William Kennedy - Roscoe

“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.”