of the block below the church, then I snubbed my smoke and went inside.
“They’re coming,” I told Miss 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 curd-white 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—atleast 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