Ironweed (1984 Pulitzer Prize)

by William Kennedy

“Not very much.”

  “You will learn to like it. It is exquisite.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Have you had any more dreams of me?”

  “One. I can’t tell it.”

  “But you must.”

  “It’s crazy.”

  “Dreams must be. Katrina is not crazy. Say: May I help you, Katrina?”

  “May I help you, Katrina?”

  “You may help me by telling me your dream.”

  “What it is, is you’re a little bird, but you’re just like you always are too, and a crow comes along and eats you up.”

  “Who is the crow?”

  “Just a crow. Crows always eat little birds.”

  “You are protective of me, Francis.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What does your mother know of me? Does she know you and I have talked as friends?”

  “I wouldn’t tell her. I wouldn’t tell her anything.”

  “Good. Never tell your mother anything about me. She is your mother and I am Katrina. I will always be Katrina in your life. Do you know that? You will never know another like me. There can be no other like me.”

  “I sure believe you’re right.”

  “Do you ever want to kiss me?”

  “Always.”

  “What else do you want to do with me?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “You may say.”

  “Not me. I’d goddamn die.”

  When they had eaten, Katrina filled her own and Francis’s wineglasses and set them on the octagonal marbletopped table in front of the sofa where she always sat; and he sat in what had now become his chair. He drank all of the wine and she refilled his glass as they talked of asparagus and lobster and she taught him the meaning of gratine, and why a French word was used to describe a dish made in Albany from a lobster caught in Maine.

  “Wondrous things come from France,” she said to him, and by this time he was at ease in the suffusion of wine and pleasure and possibility, and he gave her his fullest attention. “Do you know Saint Anthony of Egypt, Francis? He is of your faith, a faith I cherish without embracing. I speak of him because of the way he was tempted with the flesh and I speak too of my poet, who frightens me because he sees what men should not see in women. He is dead these thirty years, my poet, but he sees through me still with his image of a caged woman ripping apart the body of a living rabbit with her teeth. Enough, says her keeper, you should not spend all you receive in one day, and he pulls the rabbit from her, letting some of its intestines dangle from her teeth. She remains hungry, with only a taste of what might nourish her. Oh, little Francis, my rabbit, you must not fear me. I shall not rip you to pieces and let your sweet intestines dangle from my teeth. Beautiful Francis of sweet excellence in many things, beautiful young man whom I covet, please do not speak ill of me. Do not say Katrina was made for the fire of luxuria, for you must understand that I am Anthony and am tempted by the devil with the sweetness of yourself in my house, in my kitchen, in my yard, in my tree of trees, sweet Francis who carried me naked in his arms.”

  “I couldn’t let you go out in the street with no clothes on,” Francis said. “You’d get arrested.”

  “I know you couldn’t,” Katrina said. “That’s precisely why I did it. But what I do not know is what will be the consequence of it. I do not know what strengths I have to confront the temptations I bring into my life so willfully. I only know that I love in ten thousand directions and that I must not; for that is the lot of the harlot. My poet says that caged woman with the rabbit in her teeth is the true and awful image of this life, and not the woman moaning aloud her dirge of unattainable hopes… dead, so dead, how sad. Of course you must know I am not dead. I am merely a woman in self-imposed bondage to a splendid man, to a mannerism of life which he calls a sacrament and I call a magnificent prison. Anthony lived as a hermit, and I too have thought of this as a means of thwarting the enemy. But my husband worships me, and I him, and we equally worship our son of sons. You see, there has never been a magnificence of contact greater than that which exists within this house. We are a family of reverence, of achievement, of wounds sweetly healed. We yearn for the touch, the presence of each other. We cannot live without these things. And yet you are here and I dream of you and long for the pleasures you cannot speak of to me, of joys beyond the imaginings of your young mind. I long for the pleasures of Mademoiselle Lancet, who pursued doctors as I pursue my young man of tender breath, my beautiful Adonis of Arbor Hill. The Mademoiselle cherished all her doctors did and were. The blood on their aprons was a badge of their achievement in the operating room, and she embraced it as I embrace your swan’s throat with its necklace of dirt, the haunting pain of young ignorance in your eyes. Do you believe there is a God, Francis? Of course you do and so do I, and I believe he loves me and will cherish me in heaven, as I will cherish him. We shall be lovers. God made me in his image, and so why should I not believe that God too is an innocent monster, loving the likes of me, this seductress of children, this caged animal with blood and intestines in her teeth, embracing her own bloody aprons and then kneeling at the altar of all that is holy in the penitential pose of all hypocrites. Did you ever dream, Francis, when I called you out of our tree, that you would enter such a world as I inhabit? Would you kiss me if I closed my eyes? If I fainted would you undo the buttons of my dress to let me breathe easier?”

  o o o

  Katrina died in 1912 in the fire that began in the Brothers’ School and then made the leap to the Daugherty house. Francis was absent from the city when she died, but he learned the news from a newspaper account and returned for her funeral. He did not see her in her coffin, which was closed to mourners. Smoke, not fire, killed her, just as the ashes and not the flames of her sensuality had finally smothered her desire; so Francis believed.

  In the immediate years after her death, Katrina’s grave in the Albany Rural Cemetery, where Protestants entered the underworld, grew wild with dandelions and became a curiosity to the manicurists of the cemetery’s floral tapestry. In precisely the way Katrina and Francis had trimmed the maple tree, only to see it grow ever more luxuriant, so was it that the weeding of her burial plot led to an intensity of weed growth: as if the severing of a single root were cause for the birth of a hundred rootlings. Such was its growth that the grave, in the decade after her death, became an attraction for cemetery tourists, who marveled at the midspring yellowing of her final residence on earth. The vogue passed, though the flowers remain even today; and it is now an historical marvel that only the very old remember, or that the solitary wanderer discovers when rambling among the gravestones, and generally attributes to a freakish natural effusion.

  o o o

  “So,” said Rosskam, “did you have a nice rest?”

  “It ain’t rest what I’m doin’,” said Francis. “You got all the stuff from back there?”

  “All,” said Rosskam, throwing an armful of old clothes into the wagon. Francis looked them over, and a clean, soft-collared, white-on-white shirt, one sleeve half gone, caught his eye.

  “That shirt,” he said. “I’d like to buy it.” He reached into the wagon and lifted it from the pile. “You take a quarter for it?”

  Rosskam studied Francis as he might a striped blue toad.

  “Take it out of my pay,” Francis said. “Is it a deal?”

  “For what is it a bum needs a clean shirt?”

  “The one I got on stinks like a dead cat.”

  “Tidy bum. Sensitive, tidy bum on my wagon.”

  o o o

  Katrina unwrapped the parcel on the dining-room table, took Francis by the hand, and pulled him up from his chair. She unbuttoned the buttons of his blue workshirt.

  “Take that old thing off,” she said, and held the gift aloft, a white-on-white silk shirt whose like was as rare to Francis as the fruits de mer and Château Pontet-Canet he had just consumed.

  When his torso was naked, Katrina stunned him with a kis
s, and with an exploration of the whole of his back with her fingertips. He held her as he would a crystal vase, fearful not only of her fragility but of his own. When he could again see her lips, her eyes, the sanctified valley of her mouth, when she stood inches from him, her hands gripping his naked back, he cautiously brought his own fingers around to her face and neck. Emulating her, he explored the exposed regions of her shoulders and her throat, letting the natural curve of her collar guide him to the top button of her blouse. And then slowly, as if the dance of their fingers had been choreographed, hers crawled across her own chest, brushing past his, which were carefully at work at their gentlest of chores, and she pushed the encumbering chemise strap down over the fall of her left shoulder. His own fingers then repeated the act on her right shoulder and he trembled with pleasure, and sin, and with, even now, the still unthinkable possibilities that lay below and beneath the boundary line her fallen clothing demarcated.

  “Do you like my scar?” she asked, and she lightly touched the oval white scar with a ragged pink periphery, just above the early slope of her left breast.

  “I don’t know,” Francis said. “I don’t know about likin’ scars.”

  “You are the only man besides my husband and Dr. Fitzroy who has ever seen it. I can never again wear a lownecked dress. It is such an ugly thing that I do believe my poet would adore it. Does it offend you?”

  “It’s there. Part of you. That’s okay by me. Anything you do, or got, it’s okay by me.”

  “My adorable Francis.”

  “How’d you ever get a thing like that?”

  “A burning stick flew through the air and pierced me cruelly during a fire. The Delavan Hotel fire.”

  “Yeah. I heard you were in that. You’re lucky you didn’t get it in the neck.”

  “Oh I’m a very lucky woman indeed,” Katrina said, and she leaned into him and held him again. And again they kissed.

  He commanded his hands to move toward her breasts but they would not. They would only hold tight to their grip on her bare arms. Only when she moved her own fingers forward from the blades of his back toward the hollows of his arms did his own fingers dare move toward the hollows of hers. And only when she again inched back from him, letting her fingers tweeze and caress the precocious hair on his chest, did he permit his own fingers to savor the curving flow, the fleshy whiteness, the blooded fullness of her beautiful breasts, culminating his touch at their roseate tips, which were now being so cleverly cataleptic for him.

  When Francis put the new shirt on and threw the old one into the back of Rosskam’s wagon, he saw Katrina standing on her front steps, across the street, beckoning to him. She led him into a bedroom he had never seen and where a wall of flame engulfed her without destroying even the hem of her dress, the same dress she wore when she came to watch him play baseball on that summer day in 1897. He stood across the marriage bed from her, across a bridge of years of love and epochs of dream.

  Never a woman like Katrina: who had forced him to model that shirt for her, then take it home so that someday she would see him walking along the street wearing it and relive this day; forced him first to find a hiding place for it outside his house while he schemed an excuse as to why a seventeen-year-old boy of the working classes should come to own a shirt that only sublime poets, or stage actors, or unthinkably wealthy lumber barons could afford. He invented the ruse of a bet: that he had played poker at a downtown sporting club with a man who ran out of dollars and put up his new shirt as collateral; and Francis had inspected the shirt, liked it, accepted the bet, and then won the hand with a full house.

  His mother did not seem to believe the story. But neither did she connect the gift to Katrina. Yet she found ways to slander Katrina in Francis’s presence, knowing that he had formed an allegiance, if not an affection, for not only a woman, but the woman who owned the inimical tree.

  She is impudent, arrogant. (Wrong, said Francis.)

  Slovenly, a poor housekeeper. (Go over and look, said Francis.)

  Shows off by sitting in the window with a book. (Francis, knowing no way to defend a book, fumed silently and left the room.)

  In the leaping windows of flame that engulfed Katrina and her bed, Francis saw naked bodies coupled in love, writhing in lascivious embrace, kissing in sweet agony. He saw himself and Katrina in a ravenous lunge that never was, and then in a blissful stroking that might have been, and then in a sublime fusion of desire that would always be.

  Did they love? No, they never loved. They always loved. They knew a love that Katrina’s poet would abuse and befoul. And they befouled their imaginations with a mutation of love that Katrina’s poet would celebrate and consecrate. Love is always insufficient, always a lie. Love, you are the clean shirt of my soul. Stupid love, silly love.

  Francis embraced Katrina and shot into her the impeccable blood of his first love, and she yielded up not a being but a word: clemency. And the word swelled like the mercy of his swollen member as it rose to offer her the enduring, erubescent gift of retributive sin. And then this woman interposed herself in his life, hiding herself in the deepest center of the flames, smiling at him with all the lewd beauty of her dreams: and she awakened in him the urge for a love of his own, a love that belonged to no other man, a love he would never have to share with any man, or boy, like himself.

  “Giddap,” Rosskam called out.

  And the wagon rolled down the hill as the sun moved toward its apex, and the horse turned north off Colonie Street.

  V

  Tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at home like you? There are a few, kind sir, and dum-de-dum and dum-dum too.

  So genteel, so quaint.

  Helen hummed, staring at the wall in the light of the afternoon sun. In her kimono (only ten-cent-store silk, alas, but it did have a certain elegance, SO much like the real thing no one would ever know; no one but Francis had ever seen her in it, or ever would; no one had seen her take it ever so cleverly off the rack in Woolworth’s): in her kimono, and naked beneath it, she sank deeper into the old chair that was oozing away its stuffing; and she stared at the dusty swan in the painting with the cracked glass, swan with the lovely white neck, lovely white back: swan was, was.

  Dah dah-dah,

  Dah dah-de-dah-dah,

  Dah dah-de-dah-dah,

  Dah dah dah,

  She sang. And the world changed.

  Oh the lovely power of music to rejuvenate Helen. The melody returned her to that porcelain age when she aspired so loftily to a classical career. Her plan, her father’s plan before it was hers, was for her to follow in her grandmother’s footsteps, carry the family pride to lofty pinnacles: Vassar first, then the Paris Conservatory if she was truly as good as she seemed, then the concert world, then the entire world. If you love something well enough, Grandmother Archer told Helen when the weakness was upon her, you will die for it; for when we love with all our might, our silly little selves are already dead and we have no more fear of dying. Would you die for your music? Helen asked. And her grandmother said: I believe I already have. And in a month she was very unkindly cut down forever.

  Swan was, was.

  Helen’s first death.

  Her second came to her in a mathematics class at Vassar when she was a freshman of two months. Mrs. Carmichael, who was pretty and young and wore high shoes and walked with a limp, came for Helen and brought her to the office. A visitor, said Mrs. Carmichael, your uncle Andrew: who told Helen her father was ill,

  And on the train up from Poughkeepsie changed that to dead,

  And in the carriage going up State Street hill from the Albany depot added that the man had,

  Incredibly,

  Thrown himself off the Hawk Street viaduct.

  Helen, confusing fear with grief, blocked all tears until two days after the funeral, when her mother told her that there will be no more Vassar for you, child; that Brian Archer killed himself because he had squandered his fortune; that what money remained would not be wasted in
educating a foolish girl like Helen but would instead finance her brother Patrick’s final year in Albany Law School; for a lawyer can save the family. And whatever could a classical pianist do for it?

  Helen had been in the chair hours, it seemed, though she had no timepiece for such measurement. But it did seem an hour at least since crippled old Donovan came to the door and said: Helen, are you all right? You been in there all day. Don’t you wanna eat something? I’m makin’ some coffee, you want some? And Helen said: Oh thank you, old cripple, for remembering I still have a body now that I’ve all but forgotten it. And no, no thank you, no coffee, kind sir. Are there any more at home like you?

  Freude, schöner Götterfunken,

  Tochter aus Elysium!

  The day had all but begun with music. She left Finny’s car humming the “Te Deum”; why, she could not say. But at six o’clock, when it was still dark and Finny and the other man were both snoring, it became the theme of her morning pathway. As she walked she considered the immediate future for herself and her twelve dollars, the final twelve dollars of her life capital, money she never intended to tell Francis about, money tucked safely in her brassiere.

  Don’t touch my breasts, Finny, they’re too sore, she had said again and again, afraid he would feel the money. Finny acceded and explored her only between the thighs, trying mightily to ejaculate, and she, Lord have mercy on her, tried to help him. But Finny could not ejaculate, and he fell back in exhaustion and dry indifference and then slept, as Helen did not, could not; for sleep seemed to be a thing of the past.

  What for weeks she had achieved in her time of rest was only an illustrated wakefulness that hovered at the edge of dream: angels rejoicing, multitudes kneeling before the Lamb, worms all, creating a great butterfly of angelic hair, Helen’s joyous vision.

  Why was Helen joyous in her sleeplessness? Because she was able to recede from evil love and bloodthirsty spiders. Because she had mastered the trick of escaping into music and the pleasures of memory. She pulled on her bloomers, slid sideways out of the car, and walked out into the burgeoning day, the morning star still visible in her night’s vanishing sky. Venus, you are my lucky star.