The Flaming Corsage

by William Kennedy

  The bells for the noon hour rang in the church belfry.

  “Those are the bells of Sacred Heart,” Edward said.

  “It sounds like a requiem,” Katrina said.

  “No, just the time of day, the noon hour, time for the Angelus.”

  Katrina framed a question in her eyes.

  “A prayer to the Immaculate Conception and the mystery of the Incarnation,” Edward said. “ ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done unto me according to thy word. And the Word was made flesh. And dwelt among us.’ ”

  “It sounds like bells I heard at a neighbor’s funeral,” Katrina said. “I remember his widow getting out of a carriage in front of St. Peter’s church just as the bells began, and, as she stopped to listen, she swooned and fell on the sidewalk. I thought the slow pealing of the bells was very sorrowful, and yet it was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard. Will they ring that way for our wedding?”

  “I’ll see that they do,” Edward said.

  And he remembered Aristotle: as the eyes of a night bird relate to the bright glare of day, so the soul’s understanding relates to those things that are the clearest and most knowable of all. Oh, Katrina, most knowable, you speak the dead language of the soul with dazzling fluency.

  FINTAN (CLUBBER) DOOLEY, a butcher living on Van Woert Street in Albany, came forward to reveal his role in the decapitation of a bull the day before the Love Nest killings. This was, he said, a practical joke popularly known as the “Bull-on-the-Porch Joke.” The bull’s owner, Bucky O’Brien, told an interrogator he was asleep upstairs over his Bull’s Head tavern on the Troy Road (where drovers had penned and watered Boston-bound herds of cattle in years past) and did not hear the rifle shots that killed his bull. He was awakened by raucous singing, accompanied by the banging of a dishpan as percussion, but O’Brien judged this a normal happening in the vicinity of his tavern, and he went back to sleep. Dooley said he had banged the dishpan while singing the song “I Want My Mommy” to cover the sound of the rifle shots.

  The bull, named Clancy, a long-familiar denizen of the pasture behind the tavern, had only one eye and was known as a peaceful animal. Dooley said Culbert (Cully) Watson, a sometime hotel clerk, known pander, and erstwhile member of the Sheridan Avenue Gang, shot the bull, whereupon Dooley climbed the pasture fence and, with cleaver, handsaw, and knife, and the expertise gained in the slaughterhouses of West Albany, cut off the bull’s head and lifted it by the horns over the fence to Watson, who put it in the back of Dooley’s wagon. Dooley and Watson then rode down the Troy Road to Albany and left the head on the stoop of the Willett Street home of Dr. Giles Fitzroy. Dooley said he had known Dr. Fitzroy for many years, that the doctor was a noted practical joker, and that, in a bygone year, Dooley had helped the doctor stage the elaborate “Fireman’s Wife Joke.” Dooley was persuaded by Watson that putting the bull’s head on the doctor’s porch was a hilarious way of joking the joker. Dooley was unaware that the presence of the head might have other than comic implications.

  The whereabouts of Culbert Watson are unknown at this time.

  “EVENING, MR. DAUGHERTY,” the hall porter of the Delavan House said to Edward.

  “Evening, Frank. Cold as hell out there tonight.”

  “Back again, Mr. Daugherty,” said Willie Walsh, the liveried bellhop.

  “Only place to be on a night like this, Willie,” Edward said, guiding the golden-haired Katrina to the door of the elevator, her hair swept upward into a brilliant soft bun atop her head, the lynx collar of her coat high around her exposed ears. Toby the dwarf, also in livery, gave the Daughertys a half-bow, and bade them enter his elevator.

  “Going up, Mr. Daugherty?”

  “Indeed we are, Toby,” Edward said.

  Toby closed the door of the small wooden cubicle that accommodated himself and four people, no more, and the car moved upward. Edward and Katrina stepped out at the second floor, walked toward the dining room, and were greeted by a plump and pretty housemaid, in black dress and starched white apron, sitting on a chair just inside the cloakroom doorway.

  “Why it’s Cora,” Katrina said.

  “Miss Katrina,” said the housemaid, standing to greet them. “Mr. Daugherty.” She curtsied and smiled. “Don’t you both look elegant. Let me take those coats from ye.”

  “Welcome to them,” said Edward.

  “Oh it’s terrible frigid out, isn’t it, sir?”

  “Even polar bears are inside tonight,” Edward said.

  “Is your sister well?” Katrina asked Cora.

  “Oh she is, Miss, she’s just fine. Your sister and parents and all, they’re inside already.”

  “They all miss you, Cora. And so do I. I have no one to tell my secrets to anymore.”

  “Them were good times, Miss Katrina. I’ll never, never forget them. I miss you all so much, but isn’t that just the way it is?”

  Katrina kissed Cora on the cheek. Edward pressed a dollar bill into Cora’s hand and then took Katrina’s arm and walked with her into the dining room. People were eating at all but two of the dozen tables, and in one corner a harpist and violinist were playing “After the Ball,” a song Edward loathed and Katrina loved. Edward saw Tom Maginn across the room, dining with two couples, and recognized one of the men as a powerful New York City Assemblyman. Edward caught Maginn’s eye, waved. Katrina nodded to Maginn and smiled.

  “Maginn,” said Edward. “Busy at work.”

  Edward’s dinner guests were already seated at a round table in the far corner. The party numbered six: Edward and Katrina, Jacob and Geraldine, Katrina’s sister, Adelaide, and her new husband, Archie Van Slyke, bright young man out of Harvard Law School, now an assistant vice president of the State National Bank, and whose great-grandfather, in collaboration with Jacob Taylor’s grandfather, had assembled a pair of family fortunes by confiscating Tory estates after the Revolution.

  Dinner would begin with oysters, be followed with choices of foie gras, shad with sorrel, partridge and cabbage, tenderloin of beef, lobster gratiné (a Katrina favorite), an array of wines, fruit, and cheeses, charlotte russe and Roman punch, Napoleon brandy and Spanish coffee. The menu was chosen by Edward to please the palate of Jacob Taylor, who believed the Delavan served the best food in Albany.

  “Can you read your father’s mood at this stage of the evening?” Edward whispered to Katrina as they neared their table.

  “He doesn’t see how this dinner can do anything to stop him from loathing the sight of you,” Katrina said.

  “I hope to reverse his expectations,” Edward said, and with smiles and formality he greeted Jacob and the others, kissing the hands of his female in-laws.

  He had ordered small bunches of violets to be at the place settings of the women, and when they arrived Katrina picked hers up and pinned them as a corsage to the breast of her gown. “Flowers, like love,” she whispered to Edward, “should lie easy on one’s bosom.”

  Her mother pushed the violets to the center of the table, disowning them. Adelaide sniffed hers, threw Edward a kiss.

  “How thoughtful you are,” she said.

  Of the Taylors, only Adelaide had no censure for Edward; for she had coveted him when he was courting her sister. “If you don’t marry him,” Adelaide told Katrina when she was abed with indecision, “you’re a fool.”

  Edward had reserved this table in the Delavan’s second-floor dining room, which was decorated with sketches and photographs of the luminaries whose visits gave credence to the Delavan’s boast that it was one of the nation’s greatest hotels. Here was Abraham Lincoln, who supped here before and after he became president, and Jenny Lind, when the hotel was a temperance bulwark, and P. T. Barnum, Oscar Wilde, Boss Tweed and a generation of his plundering ilk, who had made the Delavan a political mecca. Here were actors Edwin Booth and James O’Neill, Albany’s Irish tenor Fritz Emmett, the dancers Magdalena Colón (La Última) and Maud Fallon, the actresses Mrs. Drew and Charlotte Cushman, plus one actress who inhabited the
American demimonde, photographed in a gown revealing all of her right breast except the nipple, and whom Edward once glimpsed in the Delavan bar, coquettishly urging a swinish, kneeling pol to swill champagne from her slipper.

  On this penultimate night of 1894 the hotel was in its political but not yet swinish mode, abuzz with the noise, money, and power of the politicians who had come to Albany for the legislative session that would begin on New Year’s Day. The ritual was familiar to Edward, who had dined here often during the years he covered politics for The Argus. The festive air, he decided, would be a useful distraction from the heavy mood of this dinner party. The opposing political forces were already feasting and roistering in the two grand suites at opposite ends of the second floor when oysters on the half shell were served to Edward’s table.

  The maître d’ and two liveried Negro footmen approached carrying a box almost the size of themselves.

  “Would you give that to the elegant lady over there?” Edward said, and the bellboys set the box on its end beside Geraldine.

  “What might this be?” she asked.

  “You could open it and find out,” Edward said.

  “Is this some sort of joke?”

  “I assure you it isn’t.”

  “Shall I help you unwrap it, Madame?” the maître d’ asked.

  “If I must, then please do,” Geraldine said.

  The maître d’ cut the twine that bound the box, then gently ripped away its festive holiday wrapping.

  “Open it, Mother,” Katrina said.

  “Are you in on this?” Geraldine asked. But Katrina only smiled.

  “I’ll open it,” said Adelaide, and she revealed an ankle-length black sealskin coat with high collar and abundant cuffs.

  “Gorgeous, it’s gorgeous,” said Adelaide. “Full-length.”

  “It’s a coat,” said Geraldine.

  “I’d be abashed if it wasn’t,” said Edward.

  “But what is it for?”

  “For you, my dear, for you,” Edward said, “a belated Christmas from your daughter and me. You know how things were at Christmas.”

  Adelaide lifted the coat out of the box.

  “I’ll try it on for you, Mother,” she said, and she slipped into it, with Edward’s help, and twirled about so all could see the coat’s glory from every angle. “It feels divine,” Adelaide said.

  Edward noted that the room’s other diners regarded the display with smirks and smiles, disdaining the ostentation, admiring the exquisite garment.

  “I suppose you want one now,” Archie said to Adelaide.

  “I wouldn’t say no if you brought one home.”

  “I can’t accept this,” Geraldine said.

  “Of course you can,” Katrina said.

  “It’s too much.”

  “Not for you,” said Edward.

  Adelaide took the coat off and held it for her mother.

  “Must I?” Geraldine asked.

  Then, without standing up, and offering a small smile, she thrust her left arm, then her right, into the sleeves of the coat. Edward could see Jacob relax, not quite into a grin, but that enduring owlish frown of his was fading.

  “Very becoming, Gerry,” said Jacob.

  “It feels so silky,” Geraldine said, rubbing the fur with her palms. She took the coat off and folded it into its box. “It’s a lovely gift,” she said to Katrina.

  “It was all Edward’s idea,” Katrina said.

  “Yes. Well, then. Thank you, Edward.”

  “My pleasure totally,” Edward said, snapping his fingers to the maître d’, who came forward with a much smaller package and handed it to Jacob.

  “Another gift?” Jacob said, squinting at Edward. “Wise men say that gifts make slaves like a whip makes a cur.”

  “Or a horse,” said Edward as Jacob undid the gift wrapping, revealing a pen-and-ink sketch of a racehorse pulling a sulky and driver.

  “Very pleasant,” said Jacob. “I didn’t know this was a night for gifts.”

  “The picture isn’t the gift,” Edward said. “The horse is. It’s Gallant Warrior. I know how you value a good trotter, and I know how you felt when you lost Chevalier.”

  “You bought me a horse?”

  “He’s in Baltimore,” said Edward. “And he’s yours. We can have him brought up now, or wait for the spring meeting at Island Park, whatever you prefer. He’s a handsome animal, and a winner if there ever was one.”

  “Gallant Warrior is a very classy animal, Jake,” Archie said. “He did very well on the circuit this year. He ran second in the Kentucky Futurity.”

  “Where did you get the money?” Jacob asked Edward.

  “You’d be surprised how much novels and plays earn when people like them.”

  “Which play?”

  “Several. Does it matter?”

  Jacob smirked, then looked again at the sketch. “You bought me a horse,” he said.

  From the inside pocket of his coat Edward took a fold of papers and set them in front of Jacob.

  “The bloodline, and the ownership papers in your name.”

  “This is astounding,” said Jacob. “Gallant Warrior. He must have cost you a fortune.”

  “What good is money if you don’t spend it on something of value?” said Edward, and he raised his wineglass. “And now, may I wish a joyful holiday to all here, with the sincere hope that harmony settles on our lives in the new year.”

  The others answered his toast, amid small smiles and waning tension. Katrina surreptitiously patted her husband’s hand.

  “I must add,” said Edward, “that the last play I wrote will earn neither me nor my producers any more money. When its run ends next month in Philadelphia, I’m withdrawing it from performance forever. You probably know which play I’m talking about.” He stared at Jacob Taylor.

  “You’re a clever fellow, Daugherty,” Jacob said. “A very clever fellow.”

  “So they tell me,” Edward said.

  The play was Edward’s latest work, The Baron of Ten Broeck Street, a satiric social comedy about a wealthy lumber baron (very like Jacob Taylor) that had earned Edward considerable money and a notable increment of theatrical fame. It owed its existence to Edward’s quest to balance his bias; for his previous play, The Stolen Cushion, had satirized Albany’s lofty Irish bourgeoisie as they were reduced socially by an influx of crude Irish immigrants. Those Irish vied with the Negroes for the nadir of American social status, and, some thought, won. In the play Edward mocked social rising based solely on money. His private quest, he told himself, was to raise the Irish to the intellectual level of nativist Americans, prove the educability of greenhorn multitudes, as he had proven his own, and show those same multitudes how to transcend the peasant caste into which they’d been born.

  Instead, the Cushion brought down on his crown not only the wrath of the acquisitive Irish, which he had expected, but also the hostility of his father.

  “Who isn’t looking for a better life?” said Emmett, who had never forgiven Dickens (“that arrogant beggar”) for his scurrilous portrait of Irish peasants near Albany in 1842, a year when Emmett himself was struggling upward from the shame of being least; and he now found it necessary, half a century later, to scold his son for the similar dishonor the Cushion represented.

  Edward had written the Baron in part because of Katrina’s estrangement from her father, not only for her marriage, but for converting to the Roman Catholic faith. Despite the family hostility, Katrina clove to Edward with fierce loyalty, and married him in Sacred Heart church. Her father endured the formalities of the wedding and gave Katrina away, but as the meaning of her decision pressed in on him he grew more hostile and distant. Because of this, writing a satire on Jacob Taylor’s image had seemed to Edward not only apt, but safe. But when the play appeared to resounding huzzahs, first in Albany, then New York and Boston, Katrina quixotically reembraced not only her father, but also the lush comforts of the house on Elk Street, where he had raised her with na
nnies and servants; and she now yearned for this house in ways Edward judged to be nearly irrational.

  Withdrawing the Baron from performance was a small loss, a stroke that Edward hoped would render all Taylors respectful of his apparently selfless ways. But in fact he was done with satire and social tracts that aim to reform scoundrels and pave the way to proletarian heaven. Changing the world is elevating work, but better if he could dramatize the mind of Katrina, that complex creature who so dominated his life.

  He looked at her sitting beside him, in awe, as always, of her gifts: that serene beauty which masked such lambent passion, those prismatic charms that had taken root in his soul and made him her slave: as a whip makes a cur.

  “Are you enjoying your dinner, Katrina?” he asked her.

  “You were quite brilliant, my love,” she said softly. “You did it all with such panache.”

  I did it all for the venal streak at the bottom of your elegant heart, he said silently; for his capitulation to Jacob Taylor was, above all, his recognition that unless he acted swiftly, his marriage would bleed to death from Katrina’s imagined wounds. He had built their house on a Colonie Street plot next to the Christian Brothers school he had attended. Jack McCall touted him to availability of the land and also built his own home on the same street.

  Colonie was an Irish street in the erstwhile aristocratic neighborhood of Arbor Hill, where many of Albany’s lumber barons lived. Edward built the house for Katrina as a scaled-down replica of the Taylors’ Gothic Revival town house, and, to assuage her loss of the resplendencies she had left behind, he was now refurnishing the interior of the Colonie Street replica in that halcyon Elk Street image—crystal, engravings, chairs, fabrics, lamps—all in the Taylor mode, so that she might simulate her past whenever her fits of neurasthenic nostalgia descended.

  While the remodeling proceeded, Edward, Katrina, and their seven-year-old son, Martin, were staying on Main Street with Emmett, who was alone there since Hanorah’s death in the spring of ’94.

  Since the Baron’s first production, in spite of Edward’s elaborate efforts to comfort her, Katrina had lapsed into prolonged silences, offered him vacant stares and listless, infrequent sex. Edward at first perceived these as her quirkish reaction to his play, but came to believe in a deeper cause: her vengeance against him for luring her away from her maidenly joys with his eloquent tongue, his hot love.