The Flaming Corsage (21 page)

I
T WAS ALREADY
late afternoon when Edward closed Katrina’s diary. He hitched up the horse he called Galway Kate to his demil-andau and rode out to
the Cudahy slaughterhouse in West Albany. Cattle were being led out of a storage pen and up an inclined wooden runway onto the killing floor of the huge wooden shed, where Edward told a foreman he
had urgent business with Clubber. Clubber, the foreman said, worked as a splitter, and Edward found him, heavy cleaver in hand, halving the backbone of a dead cow. Edward called his name, and
Clubber turned and stared at Edward, then finished cutting the beast and handed the cleaver to a man beside him to cope with the next carcass. Clubber spoke to the foreman, then limped toward
Edward, who was trying not to retch from the stench of the gutted animals. Clubber rinsed blood off his hands with a hose, and dried them on his trousers, which were full of bloodstains.

“Hey, Ed, what got you out here? I ain’t ever seen you out here.”

“You got a few minutes, Clubber?”

“I can take ten minutes.”

They walked out of the shed to Edward’s carriage.

“We’ll go have a drink.”

“Quick one’s all,” said Clubber.

“Get up here.”

They rode to George Karl’s saloon and Edward bought the beer. Clubber pinched himself a piece of beef on an onion slice from the lunch counter and sat at a table.

“Putting the bull’s head on Giles’s porch, what exactly happened? Tell it again, Clubber.”

“I told it twenty hundred times.”

“Once more.”

“Cully Watson says help him with the joke. Kill the bull, cut its head, leave it down at Giles’s, hell of a joke, you know it, he’ll wake up and say, ‘Hey, that’s a
dead bull on my porch. Son bitch,’ he’ll say, ‘who’d do a thing like that?’ ”

“What did Cully do on the porch? Anything you remember?”

“Lifted the head with me.”

“What else?”

“Said where to set it.”

“Did he have a piece of paper?”

“Paper?”

“With some lines of verse on it.”

“What verse?”

“Any verse at all. Whatever you remember.”

“Verse.”

“What about the paper?”

Clubber drank some beer and searched for the paper.

“I guess he coulda had a paper.”

“What’d he do with it?”

“I don’t know. Put it in the mailbox?”

“That’s right. He put it in Giles’s mailbox.”

“Yeah. That’s it. It was part of the joke. Like a valentine, Cully said. He’ll get a valentine in the morning. I forgot that.”

Edward handed Clubber the verse he’d copied from Katrina’s diary. “Here’s what that valentine said.”

Clubber’s eyes moved across and down the page, up and across, down again, up and across again.

“What’s this stuff say?”

“It says in a roundabout way that Giles’s wife is down in New York having sex with two people, a man and a woman. The man is meant to be me. The scribe. That’s what it
means.”

“That ain’t true.”

“You’re right. It’s all wrong.”

“No, that ain’t true on the valentine. It was a joke.”

“Wasn’t a joke, Clubber.”

“It was a joke, I’m telling you. Cully said it was a joke. We laughed like hell at the joke. Just a goddamn dead-bull joke, Ed. That’s all it was, a dead-bull joke.”

“When Giles read it he went to New York and murdered his wife, shot me, then blew his own brains out through the top of his head. Nobody thought that was a joke.”

“That couldn’ta been why he done it, not the joke. It ain’t possible, Ed. He gotta had somethin’ else on his mind.”

“It was this, Clubber, it was this.”

Clubber suffered Edward’s words as a succession of blows, a whipped cur cowering from an affectionate hand. He pulled in his shoulder and cried, making no noise. He tried to remove the
evidence of such unmanly behavior by rubbing the water off his face, wiping his fingers on his pants. When he did it again, he spread pink streaks of the damp cow blood on his cheeks and around his
eyes.

“Couldn’t be. It ain’t true.”

“Wasn’t a joke, Clubber.”

“I wouldn’ta hurt Giles or ’specially you. You know that, Ed.”

“I know that, Clubber.”

Clubber made a noise in his throat, an involuntary blubbering, and ducked his head below table level so none could see. He coughed, a fake cough, and smeared his face in new places with the pink
cow blood.

“Who put Cully up to it?”

Clubber only stared.

“Was it Maginn?”

“Maginn?”

After Edward revealed to Clubber the valentine’s fatal message, Clubber hid himself in the darkest corner of the attic of his two-story home on Van Woert Street. His
sister Lydie saw his lunch pail and knew he’d come home but could not find him. When Clubber heard her step on the attic stairs he climbed out the window and leaped off the roof to kill
himself. He broke an arm and an ankle, and sprained a shoulder, all of which were put in casts or wrapped by Doc Keegan at St. Peter’s Hospital. Lydie took her brother home from the hospital
and when she went to sleep he crawled back up to the attic and threw himself off the same roof, breaking a leg and a hip, and earning his ticket to the asylum at Poughkeepsie.

S
HE STOOD BEFORE
the gilt-framed mirror in the drawing room of her home, primping, reimposing a straying hair, ordering the lines of her solid-gray,
V-necked satin dress, its skirt gathered into soft billows at the front to reveal stockinged ankles, the shocking fashion at Auteuil this year. She studied what remained of the forty-seventh year
of her beauty. It was persistent, vegetative, clarion. In her own reversed eyes it seemed less fragile now than when she married him and had worried about her too-emphatic cheek-bones, the early
lines at the corners of her eyes. Such empty concern. What does all that mean to anyone now? To him? To other men?

The men in the mirror, behind her. At her. Always at her, in memory or dream, or with their need, or their plangent sorrow at the leave-taking, or their eyes that improve with reversal. And
their alcoholic breath on your neck.

She has known the joy of beauty. But, he wrote, joy is one of her most vulgar adornments, while melancholy may be called her illustrious spouse, a strain of beauty that has nothing to do with
sorrow.

She had begun the day knowing her obligations and desires, an unusual rising, life rarely so orderly for Katrina. She remembered seeing her father, and dreaming of a monkey, knew what Mrs.
Squires should make for breakfast: turkey hash, her mother’s favorite, and pumpkin parties, knew the tasks of this consequential morning, knew that revelation would greet her afternoon.

She had bathed, dressed, and, first order, taken down her large black leather shoulder bag and opened it on the bed. From her clothes hamper, where she had put it for safekeeping last night, she
took her mother’s jewel case and put it in the bottom of the bag. She walked to the third-floor storeroom and unlocked the steamer trunk her father had bought for her trip to London and
presentation at court. She rummaged under that famous dress of white chiffon over white silk in which she had made her deep curtsy before Queen Victoria, and she lifted out the seven identical
leather-bound diaries of her life. She dropped the key inside the trunk, closed it.

In her room she put six of the dairies in her bag. The remaining one (1896–98) she opened to the page where lay a newspaper clipping of a baseball player photographed in close-up as he
throws a ball. Francis of the excellent face.

She raised her glance to the window and looked out at the maple tree in the garden where she’d seen him perched on a branch, sawing another branch above his head. Her valentine in the
tree. And she had immediately, then, dressed herself naked, in sun hat and evening slippers, and walked out onto the back piazza to induct the young man into her life. And didn’t they love
each other so well after that induction? Oh they did.

She built shrines to their love: in her bureau, on her dressing table, on the shelf above the bathtub: a piece of paper on which he’d written both their names: Francis Aloysius Phelan and
Katrina Selene Taylor, a snippet of the green canvas he’d wrapped around her when he carried her naked in from the piazza, coins he’d held in his hand, a rag of a shirt he’d left
with her, a book with the poems she’d read to him, a handkerchief stained with their love. The shrines were palpable proof of time memorious, when love lived in the next house and came to
call.

Until one day it did not. And she destroyed the shrines.

She looked at the clipping, his face scowling at the unseen baserunner he is about to throw out at first, scowling at the hidden Katrina he is about to throw out of his life.

She read the open page of the diary:

She considered ripping the clipping in half, but did not. She put it between pages of the diary, put the diary into the bag, and went downstairs to breakfast.

“I dreamed of pumpkin last night,” she said to Mrs. Squires, who was serving her breakfast. “Does that mean anything?”

“Did you eat the pumpkin?” Mrs. Squires asked.

“No, it was just pulp and I threw it at a monkey.”

“Monkeys could mean sharpers are after you, so watch out, Mrs. D. But pumpkin is nice. Pumpkin means happiness. Unless you eat it, and then I’m afraid it means trouble’s
coming.”

“The monkey was a collapsed doll, sitting on a high perch, and I hated it. I hit it with a handful of pumpkin and it came to life.”

“So the monkey ate the pumpkin. You’d best be careful today, Mrs. D.”

“I shall indeed, Mrs. Squires.”

She relished her food, the taste of bygone breakfasts, when her mother shopped and arranged the daily menu. As she swallowed a forkful of the creamy turkey hash the telephone rang in the
hallway. She heard Loretta answer, heard her footsteps coming toward the dining room.

“Martin is on the wire from New York, Missus Daugherty,” Loretta said, and Katrina went quickly to the telephone.

“Martin?” she said into the mouthpiece. “This is your mother who loves you. Where are you?”

“A hotel lobby on Fourteenth Street.”

“Are you coming home?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“You should stop thinking about it and get on the train. Your father’s play opens in four days.”

“I know that, Mother.”

“Are you coming to see it?”

“That’s what I’m thinking about.”

“Martin, my sweet and only child, please stop thinking and make your decision. You no longer hate your father. You told me so yourself.”

“That’s right. I don’t hate him.”

“Then come and be with him for his play. It will be a momentous event.”

“For some people.”

“For more than you suppose. Now you must come, Martin. You can’t hide from the reality of your life. You must confront it and see what it looks like. Your mother insists. Do you hear
what she’s saying?”

“I believe I’ll be coming.”

“You surely will?”

“I believe I will.”

“How very, very good that is. Oh how very, very good, Martin. I was afraid you’d fail me. Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

“I’m staying at Father’s apartment in the Village. I’ve just taken over the rental, as he suggested.”

“You’re such a sensible young man. I’m so proud of you, Martin, so proud. Have we finished with our talk?”

“I told you I would call.”

“And so you have. And I told you I would do all in my power to make the rest of your life as harmonious as possible with your father. I do mean that, Martin. I verily do.”

“I believe you do, Mother. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“You’ve made me very happy, Martin.”

“I’m glad for that, Mother.”

“Then goodbye, my sweet boy. Goodbye.”

And she placed the receiver on its hook.

She went back to the table, her mind sprinting into the day ahead of her. She sat down to finish her breakfast, but she could not. She took one forkful of hash for old times’ sake, then
went to the drawing room, where she had left her bag and her hat.