Legs (39 page)

Lung talk: Do you know why Jack Diamond can drink so
much whiskey? Because he has TB and the fever burns up the alcohol.
Facts. Left lung is congested. But, Jack, really now, you never had
TB in your life. What will jail do to your lungs? What will it do to
your brain, for that matter? Bore you? You'll have to play a lot of
dominoes in jail. Boring dominoes. But you knew that. You were always
ready to play dominoes, right? That's part of the game, right?

Wrong. Not part of Jack's game.

Jack took off the coat of his lucky blue suit and
hung it on the back of the chair. Suit needs a pressing, Marcus told
him, even before the trial began. But Jack told Marcus, told the
press boys too: "This is my lucky suit and I'm not parting with
it. If we win, I'll get it pressed to celebrate."

The suit coat fell to the floor in a pile.

Jack took the change out of his pants pockets, his
nail tile and comb, his white monogrammed handkerchief, and put them
on top of the dresser that one of his obituary writers, Meyer Berger,
would describe as tawdry. Jack's ethereal mother, starched and bright
in a new green frying pan apron, held up Jack's bulletproof vest.
"You didn't wear this," she said. "'I told you not go
out without it, Jackie. Remember what happened to Caesar?" They
rendered old Caesar, Jack was about to say when he felt a new surge
of giddiness. It was bringing him a breakthrough perception. I am on
the verge of getting it all wrapped up, he said to the steam heat
that hissed at him from the radiator. I hear it coming. I have been
true to everything in life.

"I toast also to his uncanny ability to bloom in
hostile seasons and to survive the blasts of doom. Jack, we need only
your presence to light us up like Times Square in fervid and electric
animation. You are the undercurrent of our lives. You turn on our
light .... "

Freddie Robin, the cop, who stopped in for a quick
one, had the glass in his hand when good old Marcus started the
toast. And Milligan, the railroad dick alongside him, had a glass in
the air, too. Pair of cops toasting Jack's glorious beswogglement of
law and order. Hah! And alongside them the priest and the screwball.

"Who the hell is that screwball, anyway?"
Jack said to Hubert, who began sniffing. The screwball was talking to
everybody, wanted to meet everybody at the party. Looks like a killer
to you, does he, Jack? No. But maybe like a cop. Like a federal
stooge. They like to crash my parties. Hubert got his name. He was
Mr. Biswanger from Buffalo. A lightning rod salesman. What's he doing
at your party, Jack? Trying to hustle you a sample to wear behind
your ear? He came with the priest, Hubert reported. And the priest
came to Albany to see Marcus. Is that true, Marcus? Marcus says yes,
but adds, "He just tagged along, Jack, after a legal chat. I
didn't bring the clergy. But they have an affinity for you, like
cops. The underside of everybody's life, is what you turn out to be,
Jack."

Jack undid his tie, blue with diagonal white stripes,
and hung it on the upright pole of the dresser mirror. It slid off.
Priests and cops toasting Jack. It's like those Chinese bandits,
Jack. Nobody can tell the good from the bad. China will always have
bandits, right? So, fellow Chinks, let's sit back and enjoy them.

"To his talent for
making virtue seem unwholesome and for instilling vicarious amorality
in the hearts of multitudes .... "

* * *

Alice gave Flossie the fish eye when she kidded Jack
about pigeons in the loft and fondled his earlobe. Then Frances gave
Flossie the fish eye when the Floss kidded Marcus about pigeons in
the loft and fondled his earlobe. The Floss moved alongside the
piano, and while the pianoman played "It's a Sin to Tell a Lie,"
she shook her ass. to that sweet and gracious waltz, turning,
pivoting, shaking. Disgusting. Gorgeous. Oh, Floss, ya look like Mae
West. Harpy. Sweetmeat. Goddess of perfume.

"Who is she?" Alice asked.

"Flossie, she works here," Jack said

"She knows you pretty well to play with your
ear."

"Nah, she does that with all the boys. Great
girl, the Floss."

"I never knew anybody who liked ears like that."

"You don't get around, Alice. I keep telling you
that."

"I know you think I'm jealous of all the harpies
in the world, but I'm really not, John. Just remember that the truest
love is bright green. Avoid substitutes."

From Buffalo the hunger marchers began their walk
toward Washington. John D. Rockefeller, in Ormond, Florida, told
newsreel microphones that "better times are coming," and he
wished the world a Merry Christmas. In Vienna a grand jury
unanimously acquitted Dr. Walter Pfrimer and seven other Fascist
Party leaders of charges of high treason stemming from an attempted
putsch. A speedy recovery was predicted for Pola Negri.

Jack took off the signet ring that no longer fit,
that had been bothering him all day. He wore it because it was lucky,
like his suit, gift from the old man in high school: D is also for
Dear Daddy. Dead Dad. Defunct Diamond. Sorry, old fellow. Jack
listened to the candles burning on the altar of Saint Anne's church.
They made the sound of leaves falling into a pond where a calico cat
was slowly drowning. In the shadow of the first pillar the old man
cried as the candles danced. When the mass was ended, when Jack the
small priest had blown out the authenticating candle of his mother's
life, the old man stood up and turned to pity, politics, and drink.
And, oh, how they laughed back in Cavan. Publicans did not complain
when the laughter died and you threw your arms around yourself in a
fit of need. "Nobody knows what it's like until they lose their
wife," old Jack said. "Then you eat Thanksgiving dinner
alone." Young Jack looked on. "Just a weak old man. He
cried more than I did. I cried only once."

Jack dropped the signet ring with a clunk into the
tawdry dresser alongside two holy pictures (Stephen and Mary) Alice
had brought him from New York, alongside the letters, the holy fan
mail. Jack kept one letter: "God bless you, son, from a mother
with a large family." And God bless you too, mother, going away.

The giddiness was turning to smiles. Jack looked at
himself in the mirror and smiled at the peeling mercury. His smile
was backward. What else was backward? He was. All. All backward in
the mirror image. Nobody would ever know which image was the real
Jack. Only Jack knows that, and he giggled with the knowledge that he
alone was privy to the secret. What a wonderful feeling! A vision of
the Jack nobody knows. Fuck that stupid Legs, right Jack? What'd he
ever do for you?

One of Marcus' law partners came to the party to meet
Legs Diamond—a kid with wide eyes when he shook the hand that shook
the Catskills. Hubert brought two poker players from Troy, and they
talked to Jack about a little game some night. Love to, boys. Packy
had rounded up the musicians, piano, banjoman, drummer. Marcus asked
Alice to dance and then Jack took an armful of Frances and foxtrotted
around to "Ain't Misbehavin'."

"I must say you're a wonderful dancer,"
said Frances. And why, miss, must you say it? Jack dancing with
yesterday in his arms. Thank you, young woman out of yesterday.

"You know I never think of you as dancing or
doing anything like this."

"What do you think of me doing?"

"Terrible things," she said. She spoke
sternly. Scolded, Jack relaxed, touched her hair with his fingertips,
remembering his Army bride.

"Your hair reminds me of Helen Morgan," he
said. Frances blushed.

Doc Madison pulled his wife to her feet, stepped into
a snappy foxtrot with the same certainty he revealed when he removed
the filling from Jack, all those double-ought pellets, restoring life
to the dying frame. We're all so full of life now, Doc. And ain't it
great? So many thanks, Doc. . . perhaps you all noticed the lofty
stained-glass windows of the court house annex this afternoon as the
sun streamed through, as the light fell about our Jack's frail but
sturdy shoulder, illuminating in those windows both New York's and
Jack's splendid virtues . . . industry, law, peace, learning,
prosperity. . ."

The courtroom felt like a church still, old
Presbyterian palace desanctified years ago; choir loft over Jack's
head, judges sitting where the pulpit used to be, truncated suns over
the door, ecclesiastical fenestration and only the faces on the walls
different now: clergy and the Jesus crowd replaced with jurists. But
retributionists all.

Frankie Teller, of course, came to the party, and so
did one of the Falzo boys who ran four houses on The Line in Troy,
squiring one of his beauties. Jack asked Johnny Dyke, the Albany
bookie, to come by, and Mushy Tarsky too, who ran the grocery on
Hudson Avenue where Jack bought ham and cheese sandwiches for three
weeks when he and two boys never went off the block because of The
Goose. Jack's Uncle Tim, who had hung on at Acra since the roof fell
in, waiting for Jack to return to the homestead, came up for the
celebration.

Tuohey and Spivak, the bagmen detectives from the
gambling squad, dropped in for a look and brought greetings from the
Democratic organization.

Marion did not come.

Couldn't do that. Alice would've blown up if she
showed. Jack sent Hubert and Frankie Teller up with a pint of whiskey
to keep her happy, but she was gone. Note on the door: "Going to
Boston to see Mama. " Frankie brought the note back, and Jack
said, "Go look for her, she's on the street. Try the station,
and find her. She wouldn't go without seeing me." It took
Frankie and Hubert an hour, and they found her walking back up Ten
Broeck Street toward her apartment house, Number Twenty-one,
upstairs. Hubert says he told her, "Jack is worried about you,
Marion," and then she said, "You tell him I'm goddamn good
and mad. I'll stay till the morning, but then I'm leaving; I'm not
putting up with this. One of the biggest nights of his life, and he
leaves me alone four hours while he sits around partying with his
cow, and I have to go to the talkies to keep myself busy. The talkies
on a night like this."

So Hubert called Jack with the news, and Jack went
back to the table and told Alice a fib. Bones McDowell, a newsman,
calling with death-threat information. Gotta go see him, Al. But
she'd been waiting for this, Jack. She knows you, Jack, you and your
fake excuses. Then Jack said, "Listen, Al, I know you're having
a good time, but why don't you come with me? It's business, but Bones
is only a newspaperman with some maybe important dope, and it ain't
big business or trouble, and I won't be long. Come with me."

She believed that and gave Jack the wet one with the
lips apart, he can see them now, and her tongue just dancing and
saying, Come on in, boy, and she smiled too and winked at him, and he
let his hand slide down and pat her on the benevolent behind,
secretly, so the priest wouldn't be scandalized, so that all the eyes
that were never off either of them all night would see something,
yes, but not enough to talk dirty about such a sweet, clean woman.
And then he let go of her. And she leaned back and gave him a smile,
a real smile, crinkling her blue—green eyes and saying, "No,
I'll stay here with Kitty and Johnny," Ed's wife and the boy
alongside her, family lady to the end, the end. He gave her one final
peck and looked at her green cloche hat with the little wispy curls
of Titian, color of winners, sticking out from underneath.

"Don't be long," she said. "It's such
a swell party."

"I'll be back in half an hour," Jack said,
running his fingertips lightly down her cheek. "You can count on
that."

He stood up then. It was one o'clock and thirty
people still at the party when he turned his back on the crowd and
walked the length of the bar, past all the enduring dead on the
walls, and then out through Packy's swinging doors.

Now Playing in Albany, December 18, 1931

STRAND: (The clearest picture, the best
sound in New York State), George Bancroft in Rich Man's Folly.
HARMANUS BLEECKER HALL: (Albany's Palace of
Entertainment), Ronald Colman in The Unholy Garden.
LELAND:
(Where the talkies are better), Billie Dove in The Age A for Love.
PALACE: (Showplace of The Capital), Leo Carillo in
The Guilty Generation.
MADISON: Mae Clarke in
Waterloo Bridge.
COLONIAL: Ann Harding in
Devotion.
PARAM0UNT: Wheeler and Woolsey in
Hook, Line and Sinker.
PARAMOUNT: Marian
Nixon and Neil Hamilton in Ex Flame (a modernized version of East
Lynne).
ALBANY: Wheeler and Woolsey in Caught
Plastered.

Jack, sitting on his bed in the rooming house, took
off the blue pants, pulled them over the scuffy black shoes, the
dark-blue socks with the white clocks. He hung the pants on the open
drawer of the tawdry dresser, and they stayed there a few seconds
before they fell to the floor. Jack had drunk too much with too many.
And yet he was lucid when he left the party, pushed by the whiskey
into clarity and anticipation of the sweets of love; that face of
perfect worship, the excitement of the body of perfect satisfaction,
so wholly Jack's, so fully responsive to his touches, his needs.
Climbing the stairs to her apartment, he already relished the look of
her, the way she would smile when he greeted her with a kiss, the
sweetness of presence alone when they sat and faced each other. This
did not change. The power of sweetness had not faded in the almost
two
years he'd known her.