William Kennedy - Roscoe

“What happened to Wilbur?” Gilby asked.

“He died. Bear mauled him pretty bad.”

Gilby kicked the bear rug in the head.

At the back of the old notebook Veronica found a list of Christmas presents she and Elisha gave to friends in 1928. “We gave Patsy a set of steak knives in 1928,” she said. “We gave you a pocket watch, Roscoe.”

“I carried it until you gave me a wristwatch,” he said, raising his wrist with the Elgin he’d worn since 1936. “And it’s nine o’clock on my watch, big fella. Bedtime.”

Veronica stood up. “That’s right, and also we have to go up to the lodge for a short while,” she said. “I want to pack some of your father’s belongings.”

“I can carry them for you,” Gilby said.

“If you want to be ready when the ghosts arrive, you better get to sleep,” Veronica said. Roscoe told him Cal had fishing rods and bait ready for the morning, and instead of fishing off the dock he’d talk to Cal about getting one of the small boats on the water. Gilby approved of that, and Veronica heated water for his hot-water jar, put him to bed, and piled on the blankets.

The Phantom of Love

Roscoe opened one of the bottles of Margaux ’29 he had brought from the Tivoli wine cellar, and poured for himself and Veronica. They sat in the two wicker armchairs facing the fireplace, seats favored by visiting ghosts, according to a Tristano tradition dating to the age when spiritualists flew in and out windows; Veronica thinks they still do. Friends of Ariel are how the ghosts were first identified, specifics long lost; but some things recurred in stories: they were gray-haired men, dressed rustically and well, and they sipped brandy.

The ghosts lost vogue when the lodge was completed and Tristano’s nightlife moved onto a higher social scale up the hill. But it regained venue in the early 1930s, when, at a late hour, one of the Boston Peabodys, a financial friend of Elisha, swore that two gentlemen sat across from him for fifteen minutes, ignoring his efforts to enter their conversation, content to be spectrally aloof, but not inaudible. They made sounds, said Peabody, nothing you could repeat in words, more like whooshings and wheeings, and yet their demeanor and syntax seemed quite in keeping with proper behavior and chat you might observe at any Boston club. The elder ghost, Peabody said, drank more brandy than the other. When they vanished, so did Peabody’s bottle of brandy.

A rash of sightings followed, some vivid, one or two terrifying to the witnesses, but during the rest of the decade the vogue faded. In 1940, Pamela said she saw a ghost in the Swiss Cottage, a muscular man without a shirt, but it was adjudged to be her gin-fizzed fantasy of the young French Canadian who worked in Tristano’s kitchen. That same year, Veronica awoke from a nap in a reclining chair in the Trophy House to see a spectral young woman standing by the fireplace. Veronica asked who she was, the woman gestured vaguely to the hearth, and Veronica said, Is this your home? The woman seemed to say yes, though Veronica could not say how she did that. Veronica went to the bathroom and threw water on her face and came back to find the woman standing where she’d been, but fading, and then she was gone. Veronica told Elisha, who said, Don’t tell anybody, they’ll think you’re as crazy as Pamela. But she told Roscoe, who remembered the story and now asked, “Who do you think she really was?”

“Somebody who’d lived here and was upset by strangers in her home.”

“You didn’t invent her.”

“I did not.”

“She wasn’t an extension of your desire to believe in ghosts.”

“Positively not.”

“She had nothing to do with Rosemary.”

“Nothing whatever. Stop giving me the third degree.”

“I’m just preparing for ghosts in case we see any.”

“You think we will?”

“No, but, then again, yes, or even possibly. Let’s move to more serious matters.” He raised his glass. “To Tristano. We’re actually here.”

“I told you we would be,” she said, and sipped her wine.

“I never trust anybody who tells me the truth.”

“I have to celebrate what you did.”

She had taken off her bulky knit sweater and now wore a fashionable fawn cardigan. She had pinned her hair into a lovely upswept yellow bun, and her smile gave Roscoe reason to believe he was not only in his right mind, but gaining access to an important truth, always dangerous.

“I’ll go over to Belle’s cottage and get a key to the lodge,” he said.

“I have my key,” Veronica said.

“And I thought the lodge would be my idea.”

“I know you thought that. That’s why I brought my key.”

Veronica looked in at Gilby until she was certain he was asleep, and then they walked up the long hill to the lodge, Roscoe creating a path with his flashlight. They went up the steps of the now empty porch, past where Estelle Warner had tried to seduce Roscoe while her doctor husband was excavating Pamela. So many subsequent times Roscoe had come up these steps, and yet that wretched memory still drove out all others. Veronica unlocked the front door to the main parlor and switched on the sixty-bulb chandelier, an electrified version of the original sixty candles. The room had been exquisitely furnished by money: wall and ceiling studs made of polished logs, rustically sleek; the stained-glass unicorn window Veronica saw in a Venetian home and coveted, and Elisha bought it and shipped it here for a midsummer night’s surprise in 1936; Oriental carpeting now rolled and covered, draperies packed away, the leather sofa and large tapestried armchairs, all in their winter covers, opulence in hiding.

Veronica turned on the butterfly standing lamp, one of several Tiffanys in the lodge, and switched off the harsh light of the chandelier. The house held a damp chill, as cold as outside; but they could light no fire, for the chimneys were capped for the winter to discourage squirrel residencies. Roscoe stood by the walk-in fireplace and stared down at Pamela half naked on the raccoon rugs, come into my parlor, darling, the parlor of false love, get out of here, Ros.

“Where do you want to start?” he asked Veronica.

“Start what?”

“Don’t get specific. I don’t want to ruin it with the wrong words.”

“So we’ll silently figure out each other’s wishes.”

“You’ll never be able to figure out mine,” Roscoe said.

“We’ll start upstairs,” she said. They went up to the main bedroom, and as she lit the bedside lamps Roscoe pulled down the shades on the room’s four windows. She took a suitcase from the back of a closet and opened it on the bed, then rifled the drawers for Elisha’s favored things and packed them: a pair of English suspenders, the binoculars he used at the track and for birdwatching, two of his abandoned wallets, a jewelry case with tiepins, stickpins, and rings, a handful of bow ties, souvenir programs from Broadway shows and the Saratoga racetrack, half a dozen handsomely tailored shirts Gilby might grow into next year.

“That’s enough,” she said, and closed the suitcase and set it by the door. She pulled the dust cover off the bed and threw it into a corner, then turned to Roscoe, who was standing by the bed watching her. “I feel young,” she said.

“We were young in this house, but never in this room.”

Young lovers of a sort, lovers as children, strangers in middle age grown back into children. But she did not want those children’s games, the touch in the half-dark, just so far, no farther. And Roscoe’s poet: What did we do, I wonder, before we loved, unweaned we sucked on country pleasures, childishly. She took off her jacket and unbuttoned her sweater for him, sleight of hand behind her back and, woman as magician, breasts appear in the light, the full, bright light, aging, falling but not quite fallen, Roscoe never weaned from these, and he: I suck thee, thou, you, these, each, both, and she let her jacket fall and took off her sweater and let the bra fall into her hand, and to the floor. Roscoe crouched before her and raised her skirt, found nylons, the belt holding them tight on her thighs, silk knickers, he slid them down her hips, her bush appearing in the full, bright light, the color of fall’s last foliage, and I kiss thee, thou, you, this, it, we’ve done this before in our moderate way. And she: Yes, you have, somewhat, but we no longer need to be moderate. And she unbuttoned her skirt and let it fall, stepped out of it, picked up her jacket and put it on, naked as possible under the circumstances, but I’m freezing. Roscoe took off his jacket and shirt, put his jacket back on in solidarity with her, rid himself of clothes, shoes, socks, you can’t make love with your socks on, as Veronica sat on the bed and waited for him to be ready, was he ever, put her mouth around him, full mouth in the full, bright light, and felt him with both her hands, nothing childish about these moves, and said, That’s only hello, and stood then and put her mouth on his mouth and said, There is more. She smiled with a certainty of purpose Roscoe had never seen in these circumstances, and she sat again on the bed, still holding him, then let him go and lay back and spread her legs, thinking, This is why they punish you, this is why my mother was punished when she did this, and of course she did do it, more difficult for her, wasn’t it, in her repressive day, Catholic Jew, subordinate woman who could not be willful by law or moral ordination, we will punish any aggression, madame; yet she was wanton for my father and said as much to us, and for whom else was she so? None else, not she, and what of you, my dear? The good husband Elisha, now the good soldier Roscoe, and who else? Roscoe moved toward her and saw her face changing yet again, head flat and mouth now curved with the pressure of oncoming love, is this love, Veronica? She watches him to see what he looks like when he sees her this way and to imagine what she becomes in his eyes, and he in hers, and what those images do to them — singular instant — and the poet again: My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, as with both hands she opens herself, rare gesture, never so open, so aggressive with this man, and modesty can go to hell, this I give Roscoe, who gave me back my life. For you, she said. He has readied himself for this for thirty-one years, make no mistakes now, Roscoe, easy is the avenue to the divine places. Roscoe is a man of too much girth, too much need, too old for so much life, isn’t he? No, and don’t go around telling lies about Roscoe in the midst of his young man’s realized dream, even his own uninhibited imagination trumped by what he is feeling now, nothing abstract, no words, and of course he thinks this time it must truly be love, always was with her even when this was off limits and you could only imagine, deceive yourself that it would ever be otherwise, but here it is, isn’t it? Open love? And as he moves into the breach he says, I do think this is love, and she says, I believe it is, and Roscoe is ready to say that this is a consecration of two shopworn lives, yet he wonders, as usual, what is really going on here, love equaling love, another lying equation, is it? Which leaves out the hidden element beneath the familiar, the invisible bustle and hubbub under the carpet of foliage, what a frenzy there must be down under. Veronica sees herself emerging from the cocoon as a blue butterfly, new to her, though she has always known love with Roscoe, he always wanting her, she always pulled toward him, demonic, really, in its endurance, but she had to resist it, you can’t live on deceit and humiliation, one long-ago lapse at the hotel is all, and none with others, oh, brushings, maybe, a kiss of sorts, who were they, she doesn’t remember, yes, she does, one or two, but they don’t matter, Roscoe always saw that sort of thing, Elisha never. Roscoe feels achieved in her arms, illustrious man of privilege who believes no other except Elisha has been here, which is probably your self-deceit again, Ros, aggrandizing you-you-you and canonizing her, this adventurous woman, woman on a horse, she always did have the bold public image. You think you’re the only one who’s been here, then? Lived only on her fantasies, did she? Really? Yes, that’s all there was, don’t run her down. And they move, but inseparably, her golden hair fallen loose from its pins, visions of her now like the positionings of other women in Roscoe’s erotic museum, but she is not like others, these visions are new, because Veronica needs no coaxing, turning, or urging to be new to all that they’ve ever been, nothing like her in the museum, for this is love, my love, love, my love, it is all all all all love, my love, and we should accept that term as true for now, seek the reality that tried to kill you, and Roscoe certainly has learned to do that, but avoid truth, Roscoe, it’s the enemy. Isn’t it true that she accepts Roscoe? It is. She does. She knows how she has intimidated him, not through years of denial, he can handle that, but through rejection, which he didn’t handle well at all. But, oh, these pressures of love, and Roscoe owns them tonight, yes, he does, sweetest of pressures, less sweet than manic, swelling her senses as they come, and she holds back nothing now, once, then she is twice, and again, and oh my God again. Don’t tell Roscoe this is fraudulence, he knows fraudulence, this is love, my love, this is love, let it come. This is where we begin.