The Flaming Corsage

by William Kennedy

  “I’ll put a bandage on it,” the second boy said, and he took off the red bandanna he was wearing on his neck and tied it around his friend’s wound. The boy who’d been bitten took a few steps, limping.

  “It hurts,” he said.

  He picked up a stone and hurled it at the garden where the dog had fled. The second boy picked up two stones and threw them at the eastern sky that arced toward the bed of the Erie Canal that was: whelps all: the dog, the boys, Edward.

  The moon sent down its light to weave an image in the branches of an oak tree, and Edward saw in it Emmett’s face: a grid of sinew and wisdom that would not stay in the grave. There, perfectly etched by leaf and moonlight, were the lines of the Emmett nose and jaw, the wry slash of smile, vanishing, then reappearing in the flickering light’s gestalt. Keeper of the flame. But there is no longer a flame. Your father is preparing for your departure, Edward.

  Under this July moon, now shaped like a battered face, Edward left the porch, walked past the lot where the cattle pens used to be on Champlain Street, parallel to the tracks and the all-but-dead canal. Beyond the canal half a dozen of forty-two sawmills were still active in the Lumber District, which was dying from want of softwood: so many Adirondack pine forests denuded, so few people working in the District that for sixty years gave jobs to men by the swarm: now a zone of quiet. No more overflowing lunch crowds in Black Jack’s, no more cardsharps at the tables, no more brawls, no more dead horses in the canal, all work in the foundries now, or over the hill in the West End, at the Central’s railroad shops. Purpose vanishing from North Albany, eclipsed like the dead Irish of Connacht. Potential actualized into a living neighborhood. And then? Yes. What, then, is the potential of the new actuality?

  He walked up Erie Street past the icehouse, and the site of the old wooden Sacred Heart church, where pigs and chickens came to mass, now a vacant lot. He passed the car barns. When he read the Car Barns play to his father in his sickbed (for he would not live to see it performed) Emmett had asked:

  “Is that fella in the play supposed to be me?”

  “Does he sound like you?”

  “He does.”

  “Did you say those things he says?”

  “Never.”

  “So there you are. You and not you, reality and fantasy in one package.”

  “You’re a glib man. If you don’t change your ways you’ll come to a bad end.”

  Prophetic.

  He turned onto Broadway, bats swooping through the glow of streetlamps, and saw Cappy White with a growler under his arm. Edward hadn’t seen Cappy since his son, Bitsy, a softspun boy born without ears, who’d earned candy money eating live frogs for a nickel, went up in flames in church while lighting a candle for his mother, Mamie. Mamie weighed maybe five hundred pounds—nobody ever found a way to weigh her—and grew wider with the years. When Doc McArdle came to examine her dropped stomach she refused him access: “I never showed my front end to anybody but Cappy White. He was the first one, he’ll be the last one.”

  Mamie stayed in the house, could not leave it even for Bitsy’s funeral, did not fit into the stairwell. When she died Cappy knocked out siding and two windows, then backed up a derrick to lift her out of bed and carry her to her own funeral. After that he took himself to bed and stayed there, leaving it only to buy food and beer. Hermit of Main Street, punished by the gods for marrying fat and cherishing a freakish child. What peculiar shapes love takes.

  “Hi ya, Cappy,” Edward said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Eddie Daugherty.”

  “Eddie, yeah, you’re back. I heard you lost everything.”

  “That’s right, Cappy.”

  “So did I.”

  “I know.”

  “How you livin’?”

  “Best way I can.”

  “You still got your son,” Cappy said.

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “I lost my son.”

  “I know you did. I hate that, Cappy.”

  “So do I.”

  “You get out much, Cap?”

  “Nope. No reason to.”

  “Maybe it’ll get better.”

  “No, it won’t get no better. You oughta know that.”

  “I keep wondering whether it’s finished.”

  “It’s finished.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They ain’t nothin’ worth doin’.”

  “It seems like that, all right.”

  “You came back to North Albany.”

  “I did,” said Edward.

  “What for?”

  “No place else to go.”

  “That’s a good reason. So long, Eddie.”

  Cappy turned toward his house and Edward thought: Now Main Street has two hermits. He walked to Jack McCall’s saloon for an ale. Respite. But maybe not. The night he moved back to Main Street he stopped at Jack’s for an ale. Smiler McMahon and Petey Parker were at the bar when he came up beside them.

  “Something stinks,” Petey said.

  “Yeah. We don’t need that around here,” Smiler said, and he and Petey crossed the room and sat at a table.

  “I’ll have an ale,” Edward said to the bartender, a man he didn’t know, but who obviously took his cue from Smiler.

  “One’s all you get,” said the bartender.

  Edward let him draw the ale. He picked it up and poured it onto the floor, then let the glass drop and shatter in the puddle.

  Now, through the screen door, he saw Jimmy McGrath behind the bar. Four men looked at him when he entered, then went back to their beer. Had he ceased stinking after only a month?

  “What’ll it be, Eddie?” Jimmy asked.

  “I’ll try an ale. The last glass I had here I never got to drink.”

  “I heard about that,” Jimmy said. “And so did Jack. He fired that stupid son of a bitch. ‘Nobody tells Eddie Daugherty he can’t drink in my saloon,’ Jack said.”

  Jimmy set an ale in front of Edward, then sat on his stool behind the bar.

  “Here’s to Jack,” Edward said, taking a mouthful. “I thought you retired, Jim.”

  “I did. Had two toes taken off from the sugar. But I come in nights when Jack needs help. Business is kinda quiet, and I’m next door. Long as I don’t stand up too long.”

  “The whole neighborhood’s quiet.”

  “Right. But the Tablet Company’s comin’ in up the road. They’re hiring men, and women too, they say.”

  “That’ll be good for business.”

  Edward took another mouthful of ale.

  “Eddie,” said Jimmy, “I’m sorry about the fire, and your wife. They hit you hard.”

  “That they did.”

  “I remember her coming in after some ale when Emmett was dying. I didn’t serve her first, but she kept at me. She knew what she wanted, that one.”

  “You could say that,” Edward said.

  “The fire take everything, did it?”

  “I saved some journals, inside a trunk in the cellar. They got wet but I can read them. A few books, some silver, odds and ends, a piece of marble. The rest is ashes.”

  “How you gonna live now?”

  “That’s a hell of a question, Jimmy.”

  “People know you’re holed up down there in the house. They see the ice and the food going in. Freddy Doran, the mailman, says the letters he delivers are gone outa the box the next day.”

  “I don’t read letters. They’re all about yesterday.”

  “We got a letter here for you,” Jimmy said.

  He went to the back bar and opened a drawer, handed a letter to Edward.

  “Came about a month ago. ‘Hold for pickup,’ it says.”

  When Jimmy drew beer for the men down the bar, Edward looked at the letter. Maginn’s hand. He opened it.

  Old Chum Edward,

  Missed you at your opening night. If you’re up for a bit of a chat, look me up at 65 Division Street, any time. Always a pleasure to see you. />
  M

  Edward pocketed the letter, finished his ale.

  “Another?” Jimmy asked.

  “I’ll move along,” Edward said.

  “Anything I can do, say the word,” said Jimmy.

  “If I ever figure out the word I’ll let you know.”

  He walked back to Main Street and climbed the stairs to his workroom. He noted the time, nine-forty-five on the mantel clock, as he picked up the revolver from the desk. He put it in his back pocket and walked down the stairs, feeling the bulk of the pistol, opened the front door and stepped onto the porch. He stared at the long shadows the trees made on Main Street’s bricks, at the sky incandescent with moonlight. The brilliant blackness was suffusing his being like an elixir of resolution. He took the pistol from his pocket and stared at it. He saw Emmett’s finger on the trigger. There is a reason for everything.

  He walked into the house and through the hallway to the kitchen, down the back steps and across the yard to Emmett’s toolshed. He found matches and candle and lit them. He saw Emmett’s vise covered with dust. He broke open the pistol and let the six bullets fall onto the workbench. He opened the vise jaws and put the pistol barrel between them, tightened the jaws. He took down a small sledgehammer from its hook and swung, then swung it again, and again, until the pistol broke in three pieces. He opened the vise jaws, tossed the pieces and the bullets into the trash bucket.

  Giles, Felicity, and I bring you greetings even so, Maginn.

  DIVISION STREET, FIVE blocks long, ran west from Quay Street on the river, then crossed Broadway, Liberty, Dallius, and Green Streets, which at this hour formed a neighborhood grid thrumming with the revels and lusts of the night city. This was Albany’s Tenderloin, and life was open, the streets full of motion, the Palace Lodging House catering to quick turnover, Scambelluri’s and Marino’s poolrooms, side by side, both busy, Dorgan’s Good Life Saloon, which called itself a concert hall, thriving on music for illegal dancing, for thou shalt not dance in a saloon in Albany. And on the stoops of houses with telltale awnings on their windows (business was so good Jidgie Shea had opened an awning shop on the street), whores of the white race, and one mulata on the stoop of the Creole house, were taking the air this stifling night; and together they formed a tableau of discrete enticements. Youths too poor to buy any of their offerings walked Division Street, hoping for a charitable glimpse of raised thigh, unsequestered breast.

  “Come and get it,” one whore said to Edward. “Anything you want you can find right here. You don’t find it, you ain’t lookin’ for it.”

  Sixty-five Division Street, a three-story brick dwelling, gave entrance off street level. It adjoined the Good Life, and Edward heard the saloon piano and banjo ringing out a ragtime melody he could put no name to as he rang the bell. A well-shaped woman in her forties, wearing high-necked blouse and long, black skirt, greeted him. Edward flashed that she should have one crossed eye, but she did not.

  “You looking for company?” she asked.

  “I’m looking for Maginn. Is he here?”

  “He’s here,” she said, gesturing for Edward to enter.

  “My name is Edward Daugherty.”

  “I know who you are.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “He talks about you.”

  Maginn talks about you, of course. He plots to destroy you. Why didn’t you know this the instant Giles blew Felicity into naked infinity? Who profited from that explosion? Yes, the cur Cully was a likely avenger. But when myopia wanes, Maginn, without doubt, emerges as the epiphanic presence at the slaughter. And you, Edward, the true target, you couldn’t see that; you and Maginn such great friends, brothers of the ink stain, comrades of the imagination. Gainsaying fool is what you were. Now here you stand, believing you can goad evil into explaining itself, wondering what the whore of justice looks like, wallowing in your pathetic desire to mean.

  “He’s at the bar,” the woman said, and led the way to a large parlor furnished with two sofas and three armchairs of dark red plush, a scatter of Oriental rugs, maroon drapes on the two windows, and lighted by four electrified gas lamps with pale-blue taffeta shades. Music and tobacco smoke came through a half-open door that led to the dance floor of the saloon (Edward could see two women and two men dancing), and at the small bar at the end of the parlor a very young, carrot-haired woman, wearing a blouse that covered little of her large, shapely breasts, was pouring liquor for a man in shirtsleeves who was smoking the butt of a thin cigar. Maginn.

  “Ah, Daugherty, you worthless mutt,” Maginn said, “you’re here at last. You look well for a man whose life has been destroyed.”

  “You don’t look well at all, Maginn. You look shriveled. You look like a chimney sweep’s brush. Are you dying?”

  “Aren’t we all? But I’ll live out the week.”

  Maginn had lost hair on his head and had blackened his mustache. His skin was sallow and he was thinner by fifteen pounds from Edward’s last vision of him. A broomstraw of a man, probably venereally ravaged. His sickly look delighted Edward.

  “Have you met Nell?” Maginn asked.

  The woman who’d brought Edward in stood next to Maginn.

  “Nell runs this emporium,” Maginn said. “She’s also my wife, my strong right arm, my favorite toss, and a font of money and strumpet wisdom. I love her like a sister. I’d be lost without her. Do you remember her?”

  Edward looked at Nell and again recognized something but did not know what.

  “You met in that tenebrous tent city we visited during the State Fair. You fancied her and she you, but you went forward to a more elderly crotch, while I regressed to the nubile Nell, a relationship that’s endured for, what is it now, sweet suck of my life, twenty-seven years, on and off? Nell remembers you, Edward. I reminded her how she upped her skirt for you. Would you up it again, Nell? Give him a new look at the old puss?”

  “He looks like a real gentleman, is what I say. Such fine duds he’s got. The genuine article.”

  “A gentleman, oh yes.” And Maginn, visibly perturbed by the remark, turned to the barmaid. “And this is Cherry. Say hello to Edward, Cherry.”

  “Howdja do, Edward,” Cherry said.

  Edward smiled at Cherry.

  “And pour him a brandy, the best we have for this gentleman. Cherry, Edward, played the twelve-year-old virgin in the last house she worked. But she swiftly aged into this million-dollar set of tits, with only irony for a hymen. Does Cherry interest you, Edward?”

  Edward said nothing.

  “Let the gentleman sit down with his drink,” Nell said. “Let him get a word in.”

  “Of course. Sit, Edward, sit. Get a word in, if you have any left after that theatrical debacle.”

  Edward and Maginn sat in the plush, facing each other.

  “Gentleman. You called him a gentleman,” Maginn said to Nell. “This is Eddie, a mick to the heel of his boot, transformed by adroit social maneuvering into the elite, affluent Edward Daugherty, Esquire, famous playwright, a bit infamous lately, though. He recently had a major opening night with his new play, staged with considerable fanfare at the Hall. But, alas, it was only another facade, a mongoloid mishmash, an ambitious botch that closed with a wail and a snivel after one performance. My condolences, Edward. Did you like my critique of it?”

  “At what point did you become an assassin, Maginn?”

  “Uh-oh, he’s getting personal, Nell. Time for the parade, get a bit of life in this party.”

  Nell left the room, and Maginn dropped his cigar into the spittoon by his chair, then coughed and spat into it, the spew of rotted lungs, Edward hoped.

  “You haven’t touched your drink, Edward, and you seem depressed. I can’t blame you, given the burden you carry, some of it my doing, I fear. Truly sorry, old fellow. I berate myself constantly for what I did. You can see how I’m suffering here. But listen, when you see the parade you’ll perk up, old Edward Edward Edward. But tell the truth, now. Isn’t that name a
sham all by itself? Why not call yourself Eduardo, or Edmundo, or Oedipus, for chrissake? You always went for older women, didn’t you? Why not just be Eddie, like other micks? Edward exudes pretense. But I’ll wager it wears well in your social set.”

  “You invented a brilliant scheme, Maginn—bravura insight into the very worst human impulses. And I actually might’ve died, except for Giles’s faulty aim.”

  “I appreciate the compliment,” Maginn said, “but you overestimate my intention. It was a clever scheme, and I revel at the genius in it. But I was only answering Giles’s little joke—at least you got that right in your wretched melodrama. Who knew Giles harbored such violence? I saw him as one of the more gentle bigots of his tribe. Remember his joke about the Irishman whose cousin suffered two heart attacks and died, and the mick asked, ‘Did he die of the first attack or the second?’ Giles enjoyed jokes at the expense of others. A pity he didn’t live to enjoy mine.

  “My plan was to repay your joke with my own, but then Giles decides to atomize the useless Felicity bitch, and his own vapid self. What an oblique bonanza! Sorry he got a bit of you in the doing, but look at you! You’ve recovered splendidly. And I knew our lovely Melissa would survive, of course. The world loves soiled innocents, when they’re beautiful and repentant of their sin. Melissa, it must be said, repents well, but doesn’t know what sin is, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I’m surprised she’s not here working for you.”

  “She’s beyond my means and always was,” said Maginn. “But not beyond yours. Did you know she put Cully up to that rape of Felicity? Perverse little twat. She told Cully she’d be his if he’d rape Felicity with her looking on. She wanted to watch, and then comfort the poor, ravaged victim.”

  “More lies, Maginn.”

  “Cully told me this himself the day he left New York. I was with him before and after his little orgy. I even put him on the road with that story about the Albany police being after him. It was time to be rid of the lowlife pest. Didn’t Melissa tell you any of this? I was with her too, earlier that day. In your room.”

  “If your fiction was half as imaginative as your lies, Maginn, you’d have been famous years ago.”