The Flaming Corsage

by William Kennedy

  “Giles, how come you’re not with the firemen tonight?” Maginn asked. “Don’t you usually help them out on the Fourth?”

  “I took the night off to have dinner with you, you lout,” Giles said. “I’m tired of stupid people blowing themselves to pieces. But if you decide to blow yourself up, Maginn, I have the tetanus antitoxin in my bag to treat you.”

  “If I decide to blow myself up,” said Maginn, “there won’t be anything left to treat. I will very thoroughly atomize myself into the circumambient air.”

  “What a grisly thing to say,” Katrina said.

  “Grisly? I thought it was quite poetic. You’re very severe with me tonight, Katrina.”

  Grisly the whole thing. And unacceptable. Edward rose from his rocker and walked down onto the lawn to get away. Something magnetic in him attracts her lashing tongue. Of course she knows he lives for these lashings. What is the recourse?

  “Time for the skyrockets,” Martin said.

  “Oooh, can I light one?” Melissa asked, and she left the piazza and came to the bottom of the garden, where Edward and Martin stood beside a dozen skyrockets stuck into the ground on their launching sticks. Martin handed her the lighted punk and showed her where to touch it to a skyrocket’s fuse. She bent over the skyrocket, very probably giving Martin an unobstructed view of the chest-scape; and, as they all watched the rocket ignite, soar into the moonlit sky, and explode, Melissa touched another rocket, then another, sending them all to heaven. From the piazza came applause for the spectacle.

  As Edward and Melissa walked back toward the house she touched his arm. He turned to see her leaning toward him, offering him her beautiful moonlit breasts.

  “I just wanted to say I’m incredibly grateful for your belief in me,” she said. “You’re a very special man.”

  “I recognize talent when I see it,” Edward said. He offered her his hand and they went up the steps together.

  Maginn rose from his chair and came over to Edward.

  “Are you taking her away from me?” he whispered. “Is that what you’re doing?”

  Before Edward could answer, Felicity said, “Look, a shooting star!” and he turned to see in the northern sky the dying arc of the meteor, or was it a comet, or a falling angel?

  “Oh dear,” Melissa said, blessing herself. “That’s bad luck. That means one of us here will be dead next year.”

  “More fatalism, Edward,” Maginn said. “This superstitious child is perfect for your play.”

  “I don’t believe such things,” Katrina said.

  “On the other hand, the Trojans didn’t believe Cassandra’s prophecies,” Maginn said, “and look what happened to them.”

  “We’re all too healthy to die,” Felicity said.

  “I agree,” Edward said. “I refuse to play dead just because the sky is falling.”

  “I second that motion,” said Giles.

  At the stroke of midnight Martin lit the last fireworks of the evening: half a dozen red lights that burned brightly together for a long minute at the bottom of the garden, then weakened until their lambency was spent, and the light on the Daugherty lawn came only from the vigilant moon.

  Edward: From the Inquest Report

  SHE WAS THERE when I came into the apartment, wearing that exotic cloak and mask, moving nervously around the parlor, and exploding with her story. She said she was napping on the sofa in her room, fully dressed, when she saw a man crawling over the transom, half into the room through the fanlight’s opening; and what awakened her was the sound of his shirt buttons scraping on the wood.

  “I would have screamed,” she said, “but he waved a knife at me in silent warning. I ran to the buzzer to ring for help, but he was at me before I got to it, and he searched my purse and valise. He took all the cash I’d drawn from the bank in Albany, more than three hundred dollars, and he touched the long strand of pearls I was wearing, the ones Giles gave me. He seemed to know jewelry. ‘Now,’ he said to me, ‘get out of your clothes.’ ”

  She wept as she said this, lifting her eye mask to dab at her tears. I asked her why she was wearing the mask but she just waved both hands impatiently.

  “He led me to the bedroom and pushed me onto the bed and raped me, hurt me so much I thought I must be bleeding. When he was done he made me draw water for a bath and told me to sit in the water and soap myself. He knelt by the tub and lathered me with one hand, his knife always at me. He helped me out of the tub and handed me a towel to dry off, then opened the wardrobe and took out this mask and cloak. I never saw them before and can’t imagine how he knew they were there. Maybe he’d put them there.

  “He told me, ‘Lady, you got one great shape,’ and made me put on the mask, cloak, and shoes and walk across the room, holding the cloak open while he looked at me. Then he pushed me down on the sofa and raped me again. And he left. I knew you [me] had an apartment here, and this morning I saw Melissa in the lobby and I assumed she was visiting you. So when he was gone I grabbed my clothes and came straight here, afraid he’d come back for another go at me, or even kill me, that’s how these men are. Oh the foul dog.”

  Melissa told me she was shocked to see a masked woman at the door, and wasn’t sure it was Felicity until she spoke. Felicity’s arrival was a quarter hour before my own, and all that time, Melissa said, she was hysterical, talking of being raped and robbed of her money and pearls by a man she’d seen working in the hotel. When I arrived Felicity told me the rapist looked like one of the gang who beat up the policemen on the barge. When she described him I knew it was Cully Watson. Melissa knew Cully only as Hopkins, a sometime hotel elevator operator.

  Melissa, Felicity, and I were together half an hour, sifting what had happened, when Giles arrived. Never has a man been more deceived about what he thought he was seeing. Such costly, ghastly error. The questions remain: What led to his insane behavior? How did he know Felicity would be in my room at that moment, when neither we nor Felicity could have predicted it?

  Cully Watson: From His Statement to Police

  I was in Ohio first I heard of those killings. It was the Doc’s wife and the actress, and Daugherty. Something going on there. Same day as the killings a guy says the Albany cops are looking for me, want me for trial, so what I needed was a bundle to get gone. The Doc’s wife liked me, so when I took her stuff up to her room I parted her on the ass. She opened her bag to duke me and I saw a fold of bills thick as a steak. I told her, “I don’t want money, just a little lovin’.” I already had her three times before when she was at the hotel, so I muzzled her up. Not now, somebody’s comin’ to see me, she said. I said I’ll be quick, and I opened her up some and she let me do this and that but pushed me away.

  “We’ll do it all later,” she said, but I’m hot so I kept going and we did it on the davenport.

  She liked it but she was pissed at me mussing her hair, she’s got company coming. Then the door opened and in came the actress. She didn’t know what to make of us, both half naked, and she backed out, but the Doc’s wife said, “He’s raping me, don’t go.”

  I said, “No, I’m just fucking her. We’re friends.” And I pulled out of her.

  “I wanna take a bath,” the Doc’s wife said, and she turned on the tap in the tub, bare-ass, except for that long string of pearls. I told her I liked the way she looked in ’em so she took ’em off to spite me and threw ’em on the bed. They said I took ’em but that ain’t so. Fencing jewels on the run, you gotta be stupid. The other woman kept looking at me and she wasn’t afraid.

  “Are you busy?” I said.

  “Forget it,” she said.

  “Maybe you wanna take a bath too.”

  “No thanks,” she said, but I pulled her clothes off. She fought me pretty good, but I got it into her too, short time, just to say I did it, a hell of a sweet-looking bitch. I put ’em both in the tub, soaping each other up. I coulda diddled the two of ’em all day, but with the cops after me I slipped out, took the cash from the purse, and left t
he women playing foot-in-the-crotch. I don’t know who was doing what to who in that crowd. Maybe everybody was doing everybody. For me, I was long gone before the killings. When I heard about them I didn’t blame the Doc. His wife was no good. But she was a pretty good fuck.

  MISS INNOCENCE OF America. If a headbirth by Aphrodite and The Prince were possible she could have been the progeny: born with passion’s mouth and sacred swath, and wisdom from below. There are lessons to be learned by brushing a wing against such as she, and the lessons continue. In Melissa’s nest of tinder I remembered Rose from tent city: vivacious, talented, driven, exuberant, bright, cunning strumpet. She answered when I wrote that I wanted to talk about Felicity.

  Can you remember the dress I wore when we met? It no longer fits me, I’m so thin. The Kinegraph people think I’m ill or dying. They even say it to my face. I still wake up calling your name over and over. You’ve never left me. Some weeks I hardly eat anything. I’m wasting away, they tell me, and you know an actress can’t afford to lose her profile.

  Sickness plagues her imagination. She falls mortally ill when life goes awry, when fortune balks, when love loses its luminescence; for if you are ill, God cannot refuse you sustenance. It was because I genuinely believed her inability to either sleep without night sweats, or draw breath without pain, that I was with her when death came at us out of Giles’s pistol. She and I were finished, but I had been unable to reject that face: not beautiful, but so robustly young, and illusory. Believe that face and lose your way. Study the transformation as she applies the powders, rouges, and charcoal stripings. Discover in that colored mouth, in those magnified eyes, the lure of the virgin-into-vixen: kill my innocence and I’ll reward you with my fur.

  I’ve made thirty-five films this year and until two months ago nobody knew my name. And I thought I’d be anonymous forever. Of course I’d love to see you. Always. I was supposed to make two films last week and I missed both because of my weakness, but now that we’re leaving the city I’m wonderfully well, for we’re going to a marvelous lake with wild woodland. Do you know where I’m talking about? I can’t believe it. I’m so excited. I told them everything I knew about the place, and my director couldn’t wait. We’ll be at our hotel four weeks, so come, love, please come, and everything will be just as it was.

  Her success as my Thisbe had been supreme, she famous overnight, her photo in all the magazines. The play ran five months and when it closed Flo Ziegfeld was ready to put her in his Miss Innocence to replace Anna Held, but along came Giles’s Wild West performance and Ziegfeld said nobody tainted by scandal would ever be in a show of his. For a time no one in theater would hire her, but the scandal faded into gossip and instead of being branded as the vixen she emerged as destiny’s waif, the innocent darling corrupted by the “eater of broken meats,” as the Police Gazette labeled me.

  She sought work in the pictures, brought her photographs to Kinegraph, and was hired at fifteen dollars a week. Her salary rose to six hundred a week and is still climbing. She’s become Kinegraph’s chief asset: The Kinegraph Girl, nameless, chameleonic face of sorrow and rapture and fury and terror and wickedness and determination and invitation.

  During one of her illnesses rumors spread that she’d been killed by a burglar, or run down by a drunken motorist. The public wondered: Where has our girl gone? Kinegraph publicists advertised in the newspapers to disprove the lies about her death, and announced she was coming to New York for a new picture. Squadrons of police had to hold back fans waiting for her train at Grand Central—a greater crowd than greeted the President the previous week. Kinegraph promptly abandoned its policy of anonymity for actors and agreed the public should know the Kinegraph Girl by name: Melissa Spencer . . . Melisssssssssa Ssssssssspenccccccccer, how sweet the sibilance!

  My sickness flared up when the police came to talk about Cully Watson. All lies. How can such a man be believed? If they put it in the papers again my career is ruined. Why would he slander me? I never said a word to him, and I swear this on my breasts, which you know how much we both value. Please meet me at Cooperstown and we will erase the horror and relive our loving days there and I’ll be well again just from the sight of you.

  Her film-in-progress was The Deerslayer, Cooper’s five-hundred-page Natty Bumppo novel condensed to a twenty-minute movie. Her role was Hetty, the simpleminded daughter of scalp hunter Thomas Hutter. When I found my way to the village and then to the set, there she was, Melissa-into-Herty, lying on her bed beneath a quilt, her face powdered into a death pallor; for Hetty had been shot by a stray bullet as the British troops rescued Deerslayer and Hetty’s sister, Judith, from torture at the hands of the Huron Indians. Hetty was dying, and her secret love, Hurry Harry, another scalp hunter, was by her deathbed, along with Judith, heroic Deerslayer in his fringed buckskins, and his bare-chested Indian friend Chingachgook, noble Delaware chief. The actors mouthed Cooper’s cumbersome dialogue as if it meant something to the film.

  “How come they to shoot a poor girl like me and let so many men go unharmed?” Hetty wondered.

  “ ’Twas an accident, poor Hetty,” said Judith.

  “I’m glad of that—I thought it strange: I am feeble minded, and the red men have never harmed me before . . . there’s something the matter with my eyes—you look dim and distant—and so does Hurry, now I look at him . . . my mind was feeble—what people call half-witted . . . How dark it’s becoming! . . . I feel, Deerslayer, though I couldn’t tell you why . . . that you and I are not going to part forever . . .”

  “. . . Yes, we shall meet ag’in, though it may be a long time first and in a far-distant land.”

  “Sister, where are you? I can’t see now anything but darkness . . .”

  “Speak, dearest,” said Judith. “Is there anything you wish to say . . . in this awful moment?”

  Cooper has Hetty blush, which to Judith means Hetty is undergoing “a sort of secret yielding to the instincts of nature,” and, on cue from Judith, Hurry Harry, nature’s lusty pawn, takes Hetty in his arms. She utters her love for him, then dies.

  Melissa, no stranger at death’s door, rose up from Hetty’s bed twice, fell back twice to die twice, one of the film’s notable scenes. When it ended and the camera ceased its clatter, she rose up again to embrace me, kiss me lightly but with promise. The director eyed our kiss with disapproval, and I sensed he was Melissa’s new conquest. He was early thirtyish, boyish, and rumpled.

  “Our next film’s in California, where we’ll never have to worry about the weather,” he said. “And it gets us away from the patent wars—movie companies suing each other over who owns the camera technology. You know about that, I guess.”

  “Of course,” I said, knowing nothing of such wars.

  “Melissa has no interest in these things,” said the rumpled boy, “but she’ll thrive in California. Inspiration under the sun. You’ll have that every day, Mel.”

  “A life of sunshine,” Melissa said. “What luxury.”

  When Rumples ended the day’s filming, Melissa changed clothes, leaving Hetty’s shroud and heavy eye makeup behind, converting that face that launched a thousand nickels (ten thousand thousand nickels) back into its faux pristinity. We went to the hotel and found our way to the rear piazza with its same rockers, same hammock, same view of the lovely lake that Cooper called Glimmerglass, and its vast, lush forests. Here we had spent ten idyllic days in the summer of 1908, convinced life was a dream of sensual indolence.

  Melissa took up her familiar position in the hammock, and we ordered the same drinks (gin and quinine water), set them on the same wicker table, and we studied each other as if the 1908 dream had not dissolved in cordite reek and blood spew. Two years gone and the residual bone pain from the bullet (which had entered my left chest where the burning stick pierced Katrina: God’s own symmetry) continued to plague my sleepless nights. Yet it was the forgotten wound, spoken of by neither Katrina nor Melissa; for I’d behaved badly, had not summoned the penitential grace to die
from my bullet.

  “Tell me about your play,” she said. “Am I in it?”

  “Someone like you is in it, but it isn’t you.”

  “But I could play the role.”

  “You could if I cast you.”

  “Of course you’ll cast me.”

  “Maybe you won’t want this role.”

  “If you wrote it I want it.”

  “That’s your only interest, a role. You don’t even know what the play is about.”

  “What is it about?”

  “It’s about a marriage that fails and the partners stay together but take lovers, not very original. Then the husband is caught with his mistress in a love nest, there’s a shooting and two die. The husband is shot but doesn’t die. People wish he had. He is condemned as a lecherous cad by priests, newspaper editors, and other custodians of the high moral ground. His son abandons college to escape his father’s scandal. Thoughtless of the father not to perish from shame. To spite others, the man lives on. His life grows bleak. He can’t understand why this tragedy happened, why people died. It’s a mystery. He begins a journal, fills ledgers with ruminations, theories, then decides writing a play will combat the lethal determinism of the universe. He fills his imagined stage with a riot of scenes that synthesize events, discover answers. He discovers little and falls depressed at the pointlessness of wild endeavor. In time he humbleheartedly reunites with his estranged wife as a way of saving his soul. Magnanimous woman, she doesn’t loathe him. She has her own sorrows. She has always loved him and he her. This is such a commonplace story. It happens to everybody, don’t you think? Finally, as he’s framing a conclusion on the cause of the killings, he turns up facts that dramatically contradict his conclusion, so he visits his old paramour to confront her with the news. That’s as far as I’ve gotten.”

  “When he goes back to his wife, do they make love?”