The Flaming Corsage

by William Kennedy

  “I haven’t decided if love is what they make.”

  “But they do sexual things.”

  “I haven’t decided if what they do is sexual.”

  “You’ve forgotten what’s sexual.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Do you remember me making myself sexual in this hammock?”

  “I do.”

  “Shall I do it again?”

  She was nuding herself belowskirts. She could do this expeditiously.

  “Is anybody watching?”

  “I am.”

  “I mean others.”

  “No.”

  “Is anybody coming?”

  “No.”

  “You see how I still love you?”

  “I see the contour of a sunrise.”

  “Shall we go to the room?”

  “If you like.”

  “You’re not enticed.”

  “I seem to be.”

  “Then say it.”

  “The room. Yes.”

  We went to her rustic chamber: bed, dresser, commode, basin and pitcher, wallpaper with pink roses on a field of mattress ticking. We shed our garments and I remembered vividly what I felt whenever I took this journey; but I felt none of that now, could not invest my movement with the pelvic arrhythmia she would remember, if she could differentiate mine from others. She perceived the problem and initiated variations on the theme, but while I remained full-blooded, I did so with ice in my heart.

  “You’re like a hanged man,” she said. “Erect but dead.”

  “I am a hanged man. At the end of my rope.”

  “You don’t look dead. You look wonderful. You look like the man I fell in love with at your dinner party.”

  “That man is dead. Did you fall in love with your director? And what would he say if he saw you now?”

  She was, just then, a moving picture, stirring the air with my verticality as if it were the tiller of a boat in a rowdy sea. My question becalmed her.

  “Ah, you’re jealous. How silly.”

  She always viewed my objection to her flirtations as the fettering of her soul.

  “He knows about us,” she said, “but he assumes we’re a thing of the past.”

  “Would this scene convince him otherwise?”

  “He’s not important to me the way you are, and he’s not very good at this.” She jostled the tiller. “I told him we had a legal matter to discuss.”

  “And so we do.”

  “Not now.”

  She went to the dresser and found a long strand of pearls, put it around her neck and knotted it so the knot lay in the deep fallaway of her breasts. She straddled the tiller and let the pearls caress my chest, my face.

  “Those look like Felicity’s pearls,” I said, and she reacted as if I’d lashed her with a bullwhip.

  “Why would you say such a thing?” She knelt up straight, then put one foot on the floor, so beautiful in her angularity, her pudendal equipoise. “You think I stole them?”

  “Cully Watson says he didn’t take them, yet they did vanish. Odd he admits the money but denies the pearls.”

  “Maybe the police stole them. What do I care? How could you think I took them?”

  “I never saw you wear pearls like these before.”

  “I loved Felicity’s pearls, so I got my own.”

  “Saved your pennies, did you? Giles paid five thousand dollars for Felicity’s.”

  “Mine were a gift from an extremely wealthy gentleman. You’re being rotten.”

  “Cully contradicts everything you and Felicity told me.”

  “Cully!” she screamed. “I’m sick of Cully. He’s a murderer. You take his word over mine?”

  “Have you seen his statement?”

  “Yes, and he’s a maniac. It’s all lies. all lies! all lies!”

  She was kneeling on a pillow. She stood up, grabbed the pillow, and threw it at me.

  “You son of a bitch, you believe him, don’t you! You think I had sex with him! You think I was in the bathtub with Felicity! YOU’RE A MANIAC TOO IF YOU BELIEVE THAT!”

  She threw a box of body powder at me. It missed my head, hit the wall, and showered talcum over the bedclothes. She reached for the toilet water but I wrapped her fury in a bear hug and made her put it down.

  “That cape Felicity wore,” I said. “I found the costumier where you bought it. I saw a similar cloak in his display window. He remembered you.”

  Her body went limp in my arms. I eased her backward so she could sit on the bed, and she blanched, summoning a stroke, or the black plague, anything to solve this crisis of contradiction. She buried her face in her hands as she had when she wept for the dead horse on the Fourth of July.

  “You don’t know anything,” she said.

  “I agree with that. Why don’t you enlighten me?”

  She fell backward on the bed and stretched her arms over her head, eyes closed, her cave of opulent nuances assisting her in negotiating a new reality.

  “I gave Felicity the mask and cloak to wear for you.”

  “For me?”

  “She wanted you. Wanted to be with you.”

  “Felicity wanted me?”

  “For years. She could never tell you.”

  “Did it occur to her I might not want her?”

  “You’d have wanted her if you saw her in that cloak.”

  “I did see her in it. Alive and dead.”

  “She had a beautiful body and she wanted to give it to you. I thought you’d like that. I said I’d arrange it. We made a game of how we’d both dress up for you.”

  “You never mentioned such a thing.”

  “It was new. We talked about it the week before. We wanted to surprise you.”

  “But Cully was the surprise.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he, not I, put you both in the tub.”

  “NEVER!”

  She fumed in silence, stoking herself for an explosion of logic that would defy all argument. I pacified her with gin and in the ensuing half hour she cobbled together her story.

  She bought the cloak for Felicity a week before the famous day, she said, kept it in a closet in our apartment (ours for the previous two months; but we were finished, for I’d wearied of her feigned illnesses, her absurd jealousies—over an actress who smiled at me at the theater, or a buxom waitress where we breakfasted—and her rage over these imagined dalliances. That rage would end as irrationally as it had begun: she on her knees asking forgiveness, I touching away her tears and reaffirming my loyalty with prolonged vaginal stroking). Melissa, having seen Felicity arrive in the hotel that morning, took cloak and mask to Felicity’s room, the proposed site of our ménage. She put the garments on a chair but saw no Felicity; nor was she in the bedroom. Melissa called out, “Your wardrobe mistress has arrived,” and from the bathroom came male and female voices, then Felicity’s voice saying she would see Melissa later.

  “I left immediately,” Melissa said to me, “telling myself she was always something of a tart.”

  “You didn’t hear any fear in her voice?”

  “I suppose I should have.”

  “Wasn’t that the bathtub rape in progress?”

  “If he raped her. He said he raped me too, but I never set eyes on the man.”

  “You never told me any of this.”

  “She came to our door in that cloak, crying and carrying her clothes, hiding behind that mask. She cried rape and I let her in. She lied to you about the cloak, but how could she tell you what it was really for? Maybe she still hoped to charm you with it. Tarts are tarts. And yet how could I doubt her? She said he held a knife to her throat, that she even feared for my life when I was outside that bathroom door. I couldn’t tell you this.”

  “Not even after her death, to get at the truth?”

  “This is the truth!”

  Melissa stood up and began to dress herself and I too stepped into my clothing, told her I was going back to Albany.

  “You make it
quite credible,” I said. “I don’t doubt any part of your story. But I’m absolutely certain you’re a virtuoso liar.”

  EDWARD ENTERED HIS home and from the hallway he called Katrina. The house replied with a stillness that plummeted him into gloom. He tossed his coat and hat on a chair and went to his library where Katrina would have left him a message, if she had been in a mood to communicate. He saw the letter from Melissa to Katrina, which lay unopened on his desk where Katrina had left it, along with two volumes of her diary for the years 1894 and 1908, their marking sashes emerging, presumably, from pages to be heeded. He pushed Melissa’s letter aside and opened the pages of Katrina’s mind.

  The first diary: April 19, 1894

  Mother sold her emerald last month. I’ve only now learned this. The house was in jeopardy and the emerald preserved it for at least four years. Father had far less than he let on, lost almost half a million in the panic of ’93, and gave more than anyone knew to Madame Baldwin. He came to Mother with his problem. Had he not given her the jewels? Were they not emblematic of lush times? But now, after the panic, the times have us in a precarious position. He did not mention Madame Baldwin. Mother yielded the emerald and kept his secrets, shoring up the facade of normalcy by forgoing travel to London and Paris for the year, limiting her shopping, and letting two of the lesser servants go. Of her truly valuable jewels only her black pearls and solitaire earrings remain, and, of course, her priceless tiara, which I covet.

  Mother chaired her antisuffrage meeting today in our main parlor. Giles came, unable to resist Mother’s magnetism. Edward brought me, listened for ten minutes, amused, then left for the club. The room was filled with a hundred of Mother’s friends and peers, all so well educated, so certain of their position, so unified and uniformed in their spring bonnets against the amendment that would eliminate the word “male” from the State Constitution’s definition of suffrage. Mother was valiant, insisting an undesirable class of women would swiftly take advantage of the vote, that it is a man’s sphere for which women are unsuited. Could anyone, she inquired in her shrillest tone, imagine a proper woman serving in the militia, or on the police and fire departments? One wonders. But as B says: “I have no ambition. I am not base enough to hold a conviction.”

  Giles, sweet Giles, ever the suitor. He persuaded me the antisuffrage papers the women were reading (“. . . educated women would stay away from the polls . . . present relations between men and women are all that could be desired . . .”) were making me crimson with vexation, and he insisted we escape. We went to the dining room and sipped punch and he put down his cup and kissed me. “I want to embrace your unclothed body,” he said, his words squishing at me through the kiss. “I dream of your intimacy. I picture your head on my pillow. I don’t care a fig that you’re married. Edward is my valued friend and has nothing to do with this. I’ve loved you since we took dancing class together.” He tried to kiss me again but I twisted his ear. He yowled like a cat, yanked his head away and I left him by the punch bowl, sweet fool. Did Father treat Madame Baldwin this way? Probably so.

  I have no desire for Giles, but the idea of a lover is taking hold. It has everything to do with resisting my age, for I will be thirty soon. I know how vain and foolish this is, but it is no less real for that. Also I must punish Edward for despoiling me. I sought it, yes, but he did it, as he should have, or I would not have married him. But I cannot forgive him. He does not yet understand the craft of dying. I wonder, shall I be truly beautiful all my life?

  The second diary: October 17, 1908

  Giles arrived this morning in a frenzy but would not say what was causing it. I made him tea to calm him, and it did. He asked for Edward and when I said he was in New York working on the production of his new play he responded, “As I thought. Are you separated?” I told him Edward and I had been moving apart with glacial slowness, and distance was having antithetical effects, a growing sense of peace, through solitude and the absence of an intolerable presence; but also a deepening fury at being abandoned, however justified the abandonment. I told him I loved Edward profoundly, that in his eyes was a melting tenderness I could find in no other man. Without a word Giles took a folded sheet of paper from his coat and handed it to me. At the center was a well-drawn cartoon of a minotaur cavorting on a theater stage with two near-naked women with the heads of cows, while another and smaller minotaur with excessively large horns was watching from the theater’s front row. Beneath the cartoon were six lines of verse:

  Your little wife’s gone to the city again

  To dance on the stage with her partners in sin.

  So she and the scribe and the actress will play

  Their bovinish games in Gomorrah today,

  The ladies disporting like September Morns,

  While you sit at home cultivating your horns.

  Of course the verse concerns Edward and Melissa Spencer, common gossip by this time, and I have ignored it. But the involvement of Felicity comes as a shock to Giles and a surprise to me; and I saw his frenzy return as a twitch in his left eye. He found the poem in his mailbox this morning. And during the night someone put a severed bull’s head on his porch. I wept for the shame of it, for all our shame. I felt extremely close to Giles at this moment, as if what was happening to us with such sudden force was a form of transcendence, thrusting us naked together into some underworld dungeon for abuse by obscene devils. Giles’s face was collapsed and flushed with tears, and I then decided to disrobe for him, rid myself of blouse, skirt, petticoat, knickers, shoes, stockings, all. I stood before him as he once said he wanted me, and his weeping ceased. I sat and let him study me, giving him not my body, but the part of my soul that lives in shadow. I told him not to touch me; nor had he betrayed any such plan. He stared at me and we didn’t speak, but I felt glorious, basking in the light of my dear friend’s wan smile. He stood up and took my chin in his right hand and kissed me just once, then said, “You are the vestal goddess of sublime pain.” I had banished his frenzy.

  IT WAS ALREADY late afternoon when Edward closed Katrina’s diary. He hitched up the horse he called Galway Kate to his demil-andau and rode out to the Cudahy slaughterhouse in West Albany. Cattle were being led out of a storage pen and up an inclined wooden runway onto the killing floor of the huge wooden shed, where Edward told a foreman he had urgent business with Clubber. Clubber, the foreman said, worked as a splitter, and Edward found him, heavy cleaver in hand, halving the backbone of a dead cow. Edward called his name, and Clubber turned and stared at Edward, then finished cutting the beast and handed the cleaver to a man beside him to cope with the next carcass. Clubber spoke to the foreman, then limped toward Edward, who was trying not to retch from the stench of the gutted animals. Clubber rinsed blood off his hands with a hose, and dried them on his trousers, which were full of bloodstains.

  “Hey, Ed, what got you out here? I ain’t ever seen you out here.”

  “You got a few minutes, Clubber?”

  “I can take ten minutes.”

  They walked out of the shed to Edward’s carriage.

  “We’ll go have a drink.”

  “Quick one’s all,” said Clubber.

  “Get up here.”

  They rode to George Karl’s saloon and Edward bought the beer. Clubber pinched himself a piece of beef on an onion slice from the lunch counter and sat at a table.

  “Putting the bull’s head on Giles’s porch, what exactly happened? Tell it again, Clubber.”

  “I told it twenty hundred times.”

  “Once more.”

  “Cully Watson says help him with the joke. Kill the bull, cut its head, leave it down at Giles’s, hell of a joke, you know it, he’ll wake up and say, ‘Hey, that’s a dead bull on my porch. Son bitch,’ he’ll say, ‘who’d do a thing like that?’ ”

  “What did Cully do on the porch? Anything you remember?”

  “Lifted the head with me.”

  “What else?”

  “Said where to set it.”
/>   “Did he have a piece of paper?”

  “Paper?”

  “With some lines of verse on it.”

  “What verse?”

  “Any verse at all. Whatever you remember.”

  “Verse.”

  “What about the paper?”

  Clubber drank some beer and searched for the paper.

  “I guess he coulda had a paper.”

  “What’d he do with it?”

  “I don’t know. Put it in the mailbox?”

  “That’s right. He put it in Giles’s mailbox.”

  “Yeah. That’s it. It was part of the joke. Like a valentine, Cully said. He’ll get a valentine in the morning. I forgot that.”

  Edward handed Clubber the verse he’d copied from Katrina’s diary. “Here’s what that valentine said.”

  Clubber’s eyes moved across and down the page, up and across, down again, up and across again.

  “What’s this stuff say?”

  “It says in a roundabout way that Giles’s wife is down in New York having sex with two people, a man and a woman. The man is meant to be me. The scribe. That’s what it means.”

  “That ain’t true.”

  “You’re right. It’s all wrong.”

  “No, that ain’t true on the valentine. It was a joke.”

  “Wasn’t a joke, Clubber.”

  “It was a joke, I’m telling you. Cully said it was a joke. We laughed like hell at the joke. Just a goddamn dead-bull joke, Ed. That’s all it was, a dead-bull joke.”

  “When Giles read it he went to New York and murdered his wife, shot me, then blew his own brains out through the top of his head. Nobody thought that was a joke.”

  “That couldn’ta been why he done it, not the joke. It ain’t possible, Ed. He gotta had somethin’ else on his mind.”

  “It was this, Clubber, it was this.”

  Clubber suffered Edward’s words as a succession of blows, a whipped cur cowering from an affectionate hand. He pulled in his shoulder and cried, making no noise. He tried to remove the evidence of such unmanly behavior by rubbing the water off his face, wiping his fingers on his pants. When he did it again, he spread pink streaks of the damp cow blood on his cheeks and around his eyes.