The Flaming Corsage

by William Kennedy

  Femmitie’s and the Wentworths’ presences were reinforcements of family links to the origins of the city and the nation: American life predicated upon Dutchness without end, Albion evermore. I do believe this house is paradise, Katrina thought. I believe it is a palace of brilliant crystal, softest velvet, golden light, pervasive elegance; and memory overflows with beauty and the holiness of history. I see a proud elevation of spirit and mind in the splendid people of my life. I will lose my birthright to these things if I marry Edward.

  She slept and at painless morning took breakfast in the dining room with the family, an occasion of relief for all, the cause noted by Katrina’s sister, Adelaide: “She’s gotten over her lovesickness.”

  “That Daugherty is ruining the peace of this family,” Jacob Taylor said.

  Katrina said nothing and after breakfast gave Cora, the chambermaid, her daily fifteen minutes of tutoring in elocution in Katrina’s sitting room.

  “Is it true as Miss Adelaide says that you’re desperate sick in love with Mr. Daugherty?” Cora asked.

  “I’m not such a fool,” Katrina said. “I know the difference between my body and my soul. Love is the soul’s business. I’m sick because my body seems to want this marvelous man. I would never call it love.”

  “Oh, Miss Katrina, I think you got it backwards.”

  “You’re an expert on love?”

  “I’m commonsensical on it. I loved a boy well and do yet, and it’s body and soul, Miss, body and soul.”

  “You do speak your mind, Cora.”

  “I wouldn’t know what else to do with it, Miss.”

  Katrina’s clearest memory of Cora McNally was of the white stone china cup with the broken handle, a memorable stub of unmanageable clay. It was the day Geraldine Taylor hired Cora for scullery work (from which she swiftly graduated), and cook was giving Cora her first lunch, setting her chair and dishes at a solitary place at the drainboard of the sink: a sandwich of turkey scraps and skin dabbed with cranberry sauce, and tea in that unforgettable stone china cup. Cora came in from the scullery, saw this offering, and said not to cook but to Katrina’s mother:

  “Mrs. Taylor, on the poorest day of me life in Cashel I never ate a meal on the drain of a sink, and if ever a cup in our house broke its handle, we threw it out.”

  Geraldine nodded and said quietly to cook:

  “Sit Cora at the servants’ table and give her a proper cup.”

  And from then forward the Taylor family and its servants knew who Cora was, as you shall know me, Katrina announced silently to all future obstructionists.

  Katrina’s dilemma: whether to decide in silence to accept the offer of marriage, suffer all losses privately in advance, and move beyond loss, or allow family and peers to mount the inevitable attacks on such outrageous wedlock. Katrina knew her decision would not be influenced by the views of others. The problem lay in protocol, distortion of which would leave scars.

  As the days passed, it began to decide itself. Mother must be allowed to invite the Bishop to lecture Katrina on marrying someone outside the religion. Father must be permitted to agree to finance a tour of the Continent to take Katrina’s mind off the papist lout.

  Katrina looked at the portrait of Femmitie clutching the red rose of love, her shawl over her left shoulder emphasizing the fullness of her right breast; and in Femmitie’s mouth Katrina read the flirtatious curl of a smile, supporting the legend that Femmitie fled her parents’ unbearably pious Albany home to marry a seductive Boston confidence man (a Dublin rascal masquerading as an Ulsterman) who made her insanely rich, then was, himself, hanged for murdering a wealthy Presbyterian cleric. These events had been irrelevant to Femmitie’s sensuous smile, which survived religion, money, and the gibbet. Wrote B: Woman cannot distinguish between her soul and her body. She simplifies things, like an animal. A cynic would say it is because she has only a body. You are not talking about me, Katrina told him.

  Katrina decided her resurrection from indecision and reclusion would take place two days hence, and she wrote letters organizing the event, the first to Giles Fitzroy, asking that he take her for an afternoon ride to brighten her pallid complexion, expose her weakened spirit to the restorative of fresh air and sunshine; and the second to Edward, asking that he meet her at one-thirty in Albany Rural Cemetery near the Angel of the Sepulchre, the one landmark of whose location everyone was certain.

  In her parents’ estimation, Edward, despite his long-standing family link through Lyman, was now a figure to be kept as remote from Katrina as possible; but Giles, Katrina’s childhood friend, was eternally welcome in this house, his father being the Taylor family physician, his mother Geraldine Taylor’s colleague in maintaining standards for Albany’s social elite.

  “Where shall I take you?” Giles asked when Katrina had settled into his cabriolet (top down), his horse leading them at a sprightly pace up Broadway. Katrina covered her lap and legs with Giles’s blanket. It was the time of sublime autumn in Albany, the day bright and warm with sunshine, explosive with the reds and oranges and yellows of the dying leaves.

  “We should go to the most beautiful place we know,” she said. “The cemetery.”

  “Oh you are cheerful,” Giles said.

  “But I’m serious. I want to see where the Staatses and Taylors are buried, and decide should I be buried there.”

  “What puts you in such a morbid mood?”

  “Contemplating death isn’t morbid, Giles. It’s liberating.”

  “But why now? You’re so young and healthy. Why not think of life instead?”

  “But I do. And death is so important to it.”

  “You’re as odd as you are beautiful, Katrina.”

  They drove past St. Peter’s Hospital, where Giles was a medical intern, following his father’s career, and past her grandfather’s foundry. Without Lyman, Katrina and Edward might never have met, and most certainly would not now be contemplating marriage.

  “What do you think of me these days, Giles?”

  “I think you’re heavenly, a goddess among us. I love being with you.”

  “Will you be my slave?”

  “Gladly.”

  “Oh that is good.”

  They rode over the small bridge where the Patroon’s Creek crossed Broadway, through the tollgate by the sandpits onto the Troy Turnpike; then they turned west up the Loudonville plank road toward the cemetery.

  “Do you like Edward Daugherty, Giles?”

  “He seems a fine fellow, but he’s a few years older than I, so we’re not close.”

  “I’m going to meet him.”

  “When?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “Aren’t you with me this afternoon?”

  “You’re taking me to him.”

  “Katrina, I don’t understand anything about you.”

  “That’s all right, Giles. I understand everything about you and I’m very fond of you.”

  “ ‘Fond’ is a terrible word.”

  “A true one.”

  “Where are you meeting him?”

  “At the cemetery. By the Angel of the Sepulchre.”

  “This is ridiculous. I feel like a fool.”

  “But aren’t you my slave?”

  Giles fell silent and they turned and drove along the crest of the hill that was Rensselaer Avenue, past the Fitzgibbon country mansion, where her mother’s eccentric brother Ariel dwelled in baronial excess, and where Katrina had never been at ease. When she saw that Giles’s silence had become a sullen pout, she reached over and took his hand in hers. By the time they passed through the south gate of Albany Rural Cemetery and were approaching the Angel, his pout had melted into an abashed smile.

  “Come back for me at four o’clock,” Katrina said as she stepped down from the cabriolet near the statue of the Angel. She folded Giles’s blanket over her arm. “I’ll take this in case I have to sit somewhere and wait.”

  “Why are you meeting him?” Giles asked.

  “I
’m not sure. If I find out I may tell you.”

  “You know he just writes for the newspaper. He’s only a writer.”

  “I read him with great appreciation for his intelligence. Have you read the novel he just published?”

  “I don’t bother myself with novels. But I’ve heard it said he keeps fast company.”

  “There is none faster than I,” Katrina said.

  “At that the slave exits,” Giles said, urging his horse forward.

  A quarter hour early for Edward, Katrina walked to the Angel, who was sitting on the rock he had rolled away from the sepulchre of Jesus, atop the gravestone of the Banks family from Albany. Since his arrival in 1868, this heavenly, white-marble emissary had become the best-known resident of the cemetery, eclipsing magnates and governors, even heroes of the Revolution, and daily drew crowds of the curious and the reverential, although today only two women were standing off, staring at him. The Angel had also enhanced the fame of his creator, Erastus Dow Palmer, neighbor of Katrina’s for as long as she had been able to look out the window and see him striding along Elk Street with his walking stick and his great white beard. Instrument of the resurrection, the Palmer Angel, in flowing white nightshirt, hair of Jesus length, folded wings as tall as his seated self, stared out into Katrina’s afternoon and thrilled her, bringing her again to the edge of tears with the beauty of his irreality, the perfection of his fingers and toes, the strength and certainty in his mouth and eyes. He was speaking to the known and unknown Marys who had come to weep over the dead Jesus: “Why seek ye the living among the dead?” he asked them.

  Sentinel of salvation, rock of redemption, he knew what he was about. No perfection in bedridden indecision, Katrina. The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to the clear of heart; you know that. (Yes, yes, of course. But what, besides clarity, inhabits the heart of an angel?)

  “Beauty regards beauty,” came Edward’s voice, and Katrina turned to see him in his phaeton two-seater, looking so spirited, so ebullient, even sitting still: as fine a figure, she suddenly decided, as she would find this side of the angels. She walked toward him and he took off his hat to greet her and leaped down to take her hand, help her up into the seat beside his own.

  “I didn’t expect this day,” he told her. “Your invitation thrilled me. But how did you get here?”

  “I have my slaves,” she said.

  His dark-brown eyes focused only on her and she thought he owned the handsomest head of brown hair imaginable, and she thought: I’ll bet he took off his hat to woo me with his hair.

  “Do we have a destination?” he asked.

  “Where the road leads,” she said, and Edward told his horse to take them along it.

  Katrina could navigate all of the cemetery’s vast natural beauty, knew each vale, brook, and ravine, knew the cypress grove, the pond by the elm woods. And she knew many of its residents, could identify the replica of Scipio’s tomb where Jared Rathbone, Lyman’s old friend and business enemy, was buried, and the thirty-six-foot Doric column commemorating Albany’s heroic Revolutionary general, Philip Schuyler, and the granite sarcophagus of General James Rice, once of Elk Street, who, dying at Spotsylvania, said, “Let me die with my face to the foe,” and Thurlow Weed, founder of the Albany Evening Journal, whose Republican politics her father detested, and the very, very rich William James, whose grandson Henry wrote novels of great convolution that intimidated Katrina, and the banker Billings Learned, Katrina’s favorite capitalist, who wrote on his wife’s headstone: “Wife, I thank my God upon every remembrance of you.”

  These notable graves gave comfort to Katrina in her pursuit of love, perhaps marriage. This gilded world of the familiar dead, a world into which she had been born and raised, filled her soul with cultivated joy, for her mother had sensitized her to the splendor of an eminent death, which, as all know, perpetuates an eminent life.

  But now the beat of her heart also importuned Katrina, and as they came to a grove of blue spruces, with no monuments or people in sight, she said to Edward, “Stop here. It’s all as I remember. No corner of the world more beautiful.”

  While Edward tethered his horse, Katrina climbed down from the carriage and, with blanket in hand, walked to a shaded place beneath the holy trees, whose wood was one of the principal sources of her father’s abundant wealth. The tall spruces had shed needles and cones in a soft carpet upon the earth, and atop this carpet Katrina spread Giles’s blanket. She unpinned her hat and set it on the blanket, then sat and looked up at Edward, who was watching her private drama play itself out.

  “Come and sit,” she said.

  “You seem to know exactly what you’re doing,” Edward said. “This is indeed a secret place.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it endlessly, ever since your talk with my parents.”

  “The hymeneal event,” he said. “Does this mean you finally have an answer to my question?” He took off his coat and sat beside her.

  “Put your face near mine,” she said. “I want to know how I’ll react.”

  Edward moved close and, when their noses almost touched, he smiled.

  “Stop smiling,” she said.

  They studied each other’s eyes, mouth, hair. She parted her lips and moved her mouth onto his. She held the kiss, stopped it, withdrew to a distance of inches.

  “I like it,” she said.

  He took the game away from her and kissed her, as he well knew how to, and she folded herself into a condition for which anterior planning could not have prepared her.

  “Oh that is very good,” she said, and she resumed the kiss. When it came to a stillness she stared for a long time at Edward, decisions being made by her eyes and by a pervasive bodily tension that was thrilling.

  “It’s clear,” she said, “that we now have to do the rest. I’ve worn as few garments as possible.”

  “The rest?” Edward said.

  “I’ve read all about this,” Katrina said. “It’s nineteen days since my time. I now have nine days when I cannot conceive. It’s an ideal moment for the estrus to strike, and strike it has.”

  “This is a very bold act, Katrina.”

  “You don’t accept me?”

  “I accept with great heart but wild misgiving. We’re marked forever if something happens.”

  “I sense the ecstasy I’ve heard about. I want to be certain it exists.”

  “I love you for this, Katrina, more than I loved you yesterday, and I didn’t think that possible. You’re a wonder.”

  “You’re all the world to me now, Edward. But I must confirm that you are truly real. Do you understand?”

  “I don’t think I understand why we’re establishing my reality in the cemetery.”

  “We’ll die before we get to it if you don’t shut up,” and she arched her buttocks off the blanket, raised her skirts to her waist, and unbuttoned the top of her dress as Edward fell on his knees in front of her.

  “Why seek ye the living among the dead?” the Angel asked Katrina, and her answer came that, in her, there had taken root the truths of her poet: that death is the divine elixir that gives us the heart to follow the endless night, that it is the mystical attic, the poor man’s purse, the mocker of kings, the accursed’s balm, the certain loss that vitalizes possession. She feared it not at all, and chose to behave as if each moment were the ultimate one; and this consistency, to the end of her days, would astonish all who knew her.

  Edward, who had won her eye with his brash flirtation, and now was gaining her virginal body, believed he was the privileged one to be given such a sumptuous gift as the mythic ideal that was Katrina. And he told himself: You, Edward Daugherty, you, now prostrate on this exquisite altar, you own a fortunate heart.

  After a time that he would remember not by its length but by the intensity of his joy, he felt and heard her approaching her peak, felt it also in himself, and he moved out from her sweet place to spill his seed on the carpet of brown pine needles; for God can be tempted only so far.

&nbs
p; “Are you always so cautious with life?” Katrina asked.

  “I don’t want to lose you, now that I have you,” he said.

  “Because you did that, did you love me less?”

  “Because you court danger,” he replied, “do you love me more?”

  “You don’t understand,” Katrina said.

  “Perhaps it’s you who don’t understand.”

  “We’ll marry in the spring, I understand that,” she said.

  “People are already trying to stop us.”

  “We’ll overcome them.”

  “Love will prevail over everything.”

  “We’ll live like no other people ever lived.”

  “Only death will undo us,” he said.

  “Amen,” she said.

  Confirmed anew that a voluptuous woman is the universe’s greatest gift to a man, Edward turned back to Katrina, bent low and kissed her mouth. Stroking himself then, because this must not end, and seeing and feeling Katrina’s blood on his hand, he made his inward thrust, thinking: Do whatever you will, Lord. This is worth it.

  MAIN STREET WAS the second-last street in the North End, one of five block-long streets that sloped down from Broadway to the railroad tracks and the Lumber District. After these streets only a few isolated houses dotted Broadway before the Bull’s Head tavern and Island Park racetrack, and then came the open road that ran north toward Troy Houses stood only on the north side of Main, the south side as wooded with oak and maple and elm as it had been the day Dutchmen first left their boat to set foot on this land of the Mohawks. The five small streets were a community to Edward, a cul-de-sac of rustic, harmonious life, lived adjacent to the chug and clatter of Albany’s three lifelines: the rail, the canal, and the river. As he turned the corner in his carriage, Edward saw his mother and the Whites standing in front of the Daugherty house, then saw his father’s head halfway out the bedroom window.

  “They’re talking to neighbors,” he said to Katrina, beside him.