for hundreds of delegates, for Elisha loyalists, visitors looking for convention passes, Party faithful showing their faces, plus the press and anybody who wants to hear the latest—“It’s over. Brooklyn went for Lehman. Forget it. Fourteen more votes and Elisha’s in.” A table-full of Democratic women volunteers greet all comers with the gift of large Elisha Fitzgibbon buttons, flyers with his sterling credentials, and on the wall above the women, Elisha looks out from a poster half the size of a movie screen. The volunteers usher all delegates and alternates immediately to the Conway corner to meet Roscoe, who will vet them on Elisha: yes, no, maybe. Roscoe tends to count maybes as yeses, and Elisha’s total is climbing. During a lull Roscoe goes up to second-floor headquarters to compare numbers with Elisha, who is hiding in an inner office, exhausted from three days of selling himself to strangers and to all the upstate county leaders he had once courted for Al Smith, many of those upstaters now promising unshakable support for him.

“I added sixteen prob ables in the last two hours,” Elisha says. “I’m beginning to worry I might get elected. What does Patsy say about McCooey?” Patsy, since Saturday, has been meeting with Tammany, Brooklyn, and key upstate bosses to break the impasse.

“McCooey’s with us, but his people are afraid they’ll lose the Jewish vote if they dump Lehman.”

“Do they know my wife is half Jewish?”

“Lehman is all Jewish. Al is coming in for the next session at four-thirty. I’ll be there with Patsy for that one.”

“What is Al thinking?”

“Nobody knows.”

Elisha puts his head on the desk. “I’m tired,” he says.

“That’s not allowed,” Roscoe says.

“All right, I quit.”

“That’s not allowed either.”

“Then I have only one thing to say. We’re seeing a lot of stammecule when what we need is the real bing with some EP on it.”

“Noted,” says Roscoe.

Jim Farley, FDR’s state chairman, convenes the delegates in the 10th Infantry Armory at 12:30 p.m., but not all delegates bother to attend. And at mid-afternoon, when five from Brooklyn come to the Conway corner wanting to meet Elisha, Roscoe can’t find him. Not at headquarters, not in the restaurant, phone off the hook in his room. Roscoe stalls the delegates, says he’ll be right back, and takes the elevator up. He knocks and says, “Elisha,” and Veronica opens the door a crack and says, “He’s not here.”

“Where is he? Talk to me, open the door.”

“I’m not dressed.”

“Good. Let me in.”

“Behave yourself.”

She opens the door with her hair and lipstick ready for public viewing, but wearing only slippers and a pink satin slip.

“Where’s Elisha? Five new Brooklyn delegates are downstairs waiting to pledge allegiance to him. They’re important.”

“He’s probably at the Armory. The last I saw him was his luncheon speech to the Democratic women. Pamela came over and wrapped herself around him.”

“She wraps herself around half the population. Don’t take it personally.”

“I came up here to take a nap and get dressed for Eleanor’s tea party.” The Governor’s wife has invited all women delegates to high tea at the Mansion at four-thirty. “Pardon my déshabillé,” Veronica says.

“You look the way you used to in my time. You never took it all off.”

In the most intense summer days of their romance, Roscoe would undress her in the Trophy House at Tristano, down to the chemise, which became her uniform of partial abandon. He could raise the chemise but not remove it. He felt he could live with that arrangement until their wedding.

“You can’t stay here,” she says to him. She takes a robe from her closet and slips it on.

He stares as she ties her robe. “I could love you right now,” he says.

“I know you could. I always know that.”

He moves close, strokes her throat with the back of his fingers.

“You can’t do this,” she says.

“I used to.”

“That was years.”

“I have to love you, Vee. The pressure is impossible.”

“Not yet.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. Someday, maybe.”

“I used to do this,” he says. He unties her robe.

“No, Roscoe, you can’t.” She reties the robe.

“You used to do what you wanted to do when you wanted to do it.”

“I gave that up.”

“Maybe you didn’t entirely.”

“How did you decide to come here now?”

“I thought Elisha was here. But I must have been listening to the planets. Maybe I saw something in your look this morning, or maybe you invited me with your silent music.”

“You think I still want to be that way. Just knock, and there she is.”

He opens her robe, but she turns away and stands by the bed.

“You can’t do anything to me, Roscoe. We don’t do this anymore.”

“It isn’t my fault that we don’t.”

“We can’t go over all that again.”

“I go over it every day of my life,” he says.

“We can’t. I made a decision about you.”

“You mean against me.”

“I have to live by it.”

“I regret that with every breath we both take, every breath of yours that might have been mine,” he says. “Haven’t you ever regretted it?”

“How can I talk about that?”

“I don’t know. All I can think about is that this is the first time in eighteen years I’ve been alone with you like this. I can’t believe you’re standing there looking the way you do.”

“Neither can I.”

He opens her robe, raises her slip. “I remember this,” he says.

“We can’t do this to him on his day, Roscoe.”

“Love me,” says Roscoe. His hand is on her in the old way.

“I love that you love me, Roscoe. But we can’t do this even if I want to, and I do seem to want to. But I won’t.” She pushes his hand away but it returns. “And I won’t let myself be tempted, no, Roscoe, no more.” She pushes his hand away. It returns. “Please, no more, Roscoe. Thank you, no more.” She pulls down her slip.

He sees strands of hair have fallen across one eye from her shaking her head no. He puts them in place with one finger, kisses her on the mouth. “I own some of you again.”

“No. You can’t own any of me. Nobody can own Veronica.”

“My memory can own anything.”

She reties her robe and says, “I shouldn’t have done this. You’re a love, Roscoe, but please go away.”

“Will I be a love after I’m gone?”

“Yes, but we won’t do anything about it. Once in a lifetime, Roscoe.”

Going down to the lobby in the elevator, Roscoe decides no devil in the eighth circle can punish him as exquisitely as Veronica. It might be years before they are again so close, and he hears her portal clanging shut. When he gets to the lobby the Brooklyn delegates are gone.

He goes to the Armory, which is decked with flags, bunting, banners, and some seventy-five hundred people, the place loud with marching-band music. He wants to find Elisha and the lost delegates, also get the latest delegate poll from Bart Merrigan and his team of canvassers. But Elisha isn’t here and the Brooklyn chairs are half empty. Bart says the latest figures look about the same, good, but it’s impossible to poll this crowd — more than a thousand delegates and alternates, a herd in chaos. They’ve listened to Albany’s Mayor Thacher welcoming them to town, and to a few warm-up speakers puffing the FDR-Garner ticket and the Democrat ic platform, especially their favorite wringing-wet plank: Bring back our beer. They’ve waited hours for their leaders to come up with a candidate to vote for and, still waiting, they’re now clanging cow bells, shaking castanets, waving signs and banners, blowing whistles. And then, in a spontaneous decision, they join in a raucous sing-along as the 10th Infantry Band plays “Sidewalks of New York,” Al’s tune; “Happy Days Are Here Again,” for Democrats every where who anticipate getting rid of Hoover; and “Anchors Aweigh” for FDR, who was assistant secretary of the navy under Wilson. As they sing, Roscoe sees their heads fly back and forth through the lofty reaches of the Armory, a mob of ready-to-wear delegates, one size fits all. If they only knew Elisha they’d vote for him, but, of course, they don’t vote, they dance headlessly to the tune being written this afternoon down at the DeWitt.

The Albany delegates — Mayor Thacher, a few aldermen and county supervisors, Party lawyers, a cadre of Democratic women-are, on Patsy’s strict orders, staying close to their chairs, ready to rise up and march in an instant demonstration for Elisha if it comes to a floor fight. Roscoe sees Alex sitting in an Albany aisle.

“Are you learning how we elect a governor?” Roscoe asks him.

“Yes, you sit around and sing,” Alex says. “I thought maybe somebody might argue about something.”

“They’re arguing, but it doesn’t show.”

“I love it anyway, Roscoe. It’s true American democracy made visible.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Roscoe says.

“What happens tonight, when the convention ends?”

“We celebrate. The town is waiting to party.”

“I’m ready to be the son of the new Governor.” And Alex shows Roscoe his hip flask.

“Precocious,” Roscoe says. “But pace yourself, young fellow. It’s going to be a long night.”

The band segues into “Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?” for the New York City delegates, the tin-pan theme song of their ex-Mayor Jimmy Walker, who wrote it. Ah, Jimmy, who isn’t here and won’t be, but is a key figure in this convention’s impasse. Trouble has come to Jimmy this year after two years of investigations, begun by FDR and carried through by Judge Samuel Seabury into Tammany corruption. And certain New York judges, the sheriff, and assorted flacks have fallen victim to the right-thinkers. But Seabury’s charges also have led to Jimmy’s being summoned to Albany for a hearing, at which FDR will sit as solitary judge of the evidence of Jim’s “gross improprieties”—secret bank accounts, evasive answers, an inexplicable million in a safe-deposit box, the usual. FDR could actually remove the Mayor from office, which would be a first in state history, and a truly grievous wound to Tammany’s power.

On the August night in 1932 that Jimmy steps off the train at Albany’s Union Station for his face-off with FDR, skyrockets explode above the tracks, and the roar of ten thousand greets him—“Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy”—from people on the platforms, people wall to wall in the concourse, people filling Broadway, people Patsy wanted and Roscoe summoned through ward leaders and city department heads, the largest political turnout since Albany welcomed home Al Smith in defeat in ’28.

Patsy, Elisha, and Roscoe are closer to Jimmy than they are to anybody else from New York, including Al. Jimmy spent sixteen years in Albany as an assemblyman, a senator, then Senate leader until 1925, when Tammany tapped him for mayor of New York. He has dined often at Tivoli, pulled many an all-nighter with Patsy and Roscoe, supported Patsy’s legislation; in short, a grand fellow who became the lovable, re-electable Gentleman Jimmy, the dapper political playboy with the showgirl mistress and the persona behind which Tammany could methodically loot the city, an arrangement dating back to Tweed. The persona elects, the money perpetuates.

Patsy, since his youth, has been an ardent student of the Tammany method and has evolved into Tammany’s staunchest upstate ally. Why wouldn’t he give Jim a royal welcome? Patsy will never forgive FDR for generating all this trouble. In 1945, the year FDR dies, and after supporting him for president for four terms, Patsy will still be saying, “I didn’t like him. He didn’t like Tammany Hall, and they were the only thing in the world for me.”

There is a front-page Times-Union news photograph of Jimmy, Patsy, and Roscoe as they walk through Union Station on that August evening in ’32. Jimmy the dude is in a double-breasted gray plaid with the one-button roll, his best vest and kerchief, his sailor straw stylishly tilted onto his right ear. Patsy is also wearing his sailor, but pulled down as if he fears it will blow away, and he bulges like a puffball out of his collar and suit — it’s those mashed potatoes, Pat. And Roscoe, a bit to the right, appears almost thin beside Patsy, his fedora turned up like a diplomat’s homburg, and though modesty will never let him say so, his presence is one of companionate intelligence and dignity beside Jimmy’s dash and Patsy’s dumplingscape.

This is a war photo: three warriors marching into combat against what Roscoe calls the Morality Plague, Seabury only its latest manifestation. The Plague comes out of oblivion every seven or so years and, like the locust, builds its white houses in public cemeteries, and propagates, with evil simplicity, “truth” and “honesty” as political virtues. This has the popular appeal of chocolate, the distorting capacity of gin. But Roscoe wonders: Since when has truth been a political virtue? Can you name one truth that is every where welcome? Certainly there are none in play in any quest for, or defense of, political power — Jimmy’s, for instance-for power is based in the deep comprehension and perverse love of deception, especially self-deception, and any man who seeks power through truth is either a fool or a loser. Roscoe knows of no candidate’s ever making a campaign pledge to reveal all his own self-inflation, all those covetous, envious, lascivious, venal, and violent motives that drive every move he ever makes in politics and will continue making if elected. Roscoe certainly did not invent the perverse forces that drive human beings, and he can’t explain any of them. He believes they are a mystery of nature. He concedes that a morally pure society, with candidates unblemished by sin and vice, might possibly exist somewhere, though he has never seen or heard of one, and can’t really imagine what one would be like. “But I’ll keep looking,” he concludes.

Mayor Jimmy comes to the railing of Union Station’s elevated platform overlooking Broadway, and he salutes and quiets the cheering mob, then evokes new cheers when he tells them, “I am here to fight.” Castellano’s marching band parts the crowd and leads him down the stairs and through the concourse toward the limousine waiting to take him to the Ten Eyck.

“Where is Patsy?” Jimmy asks Roscoe as they walk.

“He’s waiting for us outside.”

Bystanders hear the question and raise the cry, “Patsy, Patsy, Patsy,” and out of the crowd comes Pat, his smile as big as his hat, and the two old friends shake hands with excessive affection.

“Grand turnout, Pat,” Jimmy says.

“They all love you, Jim. Are you ready for that sonofabitch in the morning?”

“If he cuts me, we cut him in the election and he’ll lose the state.”

When they reach Broadway, Jimmy turns and tells the crowd, “I’m confident Governor Roosevelt will not remove me,” and, to another roar of cheers, he clasps his hands in the air like a triumphant boxer and slides into the back seat of the Packard limo.

FDR sits in judgment on Jimmy for three weeks, and his anti-Tammany stance enhances his presidential campaign, just as Al Smith’s link to Tammany had wounded his presidential bid. Tammany Hall, history’s tar baby. But FDR also knows the liability of removing a wildly popular New York City mayor, and he moves slowly toward such a decision. Then Jim, drowning in Seabury’s negative evidence, solves the dilemma by abdicating before FDR can fire him, and flees to Spain to hide. Suddenly he deabdicates and heads home when Tammany decides to run him for re-election, and to hell with FDR. But the turbine of his ocean liner breaks down at Gibraltar.

Now, while the 10th Infantry Band plays his theme song at the convention, Jim is en route home on another ship, but maybe too late. You shouldn’t have left, Jim. His renomination as mayor, though not a sure thing, remains the top priority for Tammany and Brooklyn, for his restoration is the key to the whole damn kingdom. Lehman, if elected governor, will, of course, echo FDR’s hostility to Jimmy’s comeback; but Patsy assures and reassures Curry and McCooey that as governor Elisha will never act against Jim, and that state patronage under Eli will open out like the petals of a great golden flower, and the Tammany-Brooklyn twins, along with Albany, will inherit the earth.

The Showdown

It is five o’clock in Tammany’s eleventh-floor suite at the DeWitt, and Al Smith is late. Roscoe, in memory, sees Curry and McCooey, with kindred, drooping white mustaches, sitting on the same sofa, the divine duality without which there is no candidate. Patsy is in his usual armchair. Roscoe chooses to stand across the room, the keeper of the master list of delegates, all names alphabetical within each county, all maybes converted to yeses or nays, and Roscoe reports a surprising tally: Elisha six votes shy of the nomination, even without McCooey’s Brooklyn. This is bizarre! Curry says Tammany is still solid for Elisha, and the upstate total is slowly rising. This rise is partly the work of Bart Merrigan and his crew, who have been polling upstate delegates all day; also, where tactfully feasible, promising a persuasive envelope after the vote, if there’s a floor fight.

Money has come into play as Elisha closes on the brass ring. Some delegates wear “For Sale” signs on their chests, but most delegate purchasing requires subtle skills, and Bart excels at those, for he’s a likable fellow who makes friends instantly, he’s a veteran, as are many delegates, and he’s honest. Everything is based in trust, and money isn’t for everybody. Bart knows which delegations are open to suggestion, and he can read the honest men who’ll vote right. Albany cannot be passive in this battle after FDR’s threat of last night: “The enemies of Lehman will not only be defeated, they will be dead,” he said to the press. He means politically dead, but fortunately John Curry doesn’t give a rat’s tootie. He hates FDR for all his persecuting ways, is solid with Patsy and Elisha, and is waiting to put Jimmy back in City Hall. John McCooey, too, wants Jimmy back, and remains enduringly friendly to Elisha, still holding off his Brooklyn boys from tipping toward Lehman. But now Frank Roosevelt wants not just to overpower but to kill the enemy, and McCooey, not a suicidal fellow, has chosen restraint as his strategy, and by so doing holds the final balance of power.

It’s hard to remember when John McCooey, or Brooklyn either, was so central to the future of New York State, New York City, Albany, and Christ knows where else, all rising and falling on what John says at these meetings. He leaves the room to pee and futures are bought and sold, fortunes are made and lost, such leverage! But he’s an old man and this is killing him, maybe before the night is out. Jesus, this is difficult. Why does Lehman have to be a Jew, and why does Roosevelt hate us? He’d hate us even if Lehman wasn’t a Jew. There’s no need for that. John Curry and John McCooey are likable men; they take care of the money because there it is, as it always was. Somebody’s got to take care of it. Just because you’re born with money and don’t need to accumulate any, don’t mean you close out the less fortunate. Christ Almighty, Frank, it’s only a few million, nobody’ll miss it, don’t drive your bowels into a stupor. The true question is jobs and families, the flower of our meaning, the source of our blessedness, we who have been chosen to raise up our people. These people can’t make it on their own, Frank, but they’re our future, those tots of ours in carriages, little boys on the altar, darling girls playing hopscotch, God bless them all, the world is not Irish, Frank, and it was never Dutch, if you’ll pardon the expression. We’re trying to do right, elect progressive people who want to promote the general welfare of our great city and great state, we need people in office who matter, people like Elisha, who’ll do what is good for them, and for us. That’s all we ask.

Then Roscoe remembers how McCooey, coming back from a phone call, yet another pee, and still buttoning the fly, finally puts it: “I can’t keep all my people in line. They want Lehman.”

“We don’t need all your people,” Patsy says, and his flinty eyes are sparking as he looks over his little specs at McCooey. “Give us the six we can make it, John. Six.”

“Six might as well be sixty. Frank means what he says. If he gets in, and you know he will, he’ll cut us dead on patronage, state and federal both.”

“He’s already cut you dead. But Elisha won’t.”

“Or Jimmy,” says Curry.

But the Times and Daily News this morning quoted Al as saying he couldn’t support Jimmy for re-election. McCooey reminds everybody of this.

“Al won’t back Jimmy,” McCooey says.

They all have seen the papers. Patsy grinds his molars.

“Al says that, but he’ll go along with us,” says Curry.

“Where the hell is he?” Patsy asks.

McCooey shakes his head and sighs, so weary of this, and Roscoe remembers the door opening on Al just then. He enters in his rumpled tuxedo, back from an afternoon wedding, gravy on his shirt and satin lapel, and he’s had a few pops, wants to change and rest awhile before the convention reconvenes.

“Hello, Governor,” says Curry.

“Christ, haven’t you solved this yet?” Al says.

“Did you really tell the papers you won’t back Walker?” Curry asks.

“Jim’s all done,” says Al. “The people don’t want him in there anymore. Tell him not to get off the boat.”

“We’re running him,” says Curry, “and we’ll elect him.”

“If you run him, I’ll run for mayor against him.”

“On what ticket?”

“I could run on a Chinese laundry ticket and beat you,” Al says.

“We’re very close on Elisha,” Patsy says.

“You’re not close,” says Al, “you’re finished.”

“Lehman’s people are asking if Elisha will take lieutenant governor,” McCooey says.

“No,” says Patsy.

“What’s the difference whether he takes it or not?” says Al. “They don’t need him. This argument’s done and over. Lehman’s through the roof.”

“You’re with Lehman?” Patsy says.

For six weeks Al has been promising Patsy and Roscoe he won’t endorse Lehman unless Curry does; won’t do FDR any favors. Al brought FDR out of physical retirement to become Governor in ’28, and FDR nominated Al for President, but this June, at Chicago, FDR took the presidential nomination away from Al, and the happy warrior went into a deep and angry sulk. But tonight he is back in the spotlight.

“Lehman,” says Al, “supported me all-out in ’28. He gave me half a million, and I’m with him till the cat comes back. I’m nominating him tonight.”

“You hook-nosed sonofabitch,” Patsy says, “you did it again.” He stands up and Roscoe sees that curled fist. “You threw us in.”

“You green baloney,” says Al, “you don’t even belong in this room. You’re still a truck driver in my book.”

“Are you giving us those six?” Patsy asks McCooey.

“I’m tired, Patsy. We held it as long as we could. It was a good fight.”

Patsy turns to Curry. “What do you say to this, John?” he asks.

“Tell Elisha we’re solid with him for lieutenant governor,” Curry says.

Pluperfect Memory

Roscoe and Alex separated at the bottom of the cemetery slope. Joey Manucci opened the back door of the limousine for Roscoe as he slid in beside Hattie-with-no-more-tears.

“What was that all about?” she asked.

“He’s worried about me,” Roscoe said. “He thinks I attract disasters.”

“You attracted me.”

“You’re not a disaster, you’re a sexual force of nature.”

“Roscoe,” Joey said, “you’re not making a pass at the widow, are you?”

“She made a pass at me,” Roscoe said.

“I’m telling the priest,” Joey said.

“Good,” said Hattie. “Tell Mother Superior too.”

“I myself find this shocking,” Roscoe said. “I’m not used to sex in the cemetery. Tell me about 1932, the night Elisha lost to Lehman.”

“You mean did I have sex that night? No. And you were no help.”

“Don’t blame me for your dry spells. Do you remember Pamela that night?”

“She stayed at one of my places. Obnoxious woman. Attractive. She climbed all over Elisha whenever she saw him.”

Roscoe can now see Pamela sitting with the Albany delegation during that last session of the Democratic convention. The night is growing wild as the politicized mob, almost as many thousands on the street outside the Armory as inside, rushes the police line to see the historic confrontation of Al Smith and FDR. Will they spit in each other’s eye? Will Lehman and Elisha come to blows? Pamela sits in the first Albany aisle, two down from Veronica and Elisha, in Patsy’s empty chair. Pat the loser won’t sit, won’t put himself on display. Elisha is in his chair when Farley mentions his name as the next speaker, and fevered applause breaks out for the almost-Governor, what a fight you put up. They love you now, Eli; but ten minutes from now? Who can say how long love lasts?

Roscoe, standing by the stairs to the speakers’ platform, watches Elisha rise, then lean over and kiss Veronica. Pamela rises also, and as Elisha passes her on his way to the microphone she does her boa-constrictor number, big huggypoo, big kissypoo. Once past Pammypoo, Elisha makes a speech that has more sincerity and solidarity than is necessary from a betrayed man. It is an honest speech from a profoundly loyal Democrat. He truly wants FDR to be the new President, and Lehman the next Governor; never wanted that for himself, was repaying the Patsy debt, and will go on repaying it for two years as lieutenant governor, the job Patsy now calls the door prize: no authority, not much patronage goes with it, and your only hope of advancement is for the Governor to drop dead. But Elisha cannot wish anyone ill, or be false to himself, which is why Roscoe, try as he might with memory’s eye, cannot see in Elisha’s behavior the lie that would make all that flirty intertwining with Pamela anything more than family effusion. Did he actually go off with her to her Jay Street lair this afternoon when they both disappeared? Did he take her to some dark speakeasy for a back-room flip? He could have focused on her in any number of rooms at the Ten Eyck, but Roscoe doesn’t believe these possibilities. Roscoe sees Elisha’s face in memory and cannot find a trace of the necessary concupiscence, or intrigue.

“Stop at the grocery,” Roscoe said to Joey. “Get me four Hershey bars. I won’t have time for lunch.”

And when he was gone Roscoe asked Hattie, “Do you think Elisha ever got it on with Pamela?”

“God knows she was ready,” Hattie said. “And he did have a bit of a stable back then, didn’t he?”

“I don’t know how serious he ever was about that.”

“He was amused by women.”

“Many are. He was also at a low point, with the mill and the loss of his daughter. And he was drinking too much. He was in New York often, and she did live there.”

“Why are you bringing this up now?”

“I’m trying to imagine him as Gilby’s father.”

Hattie went silent at that, and in her silence Roscoe again sees the finale of the convention, the thrill, the bathos really, of the reconciliation on that stage when FDR shakes hands with Al and says, before a hundred newsmen and the whirring newsreel cameras, “I’m glad to see you, Al, and that comes from the heart.” And Al retorts, “How are you, old potato?” Hats fly into the air, and roars erupt from the headless, hatless mob at the restoration of affection between its not-quite and next presidents. Even Roscoe feels, against his will, this ready-to-wear emotion in his throat as enmity is publicly buried and harmony rises from the grave. But Al really will not stay harmonious for very long after this night, for it will quickly become clear that he will never be a New Deal insider, that his days of power and influence are over. And he will then become FDR’s vigorous enemy. Nor are Roscoe and Patsy destined to be New Deal wheelers. Their dream — the Patsy dream that Roscoe borrowed — of proximate power at a more exalted level, also died with Elisha’s defeat. We came so close. But that’s that and quit brooding, says Roscoe. Think of tonight as the festive prelude to FDR’s presidential victory, which is only a month away: a Democrat in the White House at long last, a Democrat up at the Capitol.

Roscoe, Patsy, and their Albany legion will officially bury all rivalries, will deliver heavy pluralities for every Democrat on the ticket. They will awake on the election’s morning-after and Roscoe will call Patsy to say for the first, but not last, time, “Pat, we are Democrats, remember? And we are steeped in Democracy. We own the city, the county, the state, and the nation. Things could be worse.”

They also own the splendor of the night that follows the convention’s end, the midnight streets as bright and crowded as Times Square at the theater hour, lines forming in front of the restaurants, dance bands carrying on with their hot and sweet duty at the hotels, speakeasies guarded by plainclothes Albany cops against untimely raids by dry agents who should mind their own business on a night like this. Lights will burn all night long in The Gut, a time to get well, girls, and, in the Ten Eyck’s ballroom, Elisha’s private party is throbbing for half the town. Roscoe in memory sees his allies and kindred strangers shoulder to shoulder in the social afterglow of all that political stardust. He sees Hattie being wooed by a state senator whose name has long been erased from Roscoe’s memory. Bart Merrigan is ready to deck whoever pinched his wife on the elevator, but Bart can’t decide which of three men did it. The Democratic women are in great demand by the randy Manhattan delegates, and when Roscoe brushes against Veronica he says, “I remember you,” and she answers, “And I you.” Waxey’s beer is on tap, and Roscoe sees Mush monitoring the movement of two more kegs of it; but the Waxey-Mush axis will soon be redundant, the real goods coming back, and Roscoe’s Stanwix will again become the label of choice at political gatherings, also at all saloons hoping to prosper in the city. Mike Pantone’s six-piece jazz band is playing “Walking My Baby Back Home,” and in a corner to the right of the band, partly hidden by a potted palm, Roscoe sees Alex offering his silver hip flask to his Aunt Pamela, precocious youthful reveler joining the party. They learn quickly.

Thirteen years later, alone with Hattie in the back seat of his car, Roscoe will ask her, “Where did Alex stay that night? Did he have a room at the hotel, or did you get him one?”

“Wouldn’t he have stayed out at Tivoli?”

“I doubt it. He was into the action. Do you remember seeing him at any point that night?”

“I remember him looking very young and very cute, and talking to women.”

“Which women?”

“Older women. That’s who were there. There weren’t many his age.”

“Which older women?”

“Damn it, Roscoe, how can I remember? Maddie Corrigan or Dodie Vance, maybe. I remember thinking they found a way to send their husbands home. And Pamela.”

“Alex with Pamela.”

“He was dancing with her, and I thought it was his social shyness, hanging out with the family, not quite ready to step out with a stranger. Does this surprise you?”

“Nothing surprises me, old Hat.”

And Roscoe mused on whether a one-night stand on Jay Street might have moved to Pamela’s place in New York. Alex often went down to the city from New Haven on weekends. It would explain his anxiety over Gilby’s custody case, and his fierce hostility to Pamela. And while Pamela’s line, “It’s a wise child that knows its father,” means nothing to Elisha, who’s beyond scandal, it could weigh as a genuine threat to Alex, who isn’t. A theory. And Roscoe can tell no one.

Roscoe’s Prayer to Elisha

Old father, who art in heaven,

Hallowed be thy name.

Thy bingdom come,

Thy will be done down here on earth.

Forgive us our trespasses, old boy,

And don’t worry about a thing.

Beau Geste (1)

Judge Francis Finn in shirtsleeves, his robe on a hanger on the corner coatrack, sat at his desk in his chambers, a wall of law books behind him, and watched the two benefactors who put him in this chair, Roscoe and Marcus Gorman, as they settled into leather armchairs facing him.

“Are we going to find a way to resolve this suit amicably?” he asked them both.

“Amicably between mother and son,” Marcus said.

In Marcus’s smile Roscoe saw the confidence of a man with encyclopedic precedents for the indisputable custody rights of mothers. We’ll be here all morning.

“I’ll want to talk with the young boy,” the judge said. “Is he in the courtroom?”

“He is, Your Honor, with his mother,” Roscoe said.

“You refer to his adoptive mother,” said Marcus.

“His mother in fact if not biological fact,” said Roscoe.

“The petitioner is here, Mr. Gorman?”

“She is. We are ready.”

“I have information worth airing before anything goes on the record,” Roscoe said.

“I’ll be pleased to hear it,” Marcus said.

“I’m not sure you’ll be pleased,” said Roscoe. “It’s about money. Pamela Yusupov is seeking custody of her son as a means of gaining money from the estate of the father, Mr. Danilo Yusupov.”

“She wants her son. The money will support them,” said Marcus.

“So she now says. But I am prepared to prove that Pamela, seeking money, not custody, approached Elisha Fitzgibbon months before his death. Veronica will testify to the amount she asked and how much they might have given to help her out. Pamela not only insisted on more, she wanted a continuing income. When Elisha rejected the idea she threatened to accuse him of fathering Gilby during a forcible encounter.”

“Oh, for chrissake,” Marcus said, “this is desperation strategy. This is melodrama.”

“In assorted ways, counselor,” Roscoe said. “I presume you’ve both heard the slanderous rumor that Elisha died by his own hand. His autopsy fully proves otherwise, that he was terminally ill and died of a coronary occlusion. I could affirm this with abundant fact and fanatical vigor if necessary, or I could, for the sake of our argument, hypothesize that, if he did take his life, he did so to protect his wife and his son. Elisha had readily agreed to adopt Gilby at birth and raise him as his own, for he was his own. He did not tell this to Veronica when he agreed to the adoption. She was still grieving to distraction over the loss of their five-year-old daughter and eager for another child. And he was not ready to admit that, in a bout of heavy drinking and debauched wildness, he had raped her sister. I can personally verify that Pamela is a supreme seductress, even when she isn’t trying, and that uncountable men have acted upon this obvious truth, Elisha being one of them. I don’t blame Pamela for their carnal encounter, nor did Elisha. He took the blame and lived with the shame, and in time did what he felt was necessary — he adopted his own sin and lived with it lovingly, giving the boy the fullest and richest life a father can give a son. He thought he’d lived the sin down, but then here it came back to plague him. Pamela, poor soul, fallen on hard times, sought financial relief through Elisha, and the man became unhinged. He was dying and he knew it, but when he tallied up the credits and debits he saw a way out. Pamela was determined to destroy his reputation to gain a bloodsucking income, but Elisha could not let that happen, nor could he chance the possibility that, in vengeance, she’d destroy not only him but his son Alex, and his beloved wife. And so he revealed to Veronica his shame and her sister’s threat. Pamela had no qualms about destroying her sister’s family. She had envied Veronica all their years growing up — Veronica the greater beauty and the fortunate wife; Pamela, the inferior little strawberry tart, always viewing herself as the sister in the cinders.”

“Jesus, Roscoe,” said Marcus. “Sister in the cinders?”

“I know you enjoy language, counselor,” Roscoe said. “And so Elisha, as a way of putting himself and the family beyond Pamela’s reach, designed his own death. You can’t blackmail a corpse. He knew that, for those aware of the blackmail, his death would be judged as the act of a shamed man who could not face public disclosure. But he also knew Veronica would understand why he was really doing this, and she did. He even told his secretary, just before his suicide, that the enemy was closing in and that Roscoe would understand who that was. And I certainly do. But Elisha misread his enemy’s perseverance. In the courtroom outside the door of these chambers on the first day of this hearing, Pamela whispered to Veronica, ‘It’s a wise child that knows its father.’ We all knew what she meant. Her blackmailing would continue. I wonder, counselor, did your client mention any of this to you?”

“Roscoe,” said Marcus, “you are a maestro. Your inventions are as entertaining as your rhetoric. But I fail to see your point. The father of the boy is Danilo Yusupov, and this is not disputed, not even by my client.”

“Perhaps she’ll change her mind,” Roscoe said, and he opened his briefcase, took out copies of Yusupov’s and Gilby’s blood tests, and gave them to the judge and Marcus.

“Mr. Yusupov’s blood group, which is O, doesn’t match Gilby’s, which is AB,” Roscoe said. “As you well know, Your Honor, such disparity is a legally sound basis of nonpaternity.”

“That’s correct,” said the judge.

“This is a fraud,” said Marcus. “You politicians can fabricate any document and you often do.”

Roscoe opened his briefcase and handed his listeners more papers. “A letter from Yusupov’s lawyer,” he said, “with verification of his blood test. Call the man in Los Angeles if you like. He resents Pamela’s lawsuit as much as we do. And finally,” he added, finding more papers, “Elisha’s and Pamela’s blood tests.”

“How did you get my client’s blood test?” Marcus asked.

“I married her,” Roscoe said. “We took blood tests together and I kept them. Call me sentimental. The blood groups of Elisha and Gilby are both type AB, and are compatible with Pamela’s blood group, which is A. This is not positive evidence that Elisha was the father, but it means he could have been.”

“We need time to investigate this, Your Honor,” Marcus said. “The paternity of Yusupov has never been in question before today.”

“Very true,” Roscoe said. “Yusupov rejected the child and behaved as if he never existed, and we now know he had good reason. And that’s how it remained until Pamela became a blackmailer. Her story of rape, however true, will be just another lie when her blackmail and perjury go public, and you should convey to your client, Marcus, that we stand ready to prosecute her for both blackmail and for perjury in representing Mr. Yusupov as Gilby’s father when she knew he was not. Let’s face it, counselor, your client is a scheming and perpetually lubricious woman, and I will celebrate that fact with exuberant fanfare if we go forward. I also admit the possibility that she was truly confused and believed she had diddled Yusupov when it was actually Elisha, or Elisha when it was actually Yusupov. Or maybe it was John Gilbert, for whom Gilby was named. Perhaps she could track down Mr. Gilbert’s blood type and seek relief from his estate. I don’t want to seem too severe with Pamela for losing track of her multitudes, and for the sake of Elisha, we will not bring any charges at all if she desists from this charade.”

Roscoe closed his briefcase.

“I trust, gentlemen, that these hypothetical facts will be kept confidential. Elisha’s death, which is not provable in this context unless we decide to prove it, stands as a heroic act of redemption — a beau geste, if you will — a noble gesture, a self-martyrdom by a saintly man, and his good name must not be despoiled. I have no intention whatever of prolonging this hearing any further, and if opposing counsel has no objection, Judge Finn, I move that you quash the custody petition, considering perhaps J. Hogan, ‘In the Matter of Gustow,’ that, ‘while the parent ordinarily is entitled to the custody of a child, the welfare of the child may be superior to the claim of the parent.’ I hope we can now have a speedy conclusion.”

The judge looked to Marcus, who said, “I’ll speak to my client.”

In the Courtroom

Veronica’s and Gilby’s smiles radiated sunbeams as they heard the judge say, “. the home life of the child for his entire life has been so fortunate that it certainly should not be changed in favor of a technical mother’s care, and all parties now agree the boy should stay where he is, with the relator having the right to visit at reasonable times. The habeas corpus writ is quashed and dismissed.”

Roscoe recognized fury in Marcus’s look, deceived by his client, a perjurer who didn’t even tell her lawyer the truth. Losing your touch, Marcus? Can’t tell the real ones from the fakers anymore? Roscoe felt warm palpitations in his pericardium imagining Pamela baffled by Marcus’s attack on her. Rape? Elisha? What has rape got to do with anything? I never said Elisha raped me. But Marcus can’t quite believe her. Even if there was no rape, there was action, and Gilby is over there to prove it. But Daddy Yusupov was no daddy, and that’s a fact. He was just an ex-Georgian prince, professional Russian exile, who had three million once, so they said. Pamela tried to tap into what was left of it and, another fact, she failed. Fashionable in black chalk-striped jacket and burgundy dress, her cubist bee-stung lips so out of fashion they are back, Pamela sat beside Marcus in stunned condition, hit by a brick she wouldn’t be quieter, eyes glazing as she wonders how the world could have changed so suddenly. She was yesterday’s darling and the world was still possible, with money on the table. But this is today, sweetheart.

Roscoe insisted that Gilby speak to his mother before they left the courtroom. He was wearing his blue suit and a new red-and-blue necktie Veronica had bought him for this event. The necktie aged him five years, Roscoe decided.

“I don’t want to talk to her,” Gilby told Roscoe.

“Just say goodbye, that’s enough.”

“The judge said she could visit me.”

“She probably won’t.”

Gilby went across the courtroom to where Pamela was hiding under her picture hat. “I came to say goodbye,” he said to her.

“I’m so very sad to be losing you,” Pamela said.

“I’m not. Goodbye.”

Roscoe saw the sag of Pamela’s shoulders, her collapsed expression. She seemed to be shrinking as he watched. He stayed at a distance from her but walked to Marcus to offer a collegial handshake.

“I’m glad we didn’t get into hand-to-hand combat,” Roscoe said.

“I underestimated you, Roscoe. You are utterly without scruples. I congratulate you.”

Roscoe spoke a few sentences of gratification to several news reporters in the hallway and then walked down the corridor with Veronica and Gilby on either side of him, the three arm in arm, so cooing, so happy they couldn’t, didn’t have to, wouldn’t talk about this thing, it was such a fat, happy, obvious fact of life. They giggled as they waited for the elevator, and when it came they all stepped on together, single file, arms still locked, and Roscoe said to the elevator man, “I greet you in a state of bliss, Webster.”

“Win one, did you, Mr. Conway?” Webster asked.

“I think I did.”

“You’re not sure?”

“I’m being modest.”

“He won,” said Veronica. “He so won. We all won.”

Webster closed the accordion gate of the elevator but saw another passenger coming and reopened it. Pamela. Roscoe saw Marcus walking alone in the opposite direction, toward the far stairway. Pamela stepped toward the elevator, unaware of the enemy within. She stopped as Webster opened the accordion.

“Going down,” Webster said.

“You goddamn lying bastard,” Pamela said, seeing Roscoe.

Roscoe stepped off the elevator into her words, moved into her face to block her eye contact with Veronica or Gilby. “What was that, my dear? Were you speaking to me?” And without turning he added, “Webster, take my friends down. I’ll only be a minute.” And Webster shut the elevator door.

“Rape?” Pamela said. “Rape?”

“Why not rape?” Roscoe said. “It’s as popular as blackmail.”

“Liar, liar, liar!” Pamela shrieked.

“Ah me, the perjurer offended by a falsehood,” Roscoe said.

There was no rape by Elisha. Roscoe invented that. But truth is in the details, even when you invent the details. It was sweet the way true and fraudulent facts wrapped themselves around each other so sleekly. The next sentence is a lie. The preceding sentence is true. Which means the first sentence is a lie, and the second sentence is true, which means the first sentence is true and the second is a lie, which means the first was a lie again, or does it? A pair of impregnable truths. True-and-false equality, we call that.

“It wasn’t rape,” said Roscoe, “and it wasn’t even Elisha, was it?”

“You think you’ve won,” Pamela said.

“Elisha won. He prepared us for you. Nobody will believe anything you say from now on, my dear.”

“There are many ways of letting the truth be known.”

“Yes, and if anything is said anywhere, anywhere, we will prosecute you, in this city Give scandal, you’ll get jail time, and that’s a guaranteed fact of your future. Don’t bring your venal jealousy back to this town, Pamela. Leave the family alone.”

The elevator arrived and Webster opened the doors. Roscoe gestured to Pamela and they stepped into it.

“Do you have any money?” he asked.

“Millions,” she said.

He took a roll of cash from his pocket and peeled off two one-hundred-dollar bills. He offered them to her. She stared at them.

“Take a train somewhere. Shuffle off to Buffalo.”

“You’re a lousy bastard,” she said, taking the money.

“Thank you, Webster,” Roscoe said when they reached street level. He gestured to Pamela to step out first and held the street door for her. “What’s your phone number in New York?” he asked her. “We should stay in touch.”

Pamela thought that was a riot.

Beau Geste (2)

Veronica sat in the back of the car and told Gilby to sit in front as Roscoe drove from the courthouse back to Tivoli. She had not yet thanked Roscoe for the victory. Gilby had thanked him with his facial expression of joy, but that had now turned quizzical as the mystery hit him.

“Why did we win?” Gilby asked.

“I convinced the judge your father made a life for you that was better than any other you could have,” Roscoe said.

“What about her? Will she try again?”

“No chance. She’s gone.”

“What about the Yusupov man?”

“He’s gone too.”

“Gone where?”

“Out of your life.”

“Yusupov isn’t my father?”

“Never was.”

“Why did they say my name was Yusupov?”

“She said it was. She was married to him.”

“Is my name still Yusupov?”

“Never was. Rivera is the name on your birth certificate, but that’s wrong too and we’ll change it.”

“Who’s Rivera? Was he my father?”

“A woman named Rivera was Pamela’s housekeeper in Puerto Rico when you were born.”

“She named me after a housekeeper? Why?”

“Same reason she threw hard-boiled eggs at her poodle.”

“What’s my real name?”

“Gilbert David Fitzgibbon, same as always.”

“Who’s my father?”

“Your father is still your father. Still the main man in this family.”

“Is Alex my cousin?”

“He’s your brother.”

“My father is his father?”

“That’s how it used to be, that’s how it should be, that’s how it will be.”

“My father wasn’t married to Pamela when I was born.”

“No, thank God.”

“That means I’m a bastard, doesn’t it?”

“Who said that?”

“People.”

“Your father would die if he heard you say that.”

“He already died.”

“Maybe, but don’t let him hear you say it again. Even if he’s up at Tristano he can hear that kind of stuff.”

“Are we going to Tristano?”

“I certainly hope so.”

“When?”

“Talk to your mother about it.”

“If we see my father up there we can ask him who my real father is.”

“I doubt he knows,” Roscoe said. “I doubt anybody knows.”

“People say I look like my father.”

“So does your bulldog.”

“I don’t have a bulldog.”

“No, but if you had one he’d look like your father. That’s how it goes.”

“How did my father die?”

“His heart left him. I think he gave it away.”

“To who?”

“To you.”

“I don’t understand, Roscoe.”

“That’s because you look like a bulldog.”

Beau Geste (3)

At Tivoli, Roscoe called Alex and gave him the news. Alex said that was fantastic and asked Roscoe to come to City Hall to talk.

“Your mother is preparing lunch,” Roscoe said. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

Gilby went elsewhere, and Roscoe sat in his usual chair in the east parlor and watched two of Veronica’s servants, Joseph the butler and Jennifer, a kitchen maid, set trays of food on the buffet in the dining room. Then Joseph came toward Roscoe with two glasses and a bottle of Mumms in a bucket of ice. Veronica came back with a box of Barracini chocolate creams, which she opened and set in front of Roscoe.

“Shall I open the champagne, Mrs. Fitzgibbon?”

“Please do, Joseph.” And the butler popped the cork and poured for two. Veronica closed the sliding doors to the dining room and sat across from Roscoe on the sofa.

“I got these chocolates for you in New York last week,” she said, putting a cream in his mouth and kissing him as he began to chew. She picked up her champagne.

“To your genius,” she said.

“I had great incentive,” he said.

They clinked and drank. She kicked off her shoes and tucked her legs under her, which put her knees on view like twin works of art. “Now tell me how you did it,” she said.

“I told them she was blackmailing you because Elisha raped her and fathered the boy, and that it was all true.”

“Roscoe, you didn’t say that. That’s horrible. You didn’t.”

“I did. I said he committed suicide to remove himself as the target of her blackmail, and that you understood why he did it.”

“God, Roscoe, what have you done? How could you say such awful things about us?”

“I also said it was all hypothetical and nobody would believe her rape story anyway, when and if her perjury and blackmail went public. I told Marcus we’d prosecute for blackmail if she didn’t end the custody fight.”

“Everybody will believe the rape story. It’ll be all over town.”

“I’m sure Marcus realizes by now I invented it.”

“But how could you say such a thing about Elisha?”

“He asked me to.”

“How did he ask you?”

“Little by little he’s been revealing what he did to protect you and Gilby. All our lives I could read what he was and wasn’t saying. Now I keep discovering what he did and didn’t do. Didn’t this story work? Isn’t she gone? Aren’t you and Gilby safe? And Alex?”

“I think we are. The family’s closer than ever. Alex is like a second father to Gilby since he came home from service. They go riding. He’s taking him to Army’s opening football game at West Point.”

“There you are. Elisha knew what he was doing.”

“You knew what you were doing. You’re the one who made it work.”

“I only did what he told me to do.”

“But rape, Roscoe, why rape? It’s the last thing Elisha would ever do. She never said he raped her.”

“I know that. Did she even say they’d been lovers?”

“That was her blackmail.”

“Was it?”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not sure. I’m waiting for further word from Elisha.”

Beau Geste (4)

In the Mayor’s corner office at City Hall, seated in his highbacked leather armchair at his hand-carved oak desk, framed by the American and Albany flags, with the portrait of Pieter Schuyler, Albany’s first Mayor, looking down at him, Alex, in his tailor-made, pale-gray herringbone and repp tie, had become new, had traded his lowly infantryman’s status for that of commander of the city. He was on the telephone as Roscoe sat down across from him. He winked at Roscoe as he talked, and when he hung up he leaned across the desk to shake Roscoe’s hand.

“Congratulations, old fellow,” he said. “You did good.”

“I told you not to worry.”

“You certainly did. What was your argument?”

Art Foley, Alex’s secretary, came into the office with the afternoon mail and set it in front of the Mayor.

“This isn’t the place to talk,” Roscoe said when Foley went out.

“All right,” said Alex. “We’ll go for a walk. But I have news. The Supreme Court just ruled that state troopers can’t be present at the polling places. Too much intimidation of the voters.”

“Another battle won,” said Roscoe. “What’s next in the campaign?”

“A radio speech tomorrow night,” said Alex, “right after Jay Farley. He’s harping on whores and immorality.”

“That’s last week’s news.”

“His new line is, let’s clean up the city for the returning soldier boys, give them a pure town to come home to.”

“It really is an excellent idea,” Roscoe said.

“What?”

“Cleaning up the town. Give the whores a vacation till after election, and padlock the whorehouses.”

“Didn’t the whorehouses close after the raid?”

“Does a whore ever really close her legs?”

“What about the Governor padlocking the Notchery? It looks like we’re taking dictation from him and Jay Farley.”

“Politically motivated is our line on the Notchery and on Farley’s view of it. We can’t let the Republicans take the moral high ground. We must protect our soldier boys and young people against goatish lust and illicit smut. We raid the after-hours strip clubs, Mother’s, the Blue Jay Bar, we nail Broadway Books for pushing pornographers like Henry Miller, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and those dirty Cuban comic books, then we sweep the newsstands and confiscate every girlie magazine that shows more titty than is absolutely necessary in a virtuous society.”

“That’s a freedom-of-speech issue. How do we get away with it?”

“We don’t indict anybody, and after the election things go back to normal. Meantime, it takes people’s minds off Jay Farley.”

“I saw Patsy this morning and he didn’t mention you had this in mind,” Alex said.

“He hasn’t heard it yet. I just invented the idea.”

“Well, then, fine, fine,” Alex said with a smile, “very fine. How will Bindy take it?”

“Bindy can’t object. He’s got a consorting charge hanging over him. We’ll organize it all with Burkey and Donnelly.” Melvin Burke had been named acting police chief after O.B.’s death, and District Attorney Phil Donnelly would prosecute. “We’ll make the raids tomorrow afternoon, in time for you to talk about it on the radio.”

“Sex on the radio?”

“It’s an idea whose time has come. We’ll call it something else.”

“Shouldn’t we let Patsy know the plan?”

“He’ll be thrilled. We’ll tell him after we take our walk.”

They left City Hall and walked along Eagle Street, past the Court of Appeals and the County Courthouse and up Elk Street with its old townhouses, once the city’s elite Quality Row, sometimes compared in elegance to Gramercy Park. The Governor’s Mansion had been at number 13 Elk in the last century. Now the whole street was aging with scant grace, two nightclubs on the block and one handsome building defaced with a kitschy black-and-white Art Deco façade. What would Henry James say?

On the street Alex revealed Patsy’s news. The state Party leaders were thinking Alex might make a good run for governor in 1946: a decorated combat veteran with a Yale degree, an upstater who could speak well and think on his feet, a good-looking young fellow with a million-dollar smile. What else do you want in a governor? Well, will he get any votes? Oh, he will. And now Patsy has another reason to escalate this year’s totals: shove these numbers up your nose, Governor, and look how they love our boy Alex.

“I know Patsy would like a landslide,” Roscoe said. “I have it on our agenda. How do you feel about a run for governor?”

“I think I like it. Shouldn’t I?”

“Don’t get used to it. They don’t nominate upstaters. But we can try again to be the exception. You remember 1932?”

“I’ve been thinking about it all morning.”

“Six more delegates, your father might’ve been governor.”

“Maybe history will repeat.”

“And maybe they’d offer you lieutenant governor.”

“I wouldn’t take it.”

“Don’t say that. You can’t know where it might lead. Your father took it out of duty. He never even wanted to be governor. If he’d really fought for it in his heart, he might’ve got it. And he’d have been a memorable governor. He did as well with the number-two job as anybody ever does.”

Roscoe was feeling something new in his throat, a rising gorge that might choke him, resistance to doing this thing again. He couldn’t put Alex through it, couldn’t watch it; the incumbent would be very tough to unseat next year. Food for powder, Alex, food for powder. They walked across the park behind the old Albany Academy toward the Capitol, and Roscoe felt the long line of governors hovering over their lives: Cleveland at the top of the Capitol steps watching the torchlight parade (Lyman his grand marshal) coming up State Street, lighting his road to the White House in triumph over a paternity scandal: “Ma, Ma, where’s Pa?”; and Teddy Roosevelt racing a newspaperman up the Capitol’s seventy-seven front steps, ready to give an exclusive interview if he loses, which he won’t, for the press is the enemy; and our old pal Al Smith in wing collar and cutaway, standing for his 1928 portrait of a presidential loser; and FDR entering the Executive Chamber, held at the armpit by an aide, rotating his dead legs in braces in a simulated walk to the desk where he will sit in judgment on Jimmy Walker, the trial that will destroy Tammany; our delightful incumbent Governor trying now to do the same to the Albany Democrats; and, of course, Governor Elisha Fitzgibbon delivering his State of the State message to a joint session of the legislature: “My fellow New Yorkers — I wonder do you kitty? Do you cut pips?”

These images were neither nostalgic nor cautionary, but Roscoe thought they might be trying to reveal that everything familiar was illusory and to be avoided, and that only the mysteries in Eli’s double-talk and ambiguous death were worth pursuing: Eli feeding Roscoe ammunition for the battle against oblivion. This is not the end, Eli was saying. An imaginative man will find a way around the impossible. After all, Roscoe, you are now the courtroom hero, the inventor of yesterday and tomorrow, the Prophet of Fraudulence, and what obstruction could possibly stand in your way?

They stood in the shadow of the Capitol, the fortress of the enemy. Roscoe could not foresee when the Party would again have an ally in the Executive Chamber. It depressed him to think of waging futile battles to win it back. When should an old soldier call it a day? Shouldn’t you quit a winner, Ros? And so he told Alex about Gilby’s court case.

“You actually used the word ‘rape’?”

“Better than ‘incest,’” Roscoe said. “This way it’s an instant of sexual wildness, not a family vice.”

Alex tightened his face, his eyes narrowed, his lips flattened. His resemblance to Gilby was as obvious as his anger.

“You had no right to talk of rape,” Alex said. “You should’ve checked with me. Goddamn it, Roscoe, this disgraces my father, makes him an animal. And it humiliates me. God knows what it might do to Gilby.”

“It was a distraction for Pamela’s lawyer. The blood test destroyed their case, and our threat of prosecution guarantees she won’t come back.”

“It was lousy. It stinks.”

“Try to remember why your father killed himself.”

“I’ve never understood it.”

“He did it for the family.”

“You say that, but I never bought it.”

“He did it for the Party, for you.”

“For me?”

“The scandal could’ve erupted in the middle of your campaign. But he eliminated that possibility by eliminating himself.”

“You’re reading too much into it.”

“I think not. He not only got rid of her blackmail, he proclaimed himself Gilby’s father. He knew his blood was the same as Gilby’s — type AB. We found his blood test with papers he left on his desk before he killed himself. Why leave a blood test there that night? His last chance to let us know about the paternity, to admit it to anybody who could read. He knew what the church and the public would say about it and he didn’t want anyone else blamed.”

Alex said nothing. He had probably not known his father’s blood type. Why would he? Roscoe hadn’t known it either. Elisha hadn’t left any blood test with his papers. Roscoe created the test for the court hearing, also created AB as Elisha’s type because of its compatibility with Gilby. And Alex.

At the mention of the blood type, anger instantly left Alex’s eyes, replaced with a new vigilance. He stared at Roscoe with uneasy respect, with awareness, perhaps, that this new fact had a future, and that Roscoe had found a way to say to him what had never been said, never could be said.

“Bringing in rape just sealed the bargain,” Roscoe said, “and turned it into classic melodrama. One shot and the poor soul fattens. Wouldn’t you prefer a drunken family member forcing himself on a female rather than an incestuous intrigue that carries on for months, as Pamela said it had?”

“Pamela said that?”

“She did.”

“The woman is evil.”

“It’s pitiful she has such a need for it.”

“She doesn’t deserve any of your compassion,” Alex said.

“She’s not getting much. We defeated her with Elisha’s help. She’s no longer a factor, but the war goes on.”

“What war?”

“The war between love and death.”

“Whose love and death?”

“Good question,” Roscoe said.