The Flaming Corsage (24 page)

Katrina’s hat was so large that she had to tip her head sideways in order to step into the cab.

She entered her empty house, the servants gone until dinner, and left her bag and her hat in the drawing room. She made tea for herself in the kitchen and carried it on a tray
to Edward’s office, where she set it atop his desk. She sat in Edward’s chair and took one of his lined tablets from the drawer. She sipped the tea as she considered the questions she
would write answers to on the tablet.

“What, really, was my destiny?” she wrote.

She put her head down on the desk in acquiescence to the drowsiness the question evoked in her. She slept for she knew not how long, and awoke smelling smoke. She went to the window of the
office and parted the curtains to see the Christian Brothers school next door in flames. It was clear to her that the fire would make the leap to this room in a matter of minutes. She went back to
Edward’s chair and put her head down on his desk. The smoke was familiar in her mouth. She had breathed fire before.

A
FTER THE HOUSE
burned, and Katrina died in his arms, Edward moved what was left of his life into a parlor suite at the Kenmore Hotel and began the
process of gently evicting the Cohallon family from Emmett and Hanorah’s Main Street house: his house now, his only house now. He put Katrina in the hands of Ebel Campion, whose undertaking
parlors were only two blocks from where she died, with instructions that there would be no wake, only a funeral mass in Sacred Heart church, and then private burial. He would not abide strangers
ogling her corpse.

The buzzards were already at work on the leftover carrion from the Love Nest scandal, writing how the debauchery of the ogre Daugherty had shamed Katrina, hastened her death; and
cheering—were they not?—for the innocent Melissa, who had replied to the evil done her by gaining much-deserved movie stardom. There they perched, at the edge of Edward’s life,
anticipating new morsels from
The Flaming Corsage
, which would open May 11, the fourth day after Katrina’s death; for the show must go on
now,
Mr. Ogre, or not at all.

Sacred Heart church was filled, even to standing room, and hundreds more jammed the church steps, and Walter Street’s sidewalk, twenty minutes before the small cortege arrived. Six bearers
carried Katrina’s coffin up the steps into the church, photographers recording her ascent, then moving their tripods to focus on Edward, impeccably tailored in black suit with cutaway coat
and beaver hat, stepping down from the first carriage, with Martin next, dressed like his father, and then the heavily veiled Geraldine, triadic study in family distance. Geraldine’s brother,
Ariel, and Archie Van Slyke came in the second carriage, then other relatives, friends.

As they entered the church in procession, Edward saw, first, the blaze of color on the altar: the dozen baskets of yellow flowers he had sent to brighten the solemnity for Katrina, then saw,
with sharper focus, faces from North Albany, Colonie Street, Elk Street: Francis and Annie Phelan, and old Iron Joe with them; and Jack and Ruthie McCall, she refusing to measure his eye; and the
Phelans: Peter, Chick, Molly, and Tommy, all in one pew; and Bishop Sloane, flanked by a brace of Minor Canons, bowing ecclesiastically to Geraldine as she passed him; and so many, many more
neighbors and forever-nameless witnesses to the lamentable truth: that Katrina Selene Taylor Daugherty is no more.

Father Loonan, without the stamina to say mass, sat in trembling witness on the altar, as Edward had asked of him: Katrina’s counselor in the faith when she converted. Three other priests
would celebrate Katrina’s passing with a solemn high mass, and Father Loonan, at the proper moment, feeble but clear of speech, and wearing his simple cassock and surplice, would stand and
read the Gospel, not only from the mass for the dead, but also from the mass for the previous day on the liturgical calendar, as if the two Gospels were one; and Edward found the addition of the
latter Gospel more than accidental redundancy: “. . . You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt lose its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is good for nothing any more, but to be
cast out, and to be trodden on by men. You are the light of the world. A city seated on a mountain cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but upon a candle-stick,
that it may shine to all that are in the house . . .”

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.”

I
N 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.

T
HE 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.