Roscoe

Love, Scandal, and Horses

When you are three, as in that 1921 photo on the wall of Roscoe’s hotel room, and one of the three is subtracted, the sum is less than you’d expect; for the mathematics of the spirit are complex. Now, at Elisha’s wake, they were two, Roscoe and Patsy, both feeling like leftovers after the banquet. Patsy, in politics since he was old enough to deface Republican ballots, was at his first wake since his brother Matt died (Patsy did not like the dead), looking bumptious, the only way he knew how to look, even in his new blue suit. Roscoe had combed and gracefully parted his beard, draped his corpulence stylishly in a white Palm Beach suit, and stood somberly dapper by the bier with white shoes, black pocket handkerchief, black tie.

The wake sprawled over the vast, pampered lawn of Tivoli, with its upper and lower mansions, its sculpted gardens, surrounding woods. Servants’ quarters stood behind the upper mansion, and beyond that the barns, stables, and racetrack that Lyman had built in the 1870s for his trotters, and which Ariel, and later Elisha, modified for their Thoroughbreds. It was a day full of sun and small breezes, and under a broad white canopy, Roscoe, Patsy, and O.B., a late arrival, stood watch alongside Elisha, the enigma in the open coffin, who looked great dead, in his gray linen suit and white tie, his head wound cosmetically banished.

“What do you know that I don’t?” Patsy asked when Roscoe arrived at his side.

“Alex is on the way home. He was already a day out on the troopship when he got the news. Bart or Joey will pick him up when he docks.”

“I’m talking about Eli’s autopsy.”

“Mac’s bringing that over.”

“He’s on the way,” O.B. said, looking authoritative in his police chief’s uniform, buttons polished and gleaming in the sunlight. “We did two autopsies, one real, one fake.”

“But we don’t know why he did it,” said Patsy.

“We will,” Roscoe said. “He can’t just kill himself like this and get away with it.”

“He took a hell of a lot with him,” Patsy said. “We’ll need six guys to take his place.”

“Six is nowhere near enough,” Roscoe said.

Elisha’s coffin lay on a pedestal beneath the canopy, halfway between the gatehouse and Veronica’s swimming pool. Shiny green smilax leaves covered the bottom half of the coffin, which was ringed with orchids from the Fitzgibbon hothouses. On the lawn’s very long slope perhaps a thousand floral arrangements, far more than anyone could ever recall seeing in one place, lay as a crescent-shaped blanket of regret that Elisha had gone away.

He had five official mourners: Veronica, and their twelve-year-old adopted son, Gilby, who looked sticklike and bored in black linen suit and black tie, his hair brushed flat, his acne getting serious; Elisha’s two sisters, Emily and Antonia, and his brother, Gordon, the banker, who were already crowding Veronica for control of the mill. Roscoe, Patsy, and O.B. stood as unofficial mourners at the head of the coffin, close to Veronica but away from contact with the endless line of wakegoers.

And here they came, into their third hour: wealthy lawyers, doctors, bankers, and businessmen, the financial peerage with whom Elisha had lunched almost daily at the Fort Orange Club; also the blue-book women, lady golfers, legislative wives, garden-club matrons whom he courted socially and won politically; several Catholic priests and rabbis, and all the Episcopal clerics in town; countless steelworkers and secretaries from the Fitzgibbon mill; and all three rings and sideshow of the Democratic circus: pomaded ward leaders, aldermen and committeemen, underpaid undersheriffs, jailers, lawyers and clerks, bloated contractors, philanthropic slumlords, nervous bookmakers unaccustomed to sunlight.

Happy McGraw, no known occupation, ever, edged out of line to shake hands with the rumpled boss who ran the town: Hello, Patsy, how’s yourself, what a loss, Pat, you and Eli were friends a long time, he was such a good fellow, keep well, Pat, you’re looking grand, can you spare five? And Patsy: Not here, Hap, button your pants before they fall off and see me Sunday after mass, not saying which mass or which church, he’ll find me. Ah, God love ya, Pat, Hap said, fading away with a smile.

Ex-Governor Herbert Lehman, who fought Elisha for the gubernatorial nomination in ’32, held Veronica’s hand, and Walter Foley, ex-editor of the Times-Union, the first paper to support Patsy’s run for assessor in 1919, kissed her on the cheek, as did Marcus Gorman. Patsy’s brother was in line, Benjamin (Bindy) McCall, who’d gained a hundred and fifty pounds in the six years since the Thorpe brothers hired Lorenzo Scarpelli to kill him; and, behind Bindy, Joe Colfels, who, because he went to school with Elisha, was now a Supreme Court judge; and Moishe (Mush) Trainor, who made seven million running beer with Patsy in Prohibition and blew it gambling; and Deputy Mayor Karl Weingarten, who took over as mayor when Alex joined the army. They’d all come for a last look at the dead leader who had helped create their politics, their livelihood, their city, came also to prove publicly their personal loyalty to the leaders who weren’t dead, Roscoe and Patsy.

The harmony of the Episcopal boys’ choir signaled the advent of the ceremonial moment, and the end of personal contact with the mourners, though two hundred were still in line. Seventy incumbent state senators and assemblymen walked toward the coffin, paying collegial homage to the erstwhile Lieutenant Governor, who had presided over the New York State Senate during the 1933–34 sessions.

Roscoe moved to Veronica’s side before the legislators reached the canopy. He could not resist the urge to touch her, for she was solemnly but irresistibly seductive in her elegant black chiffon mourning gown and strand of pearls, a gift from Elisha. Her eyes, without tears, were brilliant with rapt obligation to public grief.

“How are you holding up?” He touched her shoulder.

“I’m a zombie,” she said.

Most beautiful zombie Roscoe ever saw. “How are you doing, Gilby?” Gilby was staring at Elisha in his coffin.

“He didn’t say goodbye, Roscoe.”

“That’s true. He went very suddenly But we’re saying goodbye now.”

“Everybody should say goodbye to him.”

“You’re right. And everybody is here.”

“Not everybody,” Gilby said, and he looked at his mother.

“Who’s missing?” Roscoe asked. But Gilby was running across the lawn toward the stables.

“You gave him permission to get the dogs,” Veronica said. “He wanted them here but I said no. We put them in the tack room.”

Roscoe saw Gilby open the stable door as the dean of the Episcopal Cathedral began reading the funeral service, the lesson from St. John: “Jesus saith, let not your heart be troubled,” which is easy to say. And then followed a hymn of comfort, “The Strife Is O’er; the Battle Done,” a wrong message, for the battle hadn’t even begun. How can you do battle if you don’t know the point of the war, or who the enemy is?

Roscoe broke away from the hymn singing when he saw Mac crossing the lawn, and went to meet him. They went to the far end of the east portico, where no one could eavesdrop. Mac, full name Jeremiah McEvoy, wearing a blue-and-white seersucker suit, blue tie, and coconut straw hat with a blue-and-white band, ficey little well-dressed cop, handed Roscoe two autopsy reports, one for publication on Elisha, dead of coronary occlusion; and one on Abner Sprule, an alias the Party used instead of John Doe when it suited them. Chloral hydrate killed Sprule, enough to put away two people.

“Is there a body that goes with the Sprule autopsy?” Roscoe asked.

“We got a wino out of the river we can use.”

Elisha had obviously gambled that Roscoe, Patsy, and O.B. would find a way to cover up his death. They’d done it for others. Yet it was sloppy; and Roscoe concluded Elisha ran out of time for punctiliousness, sudden death his only pressing issue.

“A whole lot of chloral hydrate,” Roscoe said.

“You’re gonna do it, do it so it gets done,” Mac said.

“You know that, all right.” And Roscoe remembered when Mac, tipped by an informer, went to Union Station to meet a gunman coming to town on a train to either collect a gambling debt from Roscoe or shoot him in the knee. Mac disarmed the visitor, put him in the back of his detective car and shoved a pistol under his rump, explaining that Albany was a city of law and order, shot him through both buttocks, and drove him to see Dr. Johnny (The Butcher) Merola, the designated abortionist for and inspector general of Albany’s prostitutes, to have his wounds treated. Johnny doped up the visitor, and Mac and his partner put him in a Pullman compartment on the train back to Buffalo so he could suffer in private when he woke up. Roscoe, knees still intact, thanks you, Mac.

Roscoe read in the Sprule medical report that Elisha’s heart was twice its normal size. He could’ve dropped dead anytime. Both autopsies were done by Neil Deasey, coroner’s physician, who found whatever Patsy told him to find in any given corpse. So now Veronica and the Party would not be publicly embarrassed, and Elisha’s insurance not jeopardized. As to the real cause of death, that was the Party’s business. Was Elisha’s enlarged heart a true fact or a Neil Deasey fact? Could Elisha have known this about his heart? He could. Blighted kamikaze. Roscoe put the autopsies in his inside coat pocket.

“Mac,” Roscoe said, “you know when every pimp and felon sneezes in this town. You ever hear any threat to Elisha?”

“I hear the troopers are ready to move against the organization, but no word on what or who. Maybe close down our gambling, don’t know. You wanna shut down the city before they do?”

“That’d be a first,” Roscoe said. “Maybe close the horse rooms.”

“Is that a yes? I’ll start making the rounds.”

“Let me talk to Patsy.”

“Right. You take Gladys home the other night?”

“Why do you ask?”

“She said you did.”

“Don’t you believe her?”

“I like to make sure she gets home safe,” Mac said.

Roscoe saw O.B. coming at quick time across the lawn to the portico.

“Patsy wants the autopsies,” O.B. said to Mac.

“I’ve got them,” Roscoe said. “I’ll see he gets them.”

“This thing is almost over,” O.B. said. “I’m not going to the cemetery. I’ll ride back with you, Mac.”

“Mac says word’s around about a crackdown, maybe on gambling. You hear that?” Roscoe asked O.B.

“Twice a week, every week.”

“We should take it seriously. Patsy’ll probably want to close the horse rooms. Let ’em do phone business.”

“You don’t think the troopers’ll tap the phones?”

“The bookies take that risk, not us.”

“They’re gonna scream,” O.B. said.

“You ever know a bookie didn’t scream?” Roscoe asked.

O.B. and Mac went down the steps and toward Mac’s car, and Roscoe crossed the lawn to hear the boys’ choir singing “Nearer My God to Thee.” He saw Gladys sitting at the end of a row with, guess who, Trish, also Minnie Hausen, who handled legislative patronage for Patsy, and Hattie Wilson, dear old Hat. Roscoe stood in Gladys’s sight line until she eyed him, then he went to her, took her aside.

“Did you tell Mac I took you home from the mill?”

“No.”

“Why would he say you did?”

“I said you offered to. He keeps tabs on me.”

“Not on my account.”

“It’s everybody.”

Roscoe stood with Patsy for the rest of the hymn singing, wondering whether Gladys or Mac was lying, and why. At hymn’s end the Episcopal dean opened his prayer book, and Roscoe heard the snort of a horse. He turned to see Gilby riding out from the stable, a collie and a German shepherd at the heels of Jazz Baby, the eleven-year-old Thoroughbred gelding that had held such promise for Elisha as a racehorse until he turned into a bleeder, going too fast too young, and Elisha brought him back, but as a riding horse, and gave him to Gilby for his tenth birthday. Gilby, his black coat and tie both gone, his sleeves rolled, at home in the saddle, rode Jazz Baby slowly toward the wake and stopped at the outer edge of the crowd.

“My father didn’t say goodbye to Jazz Baby,” Gilby said. He ducked his head, moved the horse forward under the canopy. The mourners stepped back to make room.

“Bizarre,” said Gordon Fitzgibbon.

“Not at all,” said Roscoe, and he walked ahead of the horse, slowly, as Gilby positioned Jazz Baby’s head facing Elisha in the coffin.

Veronica was smiling for the first time in three days, and Roscoe, a sap for animals, was near tears. Gilby held the horse for a long look, then said, “Okay, Baby.” He threaded the horse between coffin and mourners and, on the lawn, broke into a canter toward the woods.

Elisha smiled up at Roscoe. “EP thinks that boy is ready ratoo,” he said. “Right on the bibbity bing.”

The Gossip Begins

Six days after the funeral Roscoe walked up the wide, curving path to the Tivoli swimming pool where Veronica said she’d be if he came over before noon. The walkway was sculpted with gray stone that Duke Willard had carted down from the Helderbergs in his wagons when Ariel leveled part of the south meadow to build tennis courts for his wife, Millicent, the mother of Elisha. Roscoe and Elisha played on the courts as boys, but after Ariel caught Millicent naked with her tennis teacher and divorced her, she ceased being mentioned in the family, and tennis as a pastime went to hell. Elisha, in turn, excavated the courts out of existence, building in their place the swimming pool Veronica wanted. Roscoe remembered two suckling pigs rotating on the spit, and the famous oyster roast catered by Jack Rosenstein for Veronica’s pool opening, where Elisha announced that roast oysters were the next-best thing to money.

Roscoe did not think so highly of money, the principal difference, after not having Veronica as a wife, between himself and Elisha. Roscoe made money from the Stanwix brewery he inherited, also from politics; but money was never a reason for him to get out of bed. As to Veronica, a reason for any man to get into bed, there she was, sitting by her pool, all alone with the new totality of her fortune, sleek in her rattan lawn chair, long legs elevated, feet in open-toed straw sandals, only her tanned arms and legs getting the noonday sun. Her straw picture hat shaded her face and neck, and her white sundress shielded the rest, except where it dipped at her breasts and fell away at one thigh. Remember her in that white tank suit at the pool opening? It can still bring Roscoe low, thinking how close he came to having this woman for his own. Now he has another chance; also another chance to be brought low. Elisha stood beside her that day at the pool opening, wearing his dinner jacket over bathing trunks, proclaiming her the Empress of Water. Look at her now, even in grief exuding the poise of a queen, while Roscoe, the serf, trembles with subjection. It’s good he no longer needs her.

Veronica smiled as Roscoe sat in the lawn chair facing her, that smile bidding him welcome, her head tipped at the angle of affection which he read as being for him alone. But think, Roscoe: isn’t that how she welcomes the world?

“You found me,” she said.

“Remind me, did I lose you? Lately?”

“You’re always in my life.”

“How’s your condition?”

“Perfectly dreadful and getting worse. A communiqué from my sister.”

She handed Roscoe a fold of papers that lay on a table beside her: a writ of habeas corpus from State Supreme Court, through the law firm of Voss, Gorman, and Kiley. Roscoe read: “People ex Relator Pamela Morgan Yusupov, plaintiff, against Veronica Morgan Fitzgibbon, defendant. We command you that you have the body of Gilbert David Rivera Yusupov, by you imprisoned and detained, as it is said, together with time and cause of such imprisonment and detention. before Supreme Court at a Special Term in the County Court House in Albany,” etc. And from Pamela’s petition: “. your petitioner, as mother of Gilbert David Rivera Yusupov, an infant of the age of twelve years, makes application on behalf of said infant for a writ of habeas corpus. Petitioner further shows she is the mother of said infant, having given birth to him on July 12, 1933, that his father is the late Danilo Yusupov. ”

“Is this the first she admitted she’s Gilby’s mother?”

“As far as I know. She called Elisha months ago and said she wanted Gilby back. He told her that was absurd; nobody was taking Gilby. He thought it was a desperation scheme to get money and that we wouldn’t hear any more.”

“He never mentioned this to me. Was she his enemy closing in?”

“Perhaps she was. Will you handle the case, Roscoe?”

“Me? I’m rusty on trial work, Vee.” He slapped the legal papers with the back of his hand. “She’s got Marcus Gorman, best criminal lawyer in town. They were made for each other.”

“Will you please take the case?”

“What does Gilby know about this?”

“He doesn’t even know Pamela’s his mother.”

“Oh boy. Who knows?”

“You, me, and Elisha. It was always our best-kept secret. Now everybody will know. Will you, will you take the case?”

“Get a solid trial lawyer, Vee. Get Frank Noonan.”

“Gilby loves you and I don’t care how rusty you are. You’re smarter than twenty lawyers.”

“If I was smart I’d have taken the case already.”

Veronica leaned forward, her face inches from Roscoe.

“You took it when I handed you the papers. You play dumb when you think it’s the smart thing to do.”

“Are you trying to make me feel dumber than I am?”

“No, but see how smart you are to think so?”

Veronica, Pamela, and their late brother, Lawrence, were children of Julia Sullivan, a poor Irish Catholic girl from Arbor Hill, and David Morgan, son and heir of a German immigrant peddler who built a fortune making scouring powder.

Pamela Marion Morgan, the second child of Julia and David, gave birth in 1933 to a son in a lying-in clinic in the elite Condado section of San Juan, Puerto Rico, near the beachfront house she won in a divorce settlement from her second husband, a Puerto Rican sugar baron. She lived the last five months of her pregnancy there with Esmerelda Rivera, a Puerto Rican cook and maid of temperate personality who, by the end of the fifth month, had been transformed into a quivering but well-paid wreck by the rages of Doña Pamela. Obsessively secret about her pregnancy, Pamela went out rarely, and wore a black wig when she did. She received few visitors, among them her wealthy fiancé, Danilo Yusupov, an exiled Russian prince who, like Pamela, was thrice-wed; both he and she famous for being married splashily and often. Pamela’s festive blond hair and Yusupov’s mustache were recurring images in New York society pages.

Veronica, Elisha, and Roscoe also visited Pamela, the first time to have her sign the agreement Roscoe had drawn up, and to arrange its filing with San Juan’s birth registry. It legitimized Veronica and Elisha’s custody of this child of anonymous mother, without Pamela’s yielding her right to repossess the child. Veronica went to Puerto Rico a second time, with Roscoe but without Elisha, whose duties as Lieutenant Governor kept him in Albany, to register the child’s birth and bring him home. The boy was given the first name of Gilbert for John Gilbert, the silent-film star with whom Pamela claimed to have exchanged passions after he broke up with Garbo; middle name of David, in memory of his grandfather; and fraudulent surname of Rivera, expropriated from Pamela’s maid.

When Pamela told Veronica she was having the child—“I don’t want it but won’t abort it, do you want to raise it?”—Veronica read this as Pamela’s sympathy for Veronica’s loss of her five-year-old daughter, Rosemary, in 1928, and for Veronica’s ongoing inability to conceive another child. Then, in the beach house after the birth, Veronica watched Pamela, propped in bed on pillows, eyes exhausted, her dark-yellow hair a bag of strings, her face flushed and blotched, throwing peeled hard-boiled eggs at the overweight poodle she saw by appointment. The poodle caught the eggs on the fly or chased them like tennis balls and swallowed them without a chew. Pamela smiled with her bee-stung lips, painted for her visitors, and said with great verve to Veronica and Roscoe, “Thank God, thank God I’m no longer a mother,” and threw the poodle another egg. Veronica, ecstatic with the infant in her arms, understood then that motherhood would be a splotch on Pamela’s social canvas and, should the splotch become an out-of-wedlock scandal, her marriage to the royal Yusupov would not happen. Also, Prince Yusupov, with two children from other marriages, had only contempt for this bastard son, and wanted no more children. Veronica clutched Gilby closer as she realized this. Then she and Roscoe spirited him out of Pamela’s life and onto Elisha’s private plane back to Albany.

“First they take my beautiful daughter, then my husband, now they want my son,” Veronica said to Roscoe at poolside.

“The law may say he’s Pamela’s son.”

“She gave him up. We have it in writing.”

“It wasn’t a legal adoption, Vee. All you have in writing is permission to raise Gilby. She could always change her mind. Mothers have clout.”

“After twelve years? I’m his only mother.”

“That’s what the court hearing will be about.”

“No, the hearing will be about money, what Pamela’s always about. The Prince just died and Pamela wants custody as the widowed mother so she can claim support for the child Yusupov fathered.”

“Did Elisha know this?”

“He thought she’d sue us if she got frantic. Gilby also has a trust fund with a hundred thousand in it, and Elisha made it Pamela-proof. But if she gets wind of it she’ll try to tap into that too.”

“Does she ever see Gilby?”

“She sent him a train set last Christmas. ‘From your loving Aunt Pammy.’ He outgrew trains three years ago.”

“Do you see her?”

“Not in years. You know how close we were as children, but when boys came along I was the enemy. She bedded every man she fancied. She was always after Elisha.”

“Did she nail him?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Me?” said Roscoe. “How would I know?”

“Even if you knew you’d never say,” Veronica said. “This is so unbelievably awful. Elisha not dead two weeks and she tries to steal my boy.”

“She thinks you’re vulnerable.”

“God, Roscoe, I can’t abide any more of this.” Veronica took off her hat, tossed her hair, and smiled. “So. So. How are you and Trish-trash doing?”

“I thought I got rid of her, but she came flying back like a boomerang.”

“She seemed very civilized at the wake.”

“A polite pause between psychotic eruptions.”

“Why do you bother with her?”

“Do I have to explain that?”

“You shouldn’t be so needy.”

“You don’t know about need, Veronica. ”

“Oh, don’t I?”

“. or the charm of trash.”

“Elisha was amused by trash.”

“Really? I never noticed that in him.”

“Of course you didn’t, you two trash collectors.”

“Did you swim yet this morning?” he asked.

“Not yet. Do you want to swim? You have trunks in the pool house.”

“Do you want to swim? That’s the question.”

“We’re in this deep water together now, aren’t we?”

She stood and took off her sundress. Contoured sublimely by her clinging tank suit, solid black for mourning under water, she walked to the pool’s edge and dove in, Olympically. Roscoe watched her swim, then walked to the pool house, shed his clothing, and pulled on his bathing trunks, the snake’s new skin. Slithy Roscoe: protector of widow and child, surrogate husband without privilege, barrister and sleuth for hire, quester for buried love and answers to vexing secrets, what a useful tub-of-guts you’ve become. He blinked as he stepped into the sunlight, exposing his Homeric girth to her inspection.

“Are you prepared to gaze upon this pale orb of corpulence?” he asked.

“You seem to be getting thin,” she said, treading water.

“Your lies are like candied kumquats,” he said. “But neither largeness nor love can be hid.” He bounced twice on the diving board, then cut the water with a graceful arc, pleased with his boldness, and saying in midair, “We must all to the wars — again,” and with pain stabbing him in some unidentified internal organ, he sank beneath a great wave of his own making.

A Fitzgibbon kitchen maid brought to poolside the iced tea and crustless ham and chicken sandwiches Veronica had requested. On the tray with the food was the Albany Sentinel, which had arrived by courier with a cover note from Gladys Meehan: “Dear Veronica, This came into the office this morning with the other newspapers, and I thought you should see it as soon as possible. If there’s anything I can do, please call.”

Roscoe unfolded the paper, which was open to the page with the “Ghost Rider,” a gossip column, and he and Veronica read together the item Gladys had outlined in red pencil:

COURTROOM DRAMA! The Mayor’s kid brother, Gilby Fitzgibbon, may only be his cousin! Mayor’s mother, Veronica Fitzgibbon, is being sued by her socialite sister, Pamela Morgan Yusupov, for custody of Gilby, who, she sez, is her boy. Coming atop of sudden death of hubby Elisha Fitzgibbon, this is doubly troubly for Mrs. Fitz. Fitzgibbon death also a big loss for local Dems. Remember Mayor Goddard dying strangely in Havana in 1928?. Speaking of grave matters, Ghost Rider hears a recent sudden death from natural causes looks like suicide!

“How did they get that?” Veronica asked.

“Her lawyer had to file the petition with the county clerk, and some reporter found it, or was tipped off. Nasty but legal.”

“You think they’re talking about Elisha’s suicide?”

“I think I’ll visit the Sentinel and inquire.”

He wrapped two chicken sandwiches in a napkin and ate them on the drive to the Sentinel. The gossip boiled his juices, and by the time he reached Newspaper Row at Green and Beaver Streets he was shaping the curses he’d heap upon Roy Flinn, the publisher. The Flinns were cascading back into Roscoe’s life: first Arlene, then dead Artie, now Roy.

Roscoe climbed the stairs to the loft where the weekly Sentinel had been founded by Warren Skaggs, a printer, in 1909, and thrived in the era of Republican control of the city. Skaggs did city printing business for the Republicans and also started printing, then backing, the Albany baseball pool in 1920 as a neighborhood venture with a fifteen-dollar weekly prize. Popularity grew, prizes swelled to nine hundred dollars, then three thousand, and the pool’s take kept escalating.

Players, for a dollar a play, chose six numbers (from one to sixteen), one for each day of play: Monday to Saturday. As the week began, the pool published a key that matched a number with each of the sixteen big-league baseball teams. Pool players whose numbers matched the six teams that accumulated the greatest number of runs during the week won the prize. The game appealed not only to baseball fans but to every sucker who believed in the easy dollar, and Albany was blessed with many.

Patsy paid serious attention to the pool for the first time at Willie Altopeda’s funeral in 1924, when he saw Warren Skaggs, a Republican, driving a four-thousand-dollar Cadillac. “I knew the bum when he couldn’t afford a wheelbarrow,” Patsy said.

Artie Flinn, a quick-witted gambler from Arbor Hill who’d grown up with Patsy, enlightened him on how profitable Skaggs’s baseball pool was. Patsy then invited Skaggs and his partners to share pool profits with him fifty-fifty. Skaggs gnashed his teeth and said no. Patsy threatened to have the police close the pool and put Skaggs and company in jail, but said he’d accept a lesser cut if Artie Flinn became a pool associate.

Patsy, the pool’s new panjandrum, expanded its territory and sales force, and by 1926, when he took it away from Skaggs entirely, pool plays were selling all over New England and New Jersey, and grossing four million for the year, not enough. The next summer Artie and Patsy implemented a plan to plug the pool — put thousands of dummy plays into competition with the public play. Artie oversaw the plugging, hiring young women at twenty-five dollars a week to write books full of plug plays, more than a hundred books a week, each book with twenty plays. Artie, his cohort of pluggers, and twenty accountants manipulated and published thousands of plays and combinations, okaying payoffs for enough legitimate winners to keep word-of-mouth at a frenzied pitch.

In May 1927, the pool announced its first prize of twenty-two thousand dollars had been won by “Mutt,” second prize of sixteen thousand by “Joan,” and third prize of eleven thousand shared by “John Doe,” “Beautiful,” and “Marie,” all anonymous, and there were forty ties for the low prize of five thousand dollars. None of this bothered the public. Callers clogged newspaper switchboards for baseball results. Broadway, across from Union Station at four-thirty on Saturday afternoons, was impassable to traffic as Sport Schindler posted, in front of his speakeasy, inning-by-inning scores of major-league games crucial to pool prizes. By the end of the 1928 baseball season the pool’s gross for the year was five million; by 1929, seven million.

Warren Skaggs, a grumpy loser, kept his Sentinel running as a pesky hornet trying once a week to sting Democrats. That his paper survived at all was because of its racy cover age of divorces and scandals. Cautious readers carried it home under their coats. In 1929, it printed two dozen torchy love letters, all forgeries, from a 1908 Love Nest Scandal involving an Albany playwright and an actress, and when the playwright won a libel settlement against Skaggs, Patsy used this outrage as a reason to pressure advertisers to withdraw their ads. Skaggs had to close the paper.

In September 1930, a federal prosecutor moved against the pool for violation of the interstate-lottery law, indicting Artie and two dozen others, including Warren Skaggs, who testified with great relish about Patsy’s takeover and Artie’s plug system, and also brought Elisha’s name into it. Patsy was subpoenaed to appear before Artie’s grand jury but vanished and lived as a fugitive for three weeks before he figured out what to say. He surrendered to his attorney, Roscoe Conway, and came to federal court to testify.

Q:

Are you in business in Albany?

A:

I have no business in Albany.

Q:

Are you in business anywhere else?

A:

No, sir.

Q:

How do you make a living?

A:

I am vague on that.

Q:

How did you formerly make a living?

A:

I ran my father’s saloon until the Volstead Act closed it.

Q:

You haven’t worked since 1920? How do you live?

A:

I do a little betting on horses and prizefights.

Q:

On baseball pools?

A:

I refuse to answer because it might degrade or incriminate me.

Q:

You make a living on betting?

A:

That and what I owe.

Q:

How can you make a living on what you owe?

A:

A good many people do that.

Q:

Have you ever heard of the Albany baseball pool?

A:

I am vague on that.

Q:

Do you know a man named Warren Skaggs?

A:

I am vague on that.

Q:

Did you know anyone named Skaggs connected to a baseball pool?

A:

I am vague on that.

The judge found him guilty of contempt and sentenced him to six months in a federal jail in Manhattan. No other charges were brought, for only Skaggs’s word linked Patsy to the pool. Artie, some of whose accountants and young-lady pluggers testified against him to avoid jail, was convicted and sentenced to six years, the start of his enmity toward Patsy over the imbalance of justice. Warren Skaggs was fined five thousand dollars and given a year’s suspended sentence.

Skaggs felt less than welcome in Albany after his testimony against Artie and Patsy, so he sold his printing plant, plus the rights to his defunct Sentinel, for a pittance to the only buyer who dared be interested, Artie’s son, Roy, who had been a Sentinel scandal editor before Patsy took over the pool.

Was Roscoe disturbed by the plugging? It did seem less than sporting. But can one sensibly retreat to the moral high ground when major money is on the table? Roscoe’s cut made him flush enough to dabble in racehorses with Elisha and Veronica, but his cut was minuscule compared with Patsy’s, which was bundled and banked out of state in Wilkes-Barre under various names, and held in readiness for the next Democratic crisis. What did Patsy do for himself with his new millions? He left larger tips at Keeler’s and the Elks Club bar, let ward leaders steal more than last year, bet heavier on chickens, and bought a new Panama hat.

Roy Flinn continued the Skaggs printing business and in 1943 asked Roscoe if the organization would let him resurrect the long-dead Sentinel as a patriotic sheet covering local people in military service, plus local gossip in and out of the courts, but absolutely no political content. Roscoe and Roy had been classmates at Christian Brothers Academy, an Albany military high school, and because of that connection, and still smarting with guilt over Artie, Roscoe persuaded Patsy to give Roy the okay. Roy ran the paper with two reporters and a photographer, and also wrote the anonymous “Ghost Rider” himself.

Roscoe halted at the door to the Sentinel and took six deep breaths, his usual tactical pause to retreat from rage. First find out what Roy knows, for he does tell secrets.

Roy Flinn’s Secret

In their senior year of high school, Roy came to Roscoe’s house to tell him that he had a chancre, a gift from the eighteen-year-old girl he’d been boffing, with modifiers, four times a week, and who told him one night, Roy, gimme it for real, and who turned up at the side door of Roy’s house on Christmas Day with a predictable second gift, asking for help getting rid of it.

Roy came to Roscoe because Roscoe knew people, and Roscoe talked to Patsy, who recommended an Arbor Hill doctor who said, sure, thirty bucks up front, which Roy and the girl did not have. So she got some how-to-do-it advice elsewhere, waited until her parents left town, then went at it in the cellar with assorted implements and a piece of wire, sitting on a spread of newspapers. After a while she strapped herself to keep the blood from staining the world and called in sick at Marie’s Millinery on North Pearl Street, where she sold ladies’ hats.

When she could function she went to Roy’s and brought him home, opened the door of her furnace, and showed him how she had burned the bloody papers but not the baby. “He don’t burn,” she said. Roy took out the fetus, stoked the fire with wood, and heaped on the coal, terrified that the girl’s father might walk in and murder him on the spot. He wrapped the unburned baby in a blanket of newspaper and put it on the flaming coals with a shovel. Soon there was a strong odor in the cellar, said Roy. He kept feeding the fire, and after a few hours there was nothing at all among the coals. Roy still had his chancre, however. And arsenic, mercury, bismuth, and shame were his treatment for years afterward.

He never married, was rejected by the army in the Great War, and turned into a peephole columnist, voyeur at the sex games his trauma had kept him from playing. You are one sad bastard, and it could happen to anybody, Roy, but that’s no excuse. Roscoe whistled his way into the news office at the front of the print shop.

“Roy Flinn, where the hell are you?” Roscoe called out jovially as he entered. He saluted two reporters typing at their desks and saw Roy emerge from the back room with a handful of galleys. Tieless, in shirtsleeves, fingers stained with printer’s ink, Roy Flinn was an angular, bony figure, his hair plastered down with Vaseline, a twisted and bitter freak of fate.

“Roscoe, you rascal,” said Roy, “what brings you here? You have some news for me?”

“News? What would you do with news, Roy? You know less about news than my sister, who thinks Wilson is still President. You find your news scrawled on public-toilet walls. Even your saintly sister, Arlene, is repelled by your sheet. News, Roy? I’m stunned you can even use the word in a sentence.”

“Roscoe, old mushmouth, I’ve heard your song before. Why are you here?”

“Why do geese run funny, Roy? I’m here because your scurrilous scribbles summoned me.”

“The item on the Fitzgibbon custody suit?”

“That suit is public record. I’m talking about your innuendo on Goddard, and that Elisha committed suicide.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Roy, I am fluent in the English language, and you are fluent in the language of pollywogs.”

Roscoe pulled the Sentinel out of his pocket and read from the “Ghost Rider” item: “‘Remember Mayor Goddard dying strangely in Havana in 1928?. Speaking of grave matters, Ghost Rider hears a recent death from natural causes looks like suicide!’ Dying strangely, grave matters, and suicide. I consider that innuendo, Roy.”

“Goddard’s death was never explained and you know it.”

“He died of an infection.”

“After he fell out of a car.”

“He was drunk,” Roscoe said. “Drunks fall out of cars. Drunks fall out of bed.”

“A lot of people thought it was strange.”

“I find it strange that you bring it up in context with Elisha and then add that insidious suicide item.”

“That item has nothing to do with Elisha.”

“Who, then?”

“I can’t reveal that.”

Roscoe grabbed a handful of Roy’s shirtfront, shoved him against a wall. “Are you invoking constitutional privilege here, Roy? Or claiming protection under the sacrosanctity of journalistic ethics? What are you talking about?”

“I can’t say.”

Roscoe slid Roy up the wall with one hand and held him there, the move pulling out Roy’s shirttail and tightening his collar into a noose.

“You’re a lying stringbean traitor. You were told no politics.”

“Let go of me, Roscoe,” Roy said, a windpipe croak.

“Why did you print that, Roy? Tell me why.”

“You people are in trouble,” Roy said.

Roscoe slid Roy down the wall and released his shirt. “Trouble?”

“You’ll probably beat it like you always do,” Roy said, righting his collar, “but you’re in for a dogfight.”

“With what dogs?”

“The Governor’s people know Elisha owned a block of whorehouses. That’s just the beginning.”

Roscoe’s right elbow suddenly bent upward, and his fist, from a position of rest, whomped Roy’s face with three rapid snaps of the full forearm, Roy’s head hitting the wall and rebounding into each new whomp.

“There, Roy,” Roscoe said as Roy stumbled sideways to lean on a desk, “there you have your headlines. Lawyer punches out editor for maligning his friend. Genuine news.”

As he left, Roscoe saluted the two reporters, who were out of their chairs, trying to decide how to rescue Roy. “See you later, fellas,” he said, reveling in the vision of Roy’s blood and licking his own bleeding Purple Heart, his big knuckle stabbed by Roy’s hostile fangs. He remembered his father’s commandment on justice — Never let an enemy go unpunished — and he thought, I did all right, Pa, didn’t I?

Roscoe drove twenty-five minutes to Patsy’s summer place to give him the news. It was situated on a Helderberg mountainside that gave a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree vista of Patsy’s Garden of Eden, the city and county of Albany. Patsy’s father had built a cedar-shingled summer bungalow on the land when he was sheriff. When the old man died, Patsy winterized the place, added a second story, built outbuildings to breed fighting chickens and a pit where they could fight. In the years after the Party took City Hall, the house became the summer hub of political action. Principal Albany Democrats made regular pilgrimages here to listen to Patsy the oracle tell them what they should think tomorrow.

Wally Mitchell, an ex-heavyweight who knocked down Jim Jeffries and was now Patsy’s driver and bodyguard, unlocked the chain across the driveway and waved Roscoe in. Such security had been the norm since a homegrown gang of bootleggers tried to shoot Bindy and later kidnapped his son, Charlie Boy McCall. Roscoe saw Bindy’s custom-made, bulletproof black Packard, and he parked alongside it. He stepped out into the sunshine of a clear August afternoon and could see everything, from the beginning of the patchwork fruited plain at the base of the mountains, all the way in to the tower of Albany’s splendid City Hall and the Al Smith State Office Building, Albany’s modest skyscraper. He saw the shadow of a cloud moving fast across the plain below, but in the clear, blue-white sky he could find no cloud. He saw Patsy and Bindy near the chicken coops and went to them.

“How fare the chickens of this world?” Roscoe asked.

“Chickens is chickens,” Patsy said. “Fight ’em and eat ’em.”

“The received wisdom of history,” Roscoe said. “Don’t you fellows have a main coming up?”

“Tomorrow night, up in Fogarty’s,” Bindy said.

“Been weedin’ out my sick ones,” Patsy said, a chicken under his arm. “One of my tough guys’s got the megrims, feedin’ it too much. And this guy got the chicken pox fightin’ his friends. His head’s pecked all to hell.”

The McCall brothers had raised chickens since early adolescence in North Albany. Later, when they moved to Arbor Hill, Patsy kept his coops in a stable next to his house on Colonie Street, but as the chickens grew in number he was deemed a neighborhood nuisance and told to get rid of them. A politically connected neighbor let him put his coops on the Albany County Courthouse roof, the beginning of Patsy’s life above the law.

Patsy put his poxy chicken back on the walk and led the way to the kitchen. Wally Mitchell was lifting a blue roasting pan out of the oven, two cooked chickens in it. He put forks under the chickens and moved them onto a white stoneware platter. The house smelled like Sunday.

“Cook those yourself, Wally?” Roscoe asked. Wally’s left ear, from heavy use by others, looked like a partly eaten chicken wing.

“I don’t cook,” Wally said. “I do the heavy liftin’.”

Rose Carbone, Patsy’s full-time housekeeper ever since Patsy’s wife, Flora, died, stood at the sink washing a pot.

“Did you make the gravy?” Patsy asked Rose.

“I did not and I would not and you know it,” she said.

“Good,” said Patsy.

Rose went out of the kitchen and Patsy said, “She’s all right but she can’t make gravy.” He took a tin of flour from the pantry and put the roasting pan with its drippings on the gas stove and lit the burner. He mixed the flour with some water, poured it into the pan as the drippings began to boil, added salt, pepper, a splash of Kitchen Bouquet, and water from a kettle, then stirred the mix with a wooden spoon. Roscoe knew better than to try for Patsy’s attention when he was cooking, so he sat at the kitchen table to watch a ritual that dated to their adolescent fishing trips, when Patsy cooked in self-defense against Roscoe’s and Elisha’s life-threatening concoctions; and again in the army in 1918, when shrapnel knocked Patsy off his horse; and after his leg healed they made him a cook’s helper. Patsy poured the thickened brown gravy into a bowl and set it beside the chickens.

Bindy came out of the bathroom into the kitchen. “You see that stuff in the Sentinel?” he asked Roscoe.

“I have some serious news on that,” Roscoe said.

Patsy nodded and put down his spoon and the three men walked through Patsy’s workout room toward the parlor. Patsy punched the hanging bag and bent it in half. He sat in his parlor rocker, feet crossed on the floor, a book, Hard Times, open on his reading table, and under it the Sentinel. His brown fedora sat on a straight chair by the door under the holy-water font, which was a Christmas gift from Father Tooher, pastor of St. Joseph’s.

Roscoe sat in an armchair facing Patsy and Bindy, who weighed three pounds less than a horse and made Roscoe feel thin. Bindy sat on half the sofa, eating peanuts from a silver dish.

“I just punched out Roy Flinn,” Roscoe said.

“Nice,” Patsy said.

“That little pimple,” Bindy said.

“Veronica’s a nervous wreck. I only went down to yell at Roy, but then he said Elisha owned a block of whorehouses. So I hit him.”

“Good,” Patsy said.

“He said we’re in for a dogfight with the Governor. What do you make of that, Bindy?” Control of brothels and gambling had been Bindy’s responsibility since the 1921 takeover.

“Dogfight?” Bindy said. “I’ll tell him about dogfight. I’ll break both his legs. Put the Night Squad on him, Pat. Break both his legs.”

“You hear anything about raiding the whores?” Roscoe asked.

“They been snooping around Division Street,” Bindy said, “but it don’t feel like a raid.”

“Shouldn’t we close the whores down to be safe?”

“How will anybody get laid?” Bindy asked.

“Tell the boys to have a go at their wives,” Roscoe said.

“We’ll see a lot of rape.”

“This isn’t forever,” Roscoe said. “Just till we see the whites of their eyes.”

“If this goes public I’ll catch hell from the Bishop,” Patsy said. “Wouldn’t hurt to give the girls a vacation.”

“How could Roy say that about Elisha?” Roscoe wondered.

“We had a big buy-up in ’33,” Patsy said.

“I remember that,” Roscoe said, “but not Elisha.”

“You were in Kentucky, screwing around with racehorses,” Patsy said.

“It happened fast,” Bindy said. “Income from the madams fell two thousand in two weeks, two owners died, one left town, and three houses went dark. I told Patsy we oughta own them places, so we bought ’em. And kept buyin’.”

“Elisha bought them?” Roscoe asked.

“He organized the investors,” Patsy said.

Bankers panting to do business with the city could prove their sincerity by investing in whorehouse real estate, and lawyers could do the same by representing the whores when they were periodically arrested to put their pictures in the files, and to justify the Vice Squad’s existence. Within two months the neighborhood of the whores was stabilized through dummy corporations, and whoredom also had new friends at court.

“Roy said Elisha owned the houses,” Roscoe said.

“He never owned ’em,” Patsy said.

“I wonder if his name is on any deeds.”

“He used front people.”

“But can they prove he was behind it?”

“I don’t know how,” Patsy said. “And who’s gonna indict a dead man? They want us up against the wall for Alex’s re-election. What I don’t get is where Roy Flinn borrowed the balls to take us on.”

“Maybe he wants to get back at us for what happened to Artie.”

“Artie?” said Patsy. “That’s fifteen years ago.”

“Artie died six months ago in Poughkeepsie,” Roscoe said. “Maybe it affected Roy. He didn’t even want a death notice in the papers.”

“Where’s his leverage?” Patsy asked.

“He’s cozy with the Governor’s gang, so maybe he feels protected,” Roscoe said. “Also, his paper’s heavy with ads from outside Albany — summer hotels, nightclubs, restaurants, dude ranches that don’t worry about pressure from us.”

“Send a fire inspector down to that firetrap of his,” Bindy said. “Make him spend thirty grand to bring it up to code. He’ll come around.”

“Bad scene,” Roscoe said. “Harassing the press, and the patriotic press at that. There are other ways.”

“Name a few,” Patsy said.

“Take over his block. You did it with the whorehouses.”

“The whole block?”

“It’s a small block. Condemn one side to widen it for improved traffic flow, put in new sewer pipes. Pay Roy a quarter of what his building’s worth, settle sweet with the — what? — three, four other landlords? Then we own the block. When Roy is gone and we’ve got the property, cancel the project.”

“Condemn the block,” Patsy said. “Goddamn it, Roscoe, you are one twisted, beautiful sonofabitch.”

“That’s what my mother always said.”

“You want some chicken?”

“Of course I want some chicken.”

“The gravy’s good.”

“Life without gravy is not life,” Roscoe said.

As they went back to the kitchen for lunch, O.B. called to report that Roy Flinn and his lawyer were filing a third-degree assault charge against Roscoe. Roy’s eyebrow and lip were badly split and his nose was broken.

“Have Rosy open court at two o’clock for the arraignment,” Roscoe told O.B. “Tell him to set my bail at four hundred to make Roy feel good.”

“You’ll be here, like an upstanding citizen,” O.B. said.

“Of course I’ll be there. Two o’clock. On the dot.”

Patsy looked at his watch. “Two o’clock’s too early,” he said. “You gotta eat your chicken.”

“Make that three o’clock,” Roscoe told O.B.

In Police Court, Roscoe could hear Roy Flinn’s nose throbbing under its bandage as they stood before the bench to hear Rosy Rosenberg, whom Roscoe and Patsy had put on that bench, read the law relating to assault, and then set bail at four hundred dollars, “in default of which you will be remanded to Albany County jail.” Roscoe smiled at Rosy, waved at Roy, and paid the four.

Horse Talk

They were in the east parlor of Tivoli when Gilby read the item about Pamela in the Sentinel and asked Veronica, “Is it true she’s my mother?”

Veronica told him, “I’m your mother. She gave you up before you were born.”

“Now she wants me back.”

“She can’t have you, and she won’t get you.”

“Who’s my father?”

“He’s dead,” Veronica said. “You didn’t know him.”

“I don’t know anything,” Gilby said, and he went out onto the porch.

“Where are you going? Listen to me!” But he kept walking. She caught up with him. “Did I ever tell you what your Grandma Julia used to say? ‘Patience and perseverance took the snail to Jerusalem.’ ”

Gilby shrugged.

“When she was a girl,” Veronica said, “she’d throw a penny off the bridge into Washington Park Lake and say, ‘I’m going to have a big, big house and a butler named Johnny,’ and she did.”

Gilby stared at her.

“She only went to third grade in school, but she owned the world. I’m talking about overcoming problems. Do you see that? It’s like breeding a champion Thoroughbred. Your father and I always wanted that for you. You have money and brains and love, and you can’t give that newspaper story any importance. What does the stupid Sentinel know about champions?”

Gilby went onto the back deck, vaulted the railing with one arm, and ran down the drive toward the stables.

“Gilby!” Veronica yelled. “Listen to me! I want to tell you about this.” But he would not look back. She went down the steps of the deck and ran after him as fast as her high heels would allow. When she reached the second stable, he was saddling Jazz Baby. Ticky Blake, who for twenty-two years had trained Fitzgibbon horses, stopped brushing Mr. Bantry, Veronica’s bay, and listened.

“Gilby, your life won’t change,” Veronica said. “I won’t let it. I’m a strong person. Do you believe I’m strong? Well, I am, and we have powerful friends in all the courts, and I have more money than your aunt does to fight this, and I’ve won every fight I ever had with her.”

Gilby, in his white sneakers, stepped up into the saddle.

“Gilby,” Veronica said, “talk to me.”

The boy nudged Jazz Baby onto the road and into open pasture, toward the trail through the western woods.

“Saddle Mr. Bantry for me, Ticky,” she said, and she ran to the house and up to her bedroom and pulled herself out of her dress and slip and shoes. She stepped into her riding britches and boots, then shoved her arms into a pullover shirt, and double-timed down the stairs with her hair flying, a laissez-faire beauty when she wanted to be. She mounted Mr. Bantry and rode at a gallop into the woods after the boy, praying to her trinity of Gods — Jewish, Anglican, Catholic — that she would not lose Gilby, because she absolutely could not lose another thing, not one. Yet she seemed to be galloping toward more loss and new shame, the press again prying just as it had when Elisha was named a profiteer in the crazy baseball pool and he fled with her to Europe from a scandal that never really amounted to much, so supported was he by clergy and politicians of every stripe. Elisha, grand husband, you’re gone, and you left Veronica in wicked confusion: grief still green but waning; men hovering at the wake, eyes probing her widowed beauty for just one wrinkle of welcome. But Veronica rejected every eye, wants no affection while she still cries in the half-empty bed. She’s fighting the fears her loneliness generates, but they are smothering her.

She rode the trail to where it came out of the woods at Lake Tivoli. Maybe Gilby would go to the fishing shack to be there with his memories of Elisha. She should have told Gilby the history of his birth, as Elisha wanted, but she’d waited for him to come of age, so he could handle such disturbing rejection. They told him only that he was adopted, his parents’ names unknown to them.

She saw the shack and dock and lake, which Gilby had not yet outgrown but would now think of as no longer his. It is yours, Gilby, and I’ll see you keep it. She wanted to find him on the dock but he wasn’t in sight. She turned onto another trail, seeing him ahead of her, then not. She stopped and listened for him, heard the rustling breath of the forest, the breath of her horse, but no sound of her boy. She had lost him. No, she would never lose him. He was gone. No, not gone. Gone. Never.

She came slowly back to the stables. Ticky was feeding the horses alfalfa and bran, and the shredded beet pulp. She stabled Mr. Bantry and looked toward the woods for Gilby. She saw Roscoe coming out of the house, and the sight of him was tonic. Things would change now.

Then here came Gilby, riding across the west pasture. He swung himself out of the saddle, and she was again struck by his resemblance to Elisha: lean and lanky and growing taller, and that same resolute jaw. His straight black hair blown wild, and those black eyes. Yusupov also had dark features. But from Gilby’s boyhood, Veronica suspected Elisha, not Yusupov, was his father. She hinted this once to Roscoe, who explained that children grow up to look like the people they live with, and so do bulldogs.

“So you come back,” Ticky said as Gilby walked Jazz Baby to the hose bib outside the stable. “You gonna stay awhile?”

Gilby did not answer.

“Aren’t you going to talk to us?” Veronica asked.

Gilby did not answer, or look at her.

“What ails you, boy, you don’t talk to your mama?” Ticky said. “Where you get off on that?”

Gilby looped Jazz Baby’s reins over the rail fence and took off his saddle. He filled a bucket with water from the hose, and washed the horse with a sponge.

“Lookit this boy don’t talk to his mama. What kind of boy is that?”

“I don’t have anything to say,” Gilby said softly.

“You got a whole lot to say you ain’t sayin’.”

Gilby washed Jazz Baby’s nose and whispered to the horse.

“Boy talks to his horse but don’t talk to his mama.”

“It’s all right, Ticky,” Veronica said, “he’ll talk when he’s ready.”

“I did that with my mama,” Ticky said, “my papa’d say, You don’t wanna talk to peoples you get outa this house go live with that horse.”

“I can do that,” Gilby said.

“He can do that,” Ticky said. “He can live with Jazz Baby, and Jazz Baby gonna cook breakfast for him. Jazz Baby gonna buy his shirts. Hey, Roscoe, you know this boy here don’t talk to his mama, he gonna live with his horse.”

Roscoe nodded to Ticky, touched Veronica hello on the shoulder.

“You believe in horses, is that it?” Roscoe said to Gilby.

Gilby dropped the sponge into the bucket, took the scraper off its nail, and scraped water off Jazz Baby’s flanks, shoulders, and haunches.

“Do you know how stupid horses are?” Roscoe said.

“They’re not stupid,” Gilby said, scraping the haunches.

“Stupider than crabmeat,” Roscoe said.

“Horses are smart,” Gilby said, scraping faster.

“Gimme that scraper,” Ticky said. “You gonna skin that horse.”

“Don’t tell me how smart horses are,” Roscoe said. “They tell too many lies.”

“Horses don’t lie,” Gilby said.

“Are you serious? There’s a broken horse for every light on Broadway. You ever try to hide a tennis ball in a horse’s ear? You can’t do it. On the other hand, I never met a horse I didn’t like.”

“Me either,” said Gilby with a tight-lipped smile.

“Why do you want to live with your horse?”

“Nobody tells me anything.”

“You mean that stuff in the Sentinel about the lawsuit?”

Gilby nodded.

“That’s how you learn. You read the papers. You know you’ll need a lawyer to fight this thing in court. You have any lawyer friends?”

“No.”

“Sure you do. Me.”

“Are you a lawyer?”

“I’m your lawyer. Your mother hired me.”

“When?”

“This morning.”

“She didn’t tell me that.”

“We don’t tell you everything all at once. We parcel it out. We ever tell you about Einstein’s theory that light curves with gravity? We ever tell you how John Calvin tried to cancel Sunday baseball?”

“Nobody even told me where I was born.”

“San Juan, Puerto Rico. I was there.”

“You were? Where’s Puerto Rico?”

“Down there in the middle of it all. It was a very hot day. Bright and sunny, the trade winds blowing in off the Atlantic, palm trees, sandy beach, whitecaps on the ocean. You were very good-looking when you were born. You looked like a pineapple. We brought you back here in your father’s airplane right after you left the clinic with whatsername.”

“Aunt Pamela?”

“That’s the one,” Roscoe said.

“Why does she want me? She doesn’t even like me.”

“I don’t know anybody she does like. She wants money and needs you to get at it, even though she couldn’t wait to get rid of you. But your parents loved you and wanted you even before you were born.”

“What’s my real name?”

“Gilbert David Fitzgibbon, as always. A stately name.”

“What’s stately?”

“Dignified, magnificent. Don’t let anybody change it.”

“Me and Alex have the same name, but he’s not my brother.”

“He’ll always be your brother.”

“He’s my cousin.”

“Then he’s your brother-cousin. Do you love him?”

“I guess so.”

“No guesses. Do you love him, yes or no?”

“Yes. But my father’s not my father.”

“No, of course not.”

Roscoe took off his hat and coat, handed them to Veronica, and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He tipped over a bale of hay and stood on it, took Jazz Baby’s reins, threw his right leg up, and mounted the horse.

“You gonna ride him?” Gilby asked.

“I might.”

“I didn’t know you could ride. You don’t have a saddle.”

“I used to ride bareback in rodeos. I was in ten or fifteen rodeos, one after the other.”

“You were never in the rodeo.”

“Well, you’re right, but your father and I rode bareback plenty down in Texas. They all ride bareback down there.”

“My father didn’t ride.”

“He gave you a pony, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“And when you outgrew it he gave you a horse.”

“Yes.”

“But he wasn’t much of a father, because he never rode a horse, right? And he never took you fishing, never took you to New York to see the lights of Times Square, never introduced you to Jack Dempsey, never gave you a bicycle or started a bank account so you’d have your own money, never sent you to one of the greatest schools in town, never taught you how to throw a baseball and a horseshoe, never took you down to Hyde Park so you could shake hands with the President, never let you sleep with him and your mother when burglars were coming up through the steam pipes, never took you to Laurel-and-Hardy movies and bought you White Tower hamburgers, but, hey, we all know he whipped you with his riding whip so you’d bleed all over the bed. We also know he woke up every day of your life and talked to you about something important. I know, because I was in on a whole lot of those breakfast conversations. Can you possibly imagine how much your father shaped who you are? And you say he’s not your father? Baloney gravy, kid. Who else would’ve done those things for you?”

Gilby looked at his mother and at Ticky, who kept nodding his head. Gilby wanted to say his father shouldn’t have tricked him, but the image arrived of Elisha pitching a horseshoe. Before Gilby could answer him, Roscoe moved Jazz Baby forward and, when he was in open pasture, rode him at a canter, then into a gallop, across the whole pasture to the woods, and then galloped back to the stable and slid gracefully off the horse’s back, doubling over in pain.

“What happened?” Veronica said in panic, and she took Roscoe’s arm. “Are you hurt?”

“Just the usual bareback shock waves,” Roscoe said. “It happens to everybody.” He slowly straightened himself. “Ticky,” he said, sitting on the bale of hay, “tell Gilby what your father told you about horses.”

“Oh, my father,” Ticky said. “Peoples used to say about my father, ‘Oh, he’s a good man with a horse,’ and I’d say, ‘Pa, what you doin’ with that horse? Is that the way you do it?’ And he’d say, ‘Shut up, boy. You wanna learn, go out on your own,’ and he wouldn’t teach me. I worked for other horsemens and they’d teach me. But I didn’t have no father about knowin’ horses.”

“Me either,” said Roscoe, who was trying to sit in a way that controlled his pain. “Now, you take my father. He created a big family and then he left us to live in a hotel. When he lived home he never let me into his bedroom, and if he caught me there he’d lock me in the attic. So I’d stay in my room, reading atlases, memorizing poems and songs and countries and cities, and my brain got so crowded there was no room for the baseball scores. But I liked it so much they took me to the doctor, who talked to me for a week and then said nothing was wrong with my head and all I needed was to go up and see those ghosts again, the ones your father and I saw when we were kids up at Tristano — two old men who came out in the middle of the night and sat by the fireplace in the Trophy House and drank brandy and talked and looked out at the moon until the sun came up on the lake, and then they got up and went away.”

Gilby stared at Roscoe and said, “You saw ghosts?”

“Absolutely.”

“You talked to them?”

“We could hear them whispering. They’d say to one another, ‘Wisha-wisha-wisha-wisha-wisha.’ ”

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s ghost talk.”

“My father never told me about that.”

“He was saving it till you were old enough to appreciate ghosts.”

“I’m old enough.”

“Then I’ll tell you what. I’m of the opinion that your father could very well be up there at Tristano with those ghosts. It’s the sort of place fathers go when they die, especially a father like yours, who liked to talk and fish and was very fond of ghosts. We’ll both go up there one of these days and wait till the ghosts come out, and then we’ll sit and watch them and listen to what they say. And when the sun comes up and the ghosts go to bed, we might even do some fishing. Sound all right?”

“All right,” Gilby said. “All right.”

Ticky was nodding, and as Roscoe stood up, in obvious pain, Veronica handed the witch doctor his hat and coat. She felt blackly excited by his presence, a new thing that hinted there would come a day when her marriage to Elisha would be over. She couldn’t tell Roscoe about this feeling, because she didn’t understand it herself. It was new and unwelcome and she felt guilty for having it. Roscoe had made Gilby’s smile steadfast, but the boy wasn’t out of danger just because his mood had changed. It was possible to lose him, as she’d lost her sweet baby Rosemary.

She put her arm around Gilby and squeezed him as they walked toward the house. Roscoe walked very slowly behind her, his coat slung over his shoulder, his hat on the back of his head, always close in her life, always a puzzle, so gifted, so audacious, so shy Sometimes she decided Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory. She looked at him and saw a man of immense spirit, a man for loss, just as she was a woman for loss. She reached back and took his hand.

When they were in the main parlor of the house and Gilby had gone upstairs, she took both Roscoe’s hands in hers and, standing in the burnished light of this rare Tivoli afternoon, she raised her face to his and kissed him on the mouth in a way she had kissed no other man since the Elisha of a sensual yesterday. Roscoe, suddenly transformed into six feet two and a half inches of tapioca pudding, tried to firm himself; and he grew bold.

“Will you spend one day alone with me?” he asked.

“A day alone? Where?”

“Tristano. I’m asking for a day, not a night.”

“It takes half a day just to get there.”

“We can leave early, come home late. A long day. Or we can stay over if you want to, but that’s not what I’m asking.”

“We wouldn’t be alone. There are caretakers at Tristano.”

“We’ll blindfold them. Are you creating impediments to avoid an answer?”

“I have an answer.”

“What is it?”

“Perhaps.”

“You crush me,” Roscoe said, “under the burden of hope. I pray I can survive it.”

As he walked to his car, Roscoe saw a crow, blacker and larger than crows he had known, and female, which he deduced after she landed on an upper branch of an oak tree and was immediately set upon by another large, black crow, which mounted her; and they lay sideways on the branch and copulated. Roscoe stopped the car to watch and became convinced the female crow was smiling. Roscoe might have taken this to be a good omen, but it was too proximate to his kiss, the crows were black as sin, and they were crows enthralled by passion. They were the crows of fornication.

What did you expect, Roscoe, the bluebirds of happiness?