The Flaming Corsage (6 page)

They’ll say the disparity between families and religions will cause friction among friends and relatives, be a curse on the marriage. They will never mention the Irish or that they see us
as a race of beasts.

They will imply, with exquisite finesse, that you are of lowly financial status, that Katrina stands to inherit great wealth, and that this wealth has given her her life as she knows it. You, a
writer, could you, in a lifetime, ever earn enough to preserve her birthright? Not likely.

They will praise you as a cultured man and wish you well in your literary pursuits, but they will continue to believe Katrina’s attentions should be from a suitor of an established
profession. You, Edward, being no such thing, stand as a living impediment to a harmonious marriage, in Katrina’s mind if not in your own.

He poured himself a sherry, bolted it. It tasted like the Irish Sea.

He leaned back in the leather chair, considered his position, moved a straight chair to a point where it would face the two leather chairs. He sat in the straight chair and leaned
forward—no, too close—moved the chair back a foot, poured another sherry, bolted it.

They came in together, Geraldine still growing wide with age, wearing a long black dress that covered her from throat to toe and could have passed for a mourning vestment (anticipating the
death-like eventuation of losing Katrina to this man?). Jacob came in with his high white collar and his unruly graying hair, and Edward stood to greet them, blocking Jacob’s access to his
desk chair.

“You have something to tell us?” Jacob asked.

“I do,” Edward said.

The Taylors made no move to sit down.

“Jake, Geraldine, please sit,” Edward said. “I have a few things to say, no sense standing.”

Geraldine sat in one of the leather armchairs, and Jacob, not taking his eye off Edward, sat warily beside her. Edward reseated himself on the hardback, facing his captive audience.

“I’m here,” he said, “to say directly to you that I’ve asked Katrina repeatedly to marry me, and she has not said no, but neither has she said yes. I know
she’s indecisive because you have questions and uncertainties about such a marriage, and about me, which is natural.”

Jacob moved as if to speak, but Edward pressed on.

“I don’t want to trouble either of you to speak of this now. I want only to reveal to you who I am, for even though you think you know me, you truly do not.

“I begin with this room, where the worlds of your family and mine exist side by side on your bookshelves: Dickens and Thackeray, giants in the world I aspire to, alongside chronicles of
your exalted ancestral civilization. I’ll live my life writing, books now, perhaps plays in the future, a noble profession, playwriting, as you know from Shakespeare on your shelves.

“I’m sure you’ve heard what the gossips say about Katrina and me, that I’m aiming above my station. I don’t answer such gossip and Katrina admires me for it. After
all, who’s to say what my station is? Am I fresh from the low life of the Dublin slums? Am I a rude peasant late off the stony fields of Connacht? These things may have been part of my
ancestry, just as you two derive from a culture of avaricious land barons who kept farmers in unspeakable peonage for two centuries, from generations of soulless men who grew rich off the slave
trade. Is that low life, or—”

“What’s that about the slave trade?” Jacob asked. “If you’re implying—”

“Don’t reduce yourself, Jake, don’t give it a second thought. I don’t,” and Edward quickened his speech, eliminated pauses, breathed on the run.

“I know these are old and generic accusations, and I also know how high you’ve risen above those early scoundrels who populate your ethnic history. Only a fool would hold it against
you. What a glorious heritage you have in the Staats family, paragons of religious liberty, vigorous giants of commerce, and yet there
was
old Jacobus Staats who scandalized his townsmen by
marrying a squaw, did he not? Yes, he did, and so what? Who cares who marries whom if the bride and groom are blissful?”

Jacob squirmed, his mouth forming a rebuttal, but in his eyes the question: What exactly is this man saying? Edward poured three glasses of sherry as he spoke and, without losing a beat, put two
of them in the hands of Jacob and Geraldine, downed his own, and stood and paced before them, a dynamo of pent energy made visible and audible.

“Henry James, the old man—you both know him, he went to Albany Academy before me—argues that Adam’s fall from Eden was necessary for Adam to achieve a higher plane of
existence. And I mean to tell you that Katrina and I are now together at the gates of our own Eden, and we couldn’t be more sure of our happiness. If a fall is fated I believe we’ll
rise to that higher plane, just as Adam did. We’ll thrive, we’ll transcend whatever society tries to do to us. We’ll move onto the grand stage and I’ll prosper formidably
and achieve heights no lawyer or doctor who might court Katrina could ever know; for I have talent and I have energy and both will last me a lifetime.

“I have a name descended from Irish kings who preexist Oliver Cromwell by six centuries, and I fervently believe in the aristocracy of my lost ancestral world. I’m vividly aware also
that your ancestors, Geraldine, going back as they do to Cromwell’s England, your ancestors, in the name of God, tried to eliminate the entire population of Ireland, and almost succeeded.
Then I sit here and all that self-glorifying butchery leaps out at me from the pages of books in this room—clear proof the past is behind us, that we’re in a new world with a new light
on our own days, and you, Jake, and you, Geraldine, have the strength and courage to keep—
in your own library
—the record of those unspeakable crimes. Hurrah, I say to this.
Hurrah for you both, hurrah for facing the worst history has to offer, and moving forward to honorable success in every realm worth inhabiting—civic, business, ecclesiastical, social, but,
most of all, success in conceiving and raising the peerless Katrina, icon of beauty and wisdom. And so my congratulations to you both, and don’t say anything yet. Just think on my words.
Think on me as the husband of your sublime daughter. Consider the uncritical love she and I have for each other, and what a rare thing this is in anyone’s life.”

Then, as these final words of what Edward would come to call his Manifesto of Love and History hung in the air, he backed quickly away from Jacob and Geraldine (who still stared at him, gripping
their sherry), found the library door and opened it, and then he was gone.

H
EADACHES WERE COMING
gradually to Katrina, then they became intermittent, and, after two weeks, incessant; and so she took to her bed with valerian
drops, the only avenue to sleep. When the sedatives worked she slept day into night, read poetry (especially Baudelaire and Verlaine, who, she had learned in school, were abominable writers to be
avoided), read them to tire herself with the pleasure of words, and told her family she was not ill, only full of bodily weariness.

Katrina took her meals from a tray and kept reading, marveling at Baudelaire’s misogyny:
I have always been astonished that women are allowed to enter churches. What can they have to do
with God?

God, on the arm of the Episcopal Bishop (very high church), came regularly to dinner at Katrina’s home. God ate well, stayed late, and the discourse, while boring, was not without merit:
for it reinforced the family conviction that evil resided elsewhere, and that divine providence hovered just above the dining room chandelier.

One night she awoke dreaming of panthers running loose in the forest. Her vantage point from an upper story of her house gave her a full view of the threat, and then one of the panthers was
inside the stable. Katrina went downstairs to the kitchen, and as she reached for the butcher knife to defend herself, a blue panther, jaws wide in a snarl, sprang out of the bread box. She sat up
in a silent scream, her headache gone. She put on her night-robe, walked down to the kitchen, and opened the bread box. She found the butcher knife, cut a corner of bread, and ate it sitting at the
window, staring out at that patch of her garden that was illuminated by streetlamps. She could see the Venus fountain, after Botticelli, that her father had bought in Italy, and, around its base,
the yellow and orange leaves that were falling from the trees.

Of course the dream was Edward.

She got up from the window and boiled a kettle of water, then went to the china room and took down the Berlin cup and saucer that had belonged to the King of Holland, and the tea service owned
by Oliver Cromwell. She made the tea, put the pot and china on a tray, carried it to the front drawing room. She had no precedent for her behavior, but she believed the rightness of every thought,
every impulse that came to her.

She lit four candles in the candelabra her mother said was once owned by the Bonaparte family, and sat down for contemplative midnight tea amid family treasures: the Ismari vase mounted in
ormolu, the Washington portrait by Rembrandt Peale; the Wentworth mirror, its border embroidered by Lady Wentworth; the portrait, as handsome widow, of Femmitie Staats, ancestor of her father, and
direct descendant of Johannes Staats, who had been born in 1642 into Albany’s original settlement.

Femmitie’s and the Wentworths’ presences were reinforcements of family links to the origins of the city and the nation: American life predicated upon Dutchness without end, Albion
evermore. I do believe this house is paradise, Katrina thought. I believe it is a palace of brilliant crystal, softest velvet, golden light, pervasive elegance; and memory overflows with beauty and
the holiness of history. I see a proud elevation of spirit and mind in the splendid people of my life. I will lose my birthright to these things if I marry Edward.

She slept and at painless morning took breakfast in the dining room with the family, an occasion of relief for all, the cause noted by Katrina’s sister, Adelaide: “She’s gotten
over her lovesickness.”

“That Daugherty is ruining the peace of this family,” Jacob Taylor said.

Katrina said nothing and after breakfast gave Cora, the chambermaid, her daily fifteen minutes of tutoring in elocution in Katrina’s sitting room.

“Is it true as Miss Adelaide says that you’re desperate sick in love with Mr. Daugherty?” Cora asked.

“I’m not such a fool,” Katrina said. “I know the difference between my body and my soul. Love is the soul’s business. I’m sick because my body seems to want
this marvelous man. I would never call it love.”

“Oh, Miss Katrina, I think you got it backwards.”

“You’re an expert on love?”

“I’m commonsensical on it. I loved a boy well and do yet, and it’s body and soul, Miss, body and soul.”

“You do speak your mind, Cora.”

“I wouldn’t know what else to do with it, Miss.”

Katrina’s clearest memory of Cora McNally was of the white stone china cup with the broken handle, a memorable stub of
unmanageable clay. It was the day Geraldine Taylor hired Cora for scullery work (from which she swiftly graduated), and cook was giving Cora her first lunch, setting her chair and dishes at a
solitary place at the drainboard of the sink: a sandwich of turkey scraps and skin dabbed with cranberry sauce, and tea in that unforgettable stone china cup. Cora came in from the scullery, saw
this offering, and said not to cook but to Katrina’s mother:

“Mrs. Taylor, on the poorest day of me life in Cashel I never ate a meal on the drain of a sink, and if ever a cup in our house broke its handle, we threw it out.”

Geraldine nodded and said quietly to cook:

“Sit Cora at the servants’ table and give her a proper cup.”

And from then forward the Taylor family and its servants knew who Cora was, as you shall
know me, Katrina announced silently to all future obstructionists.

Katrina’s dilemma: whether to decide in silence to accept the offer of marriage, suffer all losses privately in advance, and move beyond loss, or allow family and peers
to mount the inevitable attacks on such outrageous wedlock. Katrina knew her decision would not be influenced by the views of others. The problem lay in protocol, distortion of which would leave
scars.

As the days passed, it began to decide itself. Mother must be allowed to invite the Bishop to lecture Katrina on marrying someone outside the religion. Father must be permitted to agree to
finance a tour of the Continent to take Katrina’s mind off the papist lout.

Katrina looked at the portrait of Femmitie clutching the red rose of love, her shawl over her left shoulder emphasizing the fullness of her right breast; and in Femmitie’s mouth Katrina
read the flirtatious curl of a smile, supporting the legend that Femmitie fled her parents’ unbearably pious Albany home to marry a seductive Boston confidence man (a Dublin rascal
masquerading as an Ulsterman) who made her insanely rich, then was, himself, hanged for murdering a wealthy Presbyterian cleric. These events had been irrelevant to Femmitie’s sensuous smile,
which survived religion, money, and the gibbet. Wrote B:
Woman cannot distinguish
between her soul and her body. She simplifies things, like an animal. A cynic would say it is because she
has only a body.
You are not talking about me, Katrina told him.