The Flaming Corsage

by William Kennedy

  Praise for William Kennedy:

  “Kennedy is a writer with something to say, about matters that touch us all, and he says it with uncommon artistry”

  Washington Post

  “Kennedy’s power is such that the reader will follow him almost anywhere, to the edge of tragedy and back again to redemption”

  Wall Street Journal

  “Kennedy’s art is an eccentric triumph, a quirky, risk-taking imagination at play upon the solid paving stones, the breweries, the politicos and pool sharks of an all-too-actual city”

  The New York Review of Books

  “His smart, sassy dialogue conveys volumes about character. His scene setting makes the city throb with life”

  Newsday

  “What James Joyce did for Dublin and Saul Bellow did for Chicago, William Kennedy has done for Albany, New York: created a rich and vivid world invisible to the ordinary eye”

  Vanity Fair

  “His beguiling yarns are the kind of family myths embellished and retold across a kitchen table late at night, whiskified, raunchy, darkly funny”

  Time

  “William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle is one of the great achievements of modern American writing”

  Daily Mail

  “William Kennedy is pre-eminent among his generation of writers . . . Kennedy is peerless in the depth and acuity of his sustained vision, and the lost, past world of Albany says more to us today about the current state, about the heart and soul, of American politics than any recent bestselling, Hollywood-pandering political thriller has ever done”

  Spectator

  “Kennedy’s writing is a triumph: he tackles topics in a gloriously comic, almost old-fashioned language. You feel Kennedy could write the Albany phone book and make it utterly entertaining”

  Time Out

  “Kennedy proves to be truly Shakespearean”

  The Sunday Times

  “Kennedy is one of our necessary writers”

  GQ

  ALSO BY WILLIAM KENNEDY

  FICTION

  The Ink Truck

  Legs

  Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game

  Ironweed

  Quinn’s Book

  Very Old Bones

  Roscoe

  Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

  NONFICTION

  O Albany!

  Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

  WITH BRENDAN KENNEDY

  Charlie Malarkey and the Belly-Button Machine

  Charley Malarkey and the Singing Moose

  First published in the USA by Viking Penguin Inc. 1996

  This ebook edition published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2011

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © WJK Inc. 1996

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of William Kennedy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-84983-846-7

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-84983-847-4

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CRo 4YY

  Here’s a how-de-do!

  If I marry you,

  When your time has come to perish,

  Then the maiden whom you cherish

  Must be slaughtered, too!

  Here’s a how-de-do!

  . . . . . .

  With a passion that’s intense

  I worship and adore,

  But the laws of common sense

  We oughtn’t to ignore.

  If what he says is true,

  ’Tis death to marry you!

  Here’s a pretty state of things!

  Here’s a pretty how-de-do!

  — Gilbert and Sullivan, The Mikado

  CONTENTS

  The Love Nest

  Edward in the City of Tents

  Edward Rediscovers Katrina

  Edward Begins a Serious Dialogue with Katrina, While Dancing

  Edward and the Bean Soup

  Edward Delivers a Manifesto

  Katrina Visits the Angel of the Sepulchre

  Edward Brings Katrina Home to Main Street

  The Bull on the Porch

  Dinner at the Delavan is Interrupted

  Katrina Visits the Ruins

  Katrina at Emmett’s Sickbed

  “Cully Watson Hanged”

  A Picnic on the Barge

  Courting the Fireman’s Wife

  Dinner at the Daughertys’

  The Rape of Felicity: Two Versions

  Edward Visits a Movie Set

  Katrina’s Diary and the Bovine Poem

  Edward Goes to the Slaughterhouse

  Katrina in the Drawing Room Mirror

  Katrina Sits for her Portrait, with a Flower

  Katrina Deposits some Valuables in the Bank Vault

  Katrina Watches The Flaming Corsage

  Katrina Ruminates on what She has Seen

  Edward and Katrina Revisit the Cemetery

  Edward Completes his Play at the Kenmore Hotel

  “Scandalous Play Closes”

  Letter to the Editor

  Edward Writes a New Play

  Edward Goes to the Tenderloin at a Late Hour

  Edward Wakes in the Moonlight at Three o’Clock in the Morning

  Edward Concludes a Dialogue with Katrina on his Front Porch

  WHEN THE HUSBAND made his surprise entrance into the Manhattan hotel suite, his wife was leaning against a table, clad in a floor-length, forest-green velvet cloak, and wearing a small eye mask of the same color, her black hair loose to below her shoulders.

  The second woman, her light-brown hair upswept into a fuss of soft curls that bespoke an energetic nature, and wearing a floor-length, peach-colored evening gown embroidered with glass pearls, was in conversation with the man who had rented this suite months earlier, and who at this moment was wearing a frock coat, evening trousers, wing collar, gray ascot and pearl stickpin, the two dressed as if for a social evening. They were standing near the window that gave a view at dusk of the falling leaves and barren branches of the elms and maples of lower Fifth Avenue.

  The husband’s entrance to the suite was made with a key. How he came into possession of the key has not been discovered. The husband spoke first to his wife, saying, according to one witness, “You Babylonian whore, everything is undone”; or, according to the other witness, “Babylon, regina peccatorum, you are gone.” Turning then to both the man in the wing collar and the second woman, the husband spoke of “traitors” and “vixen,” his exact phrase unclear to both witnesses. The husband then opened his coat, drew a .45-caliber Colt revolver from his waistband, parted his wife’s cloak with its barrel, placed the barrel against her left breast, and shot her precisely through the heart. The position in which she fell onto the carpet revealed that she wore nothing beneath the cloak.

  The husband turned to the man by the window and fired two shots at him, hitting him with one, the force of which propelled him backward into the win
dowpane, which shattered. The second woman screamed, ran into the bedroom, and locked its door. The wounded man watched the husband staring at his pistol and heard him mumble, “Confido et conquiesco,” which translates from the Latin as: I trust and am at peace. After saying this, the husband put the revolver barrel under his chin, pulled the trigger, and fell dead beside his exposed wife.

  IT WAS THE year the State Fair came to Albany, and as Edward Daugherty walked through the vast city of tents and impromptu structures that had sprung up in a matter of weeks at the Fairgrounds on the Troy Road, he felt a surge of strength, a certainty that he was changing substantially, at the breaking dawn of a creative future.

  He could see the tents on the midway where seven newspapers had their offices and seven sets of reporters wrote yards of daily copy about Shorthorns and Clydesdales, Cotswold sheep, and Poland China swine. In the Albany Evening Journal’s tent he found Maginn writing at a table.

  “What news do you have of the swine?” Edward asked.

  “What a coincidence that you ask,” Maginn said, and he thrust what he was writing at Edward, who read:

  Country maidens in their best bib and tucker shot coy glances at robust lads of brawny arm and sun-browned face as a brilliantly sunny day brought thousands to the midway of the Fair yesterday. Flirtations were numerous and many lords of creation succumbed before batteries of sparkling eyes.

  “Splendid,” said Edward, “but what about the swine?”

  “They are the swine,” said Maginn.

  Edward was twenty-six, dark-haired and tall, considered by women young and old to be the handsomest of men. Thomas Maginn, lanky and lean at twenty-eight, was considered a ragtail beanpole with an acid tongue. The two worked for rival Albany newspapers, Maginn on The Journal, Edward on The Argus, had known each other a year, but now, as working rivals on the Fair’s midway—better than a circus, as all knew—they had tested each other’s attitudes toward this instant city and were impressed with its two miles of stables, its racetrack, its complete farm, its vast Hall of Machinery with the latest thermostatic chicken incubators, potato diggers, sulky plows, and typewriters, the oyster pavilion, the temporary lockup/courtroom where troublemakers won swift justice, and the curiosities—the solid-silver razor, the huge pyramid of sacked salt, the embalmed dog in a casket.

  “A confected metropolis,” Maginn had called the Fair, and Edward agreed that its rapid construction, and its appeal to both the elite and the crowd, reflected a creativity that could harmonize the wonders of existence with a flick of the mind. To such creation both young men aspired, seeing themselves as citizens of a world beyond newspapers. Edward had graduated with honors from Albany Academy and Columbia College. Maginn had been expelled from Columbia for drunkenness in his sophomore year, an autodidact ever since.

  “Luckiest day of my life when they kicked me out,” he said. “Unburdened forever of pedants and pederasts.”

  One night after the Fair closed, Maginn cajoled Edward into joining him at the Freethinkers convention at the Leland Opera House in Albany for a lecture on “The Aristocracy of Free Thought,” and they heard a man named Palmer aver that “a true gentleman would always embrace the highest forms of culture and contribute most to the good of his fellowmen. And the true gentleman will maintain that woman’s consent is as requisite as man’s.”

  “I don’t know as that’s necessary,” Maginn whispered.

  “The best must rule,” Palmer declaimed. “No man can prevail among the true elect if he remains imprisoned in the bastille of a dwarfing environment.”

  Just such an environment, Maginn said, he and Edward inhabited as Albany newsmen, but only temporarily. Edward was about to publish a novel, The Mosquito Lovers (about Irish convict laborers as expendable martyrs in the building of the Erie Canal, men who elected to risk a dig through malarial swampland rather than rot their souls in jail). Maginn regularly published reviews of fiction and belles lettres in the Atlantic Monthly, had just finished revaluing Melville’s The Confidence-Man as an underrated work on human treachery, and was writing a novel.

  This imminence of large-minded success convinced the young men they were vastly smarter than the run of Fairgoers, including their fellow reporters, and would soon inhabit a lofty perch in America’s high culture. Maginn had shown Edward his Melville essay. Edward’s response was “Well written but perfunctory. It would improve if you didn’t view your own opinions as unmatched in human thought.” Edward let Maginn read his novel in manuscript. Maginn found it “seriously wanting as fiction, but you write such effective dialogue you should be a playwright.”

  This critical honesty formed a bond of truth-telling between them, and their friendship deepened when they found they could talk to each other about anything at all.

  As they strolled the trim rolling field that came down from the western rise of the valley, they eyed passing females and tried to recall all women they had ever desired. Maginn observed that a voluptuous woman was the greatest gift the universe offered to an imaginative man, a statement that seemed true to Edward; but the word “voluptuous,” “How do you define it, Maginn?”

  “A woman who delights in her body and what a man does to it,” said Maginn. “A woman who loves the encounter.”

  “You mean a loose woman, then?”

  “Not quite, but all women are loose at some time or other,” Maginn said.

  “I disagree,” Edward said. “The most voluptuous woman I’ve ever met I know in my soul isn’t promiscuous, and is undoubtedly a virgin.”

  “They become loose after they cease to be virgins.”

  “You are very down on women.”

  “Every chance I get,” said Maginn.

  “I may marry a woman who doesn’t conform to your view of promiscuous females.” Then, without wishing to, but in defense of his putative bride-to-be, he blurted out her name: “Katrina Taylor.”

  “Katrina Taylor! She said yes to you?”

  “Not yet. I’m waiting for her answer.”

  “You are one extraordinarily lucky son of a bitch if you snare her, my friend. She’s a woman in a million. I met her last February skating on the canal, but I doubt she knows my name.”

  “She may not have me,” Edward said.

  “Ye gods! Katrina Taylor! Thinking about a woman like that must drive you mad. What do you do when the urge comes on you?”

  “Which urge? I have many.”

  “The only urge worth yielding to. It’s on me now just talking about women, and I thought I’d yield over at the Pasture.”

  “The Pasture?”

  “You are benighted, Daugherty. You’ve been here a week and haven’t heard of the other tent city? We must complete your education.”

  As dusk enveloped the Fairgrounds and the Fair’s seven gates closed for the night, the young men walked to the Bull’s Head tavern, beyond the fenced pasture where six bulls rested beside a barn. They walked across the tavern’s open meadow, where prizefights were staged, to four small tents standing in a clearing of the bordering woods. This was the Fair-spawned Night Village, where the Ladies of the Pasture sold bucolic love. The brothels downtown in Albany and across the river in Troy were servicing multitudes of visiting Fairgoers in quest of passion’s two-bit nocturne; but the higher-paid Ladies of the Pasture opened for business at high noon and worked well past moonrise, catering to postmeridian libido, and to lust which lacked the time or inclination to quit the Fair’s environs.

  The night was brisk and Edward and Maginn both wore fedoras and three-button suits. A man sitting in front of one open tent lit by a kerosene lamp was accepting money from a tall, brawny farm boy. The boy paid, then bent himself into the tent and closed the flap behind him.

  “You boys in the market?”

  “We’re shopping,” said Maginn.

  “Anything in particular?”

  “They should be pretty.”

  “Hell, they’re all pretty once you’re in that tent. Just go say hello and see what you li
ke. Last three tents. The first one’s busy.”

  “We’ll take a look,” Maginn said.

  As he and Edward walked to the farthest tent, Edward stopped and asked aloud, “Why am I doing this?”

  “What is it you’re doing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then you’re making a discovery,” Maginn said. “Like Lewis and Clark charting the Northwest Territory, we’re about to enter the heady hemisphere of love.”

  “I’m already in love.”

  “Love may look virginal, but also whorish. You have to differentiate the forms.”

  “This will serve me well?”

  “You will earn medals for your service.”

  “Who awards the medals?”

  “The whores of the world, by which I mean most of the human race.”

  “You have a dark view of life, Maginn.”

  “Dark, like French pussy,” Maginn said.

  At the last tent Maginn raised the flap and they walked in on two young whores who looked about twenty, bundled in coats, sitting on chairs.

  “Good evening, ladies, we came to say hello.”

  “Is that all you came for?” asked the one with blond bangs and a crossed eye.

  “We’d like to see what you’re offering.”

  The girls stood and took off their coats, showing matching bodies clad in chemisettes and black stockings.

  “My name is Nellie,” said the girl with normal eyes, lowering her shoulder strap. She was dark-haired and chesty. “We came to see the Fair,” she said.

  “And have you seen it?”

  “Not yet. We found this job, and when we get through at night the Fair is closed.”

  “Well, we’re glad you’re not closed,” Maginn said. “You look lovely from the anterior perspective, but may we now have your posterior revelation?”

  “What’s that?” the cross-eyed girl asked.

  “He means our fannies,” Nellie said. The two turned their backs and bent from the waist.

  “Very intriguing,” Maginn said. “We’ll be back.”

  “Thank you kindly, girls,” Edward said.