The Flaming Corsage

by William Kennedy

  As the light of day faded, a dozen lanterns surrounded the dig with ceremonial light, and families of the dead moved closer to the ruins, Katrina in the vanguard. One worker with a spade brought up a blue worsted vest. When he held it up to the light of two lanterns, a man came out of the crowd and said, “That’s Simon Myers’s vest.”

  “How might you know that?” the foreman asked him.

  “I gave it to him,” the man said. “He’s my son.”

  “I’m sorry for that, Mr. Myers, but we won’t be digging him up tonight.”

  “Why not, in heaven’s name?”

  “Just too dark. These men been here eleven hours, and I hate to say this, but the smell up from there is tough to work in. We’ll let the grave here air out and get back at it in the mornin’.”

  Most workers were smoking pipes to mask the odor of the malignant vapor that rose from the ruins. To Katrina the odor had been an onset of reality, a proof that death was more than an assumption. Workers put the lanterns in a circle around the open grave and the coroner ordered police to guard the dig. Twice during the night they chased away a bulldog.

  On the next morning at half after midnight, the seventh day after the fire, Adelaide died in the hospital. Katrina and Geraldine were with her. Jacob, on the floor above, was unaware she’d been readmitted, for Dr. Fitzroy cautioned against shocking him. He would sedate Jacob when it came time to tell him his daughter died of a ruptured spleen, suffered in her leap from the window. Edward brought the carriage to take Katrina and her mother home. Katrina put her mother to bed and told Edward she would stay the night at Elk Street.

  She lay on the canopy bed in Adelaide’s old room, a room of memory now: her old hobbyhorse, and the dozen and a half dolls of all nations, a new one every Christmas, and the Phrygian cap of liberty that was a gift from the French Ambassador when he came to the Taylor home for a dinner in his honor (the cap was supposed to be Katrina’s but was handed to Adelaide by mistake), and the Cleveland for President poster, and the toy sailboat, differing only in color from Katrina’s, that the sisters had sailed together on Washington Park Lake.

  Katrina, incapable of sleep, imagined how she might have diverted the course of life from the dreadful conclusion it had come to this night: by not letting Adelaide run away from them at the fire, by not siding with her parents against Edward, by not yielding to Edward’s plan to win back their goodwill with his dinner and gifts. By not marrying him.

  She told her mother’s servants to monitor Geraldine, make her breakfast, keep her in bed through the morning. Then she dressed, ate freshly baked bread with butter and coffee, and walked down Elk Street, past the city high school, and down Columbia Street to the Kenmore Hotel, where she bought an Argus at the hotel’s cigar stand. The paper reported there would be a Catholic mass for the dead at St. Mary’s Catholic church. Eleven of the dead were Catholic, three Protestant. Protestant ministers and mourners would be welcomed. When all bodies were presumed recovered they would be buried in a mass grave at St. Agnes Catholic Cemetery unless relatives claimed the remains. But who could say whose remains were whose?

  Toby Pender might have been buried in an unmarked grave had not Edward bought not only a grave but a sculpted sword-bearing granite angel to mark the resting place of the fire’s principal hero, the man who saved Geraldine, among many, and who deserved more than anonymity in death. When he first discovered the smoke, Toby rode his cab to every floor to alert all in earshot, picked up passengers, returned for stragglers, returned again, and yet again on a fourth trip, and was rescuing a lone woman guest when the blast of fire incinerated them both. Toby’s and the woman’s presences were verified four weeks later, in the final stages of the dig, days after the mass burial, when the woman’s melted diamond ring and Toby’s tiny crooked spine were found at the bottom of the shaft, along with fleshless, disheveled bones that crumbled at the touch.

  Katrina left the Kenmore and walked down to Broadway and stood at her post by the ruins. She was there ten minutes before the digging resumed at eight o’clock. By ten-thirty parts of eight bodies had been resurrected: part of a thighbone and a pelvic bone, both looking like coal; a wristbone with crisp flesh; the cloth of two dresses, one brown, one black with a weave of dark blue on the skirt’s hem, both fragments of cloth found adhering to the same flesh.

  “It looks to us that these two died in each other’s arms,” said the coroner to a group of reporters, Maginn among them. “We guess they were under the bed, and fell through to the kitchen, where the fire was hottest. The kitchen and bakeshop were both full of grease and just fed the fire.”

  “Those dresses may have belonged to the McNally sisters,” Maginn said to the coroner. “Her husband here recognizes the design in the black one.”

  Katrina approached Maginn and Cora’s husband. She stared at the husband, who was holding the piece of dress and weeping. She touched the man’s arm.

  “I knew Cora very well,” she said. “Please let me help you bury her and her sister.”

  The husband looked at this stranger, then at Maginn.

  “This is Mrs. Daugherty,” Maginn told him.

  “We can’t help whom it is we love,” Katrina said to the man. “We must learn to avoid love. Love is a mask of death, you know.”

  “What’s that?” asked the husband.

  “Death is venerable. You can always count on death.” Katrina began to weep, dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, saw Edward pushing through the crowd toward her.

  “Forgive me,” she said to Cora’s husband. “I weep all the time lately. I weep for everybody. It’s a pity what people come to be.”

  “What’s going on?” Edward asked.

  “I think you should take her home,” Maginn said.

  “Yes,” said Katrina. “There’s other death at home, isn’t there, Edward?”

  “Yes, there is, my dear,” Edward said. “I know how you love death, how you need it,” and Katrina smiled at him and wept anew. Maginn and Cora’s husband could only stare at the two of them.

  In a subsequent diary entry Katrina fixed on the fire as the point of transformation of Edward’s and her lives into a unity that transcended marriage, love, and a son:

  We were united through the fire in freakish fusion, like Siamese twins with a common heart that damned us both to an intimacy that not only knew the other’s every breath, but knew the difference between that every-breath and the signal breath that precedes decision, or unbearable memory, or sudden death. We now live out an everlastingly mutual curse: “May the breath of your enemy be your own.”

  Two months after the fire, in the unbanishable melancholia that followed the death of his daughter, Jacob Taylor died of a massive heart attack. Katrina was not the one to articulate the accusation, but she came to believe what her mother had said first: Edward killed Adelaide and Jacob.

  THE DAY WAS warm and brilliant with light when Katrina entered the Daugherty house on Main Street with a bouquet of asters and zinnias just cut from her garden on Colonie Street: reds, oranges, pinks, and yellows to brighten the sickroom where Emmett Daugherty, eighty-one, lay dying of decay and disuse.

  Katrina had come to see this as a house of death, for just before she and Edward stayed here, in the months the Colonie Street house was being renovated, Hanorah died of a heart seizure. And they were still here when Adelaide, Jacob, Cora, and all the others died from the fire. Now death was claiming yet another soul, and the imminence was giving meaning to Katrina’s life in the way her vigil at Cora’s exhumation had vitalized her days. The sun was shining brightly on this latest visitation.

  The front door was open (Emmett had not locked it since he built the house) and Katrina strode into the hallway and past the front parlor, which had gone all but unused since Hanorah died. The parlor always seemed to Katrina to be Hanorah’s museum: the rocking chair where she sat to sew, and to monitor the passersby on Main Street; the huge wood-stove she always tended that was now ornamental with the advent of the coal
furnace; the dusty valances, the chair doilies – when were they last washed?

  She walked down the hallway into the kitchen, found two empty milk bottles in the pantry, and filled them with water and flowers. A woman in a housedress and a clean white apron that covered the dress from waist to ankle came in through the kitchen door. Who is she? A face Katrina knew. Annie Farrell, from next door, that’s right. I haven’t seen her since ’95. So pretty So plain. And not Farrell anymore.

  “Mrs. Daugherty, I’m not interrupting, am I?” Annie said.

  “Oh, hello, hello, not at all,” said Katrina. I can’t call her Annie. Mrs. Phelan? No. “I brought some flowers.”

  “So beautiful,” Annie said. “And I baked some beans and bread, just out of the stove. I know nobody cooks in this house.”

  “That’s sweet of you,” said Katrina. She thinks I should come every day and cook?

  “With all the sickness and trouble, I mean,” Annie said. “How is he?”

  “I just this minute got here. But I know he had a very bad night. Go up and say hello.”

  “I wouldn’t intrude,” Annie said.

  “He’d love it. He speaks so fondly of the Farrells next door.”

  “There’s always been a closeness. He and my father helped each other build their houses.”

  “But you’re not a Farrell anymore,” said Katrina.

  “Right you are, Mrs. Daugherty. I’m a Phelan these four years. Francis, you know. He worships your husband.”

  “Yes.” And I worshiped him. Worshiped Francis. Before you did, Mrs. Phelan.

  “He always mentions your kindness when you were neighbors and he worked for you,” Annie said.

  “Does he? That’s nice.” Kindness he thinks it was?

  Katrina picked up the two bottles with the flowers.

  “We’ll go see Emmett,” she said, and Annie followed her up the stairs to the sickroom, where Edward, in his late-afternoon ritual, was sitting with Frank McArdle, the Daugherty family doctor, an ample-bellied man with a white brush of a mustache, here on his daily visit. Edward and the doctor were delivering up stories and gossip to keep Emmett alive with words alone. As the women entered they saw Emmett, raising phlegm from his ruined lungs, propped on pillows under a large colored likeness of Pope Leo XIII, the man Emmett loved better than Jesus.

  Katrina remembered an angry Emmett invoking Leo when the trolley strike of 1901 was looming. He would rant over supper about the injustice of the traction company for bringing in scab labor and not only refusing its workers a pittance of a wage increase, but cutting their wages and extending their workday. She could see him pounding the table, bouncing potatoes out of the dish, declaiming to all: “Don’t take my word. The Pope of Rome himself said it. Workers are not chattels, and it’s shameful to treat them like that. Shameful, that’s the Pope’s word for those traction company frauds. ‘To defraud anyone of wages that are his due is a crime that cries out to the avenging anger of heaven.’ There’s Pope Leo for you, a real man he is, and by the Jesus, no man ever spoke truer. Amen to Leo, I say. Amen to Leo.”

  Now Emmett lay beneath the image of the Workingman’s Pope, his eyes half closed, giving fading attention to Dr. McArdle, who was talking of a woman who married a man for his money and the man then went bankrupt and stayed that way twelve years.

  “It’s a rare day,” said the doctor, “that people marry for love anymore, the way you and I did, Emmett, and the way Edward did. Am I right, Edward?”

  “I hear you, Frank,” Edward said. “But love isn’t enough, and anybody who thinks it is, is demented.”

  Katrina, hearing this as she entered, said, “You are so right, my love,” and she put one bottle of flowers on Emmett’s dresser, the other on his bedside table.

  Edward took her aside, held her hand.

  “There are impediments to love,” she said softly.

  “How well I know that,” he said.

  “I’m glad you accept it.”

  “I don’t accept it.”

  “But you must,” she said.

  Edward pushed love away, whispered to her that Emmett was very weak, and that they had decided to go for the priest. Emmett heard him.

  “Yes, get Father Loonan,” Emmett said with more strength than Katrina expected. “And have a pitcher of ale to pour when he gets here.”

  Annie Farrell walked to Emmett’s bedside, touched his hand with her fingertips, shook her head.

  “Giving drink to the priest, now is that a good thing, Emmett?”

  Emmett almost smiled and answered her in such a scratchy whisper that Annie had to lean over to hear him.

  “He says ale is God’s greatest handiwork,” Annie said.

  “Then we should get some right away,” said Edward.

  “I’ll get Father Loonan,” Katrina said, “and then I’ll stop for the ale.”

  “You?” said Annie. “You surely wouldn’t be seen in a saloon.”

  “It’s time I would be,” Katrina said, and she bent over Emmett and kissed his forehead. “Don’t you dare go anywhere till I get back,” she said.

  “I’ll get the ale,” Edward told her, “you get the priest.”

  “I’ll get both,” said Katrina. “You stay here with your father, where you ought to be.”

  In the kitchen Katrina rinsed out Emmett’s two-quart pewter growler with the snap-on cover and put it in a wicker handbasket. Edward was right about love. The impulse to love is a disease. Is disease a proper reason for marrying? No sane person would do anything for such love. What had loving Francis meant? When he went away she was left with dead memories, cold as a corpse. Try drawing love out of a corpse. It’s never who or what you love that drives you, Katrina, but who or what loves you. A cat. If a cat loves me, I am alive.

  She left the house and walked the two and a half blocks to Sacred Heart church on Walter Street, the church Emmett helped build with his monthly payments and the strength of his back. She rang the parish house bell to rouse Father Loonan, who had performed the marriage ceremony for Edward and Katrina seventeen years ago. He opened the door, fresh from his prayers, or was it a nap? Well, he seemed to be elsewhere.

  “Emmett Daugherty is dying, Father. He needs you. He needs the sacrament.”

  “Ah, the poor devil, he’s all done, is he?”

  “He’s no devil, Father. He’s a virtuous man.”

  “Oh he is, he is. I’ve got someone coming in ten minutes, my dear, and then I’ll be along.”

  “Emmett can’t wait ten minutes, Father.”

  “He can’t. It’s that way, is it?”

  “Your visitor can wait, but Emmett is losing the light.”

  “Then I’ll be right along, dear, right along.”

  “Excellent, Father,” Katrina said, and turned to leave.

  “Have you candlesticks in the house?” the priest asked.

  “I believe we do.”

  “And a crucifix. You must have a crucifix.”

  “We have one.”

  “Holy water. Do you have that?”

  “We do.”

  “And the chrism?”

  “The what, Father?”

  “The chrism, child. The holy oil.”

  “I never saw any.”

  “Then I’ll bring it. And a piece of palm from Palm Sunday. You must have that.”

  “There’s some stuck behind Jesus on the crucifix.”

  “All right. And a lemon, do you have a lemon?”

  “I’ll buy one if we don’t.”

  “And water, and a spoon, I’ll need that.”

  “Are you going to make lemonade, Father?”

  “Don’t get flibbertigibbet on me,” the priest said. “And a piece of cotton. And some bread. And salt.”

  “We’ll have it all,” Katrina said.

  “Then we’ll get Emmett ready for his journey,” Father Loonan said.

  Katrina left him in the doorway and walked toward Jack McCall’s saloon on Broadway. Lemon and cotton and salt an
d oil. What a peculiar religion she had joined, its mysteries endless. She walked with a dynamic erectness, straight back, narrow waist, wide-brimmed straw hat flat on her yellow hair, her walk, almost a military pace, surging with the energy of youth, though she was now thirty-seven. She moved toward McCall’s with an all-but-visible purpose, a change of mood for Katrina, who did daily battle with absence of purpose, boredom, pervasive ambivalence toward every waking act. Why should I get up? Why go to bed? Why try to reimagine Francis? Why write the diary? Why not? It’s as meaningful as anything else you might do, and as meaningless. You have a lazy soul, Katrina. You will die with such slowness, such slight daily reduction, that no one will notice that you’ve left the room until the clusters of dust accumulate around your empty chair.

  But today could be different: today on Main Street, at the parish house, heading for the saloon, immersed in the life of the people you inherited when you wed Edward, today you know that change is so real it can almost be touched. You will be free, Katrina, when you know what drives you. When Emmett, that wonderful man, at last ceases to linger, you will be liberated from the street that marriage has imposed upon you. Won’t you be free? I do love my husband and his family. I do, I do. And I do think them alien to all that I am or will be.

  There were no saloons like McCall’s in Katrina’s private domain. She entered it through the front door, walked to the bar and put the basket on top of it. As she lifted out the growler, the bartender and six men at the bar stared at her. This was a small, two-room saloon with black window curtains that were closed only on Sunday mornings, when it was illegal to serve spirits to any but the neediest cases. Such cases entered as quickly as possible through the side door, for you wouldn’t be seen going into a saloon’s front door on a Sunday. Also, women always entered through that same side door, the ladies’ entrance, and sat at one of three tables in the back room, where ladies were supposed to sit. And not for long.

  “We don’t have women at the bar, Ma’am,” the bartender said. His name was Jimmy McGrath and he had managed the saloon for Jack McCall ever since Jack became a county under-sheriff. Jimmy was known as the most honest bartender in Albany, for no drunk ever lost the money he didn’t know he’d left on Jimmy’s bar. Jimmy would put it in the register, with a note specifying the credit, and he’d tell the drunk about it on his next visit. Katrina did not know such things about Jimmy, but she liked his kindly face, and the clever way he parted the remains of his silky white hair.