'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.'
'Hey, that's kind of maudlin.'
'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,
