Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  Kevin didn’t break the march of his men toward 840 Fifth now as the police supervisor, a heavyset officer with deep caramel skin, raised his megaphone in their direction.

  “This is Lieutenant Simms, NYPD. You’ve got no permit to march,” his voice reverberated. “Turn around and go back to your jobs.”

  Philip Grace ran ahead, waving his press pass high in the air, to prance in front of the lieutenant. “Hell, no! Workin’ press here, plus a whole mess of pissed-off union men. Why you strike-bustin’ for the owners, Lieutenant?”

  As the March of the Doormen kept its cadence like a drumroll, advancing on the police line, the officers who manned the barricades looked uneasy. Kevin put his hand over his eyes to look up to the terrace of Penthouse A. He could see white silk billowing in the wind, like banners on a parapet.

  He threw his white-gloved hand up in the air, and was shocked when the first ranks of the doorman actually halted at his command. The movement rippled through all the rest as the mass slowed down and finally stopped, men spreading out across the entire intersection of 65th Street and Fifth Avenue.

  Kevin walked briskly to the police lieutenant, who projected an air of authority with no clear idea of how to use it at this moment.

  “Officer, if it’s okay with you, I just need to borrow your megaphone for a second.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  One of the police officers tapped their lieutenant on the shoulder and leaned close. “Sir, I’m tellin’ you as your PBA rep, I think you ought to look at the big picture here.”

  The lieutenant, looking ungrateful for his rank today, covered his mouth as he huddled quickly with the Policeman’s Benevolent Association union man so Kevin couldn’t hear what they were saying.

  Andrew moved in, speaking low to the lieutenant. “Get on the right side of this, brother. We’ve got a peaceful situation here. Keep things steady.”

  The lieutenant’s eyes went back and forth unhappily, trying to look at a big picture that had just changed with the new element, Kevin realized, of a swelling crowd of pedestrians around them. Civilians were running and jogging from every direction for a better view of the March of the Doormen. Traffic stopped on the street, bumper-to-bumper like rush hour. Horns honked. Drivers shouted.

  Kevin took a breath and took action. He grabbed at the megaphone the lieutenant held loosely in his hand.

  The lieutenant gripped it and pulled it back, wide-eyed. “What the hell you think you’re doing? That’s police equipment.”

  “C’mon,” Kevin pleaded. “Just for a second.”

  The lieutenant looked at his megaphone like it was giving him an ulcer, and let Kevin take it.

  Kevin spoke clearly into the megaphone, shouting up to the sky. “Chester Lord! I need to talk to you. Now.” His voice reverberated with a righteous calm. “And I really need to speak to Cornelia.”

  * * *

  The minister was in no hurry, a man in love with his own fine baritone.

  He made eye contact all around the room as he mouthed the vows of marriage as “the most joyous covenant.”

  Tucker had begun giving the minister hard looks and gestures to speed things up a bit. Guests had begun coughing and swishing their clothing as they sat on Madame’s too-petite gilded chairs.

  Cornelia thought about the most joyous covenant. She felt glad that she had finally insisted they change the “until death do you part” thing. Perhaps a needless break with tradition, yet somehow the phrase made her claustrophobic. But at the rate the minister was going, it would be a good long time before it came up.

  She heard a muffled call from outside. It sounded vaguely familiar.

  Then a furious commotion began to disrupt her wedding.

  She glanced behind her to the terrace.

  Looking out the French doors to their huge penthouse balcony lined with white fabric and a profusion of flowers, she was surprised to see that a few of her guests had actually left the ceremony to gather at the parapet. They looked down at the street, then stared back inside at her.

  Telephones suddenly began ringing and chirping all over the apartment. Emergency pagers began beeping and others quietly vibrated in the pockets of the mayor, the police commissioner, and the owner of the Daily Globe.

  Chaos reigned.

  “Music,” Tucker loudly ordered the string quartet in the living room. He took Cornelia’s hand and held it tightly to keep her with him in the Wedding Bower. But the guests were starting out to the terrace in droves now. Finally Chester himself walked out one of the open doors to the terrace, and peered over the balcony, with the tall, curly-haired woman on his arm.

  “Who is that downstairs?” Cornelia asked Tucker.

  “A disgruntled building employee. He was just fired, now he’s back causing trouble.”

  “A building employee?” She couldn’t grasp why he would be yelling her name.

  “People!” Tucker shouted. “Let’s get on with it.”

  Startled and guilty to be caught straying, the wedding guests wandered back to the ceremony like errant sheep.

  “Go on,” Tucker told the minister. “And pick it up.”

  The minister stubbornly looked to the bride. This was her day and she would dictate its terms.

  “Yes,” Cornelia told him firmly. “Please, let’s get on with it.”

  The minister began in a halting voice.

  “Cor-nee! Cor-nee!”

  She heard the chant from below, and broke off from Tucker’s grip.

  The guests followed her as she went out the doors to the terrace choked with flowers. A young man dressed in white tie and tails under bright yellow hair stood near the wall with bird cages. He would be the dove wrangler, ready to release a dozen white doves to circle overhead as soon as he received his cue from Madame. Now the restless doves sat on their perches, picking at their feathers and darting their heads in quick gestures.

  She looked over the wall to the street below. Spread across the entire corner of Fifth Avenue in both directions, a crowd of men stood in uniform. Police, she thought at first, or army officers. But the uniform looked wrong.

  No, they were doormen.

  Hundreds of them were looking up, focused on her terrace for some reason. And beyond the doormen, a large crowd had gathered almost like a street festival. But they were all looking up at her, too. She saw a van from Channel 7 Action News pull up, and a crew of people with cameras and sound gear spill out.

  It must be an event, a march down Fifth Avenue like the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. But they weren’t marching and they looked agitated, as though penned up and ready to be released. Should she know what it was? Her memory had become so untrustworthy. Perhaps it was some new occasion, a Running of the Doormen on Fifth Avenue, like the bulls of Pamplona.

  Then she saw that the doorman who seemed to be their leader, who looked as though he wore the uniform of her own building, was breaking off from the rest and hopping into a yellow cab. The taxi peeled out, honking, maneuvered out of the traffic mess and turned into the roadway that crossed Central Park.

  The taxi kept honking, passing other cars, as it careened toward Central Park West.

  Dr. Gene Powers, curator of the New York Tesla Museum, looked unhappily at his computer screen, reading the disk. Corny had made.

  He felt responsible for Cornelia Lord. On one hand, he wished her whatever happiness could come out of this wedding. On the other, he had never heard her say anything good about Tucker Fisk, and worried about her long absence from the museum. It wasn’t the Corny he knew, this girl who flashed her gums from the society page of today’s Times.

  What schmucks her father and this fiancé had to be. He desperately wanted to forget his promise to her and let her father know what Cornelia had accomplished here, all on her own, without a scintilla of credit. He loved Cornelia Lord with a fierce protective quality that made his bowels boil at the injustice. But a pledge was a pledge. Cornelia Lord had honored her word to the museum. Could he go back o
n his? He pondered the ageless dilemma of love versus honor. Why did those two kinds of good always have to butt heads?

  A million miles deep in his own thoughts, he felt air moving in the entry to his office and looked up.

  “Kevin Doyle?”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Do you, Cornelia…”

  Her big day, her father called it. She strained to tune out the sound of “Cor-nee, Cor-nee.” That chant wafting up from the streets baffled her.

  She would steel herself and go on. A Lord does not complain or explain. A Lord maintains her composure in the face of total peculiarity.

  The minister had just begun the phrase leading up to her cue, and she would filter out all the noise and respond properly.

  Tucker held her hand tightly now and worked his jaw rather ferociously, seething at the handful of guests who still stood out on the terrace.

  The guests seemed to be looking up at the sky.

  “… take Tucker to be your lawful wedded husband,” the minister droned. “To have and to hold from this day forward, in sickness and in health…”

  But what could be happening on the terrace? She saw the guests’ hair blowing in a strong wind. They looked up and pointed as though aliens were invading Fifth Avenue. The rows of flowers on the terrace waved together like grain in a windstorm, and the billowing white silk blew back, plastered over the terrace furniture. Even the dove wrangler in tails threw his arms around the small cages with the birds inside. A tornado seemed to have landed on her terrace.

  “… so long as your love shall last?”

  As both Tucker and the minister looked to her, she caught sight of the rickety airship through the glass doors. It sailed down the entire length of her long terrace, resembling a quaint, open-air Victorian helicopter. One propeller twirled on top, another spun on the rear. Two men sat side by side on a bench seat, clearly visible through the skeletal frame.

  Tucker grabbed both her arms.

  She shook herself from the tight grip on her sleeve, and ran to the door, flung it open, and stepped out.

  The muffled noise of the airship seemed so familiar. Except for the gentle whop-whop of the propeller blades, it made no engine sound at all. Weaving over the terrace to land, it bounced onto the terrace on two of its four wheels. She laughed out loud. Guests screamed and scattered getting out of the way. Dresses and suit jackets billowed up crazily. A man’s toupee flew through the air.

  She squinted at the men in the flying machine. The older man looked awfully familiar, his eyebrows huge and fuzzy over a ripping smile.

  And now the airship wriggled to a stop, leaning forward, then settled back down. The spinning propeller still wreaked havoc, blasting her guests with gusty waves of confusion. The younger man leapt out of the open airship, a bit shakily. He ran directly toward her. His face had been hit by a couple of insects. And his lips were forming words. She took in the black hair and clear blue eyes in the uniform. A doorman’s uniform.

  She felt a tight glass box shatter inside her head. Her memories began cascading like a waterfall. A horsy-smelling bundle in the snow. A neon Saint Sebastian. A red heart that lit up the night sky.

  “Kevin?”

  “Corny.” His smile dazzled her, the light blue eyes.

  Kevin Doyle.

  He approached her slowly, his arms opening. The guests, with few rules of etiquette to follow for such an incident, simply got out of his way.

  And they met, the debutante in her taffeta and the doorman in his dress grays. Without a word, each understood what they would do.

  As Kevin began to whisk her over the windswept terrace, Tucker leapt in front of them. He grabbed Kevin’s neck to strangle him.

  “No!” she screamed at Tucker. “Don’t touch him.”

  She shoved Tucker in the chest. He stumbled backward clutching at air.

  Amid a crunch of guests now pressing around them, her father suddenly stood in front of her on the windy terrace. “Cornelia, what in God’s name…”

  “Chester, talk to her,” Tucker said. His smoothed-back hair blew straight up like a troll’s from the helicopter squatting in the middle of Madame’s wedding flowers, her friend Dr. Powers grinning at the controls.

  “Back off,” Kevin told Tucker. “Mr. Lord, Tucker Fisk sold you out for thirty million dollars from the Kois.”

  A wail behind her. “That is a lie!”

  She swiveled around to see Han Koi, Sr., his ancient head wagging so violently she was afraid it might pop off like a champagne cork. Then Han Koi, Jr., appeared at his side, hissing frantically in Chinese, trying to drag his father away. Han Junior, that sleek otter, now looked as frantic and humbled as if his trousers had just fallen down around his English shoes.

  “A lie! A lie!” old Han chanted, a sclerotic mantra.

  “Get your father out of here,” Tucker yelled at Han Junior.

  “All of you shut up!” Chester suddenly thundered in a rip-roaring bellow, as though possessed by the spirit of General Patton.

  Cornelia turned back, stunned. The crowd around them abruptly hushed. Even Tucker’s mouth hung agape at her father’s fury. Chester the reticent. Chester who had never raised his voice above what was necessary to bid “two hearts.” Now the only sound to be heard was the rhythmic whooshing of the electrical airship’s propeller.

  “What’s this about?” Her father now pointed his finger in Tucker Fisk’s face.

  “Chester,” Tucker stammered, not at all coolly persuasive now. “You can’t listen to some escaped mental patient.”

  Chester stared briefly at the spindly gyrocopter that had landed on his terrace. Then he turned to Kevin.

  “Is that what Cornelia told you in the hospital?”

  “No. I found out from your driver.”

  “My driver?”

  “Mike your driver. He heard Tucker talking on the phone.”

  “What do you think you know?” Tucker shouted in Kevin’s face. “You’re a doorman. You don’t even know what business we’re in.”

  “When you came to see me at the Sanctuary, you were in bribery and extortion.” Kevin dropped his voice an octave to mimic Tucker’s. “‘The way I see it, Kevin, you have two choices.’”

  He turned to Chester, whose face had wrung itself into a knot.

  “He did the same thing with Dr. Loblitz. That’s why Corny got shock treatments. That’s the only way Tucker could get her to marry him.”

  Chester’s face began to unknot itself, reddening in shame.

  “Just look at the two of them, Mr. Lord.” Kevin turned and pointed at Tucker and Han Koi, Jr. “There’s your wedding couple.”

  And as the two betrayers shouted their denials, caught as surely as bank robbers soaked with red paint from a trick money sack, Chester understood. He turned his back on Tucker, and took both Cornelia and Kevin by the hand.

  “You warned me,” Chester told his daughter softly. “Cornelia, I look at you today and see your mother. Tucker wouldn’t have fooled her.”

  “Mr. Lord,” Kevin stood with an officer’s confident brace of the chin over his doorman’s epaulets. “I came for Cornelia. We have some things to talk about.”

  Chester watched his daughter wipe the tiny insect wings off Kevin’s lips. “She and I have some, too, son. What in God’s name is that contraption you flew in on?”

  “A Tesla airship.” Kevin waved at the open-air cockpit. “That’s Dr. Powers over there with the beard. He’ll tell you all about it.”

  She saw the brilliant blue circle around Kevin Doyle’s head all over again. But now the corona was in his eyes, too, as they searched her soul.

  “Corny, he just taught me enough to help you fly it.”

  “Fly it?” Cornelia stared at the Tesla airship. She stuck her finger in the air. A light crosswind. Yes. She could do that. She closed her eyes and could see the rudder pedals. Throttle. Clutch. Lead-acid electrical batteries good for two hours of flight time. She flung her arms around Kevin’s neck and clutched h
im so tightly she almost choked him.

  “Are you okay?” he asked with a laugh.

  She took Chester’s hands in hers and kissed the Father of the Bride. “Thank you, Daddy. I believe I’m good to go now.”

  “Not—not to South America,” Chester stammered.

  “South America? No, with Kevin. We just need to get away for a bit.”

  “You aren’t taking her anywhere,” Tucker’s strangled yell hurt her ears. The mean, red, sweaty face of a spoiled child revealed itself in full flower now.

  Kevin leaned calmly into Tucker’s bursting-tomato face. “Hey, you aren’t the only thing out here that blows. We’re taking off before the wind changes.”

  Tucker lunged for Kevin again. It took Chester and O’Connell to hold him back.

  “Excuse us.” Kevin swooped her up in his arms. The bundle of rustling, itchy taffeta felt delicious against her skin now. He carried her like a real bride toward the waiting airship while the stunned guests parted.

  “Go, Cornee!” Tina French screeched.

  “Dr. Powers, thank you,” she said, hugging the museum curator.

  “Watch your head,” Dr. Powers yelled as he scuttled out of the tufted velvet bench seat, handing off the controls. She took the now-familiar stick and throttle in her hands. She examined the simple dashboard with two gauges, one for “Airspeed” and one that read “Batteries.”

  “You’ve got the aircraft, Corny,” Powers told her. “Do you remember everything?”

  “Enough,” she said, grabbing the stick as she and Kevin sat at the controls. “Kevin, take the clutch and the throttle. I’ll do the rest.”

  Kevin took the quaint hand controls, the clutch lever and rheostat throttle knob. He pulled his own harness on and helped tighten hers.

  “Ready?” Kevin shouted.

  “Full throttle,” she told him.

  He turned the throttle knob full ahead. As the electric engine spooled up faster, it twirled the propeller blade into a frenzy. She tested the foot pedals that controlled the rudder with her wedding slippers.

  She kissed his cheek, let out her breath, and toyed with the stick. The airship vibrated on the terrace, as eager to leave as they were.