Legs - William Kennedy

by William Kennedy

  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 h
is 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. "

  She shook Lew's hand and took my arm and walked me into the living room and whispered: "He's all through with her, Marcus, he really is. He hasn't seen her since the shooting, only once. She came to the hospital one day when I wasn't there, but I heard about it. Now she's all a part of the past. Oh, Marcus, you can't imagine how glorious it's been these past few months. We've been so damned happy you wouldn't believe we were the same people you saw the last time you were here."

  She said he was upstairs napping now, and while she went up to rouse him, Cordelia, the maid, mixed us a drink. Jack came down groggy—and in shirtsleeves, baggy pants and slippers—and gave us a few vague minutes. Then we were a group—Jack and Alice on the sofa with Alice's pair of long-legged dolls in crinoline between them, his hand in hers across the dolls, Lew and I in the overstuffed chairs as witnesses to this domestic tranquillity.

  "So you've got a deal," Jack said, and Lew immediately went for his cigar case to get a grip on something. Jack had met Lew five years back when Lew butted aggressively into a bar conversation Jack was having, without knowing who Jack was. That's another story, but it turned out Lew gave Jack a pair of theater tickets that introduced him to Helen Morgan, who became one of Jack's abstract passions. He never could understand why Morgan was so good, why she moved him so. It was perverse of him to want to understand the secrets of individual talent, to want secret keys to success. He was still talking about La Morgan the night he died.

  "I got a million-dollar idea for you, Jack," Lew said, stuffing a cigar in his mush but not lighting it.

  "My favorite kind."

  "And you don't have to do a thing for a year."

  "It gets better."

  "I like it too," said Alice.

  "You've got to be one of the most famous, pardon the expression, criminals in the East, am I right?"

  "I wouldn't admit to any wrongdoing," Jack said. "I just make my way the best I can."

  "Sure, Jack, sure," said Lew. "But plenty of people take you for a criminal. Am I right?"

  "I got a bad press, no doubt about that."

  "Bad press is a good press for this idea," said Lew. "The more people think you're a bad-ass bastard, the easier we make you a star."

  "He's already a star," Alice said. "Too much of a one."

  "You mean a Broadway star?" Jack asked. "I carry a tune, but I'm no Morgan."

  "Not Broadway. I mean all of America. I can make you the biggest thing since Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson. An evangelist. A preacher."

  "A preacher?" Jack said, and he gave it the big ho-de-ho-ho.

  "A preacher how?" Alice said, leaning forward.

  Lew said, "If you'll excuse me for saying it, there's about a hundred million people in this country know your name, and they figure you're one mean son of a bitch. Is this more or less true or am I mistaken'?"

  "Go on," Jack said. "What else?"

  "So this mean son of a bitch, this Legs Diamond, this bootlegger, this gang leader, he gives it all up. Quits cold. Goes straight. And a year later he hears the voice of the Holy Spirit. He is touched by a whole damn flock of flaming doves or tongues or whatever the hell they send down to touch guys with, and he becomes an apostle for the Big Fellow. He goes barnstorming, first on a shoestring. A spiritual peanut vendor is all he is. A man with a simple commitment to God and against Satan and his works. He talks to anybody who'll sit still for half an hour. The press picks him up immediately and treats him like a crazy. But also it's a hell of a story for them. Whatsisname, on the road to Damascus. You know the routine. Doesn't care about gin, gangs, guns, gals or gelt anymore. All he wants is to send out the word of God to the people. The people!

  They'll sell their kids for a ticket. Tickets so scarce you've got to hire a manager, and pretty soon you, he, winds up on the vaude circuits, touches every state, SRO all over. A genuine American freak. Then he gets word from God he shouldn't play theaters with those evil actors. Oughta talk in churches. Of course the churches won't have him. Fiend turned inside out is still a fiend. And a fake. A show biz figure. So he has to play stadiums now, and instead of six hundred he draws maybe twenty thousand and winds up in Yankee Stadium with a turnaway crowd, a full orchestra, four hundred converts around him, the best press agent in town, and the first million-dollar gate that isn't a heavy-weight fight. More? Sure. He builds his own temple and they come from all over the world to hear him speak. Then, at his peak, he moves off to Paris, London, Berlin. And hey. Rome."

  Lew fell against his chairback and lit the cigar he'd been using as a pointer, a round little man with a low forehead, thick black hair, and a constant fac
eful of that stogie. He worked at being a Broadway character, structured comic lines to deliver ad lib at the right moment: "Jack Johnson got the worst deal of any nigger since Othello" is one of his I never forgot.

  Lew had bought the New York Daily Mirror and read bits of it in the car on the way to J ack's, and now he pulled it out of his right coat pocket in a gesture he said later was caused by discomfort from the bulk, and tossed it onto the coffee table. Jack opened it, almost as a relfex, and skimmed the headlines while all the silence was drumming at us. Jack turned the pages, barely looking at them, then stopped and said to Lew: "How the hell could I preach anything anybody'd believe? I haven't made a speech since high school when I did something from Lincoln. I'm no speaker, Lew."

  "I'd make you one," Lew said. "I'd get you drama coaches, speech coaches, singing teachers. Why, for Christ's sake, you'd be a voice to reckon with in six months. I seen this happen on Broadway."

  "I think it's a fantastic idea," Alice said. She stood up and paced in front of the couch nervously.