Legs (24 page)

"They always get you good. "

"This time it hurt more."

"Everybody got hurt this time."

Alice was hurt, and she knew why. Because she loved
an evil person and always would. She now wondered about her
remarkable desire to see Jack dead. She had at times wished death to
bad persons. Because Alice was good. Alice would not stay long in
Purgatory. Because she was good. But now she wanted to die herself
when she wished John dead and saw how deeply evil she herself was.
She prayed to Jesus to let her want John to live. Let me not think
that he's evil. Or me either. I know he's a good man in certain ways.
Don't tell me I should've married somebody pure and holy. They
would've bored the ass off me years ago. After all, I didn't marry a
priest, Jesus. I married a thief. And landed on the front pages
alongside him. My hubbydubbylubbybubby. People asking me questions.
Coming for interviews. Forced to hide. Hide my light under the
bushel. It will shine brighter for all that hiding. Light polishes
itself under the bushel. What an awful thing for Alice to think:
polishing up her own private brilliance through the troubles of 
Johnny-victim-on-the-boat. Oh, Alice. How awful you really are. It is
so enormously wrong and wicked and evil and terrible, loving John for
the wrong reasons; wanting him dead; profiteering from your marriage.
Alice was evil and she truly hated herself.

But listen, kiddo, Alice knew she was married to one
of the rottenest sons of bitches to come along in this century. Just
the fact that she was able to sit there stroking his fingers and the
back of his hand and running her hand through his bittykittymins gave
her the evidence of her moral bankruptcy. Yet she was still trying to
reform John. She didn't want him to be a Mason on the square. She
wanted a genuine four-cornered Catholic. Four corners on my bed. Four
angels overhead. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. Bless the bed we all lie
on. She put a rosary around his neck while he lay under the influence
of drugs to invoke grace and secret blessings God couldn't possibly
deliver publicly to such a person. Hypocrisy for her to do that. Yes,
another sin, Alice. But she knew that without being a hypocrite she
could never love John.

Knowing this, knowing how evil she was for being
married to evil, she therefore knew she must stay married to it, knew
she must suffer all the evil that evil brings. For how else could a
girl, an Irish Catholic girl brought up to respect grace and
transubstantiation, ever get to heaven? How else could a girl hold
her head up in her family? How else could a girl ever show her face
among her peers, let alone her sneering inferiors, unless she
expiated her awfulness, that black terribleness of marrying and
loving evil, except by staying married to it?

Suffer the evil to come unto me, said doughty Alice.
Perhaps she enjoyed that evil too much. More than she could ever
expiate. Perhaps she will merit longer and more excruciating
punishment than she can yet imagine. Yes, the very worst may be in
store for this little lady.

But she sat there with the
villain, stroking, cooing, telling the Good Lord Above: Go ahead and
do me, Lord. I can take it.

* * *

Sitting beside his hospital bed watching him breathe
perhaps the final breaths of his life, she knew he was unquestionably
hers now forever. Nothing and nobody could part them. She had
withstood the most scandalous time and had not stopped loving him.
She was the victim of love: sucker and patsy for her own sloppy
heart. But from suckerdom comes wisdom the careful lover never
understands.

"I'm sorry what this is doing to you," John
said to Alice.

"Are you, John? Or is that just another
apology?"

"It's a bad time for you, Al, I know. But this
ain't exactly a great big bed of roses I got myself into."

"You'll get out of it."

"We both will. We'll have a special time when I
get my ass up out of here."

"Give your ass a rest."

"Anything you say."

"Give everybody's ass a rest."

"Whose ass you talking about now?"

"Maybe you could figure it out if you live long
enough."

"I'm in no condition to tire anybody out."

"That's a nice change. I also mean no visitors.
I already put up with more than I can stand, but I won't put up with
her here. "

"She hasn't shown up yet. And if she does, it
won't be my doing. But she won't."

"The police won't let her out of custody, that's
why she won't."

"She knows better. She knows her place."

"Oh? And just what the hell is her place?"

"No place. Nothing. She knows she's got no hold
on me."

"That's why you kept her in the hotel."

"I was doing her a favor."

"How often? Twice a night?"

"I saw her now and then, no more. A friend. A
date when I was in town looking for company."

"The whole world's got it figured out, John.
Don't start with the fairy tales."

She was talking to him as if he had the strength of a
healthy man, but he was only an itty-bitty piece of himself, a lump
of torn-up flesh. Why did Alice talk so tough to a sick lump? Because
she knew the lump was tough. She was tough too. A pair of tough
monkeys, is how John always said he saw this husband-wife team. Yes,
it's why we get along, was Alice's way of looking at this toughness.
She always treated him this way, even when he was most vulnerable,
told him exactly what she thought. There now. See? See his hand move
off the sheet and onto her knee? See his fingers raise the hem of her
skirt? Feel him touch her with his fingertips on the flesh above her
stocking? Home territory. Jack is coming home. Jack is not
discouraged by her tough line. Tough monkey, my husband.

When Alice felt these fingers on herself she looked
at the single wax rose on the bedside table and remembered the early
growth of the rose. There will always be a wax rose in our life,
Alice now insisted, and in his own way Jack remembered it too. With a
tea rose in his lapel when he wore his tux. Never a gardenia. Never a
white carnation. Always the red, red rose.

It was after the Fifth Avenue shooting in 1925 and he
sat in the living room of their house on l36th Street in the Bronx
with the top and back of his head shaved and bandaged, wearing the
old blue wool bathrobe with the holes in the elbows, sitting alone on
the sofa, looking at the floor and drinking coffee royals because he
liked their name and potency; eating saltine crackers with peanut
butter but no meals, awake all night for a week but saying almost
nothing, just making soft whimpering sounds like a dog dreaming of
his enemies. Keeping Alice awake until her ear got used to the
rhythms of the whimpers. When the rhythm was right, she could always
sleep.

She had tried the rosary, but he wasn't ready for
that, and so it only sat on the coffee table alongside the wax roses
in the orange and black Japanese vase. She had tried to calm him,
too, by reading from the prayer book, but he wouldn't listen. He was
as far from religion as he'd ever been. Alice told him he should take
the shooting as a warning from God to get out of the rackets or die
in the bullet rain.

"I don't want to be like that woman in Brooklyn
who lost a husband and two sons in the gang wars," Alice said to
him. But that had no effect. Alice didn't know what would have any
effect.

"Come on out, boy," she had said one day, a
little whisper in his ear. "We all know you're hiding in there."

But all he ever asked was did you call in my numbers:
356, 880, and 855. Jackie, Jack and John out of the dream book. Jack
always played numbers, from the time he ran them as a teen-ager. Now
he played five dollars on each number and she never knew whether he
hit them or not. Her game was not played with numbers.

She would also turn the radio on for him, but when
she'd leave the room, he'd turn it off.

"Jesus, they really almost got me, almost wiped
me out," he said one night and shook his head as if this were an
incredible possibility, some wild fancy that had nothing to do with
the real life and potential of John Thomas Diamond. That was when
Alice knew he was not going to quit the rackets, that he was
committed to them with a fervor which matched her own religious
faith.

"They can't keep me down forever" had been
his phrase from when she first knew him. She hoped he would find
another way up, but this thought still was the central meaning of his
whimpers.

The bridge lamp was on the night Alice got out of
bed, unable to accept the animal noises John was making. They had
become more growls than whimpers or the whisperings of troubled
sleep. She saw him on the floor where he'd slid off the couch. He was
pointing his pistol at the Japanese vase.

"Are you going to shoot the roses, John?"

He let his hand fall, and after a while she took the
pistol. She helped him back onto the sofa and then knelt in front of
him in her nightgown, not even a robe over it, and herself visible
right through the sheer silk. Her amply visible self.

"I can't sleep no more," he said to her. "I
close my eyes and I see my mother screaming every time she breathes."

"It's all right, boy. It's going to be all
right."

And then Alice rose half up out of her kneeling
position, but without sitting either, stretched herself lengthwise
and leaning, a terribly uncomfortable position as she recalls it. But
John could see all of her very private self that way, feel her all
along his arm and his hip and his good leg that wasn't shot. And
without the pistol his hand was free. First she said the Our Father
to him just to put the closeness of God into his head again and then
she maneuvered herself until her perfect center was against the back
of his hand. Then she moved ever so slightly so he could feel where
he was, even if he couldn't see it or didn't sense it.

Did this maneuvering
work'? Alice put an arm around his neck and kissed him lightly on the
ear. He turned his hand so the knuckles faced away from her. Then,
with a little bit of help, that sheer silk nightgown rose to the
demands of the moment. John said she smelled like grass in the
morning with dew on it, and she said he smelled like a puppyduppy,
and with both their hands where they had every right in the world to
be, Mr. and Mrs. John Diamond fell asleep on the sofa in their very
own parlor. And they slept through the night.

* * *

When they killed Alice, she was sitting at the
kitchen table of her Brooklyn apartment looking at old clippings of
herself and Jack. One clip, of which she had seven copies, showed her
beside his bed of Polyclinic pain. She sat beneath her cloche hat in
that old clip, a few tufts of blond hair (not yet dyed Titian to
match that of Kiki, The Titian-Haired Beauty of the tabloids; not yet
dyed saffron to glamorize her for her Diamond Widow stage career)
sticking out from underneath. She was all trim and tailored in the
gray tweed suit Jack had helped her choose. "My hero!" was
what Alice had written on the clipping.

I imagine her in her final kitchen remembering that
bedside scene and all that came later up in Acra when Jack left the
Polyclinic bed: Alice nursing her John back to health, massaging his
back with rubbing alcohol, taking him for walks in the woods with
some of the boys fanning out ahead and behind them, making him
toddies and cooking him beef stew and dumplings and tapioca pudding.
Now he was more handsome than he'd ever been in his life. Oh,
brilliant boy of mine! Hero of the strife! From New Year's Day, 1931,
when he left the hospital, on through early April, she possessed him
exclusively. Oh, rapturous time! Nothing like it ever before, ever
again. What a bitter cup it was for Alice to leave him after that.

She told me she left him the day after Lew Edwards
and I paid a curious visit to idyllic Acra. Lew was a Broadway
producer, dead now, who grew up next door to me in North Albany,
became the impresario of most of Public School 20's undergraduate
productions, and went on to produce plays for Jeanne Eagels, Helen
Morgan, and Clifton Webb. Lew knew Jack casually, knew also my
connection with Jack, and called me with an idea. I told him it was
sensational and would probably die at first exposure to Jack. Lew
said it was worth the chance and we met at the Hudson train station.
I drove down from Albany to pick him up, we had lunch in Catskill,
took a short walk to buy the papers, a fateful purchase, and then
drove out to Jack's.

The chief change from my summer visit was the set of
outside guards at the house, a pair of heavies I'd never seen before
who sat in a parked Packard and periodically left the driveway to
explore the road down toward Cairo and up toward South Durham for
visitors who looked like they might want to blow Jack's head off.
When that pair drove off, another pair on duty on the porch took up
driveway positions in a second car, and a set from the cottage took
up posts on the porch as inside guards.

"Just like Buckingham Palace," Lew said.

Alice gave me a big hello with a smooch I remember.
That tempting appleness. Fullness. Pungent wetness I remember thee
well. But she meant nothing by such a lovely kiss except hello, my
friend. Then she said to me: "Marcus, he's wonderful. He looks
better than he has in years. I swear he's even handsomer now than
when I married him. And it's better other ways too. "