The Flaming Corsage

by William Kennedy

  “We start with prostitute soup,” Katrina said.

  “You do say the most outlandish things, Katrina,” Felicity said. “You like to shock us.”

  “Do I? Is that true, Edward?”

  “Offending people has always been one of the pleasures of the upper class,” Edward said.

  “I left the upper class when I married you,” Katrina said.

  “Perhaps you did,” said Edward. “I remember Cornelia Wickham’s saying I made you déclassée. In spite of that, you certainly brought your elite social codes to the altar.”

  “Cornelia was jealous that Katrina was the true princess of Albany’s social life,” Giles said. “I remember her coming-out cotillion, the most elaborate the city had seen in decades. Cornelia looked radiant, and her dress, made by a London couturier who had gone on to design for the Queen, was the talk of the city. Yet every eye was on Katrina. All the men had to dance with her, including myself. The women, polite as they were, were wretchedly jealous, and it got into the social columns. Cornelia still hasn’t forgiven her.”

  “Cornelia was a vain and brainless ninny,” Katrina said. “I went to her cotillion determined to annoy her, and I flirted outrageously with everyone.”

  “You became the belle of someone else’s ball,” Giles said, “a mythic figure in society. And Cornelia married bountifully and grew fat as a toad.”

  “Is there something wrong in being fat?” Felicity asked.

  “Nothing at all,” Giles said. “After I lose interest in you, my dear, you may get as fat as you like.”

  “I will never be fat, Giles,” Felicity said. “And it may be I who lose interest.”

  Footsteps on the porch announced that Maginn and Melissa had arrived.

  At dinner, Maginn-by-candlelight looked less like Melissa’s escort than somebody’s ne’er-do-well uncle, with his waning, scraggly hair and mustache, expensive but wrinkled blue-silk tie, and his trademark coat with velvet collar: a coat for all seasons. His shirt collar was freshly starched, but only when Edward was sure he was wearing the complete shirt, and not just a dickey, did he give the word for the men to doff jackets. Edward and Giles, in their tailored shirts, ties in place, seemed aloof from the heat. Coatless, Maginn looked steamed.

  Edward suggested the women could follow suit in whatever way feasible, and Melissa removed her diaphanous tunic, revealing shoulders bare except for where her light-brown hair fell onto them, and the string straps holding up her loose-fitting beige gown. It was clear she wore no corset, nor could Edward see any evidence of that new device, the brassiere. Her gown became the object of silent speculation: would it offer the table, before dinner’s end, an unobstructed chest-scape?

  “The play by Edward is so exciting,” Melissa said. “I’m so flattered to be asked to even read for the role of Thisbe. There’s such pathos in her. It’s too good to be true, but it is true, isn’t it, Edward?”

  “We can’t be sure about anything,” Edward said, “but you will have the part if we’re not all stricken by disaster.”

  “There’s always the odd chance,” Maginn said, “that the play will be a disaster.”

  “Oh no,” said Melissa. “It’s a wonderful play.”

  “That has nothing to do with it,” Maginn said.

  “Here now,” said Giles, “let’s not have any sour grapes.”

  “Maginn is right,” Edward said. “Even great plays, and I make no argument for my own, are often badly received. The Seagull was mocked in its St. Petersburg premiere, and this year a horde of benighted Irishmen rioted at the Abbey Theatre over Synge’s language in Playboy of the Western World.”

  “I won’t hear of any disasters,” Melissa said. “Have you read Edward’s play, Mrs. Daugherty?”

  “Of course. It was enthralling.”

  “I agree. It’s gotten even better as I commit it to memory.”

  “You’ve memorized it already?” asked Katrina.

  “Rather a lot of it,” Melissa said. “Actors must read a play countless times, although I know some who memorize only their own lines and cues.”

  “Some do even less,” Katrina said. “They bumble through and think it enough just to stand there and shimmer in the footlights. Have you known actresses who only shimmer?”

  “I’ve only been in theater a year,” Melissa said, and she turned to Felicity. “Does theater thrill you as it does me?”

  “I rarely go,” Felicity said. “In New York I went once and found it extremely improper. Women in tights, that sort of thing.”

  “Felicity is easily shocked,” Giles said.

  “I saw Edward’s last play,” Felicity said, “but I didn’t entirely understand it.”

  “What didn’t you understand?” Melissa asked.

  “The words,” Maginn said.

  “The play has a political theme,” said Giles,” and my wife doesn’t understand politics, do you, my love?”

  “I’m not a simp, Giles.”

  “Let Felicity speak for herself, Giles,” Katrina said. “Don’t be such a mother hen.”

  “Those pearls you’re wearing are gorgeous,” Melissa said to Felicity. “I’ve never seen anything like them.”

  “Giles gave them to me for our anniversary.”

  “And your hair,” said Melissa. “I wish I had such beautiful hair.”

  “How nice of you to say that,” said Felicity. “Your own hair is very lovely. I’m sure you shimmer beautifully onstage, and I’ll bet you don’t forget your lines.”

  Edward saw Felicity as not unattractive, a hint of the hoyden in her manner, and with a flouncy appeal, under-girded by that heralded anatomy. Her hair, a mass of thick black waves, loosely plaited and gathered in soft coils to just below her shoulders, was truly beautiful, but neither bronze nor marble could rescue her long nose and small eyes. Edward also decided Melissa was extremely shrewd, with the good sense to back off an argument about acting with Katrina, and with instant insight as to where Felicity was most susceptible to flattery.

  Loretta came to take the soup bowls and Katrina introduced her to the table as “Loretta McNally, just here from Ireland. Cora’s youngest sister. Lovely Cora who died in the Delavan. Loretta isn’t a servant. She’s like family.”

  Katrina: reconstituting Cora through her sibling, replaying the psychic games she invented for that bygone girl: taking Cora to tea at the homes of social friends, teaching her how to sit a horse, and the names of flowers and jewels, correcting her posture, her speech, coiffing her hair, giving her clothes, lifting Cora up from Irish peasantry into Katrina’s own shining world.

  “You’re arousing expectations that can’t be fulfilled,” Edward had argued.

  “Nonsense. When she knows how to move she’ll rise.”

  “All she’ll have is a mask of pretense.”

  “Then she’ll be like everybody else.”

  And which mask are you wearing tonight, Katrina? Princess of the social elite? Benefactor of proles? Beloved of cats? Iconic prostitute before her mirror?

  Loretta was serving individual silver bowls of cold crab-meat on beds of cracked ice, with the pale-green sauce Edward recognized as his mother’s, created for the Patroon’s table. Katrina, knowing the sauce pleased Edward’s palate, learned the recipe from Hanorah, then saw to it her own cook, Mrs. Squires, made it to Edward’s satisfaction.

  “Let’s go back to your play, Edward,” Maginn said. “Why did you write it? I find its structure extremely strange.”

  “You’ve read it?”

  “I borrowed Melissa’s copy last night.”

  Edward looked at Melissa, whose eyes were on the crab-meat. “That wasn’t for circulation,” he said.

  “I cajoled her,” Maginn said. “I told her we were very old friends. I told her I was best man at your wedding and you wouldn’t mind. I know you’ve been working on it for years. Was it a major problem, getting the form?”

  “It took the necessary time,” Edward said. “You can’t rush it. When the mat
ter is ready the form will come.”

  “I prefer to think that when the form is ready the matter will come,” Maginn said.

  “I was echoing Aristotle. Your remark is pure Oscar Wilde.”

  “There is no pure Oscar Wilde,” said Maginn.

  “You don’t like my play?”

  “It’s so ethereal,” said Maginn. “Where’s your trademark realism? Or those cherished political themes?”

  “I left all that out.”

  “But without that the play flies off into myth, and artsy romanticism.”

  “You faulted The Car Barns for being too political. ‘Radical art,’ you called it. Now, with no radicalism, I’m artsy. I can’t find a happy medium with you, Maginn.”

  “What is this play about?” Giles asked.

  “It’s a somber love story,” Melissa said. “Beautiful and very romantic.”

  “But what is it about?”

  “It starts from the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe, Ovid’s version,” Edward said. “Two lovers, kept apart by their families, find a way to meet. Thisbe arrives by the light of the moon, sees a lioness who has just finished a kill and has come to drink at a fountain near the tomb where she is to meet Pyramus. Thisbe drops her veil and flees, the lioness finds the veil, mauls it with bloody paws and jowls, and leaves. Pyramus arrives, finds the bloody veil, and assumes Thisbe has been killed. Disconsolate, he kills himself with his sword. Thisbe emerges from hiding, finds her lover dying, and also kills herself. That’s the myth. I alter it considerably. No lioness, no sword.”

  “But it’s so fated,” said Maginn, “all wrapped up in God’s intellect. God is mindless, Edward, don’t you know that? The random moment is what’s important, not the hounds of fate. It’s time we left Oedipus behind. We should be our own gods, not their pawns. I believe in whim, not wisdom.”

  “Your random moment,” Edward said, “means to live like a blown leaf. I do believe in impulses, but I believe they come from something central to what we are, that they’re signals for action—a craving for sacrifice in exchange for love, an instinct for evil we can’t escape. We’re mostly ignorant of what’s really going on in our souls, but we should give the signals a chance.”

  “Instinct for evil,” Maginn said. “You sound like a Catholic missionary saving heathens from original sin.”

  “And you,” said Katrina, “sound like a misanthrope. What ever pleases you, Thomas?”

  “You please me, Katrina, the way you please the world. I’m overcome with pleasure when I see beauty and wit come together. And I value our visiting Miss Melissa, a young woman with a future. I do have my moments, and they arrive quite randomly.”

  “I remember one of your random moments,” said Giles. “Your date with the fireman’s wife.”

  “You never forget that, do you, Fitz?”

  “That was so funny,” said Felicity.

  “Depending on your perspective,” said Maginn.

  “Who is the fireman’s wife?” Melissa asked.

  “An invention of these grown-up boys,” said Katrina, pointing to Edward and Giles.

  “Consummate actors, both,” Maginn said. “They set out to humiliate me and they did it extremely well.”

  “Humiliation wasn’t the intention,” Giles said. “It was a joke. If we weren’t close friends we wouldn’t have bothered.”

  “They took advantage of Thomas’s infatuation with Felicity’s aunt,” Katrina said, “and convinced him she felt the same way.”

  “I told my aunt all about it,” Felicity said. “She was amused and flattered, but she’d never cheat on her husband.”

  “An exceedingly rare woman,” said Maginn. “Almost extinct in our time.”

  “Oh, you are a wretched man,” Katrina said.

  “Hateful,” said Felicity. “Devilish.”

  “You know what Chaucer said, my dears. ‘One shouldn’t be too inquisitive in life either about God’s secrets or one’s wife.’ Do you hear what I’m saying about God, Edward?”

  “I do hear,” Edward said.

  “Mundus vult decipi,” said Giles.

  “What’s that again?” Edward asked.

  “The world wants to be deceived,” Giles said. “Don’t you think so?”

  “What happened with the fireman’s wife?” Melissa asked.

  “When Thomas went to meet her,” Giles said, “a jealous husband shot at him and he fled for his life. The husband was played by a friend of ours, Clubber Dooley He screamed at Maginn as a home-wrecker and fired blank cartridges. Grand melodrama, a high point of Clubber’s life.”

  “Dooley is pitiful,” Maginn said.

  “I wouldn’t say so,” said Giles.

  “He drinks in Johnny Groelz’s saloon, morose, all but toothless, swilling beer till he’s senseless. Once a week a boy comes in and Dooley hands him money and the boy takes it home to Mother, a slattern who once indulged Dooley—what way, precisely, I’d rather develop bubonic plague than try to imagine. But ever since then she’s been on dreadful Dooley’s dole, and he dreams of another go at her someday, if he can only find a way to get off the barstool. Pitiful, needy sap.”

  “That’s perverse,” said Giles. “That boy is related to Clubber. His mother raised Clubber.”

  “Intimacy within the family is not a new thing in the universe,” Maginn said.

  “Always sex,” said Katrina. “Thomas the satyr, eternally pursuing the nymphs.”

  “The Greeks made bucolic gods of the satyrs,” Maginn said, “and I find it a jovial way of life, bouncing through the bosky with divine goatishness, spying one’s pleasure, taking it, then moving on to the next pasture. Is there a better way to spend one’s day?”

  “You are moving into depravity,” Katrina said.

  Edward saw she was smiling.

  Loretta appeared at Katrina’s elbow to say dessert was ready, and Katrina announced it would be served on the back piazza, with fireworks to follow.

  Edward had put his son in charge of the fireworks, and now here he came: Martin Daugherty, twenty, home from his day’s wandering. He stepped onto the piazza carrying his dish of Mrs. Squires’s ice cream, looking, Edward thought, like himself at that age: tall, with abundant brown hair all in place, still not quite grown into his teeth, wearing a fresh white shirt with cuffs turned. Edward saw Martin’s eyes go directly to Melissa.

  “This is our son, Martin,” Edward said. Martin stopped at Melissa’s chair and took her hand in greeting. “Melissa Spencer.” And they smiled. Both of an age.

  “You look like your father,” Melissa said. “A handsome family indeed.”

  A beginning? Two beginnings?

  “Melissa will play the lead in my new play, all things being equal,” Edward said.

  “That’s exciting,” Martin said. “A pleasure, Miss Spencer.”

  “All things are never equal, Edward,” Maginn said. “You should avoid inaccurate clichés.”

  “Are you in school?” Melissa asked Martin.

  “Going into my third year at Fordham.”

  “He may be a writer like his father,” Katrina said. “He writes well.”

  “No, not like my father. I’m not serious about it.”

  “It takes time to be serious,” Katrina said. “He’s a fine student.”

  “I might write for the newspapers,” Martin said.

  “That’s such an exciting world,” Melissa said.

  “It’s about as exciting,” said Maginn, “as being attacked by fleas.”

  “Are you really so bored by your work, Maginn?” Edward asked.

  “I would infinitely prefer setting off fireworks as a way of life,” Maginn said.

  “I just came from the fireworks at Beaver Park,” Martin said. “A huge crowd. A horse ran wild when somebody threw a cannon cracker at him. He was pulling an Italian peddler’s vegetable wagon and he ran into a moving trolley. He was on his side and bleeding badly, two legs obviously broken.”

  “Oh that’s awful,” said Melissa, a
nd she hid her face in her hands.

  “The peddler kept asking the policeman to shoot the horse, but the cop said he couldn’t kill an animal like that.”

  “You have to, if they’re in that condition,” Giles said. “You have to shoot them.”

  “A man came out of a house with a rifle and said he’d shoot the horse. The Italian got down on his knees and begged him to do it, and the man shot the horse in the head.”

  “Horrible,” said Melissa, and she wept for the horse.

  “I also saw Jack Apple do his annual jump into the river,” Martin said, breaking a silence. “He jumped off the top of the Maiden Lane bridge.”

  “He only jumped off it?” Giles said. “Anybody can do that. The trick is to jump over it.”

  “Oh Giles,” Felicity said.

  “Giles is warming up his jokes,” Maginn said. “Edward, have you considered casting Giles as Pyramus in your play? You’d have them tumbling out of their seats. Or rolling in the aisles, as you might put it.”

  “The fireworks are in those bags at the foot of the steps,” Edward said.

  Martin inspected the skyrockets, Roman candles, flowerpots, cherry bombs, strings of Chinese crackers; and Edward watched the women as they watched each other, a study in optics: Katrina aware of Giles’s and Felicity’s fascination with Melissa’s unblushing attitude toward her body; Melissa aware of Edward’s eyes on her, her own eyes on Katrina, evaluating. Edward monitored the shifting glance, the recurrent stare that extended an instant too long to be insignificant. He observed Maginn giving equal attention to all three women: failed with Felicity, failed with Katrina—didn’t he? Will he fail with Melissa, or does she collect men as he collects women? Her smiling eye lingered on Edward an instant too long not to be significant. Edward saw that Maginn saw.

  The fireworks sizzled, glowed, exploded with great bangs and a thousand small, oriental poppings, and the Roman candles thup-thupped toward where the lawn sloped down toward the brickyard on Van Woert Street, all this under Martin’s expert hand. Edward had taken him to see fireworks the first year of his life and ever after taught him caution in their handling.

  “I suppose all over Albany right now,” Edward said, “boys are having their fingers blown off and their eyes blown out.”