Roscoe
Authors: William Kennedy
Praise for William Kennedy:
“Kennedy is a writer with something to say, about matters that touch us all, and he says it with uncommon artistry”
Washington Post
“Kennedy’s power is such that the reader will follow him almost anywhere, to the edge of tragedy and back again to redemption”
Wall Street Journal
“Kennedy’s art is an eccentric triumph, a quirky, risk-taking imagination at play upon the solid paving stones, the breweries, the politicos and pool sharks of an
all-too-actual city”
The New York Review of Books
“His smart, sassy dialogue conveys volumes about character. His scene setting makes the city throb with life”
Newsday
“What James Joyce did for Dublin and Saul Bellow did for Chicago, William Kennedy has done for Albany, New York: created a rich and vivid world invisible to the ordinary
eye”
Vanity Fair
“His beguiling yarns are the kind of family myths embellished and retold across a kitchen table late at night, whiskified, raunchy, darkly funny”
Time
“William Kennedy’s
Albany Cycle
is one of the great achievements of modern American writing”
Daily Mail
“William Kennedy is pre-eminent among his generation of writers . . . Kennedy is peerless in the depth and acuity of his sustained vision, and the lost, past world of
Albany says more to us today about the current state, about the heart and soul, of American politics than any recent bestselling, Hollywood-pandering political thriller has ever done”
Spectator
“Kennedy’s writing is a triumph: he tackles topics in a gloriously comic, almost old-fashioned language. You feel Kennedy could write the Albany phone book and make
it utterly entertaining”
Time Out
“Kennedy proves to be truly Shakespearean”
The Sunday Times
“Kennedy is one of our necessary writers”
GQ
ALSO BY WILLIAM KENNEDY
FICTION
The Ink Truck
Legs
Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game
Ironweed
Quinn’s Book
Very Old Bones
The Flaming Corsage
Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes
NONFICTION
O Albany!
Riding the Yellow Trolley Car
WITH BRENDAN KENNEDY
Charlie Malarkey and the Belly-Button Machine
Charley Malarkey and the Singing Moose
First published in the USA by Viking Penguin 2002
This ebook edition published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2011
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © William Kennedy, 2002
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of William Kennedy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
1st Floor
222 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8HB
Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, Delhi
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-0-74322-073-6
eISBN: 978-1-84983-838-2
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CRo 4YY
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY COHORT OF EARLY ROSCONIANS:
Harry and Helen Staley, Andy and Betsy Viglucci,
Doris Grumbach, Laurie Bank, Peg Boyers,
Dennis Smith, Brendan Kennedy,
and to my wife, a cohort all by herself,
the endlessly astonishing
Dana
Contents
That year an ill wind blew over the city and threatened to destroy flowerpots, family fortunes, reputations, true love, and several types of virtue. Roscoe, moving along the
road, felt the wind at his back and heard the windblown voices.
“Do you know where the ill wind comes from, Roscoe?” the voices asked him.
“No,” he said, “but I’m not sure the wind is really ill. Its illness may be overrated, maybe even fraudulent.”
“Do people think there’s such a thing as a good ill wind?” they asked.
“Of course,” he answered. “And when it comes it billows the sails of our city, it nourishes our babies, comforts our aliens, gives purpose to our dead, tranquilizes our
useless, straightens our crooked, and vice versa. The ill wind is a nonesuch and demands close attention.”
“Why should we believe what you say?”
“As I am incapable of truth,” Roscoe said, “so am I in capable of lying, which is, as all know, the secret of the truly successful politician.”
“Are you a politician, Roscoe?”
“I refuse to answer on grounds that it might degrade or incriminate me.”
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 Givney and
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.