William Kennedy - Roscoe

Roscoe searched faces, found uncountable strangers. Who brought them? Who cares? Join the Party, folks, the new Party. He saw Hattie Wilson and went toward her. She had organized this celebration, cooked the corned beef, chicken, ham, the works, raised the victory banner over the bar — PATSY DID IT! — brought in dishes and silver — she also did picnics and clambakes-the most organized woman in town, and a tantalizing eyeful to Roscoe’s eye: that full bosom, covered to the neck tonight, with matching hips and slender waist, proportions definitely not made in heaven. You couldn’t call her pretty — her face was too full of experience for such a delicate term — but its soft, full, not fleshy contours held a promise of pleasure, a wish for it, or was Roscoe imagining this? He would find out one of these days. Her first husband had died in the Argonne, and now she was seeing Louie Glatz, who, Roscoe decided, was wrong for her. Roscoe asked her, “Did you cook enough to feed this mob?”

“Even you won’t be able to eat all the leftovers,” she said.

“You look too good to be a cook,” he said.

“I do other things too.”

“Those are things I’d like to see.”

“I’ll bet you would.”

“How much’ll you bet? I want to see the color of your money.”

“You’ll have to make an appointment.”

“All right. Tonight. Here.”

“Here where?”

“I’ll figure it out,” Roscoe said.

“Here?”

“Here.”

She cocked an eye at him and moved away toward the food. Was that a yes? He threaded through the crowd toward Bindy and a stranger who, if he was Moishe (Mush) Trainor from New Jersey, was about to bring money back into Roscoe’s life. With the brewery closed, Roscoe’s income had vanished overnight. He could carry on as counsel for Elisha’s steel mill, but it bored the bejesus out of him, just as the mill often bored Elisha’s bejesus, both of them preferring the new vice of political excitement, the rush of blood during the campaign, the vital hangover from all that creative fraudulence, and the anticipation of power according to Patsy McCall, who would insist Packy McCabe put Elisha and Roscoe on the Party committee that would control the next election. Here we come, Packy, and we can see daylight. Also, as a politician, Roscoe gets to use his wits, of which he has several. And although all know how smart Patsy is, he can’t run this rump faction alone. He has the desire, the talent for making friends, and profound savvy about the human proclivity for deceit, but he needs an active lawyer as much as he needs money, to create a political future out of nothing but will power.

Money: it suddenly seemed available to Roscoe, if the scheme conjured by Bindy, with Patsy and Mush Trainor as his partners, worked out. Roscoe’s dead brewery, his peculiar bequest from Felix, had new reason to exist, perhaps even thrive in these dry times. Felix had moved back home from the Ten Eyck when his pneumonia worsened and he was unable to take care of himself, came back after almost twenty years to his old brass bed in the Ten Broeck Street brownstone, and Blanche welcomed him as if he’d only been gone for the weekend. Why did she do this?

“It was peaceful when he was gone,” she said, “no spittoons or politicians. He was no use around the house and he’d never go anywhere with me. But he did come to visit. He’d give us anything we asked, and never ask a thing from us, just to live alone in that drafty hotel. Then, one day, he says to me, ‘Could I come home to die, Blanche?’ And wouldn’t I be a fine one to say he couldn’t?”

Blanche and the Conway girls — Cress, Marianne, and Libby — monitored his breathing to see if he was still here or gone up, and O.B., Dr. Lynch, and Roscoe kept him company part of the day. But he lingered, refusing to die until he was sure Patsy had been elected and Blair hadn’t. Roscoe gave him the news as soon as he heard it, and explained the Blair and Straney cuts.

“You fixed both sides?” Felix asked.

“We did,” Roscoe said.

“How delicious. I’m proud of you. And proud of Patsy.”

“We had a good teacher.”

“Next stop City Hall.”

“That could be.”

“Do that for your father,” Felix said, beaming at having given this boy the proper upbringing, and also at the prospect of a vicarious, posthumous return to the Mayor’s office, the only form of redemption left to him. He’d raised this boy right. He stopped talking and smiled up at Father Loonan from St. Joseph’s, who had come to forgive Felix his political sins. The priest began with redemption through Jesus, but Felix raised a hand to protest.

“Jesus was a nice fellow, Father,” Felix said, “but he was a con man.”

The priest nodded and forgave him his blasphemy, and Felix said, “Remember Satan offering him that deal? ‘Fall down and worship me and I’ll give you the kingdoms of the world’? The poor devil never had a chance, Father. The fix was in upstairs. Jesus conned hell out of him, just like his father and that apple. You think he didn’t know what Adam would do once he got a look at that apple? Of course he did. A con from the get-go, Father, a con from the get-go.”

Father Loonan was forgiving this further blasphemy when Felix said, “I’m nothing, Father, and never was, and the same goes for this splendid son of mine, and for you too. None of us is worth an old man’s piddle and we never could be, because the whole world is fixed against us, Father. The whole damn world is fixed.”

As the priest forgave his insults and profanity, Felix closed his eyes and lapsed into sleep. When he awoke he said nothing more of equivalent eloquence, and then he died, leaving the bulk of his estate, nearly a million, to his wife and daughters. To O.B. and Roscoe he left the Stanwix Brewery, controlling interest to Roscoe, plus a few hundred thousand for the boys to split, which would keep them respectable but hardly affluent, his reasoning being that women had it hard and men should make their own way; and Roscoe and O.B. surely could find some use for the brewery, even if beer was illegal. Be willful, boys, was his verbal bequest, which was why Roscoe was moving toward Bindy and Mush Trainor, entrepreneurs of the new age descending, in which the illusion of beer would replace beer, the illusion of gin would replace gin, and the illusion of jurisprudence and justice would transform the populace into hoodlums, chronic lawbreakers, professional hypocrites, defiant drunks, and political wizards, the grand exalted whizzer being Patsy. Roscoe had already had an opportunity to sell his brewery for a very decent price to the new consortium — Patsy, Bindy, Mush, and God knows who else — and let them do what they would with it. What they wanted to do was make near beer, 0.5 percent alcohol, and people would drink it and think they were getting drunk. The consortium would soon make it easier for them to think that by infusing alcohol into the beer, then selling it for twice, maybe triple, what a half of beer had sold for last week. Take it or leave it, folks. Roscoe considered this offer and decided for sentimental reasons that he would not sell his father’s brewery but would himself become keeper of the golden vats — vats that brought wondrous ease to all those defiant drinkers, and serious profit to their owner.

He touched Bindy’s arm and Bindy said, “All right, Roscoe. Mush, I told you about.”

“Hello, Mush. Do people really call you Mush?”

“Don’t you like it?”

“It’s fine with me. I never heard the name.”

“Some heard it,” Mush said.

Mush was slight of build, a bit of a dude, with pocket handkerchief, silk vest, and gold watch and chain. He had a scratchy voice and a face scarred by an old pox, his small blue eyes his chief agent of analysis. As Roscoe talked, Mush seemed to listen less than he scrutinized Roscoe’s face for strength, weakness, venality, stupidity.