The Flaming Corsage

by William Kennedy

  “Of course.”

  “Then I’ll tell you there.”

  They watched the paraders: all the Democratic clubs, many carrying brooms for a clean sweep, and the Irish-American Association (with which Emmett Daugherty marched), and the German Democratic Business Men, the Dry Goods Cleveland Club stepping to the rhythms of the Tenth Infantry Band, and the Flynn Fife and Drum Corps, and so many more, moving up to Capitol Park, where the President-elect waved down from his executive chamber.

  When all paraders had passed, Edward and Katrina went into Lyman’s house, where bustling servants were setting out punch bowls and placing vases of flowers on tables and mantels.

  “We’re early,” Edward said, and he greeted the servants and steered Katrina by the arm into the conservatory. She sat on a bench with her parasol in her lap, and Edward looked long at her and studied the phenomenal change in her face, the way she combed her hair, the way she held herself with such poise, such an air of certainty about who and what she was.

  “You are dazzling tonight, Katch,” he said. “How old are you now?”

  “I’m about to be nineteen, thank you.”

  “Is anybody paying court to your radiant self?”

  “I have my admirers.”

  “Permit me to join their number. Where have I been?”

  “You should control yourself and tell me how you elected the President.”

  He leaned on the back of her bench and put his eyes in line with hers. Looking at her face silenced him.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Yes, the election. I’d much rather look at you. I went to a dinner party at the Fort Orange Club to meet the Governor, and Lyman introduced me as ‘the talented son of a fine Irishman whose vote you need.’ Mr. Cleveland agreed the Irish vote was important and asked who my father might be.

  “ ‘Emmett Daugherty, foreman at Lyman’s foundry,’ I told him, ‘but I doubt he’ll vote for you, Governor. He’s very angry with all politicians, and so is the whole North End. Father Loonan, the pastor of Sacred Heart church, talks of it every Sunday from the pulpit, and a North End saloonkeeper with a keen political eye says his customers are talking Blaine. North Enders are Democrats, but this year it’s up for grabs.’

  “ ‘Why are they so angry with me?’ the Governor asked me.

  “ ‘You, the Mayor, the aldermen, everybody who forces them to live in mud,’ I said. ‘Anybody who hasn’t delivered any pavement to North Albany’s streets or sidewalks. It’s an old, old promise nobody’s ever kept. They see Elk Street, where your wealthy friends live, being paved with granite blocks, while they’re still riding on rotting planks in a sea of mud. After a rain they have to put bog shoes on their horses to get home. And they blame you.’

  “ ‘Do you know Father Loonan?’ says the Governor.

  “ ‘I do,’ says I.

  “ ‘Bring him and this saloonkeeper—what’s his name?’

  “ ‘Jack McCall. Black Jack, they call him.’

  “ ‘Bring Black Jack and the good father up to see me. We’ll have a chat.’

  “ ‘I’ll do that tomorrow,’ says I.

  “ ‘Do you know anybody else who doesn’t like me?’ the Governor says.

  “ ‘Aren’t the North End Irish enough?’ says I.

  “I had no trouble convincing Jack and Father Loonan to visit the Governor. He saw us straightaway and had Mayor Banks in the office with him. They listened to the complaints about mud and the Governor asked the Mayor could he get the contractor paving Elk Street to start on Broadway in North Albany? The Mayor said the city had let no contract to pave Broadway.

  “ ‘Well, let one,’ said the Governor. ‘We’ll get you reimbursed. But get the crews out there tomorrow.’ And the Mayor said he’d get on it.

  “The Governor thanked me for my enterprise; then he and Black Jack got off on fishing and it was as if they’d known each other forever. ‘We’ll have to go to the mountains one day and get some trout,’ the Governor said, and on the way out Father Loonan told me I ought to run for governor when Cleveland leaves. I said I couldn’t, that I was a writer.

  “The next day, workers put granite blocks on Broadway, starting in front of Sacred Heart church. We had a rally five nights later and five hundred heard Jack’s speech. They marched and chanted against Blaine, the highway robber from the state of Maine. It was the biggest political turnout in neighborhood history. And Blaine’s support went the way of North Albany mud.

  “Cleveland carried the state by one thousand one hundred and forty-nine votes,” Edward said. “Only five hundred and seventy-five votes would have reversed those results, and the Democratic plurality in North Albany was six hundred and seventy-seven.”

  “Why, you’re a miracle worker,” Katrina said.

  “I’m glad you understand that about me,” Edward said.

  People were arriving from the parade, and Lyman’s valet was helping him down the stairs to the parlor to greet them.

  “He looks so frail lately,” Katrina said.

  “Only his body. His mind is very astute.”

  “He’s terribly fond of you,” Katrina said.

  “He’s like a second father,” Edward said. “And he’s crazy about you. But right this minute I’m crazier about you than he is.”

  “You are turning this girl’s head, sir.”

  “I mean to do nothing else, as soon as I’m able. I have obligations for a month or two.”

  “I’m abandoned before I’m courted.”

  “You will not be abandoned. I intend to pursue you with a fervid Irish passion, unlike anything you’ve ever imagined. But I must finish what I’ve begun.”

  “And what is it you’ve begun?”

  “A novel I’ve been writing for more than a year, the key to my new life. One key. You are the other.”

  “You’ve become an impetuous man, Edward.”

  “I am a man instantly in love. Do you mind if I love you?”

  “I have never been so flattered, or so quickly.”

  “I have just begun to flatter you. I have just begun to worship you.”

  IN THE MONTHS that followed his rediscovery of Katrina, Edward took a leave from The Argus and devoted his days to the final research and writing of his Erie Canal novel. He finished by late summer 1885, and began, with great earnestness, a campaign to have himself invited to all social events he knew Katrina would attend. Katrina’s mother noted this.

  “That man is a pest,” Geraldine said.

  “He’s a perfect gentleman, and very intelligent,” Katrina said. “I’m always happy to see him.”

  “I don’t care how intelligent he is, he’s not the right sort for you,” her mother said.

  September’s major social event was the ball for the coming-out of Felicity Grenville, held in Bleecker Hall on Maiden Lane. Edward found Katrina besieged by suitors and only at the cotillion did he discover she had saved a place for him on her dance card. As soon as they were arm in arm in the dance he said to her, “I’ve decided. Yes, I’ve made the decision.”

  “Oh? And what did you decide?”

  “To ask you to marry me.”

  “I believe I knew that.”

  “Wasn’t that presumptuous of you?”

  “I’m a student of love, Edward, and you seem to be a proper subject for my scrutiny.”

  “You considered my proposal even before you heard it.”

  “I wouldn’t have dared.”

  “But in your scrutiny you had passing thoughts. Is your answer yes?”

  “No.”

  “Is it no?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Not a very satisfactory response.”

  “You have no right to an instant answer to that question.”

  “But you expected the question.”

  “Yes, but I must confirm the reality.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “By testing myself. For instance, how do I know if I should marry you when I haven’t even
kissed you?”

  “I could rectify that immediately. Here and now.”

  “It would cause a scandal. ‘Woe be to him who gives scandal to my brethren.’ ”

  “Upstairs, then? Downstairs? Outside?”

  “If it happens, I don’t want even the birds to see.”

  “I’ll find a secret place where we can be alone.”

  “I’ll find it when the time is right,” Katrina said.

  EDWARD WALKED THE three miles up Broadway from The Argus to Black Jack’s saloon, marking the trail through the North End with whatever psychic spoor it is that would-be bridegrooms create when they make plans to abandon home territory. He came to where the pavement used to abruptly end: at the carriageway into the pasture of the Patroon’s Manor House (where his mother had worked as a cook for the last Patroon’s widow). The Manor House was the northern boundary of civilization as Albany’s roadbuilders judged it, and after it you entered the wild Irish neighborhood where Edward was raised, and for which plank roads and mud had sufficed.

  Now new granite pavement continued past the Manor entrance, past the gasworks. And where the molders and lumber handlers of the North End had built their houses, slate sidewalks covered the old dirt paths. It pleased Edward to have been partially responsible for this, though the public heroes of upgraded life were Father Loonan and especially Jack McCall, who, in return for staging the rally that reversed the voting slide toward Blaine, had been named Democratic Leader of the Ninth Ward.

  Jack had been born into saloon life. His father, Butter McCall, ran the Bull’s Head tavern on the Troy Road until his liver stiffened, whereupon he sold the place, outraging Jack, who considered the Bull’s Head his future; so Jack then opened his own saloon on Broadway, now headquarters for anyone seeking favor with the Democratic party.

  “Short one,” Edward said to Jack, who was talking to Maginn. Jack, behind the bar in white apron and collarless white shirt, was a formidable presence, thick head of hair, Roman nose, cleanshaven, and muscular from hefting beer barrels, first at the Bull’s Head, then for the Quinn and Nolan brewery. The time now in Black Jack’s saloon was the lull before the invasion at six when the lumber mills’ whistles would blow the twelve-hour workday into oblivion, and those handlers with money to quaff would move single-mindedly into liquid pleasure. The remains of the bean soup simmered in the pot on the woodstove behind the bar, half emptied by the lunch crowd; the ham was getting down to the bone; the bread growing stale; but soup, ham, and bread would all be eaten by six-thirty, and the hell with food after that hour, was Jack’s dictum.

  Edward, when marriage became a possibility, had thought of Jack for his best man, and his visit here today was to tell Jack of his proposal to Katrina, and the resistance he was meeting from her parents. Finding Maginn here was a surprise. Maginn, now reporting for The Argus, was at the end of the bar behind his new mustache, his suit hanging loosely on his lanky frame. He was talking to Jack, pumping him about the invitation he’d received from his newfound friend, the President of the United States, to go fishing. The election poster for Cleveland and Hendricks dominated the wall of the back bar.

  “He telling his White House fish story?” Edward asked.

  “He’s telling about the letter,” Maginn said.

  “He wants the mountains,” Jack said. “Trout he wants. ‘Pick any place in the Adirondacks,’ he tells me.”

  “And what did you pick?”

  “North Creek. They got trout up there big as dogs. They jump out of the water to shake hands.”

  “That’ll be some circus, fishing with the President,” Edward said.

  “No it won’t,” said Jack. “We won’t tell anybody where we’re gonna light. He don’t want a circus, he wants to fish.”

  “I know how important the President is,” Maginn said, “but did you hear this young lad here may soon be stretched on the holy rack of matrimony?”

  “No,” said Jack. “Is that true?”

  “It could be true,” Edward said. “But there are things to be done.”

  “Buy the bed and spread the sheets, he means,” said Maginn. “He’s marrying up. Beautiful, smart, and rich. Altogether too much for him.”

  “Too much for me, but just enough for Maginn, if he could only get his hands on her.”

  “Who is she? Not Ruthie.”

  “No, not Ruthie,” Edward said.

  “Does Ruthie know?”

  “No. It’s Jake Taylor’s daughter Katrina. I proposed. She hasn’t said yes yet.”

  “Jake Taylor? That royal son of a bitch. What’s Emmett say to that?”

  “He doesn’t know about it either, but he won’t relish it.”

  “He wouldn’t, after Davy.”

  “Davy?” said Maginn.

  “My father’s brother,” Edward said. “Jake’s goons beat him so bad when he tried to organize the lumber handlers, all he can do now is shovel sawdust.”

  Edward and Jack had courted the same girls (Ruthie was the last), fished, hunted birds, and played baseball together, lived in houses back-to-back, went to school together, and grew apart only when Edward left the Christian Brothers school and moved into Lyman’s home downtown to be closer to Albany Academy.

  “Jake’s family’s Protestant,” Jack said.

  “Very true,” said Edward. Jack’s look judged him a traitor.

  “Where’s the wedding gonna be at?”

  “I haven’t even talked to her parents yet.”

  “You worry about them?”

  “She does.”

  “There’s no problem,” Maginn said. “Why should a mudhole mick from the North End have any problem marrying into one of Albany’s first families?”

  “Who’s a mudhole mick?”

  The voice came from a table where two men had been eavesdropping on the presidential talk. The bigger of the two came over to Maginn. He wore a sweater and a cap, had the slouch of a man whose back had lifted too much weight, and his drooping right eye gave him a permanent squint. Edward knew him as Matty Lookup, a lumber handler and ice cutter on hard times, suspected of breaking into Benedict’s lumber office in the District and stealing four rubber coats and pieces of harness; and so no one would hire him now. He had come by his name when he chased somebody into Tommy Mullon’s icehouse on Erie Street and lost him, but three boys in the icehouse loft called out, “Look up, Matty, look up,” and when he did they dumped a bag of horseshit on him.

  “Who’s a mudhole mick?” Matty Lookup said a second time.

  “I don’t remember,” Maginn said.

  “He’s making a joke,” Edward said. Always explaining Maginn’s jokes.

  “You calling me a mudhole mick?”

  “I don’t even know you,” Maginn said. “Why would I call you anything?”

  “You don’t like the Irish?”

  “I am Irish.”

  “You look like a goddamn Dutchman.”

  “I don’t have enough money to be Dutch.”

  “You talk like you don’t like the Irish.”

  “Why don’t you go find a mudhole that’ll accept you, and lay down and take a bath,” Maginn said.

  Matty Lookup grabbed Maginn’s throat with both hands, lifted him off his stool, then off the floor, and swung him around like the ball of a hammer. While Maginn the splinter flailed helplessly with his fists (like pummeling a sack of grain), Jack came around the bar to pull the two apart but was staggered by Matty Lookup’s backhanded wallop. Matty was pinning Maginn to a tabletop, positioning himself to bite off Maginn’s right ear, when Edward vaulted the bar, lifted the cauldron of bean soup off Jack’s stove with both hands, and moved with it toward the unequal struggle. He yelled in his most urgent vibrato, “Look up, Matty! Look up!” and, as Matty’s teeth parted to release Maginn’s ear and his glance turned predictably toward those mocking words, Edward hurled the boiling soup into his face; and Matty knew agony. He rolled off the table onto the sawdust of Black Jack’s floor, screeching the song of the sca
lded beast. Edward stood over him, the pot raised above his head with both hands, ready to break the brute’s skull if his belligerence revived. Matty wailed in pain and Edward lowered the pot. Jack, a short club in his right hand now, nudged Matty with his foot.

  “Get out you crazy son of a bitch, get out,” Jack told him. “Come in again, you’ll get worse.”

  Matty Lookup, whimpering out of his ruined flesh, stood up and shuffled his crumpled form out the door.

  “How’s your ear?” Edward asked Maginn, who, with a handkerchief, was blotting the blood that oozed from his lightly chewed ear. “Did he eat much of it?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Maginn said. “I’ve got his nose in my pocket.”

  “You hurt any place?” Jack asked him. “I thought you were all done.”

  “I would’ve been, except for our nimble novelist here. Quick thinking, old man. I myself might’ve reached for a bottle to club him with, but I’d’ve never gone for the soup. A genteel weapon. Your prospective in-laws would doubtless approve the choice.”

  Don’t say anything, Maginn.

  Jack tapped Edward’s arm with his club.

  “Good, Eddie,” he said. “You did good.” Then he went behind the bar to get the mop.

  The whistle blew in the Lumber District. Six o’clock. The men would be pouring in, any minute. Edward now hated this saloon, hated Matty Lookup, Matty Beansoup, Matty Noface, hated his own savage response to the oaf. What was served by your attack and your sacrifice, Matty? What rubric of resistance did I serve with the soup? He held the empty pot in his hand. He looked at it: foot and a half deep, blue enamel, chipped rim, charred bottom, implement of retribution. He looked up and saw Maginn staring at him and smiling, blotting soup from his coat. Jack came with the pail and mop and went to work on the beans.

  Edward could not now ask Jack to be his best man. A great fellow, Jack. A generous man if ever there was one, and now he’s got Ruthie all to himself. But he doesn’t approve of Katrina. Everybody’s generosity ends somewhere.

  Maginn was still smiling.

  “Shut up, Maginn,” Edward said.

  EDWARD MOUNTED THE stoop of Katrina’s home on Elk Street, a quiet shaded thoroughfare on Capitol Hill that because of its monied residents was known as Quality Row. This was his first visit to this house since his proposal to Katrina. He’d seen her often, exchanged letters with her daily, but was persona non grata until her insistence wore down her parents. She had written Edward this morning that her determination had triumphed, that they would talk to him about the future; and so now, at afternoon, when he rang the pullbell of the Taylors’ Gothic Revival town house, Fletcher, the family butler these ten years, opened the door to him. As Edward entered the foyer, Fletcher took his hat, put it on the hall hat rack.