The Flaming Corsage

by William Kennedy

  “Don’t mention it,” Nellie said, and she raised the front of her chemisette for Edward. Maginn pulled Edward by the arm outside and toward the next tent.

  “She was nice,” Edward said.

  “Not bad for starters,” Maginn said, “but we shouldn’t accept the first offer.”

  “What if you like the offer?”

  “You’re fond of busty women.”

  “I liked her style.”

  “She lacks all style. What you like is subliterate quim.”

  “Whatever you call it, it’s worth some attention.”

  “Take a squint here first,” Maginn said, and he opened the tent flap. A woman in her thirties, her long brown hair streaked with gray, smiled at her visitors. She was sitting on her cot, wrapped in a blanket, only her black stockings visible.

  “You boys looking to get warm?”

  “Maybe even hot,” Maginn said.

  “That can happen,” the whore said, and she stood and spread her arms to open the blanket. “Here’s the stove.”

  She had penetrating eyes that gave her face a smartness Edward liked. She wasn’t as chesty as Nellie, but ample, and her symmetry raised the issue of sexual aesthetics in Edward’s brain.

  “I wish we had a camera,” he said.

  “Camera ain’t what you point at this,” the whore said.

  “What should we point at it?” Maginn asked.

  “You really asking me that question?”

  “He’s making a joke,” Edward said.

  “I ain’t here for jokes.”

  “I apologize for him. How much do you charge?”

  “Six bits, same as the others, unless I do more. You know what I mean?”

  “I guess I do,” Edward said.

  “I guess you don’t, if you gotta guess about it.”

  “What’s your name?” Edward asked.

  “Rose,” the whore said. “And I got the pink petals to prove it.”

  “I think I’ll stay,” Edward said.

  “There’s another tent to check out,” Maginn said.

  “You check it and give me a report. I’m with Rose.”

  “That’s my cute boy,” Rose said.

  “All right, since you insist,” Maginn said. “I’ll meet you in the tavern in fifteen minutes.”

  “Fifteen minutes?” said Edward. “What if it’s two hours?”

  “You take two hours,” Rose said, “you get your money back.” She unbuttoned Edward’s suit coat.

  “Don’t wait for me past Tuesday,” Edward told Maginn.

  Edward wondered at his own choice, decided he was behaving instinctually, without accessible logic, but knew his behavior was full of awe and pity and reverence and some bizarre desire yet to be understood. As Rose moved through her early performance Edward adjudged her a woman of imaginative display: skilled in revelation, exalted by self-communion, who yielded herself without haste. “A gift of flint, nest of tinder” is how he would describe such a woman in one of his short stories. She moved Edward slowly into fervency.

  “Tell Rose you like her and you’re gonna take her.”

  “I like Rose so much I’m taking her for a ride.”

  “That’s my cute boy.”

  “This train is moving.”

  “All aboard. Going home to your best girl.”

  “Rose is my best girl.”

  “Rose is the only girl you ever wanted.”

  “Rose is there from the first day.”

  “You couldn’t go no place without Rose.”

  “We’re going to heaven, me and Rose.”

  “This boy is so nice that Rose is in love.”

  “I’m in love with Rose.”

  “The cute boy’s in love with an old whore.”

  “Rose isn’t old.”

  “The cute boy’s in love with an ugly old whore.”

  “I’m in love with a beautiful whore named Rose.”

  “The cute boy makes Rose happy.”

  “Is Rose happy making love?”

  “Rose is happy making money.”

  “Which comes first, the money or the love?”

  “They all come before Rose.”

  “Gotta go, Rose.”

  “Not yet, cute boy.”

  “Rose is so nice it’s nice, but I’m going away.”

  “It’s not two hours.”

  “Two hours couldn’t be better than now.”

  “My cute boy.”

  “Goodbye, Rose.”

  “There goes the cute boy.”

  “There goes Rose.”

  “Cute boy is gone.”

  “And Rose?”

  “Rose is where she is.”

  At the crowded bar in the Bull’s Head tavern, Maginn greeted Edward with a triumphant smile.

  “Two for the price of one,” he said. “I went back to the first tent and opted for the bung-eyed bitch, but she was so lackadaisical I departed her corpus and threatened not to pay for such inertia. Her tenting twin—Nellie, wasn’t it?—came to the rescue. Very vigorous, Nellie. Bicameral bawds. Unexpected dividend. How was Rose?”

  “Splendid.”

  “In what way?”

  “In all ways.”

  “You went all ways?”

  “She was splendid. Let it go at that.”

  “The details are important, Daugherty. As a reporter you should know that.”

  “This place is too noisy,” Edward said. The bar was two deep with drinkers, fogged with cigar and pipe smoke, and in a corner a fight seemed about to happen. “Let’s go someplace quiet. I’m hungry.”

  “Venereal delight stokes the appetite.”

  They took the West Shore train from the Fairgrounds to downtown Albany, and at Edward’s insistence walked up from the station to the Kenmore for dinner.

  “I can’t afford their prices,” Maginn said. “I’m not yet part of the plutocracy, like some of my friends.”

  “It’s good that I am,” Edward said. “I’ll buy dinner.”

  “Done,” said Maginn. “A plutocratic gesture if there ever was one.”

  In addition to wages from The Argus, Edward had an annuity from birth given to him by Lyman Fitzgibbon that would keep him from starving until he reached age thirty, four years hence, and this allowed him to keep rooms on Columbia Street, close to the newspaper and just up from the Kenmore, where, unlike Maginn, he dined often.

  He went to the men’s washroom and soaped off the residue of Rose’s body from his hands and his privates. Then he went back upstairs and with Maginn sat in the tan leather chairs of the hotel’s lobby lounge while they waited for a table. Maginn bought a cigar at the newsstand, bit off the end and spat it into the brass cuspidor, then lit the cigar with a match he struck on the sole of Edward’s shoe.

  Edward saw Katrina entering with her parents through the hotel’s side door on Columbia Street, avoiding the lobby and the vulgar stares of the loungers. The three went directly to the dining room—reserved table, of course.

  “Isn’t that the magnificent woman you proposed to?” Maginn asked.

  “That is she. With Mama and Papa.”

  “Her beauty is exhilarating.”

  “I agree.”

  “I wonder how she compares with Rose.”

  “Wonder to yourself,” Edward said.

  “Protective already,” said Maginn. “I can see the transformation. ‘Once the favorite of whores of all ages, Edward Daugherty has evolved into the perfect husband.’ ”

  Edward perceived that Maginn, the gangling whoremonger, was miffed that women in both tents had given their preferred eye to Edward; and he would, in a later year, remember this day as the beginning of his relationship to Maginn’s envy and self-esteem, the beginning of competitive lives, even to evaluating the predilections of whores (“They picked you because you picked them, no trick to that”). It would be Maginn’s oft-repeated credo that “the only thing that can improve on a lovely whore is another lovely whore.” Edward’s unspoken credo tow
ard Katrina-as-bride-to-be was: “If she becomes my wife, then my wife is my life.”

  The Kenmore’s maître d’, a light-skinned Negro, came toward them. “Your table is ready, Mr. Daugherty,” he said.

  “Very good, Walter.”

  He led them to a table next to Katrina and her parents. But Edward asked for one at the far end of the crowded dining room, Albany’s largest, where Parlatti’s orchestra was playing a medley from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, all the rage.

  “I’d like to meet your bride formally,” Maginn said. “Will you introduce me?”

  “Another time. And she’s not yet my bride.”

  They walked past the Taylors without a glance. After they’d been seated beside a thicket of ported palms, Edward walked back and greeted Katrina, Geraldine, and Jacob Taylor. He stared at Katrina, her golden hair swept into an almost luminous soft corona, and was about to bend and kiss her hand; but then he thought of his mouth on Rose’s body, and only bent and nodded and smiled his love toward her.

  “Your friend Giles Fitzroy won two gold medals today at the Fair, for his saddle horses,” Edward said to her.

  “The Fitzroys do breed champions,” Jacob Taylor said.

  “I’ve been reading what you write about the Fair,” Katrina said. “You make it so exciting. I want to see it.”

  The sound of her voice, the cadence of her speech, seemed musical to Edward, a fragment of a Mozart aria. Everything about her had the aura of perfection. He knew his perception must be awry, and he thought he should try to find flaws in the woman. But to what end? Is it so wrong to embrace perfection? Am I a dunce to believe in it?

  “Come tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll give you an insider’s tour. You come with her, Geraldine; you, too, Jake.”

  “I think not,” Geraldine Taylor said. “I’m told it’s overrun with a vulgar crowd.”

  “There are some of those,” Edward said, and he understood that Geraldine could accept no generosity, not even a meaningless invitation, if it came from beneath her station.

  “People like the Fitzroys and the Parkers and the Cornings are exhibitors,” Edward said, “and they’re frequently around. I’ll stop by in the morning, Katrina, and see what you decide.” He nodded farewell and went back to Maginn, who was buttering a biscuit as a waiter poured his wine.

  “I sit here and look at these good burghers with their gold watch chains dangling over their pus bellies,” Maginn said, “and I all but drown in my loathing.”

  “That’s juvenile,” said Edward. “They’re only people who’ve found a way to make some money.”

  “Come on now, Edward. They’re another breed. With them and us it’s like thoroughbreds and swine. Those mosquito-loving Irish canal diggers in your novel are sewer rats to them. But I loathe them just as much as they loathe me. Is there one of them in this dining room who’d invite you home if they knew you drink in a saloon that has an encampment of whores in the backyard? Or me—if they found out my old man salvages hides and bones of dead horses and sells their flesh to pig farmers?”

  “I would,” said Edward.

  “You’re a rare specimen,” said Maginn, “and I drink to whatever makes you say that.” He sipped his wine, put down the glass. “But then you still tote the baggage of the sentimental mick, offering alms to forlorn souls. You’re really not that long out of the bog yourself, are you?”

  “Long enough that I’m at home in this room, no matter what company I keep.”

  “Touché. Yet you wouldn’t introduce me to Katrina. Too obvious a bogtrotter, is that my problem?”

  “It’s a family situation. Let’s move on to something else, shall we?”

  Edward imagined Maginn unloosing his gutter candor in the presence of Katrina and her parents, and he winced. Just what Geraldine expects from the Irish. Maginn, you’re great company, and you own a fine mind, but you are a problem.

  “You keep complaining about your editor at The Journal,” Edward said. “How do you get along with him?”

  “Like a tree gets along with a dog.”

  “If you’re interested, I’ll put in a word at The Argus. I know my editor would like to have your lively style in our pages. He’s said as much.”

  “My present editor loathes my lively style.”

  “There’s a lot of loathing in your life, Maginn.”

  “You connect me at The Argus, my loathing will dissipate like warm sunshine lifting fog off a bog.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “You’re a princely fellow, Daugherty, a princely fellow, for a mick. I’ll buy the wine.”

  EDWARD HAD ENTERED Katrina’s world at the adolescent moment when he registered at Albany Academy to begin the education Lyman Fitzgibbon, Geraldine Taylor’s father, had ordained for him. Edward’s father, Emmett Daugherty, came to this country from County Galway in 1836 at age fourteen, and at eighteen hired on as coachman for Lyman’s Adirondack expedition, an extended trip to acquire land for the railroad, lumbering, and mining interests that were central to Lyman’s bountiful life. The expedition encountered hostility in a remote Warren County hamlet that was so new it lacked a name. Lyman and his lawyer were taken captive by townsmen, who foresaw accurately that these interlopers were about to change life as they knew it; and they prepared tar and feathers for them. Young Emmett Daugherty, as truculent as the next man when called upon, picked up a fallen tree branch and felled the townsmen’s ringleader, then garroted him with a horsewhip and, by legend, told the man’s cronies, “Turn those men loose or I twist the tongue out of his head,” the tongue already halfway out.

  That was July 1840, and Lyman vowed Emmett would never want for anything again, and that his children would have the best education available.

  Edward was born to Emmett and Hanorah Sweeney on Main Street in the North End in 1859, went to the North End public school for five years, then three years to the Christian Brothers boys’ school on Colonie Street in Arbor Hill, Emmett insisting that Edward first discover the workingman’s God before going off to study among pagans and Protestants.

  Lyman Fitzgibbon was London-born (1805), Oxford-educated, a translator of Tacitus’ Germania, wealthy early in life, a British diplomat at midlife, and, as British consul in France, rescuer of Louis-Philippe in the revolution of 1848. For his inventions relating to metalworking machinery he was called “the merchant-scientist” and, along with his stove-making foundry and investments, he became not only Albany’s richest man, but its most variously eminent. He was also Edward’s godfather.

  Through the benediction of this eminence, Edward, when he enrolled in the Academy, entered the elite circle of Albany’s social life, became close friends with boys whose fathers ran the city, was invited to dances with debutantes, sleigh rides and tobogganing expeditions out to the Albany County Club, and dinners at the Fort Orange Club as Lyman’s guest. On such occasions he came to know the young Katrina Taylor, Lyman’s granddaughter, but she was six years his junior, a child. They grew up as friendly “common-law cousins,” as he called their relationship. They were separated by Edward’s years at Columbia College, when he lived in New York City, and later by his western trip to research the lives of the Irish workers who had built the Erie, men whose achievement his father had invoked often, and about whom Edward was writing his first novel. And so it was not until the night the Democrats marched in the vast torchlight parade celebrating Cleveland’s defeat of Blaine in the presidential election that Edward encountered the maturing Katrina.

  The city was explosive with lights, bonfires, fireworks, and parties to hail the new chief of state from Albany, and a line of thousands of marchers, their oil-lit torches creating a dancing serpent of lights, moved past more thousands of cheering spectators in a triumphal procession up State Street’s steep incline. Edward watched from the stoop of Lyman’s home, an august four-and-a-half-story brownstone facing on State Street and, like other homes on this night, festooned with Chinese lanterns. More lanterns bloomed like bizarre fo
rms of fruit on Lyman’s trees, and buildings across the street displayed the American and Irish flags, and huge images of Grover Cleveland.

  In the crowd on the sidewalk a woman caught Edward’s eye when she opened a yellow parasol and held it aloft over her yellow bonnet as the parade approached. The band played and the marchers yelled in left-right cadence: “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of Maine,” and Edward recognized the woman with the yellow bonnet as Katrina. He went down the stoop and stood behind her and parted her shoulder. When she turned to him he saw a Katrina (she was “Katch” to him as a child) he’d never known.

  “My God, how lovely you look, Katch,” he said. “What have you done to yourself? You’re positively beautiful.”

  “I suppose I’ve grown up. But so have you. You look very much a man of the world, Edward.”

  “And so I like to think that I am. But even as a man of the world I don’t understand why you open your parasol when it is neither sunny nor raining.”

  “It well might rain oil on my new bonnet from those dreadful torches. And I would not like that at all.”

  The marchers broke into a new chant: “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?” a Blaine campaign slogan about Cleveland’s bastard son. But the electorate shrugged off this scandal, and the marchers now voiced the new, answering gibe: “Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!”

  “That is so funny, and so just,” Katrina said.

  “Didn’t his fathering a child out of wedlock scandalize you?”

  “He never denied the boy, and he took care of him. He’s a courageous man, Mr. Cleveland.”

  “You have a modern outlook on the matter, for a woman.”

  “I am a modern woman.”

  “So you say. And so you may be.”

  Katrina spotted Giles Fitzroy riding with a dozen men from the Jacksonians. She called his name and waved to him.

  “It’s Giles,” she said. “He’s riding Phantom Guest. What a beautiful horse. This is all so wonderful. We really, really, really won. It’s staggering, isn’t it?”

  “Cleveland owes his election to me, did you know that?”

  “No, you must tell me. Did you vote a thousand times?”

  “Not quite. Are you going to Lyman’s party?”