William Kennedy - Roscoe

Roscoe waved to Father Fearey, the assistant pastor at Sacred Heart and everybody’s favorite priest after Bing Crosby. Wally Kilmartin, the current Ninth Ward alderman, gave Roscoe the high sign, ready for a chat, but Dinny Rhatigan beat him to the wheelchair. Dinny was pushing eighty-five, and had been in on the election of Patsy in 1919. Patsy made him leader of the Ninth Ward when we took City Hall.

“You ailin’, Roscoe?” Dinny asked.

“I’m resting up for the football season,” Roscoe said.

“I hear Patsy got chickenswoggled.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“He called me.”

“Well, if he says so.”

“My God, is he pissed at Bindy.”

“So I understand.”

“I wouldn’t want to be Bindy.”

“Bindy won’t want to be Bindy if Patsy catches up with him.”

“The Mayor survived the war well.”

“He did.”

“It reminds me of 1919, Roscoe, after the war, and so many were against us.”

“It does exactly, Dinny. It does exactly.”

“But we’ll do fine this year.”

“I think we will, Din.”

“How long are they keeping you in that chair?”

“Till I get out of it.”

“I remember Felix in a chair like that. At the Phoenix Club.”

“I remember it too,” Roscoe said.

“It was 1919,” Dinny said. “That same year.”

“That very same year,” said Roscoe. “A musical year.”

“Musical?” Dinny said.

“I always remember it that way,” Roscoe said.

Opus One: Overture, 1919

The Phoenix Club, a one-story brick building with a step-gabled roof, Dutch-style, was a leftover from the days when the North End was part of the demesne of the patroons of the Van Rensselaer family, a tract forty-eight miles long and twenty-four miles wide, seven hundred thousand acres on both sides of the river, with sixty to eighty thousand tenant farmers living on it under feudal conditions. The building had been an office of the patroon’s manor, but in the late nineteenth century it became the Phoenix, the sanctum sanctorum of North Albany Democracy. Dinny Rhatigan, who owned the ice house on Erie Street, and thirty or so other men — Black Jack McCall the saloonkeeper-sheriff; Judge Brady, a hero when he ruled against that damned cleric who tried to stop Sunday baseball; Jack Maloney, the paving contractor, whose son Bunter held the city speed record for laying red bricks, 5,545 in forty-five minutes; Iron Joe Farrell, who ran The Wheelbarrow, the little Main Street saloon with the cockpit out back where Patsy sometimes fought his chickens; Emmett Daugherty, the old Fenian and labor radical; Pat McDonald, leader of the Eighth Ward, who rode his bicycle with the North Albany Wheelmen — these good fellows, and more, were keepers of the covenant in the old club: two rooms, two card tables, a pool table, six spittoons, and two heavily curtained windows nobody could see into or out of. In the great blizzard of ’88, six of them were playing cards when it started to snow. They raised the curtains to watch it fall, saw it get so deep that they decided not to go out. It snowed four days, and those snowbound fellas would’ve starved to death if their wives hadn’t come down with baskets of food.

It was a hot July day when Roscoe brought Felix to the Phoenix. Felix was sixty-seven and in the wheelchair with troubled lungs, wrapped in his blanket and trying to forestall pneumonia, the ailment that he feared would kill him and which, in three months, would. He had been coming to the club after the eleven o’clock mass every Sunday during all the twenty years the Republicans ran the town. It was a political haven, for, with Phoenix dominance, the ward had gone two-to-one Democrat, even in Republican landslides. For this reason also, Patsy had come along today with Roscoe and Felix to announce his candidacy for city assessor.

Felix instantly responded to Patsy’s plan: “Yessir, that assessor’s a good choice, it’s their Achilles’ heel. Same as it was ours thirty years ago.”

Assessment was a perpetual issue: high tax assessments on the property of political enemies, low assessments for loyalists and friendly corporations. Everybody did it if they were in, nobody liked it if they were out.

“What makes you think you can win?” Dinny asked Patsy.

“I’m up against Straney,” Patsy said, “and he wasn’t in the war. I’ll campaign in uniform, and I got a team ready to work with me, knockin’ on front doors till we drop. Elisha Fitzgibbon’s financing me, and Roscoe’ll manage me. They’re both smarter than me, so we can’t lose on brains.”

“Don’t matter how many brains you got,” Dinny said. “The Barnes organization can steal more votes than you can count.”

“I know that,” Patsy said. “Why the hell do you think I’m here?”

And in the laughter and then the silence that followed that brash remark, Roscoe saw that Patsy had transformed himself in the eyes of these veterans: had become not the fresh, ambitious pup he might seem at first, but a young fellow with a savvy that came from early exposure to politics at Black Jack’s knee, and then as bartender at Jack’s saloon, where politics was as important as the ale. Patsy talked the lingo and was ready for anything, even speaking the unspoken. He had a sharp, squinty eye, and an aggressive chin, ready for an argument. People knew him as fullback for the Arbor Hill Spartans, the team nobody could beat. He tilted his chair back until it leaned against the wall, his legs dangling in his high shoes.

“The Ninth Ward always goes two to one,” Patsy said. “Am I right?”

“Usually,” said Dinny.

“Can it go three to one? Four to one?”

Heads shook. Four to one? The fellow is crazy.

“It’s been done,” Patsy said. “Right, Felix?”

“That was when we had total control. Now it’s not so easy.”

“Can that control be organized? Can we buy it?”

“We can price it out,” Dinny said, “if we know the money is there.”

“It’s there,” said Patsy. “This is the year to move. We can win. McCabe is running Townsend Blair for mayor, and he’s definitely got a shot.” Packy McCabe was the longtime ineffectual boss of Albany Democrats.

“Who said they’re running Blair?” Felix asked.

“McCabe. I told him we had a candidate for mayor, and he laughed and said it was taken, that Blair had it. ‘Captain Blair of the 51st Pioneers,’ he says. ‘All right, Packy,’ I say to him, ‘then how about Roscoe Conway for district attorney?’ He says that’s taken too.”

“You never told me this,” Roscoe said.

“You don’t wanna run, but you could win. You got that medal. So I say to Packy, ‘Are you tellin’ me there’s no room on the ticket for anybody from the Eighth, Ninth, and Twelfth Wards? Are you sayin’ we’re outsiders, the lot of us, the gang of us that won the war?’ And Packy says, ‘No, no, my boy, not at all.’ ‘All right,’ I say, ‘then I’ll run for assessor.’ He says, ‘Let me think about that,’ and I say, ‘Don’t think too long or you’re gonna lose us. We’re big and gettin’ bigger, and it’s a new day. We got the vets and their families, and I got a whole lot of friends who won’t go your way if I don’t, and we’re ready to primary if we’re not on your ticket.’ ‘Let me think about that,’ he says again, and I say, ‘Okay, I’ll see you in church.’ That was yesterday, and I saw him at St. Joseph’s an hour ago, and he says he’ll back me for assessor.”

“By the great goddamn, that’s splendid, Patsy,” Felix said. “You’ve assaulted the barricades single-handed.” And the Phoenixers nodded and grunted their approval of this fighting spirit suddenly made visible in their clubhouse.