William Kennedy - Legs

I thought of Warren Van Deusen telling me people didn't understand why Alice stayed with Jack. She had her reasons. Her memories were like those squiggles. She was profoundly in love with the man, gave him her life at the outset and never wanted anyone else. She was in love with loving him too, and knew it, liked the way it looked. She won a bundle of psychic points sitting at his bedside after the Monticello, cooing into his ear while the reporters listened at the door and the nurses and orderlies carried messages to tabloid snoops. Alice heroine. Sweet Alice. Alice Blue. When the crash comes they always go back to their wives. Faithful spouse. Betrayed, yet staunch.

Adversity no match for Alice. The greatest of the underworld women. Paragon of wifely virtue. Never did a wrong thing in her life. The better half of that bum, all right, all right.

Texas Guinan let her have a limousine, with chauffeur, all the time she was in New York, so she wouldn't have to worry about hawking taxis to and from Jack's bedside. The press gave Kiki the play at first, but then they caught up with Alice at the police station (that's where Kiki and Alice first met; they glowered at each other, didn't speak). The press boys tried to make her the second act of the drama, but Alice wouldn't play.

"Did you know the Roberts girl?"

"No."

"Did you know any of his friends?"

"He had many friends, but I'm not sure I knew them."

"Did you know his enemies?"

"He didn't have any enemies."

Alice was no sap, had no need for publicity. Not then. It was all happening in her ball park anyway, whether she talked or not.

"You know," she said to me after the shooting, "I hardly even brought up the subject of Marion with him. Only enough to let him know I wasn't going to die over it, that I was bigger than that. I was just as sweet as I could be. Gave him the biggest old smile I could and told him I remembered the squiggles and let him lay there and fry."

She said she was thinking about her Mormon dream and how it didn't make any sense when she had it, even after she told John about it and they talked about him having another wife. It was in the time of the roses, after he was shot the first time, on Fifth Avenue, when he was afraid he would die before he had done what he set out to do. He saw girls at his Theatrical Club. She knew that. But that was a trivial thing in the life of Alice Diamond because she had John as a husband, and that superseded any girl. Alice Diamond was bona fide. The real thing. A wife. And don't you forget it, John Diamond. A wife. For life.

She sat on the arm of his chair one night in the living room and told him she dreamed he'd brought home a second wife. He stood alongside the woman in the dream and said to Alice, "Well, we'll all be together from now on." And Alice said, "Not on your Philadelphia tintype."

But even as she said no to him she knew it was not no. Never a total no to anything John wanted. Then the other wife came in and started taking over little things Alice used to do for John. But after Alice told him the dream, he said, "Alice, I love you, nobody else." And Alice said to him, "No, you've got another wife." And they both laughed when he said to her, "Alice, we'll be together as long as we live."

Alice did not think her dream would ever come true. Maybe he'd see a woman now and then. But to move into a hotel, to keep a woman permanently, to see her just hours after he'd seen Alice, and maybe even after he'd been with Alice, was terrible. It was not incomprehensible. How, after all, could anything be incomprehensible to a person like Alice, who knew what everybody along Broadway thinks, wants, does, and won't do? Alice was as smart about life as anybody she ever came up against. She knew the worst often happened, worse than the worst you can imagine, and so you made provisions. Her prayer book helped her make provision for the worst: for the sick, the dying, for a happy death, for the departed, for the faithful departed, for the souls in Purgatory, for the end of man, for release from Purgatorial fire. Even a special one for John. She knew she was deceived by John's capacity for passion, and so she sat by his bed and read the Prayer to Overcome Passions and to Acquire Perfection: "Through the infinite merits of Thy painful sufferings, give John strength and courage to destroy every evil passion which sways his heart, supremely to hate all sin, and thus to become a saint."

Saint John of the Bullets.

"Alice, there you are, Alice," Jack said when he woke up and saw her. The beginning and the end of his first coherent sentence.

She smiled at him, picked up the wax rose she'd brought him, the one rose, the secret nobody else knew, and said, "It's wax, John. Do you remember?" The corners of his mouth eased upward and he said, "Sure," so softly she could barely hear it. Then she ran her fingers ever so softly through his hair. Bittykittymins. Sweet baby. Son of a bitch. Bittykittymins. And when he was really awake for the first time, when he'd even had a little bouillon and she'd combed his hair and they put a new hospital gown on him, she said to him in her silent heart: I wish you had died.

"How are you, kid'?" she said out loud, the first time in a long, long while she called him kid, the code word.

"I might make it."

"I think you might. "

"They got me good this time."

"They always get you good. "

"This time it hurt more."

"Everybody got hurt this time."

Alice was hurt, and she knew why. Because she loved an evil person and always would. She now wondered about her remarkable desire to see Jack dead. She had at times wished death to bad persons. Because Alice was good. Alice would not stay long in Purgatory. Because she was good. But now she wanted to die herself when she wished John dead and saw how deeply evil she herself was. She prayed to Jesus to let her want John to live. Let me not think that he's evil. Or me either. I know he's a good man in certain ways. Don't tell me I should've married somebody pure and holy. They would've bored the ass off me years ago. After all, I didn't marry a priest, Jesus. I married a thief. And landed on the front pages alongside him. My hubbydubbylubbybubby. People asking me questions. Coming for interviews. Forced to hide. Hide my light under the bushel. It will shine brighter for all that hiding. Light polishes itself under the bushel. What an awful thing for Alice to think: polishing up her own private brilliance through the troubles of Johnny-victim-on-the-boat. Oh, Alice. How awful you really are. It is so enormously wrong and wicked and evil and terrible, loving John for the wrong reasons; wanting him dead; profiteering from your marriage. Alice was evil and she truly hated herself.

But listen, kiddo, Alice knew she was married to one of the rottenest sons of bitches to come along in this century. Just the fact that she was able to sit there stroking his fingers and the back of his hand and running her hand through his bittykittymins gave her the evidence of her moral bankruptcy. Yet she was still trying to reform John. She didn't want him to be a Mason on the square. She wanted a genuine four-cornered Catholic. Four corners on my bed. Four angels overhead. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. Bless the bed we all lie on. She put a rosary around his neck while he lay under the influence of drugs to invoke grace and secret blessings God couldn't possibly deliver publicly to such a person. Hypocrisy for her to do that. Yes, another sin, Alice. But she knew that without being a hypocrite she could never love John.

Knowing this, knowing how evil she was for being married to evil, she therefore knew she must stay married to it, knew she must suffer all the evil that evil brings. For how else could a girl, an Irish Catholic girl brought up to respect grace and transubstantiation, ever get to heaven? How else could a girl hold her head up in her family? How else could a girl ever show her face among her peers, let alone her sneering inferiors, unless she expiated her awfulness, that black terribleness of marrying and loving evil, except by staying married to it?