Roscoe Read Online Free Page B

of other young bucks, proles mostly, none out of Albany
Academy, Groton, and Yale like him, and none with the boneheaded insistence on rolling dice for his life. Roscoe, titular head of the local Draft Board, could easily have found an ailment to defer
Alex, let him continue as Albany’s boyish wartime mayor. But Patsy had given Alex the word: “Son, if you don’t serve, you’re all done in politics. They’ll call you a
slacker, and I won’t run you for re-election. Go down and join the navy and we’ll get you a commission.” But Alex joined the army, asked for the infantry, and got it. And Elisha
and Roscoe could not change his mind.
    There he came that day, down the middle of State Street, Roscoe and Elisha right here beaming at their boy on his way to becoming food for powder—Elisha, elated by his son’s
political success, and Roscoe, the exulting mentor: Wasn’t it I taught you to hold your whiskey, lad? Wasn’t it I instructed you in the survival tactics of the carouse, at which you
excelled early? Come back safe and soon, and we’ll all rekindle the festive fire.
    At Lodge Street they heard the organ music, and Elisha walked toward it through the open doors of St. Peter’s. Roscoe arched an eyebrow but followed him into the old French Gothic
bluestone church, an Episcopal parish well into its third century. The church was fully lit and half full of silent people staring at the altar, where seven candles burned in each of two silver
candelabra, the pair a gift from Elisha’s father, Ariel Fitzgibbon. Women were weeping, some in a state of rapture. Elderly couples were holding hands, young people whispering excitedly. A
soldier knelt with head down on the back of the pew. A woman in mourning entered and instantly knelt in the middle aisle.
    Pews were filling as Roscoe and Elisha stood at the back of the church, Roscoe bemused by Elisha’s odd smile. Smiling that Alex would come back alive from Europe? Whatever was inside that
stately head, Roscoe could not read it clearly. Elisha was scanning the church as if he were a tourist; but he was surely summoned here by what those familiar bells meant to his encrusted
Episcopal soul. One stained-glass window through which the day’s waning light was entering had been the gift, in the late 1870s, of Lyman Fitzgibbon. Designed by Burne-Jones, it bore a legend
that read, “ Per industria nil sine Numine ”—Nothing through diligence without the Divine Will—which Roscoe translated as, “Don’t make a serious move
without the political okay.”
    An organist moved through a five-noted chant and then a glissando of the first two bars of “America,” pausing on a long note, and then he began a second chant. Elisha interrupted the
organist, returning to the anthem. “My country, ’tis of thee,” he sang, with might in his voice, and every head turned to see this intruder continue with “Sweet land of
liberty, / Of thee I sing . . .” The organist followed Elisha, and the solemnizers of peace joined him, the familiar music and words stirring their souls as the splendid pipes of this chorister from nowhere arced into the vault of the nave; and when the verse ended and the silence longed to explode into applause, Elisha continued with a little-known verse: “Let music swell the
breeze, / And ring from all the trees / Sweet freedom’s song . . .”
    People applauded with simple nods and uncontrollably weepy smiles, all of them climbing down from the ramparts, linked by the newness of this peace that also needed leadership, affirming that
Elisha had spoken aloud the very prayer they’d all been seeking in silence, the marrow of patriotic holiness achingly evoked by this saloon tenor whom Roscoe had never before known to sing
solo in church, or sing so well in any saloon anywhere.
    “Bravura performance,” Roscoe said as they went out onto State Street.
    “Cheap chauvinism,” said Elisha. “I couldn’t help myself. It was like having