The Flaming Corsage

by William Kennedy

  “Miss Katrina will meet you in the library, Mr. Daugherty.”

  “Thank you, Fletcher. How goes the horseshoe season?”

  Fletcher, a precise and florid man of some wit, and with a day laborer’s constitution, was horseshoe champion of Elk Street servants. A summer-long competition ran in the court alongside the Taylor stables, and Edward, being of neither master nor servant class, occasionally joined the games.

  “Somewhat predictably, sir,” Fletcher said.

  “You mean you’re ahead.”

  “Yes, sir, I do mean that.”

  “I almost beat you last time,” Edward said.

  “You did, indeed. But, alas, you did not.”

  “My turn will come, Fletcher.”

  “It’s always good to believe that, Mr. Daugherty.”

  Fletcher led him to the empty library and lighted the gas in the six globes of the chandelier. The library was part sitting room with tea table and cane-bottomed straight-backed chairs, walnut bookcases with glass doors and perhaps two hundred books, blue velvet drapes on the windows, and Jacob Taylor’s orderly walnut desk, with two leather armchairs facing it. Edward sat in one of these chairs, staring at the books. He waited, listened to the silence of the vast house, stood and searched for two particular books he’d read when he came here with Lyman years ago. He scanned the English and Dutch history books, such a burden when he first opened them, and now they weighed on him again: all that confirmation of ancestry. But where are the books of my lineage, my ancient history? My history has not yet been written.

  He found books on Albany’s Dutch origins, volumes in the Dutch language, studies of the first Dutch and Episcopal churches of seventeenth-century Albany, lives of the Van Rensselaers, Albany’s founding family and its dynasty of patroons, lives of the Staatses, Jacob’s family, and shelves of Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray (which Katrina read avidly before she was allowed to have them), Washington’s memoirs, The Federalist Papers, and books on the English in Ireland, yes: what Edward was seeking.

  He took two volumes from the shelf and sat and skimmed them: “The Irish are abominable, false, cunning and perfidious people . . . The worst means of governing them is to give them their own way. In concession they see only fear, and those that fear them they hate and despise. Coercion succeeds better . . . they respect a master hand, though it be a hard and cruel one . . . Cromwell alone understood this . . .”

  The same Cromwell, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, writing of his 1649 attack on Drogheda: “. . . the enemy were about 3,000 strong in the town . . . I believe we put to the sword the whole number . . . I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the Town . . . about 200 of them possessed St. Peter’s Church-steeple . . . I ordered the steeple . . . to be fired, when one of them was heard to say in the midst of the flames: ‘God damn me, God confound me; I burn, I burn.’ . . . I wish that all honest hearts may give the glory of this to God alone . . .”

  And then to Wexford to slaughter 2,000 more: “I thought it not right or good to restrain off the soldiers from their right of pillage, or from doing execution on the enemy.”

  And Sir William Petty’s estimates: that the war reduced Ireland’s population from one million, four hundred and sixty-six thousand in 1641 to six hundred and sixteen thousand in 1652, much more than half exterminated; and three-fourths of Irish land and five-sixths of Irish houses taken over by British settlers; and, twenty years after Cromwell, three-fourths of the Irish population existing on milk and potatoes, living in cabins without chimney, door, stairs, or window.

  Wrote Gookin: “They were strong, they are weak; they were numerous, they are consumed by sword, pestilence and famine; they were hearty, they are out of courage; they were rich, they are poor and beggarly; they had soldiers, they are left naked; they had cities, they have but cottages.”

  “So,” Petty concluded on Cromwell’s achievement, “they will never rebel again.”

  Cromwell: Lyman’s presumed ancestor. Geraldine’s. Katrina’s. And here you are, Edward, seeking the hand of a woman bred of Cromwellian dust, you, whose father, by memory passed on, traces your lineage back to Connacht then and now.

  Katrina entered the library and came to him, reached out her hand and stared into his eyes.

  “I’m pleased you’re here at last,” she said. “Mother and Father will meet you alone, and I’ll come back when your conversation is over. I love how strong your face looks today.”

  “I hope it’s strong enough,” Edward said. “Will you be able to hear what is said?”

  “Oh yes, I shall,” she said.

  He watched her vanish beyond the doorway, stood with book in hand conjuring his own seventeenth-century forebears: more than two centuries gone since the ancestral Daughertys’ lands were taken in Donegal, the clan reduced to lowly cottiers tilling the land of others; some of them turning into the plundering rapparees who preferred the pike to the hoe; but, in time, all of them thrust into the barrens of western Connacht like flung dogs.

  Whether my people were marked because they had slaughtered English landholders in the bloody rebellion of 1641, or were unslaughtered remnants-in-arms after Cromwell’s 1649 conquest, it matters not, for they go into exile by Cromwellian fiat—the transplanting, he called it—to the far western part of Ireland’s most desolate province, without houses, adequate clothing, cattle, or farm implements, prohibited from living within five miles of the River Shannon or the sea. Women and children perished in ditches, dead of starvation or eaten by wolves. In their desolation the Irish fed upon dead bodies dug from graves, the survivors condemned to till the earth of Connacht’s hellish landscape and discover its essence: ubiquitous rock.

  How goes the family lineage?

  It hardens.

  And how grows the rock’s foetus?

  With neither tongue, nor brain, nor soul: doomed creature mutilated in the womb, conceived with one foot, webbed arm, vertical eyes, a row of teeth in its belly, suitable for frightening devils, born on a rock so wide the people of Connacht made it the altar of Jesus, worshiped it in Gaelic prayer, lived off its might, starving as they prayed, their priests axed or hanged, their young men and maidens sent to slavery in the Tobacco Islands where they toiled at a level below the Negro bondsmen; the leftover faithful withering by the tens of thousands, living amid a world of rock fences, those man-high sculptures that ride the contours of hills and valleys still, lace-made to foil the wind, an endless, timeless memorializing of rock in order to live free of it: fences visible for miles, miles, and miles beyond that, each rock a gravestone, each fence testament to the ingenuity of survival: leaving, where the rocks were liftable out of the earth, scrubby patches of soil for planting.

  The lineage leads from Connacht’s fences forward to famine, when even potatoes die, then into modern exile on Connacht Block in Albany, raucous overcrowded neighborhood at Madison Avenue and Quay Street, where greenhorns cluster till they find footing, send money away for others to quit the rock, then move uptown, to the North End like the Daugherty brothers, Owen and Davy first, then Emmett, or they rise like you, Edward Daugherty, to heights where you can court the modern get of an ancient devil.

  I am demonizing my love, Edward thought, to make her the equal of what her parents think I am.

  He returned the Irish books to their shelves, and he waited. Fletcher brought sherry and three glasses. Edward stared at it: Waterford crystal, brought here by Lyman.

  “The Master thought you might like a bit of sherry,” said Fletcher, setting one glass apart.

  “They are going to see me,” Edward said.

  “They will be along presently,” said Fletcher, nodding.

  “I’ve already read all the books.”

  “You are accomplished at many things, Mr. Daugherty.” And Fletcher left the room.

  Edward knew what Jacob and Geraldine would say to him, had long absorbed their hostility in the foreshortened glance, the abrupt tone, the bristling at his closeness to Lyman: for that closenes
s differed in kind from Lyman’s behavior toward his children. It was Lyman’s duty as an unmurdered man to see that Edward escaped what fate had ordained at birth for his kind. Edward was transformed, and Lyman lived to know his godson had grown and flourished, would even publish a novel, though Lyman would not live to hold it in his hand. But what Edward’s transformation would win him remains to be seen. Now here he sits, waiting to be judged, and he feels his brain on fire with ancient yearnings for justice and comprehension.

  But I will not kiss their foot.

  Well enough. Do you know what they’ll say to you?

  They’ll say the disparity between families and religions will cause friction among friends and relatives, be a curse on the marriage. They will never mention the Irish or that they see us as a race of beasts.

  They will imply, with exquisite finesse, that you are of lowly financial status, that Katrina stands to inherit great wealth, and that this wealth has given her her life as she knows it. You, a writer, could you, in a lifetime, ever earn enough to preserve her birthright? Not likely.

  They will praise you as a cultured man and wish you well in your literary pursuits, but they will continue to believe Katrina’s attentions should be from a suitor of an established profession. You, Edward, being no such thing, stand as a living impediment to a harmonious marriage, in Katrina’s mind if not in your own.

  He poured himself a sherry, bolted it. It tasted like the Irish Sea.

  He leaned back in the leather chair, considered his position, moved a straight chair to a point where it would face the two leather chairs. He sat in the straight chair and leaned forward—no, too close—moved the chair back a foot, poured another sherry, bolted it.

  They came in together, Geraldine still growing wide with age, wearing a long black dress that covered her from throat to toe and could have passed for a mourning vestment (anticipating the death-like eventuation of losing Katrina to this man?). Jacob came in with his high white collar and his unruly graying hair, and Edward stood to greet them, blocking Jacob’s access to his desk chair.

  “You have something to tell us?” Jacob asked.

  “I do,” Edward said.

  The Taylors made no move to sit down.

  “Jake, Geraldine, please sit,” Edward said. “I have a few things to say, no sense standing.”

  Geraldine sat in one of the leather armchairs, and Jacob, not taking his eye off Edward, sat warily beside her. Edward reseated himself on the hardback, facing his captive audience.

  “I’m here,” he said, “to say directly to you that I’ve asked Katrina repeatedly to marry me, and she has not said no, but neither has she said yes. I know she’s indecisive because you have questions and uncertainties about such a marriage, and about me, which is natural.”

  Jacob moved as if to speak, but Edward pressed on.

  “I don’t want to trouble either of you to speak of this now. I want only to reveal to you who I am, for even though you think you know me, you truly do not.

  “I begin with this room, where the worlds of your family and mine exist side by side on your bookshelves: Dickens and Thackeray, giants in the world I aspire to, alongside chronicles of your exalted ancestral civilization. I’ll live my life writing, books now, perhaps plays in the future, a noble profession, playwriting, as you know from Shakespeare on your shelves.

  “I’m sure you’ve heard what the gossips say about Katrina and me, that I’m aiming above my station. I don’t answer such gossip and Katrina admires me for it. After all, who’s to say what my station is? Am I fresh from the low life of the Dublin slums? Am I a rude peasant late off the stony fields of Connacht? These things may have been part of my ancestry, just as you two derive from a culture of avaricious land barons who kept farmers in unspeakable peonage for two centuries, from generations of soulless men who grew rich off the slave trade. Is that low life, or—”

  “What’s that about the slave trade?” Jacob asked. “If you’re implying—”

  “Don’t reduce yourself, Jake, don’t give it a second thought. I don’t,” and Edward quickened his speech, eliminated pauses, breathed on the run.

  “I know these are old and generic accusations, and I also know how high you’ve risen above those early scoundrels who populate your ethnic history. Only a fool would hold it against you. What a glorious heritage you have in the Staats family, paragons of religious liberty, vigorous giants of commerce, and yet there was old Jacobus Staats who scandalized his townsmen by marrying a squaw, did he not? Yes, he did, and so what? Who cares who marries whom if the bride and groom are blissful?”

  Jacob squirmed, his mouth forming a rebuttal, but in his eyes the question: What exactly is this man saying? Edward poured three glasses of sherry as he spoke and, without losing a beat, put two of them in the hands of Jacob and Geraldine, downed his own, and stood and paced before them, a dynamo of pent energy made visible and audible.

  “Henry James, the old man—you both know him, he went to Albany Academy before me—argues that Adam’s fall from Eden was necessary for Adam to achieve a higher plane of existence. And I mean to tell you that Katrina and I are now together at the gates of our own Eden, and we couldn’t be more sure of our happiness. If a fall is fated I believe we’ll rise to that higher plane, just as Adam did. We’ll thrive, we’ll transcend whatever society tries to do to us. We’ll move onto the grand stage and I’ll prosper formidably and achieve heights no lawyer or doctor who might court Katrina could ever know; for I have talent and I have energy and both will last me a lifetime.

  “I have a name descended from Irish kings who preexist Oliver Cromwell by six centuries, and I fervently believe in the aristocracy of my lost ancestral world. I’m vividly aware also that your ancestors, Geraldine, going back as they do to Cromwell’s England, your ancestors, in the name of God, tried to eliminate the entire population of Ireland, and almost succeeded. Then I sit here and all that self-glorifying butchery leaps out at me from the pages of books in this room—clear proof the past is behind us, that we’re in a new world with a new light on our own days, and you, Jake, and you, Geraldine, have the strength and courage to keep—in your own library—the record of those unspeakable crimes. Hurrah, I say to this. Hurrah for you both, hurrah for facing the worst history has to offer, and moving forward to honorable success in every realm worth inhabiting—civic, business, ecclesiastical, social, but, most of all, success in conceiving and raising the peerless Katrina, icon of beauty and wisdom. And so my congratulations to you both, and don’t say anything yet. Just think on my words. Think on me as the husband of your sublime daughter. Consider the uncritical love she and I have for each other, and what a rare thing this is in anyone’s life.”

  Then, as these final words of what Edward would come to call his Manifesto of Love and History hung in the air, he backed quickly away from Jacob and Geraldine (who still stared at him, gripping their sherry), found the library door and opened it, and then he was gone.

  HEADACHES WERE COMING gradually to Katrina, then they became intermittent, and, after two weeks, incessant; and so she took to her bed with valerian drops, the only avenue to sleep. When the sedatives worked she slept day into night, read poetry (especially Baudelaire and Verlaine, who, she had learned in school, were abominable writers to be avoided), read them to tire herself with the pleasure of words, and told her family she was not ill, only full of bodily weariness.

  Katrina took her meals from a tray and kept reading, marveling at Baudelaire’s misogyny: I have always been astonished that women are allowed to enter churches. What can they have to do with God?

  God, on the arm of the Episcopal Bishop (very high church), came regularly to dinner at Katrina’s home. God ate well, stayed late, and the discourse, while boring, was not without merit: for it reinforced the family conviction that evil resided elsewhere, and that divine providence hovered just above the dining room chandelier.

  One night she awoke dreaming of panthers running loose in the forest. Her vantage p
oint from an upper story of her house gave her a full view of the threat, and then one of the panthers was inside the stable. Katrina went downstairs to the kitchen, and as she reached for the butcher knife to defend herself, a blue panther, jaws wide in a snarl, sprang out of the bread box. She sat up in a silent scream, her headache gone. She put on her night-robe, walked down to the kitchen, and opened the bread box. She found the butcher knife, cut a corner of bread, and ate it sitting at the window, staring out at that patch of her garden that was illuminated by streetlamps. She could see the Venus fountain, after Botticelli, that her father had bought in Italy, and, around its base, the yellow and orange leaves that were falling from the trees.

  Of course the dream was Edward.

  She got up from the window and boiled a kettle of water, then went to the china room and took down the Berlin cup and saucer that had belonged to the King of Holland, and the tea service owned by Oliver Cromwell. She made the tea, put the pot and china on a tray, carried it to the front drawing room. She had no precedent for her behavior, but she believed the rightness of every thought, every impulse that came to her.

  She lit four candles in the candelabra her mother said was once owned by the Bonaparte family, and sat down for contemplative midnight tea amid family treasures: the Ismari vase mounted in ormolu, the Washington portrait by Rembrandt Peale; the Wentworth mirror, its border embroidered by Lady Wentworth; the portrait, as handsome widow, of Femmitie Staats, ancestor of her father, and direct descendant of Johannes Staats, who had been born in 1642 into Albany’s original settlement.