"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?
Suffer the evil to come unto me, said doughty Alice. Perhaps she enjoyed that evil too much. More than she could ever expiate. Perhaps she will merit longer and more excruciating punishment than she can yet imagine. Yes, the very worst may be in store for this little lady.
But she sat there with the villain, stroking, cooing, telling the Good Lord Above: Go ahead and do me, Lord. I can take it.
Sitting beside his hospital bed watching him breathe perhaps the final breaths of his life, she knew he was unquestionably hers now forever. Nothing and nobody could part them. She had withstood the most scandalous time and had not stopped loving him. She was the victim of love: sucker and patsy for her own sloppy heart. But from suckerdom comes wisdom the careful lover never understands.
"I'm sorry what this is doing to you," John said to Alice.
"Are you, John? Or is that just another apology?"
"It's a bad time for you, Al, I know. But this ain't exactly a great big bed of roses I got myself into."
"You'll get out of it."
"We both will. We'll have a special time when I get my ass up out of here."
"Give your ass a rest."
"Anything you say."
"Give everybody's ass a rest."
"Whose ass you talking about now?"
"Maybe you could figure it out if you live long enough."
"I'm in no condition to tire anybody out."
"That's a nice change. I also mean no visitors. I already put up with more than I can stand, but I won't put up with her here. "
"She hasn't shown up yet. And if she does, it won't be my doing. But she won't."
"The police won't let her out of custody, that's why she won't."
"She knows better. She knows her place."
"Oh? And just what the hell is her place?"
"No place. Nothing. She knows she's got no hold on me."
"That's why you kept her in the hotel."
"I was doing her a favor."
"How often? Twice a night?"
"I saw her now and then, no more. A friend. A date when I was in town looking for company."
"The whole world's got it figured out, John. Don't start with the fairy tales."
She was talking to him as if he had the strength of a healthy man, but he was only an itty-bitty piece of himself, a lump of torn-up flesh. Why did Alice talk so tough to a sick lump? Because she knew the lump was tough. She was tough too. A pair of tough monkeys, is how John always said he saw this husband-wife team. Yes, it's why we get along, was Alice's way of looking at this toughness. She always treated him this way, even when he was most vulnerable, told him exactly what she thought. There now. See? See his hand move off the sheet and onto her knee? See his fingers raise the hem of her skirt? Feel him touch her with his fingertips on the flesh above her stocking? Home territory. Jack is coming home. Jack is not discouraged by her tough line. Tough monkey, my husband.
When Alice felt these fingers on herself she looked at the single wax rose on the bedside table and remembered the early growth of the rose. There will always be a wax rose in our life, Alice now insisted, and in his own way Jack remembered it too. With a tea rose in his lapel when he wore his tux. Never a gardenia. Never a white carnation. Always the red, red rose.
It was after the Fifth Avenue shooting in 1925 and he sat in the living room of their house on l36th Street in the Bronx with the top and back of his head shaved and bandaged, wearing the old blue wool bathrobe with the holes in the elbows, sitting alone on the sofa, looking at the floor and drinking coffee royals because he liked their name and potency; eating saltine crackers with peanut butter but no meals, awake all night for a week but saying almost nothing, just making soft whimpering sounds like a dog dreaming of his enemies. Keeping Alice awake until her ear got used to the rhythms of the whimpers. When the rhythm was right, she could always sleep.
She had tried the rosary, but he wasn't ready for that, and so it only sat on the coffee table alongside the wax roses in the orange and black Japanese vase. She had tried to calm him, too, by reading from the prayer book, but he wouldn't listen. He was as far from religion as he'd ever been. Alice told him he should take the shooting as a warning from God to get out of the rackets or die in the bullet rain.
"I don't want to be like that woman in Brooklyn who lost a husband and two sons in the gang wars," Alice said to him. But that had no effect. Alice didn't know what would have any effect.
"Come on out, boy," she had said one day, a little whisper in his ear. "We all know you're hiding in there."
But all he ever asked was did you call in my numbers: 356, 880, and 855. Jackie, Jack and John out of the dream book. Jack always played numbers, from the time he ran them as a teen-ager. Now he played five dollars on each number and she never knew whether he hit them or not. Her game was not played with numbers.
She would also turn the radio on for him, but when she'd leave the room, he'd turn it off.
"Jesus, they really almost got me, almost wiped me out," he said one night and shook his head as if this were an incredible possibility, some wild fancy that had nothing to do with the real life and potential of John Thomas Diamond. That was when Alice knew he was not going to quit the rackets, that he was committed to them with a fervor which matched her own religious faith.