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.
