Legs - William Kennedy

by William Kennedy

  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.

  "They tell me you're going to Boston."

  "I really am."

  "Without even saying good-bye?"

  "What's another good-bye? We're always saying that."

  "You're not going anyplace. Tomorrow we'll go down to the mountains, have a drink with old Brady up at Haines Falls. Weather's still pretty good."

  "You say that, but we won't go. "

  "Sure. I'll have Frankie pick you up at noon and meet me at Marcus' office, and we'll go from there."

  "What about your darling Alice?"

  "I'll send her out shopping."

  "Something'll happen and we won't go."

  "Yes, we'll go. You can count on it. You got my word."

  Jack, euphoric now, opened Marion's robe, gazed on her garden of ecstasy. Always a vision. Now better than ever. Jack had been down. He had hit bottom. But like an astral rubber ball, he was bouncing back toward the stars. When he held Marion in his arms, he felt the giddiness. "Top of the goddamn world," he said into her ear. "I'm on top of the goddamn world."

  "That's nice, Jackie."

  "I'm a winner again."

  "That's really nice."

  Jack knew that winners celebrated with biological food. You found the most beautiful woman on the Eastern Seaboard. You took your body to where she waited. You turned off her radio, then gave her body to your body. Your body would thank you for such a gift. Your body would be a happy body.

  Jack laughed out loud, once, in his bed, a resonant "Haw!"

  Moonshine was down to thirty-five cents a pint, and kids were sipping it with two straws. Iced beer was down to five dollars a gallon, and you could get it delivered home. College girls were pledging not to call for drinks costing more than a nickel when their boyfriends took them out for a good time. Dorothy Dix found this a step in the right direction, for matrimony was waning in popularity, a direct result of the high cost of living.

  Jack remembered the night he penetrated to the center of Kiki's treasure at Haines Falls and struck something solid.

  "What the hell is that?"

  "A cork," she said.

  "'A cork? How'd it get up there?"

  "I took it off a gallon of dago red and put it up there. It's my Italian chastity cork."

  "What the hell's the matter with you?"

  "I'm not taking it out till you promise to marry me."

  But she got over that, and when he entered her on this euphoric night in Albany there was no cork, no ultimatum; no climax either. Jack erected, Marion lubricious, they could've danced all night. But Jack wearied of the effort, and Marion ran out of her capacity to groan with pleasure. They rolled away from each other and let the sweat slowly cool, the breathing return to normal, the artifacts dry. He pulled off one shoe without opening the laces, let it drop. He took off the second shoe, noted its scuffiness and remembered the night he surrendered on the Hotsy charges. He walked into the Forty-seventh Street station house in his navy-blue chesterfield with the velvet lapels, white on white silk scarf, the midnight-blue serge double-breasted, the gray and black dragon tie, and the shoes so highly polished they could pass for patent leather, the derby heightening the tone of his special condition. Jack was on top that night, too, remembering Vinnie Raymond from East Albert Street, who walked by the Diamond house every night in his derby and his high-polish shoes and spats, on his way to life. The image of that man's perfection was still in the mind that controlled the scuffed shoe, down at the heel. Then he let it too, drop.

  Jack heard the horn blowing in the street outside Marion's Ten Broeck Street apartment. He raised the window.

  "It's gettin' late, Jack," Frankie Teller called up to him. "You said half an hour. It's going on two hours. You know what Alice told me. You get him back here to this party, back here to me."

  But no partying remained in Jack. He would not return to any festive scene, festive drunks, festive Alice. He closed the window and looked at Marion, who had wrapped herself in a beige floor-length silk robe, gift from Jack six months ago when he had money for anything. The gown had one large brown flower below the knee, same color as the stripe around the small lapel. So gorgeous. Will ever a woman look more gorgeous to Jack than this one?

  "You treat women like animals," Marion said.

  "Ah, don't fight me tonight, baby. I'm feelin' good."

  "Like cats. You treat us like damn old cats. Pet us and pussy us up and scratch our neck."

  Jack laughed, fell back on the pillow of his own rooming house bed and laughed and laughed and laughed. She was right. You look a cat in the eye and demand a love song. It sits there, and if it likes you at all, it doesn't run away. It wants its goddamn neck scratched. Wants you to play with its whiskers. Give it what it wants, it turns on its motor. He laughed and raised his feet off the floor and saw his socks, still on.

  He sat up and took off one sock, dropped it onto one shoe, missed.

  . . I toast his defiance, his plan not to seduce the

  world but to terrify it, to spit in the eye of the public

  which says no Moloch shall pass . . ."

  Jack would not begin life again in the same way. Adirondacks? Vermont? Maybe. But Coll was in jail, his mob busted up after a shoot-out in Averill Park and a roundup in Manhatt
an. Jack would have to recruit from scratch, and the prospect was wearying. So many dead and gone. Mike Sullivan, Fatty Walsh, Eddie. He reached for the second sock, remembering all the old boys, friends and enemies. Brocco. Babe. Frenchy. Shorty. Pretty. Mattie. Hymie. Fogarty. Dead, gone off, or in jail. And he seemed to himself, for the first time, a curiously perishable item among many such items, a thing of just so many seasons. When does the season end? He has survived again and again to another day, to try yet again to change what he had never been able to change. Would Jack Diamond ever really change? Or would he wake tomorrow out of this euphoria and begin to do what he had done every other day of his senior life? Was there any reason to doubt that recurring pattern? In the morning he would pay Marcus what he owed and take Kiki for a ride and hustle Alice and keep her happy somehow and try to figure out what next. Where was the money coming from? Something would come up.

  He would solve it—he, Jack Diamond, who is what was designed, what was made this morning, yesterday, and the day before out of his own private clay.

  Ah. What was designed.

  This perception arrived as Jack dropped his second sock to the floor and leaned toward the dresser and saw the rosary in the top drawer. He thought then of saying it again. But no. No rosary. No prayer. No remorse. Jack is so happy with his perception of being what was designed, so released from the struggle to change, that he begins with a low rumble that rises from the sewers of madness; and yet he is not mad, only enlightened, or could they be the same condition? The rumble grows and rises to his throat where it becomes a cackle, and then into his nose where he begins to snort its joy, and into his eyes which cry with this pervasive mirth. Now his whole being—body, mind, and the spirit of nothing that he has at last recognized in the mirror-is convulsed with an ecstasy of recognition.

  ". . . Jack, when you finally decide to go,when you are only a fading memory along Broadway, a name in the old police files and yellowing tabloids, then we will not grieve. Yet we will be empty because our friend Jack, the nonpareil, the nonesuch, the grand confusion of our lives, has left us. The outer limit of boldness is what your behavior has been, Jack, and even if Christ came to town, I'm not sure He'd be seen on the same hill with you. Nevertheless, I think I speak for all when I say we're rooting for you. And so here's to your good health, and to ours, and let me add a safe home, Jacko, a safe home."

  Jack heard the cheer go up out in the street in front of the courthouse. But he knew they were cheering for the wrong man.

  "I know that son of a bitch," Jack said as he entered his final dream. "He was never any good."

  * * *

  Mrs. Laura Woods, the landlady at 67 Dove, said she heard two men climb the carpeted stairs past the potted fern and enter the front room where the noted guest, who had originally rented the room as Mr. Kelly, was sleeping. She heard the shots, three into Jack's head, three into the wall, and then heard one man say, "Let's make sure. I been waiting a long time for this." And the second man said, "Oh, hell, that's enough for him."

  Mrs. Woods telephoned The Parody Club where she knew Mrs. Diamond was partying. It was 6:55 A.M. before the family notified the police and by then Doc Madison had said yes, death seemed to have at last set in for Jack. When the detectives arrived, Alice was holding a bloody handkerchief, with which she had wiped the face of the corpse with the goggle eyes.

  "Oh, my beloved boy," she was saying over and over, "I didn't do it, I didn't do it."

  * * *

  ". . . Months ago," Winchell wrote, "we called him 'On His Last Legs' Diamond .... "

  * * *

  Jack wore his tuxedo and signet ring and held his rosary at the wake, which was given at the home of Alice's relatives in Maspeth, Long Island., The family sent four floral tributes, and I paid for one-third of the fifth, a pillow of red roses, the other two-thirds kicked in by Packy and Flossie, and signed, "Your pals." An eight-foot bleeding heart was dedicated to "Uncle John," and Alice sent a five-and-a-half-foot-high floral chair of yellow tea roses and lilies of the valley. On a gauze streamer in two-inch gold letters across the chairback she had inscribed: VACANT CHAIR, TO MY OWN, AFTER ALL, YOUR LOVING WIFE.

  Owney Madden paid for the coffin, a dark mahogany box worth eight hundred dollars. Jack had seven hundred dollars' worth of industrial insurance once, but the company canceled it. The plan was to bury Jack in Calvary Cemetery alongside Eddie, but the church wouldn't let him be put in consecrated ground. Wouldn't allow a mass either. And the permission for the final prayer by a priest at the wake house, which I negotiated with Cardinal Hayes, was withdrawn at the last minute, putting the women in tears. A thirteen-year-old cousin of Jack's said the rosary in place of the priest, as a thousand people stood outside the house in the rain.

  It rained yellow mud into the grave. A couple of hundred of Jack's fans went to the cemetery with the family and the press. Somebody from the undertakers picked up a shovel and tried to drive the photographers away from the graveside, but none of them gave an inch, and when the man screamed at them, the photographers chased him up a tree. Jack belonged to them.

  It was all over quickly. Alice, heavily veiled, said, "Good-bye, boy, good-bye," when they began to fill the grave, and then she walked away with a single red rose in her hand. Ten minutes later most of the flowers on the grave were gone. Souvenirs.

  * * *

  When Kiki began her five-a-day stint at the Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street ("See Kiki, the Gangster's Gal"), fifteen hundred people were in line before the theater opened at eleven in the morning, and the manager sold two hundred and fifty SRO tickets. "She is better box office than Peaches Browning," the manager said, "and Peaches was the best I ever had here." Sidney Skolsky reported Alice was in the balcony at the opening to see the wicked child (she was just twenty-two) tippy-tap-toe to the tune of twin banjos, then take four bows and never mention Jack. But Sidney was wrong. Alice didn't see the show. I called her to offer a bit of consolation after I'd read about Kiki's success.

  "Only eighteen days, Marcus," Alice said. "He's dead only eighteen days and she's out there with banjos, dancing on his grave. She could at least have waited a month."

  My advice was to stop competing with Kiki for a dead man, but it was an absurd suggestion to a gladiator, and the first time I made the mistake of thinking Jack was totally dead. Alice had already hired a writer and was putting together a skit that would be staged, thirty-five days after Jack's murder, on the boards of the Central Theater in the Bronx. The theme was crime doesn't pay. In one moment of the drama Alice interrupted a holdup, disarmed the gunman, and guarded him with his own gun until the police arrived. Then she said to the audience, "You can't make a dime with any of them. The straight and narrow is the only way," which brought to mind the era when she banked eighteen thousand dollars in about six months at Acra. Ambivalence, you're beautiful.

  Kiki and Alice both took their acts on the road, in vaudeville and on the Minsky burlesque circuit, outraging any number of actors, the Marx Brothers among them. "A damn shame and a disgrace," said Groucho of Kiki's sixteen-week contract, "especially when so many actors are out of work. For what she is getting they could have hired five good acts, people who know their business. She's nothing but a gangster's moll."

  The girls both played the same big towns, and both scandalized the smaller ones, Alice barred from Paterson, Kiki hustled out of Allentown, Alice presuming to teach a moral lesson with her act, Kiki the successful sinner against holy matrimony. Who drew the crowds? Ah.

  By spring Kiki was still traveling, but Alice was no longer a serious road attraction. Alice and I talked a few times because she was having money problems, worried about the mortgage on the Acra house. She said then she was going to open at Coney Island and she chided me for never seeing her perform. So I said I'd come and catch her opener.

  There is a photograph of her as she looked on the day her show opened on the boardwalk. I was standing behind the news cameraman as he caught her by surprise, and I remember her f
ace before, during, and after the click: the change from uncertainty to hostility to a smile at me. Her hair is parted and wavy, falling over her forehead and covering her ears. A poster behind her advertises Siamese twins joined at the shoulder blades, and there is a girl outlined by a dozen long-bladed knives. A midget is in the photo, being held aloft by a man with dark, oily hair and a pencil-thin mustache. The sign says SIDE SHOW in large letters and to the right: BEAUTIFUL MRS. JACK LEGS DIAMOND IN PERSON.

  The weather was unseasonably warm that afternoon, mobs on the boardwalk in shirtsleeves and unnecessary furs, camp chairs on the sand, and young girls blooming in summer dresses as Beautiful Mrs. Jack walked onto the simple unpainted board stage.

  From the other direction came the tuxedo man with the little mustache. He introduced Alice, then asked if she wanted to say anything at the start.

  "Mr. Diamond was a loving and devoted husband," she said. "Much that was stated and printed about him was untrue."

  "People find it difficult to understand why a woman would stay married to a gangster," said the tuxedo man.

  "Mr. Diamond was no gangster. He wouldn't have known how to be a gangster."

  "It's been said he was a sadistic killer."

  "He was a man in love with all of nature, and he celebrated life. I never saw him kill even a fly."

  "How, then, would you say he got the reputation for being a gangster and a killer ?"

  "He did some very foolish things when he was young, but he regretted them later in life."

  So it went. The sixteen customers paid ten cents each to enter, and after the show Alice also sold four photos of herself and Jack, the one with "my hero" written on the clipping found in her apartment a year later when they put a bullet in her temple. The photos also sold for a dime, which brought the gross for the first performance to two dollars. "Not much of a crowd," she said to me when she came off the stage. Her eyes were heavy and she couldn't manage a smile.

  "You'll do better when the hot days come along."

  "The hot days are all over with, Marcus."