The Flaming Corsage (19 page)

Melissa told me she was shocked to see a masked woman at the door, and wasn’t sure it was Felicity until she spoke. Felicity’s arrival was a quarter hour before my own, and all that
time, Melissa said, she was hysterical, talking of being raped and robbed of her money and pearls by a man she’d seen working in the hotel. When I arrived Felicity told me the rapist looked
like one of the gang who beat up the policemen on the barge. When she described him I knew it was Cully Watson. Melissa knew Cully only as Hopkins, a sometime hotel elevator operator.

Melissa, Felicity, and I were together half an hour, sifting what had happened, when Giles arrived. Never has a man been more deceived about what he thought he was seeing. Such costly, ghastly
error. The questions remain: What led to his insane behavior? How did he know Felicity would be in my room at that moment, when neither we nor Felicity could have predicted it?

Cully Watson: From His Statement to Police

I was in Ohio first I heard of those killings. It was the Doc’s wife and the actress, and Daugherty. Something going on there. Same day as the killings a guy says the
Albany cops are looking for me, want me for trial, so what I needed was a bundle to get gone. The Doc’s wife liked me, so when I took her stuff up to her room I parted her on the ass. She
opened her bag to duke me and I saw a fold of bills thick as a steak. I told her, “I don’t want money, just a little lovin’.” I already had her three times before when she
was at the hotel, so I muzzled her up. Not now, somebody’s comin’ to see me, she said. I said I’ll be quick, and I opened her up some and she let me do this and that but pushed me
away.

“We’ll do it all later,” she said, but I’m hot so I kept going and we did it on the davenport.

She liked it but she was pissed at me mussing her hair, she’s got company coming. Then the door opened and in came the actress. She didn’t know what to make of us, both half naked,
and she backed out, but the Doc’s wife said, “He’s raping me, don’t go.”

I said, “No, I’m just fucking her. We’re friends.” And I pulled out of her.

“I wanna take a bath,” the Doc’s wife said, and she turned on the tap in the tub, bare-ass, except for that long string of pearls. I told her I liked the way she looked in
’em so she took ’em off to spite me and threw ’em on the bed. They said I took ’em but that ain’t so. Fencing jewels on the run, you gotta be stupid. The other woman
kept looking at me and she wasn’t afraid.

“Are you busy?” I said.

“Forget it,” she said.

“Maybe you wanna take a bath too.”

“No thanks,” she said, but I pulled her clothes off. She fought me pretty good, but I got it into her too, short time, just to say I did it, a hell of a sweet-looking bitch. I put
’em both in the tub, soaping each other up. I coulda diddled the two of ’em all day, but with the cops after me I slipped out, took the cash from the purse, and left the women playing
foot-in-the-crotch. I don’t know who was doing what to who in that crowd. Maybe everybody was doing everybody. For me, I was long gone before the killings. When I heard about them I
didn’t blame the Doc. His wife was no good. But she was a pretty good fuck.

M
ISS INNOCENCE OF
America. If a headbirth by Aphrodite and The Prince were possible she could have been the progeny: born with passion’s mouth and
sacred swath, and wisdom from below. There are lessons to be learned by brushing a wing against such as she, and the lessons continue. In Melissa’s nest of tinder I remembered Rose from tent
city: vivacious, talented, driven, exuberant, bright, cunning strumpet. She answered when I wrote that I wanted to talk about Felicity.

Sickness plagues her imagination. She falls mortally ill when life goes awry, when fortune balks, when love loses its luminescence; for if you are ill, God cannot refuse you sustenance. It was
because I genuinely believed her inability to either sleep without night sweats, or draw breath without pain, that I was with her when death came at us out of Giles’s pistol. She and I were
finished, but I had been unable to reject that face: not beautiful, but so robustly young, and illusory. Believe that face and lose your way. Study the transformation as she applies the powders,
rouges, and charcoal stripings. Discover in that colored mouth, in those magnified eyes, the lure of the virgin-into-vixen: kill my innocence and I’ll reward you with my fur.

Her success as my Thisbe had been supreme, she famous overnight, her photo in all the magazines. The play ran five months and when it closed Flo Ziegfeld was ready to put her in his
Miss
Innocence
to replace Anna Held, but along came Giles’s Wild West performance and Ziegfeld said nobody tainted by scandal would ever be in a show of his. For a time no one in theater would
hire her, but the scandal faded into gossip and instead of being branded as the vixen she emerged as destiny’s waif, the innocent darling corrupted by the “eater of broken meats,”
as the
Police Gazette
labeled me.

She sought work in the pictures, brought her photographs to Kinegraph, and was hired at fifteen dollars a week. Her salary rose to six hundred a week and is still climbing. She’s become
Kinegraph’s chief asset: The Kinegraph Girl, nameless, chameleonic face of sorrow and rapture and fury and terror and wickedness and determination and invitation.

During one of her illnesses rumors spread that she’d been killed by a burglar, or run down by a drunken motorist. The public wondered: Where has our girl gone? Kinegraph publicists
advertised in the newspapers to disprove the lies about her death, and announced she was coming to New York for a new picture. Squadrons of police had to hold back fans waiting for her train at
Grand Central—a greater crowd than greeted the President the previous week. Kinegraph promptly abandoned its policy of anonymity for actors and agreed the public should know the Kinegraph
Girl by name: Melissa Spencer . . . Melisssssssssa Ssssssssspenccccccccer, how sweet the sibilance!

Her film-in-progress was
The Deerslayer
, Cooper’s five-hundred-page Natty Bumppo novel condensed to a twenty-minute movie. Her role was Hetty, the simpleminded daughter of scalp
hunter Thomas Hutter. When I found my way to the village and then to the set, there she was, Melissa-into-Herty, lying on her bed beneath a quilt, her face powdered into a death pallor; for Hetty
had been shot by a stray bullet as the British troops rescued Deerslayer and Hetty’s sister, Judith, from torture at the hands of the Huron Indians. Hetty was dying, and her secret love,
Hurry Harry, another scalp hunter, was by her deathbed, along with Judith, heroic Deerslayer in his fringed buckskins, and his bare-chested Indian friend Chingachgook, noble Delaware chief. The
actors mouthed Cooper’s cumbersome dialogue as if it meant something to the film.

“How come they to shoot a poor girl like me and let so many men go unharmed?” Hetty wondered.

“ ’Twas an accident, poor Hetty,” said Judith.

“I’m glad of that—I thought it strange: I am feeble minded, and the red men have never harmed me before . . . there’s something the matter with my eyes—you look dim
and distant—and so does Hurry, now I look at him . . . my mind was feeble—what people call half-witted . . . How dark it’s becoming! . . . I feel, Deerslayer, though I
couldn’t tell you why . . . that you and I are not going to part forever . . .”

“. . . Yes, we
shall
meet ag’in, though it may be a long time first and in a far-distant land.”

“Sister, where are you? I can’t see now anything but darkness . . .”

“Speak, dearest,” said Judith. “Is there anything you wish to say . . . in this awful moment?”

Cooper has Hetty blush, which to Judith means Hetty is undergoing “a sort of secret yielding to the instincts of nature,” and, on cue from Judith, Hurry Harry, nature’s lusty
pawn, takes Hetty in his arms. She utters her love for him, then dies.

Melissa, no stranger at death’s door, rose up from Hetty’s bed twice, fell back twice to die twice, one of the film’s notable scenes. When it ended and the camera ceased its
clatter, she rose up again to embrace me, kiss me lightly but with promise. The director eyed our kiss with disapproval, and I sensed he was Melissa’s new conquest. He was early thirtyish,
boyish, and rumpled.

“Our next film’s in California, where we’ll never have to worry about the weather,” he said. “And it gets us away from the patent wars—movie companies suing
each other over who owns the camera technology. You know about that, I guess.”

“Of course,” I said, knowing nothing of such wars.

“Melissa has no interest in these things,” said the rumpled boy, “but she’ll thrive in California. Inspiration under the sun. You’ll have that every day,
Mel.”

“A life of sunshine,” Melissa said. “What luxury.”

When Rumples ended the day’s filming, Melissa changed clothes, leaving Hetty’s shroud and heavy eye makeup behind, converting that face that launched a thousand nickels (ten thousand
thousand nickels) back into its faux pristinity. We went to the hotel and found our way to the rear piazza with its same rockers, same hammock, same view of the lovely lake that Cooper called
Glimmerglass, and its vast, lush forests. Here we had spent ten idyllic days in the summer of 1908, convinced life was a dream of sensual indolence.

Melissa took up her familiar position in the hammock, and we ordered the same drinks (gin and quinine water), set them on the same wicker table, and we studied each other as if the 1908 dream
had not dissolved in cordite reek and blood spew. Two years gone and the residual bone pain from the bullet (which had entered my left chest where the burning stick pierced Katrina: God’s own
symmetry) continued to plague my sleepless nights. Yet it was the forgotten wound, spoken of by neither Katrina nor Melissa; for I’d behaved badly, had not summoned the penitential grace to
die from my bullet.

“Tell me about your play,” she said. “Am I in it?”

“Someone like you is in it, but it isn’t you.”

“But I could play the role.”

“You could if I cast you.”

“Of course you’ll cast me.”

“Maybe you won’t want this role.”

“If you wrote it I want it.”

“That’s your only interest, a role. You don’t even know what the play is about.”

“What
is
it about?”

“It’s about a marriage that fails and the partners stay together but take lovers, not very original. Then the husband is caught with his mistress in a love nest, there’s a
shooting and two die. The husband is shot but doesn’t die. People wish he had. He is condemned as a lecherous cad by priests, newspaper editors, and other custodians of the high moral ground.
His son abandons college to escape his father’s scandal. Thoughtless of the father not to perish from shame. To spite others, the man lives on. His life grows bleak. He can’t understand
why this tragedy happened, why people died. It’s a mystery. He begins a journal, fills ledgers with ruminations, theories, then decides writing a play will combat the lethal determinism of
the universe. He fills his imagined stage with a riot of scenes that synthesize events, discover answers. He discovers little and falls depressed at the pointlessness of wild endeavor. In time he
humbleheartedly reunites with his estranged wife as a way of saving his soul. Magnanimous woman, she doesn’t loathe him. She has her own sorrows. She has always loved him and he her. This is
such a commonplace story. It happens to everybody, don’t you think? Finally, as he’s framing a conclusion on the cause of the killings, he turns up facts that dramatically contradict
his conclusion, so he visits his old paramour to confront her with the news. That’s as far as I’ve gotten.”