The Flaming Corsage

by William Kennedy

  Yea, verily, Father. Edward will make Katrina shine for all in the house. Come and see his play.

  Ebel Campion and his bearers carried Katrina’s coffin out of the church to the hearse, then drove it not to St. Agnes Cemetery, as expected, but back to the funeral home, where it remained for hours, until the last of the snuffling press had abandoned its watch. The undertaker then put the coffin into the closed wagon he used for picking up corpses, a vehicle never pressed into cemetery service before; then, with one bearer who could be trusted to keep his mouth shut, rode to the Kenmore to pick up Edward and Martin, and transported the Daugherty family to Albany Rural Cemetery, to the plot Edward had bought for Katrina, twenty yards from the grove of blue spruces where she had offered up her virginity to him.

  Without prayer, the four men lowered her into the newest grave in this gateway to the Protestant beyond, the heaven where Katrina would be most at ease, and watched silently as two gravediggers arrived to bury the coffin and fill the grave with fresh earth. When the workers departed, Edward asked his son, “Do you want to say anything?”

  Martin shook his head. “You really need a ritual at this point?”

  Edward smiled at the new clarity in Martin, done with adolescence at last, his face refined to a mature handsomeness, a young man who speaks with a quiet fluency that belies the anger Edward sees in him.

  “You’re a man who uses words, as am I,” Edward said.

  “I’ve already spoken my words to her,” Martin said.

  “Before or after she died?”

  “Before.”

  “That smacks of excellence,” Edward said. “I applaud your initiative.”

  “Your applause sounds like parental pride for what you’ve instilled in me.”

  “I think your mother would not want us to argue at her grave.”

  “She wanted us reconciled.”

  “And so we are,” Edward said. “We’re together. We have each other. We have no one else.”

  “I don’t feel reconciled,” Martin said. “I seem unable to forgive what you did to us.”

  “Understandably so. But it’s a pity you see the world from only one perspective.”

  “You mean I should take her madness into consideration? I’ve watched it since I was a child.”

  “She wasn’t mad, she was original.”

  Edward took a step forward and spoke to the grave.

  “I don’t know what she believed,” he said, “but it was a belief like none other. She began with God and moved on to death, and made them part of her being. But she abandoned both to astonish her soul. She sought something no one expects out of this life, and sought it with a firm purpose that she defined and executed without the advice or consent of others. She might have been judged an ascetic in another time, for she was much in love with suffering, her own and others’. She was also seraph and voluptuary, of such uncommon ways she seemed to preexist the fall; and there is no name for such a hybrid in our limited world, or our limited heavens. But she does not need justification. Katrina dwelled among us, and we are thankful for that. We will regret forever that she has willfully left us.”

  “Willfully?” said Martin. “What do you mean?”

  “Her time had ended. She knew it.”

  “The fire killed her.”

  “Of course it did,” said Edward. “It was her element.”

  IN THE SPRING months when he was trying to finish The Flaming Corsage, Edward was accumulating evidence that he owned only half a brain, half a heart, that his talent had decayed, all fire gone from his imagination. With his early plays he had run blindfolded into the unknown and come away with the prize, or believed he had. But now he knew that despite his relentless work, something was missing. This play did not end, it aborted. Three years of writing and he had produced a ridiculous lie, an evasion, a travesty of the truth. Nothing will save it from savagery by all who see it.

  There is blood in your mouth, Edward.

  The enemy applauds your fate.

  He decided Maginn must have lived all his life in this condition: full of desire and effort, but a creative cripple: inadequate strength to imagine the substance of the work, and an intelligence too arrogant to shape it. The love song of the wrong word.

  Then Katrina died, and Edward sat at the desk in the parlor of his hotel suite and began a new ending for the play—already in production with the flawed ending. He wrote the night she died; wrote most of the following two days, except for some time with Martin, and arranging the funeral. After the mass, while waiting for the undertaker, he began yet another version of the final scene, one with promise. After the burial he reread the scene and let it stand.

  The two as measured distance. The absence that grows in the fertile earth.

  He hired the young woman typewriter-copyist in the hotel’s office to make three copies, and was at the theater to hand them to the director and actors when they arrived in the evening for the final run-through.

  Too late to change this much dialogue, the director said. It absolutely must be changed, Edward said. I’ll never memorize it in time, the lead actor said. Oh yes, you will, said Edward. And the play opened Saturday night with the final dialogue dictated by Katrina.

  Edward watched the performance from the aisle of the parquet. When the houselights went up on the clamor that greeted the end of the play, Edward saw Maginn in a forward box with a woman, and moved toward him immediately. But he was met by the exiting throng and lost Maginn in the crowd.

  The play closed after one performance.

  THE FORCES OF decency in the city dealt a sledgehammer death blow to the new play by Edward Daugherty Saturday night. The opening performance at Harmanus Bleecker Hall was greeted with hisses at the first scene of Act Four, and shouts of “unclean” and “filth” were heard as the play progressed to its conclusion. A score of people left the theater, which was packed to capacity for the performance, more than 2,500 seats filled. When the curtain came down, the hisses and boos were loud and relentless, especially from the gallery, and extra police were summoned to move the audience out of the theater.

  Yesterday morning Episcopal Bishop Sloane and Catholic Bishop Burke, in concert with Mayor McEwan and many leading citizens of the city, pressed the owners of the Hall and the play’s producers to cease further performance. At midafternoon the producer announced the cancellation of the play’s two-week run. The Hall’s manager said he will offer, in its place, the return of last week’s immensely popular production of Regeneration, with Bert Lytell, the story of an Irish Bowery thug raised to manhood by the power of a woman’s prayer.

  Daugherty’s play, titled The Flaming Corsage, purports to be a tragic love story, but is a thinly veiled excursion into the lower regions of human degradation, beginning with the murder, in a “love nest,” of an unfaithful wife, who is shot by her husband; and the husband then suicides. It carries on from there through such morally repugnant dialogue as has never been heard on the Albany stage. Some phrases would not be printable in this newspaper under any circumstances, yet they are uttered brazenly by two women characters.

  “The shame of Albany” is what Bishop Sloane called the play; Bishop Burke said such a writer should be “damned to hell for such public sin”; and the Mayor, who had not seen the play, said, “From all accounts it is a degenerate assault on American womanhood. And we won’t stand for that in this city.”

  It was agreed yesterday by seasoned theatergoers who saw the play that it is little more than a self-exculpation by the playwright, an apologia for his involvement in the Love Nest Scandal of 1908 in Manhattan, whose events closely parallel those of the play, with names of the characters changed so slightly from their real-life counterparts that all are recognizable. And so the old scandal is rekindled to a bright flame.

  Dear Sir,

  I rush to correct the general misapprehension of the play The Flaming Corsage, which closed after a single performance on Saturday. The play is seen as a violation of our Magnificent Munic
ipal Moral Code (would that it were!). But it was not that at all, and judgment of it on that basis should be left to the philistines. The play will have, most certainly, a secure place in the history of American theater, as a curiosity. It has kinship with dreadful Ibsen’s one great achievement, Peer Gynt, and may be as great a literary benchmark as Beowulf, that ossified ostrich egg of fictional narrative, though the Daugherty play resembles neither work.

  The Flaming Corsage must be judged a failure, a great botch of a work that should probably have been a novel, just as Chekhov’s plays, overstuffed with characters and incident, would have shone as novels. Daugherty, the playwright, was, potentially, a novelist of the first rank, but abandoned the genre for playwriting, a major mistake, the success of his last play notwithstanding. That play, The Masks of Pyramus, owed its success to its paralleling of Romeo and Juliet, just as the Shakespeare work owed its nucleus to Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe. Plagiarism in the arts continues apace.

  But The Flaming Corsage does have its merits. It casts aside the weeping and wailing of our mouldy melodrama and the contrived realism of our present potpourri of pygmy playwrights, and instead it offers up scenes rich with raw realism, as well as stinging satire of a high order. The bovinish women of the piece, and their hopeless husbands and lovers, all struggle between lofty intentions and hidden animal instincts, much the way Peer Gynt confronts the evil trolls of his life in the Ibsen play.

  No one in American theater has ever written with as much insight into the dark quotidian reality as Edward Daugherty. It is a great pity that he is such a paltry buffoon when it comes to organizing his play, and sorting out the fates of his characters. He creates fine china, then destroys it all with his unruly hindquarters.

  Like Beowulf, which was fated to be unreadable, this play is fated to be judged unplayable by future generations. But it will also be studied as a grotesque curiosity that broke new theatrical ground. It does not surprise me that it was closed, but it was closed for the wrong reasons.

  THEATER LOVER

  (Name withheld)

  EDWARD SAT NOW in a long pause, staring out the second-floor window of his workroom at another grotesquely shadowed evening that had become abominably hot. The pages of his nameless play-in-progress lay on the desk beside the marble bust of Persephone, the only artifact of value to survive the fire. And beside that lay Emmett’s loaded .32-caliber revolver.

  Emmett had bought the pistol to defend himself during labor trouble at the Fitzgibbon foundry, protection against men he’d fought for all his life; for when he became foreman, he became their enemy. Rise in the world and count your friends on your thumb.

  “I could shoot it and hit what I shot at,” Emmett said, “but I never pulled the trigger in anger, or in fear. It was a useless damn gadget and I knew that the day I bought it.”

  Edward looked at the pistol. He looked at his pages. He picked up his first page, read the opening scene. Sweat dropped from his forehead onto the paper.

  Scene One

  (The execution chamber of Sing Sing prison. Six WITNESSES sit on folding chairs facing the empty electric chair. EXECUTIONER stands near large-handled switch that will activate electric current.

  WARDEN and PRIEST enter with THOMAS MAGINN, the prisoner. Two GUARDS, escorting MAGINN, seat him in electric chair, strap him into it, apply one electrode to calf of his right leg, another to cover his forehead and shaved temples.

  DR. GILES FITZROY enters, walking ahead of stretcher wheeled in by another guard, and upon which lies the pale corpse of EDWARD DAUGHERTY. GILES motions to GUARD where to put stretcher: GUARD tips stretcher on its end so that DAUGHERTY corpse stands upright, facing the electric chair.)

  GILES (TO WARDEN): Is the condemned ready?

  WARDEN (TO PRIEST): Is he ready, Father?

  PRIEST: Frankly, I don’t think he has a prayer.

  WARDEN : Are you ready, Mr. Maginn?

  (MAGINN breaks into hysterical laughter, which continues as he speaks.)

  MAGINN: My father collected dead horses for pig food. My mother was a one-armed bitch who took in washing for cowboys. My sister was a whore at age six. My kid brother tortured cats with hatpins. My uncle gouged eyes for a dime. My family was saintly in the extreme.

  (His laughter subsides somewhat.)

  I’m a lucky man, the first in my family to be executed for his intelligence. The world will mark today as the day they uselessly martyred a beloved hero, and it will await my resurrection. There’s no doubt I’m the smartest man on the North American continent, given to humility at all hours, ready to play the fool for any woman with pubic hair. I also admire them shorn.

  (MAGINN’s laughter is gone, his face saddens gradually. He weeps, then cries openly.)

  The worth of my being is proportionate to the weight of my written work. The essence of all power in this life is defiance, malfeasance, the pox, the smile, the dollar, and comprehension of the nature of time, which is running short. In sum, I’m as unprepared for death as I was for life. But let’s get on with it.

  (MAGINN is now sobbing, breathing with difficulty.)

  Red pig blood, orange sunset and evening star, pale-yellow pig shit, lime-green urine, blue sky and meadow, indigo clouds, violet pussy, white horses, whiteness whitening the white white . . .

  (He stops sobbing, laughs hysterically.)

  WARDEN (TO GILES): The condemned is ready.

  GILES: Are you ready, Mr. Daugherty?

  DAUGHERTY: I am.

  GILES: Let it be noted for the record that the eyes of the dead Daugherty have been sewn open to enable him to witness the execution of his murderer, the fugitive whoremonger, the unrequited narcissist. Now, let us proceed. (He waves his hand to executioner, who pulls switch, sending current into maginn, who stiffens. Steam rises from his skull and from his leg. giles, checking his pocket watch, waves to executioner, who turns switch off. giles examines maginn with stethoscope and holds thermometer against his leg.)

  GILES: Let it be noted that auscultation indicates the condemned still has a pulse, and the temperature of the skin is one hundred eighty degrees. All skin contacts show notable burn marks. How are you feeling, Mr. Maginn?

  MAGINN: Tip-top.

  GILES: Then let us continue.

  (He gestures again to EXECUTIONER, who pulls switch, with same reaction from MAGINN. Not steam but smoke rises from burned flesh. GILES times this jolt with his watch, waves to EXECUTIONER, who turns off current. GILES examines MAGINN.)

  GILES: The condemned heart still beats. Temperature at contact points now two hundred fourteen degrees, nicely above boiling point. Crepitation noted throughout. Anterior epithelial cells of the cornea have desquamated from the action of heat. Sclera of left eye bulges at its left corneal junction. Scalp and skin of neck have a dull, purplish hue, with blisters on temples, cheeks, and eyelids. Epidermis at flexure of knee joint has been torn away. How are you feeling, Mr. Maginn?

  MAGINN (Weakly): Violet piss, golden pigs.

  GILES: Then let us continue.

  (He waves hand again to EXECUTIONER, etc.)

  Edward stopped reading. He ordered the pages of the play and walked downstairs to the kitchen, the heat no longer tolerable. He pumped water, wet his face, hair, arms. He walked, dripping, to the front porch, sat in his father’s rocking chair, and stared at the corner of the porch. The flood this spring had tilted it another fraction of an inch eastward: fittingly askew.

  He stared up the empty street and saw his young self walking off it forever (oh yes) and out of this city into worlds no boy, no man on this block, except his father, could even have imagined. Now he was back, solitary Main Streeter: no visitors, curtains drawn, answering no rings of the bell, no knocks, reading no mail, food delivered by Drislane’s.

  The oaks and the elms are in full leaf, the honeysuckle bush his mother planted in 1859, when the house was new, when Main Street and Edward were new, is a tree now, yielding berries, and the robins are eating them. Nobody hates these leaves, the
se berries, these robins, the way people hate Edward. Neither will Edward love any of them for their overrated glory, their vaunted beatitude. You think such mindless things deserve love? Love is what you feel during yesterday’s lightning storms. And then here come the dogs.

  He saw two boys with sticks running down from Broadway, chasing a dog that was leaving them behind, that ran into the horse-shoe court between Joe Farrell’s and Edward’s houses, across Francis Phelan’s backyard, and was gone.

  “You won’t catch him now, boys,” Edward said, and the boys stopped and looked at him. “And there’s gardens back there. You wouldn’t want to run through them.”

  “He bit me,” one boy said.

  “Did he draw blood?”

  The boy, in short pants, looked at his bare leg. Edward could see a line of blood from calf to ankle.

  “Yeah, he got me,” the boy said.

  “You should go see Doc McArdle,” Edward said. “You know where he lives?”

  “Doc McArdle is dead,” the boy said.

  “Is he?”

  “His horse kicked him in the head.”

  The boy bent his leg to look at the wound, spat on it, and rubbed up the trickle of blood with two fingers. He snapped the spit and blood off the fingers, pulled a leaf off an oak tree and wiped the wound.