William Kennedy - Roscoe

Does Roscoe Really Believe in Ghosts?

He has lived with the ghosts of Hamlet and Banquo, with post-Easter Jesus on the road, with Lourdes, Fatima, Padre Pio’s stigmata, with Marley, Dracula, the Topper gang, the depressed dead of Grover’s Corners, the Holy Ghost guised as a bird. He has listened to reasonable people, including Veronica, who believe they’ve seen ghosts. He has seen fabricated ghosts deceiving the gullible, including Veronica, seen his own dead father calling his name, and dead Elisha shaving with an electric razor. He knows ghosts are hallucinations, optical fantasies, formulations by visionaries, hypnotic suggestions, imaginative impositions, wishful resurrections with no more substance than a political promise. But promises sometimes materialize and so do ghosts, who can change life for the quick, as Elisha changed us all with his postmortal fiddlings. And so Roscoe allows for all realities, including those that do not exist.

The dominant reality for Roscoe tonight is passionate love, which has risen, fallen, risen, and then some, and is now in seemly quiescence. They have been back in the Trophy House for an hour, Gilby still in profound slumber, Veronica napping on the sofa, ready to rise up for ectoplasmic visitors, and Roscoe rocking in a rocking chair by the reinvigorated fire, watching Veronica breathe. He is what is sometimes called lovesick. He cannot stop thinking about making love with her: how they stood, sat, moved, lay, how they spoke to each other in the language of love, how they stood, sat, moved, etc., repeat all, then rerepeat, then do it again, and then one more time, etc. This condition will prevail for days with diminishing intensity. Beyond the love words that he did speak, Roscoe now thinks he should have spoken to her about the future, his intention to leave politics and start a new life with her — How are you with that, my oh-so-sensual love? They could find a new great house, money not a problem for either of them. Alas, he cannot move too fast on such things, usurping. But when she awakens, he will point out that today is the second time he, she, and Gilby have been alone together away from home, the first in Puerto Rico in 1933, when they flew down for his birth, baptized him there, godfather Roscoe, surrogate adopting father. As the boy grew, Roscoe became father on call, father by desire, and after Elisha’s death, caretaker father, juridical father, preludes, were they, to becoming step father of the holy Roscoe family? But he cannot move too fast, usurping.

He set out the Salignac and the brandy snifters he had brought down from the lodge. He placed one snifter by sleeping Veronica, the others on the table for himself, Elisha, and the two traditional ectos. He left the old wicker chairs ready for the two, and he brought a third chair for Elisha. He poured the Salignac, varying the pours, one of them drinks more than the other, gave a bit to Veronica, left Elisha’s snifter empty, then poured his own, sat, and tasted it, magnifique, and considered how to summon ghosts. Sit here till Christmas, Ros, no rustically well-dressed gentlemen will turn up speaking wind sounds and ectosipping your splendid brandy. Blood tests, elections, judges, juries are easy, but a habeas corpus for the dead? You don’t know their names or faces; they don’t speak any known language. Perhaps they’re generic ghosts, perpetuating a bygone Tristano life-style: brandy, tweeds, soft handmade Italian leather boots, you made up the boots, Ros, and they’re not generic ghosts, they were friends of Ariel, came here often, before your time, had money, one a Scotch-Irish insurance man name of Amos Ford who liked duck hunting, the other a fly fisherman, Seth Cooper, department-store owner from Albany. They found common ground at Tristano, discovered they could talk fish and birds forever, at which point their lives achieved lucid but brief symmetries, for a great wind blew up, capsizing Seth’s boat, and blowing a tree down onto Amos’s duck blind.

“The same wind did you both,” Roscoe said. “Imagine that.”

In the afterlife they were apotheosized as ideals of their pursuits, and were allowed to meet each other at Tristano on select days to remember the stillness of the water just before the great wind blew them into death, to remember the precise size, weight, color, and markings of every bird, every fish that ever died by their hand, to consider whether fish or birds were more intelligent, or equally gifted with reason, for each does know the enemy and does know to flee destruction at his hand; and, considering that nature is based in injustice and suffering, Seth and Amos were also mandated to dwell on how the subtraction of all those creatures’ lives changed the natural world.

“You now know each duck and fish you killed?” Roscoe asked. “Have you named them?. A few. But you really do recognize every one?. Amazing memory. Ah, everybody has that over there.”

“Who are you talking to?” Veronica asked, one eye open.

“Amos and Seth,” Roscoe said. “They used to come here.”

“Who? Where are they?”

“Here in their chairs, can’t you see them? Say hello.”

“Hello, Amos; hello, Seth.”

“This is Veronica,” Roscoe said. “Yes, she’s a beauty. sleeping beauty. No, we’re not married, but that’s not a bad idea.”

“Are they worried that we’re not married?”

“No,” said Roscoe, “but I am. They were friends of Ariel, and they died in a big wind in 1906. Seth is the older one with the white mustache and the tan leather vest. You shopped in his store, Cooper’s, on North Pearl Street, when you were a child. Seth remembers you and your mother. Uh-huh. Seth says he also saw you at Saratoga.”

“Roscoe,” Veronica said.

“Just let them talk,” Roscoe said.

“Are you talking to the ghosts?” Gilby asked. He stood in the doorway of his room, in pajamas, robe, and sweat socks, his cowlick standing tall from sleeping on it.

“Come and sit down,” Roscoe said. “Meet Seth and Amos. They both knew your father when he was a boy. This is Gilbert Fitzgibbon, gentlemen, my godson.” Gilby walked slowly across the room and sat on the sofa beside his mother, never taking his eyes off the empty chairs. Roscoe refilled Seth’s and Amos’s brandies.

“There’s nobody sitting there. Nobody’ll drink that,” Gilby said.

“No? You should’ve seen what was in those glasses five minutes ago. We were talking hunting and fishing, and which one is smarter, a duck or a trout. Oh?. They say your father’s coming.”

“I don’t see him,” Gilby said. “I don’t see anybody.”

“Just watch that chair,” Roscoe said pointing to Elisha’s place at the table. “I mean seriously watch it. Pay attention. Listen. Quiet. The loudest noise you hear is the fire, listen, then you hear your own breathing, listen, then you hear mine, listen and you’ll see everything that’s there, and then you’ll start to see everything that isn’t, keep listening and you’ll find sympathy with all things, you’ll hear the moon shine and the grass grow. Do you remember what your father looked like the last time you saw him? He looks like that now, except he got rid of most of the gray in his hair, and he looks younger. Close your eyes and look at him. Hair combed same as always, they didn’t make him change it. Oh yes?. Seth says you get to pick your favorite age when you come back. Your father picked forty-six, eight years ago, 1937, the year the Yankees took the Series from the Giants in five games and Pleasure Power won the Travers at Saratoga. A good year for us. The lines in your father’s cheeks aren’t quite as deep as they became, and his energy level is up. You were four years old that year, and your parents bought you a blue tricycle for Christmas. John Thacher was re-elected our Mayor, FDR was a year into his second term, and the second war hadn’t started yet. The Nazis hadn’t taken over Vienna, so your mother’s Jewish uncles and aunts were still alive. See what your father’s wearing? His gray houndstooth jacket with the suede elbow patches, much like our visitors’ jackets. What’s that, Elisha?.. He says he likes what we’ve been doing for him, especially the way the trial came out. He predicts Alex will be re-elected. I know that, Elisha, and I’m not even dead. Ah. He says, yes, he’s trying to say. ‘I died too quickly, too soon, and I left a vacuum. I’m sorry about that,”’ and Roscoe’s voice deepened, picked up the Elisha timbre and cadence he’d been mimicking for forty years. He poured the Salignac into Elisha’s snifter. “‘I wish I’d had a chance to talk to somebody, tell you all what was on my mind, but I didn’t have time.’”