“But—”
“You were wrong, dead wrong, and the only reason I saved your miserable hide was because I happen to want to see this band stay together. If you’d walked out of there alone, he’d never have taken you back, never in a million years. With me gone, he’s losing a friend, too — and Tony respects friendship.”
“Gee, Bud, I didn’t—”
“You didn’t what? You didn’t know you were behaving like a smirking little wetpants? Grow up, for Christ’s sake! I’m not going to be here holding your hand forever!”
“I’m... I’m sorry,” Andy said. “I didn’t realize. I was just—”
“You think I like this?” Bud hurled, his eyes blazing. “You think I like having you on my back every goddamn minute of the day? I’ve got my own problems, my own damn life to lead. When the hell are you gonna grow up?” He paused and then said, “Get in there. Get in there and eat dirt, and eat it a mile long and a mile wide.”
Andy swallowed hard, nodding stupidly. A panic was growing inside him. He did not want to enter the gym alone, did not want to face Tony again. He wanted to turn and run from where they stood. The panic grew, mushrooming onto his face.
Bud’s hand released his collar. He smiled suddenly. “All right, inside. And stop looking so goddamned pained. I’m still your friend.”
The words hung between them, as brittle as the air around them. He felt the panic leaving slowly. He nodded and pulled back his shoulders. Then he opened the door, and, together, they stepped into the gym.
14
second chorus, iii
APRIL, 1944
White streamers trailed across the ceiling of the hall on East New York Avenue. A large white crepe-paper wedding bell hung from the center of the ceiling, providing the focal point from which the streamers radiated. The groom was short and squat and dark, a corporal in the Air Corps. The bride, with all due respect for Tony Banner’s family on his mother’s side, was tall and thin, with features strongly reminiscent of Seabiscuit’s.
The band played “Here Comes the Bride” first, reading from sheets which incorporated such versatile old stand-bys as “Hatikvah,” “Irish Washerwoman,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and “Happy Birthday to You.” The owner of the hall, rushing about as an improvised master of ceremonies, led the wedding party around the floor while both families beamed, exuding sympathy and joy simultaneously. The boys went into “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” and the bride danced with the groom alone until the M.C. led the best man and the maid of honor onto the floor, followed by the ushers and the bridesmaids. The best man then switched partners with the groom, and then everyone switched partners, and then all the spectators ringing the floor moved onto the floor and began dancing, and the reception started. Bud modulated from “Let Me Call You” into “Sleepy Lagoon,” and the band took that all the way through and then, for lack of any other waltzes in their repertoire, played “Let Me Call You” again. When they ended the waltz set, they went into “The Man I Love,” having decided upon that as their theme song. Bud and Frank played a moody, heavy introduction, and then Andy came in with a theme-songish trumpet solo, backed up by the sax section’s harmony. The rest of the evening, except when a fattish lady of forty came over to the piano with some music she wanted Bud to transpose while she sang, was a breeze.
The wedding was of the type the boys later referred to as “The Genoese Brawl.” None of them had ever been to Genoa, of course, but the expression served to typify the scores of Italian weddings they were to play in the weeks and months that followed. The Genoese Brawl was not to be confused with what they considered a high-class catered affair. They played several of those jobs, too, but those jobs were duck soup, and quite refined when compared to The Genoese Brawl. The Genoese Brawl was not a catered affair; it did not give the members of the wedding a meal, and whisky, and what-have-you.
It gave the members, instead, beer and sandwiches. The beer was drawn from kegs behind a bar at one end of the hall. Several members of the bride’s or groom’s family usually served as bartenders, drawing the beer and passing out the sandwiches. The sandwiches were kept in a large cardboard box, wrapped in waxed paper. There were usually two boxes because there were usually two different kinds of sandwiches: ham, and ham and cheese. The members of the wedding crowded the bar and shouted, “Two beers and two hams and cheese.” Soda pop was also stacked in an ice-filled sink behind the bar, but no one drank soda pop except children and pregnant women.
There were a good many children at a Genoese Brawl, and almost as many pregnant women. The children spent their time running across the highly waxed floor, putting on the brakes, and then skidding for a good twelve feet. They also spent their time chasing other children in and out and around the dancing couples when they could not slide. They also spent some of their time falling, or knocking over pitchers of beer, or spitting, or stepping on the train of the bride’s gown, or simply behaving as bastardly as only children who were habitues of this type of wedding knew how to behave.
The pregnant women sat at the tables around the hall and smiled Madonnalike, wondering how pretty the bride would look in six months when she’d been “caught.” They occasionally smoothed their silken maternity jackets over the bulge of their maternal abdomens. They sipped at their soda pop and ate their ham and cheese sandwiches, watching their husbands dance with young and heavily rouged distant cousins from Red Bank, New Jersey.
The bride and groom sat at a long table, usually to the right or left of the bandstand. The members of the wedding filed past the table, kissing the bride and shaking hands with the groom. An envelope was usually passed during the ritual, sometimes to the groom (who instantly handed it to the bride) and sometimes directly to the bride (who instantly dropped it into a large, sacklike white silken purse she carried, pulling the drawstrings tight.) The envelopes contained currency of the United States in denominations of from five to twenty-five dollars. No one dared give less than five. (A catered affair called for ten.) No one but the principals’ parents ever gave more than twenty-five.
A little before the bride and groom departed for points unknown to share their first night of nuptial bliss, they went around the hall with a tray piled full of macaroons, cookies with cherries, cookies with chocolate, and just plain cookies — a tray which had been in evidence all night on the long table behind which the bride and groom sat. Someone usually accompanied the couple on their circuit of the hall, and this someone carried small white thin cardboard boxes which contained candy-covered almonds, or as the Genoese called them, “Confetti.” The boxes usually carried the inscription “Wedding Bells” or “Congratulations” or, in the cases of more affluent principals, “Mr. and Mrs. Genoese.” The cookies and confetti were distributed (and beware the wrath of any member who was missed during the distribution) and later carried home to those unfortunate enough to have missed the brawl.
Sometime during the evening, before the bride and groom departed (and there were always the jokes about “Hey, Harry, when the hell are you going to leave? Getting anxious, Harry?” To which Harry always shrugged stupidly and smiled a nonchalant above-such-petty-sex-habits smile), the M.C. put the couple and the entire assemblage through the primitive torture of the Grand March. The Grand March was a not-so-grand march around the hall, first two abreast, then four abreast, then eight abreast, then under-the-hands arch, then this way and that way until the floor and the party resembled a college band doing a complicated maneuver on a football field between halves. The Grand March invariably ended in stark confusion, with the M.C. rushing to the bandstand and shrieking for some dance music to untangle the knot he’d woven.