Roscoe (5 page)

“God bless you, Roscoe,” Arlene said. “The pain is awful and the gin is gone.”

She wobbled and almost fell, Roscoe’s first gin-soaked nun. He swept her into his arms, a feather, the pain from his trauma twisting a small knife in his belly as he carried her to the
parking lot.

“This is the date we never had, Arlene,” he said. “I dearly love the way you turned out.”

“Don’t you dare be nice to me, Roscoe. I don’t want it. I’m going to stay a virgin till I die.” She resumed her hymn—“. . .
Bella premunt hostilia
.
..” —as he drove her uptown in his car with the dented bumper.

“I’ve never known a woman like you, Arlene.”

“Doesn’t surprise me.”

“Let’s take a boat to Bermuda.”

“I’ve still got a toothache.”

Roscoe found Doc Reardon, who did free dental work for select Democrats, and he promptly eliminated her pain and fixed the blessed tooth. Arlene then promised Roscoe and the doc a place among
the lesser angels.

“God bless you, too, Arlene,” Roscoe said. “God bless all nuns and all women.” Then he thought of Trish and added, “Most women.”

He drove Arlene back to the Academy of the Sacred Heart at Kenwood, hoping her time with him would incite a convent-wide scandal, then went back to the hospital to check on
Elisha. But he’d been sent home, no concussion after all. It was ten-thirty, too late to visit, a missed opportunity to be with Veronica. Roscoe went back to his car in the emergency-room
parking lot. Where to go now? He watched ambulances and cars come and go with the dying and the wounded from the peaceful home front. He dwelled on Artie Flinn, casualty of the political wars, a
man who’d been making a fortune but ran out of luck. What other disasters will unfold for Roscoe on this night of radical developments? He could go to Trish’s apartment and retrieve his
clothes out of her closet. She might be there with four sailors. Go home and get some sleep, Ros. But who can sleep on V-J night? Go find a woman, then. Shouldn’t be difficult tonight. But if
you don’t score, don’t even think of buying one, they’re watching you. You should have kidnapped Arlene, your prototype of ideal beauty. You could’ve talked about the good
old days of young sin. They don’t make sin like they used to. Also, your stomach is rumbling. You never finished your dinner. Forget women and celebrate the Jap surrender with a steak. Or
three hamburgers. Or a hot beef sandwich at the Morris Lunch, two hot beefs with double home fries and a wedge of apple pie with a custard-pie chaser. He drove to the Miss Albany Diner on Central
Avenue, open all night, found it dark. A sign in the window reported, “No Food.” The Boulevard Cafeteria, never closes, was open but no steaks, no roast beef, no ham, no hamburgers, no
eggs. All they had was bread, coffee, and no cream. The whole town ate out tonight. Roscoe had two orders of buttered toast, a plate of pickle slices, black coffee, and went back to his car. The
streets were busy but no more traffic jams. The frenzy wanes. Who’ll be at the bar in the Elks Club? Who cares? Roscoe did not want to talk about war or peace or politics, not even the Cutie
Diversion. What
do
you want, Ros? How about Hattie? Yes, a very good idea. Hattie Wilson, his perennial love. He did love her, always would. He wouldn’t lay a hand on her. That’s
not what Roscoe is looking for right now. What’s more, isn’t Hattie married to O.B., Roscoe’s brother? Yes, she is. Roscoe wants only straight talk, smart talk, maybe a little
sweet talk with Hattie, who is wise, who is a comfort. Six husbands and still nubile. Get your mind off nubility, for chrissake. He drove to Lancaster Street east of Dove Street and parked across
from Hattie’s house. All four floors were dark. She could be awake in the back of the house, probably asleep. Roscoe did not want to get her out of bed to carry on a conversation—about
what? Why are you waking me up in the middle of the night, Rosky? I wish I knew, old Hat. Never mind waking up. Some other time, Hat. Roscoe drove back to the hotel and told the doorman to send his
car back to the garage. He decided to go upstairs, order room service, and go to bed, but the saboteurs had preceded him. No more room service tonight. So Roscoe settled into his suite on the tenth
floor, ordered ice for his ice bag from the bellman, ate a Hershey bar out of the drawer, poured himself a double gin, hold the quinine, swallowed his blood-pressure pills with the gin, toasted
peace in the world and freedom from politics, then went to bed hungry.

A Flagrant Departure

V-J Day-plus-one was a holiday for much of the city, a day of prayer, thanksgiving, and patriotism, the main speech of the day given on the Capitol steps by Marcus Gorman, the
noted criminal lawyer who had become Albany’s Demosthenes. Bart Merrigan, in his role as Albany’s commander of the American Legion, was master of ceremonies and introduced Marcus, who
thanked God in his mercy for restoring justice and honor to the world, two commodities Marcus had spent his career subverting. Roscoe sent Joey Manucci up to Patsy’s summer house on the
mountain with news of Cutie LaRue as a possible candidate. Patsy loved the idea and sent word back to Roscoe to hire Eddie Brodie as Cutie’s speechwriter, the man who would help Cutie lose.
Brodie, an ex-newspaperman, had helped Jimmy McCoy lose in 1937 by coining his campaign remark: “I never met a woman I liked as much as my dog.”

At late morning Veronica called Roscoe to say Elisha woke with a headache but was feeling better, and talking about going to the office in the afternoon. Roscoe spent half the day in bed with
his ice bag, ate supper alone in the hotel dining room, then went back to bed. A phone call woke him and he sat up in the darkness to answer it: 4 a.m. on the luminous face of his alarm clock. He
heard Gladys Meehan say, “It’s Elisha, Roscoe.” He switched on the bed-table light, and there was Elisha on the wall in that famous photo with Roscoe and Patsy, election night,
1921, when those three young rebels, their smiles exuding power and joy at taking City Hall back from the Republicans, were about to found the new city of war and love.

“What about Elisha?”

“Everything,” Gladys said. “Come immediately. The mill.”

Roscoe had the bellman call up his car and he drove to Fitzgibbon Steel, a small city of twenty-nine buildings—rolling mills, forges, furnaces, shearing shops, machine shops, and a maze of
Delaware and Hudson Railroad tracks running through it all. It covered twenty-eight acres between Broadway and the river in the northeast corner of the city, and had employed fifteen hundred men
and a hundred women in the peak war years.

Roscoe parked by the mill’s office in the machine-shop building and went in past the night guard, up to the third floor, the stairs aggravating his pain. He found Gladys in a leather chair
staring at Elisha, whose horn-rim glasses were on his desk, a flesh-colored bandage on his forehead where it had hit the windshield. The sleeves of his tailor-made blue shirt were rolled to the
elbow, his dark-blue tie loose at the open collar, his gray suit coat on the back of his chair, hands folded in his lap, chin on his chest, wearing his favorite cordovan wingtips, and facing the
fireplace full of ashes. His face was pale blue, and strands of his hair, gray as the chromium steel he manufactured, hung in his eyes, which Gladys had closed.

Elisha at fifty-four.

As Roscoe stared at him, Elisha stood up, walked to the bathroom, and began shaving with his electric razor. Roscoe followed him.

“Who gave you the okay to die?” Roscoe asked.

“You know what they say,” Elisha said. “Never meet the enemy on his own ground.”

“Which enemy?”

“If you don’t have a solution, you transform the problem.”

“What problem?”

“The same old EP on the bing and the kitty bosso . . .”

Then Elisha, in the midst of his peerless babble, fell over backward, dead again.

“I’ve been here all night,” Gladys said to Roscoe. “He came in at seven o’clock last night and called me at the house and asked me to come back.”

“With that head injury, I’m surprised Veronica let him go out.”

“He convinced her he was all right.”

“When did he die?”

“I don’t know. I slept, I woke up and saw him, and I called you. We worked hours in the file room pulling out old letters. I got filthy moving those boxes. He knew the exact years.
He’d read one file and ask for another. Then he’d burn some in the fireplace. He said to give you this.” She handed Roscoe a notarized letter from Elisha naming Roscoe executor of
his estate. “He told me, ‘The enemy is closing in,’ and I asked him, ‘Who?’ and he said, ‘Roscoe will figure it out.’ What enemy, Roscoe?”

“We have many,” Roscoe said, pocketing the letter. “What did he burn?”

“Real-estate files, contracts, deeds, canceled checks, letters, insurance papers, bank statements out of the safe.”

“Write down any specifics you remember. Why did you stay so late?”

“After he burned the papers I started to leave, but he said, ‘Can you stay tonight? I need your company.’ It’s the first time he ever admitted he needed me. Twenty-five
years, every day all day, sometimes weekends, trusting me to do what needed doing.”

Gladys stared at Elisha in his death chair, put her hand on his forehead, and stroked the hair off his face. He opened his eyes and winked at her.

“Mac was coming over to the house on his dinner break,” she said, “but I called and told him I was working late. Then Elisha poured us some whiskey from a Christmas bottle he
had on the closet shelf. I never drink whiskey.”

The whiskey and two empty glasses were on Elisha’s desk.

“Where did you sleep?”

“On the sofa. He stayed in the chair, thank you.”

“How did he do it?”

“What? You think he did it?”

“So do you, don’t you? Why did you call me instead of the ambulance?”

“Who else would I call?”

“How about Veronica?”

“She wouldn’t know what to do, how to protect him. She’d end up calling you anyway.”

“You find any bottles or pills?”

“I didn’t look.”

They looked in the desk, in the safe, in Elisha’s coat, in the cardigans hanging in the closet, in the medicine cabinet, in all his pockets, but found no pills, only a wallet. Roscoe
counted its cash: “Four hundred and seventy-seven,” he said, and put the money back in the wallet and pocketed it.

Roscoe examined the photos on the desk: Elisha and Veronica sailing with their boy Gilby; Alex in battle jacket, steel helmet, and boots, jabbing his rifle-with-bayonet at the camera. On the
wall, Elisha was being sworn in as lieutenant governor, and Roscoe remembered his line after taking the oath: “This is a great job for a man with misguided ambition.” There was Elisha
at a 1929 political dinner with Governor FDR, and again in 1943 with President FDR as he made Elisha a dollar-a-year man for donating his expertise in steel production to the wartime government,
the check for one dollar framed with the photo.

In a corner of the office stood another fragment of history, a silvery-gray 1860 Fitzgibbon woodstove, chrome-trimmed, three mica windows, sculpted feet, a work of foundry art made by Lyman
Fitzgibbon, who established the foundry when the world was new and turned out three hundred stoves a day, ninety thousand a year, until the industry went west to the ore sources. The foundry
tripled the fortune Lyman had already made through land speculation and railroads, the same fortune Ariel, Elisha’s father, would fribble away, and that Elisha, when he was barely out of
college, young magus of the new day, would replenish. With the help of a Yale classmate’s father’s two patents, for making rail joints and springs for railroad cars, he stabilized the
firm. He then oversaw the introduction of the first electric furnaces for making alloy steels, and the very early pouring of stainless steel in the U.S., both ventures coming just after the first
war. How did he know so much about steel? He began at the blacksmith level, rolled up his sleeves with every worker who could teach him anything; did the same at the research level of the industry
and became an intuitive wonder.

It was going for five, and the first shift of the shops came in at six-fifteen. Roscoe swept the ashes out of the fireplace and flushed them down the toilet, Gladys vacuumed the fireplace and rug
and dusted the room, and Roscoe called his brother at Hattie’s house.

“Who’s calling at this hour?” Hattie asked.

“It’s Roscoe, Hat. Put O.B. on.”

“Yeah,” said the half-asleep O.B.

“Need you at the mill,” Roscoe said. “There’s been a bad accident and I need you. Immediately.”

“What accident?”

“For chrissake, just get here.” And Roscoe hung up.

Gladys handed him her list of files Elisha had burned, then collapsed back into her chair. Roscoe started to pour two short whiskeys but decided that maybe this whiskey was poisoned. He let it
sit and found an unopened bottle on Elisha’s closet shelf and poured the drinks. He and Gladys sipped the whiskey while they waited for O.B.’s official police inquiry to begin, an
inquiry that would willfully discover death from natural causes and little else. If anyone discovered anything true about this death it would be Roscoe.

“Whiskey twice in the middle of the night,” Gladys said. “What’s the world coming to?”

“Less and less.”

Roscoe opened the drapes on the interior picture window that offered a view of the great machines in the shop below: lathes, drills, punches, boring mills, monster planers, and the great cranes
that loomed over all three bays of the shop. Elisha had built this window for the vision it gave of the world he’d salvaged out of the ashes of his father’s folly, a world he’d
known so intimately for thirty-four years and which, until this morning, depended on him for its perpetuation, just as the Party had depended on him. Roscoe watched the sun entering the machine
shop’s windows, watched it rise on Fitzgibbon Steel’s thirty-six smokestacks and shape them into long black fingers pointing upward into this shabby new day.

“Could you have predicted this?” Roscoe asked Gladys.

“Never.”

“What was the situation here at the mill this week?”