Roscoe

by William Kennedy

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The first novel from William Kennedy in more than five years and universally acclaimed as his most powerful work since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed, Roscoe shows Kennedy at his very best. It's V-J Day, the war is over, and Roscoe Conway, after twenty-six years as the second in command of Albany's notorious political machine, decides to quit politics forever. But there's no way out, and only his Machiavellian imagination can help him cope with the erupting disasters. Every step leads back to the past-to the early loss of his true love, the takeover of city hall, the machine's fight with FDR and Al Smith to elect a governor, and the methodical assassination of gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond. "Thick with crime, passion, and backroom banter" (The New Yorker), Roscoe is an odyssey of great scope and linguistic verve, a deadly, comic masterpiece from one of America's most important writers.

Release date: November 26, 2002

Publisher: Penguin Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

THE SPHERES OF
WAR AND PEACE
*

Roscoe Owen Conway presided at Albany Democratic Party headquarters, on the eleventh floor of the State Bank building, the main stop for Democrats on the way to heaven. Headquarters occupied three large offices: one where Roscoe, secretary and second in command of the Party, received supplicants and debtors, one where Bart Merrigan and Joey Manucci controlled the flow of visitors and phone calls, and one for the safe which, when put here, was the largest in the city outside of a bank vault. Of late, no money was kept in it, only deceptive Democratic financial data to feed to the Governor's investigators, who had been swooping down on the Party's files since 1942, the year the Governor-elect vowed to destroy Albany Democrats.

Money, instead of going into the great safe, went into Roscoe's top drawer, where he would put it without counting it when a visitor such as Philly Fillipone, who sold produce to the city and county, handed him a packet of cash an inch thick, held by a rubber band.

"Maybe you better count it, make sure there's no mistake," Philly said.

Roscoe did not acknowledge that Philly had raised the possibility of shorting the Party, even by accident. He dropped the cash into the open drawer, where Philly could see a pile of twenties. Democratic business was done with twenties. Then Philly asked, "Any change in how we work this year, Roscoe?"

"No," Roscoe said, "same as usual." And Philly went away.

At his desk by the door Joey Manucci was recording, on the lined pad where he kept track of visitors in their order of arrival, the names of the men who had just walked in, Jimmy Givneyand Cutie LaRue. Joey was printing each name, for he could not write script or read it. Bart Merrigan spoke to the two arrivals. Merrigan, who had gone into the army with Roscoe and Patsy McCall in 1917, was built like a bowling pin, an ex-boxer and a man of great energy whom Roscoe trusted with his life. Merrigan leaned into Roscoe's office.

"Patsy called. He'll be in the Ten Eyck lobby in fifteen minutes. Givney from the Twelfth Ward and Cutie LaRue just came in."

"Have them come back Friday," Roscoe said. "Is the war over?"

"Not yet. Cutie says you'll want to see him."

"How does he know?"

"Cutie knows. And what Cutie don't know he'll find out."

"Send him in."

Merrigan told Jimmy Givney to come back Friday and Joey scratched a line through his name, using a ruler for neatness. Merrigan turned up the volume of the desk radio he was monitoring for news of the official Japanese surrender. A large framed photo of the new President hung on the wall behind his desk. On the wall opposite hung George Washington, FDR, who was still draped in black crepe, and Alexander Fitzgibbon, the young Mayor of Albany.

"What can I do for you, Cute?" Roscoe asked.

"Can we close the door?"

"Close it."

And Cutie did. Then he sat down. George (Cutie) LaRue was an aspiring lawyer who had failed the bar examination fourteen times in eight states before he passed it. He did not practice, but he knew most of the political population of Albany on a first-name basis. He functioned as a legislative lobbyist, and everybody knew him by his large, heavy-lidded, Oriental eyes, though he was French. He had a low forehead and combed his hair straight back. His tic was slicking back the hair over his right ear with the heel of his hand as he exhaled cigarette smoke from his mouth and inhaled it up his nose. Cutie knew your needs and he often lobbied for you, whether you paid him or not. If he delivered, you paid him. If he didn't deliver, he'd try again next session. He held no grudges, for he was ambitious. Cutie once overheard Patsy saying he wanted a book on Ambrose Burnside, a Union general in the Civil War, but it was out of print. Cutie learned that a copy was sitting on a shelf in the library at West Point. He drove to West Point, stole the book, and gave it to Patsy.

"You didn't hear this from me," Cutie said to Roscoe.

"I don't even know what you look like," Roscoe said.

"I heard it from Scully's office this afternoon. Straight stuff, Roscoe. I kid you not."

"Are you just talking, Cute, or are you trying to say something?"

"They want to nail you."

"This is very big news, Cute. I wish you could stay longer."

"They have stuff they can use."

"Like that missing forty thou when they subpoenaed our books? That money is not missing," Roscoe said.

"They're tapping your lines, reading your mail, watching your wild girl-friend, Trish Cooney."

"She's easy to watch. Also, she leaves the shades up."

"They know all your moves with women."

"They get paid for this?"

"You got a reputation. You know how they like scandal."

"I wish my life was that interesting. But thanks, Cute. Is that it?"

"They're on you full-time. I heard Scully himself say nailing you was as good as nailing Patsy."

"I appreciate this news."

"You know what I'm looking for, Roscoe."

"Yes, I do. A courtroom you can call home."

"It's not asking a lot. I'm not talking Supreme Court. Small Claims Court, maybe. Or Traffic Court. I'd make a hell of a judge."

Roscoe considered that: The Cute Judge. Cute the Judge. Judge Cutie. Cutie Judgie. Jurors in his court would do Cutie Duty.

"A hell of a judge," Roscoe said. "It goes without saying."

*

Roscoe put on his blue seersucker suitcoat, waved farewell to the boys, took the elevator down, and went out and up State Street hill. The day was August 14, 1945. Roscoe wore a full beard, going gray, but his mustache was mostly black. Trust no man, not even your brother, if his beard is one color, his mustache another. He was fat but looked only burly, thinking about developing an ulcer but seemed fit. He was burning up but looked cool in his seersucker.

He went into the State Street entrance of the Ten Eyck and up the stairs to the lobby, which was also cool and busy with people checking in-three soldiers, two WACs, a sailor and a girl, rooms scarce tonight if the Japs surrendered. He crossed the marble floor of the lobby and sat where he always sat, precisely where Felix Conway, his father, had sat, this corner known then and now as the Conway corner. He signaled silently to Whitey the bellhop to send a waiter with a gin and quinine water, his daily ritual at this hour. He looked across the lobby, trying to see his father. I'm looking for advice, he told the old man.

Roscoe's condition had become so confounding that he had asked Patsy McCall and Elisha Fitzgibbon, his two great friends, with whom he formed the triaxial brain trust of the Albany Democratic Party, to come to the hotel and talk to him, away from all other ears. Roscoe, at this moment staring across time, finds his father sitting in this corner. It is a chilly spring afternoon in 1917, the first Great War is ongoing in Europe, and Roscoe, twenty-seven, will soon be in that war. He's clean-shaven, a lawyer whose chief client is the Fitzgibbon Steel mill, and he also has an eye on politics. Felix Conway is a man of sixty-five, with a full, gray beard down to his chest, hiding his necktie. He's wearing a waistcoat, suit coat, overcoat, and cap, but also covers himself with a blanket to fend off the deadly springtime drafts in the Ten Eyck Hotel lobby. Felix is a hotel-dweller and will remain one for the rest of his days, which are not many. He had been the thrice-elected, once-ejected Mayor of Albany, and made a sizable fortune brewing ale and lager. He was ousted from City Hall in 1893 after a lawsuit over voting fraud, but his Democrats regained City Hall in the next election and kept it for five years. In those years Felix was the Party's elder statesman, with an office next to the new Mayor, and a luncheon table at the Sadler Room in Keeler's Restaurant, where he held court for Democrats and influence salesmen of all varieties. This lush period for Felix ended in 1899.

In that year the Republicans took City Hall and also found they could afford lunch at Keeler's great restaurant. But Felix could not bear the effluvia they gave off, so he went home for lunch. It took him six months to admit he was not suited to living full-time among his wife, two sons, and three daughters. And when he did admit it, he betook himself to the brand-new Ten Eyck Hotel and told the folks, Goodbye, dear family, I'll be home Saturday afternoons and stay till Sunday tea. We'll have a fine time going to mass, eating the home-cooked meal, won't it be grand? Yes, it will, and then I'll be done with you for a week.

The Republicans of 1917 are secure in their power, and the Democrats no longer even try to win, for it is more profitable to play the loser and take Republican handouts for assuming this pose. Yet Democratic reform elements endure, and there sits Roscoe beside his father, eavesdropping as the old man holds court for a steady, life-giving flow of pols, pals, has-beens, and would-bes. Bellhops daily place "reserved" signs on the marble tea table, the Empire armchair and sofa, in the Felix Conway corner. At the moment, Felix is in his chair, giving an audience to Eddie McDermott, leader of yet another reform faction that hopes to challenge Packy McCabe's useless but invulnerable Albany Democratic Party organization in the 1917 primary.

Eddie stares into Felix's eye, revealing his plans to reform the Party if he wins the primary, and reform the city if he wins the election. He leans farther and farther forward as he speaks ever-so-softly to Felix, finally rolling off the sofa onto one knee to make his message not only sincere but genuflectional, and he whispers to the Solomon of Albany politics: "You do want the Democrats to make a comeback and take City Hall again, don't you, sir?"

"Oh, I do, I do," says Felix. And he truly does.

"I have much to learn, Mr. Conway, but there's one thing I can learn only from you, for nobody else has an answer, and I've asked them all."

"What might that be, Mr. McDermott?"

"Once we take over the Party, how do we get the money to run it?"

Felix Conway throws his arms wide, kiting his blanket toward the outer lobby, startling Roscoe. He opens both his coats, pulls off his muffler, the better to breathe, and begins to laugh.

"He wants to know how you get the money," Felix says to Roscoe, and then his laughter roars out of control, he rises from his chair, and shouts out, "How do you get the money? Oh my Jesus, how do you get the money!"

Then the laughter, paroxysmal now, seals Felix's throat and bloats him with its containment. He floats up from his chair, still with a smile as wide as his head, and he rises like a hot-air balloon, caroming off the balustrade of the Tennessee-marble stairway, and he keeps rising on up to collide with the lobby's French chandelier, where he explodes in a final thunderclap of a laugh, sending crystal shards raining down onto Eddie McDermott, the terrified reformer below.

FELIX DECLARES HIS PRINCIPLES
TO ROSCOE

"How do you get the money, boy? If you run 'em for office and they win, you charge 'em a year's wages. Keep taxes low, but if you have to raise 'em, call it something else. The city can't do without vice, so pinch the pimps and milk the madams. Anybody that sells the flesh, tax 'em. If anybody wants city business, thirty percent back to us. Maintain the streets and sewers, but don't overdo it. Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it. If they play craps, poker, or blackjack, cut the game. If they play faro or roulette, cut it double. Opium is the opiate of the depraved, but if they want it, see that they get it, and tax those lowlife bastards. If they keep their dance halls open twenty-four hours, tax 'em twice. If they run a gyp joint, tax 'em triple. If they send prisoners to our jail, charge 'em rent, at hotel prices. Keep the cops happy and let 'em have a piece of the pie. A small piece. Never buy anything that you can rent forever. If you pave a street, a three-cent brick should be worth thirty cents to the city. Pave every street with a church on it. Cultivate priests and acquire the bishop. Encourage parents to send their kids to Catholic schools; it lowers the public-school budget. When in doubt, appoint another judge, and pay him enough so's he don't have to shake down the lawyers. Cultivate lawyers. They know how it is done and will do it. Control the district attorney and never let him go; for he controls the grand juries. Make friends with millionaires and give 'em what they need. Any traction company is a good traction company, and the same goes for electricity. If you build a viaduct, make the contractor your partner. Whenever you confront a monopoly, acquire it. Open an insurance company and make sure anybody doing city business buys a nice policy. If you don't know diddle about insurance, open a brewery and make 'em buy your beer. Give your friends jobs, but at a price, and make new friends every day. Let the sheriff buy anything he wants for the jail. Never stop a ward leader from stealing; it's what keeps him honest. Keep your plumbers and electricians working, and remember it takes three men to change a wire. Republicans are all right as long as they're on our payroll. A city job should raise a man's dignity but not his wages. Anybody on our payroll pays us dues, three percent of the yearly salary, which is nice. But if they're on that new civil service and won't pay and you can't fire 'em, transfer 'em to the dump. If you find people who like to vote, let 'em. Don't be afraid to spend money for votes on Election Day. It's a godsend to the poor, and good for business; but make it old bills, ones and twos, or they get suspicious. And only give 'em out in the river wards, never uptown. If an uptown voter won't register Democrat, raise his taxes. If he fights the raise, make him hire one of our lawyers to reduce it in court. Once it's lowered, raise it again next year. Knock on every door and find out if they're sick or pregnant or simpleminded, and vote 'em. If they're breathing, take 'em to the polls. If they won't go, threaten 'em. Find out who's dead and who's dying, which is as good as dead, and vote 'em. There's a hell of a lot of dead and they never complain. The opposition might cry fraud but let 'em prove it after the election. People say voting the dead is immoral, but what the hell, if they were alive they'd all be Democrats. Just because they're dead don't mean they're Republicans."

The 1945 election was twelve weeks away, the Governor's three-year-old investigation was intensifying if you believed Cutie, and who knew what they might come up with? The Republicans, because of the Governor's pressure, were running Jason (Jay) Farley for mayor, an intelligent Irish Catholic businessman who made smart speeches, their strongest candidate in years. And the absence of Alex, the city's soldier-boy Mayor, who was still somewhere in Europe, was a factor to be determined. Patsy had decided that, not only would we win this election, we would also humiliate the Governor for trying to destroy us, and his secret weapon was an old one: a third-party candidate who would dilute the Republican vote, the same ploy Felix Conway had used repeatedly in the 1880s and '90s.

Roscoe, working on his second gin and quinine, sat facing Patsy, who was having his usual: Old Overholt neat. Patsy sat here often, but he was out of place amid the gilded rococo furniture and Oriental rugs of the lobby, and looked as if he'd be more at ease at a clambake. But despite the August heat, there he was under his trademark fedora, sitting where Felix Conway had received visitors a quarter-century ago, looking not at all like a man of power, yet with far greater power than Felix could have imagined having. For Patsy now, as leader of the Albany Democratic Party for twenty-four heady years, was everybody's father, Roscoe included. Patsy, five years Roscoe's senior, was the main man, the man who forked the lightning, the boss.

"What's so urgent?" Patsy asked Roscoe.

"It's not urgent to anybody but me, but it is important. I have to retire."

Patsy screwed up his face.

"Say it again?"

"I've got to get out. Do something else. Go someplace else. I can't do this any more."

"Do what?"

"What I do."

"You do everything."

"That's part of it."

"You gettin' bored?"

"No."

"You need money?"

"I've got more money than I can use."

"You have another bad love affair?"

"When did I ever have a good one?"

"Then what is it?"

"You know what it's like when you come to the end of something, Pat?"

"Not yet I don't."

"Of course. You'll go on forever. But it's over for me and I don't know why. It may seem sudden to you, but it's been on the way a long time. There's nothing I can do about it. It's just over."

"The organization can't get along without you. You're half of everything I do. More than half."

"Nonsense. You can get twenty guys this afternoon."

"Counting all my life," Patsy said, "I never knew three, let alone twenty, I trusted the way I trust you."

"That's why I'm giving you plenty of notice. I'll ride out the election, but then I have to quit."

"It's this goddamned investigation. Did they come up with something on you?"

"Cutie LaRue says they're hot to get me, but we all know that, and that's not it. I'm fifty-five years old and going noplace. But now I've got to go someplace. Anyplace. I need more room in my head."

"You're leaving Albany?"

"Maybe. If I can convince my head to leave town."

"You're sick from that ulcer. That's it."

"My gut hurts, but I've never felt better. Don't look for a reason. There's twenty, fifty. If I could figure it out I'd tell you."

"We gotta talk about this."

"We are talking about it."

"What about the third-party candidate? You got one?"

"I'm working on it."

"Did you tell Elisha about this plan of yours?"

"He's due here for dinner. I'll tell him then."

"This is a disaster."

"No, it isn't."

"Goddamn it, if I say it's a disaster it's a disaster. This is a goddamn disaster. What the hell's got into you?"

"Time. Time gets into everything. I'm sick of carrying time around on my back like a bundle of rocks."

"Time? What are you talking about, time? To hell with time."

"Pat, don't worry. We'll figure it out."

"Time. Jesus H. Jesus."

*

The lives of Roscoe, Patsy McCall, and Elisha Fitzgibbon had been a lock from their shared boyhood on the city streets they would come to own, at the cockpits where their fathers fought chickens, and on the nine hundred acres of Tivoli, the great Fitzgibbon estate in Loudonville created by Elisha's grandfather Lyman Fitzgibbon, who in his long life made several fortunes-in railroads, land speculation, foundries, and steel manufacture. Tivoli was a paradise made for moneyed creatures and small boys. The three walked the virgin woods of oak and maple and birch and hemlock and white pine, they fished the pristine waters of Elisha's tiny Lake Tivoli until they outgrew sunfish and perch and went down to the Hudson River for blues, stripers, shad, and sturgeon. They swam in the Erie Canal and the river, hunted partridge and pheasant on the river flats, wild turkey in the Fitzgibbon woods, and deer up at Tristano, Elisha's family's sumptuous rustic camp in the Adirondacks. The boys brought their river catch and hunters' quarry to Felix Conway's table, for neither Patsy's mother nor Elisha's stepmother would give them houseroom. Roscoe organized all their excursions, fished with the eye of a pelican, and could put a bullet between a snake's fangs at sixty yards. Felix marveled at his son's talent, but it was his own doing, for he'd given Roscoe a .22 rifle as soon as the boy reached the age of good reason.

"Remember," his mother warned Roscoe at age nine, just after Felix had left her and the children to live at the Ten Eyck, "never shoot anybody with that gun unless it's a politician."

But it was the politics of Democracy that cemented the boys' friendship. Their headquarters, even before they'd begun to drink, was the North End saloon run by Patsy's father, Black Jack McCall, the Ninth Ward leader who would become sheriff. The saloon had long been closed, but Patsy reopened it every year to hear the ward leaders predict the vote they would deliver, and then give them their street money to help it happen. The trio's mentor in the liabilities of political honesty was Felix, who helped them plan Patsy's campaign for a city assessorship in 1919, the year he died. Campaign money came from Elisha, who, along with his siblings, inherited the steel fortune accumulated by his grandfather Lyman (who had helped finance Grover Cleveland's first campaign for the presidency). Elisha financed both Patsy's successful run for the assessorship in 1919, and the Democratic takeover of City Hall in the 1921 election. After that, politics was the mother lode for this trio, and money, for most of the decade, was not a problem.

Roscoe and Elisha were in the Ten Eyck dining room, finishing their second bottle of wine with a dinner of shrimp, bluefish, boiled potatoes, and fresh snowflake rolls. Elisha exuded ruddy good health, or was it the flush that comes with a summer evening? He was the picture of composure in his buttoned-down Brooks Brothers shirt, his tie tight on his collar, his double-breasted cream sport jacket impeccably tailored by Joe Amore, his steel-gray hair associated with Men of Distinction in whiskey ads. His age was visible in his receding hairline, but Red the Barber had consoled him that he would not live long enough to be bald. No one looked more stylishly rich than Elisha, the capitalist at his zenith.

The bells of St. Peter's Church began ringing up the street and Roscoe said, "So it's over."

"Sounds that way."

"Alex will be coming home."

"I hope he's not one of those postwar casualties like that German soldier in All Quiet on the Western Front. It's after the Armistice, and he raises his head up out of the trench to look at a butterfly, and a sniper who doesn't know the war is over, or maybe he does, puts one through his brain."

"Alex is too smart for that," Roscoe said. "He'll come home as fit as he went. We'll give him a parade."

"I don't think he'd march in it."

"You're probably right. He has that leveling instinct about himself."

"He'll be leveled in other ways. He won't be as rich as he used to be. None of us will."

"That's right. The government will cancel your million-dollar contracts."

"They won't need my steel for their tanks."

"You may have to make refrigerators."

"If I do that, my salesmen will have to uncover the difference between refrigerators and tanks."

"Does that make you sad?"

"It makes me poor."

"You're not poor, Elisha."

"No, I still have my shoes."

"You're a millionaire. You can't kid me."

"At times I'm a millionaire," Elisha said. "But being a millionaire opens you to criticism."

"Politics also does that."

"It's a short walk from politics to hell," Elisha said.

"Ah. It's nice to see that winning the war has lightened your mood."

"I'm tired of the scandalous liabilities of wealth."

"Which scandalous liabilities, other than the usual, might those be?"

"Nothing I want to talk about. You'll know soon enough."

"A mystery. I'll try to understand," Roscoe said. "But at no time have I ever been wealthy enough to have such worries, even though I've told people otherwise."

"I've heard you say that."

"I'm a fraud," Roscoe said. "I've always been a fraud."

"Nonsense. Nobody ever believes anything you say about yourself."

"Not even when I'm lying?"

"No, never."

"What if I said I was quitting the Party?"

Elisha stared at him, inspecting for fraudulence.

"Did you tell Patsy?"

"He wanted to know if I'd told you. Now it's yes on both counts."

Elisha's smile exuded knowledge of Roscoe's meaning. The man could understand what was unspoken, even unknown. Patsy understood, but could not admit it, for it ran counter to his plans and outside his control. Elisha knew Roscoe's thoughts without having to ask questions. Their friendship had gone through storms of trouble, rich men's poverty, broken love. Especially that, for Roscoe had been in love with Elisha's wife since before the two married. It didn't interfere with the friendship, for Roscoe's love for Veronica was impossible and he knew it and mostly let it alone.

"I wonder what you'll do when you quit," Elisha said. "You're not suited for a whole lot of jobs. Will you just loll around spending your money?"

"I haven't carried it that far yet. But I have to change my life, do something that engages my soul before I die."

"I'm glad to hear you still have a soul."

"It surfaces every so often," Roscoe said.

"You don't look like a man with a tortured soul. It's always a surprise how well we dissemble. You're as good as there is at that game, the way you've kept your feeling for Veronica under lock and key-it's admirable."

"I have no choice. I have no choice in most things. All the repetitions, the goddamn investigations that never end, another election coming, and now Patsy wants a third candidate to dilute the Republican vote. We'll humiliate the Governor. On top of that, Cutie LaRue told me this afternoon George Scully has increased his surveillance on me. They're probably doubling their watch on you, too. You'd make a handsome trophy."

"Wouldn't I? Do you think I should worry?"

"Are you worrying right now?"

"No. I'm listening to those bells," Elisha said. "We should avoid worrying and celebrate peace in the world. They'll call us Jap-lovers if we don't."

"I loved a Jap once," Roscoe said. "She was unusually lovely."

"I hope that wasn't during the war effort."

"Much earlier."

"Then you're safe."

"We have to battle the plague of jingoism that's about to engulf us. Some modest degree of intoxication seems the obvious strategy."

"We could drink here," Elisha said.

"Drinking in a hotel dining room at a time of jubilation," said Roscoe, "is not drinking and not serious and not jubilant. We have to mix with the hoi polloi when we drink. We have to bend with the amber waves of grain, roil our juices under spacious skies. We have to join the carnival."

"EP on the bing," Elisha said emphatically.

*

They went downstairs to the Ten Eyck's bar, which was locked and dark. They walked across Chapel Street to Farnham's and found no customers, only Randall, the barman, cleaning his sink.

"We're closed," he said.

"Closed?"

"The war's over," Randall said, taking off his apron. "Alfie says this is no time to drink. Alfie says to me, 'Close up, Randall. This is a time for prayer and patriotism.'"

"I'll remember Alfie, and I'll remember you too, Randall," Roscoe said. "Patriotism is the last refuge of saboteurs."

"Right you are, Mr. Conway. O'Connor's and Keeler's are also closed." Randall turned off the bar light. "I'll be open tomorrow after five."

On the street they heard bells gonging in several churches, trains whistling down at Union Station, the carillon clanging in the City Hall tower, the air-raid siren wailing for the last time. They saw trolleys at a standstill, traffic grid locked at State and Pearl, clots of hundreds, soon to be tens of thousands, moving into pandemonium. They walked up State and tried the bar at the DeWitt Clinton Hotel, but saboteurs had locked it.

"The Kenmore won't close," Roscoe said. "The bells of Mahoney's cash register are the opposite of patriotic."

They walked back down State Street, the majestic hill of Albany, this very old city in which they both owned uncommon stock and psychic shares. No merchant, no owner of real es