The Flaming Corsage (10 page)

The maître d’ and two liveried Negro footmen approached carrying a box almost the size of themselves.

“Would you give that to the elegant lady over there?” Edward said, and the bellboys set the box on its end beside Geraldine.

“What might this be?” she asked.

“You could open it and find out,” Edward said.

“Is this some sort of joke?”

“I assure you it isn’t.”

“Shall I help you unwrap it, Madame?” the maître d’ asked.

“If I must, then please do,” Geraldine said.

The maître d’ cut the twine that bound the box, then gently ripped away its festive holiday wrapping.

“Open it, Mother,” Katrina said.

“Are you in on this?” Geraldine asked. But Katrina only smiled.

“I’ll open it,” said Adelaide, and she revealed an ankle-length black sealskin coat with high collar and abundant cuffs.

“Gorgeous, it’s gorgeous,” said Adelaide. “Full-length.”

“It’s a coat,” said Geraldine.

“I’d be abashed if it wasn’t,” said Edward.

“But what is it for?”

“For you, my dear, for you,” Edward said, “a belated Christmas from your daughter and me. You know how things were at Christmas.”

Adelaide lifted the coat out of the box.

“I’ll try it on for you, Mother,” she said, and she slipped into it, with Edward’s help, and twirled about so all could see the coat’s glory from every angle.
“It feels divine,” Adelaide said.

Edward noted that the room’s other diners regarded the display with smirks and smiles, disdaining the ostentation, admiring the exquisite garment.

“I suppose you want one now,” Archie said to Adelaide.

“I wouldn’t say no if you brought one home.”

“I can’t accept this,” Geraldine said.

“Of course you can,” Katrina said.

“It’s too much.”

“Not for you,” said Edward.

Adelaide took the coat off and held it for her mother.

“Must I?” Geraldine asked.

Then, without standing up, and offering a small smile, she thrust her left arm, then her right, into the sleeves of the coat. Edward could see Jacob relax, not quite into a grin, but that
enduring owlish frown of his was fading.

“Very becoming, Gerry,” said Jacob.

“It feels so silky,” Geraldine said, rubbing the fur with her palms. She took the coat off and folded it into its box. “It’s a lovely gift,” she said to
Katrina.

“It was all Edward’s idea,” Katrina said.

“Yes. Well, then. Thank you, Edward.”

“My pleasure totally,” Edward said, snapping his fingers to the maître d’, who came forward with a much smaller package and handed it to Jacob.

“Another gift?” Jacob said, squinting at Edward. “Wise men say that gifts make slaves like a whip makes a cur.”

“Or a horse,” said Edward as Jacob undid the gift wrapping, revealing a pen-and-ink sketch of a racehorse pulling a sulky and driver.

“Very pleasant,” said Jacob. “I didn’t know this was a night for gifts.”

“The picture isn’t the gift,” Edward said. “The horse is. It’s Gallant Warrior. I know how you value a good trotter, and I know how you felt when you lost
Chevalier.”

“You bought me a horse?”

“He’s in Baltimore,” said Edward. “And he’s yours. We can have him brought up now, or wait for the spring meeting at Island Park, whatever you prefer. He’s a
handsome animal, and a winner if there ever was one.”

“Gallant Warrior is a very classy animal, Jake,” Archie said. “He did very well on the circuit this year. He ran second in the Kentucky Futurity.”

“Where did you get the money?” Jacob asked Edward.

“You’d be surprised how much novels and plays earn when people like them.”

“Which play?”

“Several. Does it matter?”

Jacob smirked, then looked again at the sketch. “You bought me a horse,” he said.

From the inside pocket of his coat Edward took a fold of papers and set them in front of Jacob.

“The bloodline, and the ownership papers in your name.”

“This is astounding,” said Jacob. “Gallant Warrior. He must have cost you a fortune.”

“What good is money if you don’t spend it on something of value?” said Edward, and he raised his wineglass. “And now, may I wish a joyful holiday to all here, with the
sincere hope that harmony settles on our lives in the new year.”

The others answered his toast, amid small smiles and waning tension. Katrina surreptitiously patted her husband’s hand.

“I must add,” said Edward, “that the last play I wrote will earn neither me nor my producers any more money. When its run ends next month in Philadelphia, I’m withdrawing
it from performance forever. You probably know which play I’m talking about.” He stared at Jacob Taylor.

“You’re a clever fellow, Daugherty,” Jacob said. “A very clever fellow.”

“So they tell me,” Edward said.

The play was Edward’s latest work,
The Baron of Ten Broeck Street
, a satiric social comedy about a wealthy lumber baron (very like Jacob Taylor) that had earned Edward considerable
money and a notable increment of theatrical fame. It owed its existence to Edward’s quest to balance his bias; for his previous play,
The Stolen Cushion
, had satirized Albany’s
lofty Irish bourgeoisie as they were reduced socially by an influx of crude Irish immigrants. Those Irish vied with the Negroes for the nadir of American social status, and, some thought, won. In
the play Edward mocked social rising based solely on money. His private quest, he told himself, was to raise the Irish to the intellectual level of nativist Americans, prove the educability of
greenhorn multitudes, as he had proven his own, and show those same multitudes how to transcend the peasant caste into which they’d been born.

Instead, the
Cushion
brought down on his crown not only the wrath of the acquisitive Irish, which he had expected, but also the hostility of his father.

“Who isn’t looking for a better life?” said Emmett, who had never forgiven Dickens (“that arrogant beggar”) for his scurrilous portrait of Irish peasants near
Albany in 1842, a year when Emmett himself was struggling upward from the shame of being least; and he now found it necessary, half a century later, to scold his son for the similar dishonor the
Cushion
represented.

Edward had written the
Baron
in part because of Katrina’s estrangement from her father, not only for her marriage, but for converting to the Roman Catholic faith. Despite the family
hostility, Katrina clove to Edward with fierce loyalty, and married him in Sacred Heart church. Her father endured the formalities of the wedding and gave Katrina away, but as the meaning of her
decision pressed in on him he grew more hostile and distant. Because of this, writing a satire on Jacob Taylor’s image had seemed to Edward not only apt, but safe. But when the play appeared
to resounding huzzahs, first in Albany, then New York and Boston, Katrina quixotically reembraced not only her father, but also the lush comforts of the house on Elk Street, where he had raised her
with nannies and servants; and she now yearned for this house in ways Edward judged to be nearly irrational.

Withdrawing the
Baron
from performance was a small loss, a stroke that Edward hoped would render all Taylors respectful of his apparently selfless ways. But in fact he was done with
satire and social tracts that aim to reform scoundrels and pave the way to proletarian heaven. Changing the world is elevating work, but better if he could dramatize the mind of Katrina, that
complex creature who so dominated his life.

He looked at her sitting beside him, in awe, as always, of her gifts: that serene beauty which masked such lambent passion, those prismatic charms that had taken root in his soul and made him
her slave: as a whip makes a cur.

“Are you enjoying your dinner, Katrina?” he asked her.

“You were quite brilliant, my love,” she said softly. “You did it all with such panache.”

I did it all for the venal streak at the bottom of your elegant heart, he said silently; for his capitulation to Jacob Taylor was, above all, his recognition that unless he acted swiftly, his
marriage would bleed to death from Katrina’s imagined wounds. He had built their house on a Colonie Street plot next to the Christian Brothers school he had attended. Jack McCall touted him
to availability of the land and also built his own home on the same street.

Colonie was an Irish street in the erstwhile aristocratic neighborhood of Arbor Hill, where many of Albany’s lumber barons lived. Edward built the house for Katrina as a scaled-down
replica of the Taylors’ Gothic Revival town house, and, to assuage her loss of the resplendencies she had left behind, he was now refurnishing the interior of the Colonie Street replica in
that halcyon Elk Street image—crystal, engravings, chairs, fabrics, lamps—all in the Taylor mode, so that she might simulate her past whenever her fits of neurasthenic nostalgia
descended.

While the remodeling proceeded, Edward, Katrina, and their seven-year-old son, Martin, were staying on Main Street with Emmett, who was alone there since Hanorah’s death in the spring of
’94.

Since the
Baron’s
first production, in spite of Edward’s elaborate efforts to comfort her, Katrina had lapsed into prolonged silences, offered him vacant stares and listless,
infrequent sex. Edward at first perceived these as her quirkish reaction to his play, but came to believe in a deeper cause: her vengeance against him for luring her away from her maidenly joys
with his eloquent tongue, his hot love.

Now his resentment was growing: a muffled fury accumulating toward his wife of eight years. He was stifling it at this instant, admiring the assertive swatch of color the corsage of violets made
on her breast, when the waiter served the lobster gratiné. For no reason except his strange intuition to monitor portent, Edward then took his watch from his waistcoat pocket and noted the
hour, eight forty-one o’clock, and that Toby, the elevator operator, was waddling, at the highest speed his stubbiness allowed, across the dining room to the maître d’. Edward saw
Toby whisper a message, and then return on the run to the hallway, from which Edward now saw smoke entering the dining room.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the maître d’ announced in a loud but thoroughly courteous voice, “I suggest that everyone leave with all swiftness. The hotel is on
fire.”

Edward grabbed Katrina and Adelaide by the arm and moved rapidly away from their table toward the rushing and already whimpering throng that formed an instant clot in the dining room’s
double doorway. Edward saw the maître d’ and Maginn already in the hallway beyond the clot, turned to see Jacob and Geraldine just behind him, and then he rammed himself into the edge
of the clot, his force breaking the impasse and sending people stumbling into the hallway toward the stairwells.

In the hall Edward heard Archie behind him saying, with a voice full of panic, “The stairway’s jammed and the hallway’s full of smoke. We should go to the roof.”

“The roof?” Edward said. “How will you get down? Look, this hallway has two staircases.”

“The elevator,” Geraldine said with a high-pitched gasping that wanted to be a screech, “where is the elevator?”

“Hunker down, get under the smoke if you can, and follow me,” said Edward, and the family did as he said and followed him in a crouch along the hall. Edward heard Toby calling,
“Here, here, the elevator, I can take one more!” and Edward grabbed Geraldine’s shoulder and thrust her at Toby, who pulled her inside the crowded car, slammed the door, and
descended to the street level in a rush.

“Mother’s coat,” said Adelaide, and she ran back to the dining room before Archie could grab her, and vanished in the hallway’s thickening smoke.

“Don’t die for a coat,” Edward yelled to her.

“The roof,” said Archie in a voice broken with panic, “we’ve got to get to the roof! The firemen will get us down.”

“You don’t even know how to get to the roof,” Edward said, but Archie was already on the run into the dining room, pursuing Adelaide.

Two people came toward Edward on their hands and knees, coughing, crying in their fear and asphyxia, a woman in a blue gown and a man Edward recognized as the New York Assemblyman who had been
at Maginn’s table. He was dragging a trunk as he crawled, and when he reached the staircase he pushed the trunk down the steps ahead of him.

“Come on, Edna,” he called to the woman in blue. But Edna had stopped moving, and Edward saw Jacob wheezing badly, immobilized by the smoke.

“His heart,” said Katrina, and Edward lifted Jacob and dragged him toward the narrow southern stairway. Through the thinning smoke Edward saw that the New York politician had gotten
ahead of his trunk and was pulling it down the stairs behind him, oblivious of the loss of Edna.

Edward began to cough, and Katrina, who could not stop coughing, fell on the stairs. “We’re in hell,” she said.

“Only on the outskirts,” Edward said. “Don’t panic on me. Hold my coattail so I know you’re here.” He saw the winding stairway below, pocked with flame.

“We’ll go,” he said, but Katrina’s cough revealed her weakening strength, and Edward took off his jacket and wrapped her head with it. “Breathe through the
cloth,” he said, “and wait one second,” and he crawled back toward the collapsed woman.

“Let’s go, Edna,” he said, and he dragged her by one arm to the stairway. Behind him the hallway’s carpet in front of the elevator was a running pathway of flame. No one
else would get through that.

“Grab her other arm,” Edward told Katrina, and together they moved down the stairs, Edward holding his father-in-law under his left arm like a sack of grain, Jacob’s head
forward, and he and Katrina pulling Edna, faceup, by her arms. The smoke lessened dramatically, for reasons Edward could not understand, as they descended to the first-floor landing. They moved
down the final flight to the ground floor, the fire erratically licking only two walls, and when they reached the billiard room they found four sawhorses blocking the nearest street doorway, which
had been painted earlier in the day. Edna’s husband was throwing his weight against the door with no success. Edward left the women and Jacob near the door, picked up the man’s trunk
and used it as a bartering ram, smashing the door outward and letting in a rush of cold air. He tossed the trunk out onto the sidewalk and its latch snapped open, revealing a score of wrapped
packages of cash lying atop folded shirts.