William Kennedy - Roscoe

“You even walk sick,” Joey said, and he hit the doorbell.

“Just shut up and open the door,” Roscoe said.

They went into the hallway and Roscoe knocked at Hattie’s inner door.

“Open up,” he said. “It’s a raid.”

“At this hour it couldn’t be social,” Hattie said from the other side of the door, and then she opened it to Roscoe and Joey, with Bridget, her Irish setter, at her heel. Hattie was fifty-one, wearing a flowered housedress, her hair both prematurely white and unchangingly bobbed since the mid-1920s, smoking a Camel, as usual, moving into a bit of broadness at the hips but still with that hourglass waist, and, to Roscoe, even at raw morning, a woman worth looking at, as she had been since he first intersected with her at Patsy’s victory party in 1919. He would have married her if he wasn’t so down on marriage and she wasn’t already married; and she was always married, except for brief pauses between the “I do”s: the perpetual bride, outthinking or outliving her husbands, or leaving them behind and finding another, always eager for that ring, because it meant a focus on the hearth and not just the bed. It also meant she had not another breadwinner, for she’d already won all the bread she’d ever need, but another cohabiting love slave, a focus on one man, even though she always had her eye on half a dozen, couldn’t help it, the poor thing, always such a magnet for men, such a triumph when they won her, had her, not knowing that it was she who had them, that they could never win her if she hadn’t first singled them out of the crowd, faithful to each in her own way, never trespassing on the previous or the current one, no matter how many mounted up on her scorecard; and Roscoe always in on her action, whatever, whom ever she did.

“You’re right again, old Hat,” Roscoe said, and Hattie stepped aside to let him and Joey into her parlor, whose furnishings, like much in her life, like Roscoe, were secondhand and at least a generation out of fashion.

“Turn on your fans,” Roscoe said. “A day like this, even dogs leave town and head for water. Why aren’t you out at the lake, Bridget?” And the dog licked his hand. Hattie was as intense about dogs as about husbands, and visited some of her neighbors only to talk to their dogs. Roscoe draped his suit coat over a chair back and sat on the sofa facing one of Hattie’s electric fans, waiting for air.

“You don’t look like yourself, Rosky,” Hattie said, and she switched on both her fans.

“I told him he looked sickly,” Joey said.

“You got any iced tea?” Roscoe asked.

“In the kitchen. You go make it, Joey,” Hattie said, and Joey left the room. “What’s wrong with you, Rosky? Your color is off. And you’re puffing.”

“The hell with that. You hear about anybody making a move on the whorehouses?”

“Anybody who?”

“The troopers, the Governor.”

“I thought you got the Governor off your backs last year.”

“He won’t quit. Election’s coming.”

“All I hear is that business is great since V-J Day. Now that the war’s over, people can think about something else.”

“They didn’t think about it during the war?”

“Don’t get on me. You want me to call a doctor?”

“No doctors. I’ve got too much to do.”

“Somebody else to punch out? You’re in the papers again.”

“Some people need punching out for their own good.”

“You never change, Rosky.”

“I change like an emanation of nature, my dear. I change like an oak tree developing acorns. I change like churned milk, I change like a turnip growing ever larger, ever rounder, and palatable only when seriously boiled.”

“You still look like the boy I got to know in Malley’s back room.”

“That billygoat. You knew so many like him. You ever keep count?”

“I can’t count that high, love.”

“If we’d gotten married, I’d be dead and gone like your first five husbands. You’re a lethal woman, Hattie.”

“Floyd is still alive, out west. He sends me postcards. And O.B. is holding his own.”

“O.B. is alive because he sees you in moderation. Smart man, O.B. Floyd I never understood.”

“Floyd made me laugh, read me poems, played the harp. I bought him a lovely big one and he played it every night.”

“But you never screwed him.”

“I never had to.”

“Not his preference.”

“I couldn’t take him serious after I caught him parading around in my stockings and garters. He took a drawerful when he left. The harp too.”

“Your figure still makes me giddy. I’m feeling the need to take it in hand again.”

“In your condition it might do you in.”

“What better way to go? Better than Elisha. Are you ready if I come by some night?”

“If you promise not to die on me, I’ll love you like a husband.”

“Good. Now I need a favor.”

“Of course you do.”

“Call Mame and ask her to come over. So many politicians move through her place, and she does loosen their tongues. Don’t mention me on the phone.”

“You’re worried about this.”

“I’m paid for what I know about this town, and what I don’t know will eat my gizzard.”

Hattie went to her telephone table and called Mame, out of Roscoe’s earshot. Joey came in from the kitchen with a pitcher of tea, three glasses, a cut lemon, ice cubes, and the sugar bowl. No spoons, but otherwise a wonderful achievement. Roscoe would not ask anything more of him today.

Mame Ray was forty, child of a whore, raised in a whorehouse, a practitioner at puberty, a madam at twenty-five, who brought to whoring an attitude which her man, Bindy McCall, articulated to Roscoe early on in his relationship to her: “She’s a degenerate broad, but all broad.”

Roscoe could agree, having known Mame on and off for three months before Bindy took her over, a wild trimester of melodramatic sex that curdled when Mame invited paying spectators to watch them through peepholes. Roscoe now avoided Mame unless he had a reason to see her. He considered her a narcissistic cauldron of spite, a felonious virago if crossed; but an acute manager of business and people, effective scavenger in grocery marts and ten-cent stores for poor but shapely salesgirls ready to be rented, a wizard concerning the textures of desire, and at turning even casual customers into slaves of their own sexuality. In her early twenties she was a roving freelancer, and then princess of whichever house she settled into — in New York, Hudson, and finally Albany in 1930, when Roscoe found her. Bindy, after he took her over, saw to it that she spent less time on her back, more time counting revenue from the eight houses he gave her to supervise, all eight in Hattie’s buildings.

Mame’s main brothel, Hattie’s only building outside the rooming-house district, was an old Prohibition roadhouse in the city’s West End, known first as the Come On Inn, now called the Notchery, and it was all gold. Its first two floors were luxuriously furnished for a whorehouse, and Mame lived amid high-fashion décor on the third floor. It was also the collection depot for payoffs to Bindy from all city brothels, and these sums he passed on to Roscoe three times a week at Party headquarters after he took his cut, which Patsy suspected was getting larger lately, a point of contention between the brothers.

When Hattie saw Mame step out of the taxicab, she opened the inner door for her and went back to her chair. Roscoe, sipping his second glass of iced tea, watched Joey playing solitaire on the coffee table. Joey was cheating, yet losing. What kind of a senator is this? Mame flounced through the open door, her hair a new shade of auburn since Roscoe last saw her, her seductive amplitude unchanged, and wearing a tan linen skirt and white blouse. Mame’s face was not her fortune: her nose was a bump, her eyes too small, her cheekbones lost in the puff of her cheeks, but her mouth and its savvy smile offered serious intimacy.