Roscoe

The Genie in the Vase

Cal Kendrick, second-generation caretaker at Tristano, piled up three tiers of logs to start a major fire burning in the great fireplace of the Trophy House after he heard from Veronica that visitors would be coming for a short stay. The house was Tristano’s original building, built in 1873 by Lyman Fitzgibbon.

Cal’s father, Zachary, an Adirondack guide, had been hired by Lyman as Tristano’s first resident outdoorsman. The main lodge and the Swiss Cottage, where the family stayed, had both been closed since late September, and Cal and his wife, Belle, were shuttering all secondary buildings when Veronica called and said to keep the Trophy House open. So Cal started the fire at dawn to banish the deep chill and bake heat into the fieldstone walls, which would hold the heat long after the fire faded. Belle dressed all six beds in the three bedrooms with extra blankets, flannel sheets, and hot-water jars for cold feet. More than thirty years ago Roscoe and Veronica discovered, in all of those beds, varying intensities of what they considered love, as well as the thrilling dimensions of most of each other’s bodies — discovery that went just so far and no farther. Roscoe did not expect any of the beds to be put to comparable use tonight, yet it was Veronica’s decision to stay here, and not in the lodge, so there was no reason to abandon all hope, ye who enter.

“I want to see the mink family and I want to see the ghosts,” Gilby said.

They were in Veronica’s 1942 Buick station wagon, Roscoe driving, the back of the wagon piled with suitcases, an ice chest with sandwiches and Tru-Ade for Gilby, plus four bottles of Margaux from the Tivoli wine cellar. When they stopped at Chestertown for coffee, Roscoe said he’d have to call Alex in the morning to find out how the press received his ungodly sex speech; but Veronica said, No, don’t call. No? No. And Roscoe: All right, why? And she: Don’t change the subject, we’re supposed to have a good time without politics, this is a family visit, this is Tristano time, isn’t it? It certainly is, said Roscoe.

And Gilby asked, “Will we see the ghosts tonight?”

“My definitive and absolutely final answer to your question,” Roscoe said, “is maybe.”

“You said we would.”

“I said it and I stand by it. But you don’t think I know exactly when ghosts come and go, do you, Gil? There’s nothing to stop them from ramming around the house at sunset, or dawn, or high noon, or not at all. Nobody knows the timetables of ghosts.”

“Ghosts aren’t real, anyway. You’re just playing a game. Ghosts are dead. People don’t come back as ghosts when they die.”

“Well, it’s true ghosts are dead, but you’re one hundred percent wrong, Gilbino, and you’re also one hundred percent right. I’d say you’re probably more right than wrong and probably we won’t see any ghosts because, as you say, there aren’t any ghosts. But if there are ghosts, and we see them, then you’ll be a hundred percent more wrong than right. And if we sit in the Trophy House and ghosts come out of wherever ghosts come out of and sit and talk to each other, then you’ll be wrong in spades, and I’ll go to my grave saying I’ve never known anybody to be more wrong than Gilby was about Tristano’s ghosts.”

“I’d like to see the ghosts, too,” Veronica said.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never seen them,” Roscoe said.

“I saw something once but Elisha didn’t believe me. Another night we were supposed to see them but I fell asleep in the chair. When I woke up they said the ghosts had come and gone. Like Santa Claus. You remember Santa Claus, Gilby?”

“He was a fake,” Gilby said.

“In spades,” said Roscoe. “I believed in him till I was forty-two years old.”

“You did not,” Gilby said.

“The Times-Union wrote a story about me. Oldest living believer in Santa Claus. Nothing could shake my belief. I saw those scrawny Salvation Army Santas ringing their bells and I knew their whiskers were phony, but I believed they were all Santa. What a sap. On the other hand, you can’t legally say that imitations are all there is. I could prove the existence of Santa Claus in any court in this country if somebody hired me. Of course, I wouldn’t take the case, because I no longer believe in him.”

“Why did you stop?”

“I found something else to believe in. I fell in love again. You got a girlfriend, Gilbo?”

“I’ve got five or six.”

“Whoa. Playing the field.”

“People say you have lots of girlfriends, Roscoe.”

“People are wrong,” Roscoe said.

“How many do you have?”

“You mean legally?”

“Any way.”

“Just one.”

“Who is she?”

“I’d only reveal that on the witness stand under oath.”

“You never tell the truth, Roscoe, do you?”

“Always never,” Roscoe said. “Or is it never always?”

When the ferry stopped running on the lake in 1938, Elisha built two bridges, at the east and west ends of Lyman’s Island, and made Tristano accessible by car on the gated macadam road, until snow closed the road for the season. When they parked and unloaded the wagon at the house, Belle told them dinner was roasted wild turkey and woodcock that Cal had shot. Veronica unpacked in a hurry, and Gilby asked would they go hunting for birds. Roscoe said, No, Cal got enough; we won’t kill anything more today. Will we go fishing? No. Cal put all the boats in the boathouse for the winter, and it’s too cold to fish today. The fish will all be keeping warm at the bottom of the lake. We’ll fish off the dock in the morning, when the sun is up, all right? All right, but what are we going to do today? We’ll walk the land, said Roscoe, and we’ll look at stuff, and try to see things nobody wants us to see. And so the three of them dressed for the chill weather and went first to the boulder near the house to visit the mink family that Gilby had seen living under it.

“They’re gone,” Gilby said.

“When did you last see them?”

“In the summer. They were brown, four of them.”

“What were they doing?”

“Nothing.”

“That explains it,” Roscoe said. “They got bored and went looking for action.”

They walked to Seneca Rock, where Veronica said she found the large deer horns that were now mounted in the Trophy House, Veronica’s deer that got away. They walked north along the shore of the lake and along the dead sumac with the carmine fruit, still on some branches, that the game birds would eat in the winter. Ferns surrounded the small, clear pool coming up from the well that served the Trophy House, and overflowed into the lake. The forest they walked through came almost to the shore of the lake, tall white pines whose needles had created a carpet through which nothing grew, and the only green was the moss on the rocks and the fallen trees. Gilby said, We’re not seeing anything. And Roscoe said, You’re not looking. You can see everything there is, the secret life of blue jays and pheasant and owls and petrels if you’re careful and don’t intrude. They sat awhile in silence and watched and listened. They heard a bird, a few high and squeaky musical notes, and then heard it again, and Roscoe said, That sounds like a starling, one of those little black devils. They travel in huge flocks, like Albany Democrats. Just keep watching and maybe we’ll see some ducks that haven’t gone to Cuba for the winter. They stared across at the vast mountain range that rose up beyond the far side of the lake.

“I don’t see anything,” Gilby said.

Roscoe led the way up an incline to a plateau of rock that gave a view into the forest, and to a swampy area bordered by elms and maples and birch, and a vagrant pattern of dead trees that had fallen, or tried to fall, in the directions of greatest rot or strongest wind. A few frogs found reason to utter a few croaks, and you could find silken webs intact in the standing trees, signs of life. So many rotting stumps and fallen trees: bark gone, branches gone, their punky selves good for nothing. You could suffocate here in decay and death. What dry ground they could see was solid with dead brown leaves. At the edge of the plateau they could look down at the dark, quiet water of the lake.

“Keep watching the shore,” Roscoe said. “We sat like this one day and saw a fox and her four cubs come out and fool around for ten minutes. It was like being at the movies. Another time we saw a doe, and two fawns on the beach cavorting like puppies, and the mother very watchful, wasn’t she, Vee?”

“Mothers are usually watchful,” Veronica said. “But I don’t think I was with you.”

“Of course you weren’t. I admit sometimes you can’t find the hidden life, but you keep looking. You know where you find monster largemouth bass in this lake?”

“Where?”

“Anyplace you’re not. Once we saw a school of perch swimming right off this rock, out there, as far as we could see. You wouldn’t believe there were that many perch in the universe. But we saw them. Didn’t we, Vee?”

“I don’t think I was with you.”

“Of course you weren’t. It was Elisha. He said to me, ‘What do we do with all these perch?’ And I said we should invite them to dinner. We always invited the fish to dinner. But you were definitely there the day you caught that famous bass, nobody could believe how big it was.”

“Especially me,” Veronica said.

“You put up a great fight.”

“How big?” Gilby asked.

“So big it’s still a world record for Tristano. The previous record was three pounds twelve ounces. But your mother’s was four eight. We put it on the scales and showed everybody. We had it mounted with the names of all the witnesses. You can see it at the Trophy House, on the wall near the big table. You remember that day, Vee?”

“Oh yes. A special day.”

“Fantastic day. That was a trophy and a half. I caught a silver trout on a fly that afternoon. We both had a good day.”

“You have a good memory,” she said.

“I never forget anything,” Roscoe said. “Do you remember the day you met the beaver on the mill stream?”

“Yes, and I remember the partridge with her chicks that we found at a fork in the road,” Veronica said. “One chick was the size of your thumb.”

“Elisha found a loon egg in a nest on Adler’s Island,” Roscoe said. “We kept looking and we found a loon. Elisha talked to it for ten minutes to find out who owned the egg.”

“What did the loon say?” Gilby asked.

“Nothing. It just laughed at Elisha for trying to talk to a bird.”

They walked on and passed what Roscoe called the deer highway and sat awhile to wait for traffic, but none came. Then two birds soared into view over the edge of the lake, and Roscoe said, Don’t move, don’t talk, and they watched the larger bird fly low and dive into shallow water and come up with a dead eel. Both birds flew to an outcropping of flat shale, where the bird dropped the eel and held it with a talon while the smaller bird ate into the eel carcass, and then the big bird also ate.

“They’re eagles,” Veronica said. “You ever see an eagle, Gilby?”

“I saw a duck hawk, but not an eagle.”

“They’re bald eagles, father and son, probably,” Roscoe said. “The national emblems of our democracy, having a late lunch. Anybody hungry?”

After dinner Roscoe tried to tune in WGY on the shortwave radio to hear Alex’s speech, but all he could get was Canadians speaking French and a station somewhere in Scandinavia. “We are outside civilization,” Roscoe said. “We could be in the nineteenth century. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lyman walked through the door.”

Veronica and Gilby had exhausted checkers, and the 1903 books on planting trees and perennials, and Audubon on hawks and eagles. Veronica read Gilby from a 1908 volume of Arabian Nights, the story of the fisherman who finds a vase in the sea and when he opens its cover he releases a genie. The genie, not at all grateful for being freed, is so angry at having been a prisoner he says he must kill the fisherman. But he grants him one wish: he may choose the manner of his death. Since he cannot escape death, the fisherman conjures the genie, in the name of Allah, to answer one question truly: Were you really inside that vase? The genie, compelled to speak the truth, says he was. The fisherman doesn’t believe him and says, That vase wouldn’t even hold your foot. So, to prove the truth, the genie changes into smoke, and re-enters the vase. The fisherman claps the cover on, throws the vase into the sea; so long, genie.

“That fisherman was smart,” Gilby said.

“I’m glad you think so,” Roscoe said.

“Let’s play cards, Roscoe,” said Gilby, and Roscoe then lost eighteen thousand dollars to Gilby playing blackjack with five-hundred-dollar chips. Veronica found the notebook in which records were kept of the great catches and sightings of birds, fish, and game. “‘Tried to shoot giant turtle near dock,’ ” she read. “‘Fired at one deer but no luck. Killed two hundred pound black bear, female, behind Swiss Cottage.’ That’s her there on the floor, Gil.” The bear, twenty-two years dead and now a rug, black, tan, mottled gray, lay in front of the fireplace, nose, teeth, and nails intact, but her hide cracked, frazzled, balding, a sad case.

“Who shot her?” Gilby asked.

“Roscoe,” Veronica said.

“You’re making that up,” Gilby said.

“Roscoe is a great shot, aren’t you, Ros?”

“I used to be. Don’t shoot much anymore. I don’t want to kill anything. Killed the bear because she was dangerous. She came out of the woods behind the lodge and attacked Wilbur, an Irish wolfhound your father owned, Gilby. I shot her before she did more damage.”

“What happened to Wilbur?” Gilby asked.

“He died. Bear mauled him pretty bad.”

Gilby kicked the bear rug in the head.

At the back of the old notebook Veronica found a list of Christmas presents she and Elisha gave to friends in 1928. “We gave Patsy a set of steak knives in 1928,” she said. “We gave you a pocket watch, Roscoe.”

“I carried it until you gave me a wristwatch,” he said, raising his wrist with the Elgin he’d worn since 1936. “And it’s nine o’clock on my watch, big fella. Bedtime.”

Veronica stood up. “That’s right, and also we have to go up to the lodge for a short while,” she said. “I want to pack some of your father’s belongings.”

“I can carry them for you,” Gilby said.

“If you want to be ready when the ghosts arrive, you better get to sleep,” Veronica said. Roscoe told him Cal had fishing rods and bait ready for the morning, and instead of fishing off the dock he’d talk to Cal about getting one of the small boats on the water. Gilby approved of that, and Veronica heated water for his hot-water jar, put him to bed, and piled on the blankets.

The Phantom of Love

Roscoe opened one of the bottles of Margaux ’29 he had brought from the Tivoli wine cellar, and poured for himself and Veronica. They sat in the two wicker armchairs facing the fireplace, seats favored by visiting ghosts, according to a Tristano tradition dating to the age when spiritualists flew in and out windows; Veronica thinks they still do. Friends of Ariel are how the ghosts were first identified, specifics long lost; but some things recurred in stories: they were gray-haired men, dressed rustically and well, and they sipped brandy.

The ghosts lost vogue when the lodge was completed and Tristano’s nightlife moved onto a higher social scale up the hill. But it regained venue in the early 1930s, when, at a late hour, one of the Boston Peabodys, a financial friend of Elisha, swore that two gentlemen sat across from him for fifteen minutes, ignoring his efforts to enter their conversation, content to be spectrally aloof, but not inaudible. They made sounds, said Peabody, nothing you could repeat in words, more like whooshings and wheeings, and yet their demeanor and syntax seemed quite in keeping with proper behavior and chat you might observe at any Boston club. The elder ghost, Peabody said, drank more brandy than the other. When they vanished, so did Peabody’s bottle of brandy.

A rash of sightings followed, some vivid, one or two terrifying to the witnesses, but during the rest of the decade the vogue faded. In 1940, Pamela said she saw a ghost in the Swiss Cottage, a muscular man without a shirt, but it was adjudged to be her gin-fizzed fantasy of the young French Canadian who worked in Tristano’s kitchen. That same year, Veronica awoke from a nap in a reclining chair in the Trophy House to see a spectral young woman standing by the fireplace. Veronica asked who she was, the woman gestured vaguely to the hearth, and Veronica said, Is this your home? The woman seemed to say yes, though Veronica could not say how she did that. Veronica went to the bathroom and threw water on her face and came back to find the woman standing where she’d been, but fading, and then she was gone. Veronica told Elisha, who said, Don’t tell anybody, they’ll think you’re as crazy as Pamela. But she told Roscoe, who remembered the story and now asked, “Who do you think she really was?”

“Somebody who’d lived here and was upset by strangers in her home.”

“You didn’t invent her.”

“I did not.”

“She wasn’t an extension of your desire to believe in ghosts.”

“Positively not.”

“She had nothing to do with Rosemary.”

“Nothing whatever. Stop giving me the third degree.”

“I’m just preparing for ghosts in case we see any.”

“You think we will?”

“No, but, then again, yes, or even possibly. Let’s move to more serious matters.” He raised his glass. “To Tristano. We’re actually here.”

“I told you we would be,” she said, and sipped her wine.

“I never trust anybody who tells me the truth.”

“I have to celebrate what you did.”

She had taken off her bulky knit sweater and now wore a fashionable fawn cardigan. She had pinned her hair into a lovely upswept yellow bun, and her smile gave Roscoe reason to believe he was not only in his right mind, but gaining access to an important truth, always dangerous.

“I’ll go over to Belle’s cottage and get a key to the lodge,” he said.

“I have my key,” Veronica said.

“And I thought the lodge would be my idea.”

“I know you thought that. That’s why I brought my key.”

Veronica looked in at Gilby until she was certain he was asleep, and then they walked up the long hill to the lodge, Roscoe creating a path with his flashlight. They went up the steps of the now empty porch, past where Estelle Warner had tried to seduce Roscoe while her doctor husband was excavating Pamela. So many subsequent times Roscoe had come up these steps, and yet that wretched memory still drove out all others. Veronica unlocked the front door to the main parlor and switched on the sixty-bulb chandelier, an electrified version of the original sixty candles. The room had been exquisitely furnished by money: wall and ceiling studs made of polished logs, rustically sleek; the stained-glass unicorn window Veronica saw in a Venetian home and coveted, and Elisha bought it and shipped it here for a midsummer night’s surprise in 1936; Oriental carpeting now rolled and covered, draperies packed away, the leather sofa and large tapestried armchairs, all in their winter covers, opulence in hiding.

Veronica turned on the butterfly standing lamp, one of several Tiffanys in the lodge, and switched off the harsh light of the chandelier. The house held a damp chill, as cold as outside; but they could light no fire, for the chimneys were capped for the winter to discourage squirrel residencies. Roscoe stood by the walk-in fireplace and stared down at Pamela half naked on the raccoon rugs, come into my parlor, darling, the parlor of false love, get out of here, Ros.

“Where do you want to start?” he asked Veronica.

“Start what?”

“Don’t get specific. I don’t want to ruin it with the wrong words.”

“So we’ll silently figure out each other’s wishes.”

“You’ll never be able to figure out mine,” Roscoe said.

“We’ll start upstairs,” she said. They went up to the main bedroom, and as she lit the bedside lamps Roscoe pulled down the shades on the room’s four windows. She took a suitcase from the back of a closet and opened it on the bed, then rifled the drawers for Elisha’s favored things and packed them: a pair of English suspenders, the binoculars he used at the track and for birdwatching, two of his abandoned wallets, a jewelry case with tiepins, stickpins, and rings, a handful of bow ties, souvenir programs from Broadway shows and the Saratoga racetrack, half a dozen handsomely tailored shirts Gilby might grow into next year.

“That’s enough,” she said, and closed the suitcase and set it by the door. She pulled the dust cover off the bed and threw it into a corner, then turned to Roscoe, who was standing by the bed watching her. “I feel young,” she said.

“We were young in this house, but never in this room.”

Young lovers of a sort, lovers as children, strangers in middle age grown back into children. But she did not want those children’s games, the touch in the half-dark, just so far, no farther. And Roscoe’s poet: What did we do, I wonder, before we loved, unweaned we sucked on country pleasures, childishly. She took off her jacket and unbuttoned her sweater for him, sleight of hand behind her back and, woman as magician, breasts appear in the light, the full, bright light, aging, falling but not quite fallen, Roscoe never weaned from these, and he: I suck thee, thou, you, these, each, both, and she let her jacket fall and took off her sweater and let the bra fall into her hand, and to the floor. Roscoe crouched before her and raised her skirt, found nylons, the belt holding them tight on her thighs, silk knickers, he slid them down her hips, her bush appearing in the full, bright light, the color of fall’s last foliage, and I kiss thee, thou, you, this, it, we’ve done this before in our moderate way. And she: Yes, you have, somewhat, but we no longer need to be moderate. And she unbuttoned her skirt and let it fall, stepped out of it, picked up her jacket and put it on, naked as possible under the circumstances, but I’m freezing. Roscoe took off his jacket and shirt, put his jacket back on in solidarity with her, rid himself of clothes, shoes, socks, you can’t make love with your socks on, as Veronica sat on the bed and waited for him to be ready, was he ever, put her mouth around him, full mouth in the full, bright light, and felt him with both her hands, nothing childish about these moves, and said, That’s only hello, and stood then and put her mouth on his mouth and said, There is more. She smiled with a certainty of purpose Roscoe had never seen in these circumstances, and she sat again on the bed, still holding him, then let him go and lay back and spread her legs, thinking, This is why they punish you, this is why my mother was punished when she did this, and of course she did do it, more difficult for her, wasn’t it, in her repressive day, Catholic Jew, subordinate woman who could not be willful by law or moral ordination, we will punish any aggression, madame; yet she was wanton for my father and said as much to us, and for whom else was she so? None else, not she, and what of you, my dear? The good husband Elisha, now the good soldier Roscoe, and who else? Roscoe moved toward her and saw her face changing yet again, head flat and mouth now curved with the pressure of oncoming love, is this love, Veronica? She watches him to see what he looks like when he sees her this way and to imagine what she becomes in his eyes, and he in hers, and what those images do to them — singular instant — and the poet again: My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, as with both hands she opens herself, rare gesture, never so open, so aggressive with this man, and modesty can go to hell, this I give Roscoe, who gave me back my life. For you, she said. He has readied himself for this for thirty-one years, make no mistakes now, Roscoe, easy is the avenue to the divine places. Roscoe is a man of too much girth, too much need, too old for so much life, isn’t he? No, and don’t go around telling lies about Roscoe in the midst of his young man’s realized dream, even his own uninhibited imagination trumped by what he is feeling now, nothing abstract, no words, and of course he thinks this time it must truly be love, always was with her even when this was off limits and you could only imagine, deceive yourself that it would ever be otherwise, but here it is, isn’t it? Open love? And as he moves into the breach he says, I do think this is love, and she says, I believe it is, and Roscoe is ready to say that this is a consecration of two shopworn lives, yet he wonders, as usual, what is really going on here, love equaling love, another lying equation, is it? Which leaves out the hidden element beneath the familiar, the invisible bustle and hubbub under the carpet of foliage, what a frenzy there must be down under. Veronica sees herself emerging from the cocoon as a blue butterfly, new to her, though she has always known love with Roscoe, he always wanting her, she always pulled toward him, demonic, really, in its endurance, but she had to resist it, you can’t live on deceit and humiliation, one long-ago lapse at the hotel is all, and none with others, oh, brushings, maybe, a kiss of sorts, who were they, she doesn’t remember, yes, she does, one or two, but they don’t matter, Roscoe always saw that sort of thing, Elisha never. Roscoe feels achieved in her arms, illustrious man of privilege who believes no other except Elisha has been here, which is probably your self-deceit again, Ros, aggrandizing you-you-you and canonizing her, this adventurous woman, woman on a horse, she always did have the bold public image. You think you’re the only one who’s been here, then? Lived only on her fantasies, did she? Really? Yes, that’s all there was, don’t run her down. And they move, but inseparably, her golden hair fallen loose from its pins, visions of her now like the positionings of other women in Roscoe’s erotic museum, but she is not like others, these visions are new, because Veronica needs no coaxing, turning, or urging to be new to all that they’ve ever been, nothing like her in the museum, for this is love, my love, love, my love, it is all all all all love, my love, and we should accept that term as true for now, seek the reality that tried to kill you, and Roscoe certainly has learned to do that, but avoid truth, Roscoe, it’s the enemy. Isn’t it true that she accepts Roscoe? It is. She does. She knows how she has intimidated him, not through years of denial, he can handle that, but through rejection, which he didn’t handle well at all. But, oh, these pressures of love, and Roscoe owns them tonight, yes, he does, sweetest of pressures, less sweet than manic, swelling her senses as they come, and she holds back nothing now, once, then she is twice, and again, and oh my God again. Don’t tell Roscoe this is fraudulence, he knows fraudulence, this is love, my love, this is love, let it come. This is where we begin.

Does Roscoe Really Believe in Ghosts?

He has lived with the ghosts of Hamlet and Banquo, with post-Easter Jesus on the road, with Lourdes, Fatima, Padre Pio’s stigmata, with Marley, Dracula, the Topper gang, the depressed dead of Grover’s Corners, the Holy Ghost guised as a bird. He has listened to reasonable people, including Veronica, who believe they’ve seen ghosts. He has seen fabricated ghosts deceiving the gullible, including Veronica, seen his own dead father calling his name, and dead Elisha shaving with an electric razor. He knows ghosts are hallucinations, optical fantasies, formulations by visionaries, hypnotic suggestions, imaginative impositions, wishful resurrections with no more substance than a political promise. But promises sometimes materialize and so do ghosts, who can change life for the quick, as Elisha changed us all with his postmortal fiddlings. And so Roscoe allows for all realities, including those that do not exist.

The dominant reality for Roscoe tonight is passionate love, which has risen, fallen, risen, and then some, and is now in seemly quiescence. They have been back in the Trophy House for an hour, Gilby still in profound slumber, Veronica napping on the sofa, ready to rise up for ectoplasmic visitors, and Roscoe rocking in a rocking chair by the reinvigorated fire, watching Veronica breathe. He is what is sometimes called lovesick. He cannot stop thinking about making love with her: how they stood, sat, moved, lay, how they spoke to each other in the language of love, how they stood, sat, moved, etc., repeat all, then rerepeat, then do it again, and then one more time, etc. This condition will prevail for days with diminishing intensity. Beyond the love words that he did speak, Roscoe now thinks he should have spoken to her about the future, his intention to leave politics and start a new life with her — How are you with that, my oh-so-sensual love? They could find a new great house, money not a problem for either of them. Alas, he cannot move too fast on such things, usurping. But when she awakens, he will point out that today is the second time he, she, and Gilby have been alone together away from home, the first in Puerto Rico in 1933, when they flew down for his birth, baptized him there, godfather Roscoe, surrogate adopting father. As the boy grew, Roscoe became father on call, father by desire, and after Elisha’s death, caretaker father, juridical father, preludes, were they, to becoming step father of the holy Roscoe family? But he cannot move too fast, usurping.

He set out the Salignac and the brandy snifters he had brought down from the lodge. He placed one snifter by sleeping Veronica, the others on the table for himself, Elisha, and the two traditional ectos. He left the old wicker chairs ready for the two, and he brought a third chair for Elisha. He poured the Salignac, varying the pours, one of them drinks more than the other, gave a bit to Veronica, left Elisha’s snifter empty, then poured his own, sat, and tasted it, magnifique, and considered how to summon ghosts. Sit here till Christmas, Ros, no rustically well-dressed gentlemen will turn up speaking wind sounds and ectosipping your splendid brandy. Blood tests, elections, judges, juries are easy, but a habeas corpus for the dead? You don’t know their names or faces; they don’t speak any known language. Perhaps they’re generic ghosts, perpetuating a bygone Tristano life-style: brandy, tweeds, soft handmade Italian leather boots, you made up the boots, Ros, and they’re not generic ghosts, they were friends of Ariel, came here often, before your time, had money, one a Scotch-Irish insurance man name of Amos Ford who liked duck hunting, the other a fly fisherman, Seth Cooper, department-store owner from Albany. They found common ground at Tristano, discovered they could talk fish and birds forever, at which point their lives achieved lucid but brief symmetries, for a great wind blew up, capsizing Seth’s boat, and blowing a tree down onto Amos’s duck blind.

“The same wind did you both,” Roscoe said. “Imagine that.”

In the afterlife they were apotheosized as ideals of their pursuits, and were allowed to meet each other at Tristano on select days to remember the stillness of the water just before the great wind blew them into death, to remember the precise size, weight, color, and markings of every bird, every fish that ever died by their hand, to consider whether fish or birds were more intelligent, or equally gifted with reason, for each does know the enemy and does know to flee destruction at his hand; and, considering that nature is based in injustice and suffering, Seth and Amos were also mandated to dwell on how the subtraction of all those creatures’ lives changed the natural world.

“You now know each duck and fish you killed?” Roscoe asked. “Have you named them?. A few. But you really do recognize every one?. Amazing memory. Ah, everybody has that over there.”

“Who are you talking to?” Veronica asked, one eye open.

“Amos and Seth,” Roscoe said. “They used to come here.”

“Who? Where are they?”

“Here in their chairs, can’t you see them? Say hello.”

“Hello, Amos; hello, Seth.”

“This is Veronica,” Roscoe said. “Yes, she’s a beauty. sleeping beauty. No, we’re not married, but that’s not a bad idea.”

“Are they worried that we’re not married?”

“No,” said Roscoe, “but I am. They were friends of Ariel, and they died in a big wind in 1906. Seth is the older one with the white mustache and the tan leather vest. You shopped in his store, Cooper’s, on North Pearl Street, when you were a child. Seth remembers you and your mother. Uh-huh. Seth says he also saw you at Saratoga.”

“Roscoe,” Veronica said.

“Just let them talk,” Roscoe said.

“Are you talking to the ghosts?” Gilby asked. He stood in the doorway of his room, in pajamas, robe, and sweat socks, his cowlick standing tall from sleeping on it.

“Come and sit down,” Roscoe said. “Meet Seth and Amos. They both knew your father when he was a boy. This is Gilbert Fitzgibbon, gentlemen, my godson.” Gilby walked slowly across the room and sat on the sofa beside his mother, never taking his eyes off the empty chairs. Roscoe refilled Seth’s and Amos’s brandies.

“There’s nobody sitting there. Nobody’ll drink that,” Gilby said.

“No? You should’ve seen what was in those glasses five minutes ago. We were talking hunting and fishing, and which one is smarter, a duck or a trout. Oh?. They say your father’s coming.”

“I don’t see him,” Gilby said. “I don’t see anybody.”

“Just watch that chair,” Roscoe said pointing to Elisha’s place at the table. “I mean seriously watch it. Pay attention. Listen. Quiet. The loudest noise you hear is the fire, listen, then you hear your own breathing, listen, then you hear mine, listen and you’ll see everything that’s there, and then you’ll start to see everything that isn’t, keep listening and you’ll find sympathy with all things, you’ll hear the moon shine and the grass grow. Do you remember what your father looked like the last time you saw him? He looks like that now, except he got rid of most of the gray in his hair, and he looks younger. Close your eyes and look at him. Hair combed same as always, they didn’t make him change it. Oh yes?. Seth says you get to pick your favorite age when you come back. Your father picked forty-six, eight years ago, 1937, the year the Yankees took the Series from the Giants in five games and Pleasure Power won the Travers at Saratoga. A good year for us. The lines in your father’s cheeks aren’t quite as deep as they became, and his energy level is up. You were four years old that year, and your parents bought you a blue tricycle for Christmas. John Thacher was re-elected our Mayor, FDR was a year into his second term, and the second war hadn’t started yet. The Nazis hadn’t taken over Vienna, so your mother’s Jewish uncles and aunts were still alive. See what your father’s wearing? His gray houndstooth jacket with the suede elbow patches, much like our visitors’ jackets. What’s that, Elisha?.. He says he likes what we’ve been doing for him, especially the way the trial came out. He predicts Alex will be re-elected. I know that, Elisha, and I’m not even dead. Ah. He says, yes, he’s trying to say. ‘I died too quickly, too soon, and I left a vacuum. I’m sorry about that,”’ and Roscoe’s voice deepened, picked up the Elisha timbre and cadence he’d been mimicking for forty years. He poured the Salignac into Elisha’s snifter. “‘I wish I’d had a chance to talk to somebody, tell you all what was on my mind, but I didn’t have time.’”

“You killed yourself,” Gilby said.

“Gilby, what are you saying?” Veronica said.

“Everybody knows it,” said Gilby. “I’m always the one who never gets told. You took poison,” he said to the empty chair, with a glance at Roscoe. And Roscoe saw in Veronica’s face the terror that truth brings; and he feared it more than she.

“‘You know what they did in the Middle Ages?’” Elisha asked. “‘They drove a stake through the heart of any man who killed himself. They still do that with Dracula, but not with suicides anymore. Because now everybody knows there’s no such thing as suicide. There’s only death. Some people die years before they bury them. People get sick. People go crazy I met a fella over here, his wife insured him against going crazy and then he went crazy. They put him in the asylum and she went every week and brought him bananas, he hated bananas. Then he died. You think she killed him, or was it the bananas? You don’t know what makes people crazy. Just a little too much of the old EP and then — bingity bing! — there goes the whole kitty bosso. My trouble was I couldn’t say what was on my mind, it was so complicated. I tried, but it wouldn’t come out. A secret, even from me. Some kind of code, I suppose it was, but I never could solve it. Breedy ale wouldn’t kitty, wouldn’t cut pips. I was sick and got sicker and then I died. You say I killed myself, but I was dead before the poison. That poison was there for years, just waiting. So many times we don’t know we’re drinking poison. Could be just like sipping this great brandy,’” and Roscoe lifted Elisha’s snifter and sipped from it, put it back where it was. “‘We try to do something, but before we can finish it, everything changes and there’s no point doing it anymore. That’s a disease, when you don’t do the only thing you ever wanted to do. Probably you made the wrong choice, lived in the wrong town, did the wrong work for the wrong reasons, married the wrong woman, I didn’t do that. Poison in your system but it doesn’t seem like poison. You’re dead but you keep living. You’re a corpse but you can’t get to the cemetery. You talk, eat, smile but you don’t know you’re doing any of it, how could you? You’re dead. But, Gilly my boy, you’re not dead, and neither are your mother and Roscoe. You all had quite a day today, seeing those eagles. Seth can probably call them by name, right, Seth? No. Seth says he only knows ducks. But a good day like today, that’s worth a lot. It’s gone, and you’ll go home tomorrow, no more Tristano, no more eagles. But just because a good day slips into history doesn’t mean it’s gone. You had it once and you’ll have it forever in memory. You came up here looking for me because I’m in your memory, and here I am talking about death. I don’t mean to be gloomy when you all have so much life. You’ll be all right, all of you. Just keep asking that question, the one you don’t know how to answer and hardly know how to ask. I miss you all terribly, and I hope I’ll see you later.’”

In the silence that followed, Roscoe took a long swallow of his own brandy and started rocking again. Gilby stared at the chair, then at Roscoe, anticipating more. “Is he gone?”

“He is.”

“Are Seth and Amos gone?”

“They are.”

“They weren’t really here.”

“No?”

“Were they?”

“I think they were,” Veronica said. “I heard them.”

“Where did they go?”

“Back in the vase, maybe, like that genie,” she said.

“They were all Roscoe,” Gilby said.

“One of them was your father,” she said. “I’d know his voice anywhere.”

“You were my father, weren’t you, Roscoe?”

“No, but I’d like to be, in case anybody asks.”

“He did sound like my father,” Gilby said to his mother.

“I hope you remember his words,” she said. “It was so sad to hear him. But wasn’t it a lovely visit?”

Elective Affinities

The newspapers trumpeted Alex’s sex speech and the police raids: “Mayor Cracks Down on Sin and Smut,” “Our GI Mayor Wants Sinless Town for Returning GIs.” Twelve pimps and assorted whores were arrested, but, folks, you pay dues to do business in Albany. The raids outraged bookstores and newsstands, but Night Squad detectives assured them they’d get their merchandise back after election.

The next day, still courting page one, George Scully, the Governor’s special prosecutor, personally led a State Police raid on three Albany betting parlors, including the central office, from where racing information was sent by phone lines to horse rooms throughout the city. Forty workers and horseplayers were arrested, including Johnny Mack, Patsy’s pal, whose famous White House was padlocked. And Johnny faced a judge for the first time in forty years. Candidate Jay Farley called a press conference to say such open gambling was proof of political collusion with gamblers in this corrupt city.

In an election-eve rally at Knights of Columbus Hall on Clinton Square, Alex told the Party faithful and the press that “the Governor spent half a million dollars investigating this city, harassed our citizens, pried into our private lives, put fear into the hearts of people who had no connection to politics, and what has he got to show for it? He disturbed the peace of a few gamblers, but he solidified Albany more solidly than ever behind our Democratic Party. I feel sad that our former Lieutenant Governor, my father, Elisha Fitzgibbon, who founded this Party with Patsy McCall and Roscoe Conway, isn’t here to see what’s about to happen in our city. But I spoke to Patsy a minute ago and asked him to make a prediction for us tonight. Will you come up, Patsy?”

Patsy, who rarely spoke in public but this year saw himself in close combat with the enemy, rose from his front-row chair and stepped onto the small stage. Alex made room at the microphone, then asked, “How do you think we’ll do tomorrow, Pat?” Patsy put his hands in his pants pockets, looked out at the crowd of five hundred that thought he was Jesus Christ in those baggy pants and that wide-brimmed fedora, and told them, “The Governor made our campaign for us. Mayor Fitzgibbon will be re-elected by upward of thirty-five thousand plurality.” And as the cheers, huzzahs, and whistling exploded, Alex ended the meeting by saying into the mike, “You heard the man, now let’s go out and do it!”

Patsy had wanted to say forty thousand, but Roscoe was dubious. Forty was a nice Biblical number to humiliate the Governor with, but our registration this year is down eight thousand from when Alex won in 1941. That year a single taxi driver registered one hundred and eighty times and voted two hundred and three times. Nobody was looking. This year many servicemen haven’t been home to register, and with the goddamn State Police on our backs, taxi drivers are no longer so intrepid. Roscoe felt the need to pump up the numbers another way, so he decided to put Cutie’s votes into Alex’s column. Cutie might get a few thousand protest votes, and the switch would be done in the courthouse by the six-man presumably bipartisan Election Commission, who were all Democrats. Roscoe would tell Cutie not to protest the election: We’ll let him have a few hundred and a no-show job for his mother. Roscoe also ordered the ward leaders to have all four hundred committeemen do a second canvassing count — No half-assed guesswork this year, we want to shove firm numbers down the Governor’s throat. After the second canvass, Roscoe showed Patsy that forty was too high, he should go with thirty-five.

Extra desks came into Party headquarters for the election count, half a dozen city accountants manned adding machines, and women volunteers handled the six special phone lines. Joey Manucci went to Keeler’s twice for sandwiches and coffee, and Charlie Foy and Tony Mirabile from the Night Squad sat outside the door to keep out visitors and press. When the polls closed at nine o’clock, the phones jangled and final numbers flowed in from every district. The only real surprise was one district of the Ninth Ward where Republicans got no votes at all; but Bart Merrigan explained to Roscoe that on that voting machine the Republican line was soldered. By nine-fifteen, Jay Farley was conceding at his headquarters and Alex was promising a victory interview at ten in City Hall. At nine-twenty, Bart found a phone message for Patsy that Joey had taken at five-thirty, long before Patsy arrived. The caller asked for Patsy’s home phone, but Joey wouldn’t give it. The caller said he was from the White House, but that didn’t cut Joey’s mustard. Bart chided Joey. “You fucking moron, it was the President. You wouldn’t give Patsy’s number to the President?” Bart called the White House back and connected Patsy to President Truman, whom Patsy first knew through Tom Pendergast. Patsy had been solid with Truman for vice-president at the ’44 convention, when half the New York delegation still backed Henry Wallace. Mr. Truman asked Patsy how Albany Democrats were faring under all that pressure from New York’s Governor. “That fella’s probably gonna run against me on the boss issue in ’48.” And Patsy told him, “We beat him bad, Mr. President. He never laid a glove on us.” And Mr. Truman said, “Nice work, Patsy. You boys know what you’re doing up there.”

By nine-forty, the absentee ballots were counted, Cutie’s votes were switched, and the official count was Jay Farley 14,747, Cutie LaRue 320, and Alex, as Patsy had called it, upward of 35,000, specifically 35,716.

After Patsy talked to the President he went into Roscoe’s office and closed the door. “I want you to go see the President,” Patsy said. “I want to send him a Civil War book, let him know how strong we are for him up here.”

Roscoe made no reply and Patsy looked at him with a cocked eye.

“Send Alex,” Roscoe said. “Or anybody. I’m all done, Pat. I told you that in August and now I say it again. The returns are in and I’m through.”

“Goddamn it, Roscoe, don’t start this.”

“It’s done, Pat. I’m out as of tonight. Bart can handle this office.”

“You can’t quit politics. That’s like a dog who says he don’t want to be a dog anymore.”

“Even if I’m a dog, I quit.”

“Does this have to do with Veronica?”

“It might. Why do you ask?”

“Eh,” Patsy said.

“Eh what?”

“You living at Tivoli and all that.”

“All that what?”

“I talked to Alex. You’re not keeping any secrets.”

“I haven’t been trying. But, all right, being around her changed my life. But I was ready to change. I doubt I’ll ever have a better life than I’ve had here for twenty-six years. But twenty-six is a long time. You’re my best friend, Patsy, the only best friend I’ve got left. I wouldn’t con you. I can’t handle it anymore.”

“You really mean it.”

“Now you got it.”

“I don’t like it.”

“We won the election, you still own the town, we control all fifty-two cards in the deck. Let’s go celebrate. The party’s at Quinlan’s.”

When they wrapped up the final count and left Bart to close the office, Patsy said he wasn’t up for Quinlan’s. Alex said he wouldn’t get there right away, had to do those City Hall interviews.

“But I’ll walk you up the hill, Roscoe,” Alex said, and they rode the elevator down from the eleventh floor in silence. Only when they were walking up State Street did Alex speak. He looked once at Roscoe, then spoke while staring up the hill at the Capitol.

“I know you and my mother went to Tristano with Gilby,” he said, “and I know something’s going on,” he said. “Roscoe, you may own the best political mind of anybody who ever drew breath in this town. You know how to manipulate power, you know how to win, and politically I’m immensely grateful. You were also a great friend of my father, a guardian to my mother after he died, and wonderful to me when I was growing up. Those were memorable days, and I hung on every word out of your mouth on how to play and gamble and drink and appreciate women. I no longer value that kind of life. But you’ve sunken back into it, worse than ever — punching out a cheap editor in his own office, caught with naked prostitutes, personally championing that vicious whore, watching your psychopathic friend murder your own brother, and then your insane hypothesis that my father raped Pamela. You won the case, but what a price you paid — a scurrilous false rumor that profanes his memory forever. It’s always the lowest common denominator that you cozy to, Roscoe, and I include your friend Hattie Wilson, landlady for the whorehouses. We’re a big city and we have to deal politically with all kinds, but you’ve brought the lowlife home to my family once too often. I say this with very mixed feelings, but I consider you a negative influence on Gilby, and an unfit suitor for my mother. So here’s the line, Roscoe. From now on, my family’s off limits to you. Do you understand me?”

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

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

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

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

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

“We did.”

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

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

“Got a great landlady,” Ted said.

“He loves dogs,” Hattie said.

“Good for him.”

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

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

“I look forward to it.”

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

“I do, Rosky, I do.”

“You getting into that famous mood again?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey, you’re a live one, Roscoe.”

“That’s one possibility,” Roscoe said.

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

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

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

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

“It may be true.”

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

“But we try to be honest, don’t we?”

“Do we?”

“I do.”

“Good. I had a talk with Alex.”

“I know. He called me.”

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

“How wasn’t he?”

“You don’t know?”

“Did he lie? What did he say?”

“Didn’t he tell you what he said?”

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

“Perfect sense but not the truth.”

“What’s the truth, Roscoe?”

“I never tell the truth.”

“Tell me, damn it.”

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

“I suppose I do.”

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

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

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

On the Night Boat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Epiphanies come when you least expect them.”

“What’s that game in the corner?”

“What would you like it to be?”

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

“Who would you like to play against?”

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

“I’ll pass on the game, but I’ll bet that filly, Cabala 2,” Roscoe said.

“Again?” Johnny asked.

“I’m a sucker for it,” Roscoe said.

It was August 1937, he in the Fitzgibbon box in the Club House at Saratoga, next to Veronica. The horse he owned with Elisha and Veronica, Pleasure Power, would run in and win the Travers, two races hence. Perhaps through unconscious symmetry, Roscoe and Veronica had both bet Johnny Mack’s two-year-old filly, Cabala. But the horse entered the starting gate in fear, reared wildly, threw her jockey, flipped herself onto her back under the gate between two stalls, and, in her insane flailing to stand upright, fractured a pelvic bone that severed an artery. When they pulled her out from under the gate she tried to stand but fell on top of her useless leg. She bled so rapidly into the turf she was dead before they came to quiet her with the pistol. Veronica hid her eyes. Roscoe watched through binoculars. The turf below, the sky above, are true. It’s true only if you can’t fix it. Everybody in the cemetery is true.

“Your bet is accepted,” Johnny said, marking his notepad.

Roscoe decided long ago that only a bet on the impossible makes sense. It is an act of faith and courage requiring an irrational leap over reason. A man wins simply by making such a bet.

He went back out onto the deck and could hear the heavy churning of the paddle wheel and the th-th-thump of its crankshaft as the boat moved out into the center of the darkening river. Perhaps a thousand passengers were in their berths making love. That’s why the Night Boat was born. When Roscoe circled back to the entrance of the main saloon, the orchestra was still doing Wagner, but was now into the love theme; or was it the death theme? One of those.

Ah well, he thought, going in, either way I could use a little music.