Legs

by William Kennedy

  "No, just honest. Nothing's like it used to be. Nothing."

  "You look as good as ever. You're not going under, I can see that."

  "No, I don't go under. But I'm all hollow inside. If I went in for a swim I'd float away like an old bottle."

  "Come on, I'll buy you a drink."

  She knew a speakeasy a few blocks off the boardwalk, upstairs over a hot dog stand, and we settled into a corner and talked over her travels, and her fulfilling of her own fragment of Lew Edwards' dream: John the Priest on the boards of America. He was there. The presence within Alice.

  "Are you staying alive on this spiel?" I asked her.

  "You mean money? No, not anymore. But I've got a little coming in from a dock union John did some favors for. One of his little legacies to me was how and why he did the favors, and who paid off. And when I told them what I had, they kept up the payments."

  "Amazing."

  "What?"

  "That he's still taking care of you. "

  "But she's living off him, too. That's what galls me."

  "I know. I read the papers. Did you ever catch her act?"

  "Are you serious? I wouldn't go within three miles of her footprints."

  "She stopped by to see me when she played a club in Troy. She spoke well of you, I must say. 'The old war-horse,' she said to me, 'they can't beat her.' "

  Alice laughed, tossed her hair, which was back to its natural color—a deep chestnut—but still a false color, for after Jack died, her roots went white in two days. But it looked right, now. Authentic Alice. She tossed that authentic hair in triumph, then tossed off a shot of straight gm.

  "She meant she couldn't beat me."

  "Maybe that's what she meant. I only agreed with her."

  "She never knew John, not till near the end. When she moved into Acra she thought she had him. Then, when I walked out of the Kenmore she thought she had him again. But she didn't know him."

  "I thought she left the Kenmore."

  "She did. The police came looking and John put her in a rooming house in Watervliet, then one in Troy. He moved her around, but he kept bringing her back to the Rain-Bo room and I refused to take it. I told John that the day I left. I wasn't gone three days when he called me to come back up and set up a house or an apartment. But I didn't want Albany anymore, so he came to New York when he wanted to see me. It must've killed her."

  I remember Jack telling a story twice in my presence about how he met Alice. "I pulled up to a red light at Fifty-ninth Street and she jumped in and I couldn't get her out."

  In its way it was a true story. Jack couldn't kick her out of his life; Alice couldn't leave. Her wish was to be buried on top of him, but she didn't get that wish either. She had to settle for a spot alongside; and buried, like Jack, without benefit of the religion she loved so well. Her murderers took her future away from her, and that, too, was related to Jack. She was about to open a tearoom on Jones' Walk at Coney, which would have been a speakeasy within hours, and was also lending her name to a sheet to be called Diamond Wid0w's Racing Form. She'd gotten the reputation of being a crack shot from practicing at the Coney shooting galleries and practicing in her backyard with a pistol too, so went the story. And in certain Coney and Brooklyn bars, when she was escorted by gangsters who found her company improved their social status, she would announce with alcoholic belligerence that she could whip any man in the house in a fight. They also said she was threatening to reveal who killed Jack, but I never believed that. I don't think she knew any more than the rest of us. We all had our theories.

  I remember her sitting at that Coney table, head back, laughing that triumphant laugh of power. I never saw her again. I talked to her by phone some months later when she was trying to save Acra from foreclosure and she was even talking of getting a few boys together again to hustle some drink among the summer tourists. But she just couldn't put that much money together (sixty-five hundred dollars was due) and she lost the house. I did what I could, which was to delay the finale. She wrote me a thanks-for-everything note, which was our last communication. Here's the last paragraph of that letter:

  Jack once told me when he was tipsy that "If you can't make 'em laugh, don't make 'em cry." I don't know what in hell he meant by that, do you? It sounds like a sappy line he heard from some sentimental old vaudevillian. But he said it to me and he did mean something by it, and I've been trying to figure it out ever since. The only thing I can come up with is that maybe he thought of himself as some kind of entertainer and, in a way, that's pretty true. He sure gave me a good time. And other people I won't name. God I miss him.

  She signed it "love and a smooch, just 0ne." She was dead a month later, sixty-four dollars behind in her thirty-two-dollar-a-month rent for the Brooklyn apartment. Her legacy was that trunkful of photographs and clippings, the two Brussels griffons she always thought Jack bought in Europe, and a dinner ring, a wedding ring, and a brooch, all set with diamonds.

  She was a diamond, of course.

  They never found her killers either.

  * * *

  I saw Marion for the last time in l936 at the old Howard Theater in Boston, another backstage encounter. But then again why not? Maybe Jack hit the real truth with that line of his. The lives of Kiki and Alice were both theatrical productions; both were superb in their roles as temptress and loyal wife, and as leading ladies of underworld drama. Marion was headlining a burlesque extravaganza called The Pepper Pot Revue when I read the item in the Globe about her being robbed, and I went downtown and saw her, just before her seven o'clock show.

  She was sitting in one of the Howard's large dressing rooms, listening to Bing Crosby on the radio crooning a slow-tempo version of "Nice Work If You Can Get It."

  She wore a fading orchid robe of silk over her costume, wore it loosely, permitting me a glimpse of the flesh-colored patches which made scant effort to cover her attractions. She worked on her toes with two ostrich-feather fans, one of which would fall away by number's end, revealing unclothed expanses of the whitest of white American beauty flesh. She billed herself out front as "Jack (Legs) Diamond's Lovely Light o'Love," a phrase first applied to her after the Monticello shooting by a romantic caption writer. Her semipro toe dance, four a day, five on Saturday, was an improvement over her tippy-tap-toe routine, for the flesh was where her talent lay. "You're still making the headlines," I told her when the stage doorman showed me where she was.

  Her robe flowed open, and she gave me a superb hug, my first full-length, unencumbered encounter with all that sensual resilience, and after the preliminaries were done with, she reached in a drawer, put a finger through an aperture in a pair of yellow silk panties with a border of small white flowers and dangled them in front of me.

  "That's the item?"

  "That's them. Isn't it ridiculous?"

  "The publicity wasn't bad, good for the show."

  "But it's so . . . so cheap and awful." She broke down, mopped her eyes with the panties that an MIT student had stolen from her as a fraternity initiation prank. He left an ignominious fifty-cent piece in their place, saying, when they nabbed him at the stage door with the hot garment in his pants pocket, "I would've left more, only I didn't have change."

  I was baffled by her tears, which were flowing not from the cheapness of the deed, for she was beyond that, inured. I then considered that maybe the fifty cents was not enough. But would five or fifty dollars have been enough for the girl who once wore a five-hundred-dollar negotiable hymen inside another such garment? No, she was crying because I was witness to both past and present in this actual moment, and she hadn't been prepared to go over it all again on such short notice. She knew I remembered Ziegfeld and all her promise of greater Broadway glory, plus a Hollywood future. But Ziegfeld turned her down after Jack died, and Will Hays wouldn't let her get a foothold in Hollywood: No molls need apply. And finally, as we talked, she brought it out, tears gone, panties there to haunt both of us (I remembered the vision at the miniature golf cour
se, in her Monticello room, and I thought, Pursue it now; nothing bars the way now; no fear, no betrayal intervening between you and that bound-to-be-lovely by-way), and she said: "It's so shitty, Marcus. It seems once fate puts the finger on you, you're through."

  "You're still in the paper, kiddo; you're in big letters out front, and you look like seven or eight million dollars. Eight. I know a few young ladies with less to point to."

  "You were always nice, Marcus. But you know I still miss Jack. Miss him. After all these years."

  Would the maudlin time never end?

  "You're keeping him alive," I said. "Look at it that way. He's on the signs out front, too."

  "He wouldn't like his name there."

  "Sure he would, as long as you were tied to it."

  "No, not Jack. He liked it respectable, the two-faced son of a bitch. He left me that night to go home to bed so Alice wouldn't come find him, so he could be there in bed ahead of her. Imagine a man like him thinking like that?"

  "Who said he did that?"

  "Frankie Teller told me. Jack mumbled it in the cab when they left my place."

  She let the old memories run by in silence, then she said, :But I was the last one to see him," and she meant, to make love to him. "He always left Old Lady Prune to come to me. I don't think she had a crotch." And then Kiki laughed and laughed. as triumphantly as Alice had in the Coney speakeasy.

  I bought her a sandwich between shows, then took her back to the theater. I kissed her good-bye on the cheek, but she turned and gave me her mouth as I was leaving, a gift. But she didn't linger over it.

  "Thanks for coming," she said, and I didn't know whether to leave or not. Then she said, "I could've made it with you, Marcus. I think I could've. But he spoiled me, you know."

  "Sometimes friends should just stay friends."

  "He spoiled me for so many men. I never thought any man could do that to me."

  "You'll never be spoiled for me."

  "Come and see me again, Marcus. Next time you see me on a marquee someplace."

  "You can bank on that," I said.

  But I never did. Her name turned up in the papers when she married a couple of times, never with success. About 1941 a patient treated in Bellevue's alcoholic ward gave the name of Kiki Roberts, but the story that it was the real Kiki was denied in the press the next day. She was hurt in a theater fire in Newark somewhere around that time, and a friend of mine from Albany saw her back in Boston in a small club during the middle years of the war, still known professionally as Jack's sweetheart, not stripping any longer, just singing torch songs, like "Broken Hearted," a tune from '27, the year they killed Little Augie and shot Jack full of holes, the year he became famous for the first time for not dying. You can't kill Legs Diamond. I've heard Kiki died in Detroit, Jersey, and Boston, that she went crazy, broke her back and had a metal backbone put in, got fat, grew old beautifully, turned lesbian, and that she still turns up in Troy and Catskill and Albany bars whose owners remember Jack. I don't believe any of it. I don't know what happened to her.

  * * *

  That isn't the end of the story, of course. Didn't I, like everybody else who knew him, end up on a barstool telling Jack's tale again, forty-three years later, telling it my own way? And weren't Tipper and The Pack and Flossie there with me, ready, as always with the ear, ready too to dredge up yet another story of their own? The magazines never stopped retelling Jack's story either, and somebody put it out in book form once, a silly work, and somebody else made a bum movie of it. But nobody ever came anywhere near getting it right, and I mean right, not straight, for accuracy about Jack wasn't possible. His history was as crooked as the line between his brain and his heart. I stand on this: that Packy's dog story was closer to the truth about Jack and his world than any other word ever written or spoken about him.

  We were all there in the dingy old Kenmore when Packy told it, old folks together, wearying of talk of any kind by now, all of us deep into the drink, anxious to move along to something else, and yet not quite able to let go. I remember I was winding up, telling what happened to The Goose, who at age sixty-eight homosexually assaulted a young boy in a prison shower and was stabbed in his good eye for his efforts. And Oxie, who did seven long ones and then dropped dead of a heart attack on a Bronx street corner after a month of freedom. And Fogarty, who was let out of jail because of his sickness and wasted away with TB in the isolation ward of the Ann Lee Home in Albany, and who called me at the end to handle his legacy, which consisted of Big Frenchy DeMange's diamond wristwatch. Jack gave it to him as a souvenir after the Big Frenchy snatch, and Fogarty kept it in a safe-deposit box and never sold it, even when he didn't have a dime.

  My three old friends didn't know either that Jack never paid me for the second trial, nor had he ever paid Doc Madison a nickel for all the doc's attention to his wounds.

  "He stole from us all, to the very end," I said.

  "Yes, Marcus," said Flossie, the loyal crone, misty-eyed over her wine, profoundly in love with all that was and would never be again, "but he had a right to. He was magic. He had power. Power over people. Power over animals. He had a tan collie could count to fifty-two and do subtraction."

  "I wrote a story about his dog," said the Tipper. "It was a black and white bull terrier named Clancy. I went and fed him when they all left Acra and forgot he was there. Smartest dog I ever saw. Jack taught him how to toe dance."

  "It was a white poodle," said Packy. "He brought it with him right here where we're sitting one night in the middle of '31. There was a bunch of us and Jack decides he'll take a walk, and we all say, okay, we'll all take a walk. But Jack says he needs his sweater because the night air gets chilly, and we all say, you're right, Jack, it sure gets chilly."

  "Jack could turn on the electric light sometimes, just by snapping his fingers," Flossie said.

  "So Jack says to the white poodle, 'Listen here, dog, go up and get my black sweater,' and that damn dog got up and went out to the lobby and pushed the elevator button and went up to Jack's suite and barked, and Hubert Maloy let him in."

  "Jack could run right up the wall and halfway across the ceiling when he got a good running start," Flossie said. "We all waited, but the poodle didn't come back, and Jack finally says, 'Where the hell is that dog of mine?' And somebody says maybe he went to the show to see the new Rin-Tin-Tin, and Jack says, 'No, he already saw it.' Jack got so fidgety he finally goes upstairs himself and we all follow, and Jack is sayin' when he walks into his room, 'Come on, you son of a bitch, where's my goddamn sweater?' "

  "Jack could outrun a rabbit," Flossie said.

  "Well, let me tell you, it took the wind right out of Jack when he saw that damn dog sitting on the sofa with the sweater, sewin' on a button that was missin' off the pocket."

  "Jack could tie both his shoes at once," Flossie said.

  JACKED UP

  Jack (Legs) Diamond, aged thirty-four years, five months, seven days, and several hours, sat up in bed in his underwear and stared into the mirror at his new condition: incipiently dead.

  "Those simple bastards," he said, "they finally did it right."

  He moved without being able to move, thought out of his dead brain, smiled with an immobile mouth, his face intact but the back of his head blown away. Already aware he was moving outside time, he saw the yellow fluid coming to his eyes, trickling out his nose, his ears, down the corners of his mouth. He felt tricklings from his rectum, his penis, old friend, and knew those too were the yellow. He turned his head and saw the yellow coming out his wounds, on top of his congealing blood. He had known the yellow would come, for he had been at the edge before. But he always failed to understand the why of it. The wisdom of equality, the Book of the Dead said, but that made no sense. Death did make sense. It was a gift. The dead thanked you with stupid eyes.

  "Do you think I worry because I'm dead?" Jack asked aloud.

  The yellow oozed its curious answer.

  The press of death was deranging. H
e was fully aware of the pressure, like earth sinking into water. Yet there was time left for certain visitors who were crowding into the room. Rothstein stepped out of the crowd and inspected the crown of Jack's head. He fingered that bloody skull like a father fondling the fontanel of his infant son—and who with a better right? He pulled out two hairs from the center of the scalp.

  "What odds that I find the answer, big dad?" Jack said. Rothstein mulled the question, turned for an estimate to Runyon, who spoke out of a cancerously doomed larynx.

  "I've said it before," said Damon. "All life is nine to five against."

  "You hear that?" A. R. asked.

  "I hear it."

  "I must call against."

  "Then up yours," said Jack. "I'll make it my way."

  "Always headstrong," said A. R.

  I took Jack by the arm, guided him back from the mirror to lie on his right side, the lying posture of a lion. I pressed my fingers against the arteries on both sides of his throat.

  "It's time, Jack," I said. "It's coming."

  "I'm not sure I'll know it when it comes."

  "I'll tell you this. It looks like a thought, like a cloudless sky. It looks like nothing at all."

  "Like nothing?"

  "Like nothing."

  "I'II recognize it," Jack said. "I know what that looks like."

  "Say a prayer," I suggested.

  "I did."

  "Say another."

  "I knew a guy once had trouble cheating because his wife was always praying for him."

  "Try to be serious. It's your last chance."

  Jack concentrated, whispered, "Dear God, turn me onto the Great White Way." He felt the onset of clammy coldness then, as if this body were fully immersed in water. He remembered Rothstein's prayer and said that too, "O Lord, God of Abraham, keep me alive and smart. The rest I'll figure out for myself."

  "Perfect." said A. R.

  "Dummy," I said, "you're dead. What kind of a thing is it, asking to stay alive?"

  I eased the pressure on Jack's arteries and pressed his nerve of eternal sleep. Then I knelt beside him, seeing the water of his life sinking into fire, waiting for his final exit from that useless body. But if Jack left his body through the ear instead of the top of the head where Rothstein had pulled out the hairs, he might come back in the next life as a fairy musician.