Roscoe

by William Kennedy

  He awoke in sunshine, the pain bearable only if he didn’t move. Nine o’clock on the bedside table clock. He felt as if he’d slept a week, but it was only sixteen hours. Veronica was watching him from the heavy oak rocker by the fireplace. Beside her on a four-wheeled oak serving wagon lay mystery food under two silver-covered serving dishes. Veronica at morning: scoop-neck white blouse with pink roses on the bodice, tan riding britches and brown boots, a vague suggestion of lipstick, hair in a tie at the back of her neck, smiling.

  “Somebody killed me and I went to heaven,” Roscoe said.

  “You went someplace. I came to call you for dinner three times last night, but you were comatose.”

  “You’re looking out for me.”

  “People know you’re not entirely well, don’t they?”

  “Some people. Is that really nine o’clock?”

  “What do you care what time it is?”

  “I have to place myself in the cosmos. Time is important. So is food. I’m starving to death and you sit there quizzing me about time, hoarding mysterious food under silver covers.”

  “I can’t believe you’re hungry. Not you.”

  “I haven’t eaten for weeks. People refuse to feed me.”

  “Can you sit up?”

  “I can try.” And, as he did, the pain stabbed him in the stomach, the chest, the heart. He fell back. “It hurts,” he said.

  “All right, I’ll feed you.” She wheeled the tray to his bedside and uncovered lox and cream cheese and capers and onions and sour cream and applesauce. “There’s coffee in the thermos pitcher, and bagels and blintzes in the warmer, if you want any.”

  “Of course. I want it all.”

  She took a bagel and a blintz from the warmer in the bottom of the wagon, which was heated by two flaming cans of Sterno. She poured him a cup of coffee.

  “You’re serving me a Jewish breakfast.”

  “It was my father’s favorite.”

  “I remind you of your father, is that your point?”

  “You take care of me the way he did. Gordon’s lawyer called. He got your letter and they want to settle. Whatever did you say that made them so agreeable?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. I want a bagel.”

  She sat on the bed and ripped half a bagel, spread cream cheese on a fragment, piled it with capers, onions, a slice of lox, and put it to his mouth. He bit and chewed, stared at her, swallowed, sipped the coffee, waited for another bite, chewed it, stared.

  “Press your breasts against my arm while you feed me,” he said.

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s brazen.”

  “It’s not brazen. It’s a friendly gesture.”

  “It’s more than friendly.”

  “We’re more than friends. I’m no stranger to your breasts. I remember them well.”

  “Then you don’t need them pressed against you.”

  “Memory only goes so far. I need full-rounded reality.”

  “You’re very fresh.”

  “Just like your bagels.”

  She cut a blintz and dabbed it with sour cream and applesauce. She put it into his mouth, and a spot of applesauce stayed on his chin. She leaned close to him and licked it away. He pulled her close and kissed her, her arms over his shoulders, her breasts against him, and it was years gone, years since she had yielded her soft mouth so totally, everything unbelievably sharp to Roscoe. But are these real responses, Ros, or ritualized emotions you turn on like the radio? Is this even the same woman you fell in love with? Well, she still responds the same way in your arms, so the real question is, will she stay there? Don’t ruin it. Don’t go too far. If it’s going to happen it could happen at Tristano, if we ever get there. Also, you couldn’t do anything, anyway. You can barely move. He licked the top of her chest.

  “Be careful there,” she said.

  “You licked me. I’m getting even.”

  “I’m in your debt again.”

  Gratitude. Is that what this is about? Gratitude is cheap. True, but if that started it, don’t knock it. And that worshipful-slave routine, so grateful for her handouts—get past it. No woman is that perfect. She’s got the venal streak of the rich, money tunes in her music. Didn’t the phone call on the mill settlement bring on this affection? And somewhere in that beautiful head she’s still a bit of a nutcake, believing a con artist like Nadia has answers. Don’t call her a nutcake.

  He put both arms around her and squeezed her, his cheek on hers, and she squeezed him, hurting him, breathless pain he could love. They held this intimate clinch, the closest moment of their lives, at least since 1932, another year that made Roscoe crazy, and this would do it again, no doubt about that either, this embrace that was setting off alarm bells in both of them. You can feel that in her, can’t you, Ros? She squeezed him again. He kissed her hair. He would kiss her soul if he could only find it.

  “You are a wonderful man,” she whispered.

  He was about to say something excessive and fatuous when he saw Alex in the doorway, a civilian in a gray suit, white shirt, blue necktie, his suit coat folded over his left arm. No smile.

  “Alex,” Roscoe said. “Where the hell did you come from?”

  “I got in last night,” Alex said, coming into the room.

  Veronica stood up and faced Alex. “I was keeping him as a surprise,” she said to Roscoe. “That’s why I kept coming up to get you.”

  “How are you feeling?” Alex asked. “Mother says you’re not well.”

  “I’m in trouble. I should see the doctor.”

  “I’ll call and have him come over. Can you walk?”

  “I don’t think so,” Roscoe said. “I can hardly breathe, and the pain got worse overnight.”

  “I’ll get on it,” Alex said. He went out of the room and down the stairs.

  “I think we may have shocked him,” Roscoe said.

  “He knows we’re close friends,” Veronica said.

  “We looked like more than that.”

  “We did absolutely nothing wrong. Nothing.”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “Quit it.”

  “Why was that fortune-teller here?”

  “Oh. Nadia?”

  “Nadia.”

  “Yes, she came by. We visit now and then.”

  “You already spent a small fortune with that fraud. Are you paying her again?”

  “Why would I pay her? We just talk.”

  “You talk to your dead daughter?”

  “I’m over that, Roscoe. You know that.”

  “But something’s going on. She’s reading the future for you.”

  “If you must know.”

  “You want to find out how the hearing will go. You’re afraid of losing Gilby after losing Rosemary.”

  “You are clever.”

  “Why didn’t you ask me about the future? I’d have told you we’re going to win.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because Yusupov wasn’t Gilby’s father. I have a blood test to prove it.”

  “No. Where did you get a blood test on him?”

  “I’m a resourceful citizen.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “Everything points to Elisha as his father.”

  “Shhhh.”

  Then, in whispers, he said, “Elisha had to have known it wasn’t Yusupov, and why wouldn’t he? Pamela was blackmailing him.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  “What else would she mean when she says, ‘It’s a wise child that knows its father’?”

  “You’re really the cleverest man alive. That’s exactly true. First she wanted money or she’d sue for custody. We offered her five thousand dollars, but it wasn’t enough. And she said if we didn’t pay she’d name him as the father and scandalize the family. He laughed at her, so she sued.”

  “What she didn’t foresee,” said Roscoe, “was Elisha removing himself as her tar
get. He aced her. It must have enraged her.”

  “I can’t believe he’d kill himself over that,” Veronica said.

  “A sick man trying to protect you and Gilby, and looking at the short odds on himself? Those could be two very good reasons.”

  Roscoe watched her trying to absorb the theory, offering no resistance at all to Elisha as father of Gilby. It had hovered for years with her as an idea, and now here it was as logic on the hoof from Roscoe, to explain the meaning of the Yusupov blood test. The blood-test part was genuine. The rest, well, Roscoe is a lawyer. He could believe his own theory, or he could believe some of it, or none at all. It was his theory. Whatever Roscoe decided, he would take direction from Elisha. Already he was decoding what seemed like an urgent message, one that Elisha could not write down or even speak about. Roscoe understood that Elisha, for good reason, could only point to the core of its mystery with this silent code, full of faith that Roscoe and Patsy would know what he meant; for weren’t they the translators and keepers of all secrets?

  “His death is still a mystery,” Roscoe said to her, “but the mystery isn’t quite as dense as it was a few weeks ago. Just do me a favor and stay away from that fortune-teller. If you want to know about things to come, ask me. And say nothing about the blood test. That’s my surprise.”

  She nodded and kissed him on the lips.

  “I’ll see what’s going on with the doctor,” she said.

  Roscoe and Alex

  Roscoe heard the footsteps, and now would come Alex of the censorious eye. What are you doing with my mother? He would not say that, but he would watch Roscoe’s every gesture. Well, so be it. He’s a willful young man and always has been. Roscoe knew him as a bright and charming child, then as the seldom seen Alex-away-at-school: Groton first, then Yale, home on the holidays, off to Tristano for the summer, only twenty or so days a year spent totally with the family. But he was much loved, and reared in politics. When he was four, Elisha, Roscoe, and Patsy took the Democratic Party away from Packy McCabe. When he was six, they took the city away from the Republicans. His father sent him clippings of Party triumphs throughout his school days, and as he accumulated scholastic honors, he also lived a vicarious political life through Elisha, who told people: Alex is smarter than I’ll ever be. In his last year at Groton, a wealthy classmate’s uncle, a Democrat, was heavily favored for election to the State Senate. Alex heard Roscoe tell Elisha that the uncle would be sued for divorce and that this would sink him with the voters. Alex and his classmate took all their own best clothing, plus the classmate’s sister’s fox coat and his father’s winter chesterfield, the lot worth thousands, from closets in the family’s Fifth Avenue townhouse, carried it all in a taxi to an East Side pawnshop, hocked it for seven hundred dollars, found a bookmaker and bet the seven on the uncle’s Republican opponent, saw the uncle sued and beaten as Roscoe had predicted, collected at four to one, redeemed the clothes from the pawnshop, had them back in their closets before anybody knew they were gone, and spent their fresh money roistering in Manhattan over the Christmas break.

  Alex took time off from Yale in early October 1932 to come home for the Democratic convention in Albany when his father was on track to be nominated for governor. He sat with the Albany delegates, too young to be one, but learning how it was done. Patsy promised to, and did, make him a genuine delegate to the ’36 convention, the year he finished Yale (history major, Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude), then Pat ran him for the Assembly in ’37, and the Senate in ’38.

  In those early days Roscoe began advising Alex in the proper way to carouse, but he found he was also Phi Beta Kappa in carousing. In 1939, at age twenty-four, Alex married Marnie Herzog, daughter of a coal merchant of means, and moved into the mansion Elisha had built for him at Tivoli, the lower farm, where Marnie kept show horses, and Alex, in the family tradition, kept racehorses. He was elected America’s youngest mayor in ’41, grew stellar as the GI mayor who refused a deferment, declined officers’ candidate school, and volunteered for the infantry: the raw material for his myth.

  He entered Roscoe’s bedroom exuding a vigorous presence, every trace of youth gone from that face, in full manhood now, with the tailored good looks of a matinee idol and the self-assurance of a princely heir to power over the future. Roscoe remembered that condition. He’d once owned a bit of it.

  “The doctor’s on the way with an ambulance,” Alex said. “He thinks you’ll need one.”

  “He’s probably right,” Roscoe said.

  “This means surgery, I gather.”

  “I won’t resist. I can’t live this way.”

  “How did you let it get so bad?”

  “I got busy.”

  “You surely did. What happens to Gilby’s hearing? This week, isn’t it?”

  “We’ll get a postponement.”

  “Do you want another lawyer to step in for you?”

  “Only if I’m dead and buried. If I’m just dead I’ll be there.”

  “Are there any developments? Any new bitchiness from slutty Aunt Pamela?”

  “I don’t expect much else from her.”

  “And you? Anything new on the legal front?”

  “I have plans. Nothing to talk about.”

  “I hope you’re making a strong case.”

  “I like to think I am.”

  “One thing I can’t understand, Roscoe. How in the hell did you ever get sucked into the Notchery? I’ve heard the story, but why would you set foot in that place? This publicity is a disaster. It’s made all the New York papers.”

  “I think we avoided a civil war in the party. I’m glad I was there.”

  “Glad? Arrested with whores? Your reputation is a shambles.”

  “I haven’t had a reputation since I was seven years old, Alex. And if Patsy had arrested Bindy, there’s a very good chance one of them would now be dead.”

  “Patsy wouldn’t have ordered that raid. He told me last night he just wanted to make a point. Ask him yourself.”

  Roscoe nodded, understanding Patsy’s reversal of unbearable history. The man could not stand to be wrong. Situational truth. Roscoe understood also that Patsy’s new version of his Bindy plan downgraded Roscoe’s achievement. Nice going, Ros. What you did was miraculous, more or less, but not really necessary Now get off stage and stop making me look stupid.

  “Roscoe, I know turning the tables on the raiders the way you did was brilliant, and I congratulate you. But people just don’t believe you were there only as a lawyer. You’ve got to reverse your image.”

  “If they reverse my pain and fix my breathing, my image will take care of itself. Look, Alex, forget about me. I’m not important. Pay attention to your campaign.”

  “I’ve got a rally and two radio speeches coming up.”

  “Good. Take the limelight back from Cutie. The clown is stealing the show. Two days ago he turned up as Abe Lincoln. He read the Gettysburg Address and dedicated it to the Battle of the Bulge.”

  Roscoe judged Alex’s aggressive tone as probably a learned response to living among redneck sergeants; also, he doesn’t want your arms around his mother. But what put an edge to this for Roscoe was Alex’s misreading of Patsy’s dissembling, and that virtuous worrying over Roscoe’s reputation; which gave his discontent another dimension.

  Veronica brought Dr. Toussaint to Roscoe’s bedside, then she and Alex waited in the hallway during the examination. Roscoe’s internal bleeding had obviously continued, its buildup of pressure worsening the pain, his blood pressure dangerously low. “Into the hospital immediately, Roscoe,” Dr. Toussaint concluded.

  “I’m not fighting it,” Roscoe said, “but I’m beginning to feel like that fellow with the wound that never heals.”

  “There’s a lot of those fellows out there,” the doctor said.

  “The brotherhood of the open wound,” Roscoe said.

  The doctor sent Alex for the ambulance attendants, a burly pair who lifted Roscoe out of bed onto the stretcher, twisting
his pain.

  “I’ll follow Roscoe to the hospital, get him settled in,” Veronica said, which did not thrill Alex.

  Roscoe Muses on Politics and Death While Having His Heart Cut Out

  It’s true, Rozzie, we’re going to slice you from hell to breakfast and then saw your chest, crank open your sternum like an oyster, go in and get at that heart of yours, and slit a corner of the sack it comes in to let loose all the dammed-up blood. We’ll sew up any little nick to your heart where you hurt yourself, suck out the old clotty stuff, and let any fresh blood ooze out for a while. Can’t sew up the sack or we’d just be damming it back up and have to go in again. So we leave it open and it’ll either figure out how to fix itself or it won’t. Then we sew up with catgut wherever we cut you going in, we wire that sternum back together, stitch up the chest and there you have it, another one of the old thor acotomies, another one of the old pericardiotomies. Your blood won’t leak no more and you’ll be good as new if you don’t die, always a possibility, this is not easy what we do, stuff can go wrong and we just might slit the heart wrong and set off a little arrhythmia, or you could have a stroke or a heart attack or a blood clot with the last word. But just maybe it’ll be sweet sailing, like on your favorite boat up at Tristano. Think about that boat.