The Flaming Corsage

by William Kennedy

  “Is that bad? Do you want to come back later?”

  “No, neighbors are good. They’ll cut the ice. It’s Cappy and Mamie White.”

  “Such a large woman.”

  “She’s larger than that. Cappy drives the Lumber District horse-car and when she gets on the front of it the back end goes up.”

  “Does she have to be so big?”

  “They’ve had doctors, but she keeps growing. It’s been like watching the slow inflation of a balloon for as long as I’ve known her.”

  A brown chicken ran into the street as Edward pulled up, and his mother, an apron over her long housedress, ran after it, snatched it up and held it under her arm. Edward reined the horse, and as he jumped down to tether it, Katrina said to him, “That’s your mother.”

  “It certainly is.”

  “I remember her.”

  He helped Katrina down from the carriage, then walked her over to introduce her first to his mother, then to the Whites, as his fiancée. His father was gone from the window.

  “Katrina says she remembers you,” Edward told his mother.

  “From the Manor House,” Katrina said. “My mother took me to visit the Van Rensselaer girls when I was eight or nine, and when we played in the kitchen, you were there. I remember how young you were, and yet your hair was pure white.”

  “I do remember your mother came often,” Hanorah Daugherty said. She smiled at Katrina. “But I wasn’t so young, I don’t think.”

  “Oh, but you were,” Katrina said.

  “We’ll move along, Hanny,” Cappy White said. Cappy was a burly six-footer with a thatch of bristle on his upper lip, and already graying at thirty-eight. “Congrats to you, Eddie.”

  “Thanks, Cappy. I deserve them.”

  “You have a beautiful, beautiful bride,” Mamie White said. She stared at Katrina, then gave Edward the saddest of smiles.

  “She’s not my bride quite yet, Mamie. But we’re getting there.”

  The Whites said their goodbyes and walked off slowly, Mamie’s shoulders rocking from side to side.

  “Go on in, go in,” Hanorah said, shooing them toward the front door. “I’ll put this one back in the yard,” and she walked to the rear of the house with the chicken in her arms.

  Edward opened the door for Katrina and led her into the parlor with its huge chrome stove, the beaded valances on the windows, the doilies on the arms of the horsehair chairs. A small braided rug in front of the rocking chair was the only covering on the wide pine-board floor.

  Edward moved the wicker rocker into the sunlight for Katrina, and took three tintypes off the otherwise bare white mantelpiece: individual studio shots of his father in a suit and derby, his mother in a full-length flowered skirt, white blouse, and black bonnet tied under her chin with a ribbon; and one photo of them sitting together, with little boy Edward on Emmett’s lap.

  “This is what we no longer look like,” he said, handing Katrina the pictures. “I’ll be right back.”

  He went to find his father, bring him out of hiding. Emmett had said he would go to no wedding, nor would be hear any argument aimed at changing his mind. Edward had revealed this fact to Katrina and vowed he’d confront his own parents as he’d confronted hers.

  Katrina said her mother thought him “a rude social climber” and was furious at his suggestion that her family had committed violence against the Irish; and her father, baffled by Edward’s “babbling about atrocity and slavery,” wondered, “What world is that overeducated maniac living in?”

  “But what did they say about the marriage?” Edward asked.

  “They disapprove but they honor my choice, and they certainly won’t stay away from the wedding, as your father threatens to do. My father wouldn’t abide anyone but him giving me away, and Mother will insist on buying my dress and shoes and choosing the flowers and decorating the church. She lives for such things.”

  Decorating the church. Which church?

  Emmett was a different problem.

  “I’m thinking of marrying Katrina Taylor” was all Edward had said, and Emmett exploded: “Any kin of Jacob Taylor has to be poison . . . that polished fool . . . that felonious rodent . . . a family of pretenders . . . merchants without souls . . . They aspire to nothing but money . . . It’s traitorous marrying one of them after what he did to Davy . . . smashed his mind because he pushed for a better wage . . . I dream of seeing them in rags and clogs. No good can come of it, boy, it’s a wrong idea.”

  “It’s not an idea, Papa. She and I, we’re a matched pair. We’ve a great love and she’s as bright as any woman alive. She’s a woman you only dream of knowing.”

  “Marry your dream, then,” Emmett had said. “I’ll not witness it.”

  Edward now climbed the stairs and glanced at the framed tapestry of the Daugherty crest (a leaping stag) hanging on the stairway wall. The Pittsburgh chapter of the molders’ union Emmett helped establish gave it as a going-away gift when Emmett left Pittsburgh to come back to Albany. The family name was stitched under the crest in the Irish: docararch. Emmett was fond of explaining that it translated as either “unfortunate” or “disobliging,” take your pick.

  Edward found his father shoeless, in a fresh shirt and his everyday pants, sitting in his bedside rocker, cleaning his fingernails with a six-inch knife. His hair was the color of granite now, and as wild as the mind beneath it.

  “So you brought her home,” Emmett said.

  “She’s in the parlor.”

  “You know what I think about this.”

  “Nobody could know what to think about Katrina without talking to her. You don’t even know what’s going on in my head.”

  “I won’t argue,” Emmett said. He closed the knife, pocketed it, and bent over to pull on a shoe.

  “You won’t hear me out? You, the one who’s always fighting for the right to be heard?”

  Emmett leaned back in the rocker and stared at his son. “What is it, then?”

  “It’s me, it’s what I’ve become,” Edward said, and he felt the same energy rising that he’d known in delivering the Manifesto. He could not taunt his father as he’d taunted the Taylors, for the man wouldn’t sit for it. So, then, he would neither pace nor gesticulate. He would keep his energy leashed. He sat on the bed and faced Emmett.

  “You raised me and Lyman educated me,” Edward said, “and now I’m some kind of new being with no known habitat—not North Albany, not Elk Street. Katrina knows this without my saying it. She’s as smart as the edge of your knife. She knows exactly who I am and she loves me and wants to marry me. And God knows I want to marry her. I’ve never felt anything even close to what I feel with her. It’s thrilling, Papa, unbelievably thrilling. I’m not marrying her father, and I’m not condoning what he did to Davy. But is this a blood feud that carries on for generations? Do the wars of the father have to be the wars of the son? I wrote The Mosquito Lovers, didn’t I? You planted that in my head and I’m glad you did, but I’ve got other things to write. I’m no soldier in the class war. If I’m geared to do anything it’s to celebrate the mind and the imagination. Rise in the world with your brain, not your back and your fists—if you can. And I believe I can. And I believe others can as well as me. Where are the minds of our people? Why aren’t we running the foundries and lumber mills instead of being molders and handlers all our lives? I’m not against radicalism, but I want to get beyond it. I want to leap over the past and live in a world where people aren’t always at each other’s throats. I know some of our roots are in the hovels of Connacht and we shouldn’t forget that. But there was Donegal before Connacht, and before Donegal who can say? Were we ever anything besides tribal warriors? We were bards, weren’t we, some of us? And we were architects of the book. And we had the music, as you always said. If they reduced us to breaking rock to stay alive, those other qualities were still in us, and I see them now in myself. They’re not new to me but I look in the mirror and I think, ‘You’re a new being,’ and I wonder what
to do about that. Do I lose my past by shaping a future? Do I disinherit myself? No matter what you think, I haven’t abandoned the struggle. If you’d heard what I told Jake and Geraldine when I asked to marry Katrina, you wouldn’t have turned a deaf ear. I probably made lifetime enemies of them. I don’t want to fight with you now, Papa, or ever, just as I don’t want to give up this woman, who is everything I value. My love for her seems like a primal force, as basic and as strong as what I feel for you and Mama.”

  Edward stopped talking. He stood and took two hesitant steps toward the door.

  “Now that you know this,” he said, “can you still tell me to abandon Katrina to satisfy your vengeance against Jake Taylor? If you can, then I think you’re wrong, and I don’t believe I ever said that to you before, or even thought it. Now I’m going downstairs and talk to Katrina and Mama. I hope you come down and join us.”

  Katrina had left the parlor. Edward found her in the kitchen, sitting at the table, watching Hanorah at the stove stirring something in a frying pan. The kettle was sending up wisps of early steam and the table was set for five, one extra, of course.

  “I saw those children grow up and move off,” Hanorah was saying. “Twenty-six years I was with them, from when I went in there to wash pots. Then they found out I could cook and I cooked for the Patroon till he died, and for Mrs. Bayard until she died, too. Then they closed the place up. I still cook for some of the family when they stay the month at Saratoga, but mostly I only cook for himself, and for this one, whenever he comes to see us,” nodding at Edward as he entered the kitchen.

  He walked to Hanorah and looked over her shoulder at the frying pan.

  “Bubble and squeak?” he said.

  “You don’t like it?” Hanorah said.

  “I don’t like it, I love it with a passion I reserve only for beautiful women like yourself.”

  “Listen to the mouth, will you?” Hanorah said.

  “Bubble and squeak,” Edward said to Katrina, “is this cook’s way of joining potatoes and cabbage in God’s secret recipe. I presume we’re having lunch.”

  “Miss Taylor said you didn’t eat.”

  “Miss Taylor is Katrina.”

  “I just met her, if you don’t mind.”

  “You set five places. Is Hughie Gahagan joining us?”

  “He might.”

  “Hughie Gahagan is dead,” Edward said to Katrina, “but my mother doesn’t give up on him. My father brought him home one night for supper and put him to work in the lock-house. He stayed five years and we buried him out of the parlor. He had nobody else.”

  “Emmett brought men home for a meal all his life, especially if they were down on their luck,” Hanorah said. “He still does it, so I always set an extra place.”

  Emmett’s step on the stairs silenced the conversation.

  “There’s a boat in the lock,” Emmett said as he came into the kitchen. He looked at no one and walked to the kitchen window that gave a view of the canal at the foot of North Street. He stood looking out, his back to those in the room.

  “It’s a passenger packet,” he said.

  No one reacted. After a while he said, “Cappy White, he’s a hard-luck man.”

  “He has more than his share of trouble,” Hanorah said.

  “He lost a thousand dollars’ worth of horses in a fire last year. And then Mamie like that.”

  “Well, she’s getting about,” Hanorah said. “She walks the block and she does the garden. She sat in the chair this summer in the garden. She leans sideways and pulls the weeds she can reach. Those she can’t she tells Cappy to pull. Sometimes he pulls up the flowers.”

  “Cappy and I raced horses on the canal in the winter,” Emmett said, still staring out the window, “and sometimes up at Island Park on a Sunday, when we had the money. We had fast horses them days.”

  “We have a very fast horse,” Katrina said.

  Emmett turned slowly around and stared at her.

  “This is my father, Emmett Daugherty, Katrina,” Edward said. “He sometimes forgets to say hello to people. And this is Katrina Taylor, Papa. I mentioned her to you.”

  Katrina nodded at Emmett. “Chevalier is his name,” she said. “He’s a trotter.”

  Emmett continued to stare at her.

  “We’re having bubble and squeak,” Hanorah said.

  “Is it your horse?” Emmett asked.

  “No, my father’s,” she said.

  “Unh,” Emmett said and he sat at the table across from Katrina and stared out the back door. The brown chicken pushed through the broken screen of the door and stepped into the kitchen.

  “That hen is in again,” Emmett said.

  “Let her be,” Hanorah said.

  The hen came over to Hanorah and moved in a circle near her, pecking at the hem of her dress.

  “It’s all right, Biddy,” Hanorah said to the hen.

  “My mother’s pet,” Edward said. “A hen that behaves like a cat.”

  “She’s a bloody nuisance,” Emmett said.

  “She just comes to see me,” Hanorah said. “I bought her as a chick last year at the fair. I saw her born in one of them machines and I paid ten cents for her.”

  The hen beat her puny wings and lofted herself onto a chair and sat on its cushion.

  “Now she’ll lay an egg on the chair,” Emmett said. “For the love of Jesus will you look at that.”

  “She lays the egg for me,” Hanorah said. “She doesn’t know anything about Jesus.”

  The hen sat, adjusted her rump, stared at her audience and spoke to it—”toook-a-takaawk”—shook her rump, laid her egg on the cushion, batted her wings anew, and lofted herself back to the floor.

  “She came upstairs and laid one in the bed one morning and Emmett rolled over on it,” Hanorah said.

  “Isn’t it good luck, a hen in the house?” Katrina asked.

  “There are those who’d argue with that,” Hanorah said.

  She picked up the hen and carried it out to the yard, then came back and rinsed her hands under the pump by the sink and wiped them dry with her apron. She picked the new egg off the chair and put it in the icebox with the other eggs and took out the butter and put it on the table. She poured boiling water into the teapot, spooned the potatoes and cabbage into a dish, and took warm bread out of the oven and sliced it. She put it all on the table and said, “We’re ready.”

  She and Edward then sat on either side of Katrina, the spirit of Hughie Gahagan separating Edward from his father. Hanorah caught Emmett’s eye and he bowed his head and said silent grace. Then Hanorah passed the bread and the bubble and squeak, and they all helped themselves.

  “There’s talk now of a wedding,” Hanorah said.

  “There is,” said Edward.

  “When did you meet?”

  “When we were children, or at least Katrina was a child. Then all of a sudden she grew up and I saw her at Cleveland’s victory parade, and she looked like this,” and he opened his hand to Katrina’s face. “I was conquered, or maybe I was victorious, finding what I didn’t even know I’d been looking for all my life.”

  “Did you feel that way, too?” Hanorah asked Katrina.

  “I thought him quite perfect,” Katrina said. “I’ve tried to discover ways to improve him, but I’ve found none at all.”

  “You may find some. You’re still young,” Hanorah said.

  “I’m almost twenty. Juliet, had she lived, would’ve been married six years at my age. Perhaps I’m older than I seem.”

  “Where would the wedding be?” Hanorah asked.

  Katrina looked at Edward. He waited for her to answer, but she did not.

  “We’ve made no plans,” Edward said. “We wanted to talk to you before we did anything.”

  “My parents want it to be at the Cathedral Chapel of All Saints,” Katrina said.

  “That’s where the Episcopalians go,” Hanorah said.

  “Yes. Bishop Sloane is a friend of the family.”

&nb
sp; “What do you say to that?” Emmett asked Edward.

  “I hadn’t heard this,” said Edward.

  “You marry in that church, you’re excommunicated,” Emmett said, and he turned to Katrina. “Do you know what you’re doing to the man, taking him out of his religion?”

  “I had no idea,” she said.

  “We’ll find a way to solve it,” Edward said.

  “Which is your church?” Katrina asked Edward.

  “Sacred Heart, here in North Albany.”

  “Then we’ll marry there. Will that solve it?”

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “You can’t marry in the church if you’re not Catholic,” Emmett said.

  “Then I’ll become Catholic. How long does it take?”

  “You have to take instructions,” Edward said. “A few months, maybe?”

  “That’s fine. I was thinking of a spring wedding anyway, weren’t you?”

  “Just like that, you become a Catholic?” Emmett said, snapping his fingers.

  “I don’t believe it matters which language we use when we talk to God. It’s possible I’m really a pagan. If so, I shall now be a pagan Catholic.”

  “What will your parents say?” Hanorah asked.

  “They’ll be furious.”

  “You certainly make quick decisions,” Emmett said.

  “I do what I think I should do, so I can become what I feel I must be.”

  The Daughertys fell into silence. Edward stared at Katrina, understanding that with a few words she had transformed herself, become as rare to his parents as he already knew her to be, yet he could not have predicted any word she said. Emmett and Hanorah stared at her, rancor gone from Emmett’s face, Hanorah a study in bewilderment. What Katrina had done was akin to her action at the cemetery, and Edward now knew she would have this effect on everyone, that the directness of her idiosyncratic behavior was a singular gift. He coveted it, felt the young man’s ambition to conquer life with a stroke, as Katrina just had. But he knew he would live a long time before he understood even where to direct such a stroke. Yet, credit where credit is due, Edward: you intuited the rightness of bringing her here unannounced, and for that much you should congratulate yourself. Blind navigation, a maestro’s talent, won the battle for today.