Roscoe

  “I’m trying to understand you,” Alex said. “You’re central to every disaster—my father, the Patsy-Bindy thing, beating up editors, the Notchery scandal, the Dutchman and that murderous whore, now poor O.B. and mad Mac. What’s next for you, Roscoe, wholesaling opium? White slavery? I wouldn’t sell you an insurance policy. You’re a bad risk.”

  “I do seem to ride the lightning,” Roscoe said.

  “I worry. I worry about Gilby’s case. These are not good omens.”

  Ah yes, Gilby’s case.

  “It’s two days away. The judge may decide you’re a villain yourself, to be such a friend to villainy.”

  “Only a judicial villain could make such a ruling, and we have none so injudicious in Albany.”

  “Are you ready for Marcus Gorman? He’s a great trickster.”

  “God and natural motherhood are on his side. We can’t lose.”

  “I don’t think I follow.”

  “Righteousness doesn’t stand a chance against the imagination, Alex.”

  “I’d like to believe that. But if Mother loses Gilby, she’ll fall apart.”

  “I won’t let that happen.”

  “That goddamned cunt.”

  “The expressive word. I tell you, Alex, Roscoe is ready for whatever she offers, and you’ll see that not only is he capable of change, Roscoe is capable of changing the world. I am a lonely man, but I am a crowd. I grow old. But ancient salt is the best packing.”

  “You talk riddles.”

  “The poetry of the giants, my boy. You see before you a transfiguration, a man so chastened by experience that he has shunted all his old faults into the brotherly grave. He is awash in mortification. He’s bought several new hair shirts, and he may even go to church.”

  “Don’t go too far, old fellow. Lightning may light the church.”

  “A new day is rising up from the fresh earth, and a new Roscoe stands astride it.”

  “You sound like an old lush taking the pledge,” said Alex.

  “Your tongue has a talent for brutish truth.”

  “Isn’t all truth brutish?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Roscoe. “I rarely encounter any.”

  Isn’t It Romantic?

  As Roscoe walked down the cemetery slope he decided that derision is not healthy behavior, a defense mechanism, really, and that he must get Alex beyond this attitude. A sour mouth is not becoming in a candidate. Also, Alex evoked Pamela, and, against Roscoe’s will, there she is in memory at the Ten Eyck, why? And there’s Elisha with her, and Veronica, ah, now he sees the day clearly, Patsy is at a peak, O.B. and Mac are ten months past Diamond, Alex the youth is spectating, and Jimmy Walker, Al Smith, and FDR are in crisis. Thirteen years gone, but it’s yesterday, and Roscoe must have his reasons for this.

  It’s Tuesday afternoon, October 4,1932, the day Elisha, the reluctant gladiator, is on the road to glory. Pamela is striding into Elisha’s busy headquarters on the second floor of the Ten Eyck, just off the train, right out of Vogue in her maroon silk Schiaparelli dress with the emphatic bustline, complaining the front desk won’t give her a room. Roscoe, no longer regretting he ever knew Pamela, now thinking of her as his principal mentor in lousy love, explains that all twenty-five hundred rooms in the town’s ten main hotels have been overbooked for a month; the Trojan, the night boat that brought five hundred Tammanyites up from New York for the Democratic state convention, is a floating hotel this weekend; the New York Central is renting berths in Pullman cars on sidings; and even Al Smith had no room until Tammany boss John Curry dispossessed a delegate to give Al a bed in the DeWitt Clinton Hotel, headquarters for both Tammany and John McCooey’s Brooklyn organization, Tammany’s Siamese twin.

  “Right now the town has about ten thousand too many people,” Roscoe says to Pamela.

  “My brother-in-law’s going to be Governor,” she says. “I want a room.”

  “Why don’t you stay out at Tivoli?”

  “I want to be where things are happening.”

  “Tivoli’s a fifteen-minute ride, including stoplights.”

  “Goddamn it, Roscoe, I want a goddamn room. Release one you’re holding out for your goddamn thieving political celebrities.”

  “How could I resist such a charming request?”

  He sends her down the hall to see Hattie, who is in charge of spillover: placing people in her own rooming houses, or in one of the six hundred private homes that their owners have opened to visitors, sixteen hundred already placed. Ten minutes later, Hattie comes to see him.

  “Don’t send me any more like her,” she says.

  “There are no more like her,” Roscoe says.

  “What a bitch. She didn’t want anybody’s house, didn’t want a room without a sitting room, didn’t want a ground floor, and it couldn’t be more than five blocks from here. I told her I had one house I wasn’t going to rent but she could have it, a third-floor walkup on Jay Street, take it or leave it.”

  “She took it?” asks Roscoe.

  “Yes. I didn’t tell her it used to be a whorehouse.”

  The city has been ablaze with political firelight since Saturday, when Democrats began arriving to nominate a governor to succeed FDR, now the presidential candidate. They face two choices: incumbent Lieutenant Governor Herbert H. Lehman, FDR’s choice, the heavy favorite; and Elisha, Patsy’s choice, the underdog who doesn’t even want the job. It will take 464 votes to win, and on Sunday Lehman claimed 480 and Elisha 469, both sides lying, even to themselves. Neither can win without New York City’s vote, which isn’t quite what it used to be since the death of Tammany leader Charlie Murphy in 1924 splintered the boroughs. The Bronx has been in FDR’s pocket since he appointed its leader, Ed Flynn, his secretary of state, a ploy to make the Tammany splinter permanent. Queens and Richmond will still follow Tammany’s lead, Tammany’s own 154 votes are solid for Elisha, and Brooklyn’s 159 are on the fence. Now it is Tuesday, and despite three days of argument and horse-trading future patronage among big and little city bosses, neither candidate has a majority; but the odds on Elisha are dropping. Johnny Mack, dean of Albany bookmakers, is offering even money pick one; and the FDR-Lehman camp is baffled by the Albany upstart’s strength.

  The Ten Eyck lobby is a crossroads for hundreds of delegates, for Elisha loyalists, visitors looking for convention passes, Party faithful showing their faces, plus the press and anybody who wants to hear the latest—“It’s over. Brooklyn went for Lehman. . .Forget it. Fourteen more votes and Elisha’s in.” A table-full of Democratic women volunteers greet all comers with the gift of large Elisha Fitzgibbon buttons, flyers with his sterling credentials, and on the wall above the women, Elisha looks out from a poster half the size of a movie screen. The volunteers usher all delegates and alternates immediately to the Conway corner to meet Roscoe, who will vet them on Elisha: yes, no, maybe. Roscoe tends to count maybes as yeses, and Elisha’s total is climbing. During a lull Roscoe goes up to second-floor headquarters to compare numbers with Elisha, who is hiding in an inner office, exhausted from three days of selling himself to strangers and to all the upstate county leaders he had once courted for Al Smith, many of those upstaters now promising unshakable support for him.

  “I added sixteen prob ables in the last two hours,” Elisha says. “I’m beginning to worry I might get elected. What does Patsy say about McCooey?” Patsy, since Saturday, has been meeting with Tammany, Brooklyn, and key upstate bosses to break the impasse.

  “McCooey’s with us, but his people are afraid they’ll lose the Jewish vote if they dump Lehman.”

  “Do they know my wife is half Jewish?”

  “Lehman is all Jewish. Al is coming in for the next session at four-thirty. I’ll be there with Patsy for that one.”

  “What is Al thinking?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  Elisha puts his head on the desk. “I’m tired,” he says.

  “That’s not allowed,” Roscoe says.

  “All right, I quit.??
?

  “That’s not allowed either.”

  “Then I have only one thing to say. We’re seeing a lot of stammecule when what we need is the real bing with some EP on it.”

  “Noted,” says Roscoe.

  Jim Farley, FDR’s state chairman, convenes the delegates in the 10th Infantry Armory at 12:30 p.m., but not all delegates bother to attend. And at mid-afternoon, when five from Brooklyn come to the Conway corner wanting to meet Elisha, Roscoe can’t find him. Not at headquarters, not in the restaurant, phone off the hook in his room. Roscoe stalls the delegates, says he’ll be right back, and takes the elevator up. He knocks and says, “Elisha,” and Veronica opens the door a crack and says, “He’s not here.”

  “Where is he? Talk to me, open the door.”

  “I’m not dressed.”

  “Good. Let me in.”

  “Behave yourself.”

  She opens the door with her hair and lipstick ready for public viewing, but wearing only slippers and a pink satin slip.

  “Where’s Elisha? Five new Brooklyn delegates are downstairs waiting to pledge allegiance to him. They’re important.”

  “He’s probably at the Armory. The last I saw him was his luncheon speech to the Democratic women. Pamela came over and wrapped herself around him.”

  “She wraps herself around half the population. Don’t take it personally.”

  “I came up here to take a nap and get dressed for Eleanor’s tea party.” The Governor’s wife has invited all women delegates to high tea at the Mansion at four-thirty. “Pardon my déshabillé,” Veronica says.

  “You look the way you used to in my time. You never took it all off.”

  In the most intense summer days of their romance, Roscoe would undress her in the Trophy House at Tristano, down to the chemise, which became her uniform of partial abandon. He could raise the chemise but not remove it. He felt he could live with that arrangement until their wedding.

  “You can’t stay here,” she says to him. She takes a robe from her closet and slips it on.

  He stares as she ties her robe. “I could love you right now,” he says.

  “I know you could. I always know that.”

  He moves close, strokes her throat with the back of his fingers.

  “You can’t do this,” she says.

  “I used to.”

  “That was years.”

  “I have to love you, Vee. The pressure is impossible.”

  “Not yet.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. Someday, maybe.”

  “I used to do this,” he says. He unties her robe.

  “No, Roscoe, you can’t.” She reties the robe.

  “You used to do what you wanted to do when you wanted to do it.”

  “I gave that up.”

  “Maybe you didn’t entirely.”

  “How did you decide to come here now?”

  “I thought Elisha was here. But I must have been listening to the planets. Maybe I saw something in your look this morning, or maybe you invited me with your silent music.”

  “You think I still want to be that way. Just knock, and there she is.”

  He opens her robe, but she turns away and stands by the bed.

  “You can’t do anything to me, Roscoe. We don’t do this anymore.”

  “It isn’t my fault that we don’t.”

  “We can’t go over all that again.”

  “I go over it every day of my life,” he says.

  “We can’t. I made a decision about you.”

  “You mean against me.”

  “I have to live by it.”

  “I regret that with every breath we both take, every breath of yours that might have been mine,” he says. “Haven’t you ever regretted it?”

  “How can I talk about that?”

  “I don’t know. All I can think about is that this is the first time in eighteen years I’ve been alone with you like this. I can’t believe you’re standing there looking the way you do.”

  “Neither can I.”

  He opens her robe, raises her slip. “I remember this,” he says.

  “We can’t do this to him on his day, Roscoe.”

  “Love me,” says Roscoe. His hand is on her in the old way.

  “I love that you love me, Roscoe. But we can’t do this even if I want to, and I do seem to want to. But I won’t.” She pushes his hand away but it returns. “And I won’t let myself be tempted, no, Roscoe, no more.” She pushes his hand away. It returns. “Please, no more, Roscoe. Thank you, no more.” She pulls down her slip.

  He sees strands of hair have fallen across one eye from her shaking her head no. He puts them in place with one finger, kisses her on the mouth. “I own some of you again.”

  “No. You can’t own any of me. Nobody can own Veronica.”

  “My memory can own anything.”

  She reties her robe and says, “I shouldn’t have done this. You’re a love, Roscoe, but please go away.”

  “Will I be a love after I’m gone?”

  “Yes, but we won’t do anything about it. Once in a lifetime, Roscoe.”

  Going down to the lobby in the elevator, Roscoe decides no devil in the eighth circle can punish him as exquisitely as Veronica. It might be years before they are again so close, and he hears her portal clanging shut. When he gets to the lobby the Brooklyn delegates are gone.

  He goes to the Armory, which is decked with flags, bunting, banners, and some seventy-five hundred people, the place loud with marching-band music. He wants to find Elisha and the lost delegates, also get the latest delegate poll from Bart Merrigan and his team of canvassers. But Elisha isn’t here and the Brooklyn chairs are half empty. Bart says the latest figures look about the same, good, but it’s impossible to poll this crowd—more than a thousand delegates and alternates, a herd in chaos. They’ve listened to Albany’s Mayor Thacher welcoming them to town, and to a few warm-up speakers puffing the FDR-Garner ticket and the Democrat ic platform, especially their favorite wringing-wet plank: Bring back our beer. They’ve waited hours for their leaders to come up with a candidate to vote for and, still waiting, they’re now clanging cow bells, shaking castanets, waving signs and banners, blowing whistles. And then, in a spontaneous decision, they join in a raucous sing-along as the 10th Infantry Band plays “Sidewalks of New York,” Al’s tune; “Happy Days Are Here Again,” for Democrats every where who anticipate getting rid of Hoover; and “Anchors Aweigh” for FDR, who was assistant secretary of the navy under Wilson. As they sing, Roscoe sees their heads fly back and forth through the lofty reaches of the Armory, a mob of ready-to-wear delegates, one size fits all. If they only knew Elisha they’d vote for him, but, of course, they don’t vote, they dance headlessly to the tune being written this afternoon down at the DeWitt.

  The Albany delegates—Mayor Thacher, a few aldermen and county supervisors, Party lawyers, a cadre of Democratic women-are, on Patsy’s strict orders, staying close to their chairs, ready to rise up and march in an instant demonstration for Elisha if it comes to a floor fight. Roscoe sees Alex sitting in an Albany aisle.

  “Are you learning how we elect a governor?” Roscoe asks him.

  “Yes, you sit around and sing,” Alex says. “I thought maybe somebody might argue about something.”

  “They’re arguing, but it doesn’t show.”

  “I love it anyway, Roscoe. It’s true American democracy made visible.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Roscoe says.

  “What happens tonight, when the convention ends?”

  “We celebrate. The town is waiting to party.”

  “I’m ready to be the son of the new Governor.” And Alex shows Roscoe his hip flask.

  “Precocious,” Roscoe says. “But pace yourself, young fellow. It’s going to be a long night.”

  The band segues into “Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?” for the New York City delegates, the tin-pan theme song of their ex-Mayor Jimmy Walker, who wrote it
. Ah, Jimmy, who isn’t here and won’t be, but is a key figure in this convention’s impasse. Trouble has come to Jimmy this year after two years of investigations, begun by FDR and carried through by Judge Samuel Seabury into Tammany corruption. And certain New York judges, the sheriff, and assorted flacks have fallen victim to the right-thinkers. But Seabury’s charges also have led to Jimmy’s being summoned to Albany for a hearing, at which FDR will sit as solitary judge of the evidence of Jim’s “gross improprieties”—secret bank accounts, evasive answers, an inexplicable million in a safe-deposit box, the usual. FDR could actually remove the Mayor from office, which would be a first in state history, and a truly grievous wound to Tammany’s power.

  On the August night in 1932 that Jimmy steps off the train at Albany’s Union Station for his face-off with FDR, skyrockets explode above the tracks, and the roar of ten thousand greets him—“Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy”—from people on the platforms, people wall to wall in the concourse, people filling Broadway, people Patsy wanted and Roscoe summoned through ward leaders and city department heads, the largest political turnout since Albany welcomed home Al Smith in defeat in ’28.

  Patsy, Elisha, and Roscoe are closer to Jimmy than they are to anybody else from New York, including Al. Jimmy spent sixteen years in Albany as an assemblyman, a senator, then Senate leader until 1925, when Tammany tapped him for mayor of New York. He has dined often at Tivoli, pulled many an all-nighter with Patsy and Roscoe, supported Patsy’s legislation; in short, a grand fellow who became the lovable, re-electable Gentleman Jimmy, the dapper political playboy with the showgirl mistress and the persona behind which Tammany could methodically loot the city, an arrangement dating back to Tweed. The persona elects, the money perpetuates.

  Patsy, since his youth, has been an ardent student of the Tammany method and has evolved into Tammany’s staunchest upstate ally. Why wouldn’t he give Jim a royal welcome? Patsy will never forgive FDR for generating all this trouble. In 1945, the year FDR dies, and after supporting him for president for four terms, Patsy will still be saying, “I didn’t like him. He didn’t like Tammany Hall, and they were the only thing in the world for me.”