The Flaming Corsage (18 page)

“But it’s so fated,” said Maginn, “all wrapped up in God’s intellect. God is mindless, Edward, don’t you know that? The random moment is what’s
important, not the hounds of fate. It’s time we left Oedipus behind. We should be our own gods, not their pawns. I believe in whim, not wisdom.”

“Your random moment,” Edward said, “means to live like a blown leaf. I do believe in impulses, but I believe they come from something central to what we are, that they’re
signals for action—a craving for sacrifice in exchange for love, an instinct for evil we can’t escape. We’re mostly ignorant of what’s really going on in our souls, but we
should give the signals a chance.”

“Instinct for evil,” Maginn said. “You sound like a Catholic missionary saving heathens from original sin.”

“And you,” said Katrina, “sound like a misanthrope. What ever pleases you, Thomas?”

“You please me, Katrina, the way you please the world. I’m overcome with pleasure when I see beauty and wit come together. And I value our visiting Miss Melissa, a young woman with a
future. I do have my moments, and they arrive quite randomly.”

“I remember one of your random moments,” said Giles. “Your date with the fireman’s wife.”

“You never forget that, do you, Fitz?”

“That was so funny,” said Felicity.

“Depending on your perspective,” said Maginn.

“Who is the fireman’s wife?” Melissa asked.

“An invention of these grown-up boys,” said Katrina, pointing to Edward and Giles.

“Consummate actors, both,” Maginn said. “They set out to humiliate me and they did it extremely well.”

“Humiliation wasn’t the intention,” Giles said. “It was a joke. If we weren’t close friends we wouldn’t have bothered.”

“They took advantage of Thomas’s infatuation with Felicity’s aunt,” Katrina said, “and convinced him she felt the same way.”

“I told my aunt all about it,” Felicity said. “She was amused and flattered, but she’d never cheat on her husband.”

“An exceedingly rare woman,” said Maginn. “Almost extinct in our time.”

“Oh, you are a wretched man,” Katrina said.

“Hateful,” said Felicity. “Devilish.”

“You know what Chaucer said, my dears. ‘One shouldn’t be too inquisitive in life either about God’s secrets or one’s wife.’ Do you hear what I’m saying
about God, Edward?”

“I do hear,” Edward said.

“
Mundus vult decipi,
” said Giles.

“What’s that again?” Edward asked.

“The world wants to be deceived,” Giles said. “Don’t you think so?”

“What happened with the fireman’s wife?” Melissa asked.

“When Thomas went to meet her,” Giles said, “a jealous husband shot at him and he fled for his life. The husband was played by a friend of ours, Clubber Dooley He screamed at
Maginn as a home-wrecker and fired blank cartridges. Grand melodrama, a high point of Clubber’s life.”

“Dooley is pitiful,” Maginn said.

“I wouldn’t say so,” said Giles.

“He drinks in Johnny Groelz’s saloon, morose, all but toothless, swilling beer till he’s senseless. Once a week a boy comes in and Dooley hands him money and the boy takes it
home to Mother, a slattern who once indulged Dooley—what way, precisely, I’d rather develop bubonic plague than try to imagine. But ever since then she’s been on dreadful
Dooley’s dole, and he dreams of another go at her someday, if he can only find a way to get off the barstool. Pitiful, needy sap.”

“That’s perverse,” said Giles. “That boy is related to Clubber. His mother raised Clubber.”

“Intimacy within the family is not a new thing in the universe,” Maginn said.

“Always sex,” said Katrina. “Thomas the satyr, eternally pursuing the nymphs.”

“The Greeks made bucolic gods of the satyrs,” Maginn said, “and I find it a jovial way of life, bouncing through the bosky with divine goatishness, spying one’s pleasure,
taking it, then moving on to the next pasture. Is there a better way to spend one’s day?”

“You are moving into depravity,” Katrina said.

Edward saw she was smiling.

Loretta appeared at Katrina’s elbow to say dessert was ready, and Katrina announced it would be served on the back piazza, with fireworks to follow.

Edward had put his son in charge of the fireworks, and now here he came: Martin Daugherty, twenty, home from his day’s wandering. He stepped onto the piazza carrying his
dish of Mrs. Squires’s ice cream, looking, Edward thought, like himself at that age: tall, with abundant brown hair all in place, still not quite grown into his teeth, wearing a fresh white
shirt with cuffs turned. Edward saw Martin’s eyes go directly to Melissa.

“This is our son, Martin,” Edward said. Martin stopped at Melissa’s chair and took her hand in greeting. “Melissa Spencer.” And they smiled. Both of an age.

“You look like your father,” Melissa said. “A handsome family indeed.”

A beginning? Two beginnings?

“Melissa will play the lead in my new play, all things being equal,” Edward said.

“That’s exciting,” Martin said. “A pleasure, Miss Spencer.”

“All things are never equal, Edward,” Maginn said. “You should avoid inaccurate clichés.”

“Are you in school?” Melissa asked Martin.

“Going into my third year at Fordham.”

“He may be a writer like his father,” Katrina said. “He writes well.”

“No, not like my father. I’m not serious about it.”

“It takes time to be serious,” Katrina said. “He’s a fine student.”

“I might write for the newspapers,” Martin said.

“That’s such an exciting world,” Melissa said.

“It’s about as exciting,” said Maginn, “as being attacked by fleas.”

“Are you really so bored by your work, Maginn?” Edward asked.

“I would infinitely prefer setting off fireworks as a way of life,” Maginn said.

“I just came from the fireworks at Beaver Park,” Martin said. “A huge crowd. A horse ran wild when somebody threw a cannon cracker at him. He was pulling an Italian
peddler’s vegetable wagon and he ran into a moving trolley. He was on his side and bleeding badly, two legs obviously broken.”

“Oh that’s awful,” said Melissa, and she hid her face in her hands.

“The peddler kept asking the policeman to shoot the horse, but the cop said he couldn’t kill an animal like that.”

“You have to, if they’re in that condition,” Giles said. “You have to shoot them.”

“A man came out of a house with a rifle and said he’d shoot the horse. The Italian got down on his knees and begged him to do it, and the man shot the horse in the head.”

“Horrible,” said Melissa, and she wept for the horse.

“I also saw Jack Apple do his annual jump into the river,” Martin said, breaking a silence. “He jumped off the top of the Maiden Lane bridge.”

“He only jumped
off it
?” Giles said. “Anybody can do that. The trick is to jump
over
it.”

“Oh Giles,” Felicity said.

“Giles is warming up his jokes,” Maginn said. “Edward, have you considered casting Giles as Pyramus in your play? You’d have them tumbling out of their seats. Or rolling
in the aisles, as you might put it.”

“The fireworks are in those bags at the foot of the steps,” Edward said.

Martin inspected the skyrockets, Roman candles, flowerpots, cherry bombs, strings of Chinese crackers; and Edward watched the women as they watched each other, a study in optics: Katrina aware
of Giles’s and Felicity’s fascination with Melissa’s unblushing attitude toward her body; Melissa aware of Edward’s eyes on her, her own eyes on Katrina, evaluating. Edward
monitored the shifting glance, the recurrent stare that extended an instant too long to be insignificant. He observed Maginn giving equal attention to all three women: failed with Felicity, failed
with Katrina—didn’t he? Will he fail with Melissa, or does she collect men as he collects women? Her smiling eye lingered on Edward an instant too long not to be significant. Edward saw
that Maginn saw.

The fireworks sizzled, glowed, exploded with great bangs and a thousand small, oriental poppings, and the Roman candles thup-thupped toward where the lawn sloped down toward the brickyard on Van
Woert Street, all this under Martin’s expert hand. Edward had taken him to see fireworks the first year of his life and ever after taught him caution in their handling.

“I suppose all over Albany right now,” Edward said, “boys are having their fingers blown off and their eyes blown out.”

“Giles, how come you’re not with the firemen tonight?” Maginn asked. “Don’t you usually help them out on the Fourth?”

“I took the night off to have dinner with you, you lout,” Giles said. “I’m tired of stupid people blowing themselves to pieces. But if you decide to blow yourself up,
Maginn, I have the tetanus antitoxin in my bag to treat you.”

“If I decide to blow myself up,” said Maginn, “there won’t be anything left to treat. I will very thoroughly atomize myself into the circumambient air.”

“What a grisly thing to say,” Katrina said.

“Grisly? I thought it was quite poetic. You’re very severe with me tonight, Katrina.”

Grisly the whole thing. And unacceptable. Edward rose from his rocker and walked down onto the lawn to get away. Something magnetic in him attracts her lashing tongue. Of course she knows he
lives for these lashings. What is the recourse?

“Time for the skyrockets,” Martin said.

“Oooh, can I light one?” Melissa asked, and she left the piazza and came to the bottom of the garden, where Edward and Martin stood beside a dozen skyrockets stuck into the ground on
their launching sticks. Martin handed her the lighted punk and showed her where to touch it to a skyrocket’s fuse. She bent over the skyrocket, very probably giving Martin an unobstructed
view of the chest-scape; and, as they all watched the rocket ignite, soar into the moonlit sky, and explode, Melissa touched another rocket, then another, sending them all to heaven. From the
piazza came applause for the spectacle.

As Edward and Melissa walked back toward the house she touched his arm. He turned to see her leaning toward him, offering him her beautiful moonlit breasts.

“I just wanted to say I’m incredibly grateful for your belief in me,” she said. “You’re a very special man.”

“I recognize talent when I see it,” Edward said. He offered her his hand and they went up the steps together.

Maginn rose from his chair and came over to Edward.

“Are you taking her away from me?” he whispered. “Is that what you’re doing?”

Before Edward could answer, Felicity said, “Look, a shooting star!” and he turned to see in the northern sky the dying arc of the meteor, or was it a comet, or a falling angel?

“Oh dear,” Melissa said, blessing herself. “That’s bad luck. That means one of us here will be dead next year.”

“More fatalism, Edward,” Maginn said. “This superstitious child is perfect for your play.”

“I don’t believe such things,” Katrina said.

“On the other hand, the Trojans didn’t believe Cassandra’s prophecies,” Maginn said, “and look what happened to them.”

“We’re all too healthy to die,” Felicity said.

“I agree,” Edward said. “I refuse to play dead just because the sky is falling.”

“I second that motion,” said Giles.

At the stroke of midnight Martin lit the last fireworks of the evening: half a dozen red lights that burned brightly together for a long minute at the bottom of the garden, then weakened until
their lambency was spent, and the light on the Daugherty lawn came only from the vigilant moon.

Edward: From the Inquest Report

S
HE WAS THERE
when I came into the apartment, wearing that exotic cloak and mask, moving nervously around the parlor, and exploding with her story. She
said she was napping on the sofa in her room, fully dressed, when she saw a man crawling over the transom, half into the room through the fanlight’s opening; and what awakened her was the
sound of his shirt buttons scraping on the wood.

“I would have screamed,” she said, “but he waved a knife at me in silent warning. I ran to the buzzer to ring for help, but he was at me before I got to it, and he searched my
purse and valise. He took all the cash I’d drawn from the bank in Albany, more than three hundred dollars, and he touched the long strand of pearls I was wearing, the ones Giles gave me. He
seemed to know jewelry. ‘Now,’ he said to me, ‘get out of your clothes.’ ”

She wept as she said this, lifting her eye mask to dab at her tears. I asked her why she was wearing the mask but she just waved both hands impatiently.

“He led me to the bedroom and pushed me onto the bed and raped me, hurt me so much I thought I must be bleeding. When he was done he made me draw water for a bath and told me to sit in the
water and soap myself. He knelt by the tub and lathered me with one hand, his knife always at me. He helped me out of the tub and handed me a towel to dry off, then opened the wardrobe and took out
this mask and cloak. I never saw them before and can’t imagine how he knew they were there. Maybe he’d put them there.

“He told me, ‘Lady, you got one great shape,’ and made me put on the mask, cloak, and shoes and walk across the room, holding the cloak open while he looked at me. Then he
pushed me down on the sofa and raped me again. And he left. I knew you [me] had an apartment here, and this morning I saw Melissa in the lobby and I assumed she was visiting you. So when he was
gone I grabbed my clothes and came straight here, afraid he’d come back for another go at me, or even kill me, that’s how these men are. Oh the foul dog.”