Roscoe (38 page)

“Sex on the radio?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think I like it. Shouldn’t I?”

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

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

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

“Maybe history will repeat.”

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

“I wouldn’t take it.”

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

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

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

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

“You actually used the word ‘rape’?”

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

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

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

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

“It was lousy. It stinks.”

“Try to remember why your father killed himself.”

“I’ve never understood it.”

“He did it for the family.”

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

“He did it for the Party, for you.”

“For me?”

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

“You’re reading too much into it.”

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

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

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

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

“Pamela said that?”

“She did.”

“The woman is evil.”

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

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

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

“What war?”

“The war between love and death.”

“Whose love and death?”

“Good question,” Roscoe said.

Roscoe sat up when the balloon burst, but of course there was no balloon. He had been visiting the Museum of Forgotten Sounds and on the wall he found a sign: “Call me
and I will come to free you.” He did not know who might be the “I” of the statement. He went on to listen to the triangle the junkman jangled, the pumper’s bells when the
horses came out the firehouse door, the sound of Owen Ward’s ice pick when Owen stuck it into a cake of ice, the Jewish peddler’s voice chanting pineapples for sale, “Pineys,
pineys, the things with the shtickies on them.” Roscoe heard the women in black dresses and black head-kerchiefs speaking a foreign tongue as they cut dandelions from the field and dropped
them into a cloth sack. He heard the bolt action of an ’03, the bell of the horse car entering the Lumber District, St. Joseph’s church bell on the morning of his father’s
funeral, the bell on Judge Brady’s cow, the scissors sharpener’s emery wheel grinding the butcher knife. The sounds seemed to imply trauma. A voice from the gramophone asked, “In
what year did compassion win the election?” As he left the museum, the female usher told him, “Call me and I will come to free you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You said we would.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He was a fake,” Gilby said.

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

“You did not,” Gilby said.

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