"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 course, 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?"