William Kennedy - Roscoe

At the mention of the blood type, anger instantly left Alex’s eyes, replaced with a new vigilance. He stared at Roscoe with uneasy respect, with awareness, perhaps, that this new fact had a future, and that Roscoe had found a way to say to him what had never been said, never could be said.

“Bringing in rape just sealed the bargain,” Roscoe said, “and turned it into classic melodrama. One shot and the poor soul fattens. Wouldn’t you prefer a drunken family member forcing himself on a female rather than an incestuous intrigue that carries on for months, as Pamela said it had?”

“Pamela said that?”

“She did.”

“The woman is evil.”

“It’s pitiful she has such a need for it.”

“She doesn’t deserve any of your compassion,” Alex said.

“She’s not getting much. We defeated her with Elisha’s help. She’s no longer a factor, but the war goes on.”

“What war?”

“The war between love and death.”

“Whose love and death?”

“Good question,” Roscoe said.

Roscoe sat up when the balloon burst, but of course there was no balloon. He had been visiting the Museum of Forgotten Sounds and on the wall he found a sign: “Call me and I will come to free you.” He did not know who might be the “I” of the statement. He went on to listen to the triangle the junkman jangled, the pumper’s bells when the horses came out the firehouse door, the sound of Owen Ward’s ice pick when Owen stuck it into a cake of ice, the Jewish peddler’s voice chanting pineapples for sale, “Pineys, pineys, the things with the shtickies on them.” Roscoe heard the women in black dresses and black head-kerchiefs speaking a foreign tongue as they cut dandelions from the field and dropped them into a cloth sack. He heard the bolt action of an ’03, the bell of the horse car entering the Lumber District, St. Joseph’s church bell on the morning of his father’s funeral, the bell on Judge Brady’s cow, the scissors sharpener’s emery wheel grinding the butcher knife. The sounds seemed to imply trauma. A voice from the gramophone asked, “In what year did compassion win the election?” As he left the museum, the female usher told him, “Call me and I will come to free you.”

Cal Kendrick, second-generation caretaker at Tristano, piled up three tiers of logs to start a major fire burning in the great fireplace of the Trophy House after he heard from Veronica that visitors would be coming for a short stay. The house was Tristano’s original building, built in 1873 by Lyman Fitzgibbon.

Cal’s father, Zachary, an Adirondack guide, had been hired by Lyman as Tristano’s first resident outdoorsman. The main lodge and the Swiss Cottage, where the family stayed, had both been closed since late September, and Cal and his wife, Belle, were shuttering all secondary buildings when Veronica called and said to keep the Trophy House open. So Cal started the fire at dawn to banish the deep chill and bake heat into the fieldstone walls, which would hold the heat long after the fire faded. Belle dressed all six beds in the three bedrooms with extra blankets, flannel sheets, and hot-water jars for cold feet. More than thirty years ago Roscoe and Veronica discovered, in all of those beds, varying intensities of what they considered love, as well as the thrilling dimensions of most of each other’s bodies — discovery that went just so far and no farther. Roscoe did not expect any of the beds to be put to comparable use tonight, yet it was Veronica’s decision to stay here, and not in the lodge, so there was no reason to abandon all hope, ye who enter.

“I want to see the mink family and I want to see the ghosts,” Gilby said.

They were in Veronica’s 1942 Buick station wagon, Roscoe driving, the back of the wagon piled with suitcases, an ice chest with sandwiches and Tru-Ade for Gilby, plus four bottles of Margaux from the Tivoli wine cellar. When they stopped at Chestertown for coffee, Roscoe said he’d have to call Alex in the morning to find out how the press received his ungodly sex speech; but Veronica said, No, don’t call. No? No. And Roscoe: All right, why? And she: Don’t change the subject, we’re supposed to have a good time without politics, this is a family visit, this is Tristano time, isn’t it? It certainly is, said Roscoe.

And Gilby asked, “Will we see the ghosts tonight?”

“My definitive and absolutely final answer to your question,” Roscoe said, “is maybe.”

“You said we would.”

“I said it and I stand by it. But you don’t think I know exactly when ghosts come and go, do you, Gil? There’s nothing to stop them from ramming around the house at sunset, or dawn, or high noon, or not at all. Nobody knows the timetables of ghosts.”

“Ghosts aren’t real, anyway. You’re just playing a game. Ghosts are dead. People don’t come back as ghosts when they die.”

“Well, it’s true ghosts are dead, but you’re one hundred percent wrong, Gilbino, and you’re also one hundred percent right. I’d say you’re probably more right than wrong and probably we won’t see any ghosts because, as you say, there aren’t any ghosts. But if there are ghosts, and we see them, then you’ll be a hundred percent more wrong than right. And if we sit in the Trophy House and ghosts come out of wherever ghosts come out of and sit and talk to each other, then you’ll be wrong in spades, and I’ll go to my grave saying I’ve never known anybody to be more wrong than Gilby was about Tristano’s ghosts.”

“I’d like to see the ghosts, too,” Veronica said.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never seen them,” Roscoe said.

“I saw something once but Elisha didn’t believe me. Another night we were supposed to see them but I fell asleep in the chair. When I woke up they said the ghosts had come and gone. Like Santa Claus. You remember Santa Claus, Gilby?”

“He was a fake,” Gilby said.

“In spades,” said Roscoe. “I believed in him till I was forty-two years old.”

“You did not,” Gilby said.

“The Times-Union wrote a story about me. Oldest living believer in Santa Claus. Nothing could shake my belief. I saw those scrawny Salvation Army Santas ringing their bells and I knew their whiskers were phony, but I believed they were all Santa. What a sap. On the other hand, you can’t legally say that imitations are all there is. I could prove the existence of Santa Claus in any court in this country if somebody hired me. Of course, I wouldn’t take the case, because I no longer believe in him.”

“Why did you stop?”

“I found something else to believe in. I fell in love again. You got a girlfriend, Gilbo?”

“I’ve got five or six.”

“Whoa. Playing the field.”

“People say you have lots of girlfriends, Roscoe.”

“People are wrong,” Roscoe said.

“How many do you have?”

“You mean legally?”

“Any way.”

“Just one.”

“Who is she?”

“I’d only reveal that on the witness stand under oath.”

“You never tell the truth, Roscoe, do you?”

“Always never,” Roscoe said. “Or is it never always?”

When the ferry stopped running on the lake in 1938, Elisha built two bridges, at the east and west ends of Lyman’s Island, and made Tristano accessible by car on the gated macadam road, until snow closed the road for the season. When they parked and unloaded the wagon at the house, Belle told them dinner was roasted wild turkey and woodcock that Cal had shot. Veronica unpacked in a hurry, and Gilby asked would they go hunting for birds. Roscoe said, No, Cal got enough; we won’t kill anything more today. Will we go fishing? No. Cal put all the boats in the boathouse for the winter, and it’s too cold to fish today. The fish will all be keeping warm at the bottom of the lake. We’ll fish off the dock in the morning, when the sun is up, all right? All right, but what are we going to do today? We’ll walk the land, said Roscoe, and we’ll look at stuff, and try to see things nobody wants us to see. And so the three of them dressed for the chill weather and went first to the boulder near the house to visit the mink family that Gilby had seen living under it.