They set the date: June, in a small ballroom in a downtown hotel that was booked through October, but had a miraculous last-minute cancellation. Phil Scarpetti had placed a brief call to Ellen, advising her to try the hotel again. He didn’t identify the source of his information.
“Spill,” Jacob said, when they were smoking an illegal substance in the artist’s apartment. “It was one of your shady contacts, wasn’t it?’
“Nothing so sinister. I’m Carmelita’s son Philip, not Pittsburgh Phil. The bride got caught shoplifting in the store where she was registered. Groom-to-be bugged out.”
“How’d you manage that?”
“I didn’t plant the stuff on her, if that’s what you mean. I’ve got friends in store security all over town.”
“I’m relieved. I considered asking Irish Mickey Shannon for a favor, but since I never heard from him after The Fence came out I didn’t want to press my luck.”
Scarpetti blew smoke out his nostrils. “You still might, when he gets out. The state gave him time to catch up on his reading.”
“Prison?”
“Short stretch, and he was lucky to get it. He sold a set of steak knives to a detective from the Third Precinct. It had the governor’s crest on the box.”
“He must not have read my book.” Jacob felt woozy. He snuffed out his butt and laid it in the ashtray. “Where are you taking me for my bachelor party?”
“That’s a surprise.”
“Tell me you’re not planning to throw a bag over my head and kidnap me to some roadhouse. I’ll go into cardiac arrest. Any minute now, Frank Costello might recognize himself as Blinky Fantonetti, the Juke King of Jersey.”
“Simmer down. Nobody recognizes himself in books. Where’s the ceremony?”
“United Church of Christ on Houston, the Reverend Charles Odell presiding. I met him at the Clock. He likes Chinese.”
“Ellen okayed him?”
“She’d be okay with the captain of the Staten Island ferry.” He paused. “Phil?”
“Um-hum?”
“I couldn’t think of anyone else I’d want to stand up for me.”
“I couldn’t think of anyone else who’d trust me not to hock the ring.”
Scarpetti took a suite in the wedding hotel for the stag party. Robin Elk attended, along with Skip Glaser, his art director, and Howard Belknap, the Blue Devil receptionist in the horn-rimmed glasses. Several brands and varieties of whiskey occupied a low table and cigar smoke hazed the air. Young Belknap declined a cigar, but after a few sips of bourbon he tried one, and spent the next ten minutes in the bathroom.
Someone knocked. Scarpetti ushered in a diminutive blonde dressed like Annie Oakley, all in white, from her cowboy hat to her high-heeled boots. Rhinestones crusted her short fringed skirt and suede vest, which covered only her nipples. She carried a portable phonograph.
“Which one’s the bridegroom?” She beamed.
He pointed his cigar. “The one with his tongue hanging out.”
She set down the record player and switched her hips Jacob’s way. She threw her arms around him and grinned up. Her perfume stung his eyes. “My name’s Calamity. What’s yours?”
“Jack.” He said it without thinking.
“Sit down, Jack.” She splayed a palm against his chest and shoved. He fell into an armchair.
Her record collection was all western. By the time Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters finished “I’m an Old Cowhand (from the Rio Grande),” she was down to her hat, boots, and a pair of red panties embroidered with a gold lariat. Howard, recovered from his cigar emergency, flushed furiously when she shook her breasts in his face. They were clad only in pasties shaped like tiny sheriff’s stars. Elk, equally red-faced, but from drink (Jacob had never seen him imbibe more than a glass of wine at lunch), shook his head smiling as she approached him, so she turned to Glaser. The gaunt man showed no reaction as she straddled his lap, grinding her crotch against his; for the hundredth time, Jacob wondered who had nicknamed him Skip.
Jacob got the same treatment, but only briefly. He took firm hold of her shoulders and gave her a gentle push. Without losing her smile, she kissed him on the lips and got up, dancing toward Scarpetti, sitting on the sofa.
He grinned, cigar clamped between his teeth, as she ground herself against him. She started to unzip his fly.
He shot upright, spilling her to the floor. She landed on her tailbone.
“Hey!”
Stooping, he grasped her arm and jerked her to her feet. He dug a roll of cash from a pocket and peeled off several bills. “Show’s over, Calamity. The stage is pulling out.” He stuffed the money into her panties.
“Son of a bitch motherfucker.” She dressed quickly and swept out carrying her phonograph.
Scarpetti addressed the silence in the room.
“When I take out my dick it’s my idea.” He twisted out his cigar in an ashtray. “And I don’t pay for it.”
Elk was the first to react, with a characteristically abashed laugh. “It’s better than my family motto. I wonder if it would translate into Latin.”
The drinking resumed. Belknap passed out in his chair. Scarpetti went into the bedroom, brought back a blanket, and spread it over him. Elk, on his third Irish whisky, kept the conversation going.
“My first ambition was to be a ballroom dancer,” he said. “I saw Top Hat at an impressionable age when it showed in London. The pater threw a fit, but I was determined. I have Jerry to thank for sparing me the worst.” He tapped one of his slippered feet with his cane. “Did you always want to write?” he asked Jacob.
“No. I guess I can thank that foreman in the Battery for how I turned out.”
The publisher changed the subject; despite his choice of literary subject matter, his POW experience seemed to have left him with a low tolerance for violent interaction. “And you, Skip? Born with the itch to draw?”
The art director was sketching in a hotel pad. “I was going to be Bud Fisher.”
“Who’s that? Baseball player, I suppose. All you red-blooded Yanks want your picture on a bubble-gum card.”
“He’s a cartoonist, Lord Fauntleroy. Mutt and Jeff?”
Elk, blowing smoke rings, shook his head.
Glaser turned the pad around. He’d drawn a facsimile of the tall gaunt drifter of comics in the straw boater and his short, silk-hatted companion. “My father died when I was six. My mother got a job in a pulp mill. She was always bringing home reams of paper for me to scribble on.”
“What happened?” Jacob said.
“I came to a bad end.” He tore off the sheet, crumpled it, and slammed it into the wastebasket.
“Phil?” Elk said. “Who did you want to be?”
“Machine Gun Kelly.”
“Surely that’s a baseball name.”
“He was a thug,” Glaser said. “Don’t you read anything besides Punch?” He was palpably drunk.
“Well. It seems no one in this room quite turned out as planned.”
“All except Calamity,” said Jacob.
Even Scarpetti laughed.
The ceremony, in the hotel ballroom, was brief and informal; the guests applauded when the couple kissed. The Reverend Odell shook Jacob’s hand, kissed Ellen—radiant in a powder-blue suit and matching pillbox hat with a brief veil—accepted the envelope from the bridegroom with a discreet gesture, and left for a funeral in Westchester.
The reception followed in the same room. Robin Elk was first in the receiving line—peck on the cheek and an unaffected glistening in his eyes—then Scarpetti, followed by a critic from The Post who’d stuck out his neck to review Down by the Docks favorably (“and got mail, I can tell you, from the archdiocese”), Ellen’s old roommate Ann (six months’ pregnant with her husband, a dull-but-successful plumbing contractor in Queens), the entire Blue Devil staff, and sundry acquaintances of whose connection to the occasion Jacob was only dimly aware.
Cliff Cutter was the only writing colleague invited. There was a dignity about the old westerner that could only add to the occasion. He brought along his wife, a small round American Indian whose moon face might have been fashioned from terra-cotta. She presented Ellen with a small stone carving of an animal attached to a braided leather thong, to be worn around the neck. “Wear tonight,” she said. “In nine months, a child.”
Jacob snatched it as Ellen was opening her purse. He stuck it in his pocket. “It goes into a safe-deposit box.”
A jazz combo Scarpetti had found in a neighborhood club took the bandstand. Between sets, Ellen mounted the platform and threw the bouquet over her shoulder. Alice, Elk’s secretary, caught it. Howard Belknap blushed.
“You know the truth about marriage, right?” Scarpetti, buttonholing the groom, breathed pure gin from the open bar into his face, a heavy hand on his shoulder.
“I’ve heard theories. I’m sure you can add to them.”
“It’s like belonging to the Pinup-of-the-Month Club; only it’s the same girl, month in and month out, for the rest of your life.”
“You’re sloshed, Scarpetti.”
“That’s the effect I was going for.”
Ellen’s mother came up. She was a shorter, broader version of her daughter, but a handsome woman of fifty, in a brocaded jacket over a ruffled blouse and floor-length skirt, with a corsage the size of a cauliflower pinned to one lapel. She smiled at Scarpetti. “Well, hello, there, do you remember me?”
For once the artist was stuck for a reply.
“Don’t you remember? You liked my spaghetti.”
He spluttered. “I didn’t know you without your hairnet! But you must’ve served meals to—”
“Thousands. But only one with a compliment.”
“That’s because your sauce didn’t come from a can.”
“I did my own shopping. Are you behaving yourself?”
“It’s a struggle. I’ve searched five boroughs looking for your recipe.”
“The secret’s brown sugar; but don’t tell anyone. I’m opening a restaurant after I retire.”
“I’m no stoolie.” He stooped to buss her on the cheek.
After he excused himself, Jacob approached her. “I wondered if you knew each other.”
“I was glad when he was released,” she said. “Prison’s dangerous for men like him.”
“Artists?”
She smiled at him. “I’m so happy he was your best man. You’re a true friend.”
They honeymooned in the Catskills; a compromise. Jacob said, “How many kids do you want? I’m thinking ten, in case nine of them turn out no good.”
“I thought you didn’t want children right away.”
“That was just for public consumption. I’m all ready to start the next generation of juvenile delinquent.”
“In that case, I better put this on.” She took the wedding gift from Cliff Cutter’s wife out of her purse.
“How’d you get that?”
“Picked your pocket while you were in the shower.”
He looked at the carving. “I think it’s some kind of weasel. I hope the kids are better looking.”
She gave him a humid kiss. “Let’s start with Jacob Heppleman, Junior, and see how he turns out.”
“Jack.”
“I thought you hated that.”
“I’m warming to it. It’s brought me luck.”
“Let’s start with conception and do the rest later.”
“Okay, but I need to practice.”
And they did. Three months later, Ellen came back from her doctor’s office wearing a huge smile.
“Damn,” said her husband. “Someone should call the cops. That weasel’s a concealed weapon.”