We trooped up the walk, each of us carrying his instrument in one hand and some part of Biff’s drum-kit in the other. A thin lady with no breastworks to speak of was directing traffic inside. Two sweating men were hanging crepe paper. There was a bandstand at the front of the hall, and over it was a banner and a couple of big pink paper wedding bells. The tinsel lettering on the banner said BEST ALWAYS MAUREEN AND RICO.
Maureen and Rico. Damned if I couldn’t see why Scollay was so wound up. Maureen and Rico. Stone the crows.
The thin lady swooped down on us. She looked like she had a lot to say so I beat her to punch. “We’re the band,” I said.
“The band?” She blinked at our instruments distrustfully. “Oh. I was hoping you were the caterers.” I smiled as if caterers always carried snare drums and trombone cases.
“You can—” she began, but just then a ruff-tuff-creampuff of about nineteen strolled over. A cigarette was dangling from the comer of his mouth, but so far as I could see it wasn’t doing a thing for his image except making his left eye water. “Open that shit up,” he said.
Charlie and Biff looked at me. I shrugged. We opened our cases and he looked at the horns. Seeing nothing that looked like you could load it and fire it, he wandered back to his comer and sat down on a folding chair.
“You can set your things up right away,” the thin lady went on, as if she had never been interrupted.
“There’s a piano in the other room. I’ll have my men wheel it in when we’re done putting up our decorations.” Biff was already lugging his drum-kit up on to the little stage.
“I thought you were the caterers,” she repeated in a distraught way. ” Scollay ordered a wedding cake and there are hors d’oeuvres and roasts of beef and—”
“They’ll be here, ma’am,” I said. “They get payment on delivery.” “—two roasts of pork and a capon and Mr. Scollay will be just furious if—” She saw one of her men pausing to light a cigarette just below a dangling streamer of crepe and shrieked, “HENRY!” The man jumped as if he had been shot. I escaped to the bandstand.
We were all set up by a quarter of five. Charlie, the trombone player, was wah-wahing away into a mute and Biff was loosening up his wrists. The caterers had arrived at 4:20 and Gibson (that was the thin lady’s name; she made a business out of such affairs) almost threw herself on them.
Four long tables had been set up and covered with white linen, and four black women in caps and aprons were setting places. The cake had been wheeled into the middle of the room for everyone to gasp over.
It was six layers high, with a little bride and groom standing on top.
I walked outside to grab a fag and just about halfway through it I heard them coming—tooting away and raising a racket. I stayed where I was until I saw the lead car coming around the corner of the block below the church, then I snubbed my smoke and went inside.
“They’re coming,” I told Gibson.
She went white and actually swayed on her heels. There was a lady that should have taken up a different profession—interior decoration, maybe, or library science. “The tomato juice!” she screamed. “Bring in the tomato juice!” I went back to the bandstand and we got ready. We had played gigs like this before—what combo hasn’t?—and when the doors opened, we swung into a ragtime version of “The Wedding March” that I had arranged myself. If you think that sounds sort of like a lemonade cocktail I have to agree with you, but most receptions we played for just ate it up, and this one was no different. Everybody clapped and yelled and whistled, then started gassing amongst themselves. But I could tell by the way some of them were tapping their feet while they talked that we were getting through. We were on—I thought it was going to be a good gig. I know everything they say about the Irish, and most of it’s true, but, hot damn! they can’t not have a good time once they are set up for it.
All the same, I have to admit I almost blew the whole number when the groom and the blushing bride walked in. Scollay, dressed in a morning coat and striped trousers, shot me a hard look, and don’t think I didn’t see it. I managed to keep a poker face, and the rest of the band did, too—no one so much as missed a note.
Lucky for us. The wedding party, which looked as if it were made up almost entirely of Scollay’s goons and their molls, were wise already. They had to be, if they’d been at the church. But I’d only heard faint rumblings, you might say.
You’ve heard about Jack Sprat and his wife. Well, this was a hundred times worse. Scollay’s sister had the red hair he was losing, and it was long and curly. But not that pretty auburn shade you may be imagining.
No, this was County Cork red—bright as a carrot and kinky as a bedspring. Her natural complexion was curdwhite but she was wearing almost too many freckles to tell. And had Scollay said she was fat? Brother, that was like saying you could buy a few things in Macy’s. She was a human dinosaur—three hundred and fifty pounds if she was one. It had all gone to her bosom and hips and butt and thighs, like it usually does on fat girls, making what should be sexy grotesque and sort of frightening instead. Some fat girls have pathetically pretty faces, but Scollay’s sis didn’t even have that. Her eyes were too close together, her mouth was too big, and she had jug-ears. Then there were the freckles. Even thin she would have been ugly enough to stop a clock—hell, a whole show-window of them.
That alone wouldn’t have made anybody laugh, unless they were stupid or just poison-mean. It was when you added the groom, Rico, to the picture that you wanted to laugh until you cried. He could have put on a top hat and still stood in the top half of her shadow. He looked like he might have weighed ninety pounds or so, soaking wet. He was skinny as a rail, his complexion darkly olive. When he grinned around nervously, his teeth looked like a picket fence in a slum neighborhood.
We kept right on playing.
Scollay roared: “The bride and the groom! God give ’em every happiness!” And if God don’t, his thundering brow proclaimed, you folks here better—at least today.
Everyone shouted their approval and applauded. We finished our number with a flourish, and that brought another round. Scollay’s sister Maureen smiled. God, her mouth was big. Rico simpered.
For a while everyone just walked around, eating cheese and cold cuts on crackers and drinking Scollay’s best bootleg Scotch. I had three shots myself between numbers, and it put Tommy Englander’s rye in the shade.
Scollay began to look happier, too—a little, anyway.
He cruised by the bandstand once and said, “You guys play pretty good.” Coming from a music lover like him, I reckoned that was a real compliment.
Just before everyone sat down to the meal, Maureen came up herself. She was even uglier up close, and her white gown (there must have been enough white satin wrapped around that mama to cover three beds) wasn’t helping her at all. She asked us if we could play “Roses of Picardy” like Red Nichols and His Five Pennies, because, she said, it was her very favorite song. Fat and ugly she was, but hoity-toity she was not—unlike some of the two-bitters who’d been dropping by to make requests. We played it, but not very well. Still, she gave us a sweet smile that was almost enough to make her pretty, and she applauded when it was done.
They sat down to dinner around 6:15, and Gibson’s hired help rolled the chow to them. They fell to like a bunch of animals, which was not entirely surprising, and kept knocking back that high-tension booze the whole time. I couldn’t help watching the way Maureen was eating. I tried to look away, but my eye kept wandering back, as if to make sure it was seeing what it thought it was seeing. The rest of them were packing it in, but she made them look like old ladies in a tearoom. She had no more time for sweet smiles or listening to
“Roses of Picardy”; you could have stuck a sign in front of her that said WOMAN WORKING That lady didn’t need a knife and fork; she needed a steam shovel and a conveyor belt. It was sad to watch her. And Rico (you could just see his chin over the table where the bride was sitting, and a pair of brown eyes as shy as a deer’s) kept handing her things, never changing that nervous simper.