Strange Bedfellows

Roscoe a novel by William Kennedy.  Penguin.  291 pp.  $15.00 *****

Roscoe is William Kennedy’s political novel, and we should have seen it coming.  As far back as Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, we knew that Albany was essentially run by a couple of guys named Roscoe Conway and Patsy McCall, who were important presences in that novel but not fully realized characters (the more I read in this series—and there’s only one novel to go—the more I think that Billy Phelan is the key work).  They weren’t exactly politicians, they weren’t exactly gangsters; they were some odd combination of both, but nevertheless ran the place.  In this novel, we see the sweep of their whole lives, and their friendship.  This novel humanizes them.  I don’t know that I approve.  This is about as corrupt a political system as I’ve ever encountered.  But I can’t help liking them as people.  I especially like Roscoe.  He was the right focus for a novel.

The book opens late in their careers, on V-J Day, when the war is coming to an end.  When we first see Roscoe, he is having lunch (and a hearty lunch it is, shrimp, bluefish, and a fine wine) with a third member of the triumvirate, Elisha Fitzgibbon (grandson of Lyman Fitzgibbon, an important character in The Flaming Corsage).  Lyman actually is a politician, the front man for their behind-the-scenes machinations; he once ran for governor, though he fell six votes shy of getting the Democratic nomination, and his son Alex, who has been away fighting the war, is the current Mayor of Albany.  They’re celebrating partly because Alex is coming home.

They decide really to celebrate, but find that, on this day that should be full of revelry, all the bars are closing, apparently in reaction to the solemnity of the moment.  They want to get drunk but can’t get a drink (a special irony because Roscoe’s family owned the city’s major brewery).

While they’re driving around town contemplating their next step, Roscoe—who has decided on that day to finally get out of politics, and told Elisha so—has a weird minor accident, going off the road and running into a tree.  It doesn’t seem important at the time, though Roscoe rams into the steering wheel and feels a pain in his torso and Elisha’s head hits the windshield and gets bloodied.  Both men go to the hospital, and get separated.  Roscoe, who is estranged from his wife and lives in a hotel, and who is a rotund man who is constantly eating, goes to bed without a satisfactory dinner.  So many people had been celebrating that the restaurants that hadn’t closed altogether had run out of food.

Elisha, on the other hand, spent a day recovering, then went that evening into his office, worked feverishly at something with his secretary, whom he summoned from her home, and turned up the next day dead.  Roscoe, the first person the secretary called, believes he has, unaccountably, taken his own life.  He seemed to have every reason to live.  His son was just coming back from the war.

This is yet another William Kennedy novel (like The Flaming Corsage) where the story revolves around a trio of men.  We’ve been dropped into the middle of a plot that we don’t begin to understand; it will take us the whole novel to put the pieces together.  Roscoe’s idea is that Elisha committed suicide either because of some approaching disgrace, or because his death would remove the occasion of the disgrace.  The autopsy did reveal that he had a severely enlarged heart.  I myself wondered if this might have been a natural death.  But Roscoe is convinced it was suicide.

Elisha, when he heard that his friend wanted out of politics, not only couldn’t believe it; he was profoundly disturbed, in a way that we didn’t understand at the time.  It turns out that Roscoe is what you might call a fixer, the person who figures out what to do when everything is going to hell.  If Patsy—in this political trio that oddly resembles a groups of gangsters—is the Godfather, and Elisha is the politician that fronts for them, Roscoe is the consigliere, the lawyer who advises everyone and keeps the whole operation oiled.  In many ways, he’s the brains behind everything, though he rarely gets credit.  But he seems to have tired of the whole situation, its essential corruption, the need to keep lying.  He feels he was made for better things.

A complicating factor is that, when they were young, both he and Elisha were in love with a woman named Veronica, a true beauty and an aristocratic and cultivated being, a woman still so beautiful and perfect that she’s a little hard to believe.  She chose Elisha, and truly loved him, though she retained a strong affection for Roscoe, and is now available.

Roscoe eventually married her sister Pamela, who seemed to be the next best thing.  It turned out she was far from that, an unfaithful wife and a fortune-hunting reprobate, who at some point had a child she didn’t want and gave to Veronica and Elisha to adopt.  (The two of them were open to that, because they had tragically lost their daughter to a childhood illness.)  Now, for various reasons (including the fact that he is heir to a fortune) she wants her child back.  The lawyer taking her case is the high-powered Marcus Gorman, the same man who successfully defended Legs Diamond in the first of the Albany novels.  The lawyer facing him is our boy Roscoe, who happens to be in love with his client.

The question is: did Elisha’s suicide have something to do with Pamela’s wish to get her child back?

The plot of this novel is probably the most complicated of any novel in the Albany series.  I can’t begin to describe all the twists and turns.  It is also (as is often true for Kennedy) ultimately a love story, between Roscoe and Veronica.  Will that romance finally come to flower?  It is also the novel in which we discover, after waiting through seven books, who actually killed Legs Diamond.  I was shocked, though maybe I shouldn’t have been.

In a way it reads like the last novel in the series.  But there’s one more.