The Flaming Corsage (28 page)

“Take a new one.”

He wet a third towel for Edward.

“I’ll pay your laundry bill, too,” Edward said.

He walked up Dallius toward where Division crossed. The pain was awful but easing. Why did he want to go back to the whorehouse? Explain the riddle of the goat. He turned on Division and walked
until he came to Dorgan’s. It was dark. He broke a panel of the glass door with a high kick and entered. By the light of the streetlamp he saw the back bar empty of bottles. He walked across
the dance floor toward Maginn’s, opened the whorehouse door, and stepped into darkness. He found a window and raised a shade, letting in light from the street. The rugs, lamps, chairs, and
drapes were all gone. One sofa and small bar, without bottles, remained. He moved the bar and found nothing on its one shelf. They took the lead pipe and the chloroform. On the floor he found a
large envelope.

He went outside and left the front door wide open. Let the rats out. On the street he lightly touched his wound. The blood seemed to be coagulating. He stood under the streetlight and opened the
envelope, to find two dozen identical postcard photos of a woman in a flat, flowered hat, black stockings, shoes, and a white blouse she was holding partly open. She wore no skirt and was facing
front, taking the viewer’s picture with her fluffy black camera. Nellie. He would recognize those thighs anywhere. He pocketed one postcard, tossed the rest.

He walked toward the all-night cabstand on State Street, evaluating his latest creation: Cully’s lost confession. Not until he’d finished his monologue to Maginn had he thought of
resurrecting it. He’d often imagined an investigator would discover it just that way; and it also made perfect sense for Maginn to hire Cully’s hangman.

His mood improved as he thought of Maginn, with fewer teeth, and fettered with whores, forced into midnight exile by the power of fiction.

E
DWARD REACHED FOR
his watch when the intern at St. Peter’s Hospital finished with his bandage. The watch was gone. What else could he lose
tonight? The pain in his head was horrible, the whiskey wearing off, the powders they gave him not yet working. They wanted him to stay overnight in the hospital but he would not. He wanted to walk
to Main Street but he lacked the stamina. They rang for a cab and the intern gave him a chair. He sat by the door and waited for the cab.

He looked for Giles in the hospital hallway but did not find him. He’s here someplace. He saw a wall clock that said four-twenty. It’s early. Late. It was not likely that his play
would be resurrected. His playwriting days were over. Everything was over. It won’t get no better, Cappy said. Nothin’ worth doin’, it’s finished. The only thing that
isn’t over is the pain. He regretted not having time enough to do the play properly, and to use the real names. Who would care? The play would never be done again. But if it was done, some
scenes would be different.

(
KATRINA
is seated on sofa in the Daugherty drawing room, looking at photo album.
EDWARD
stands with his arms folded, watching her. They are
dressed for the evening. She wears a corsage of violets.)

When the cab was halfway down Main Street, Edward saw he had left a light on in the parlor. His pain was leveling, but would not go away. He went to the bedroom for money he kept in a jar, paid
the driver, then went to the icebox. The ice was almost gone. With the pick he chipped some ice into a glass, then half-filled the glass with whiskey. Quarter to five. The whiskey and powders would
take away the pain. He stared out the kitchen window at the canal and remembered Emmett in his days as the lock tender, standing here watching the boat traffic, waiting for trouble and grievance
from the canalers, his problem as well as theirs to solve. It may be that the existence of the planet Neptune does not contradict the design of the solar system. How can it if it is really
there?

Edward walked out the back door to Emmett’s toolshed and found the bullets and broken pieces of the pistol in the waste bucket. He picked them out and carried them to the kitchen.

“Did you ever consider,” he said to Emmett, “that I never was the Irishman on horseback? It may be I was free of racial and social destinies, and that what I wanted was
altogether different from what had gone before.”

He put the bullets and pistol on the kitchen table, where Hughie Gahagan would have been sitting. The dead pistol meant something simple: sycophancy, scorn, false praise, cruelty, rage,
narcissism, pain, prayer. Maginn was innocent of everything relating to success. He contrived complexity as a substitute for disuse. “If you don’t find her in one room, try the
other,” he wrote on his note with the passkey.

It may be that after the worst has happened, you see that Neptune was there from the beginning, problematically, and the old orbit of death is superseded. Then you see that faith, or its
mathematical equivalent, has to do with your discovery.

When Emmett wanted anything he invoked Connacht.

Booming voice.

Shorn of sustenance, shorn of the past, of love, of the theater of action, what’s left to a man? The answer, son, is the necessary sin. You won’t name it. It’s written in a
forgotten code. The light’s still on in the parlor.

(The
FIREMAN
,
a handkerchief over his mouth and nose, carries
KATRINA
out of the burning house in his arms and
crosses the street to where
EDWARD
is standing. The
FIREMAN
lays her down on the street, unbuttons her bodice, puts smelling salts
under her nose. She does not move. The
FIREMAN
puts his mouth on hers, breathes into her. She opens her eyes, looks at the
FIREMAN
,
then looks past him at
edward,
who moves closer to her.)

Edward picked up his whiskey and walked to the front porch. He sat in the chair beside Emmett and decided mockery was a more exalted mode of behavior than was generally assumed.
He sat on the porch drinking whiskey with Emmett until he grew ravenous. He thought of what he would cook.

He would fry bacon.

He would stay up and outlast Emmett. He had outlasted Martin, and the boy went back to New York. That was part of their problem. The father’s energy acknowledged the irrelevance of the
future, the worship of the present tense.

He could almost smell the bacon. A pig is turned into bacon, bacon becomes food that gives unity and purpose to the imagination. Brother William died in the fire, kneeling, turned into a bent
cinder. Katrina, heroine of neighborhood children, had walked into the classroom and whipped William with the same stick he’d been using to whip a boy. Katrina understood the nature of
fire.

Edward, seeing the earliest blue line of things to come, finished his whiskey. Then he went to the icebox for the bacon, which will always be with us.