William Kennedy - The Flaming Corsage

“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.

Katrina decided her resurrection from indecision and reclusion would take place two days hence, and she wrote letters organizing the event, the first to Giles Fitzroy, asking that he take her for an afternoon ride to brighten her pallid complexion, expose her weakened spirit to the restorative of fresh air and sunshine; and the second to Edward, asking that he meet her at one-thirty in Albany Rural Cemetery near the Angel of the Sepulchre , the one landmark of whose location everyone was certain.

In her parents’ estimation, Edward, despite his long-standing family link through Lyman, was now a figure to be kept as remote from Katrina as possible; but Giles, Katrina’s childhood friend, was eternally welcome in this house, his father being the Taylor family physician, his mother Geraldine Taylor’s colleague in maintaining standards for Albany’s social elite.

“Where shall I take you?” Giles asked when Katrina had settled into his cabriolet (top down), his horse leading them at a sprightly pace up Broadway. Katrina covered her lap and legs with Giles’s blanket. It was the time of sublime autumn in Albany, the day bright and warm with sunshine, explosive with the reds and oranges and yellows of the dying leaves.

“We should go to the most beautiful place we know,” she said. “The cemetery.”

“Oh you are cheerful,” Giles said.

“But I’m serious. I want to see where the Staatses and Taylors are buried, and decide should I be buried there.”

“What puts you in such a morbid mood?”

“Contemplating death isn’t morbid, Giles. It’s liberating.”

“But why now? You’re so young and healthy. Why not think of life instead?”

“But I do. And death is so important to it.”

“You’re as odd as you are beautiful, Katrina.”

They drove past St. Peter’s Hospital, where Giles was a medical intern, following his father’s career, and past her grandfather’s foundry. Without Lyman, Katrina and Edward might never have met, and most certainly would not now be contemplating marriage.

“What do you think of me these days, Giles?”

“I think you’re heavenly, a goddess among us. I love being with you.”

“Will you be my slave?”

“Gladly.”

“Oh that is good.”

They rode over the small bridge where the Patroon’s Creek crossed Broadway, through the tollgate by the sandpits onto the Troy Turnpike; then they turned west up the Loudonville plank road toward the cemetery.

“Do you like Edward Daugherty, Giles?”

“He seems a fine fellow, but he’s a few years older than I, so we’re not close.”

“I’m going to meet him.”

“When?”

“This afternoon.”

“Aren’t you with me this afternoon?”

“You’re taking me to him.”

“Katrina, I don’t understand anything about you.”

“That’s all right, Giles. I understand everything about you and I’m very fond of you.”

“ ‘Fond’ is a terrible word.”

“A true one.”

“Where are you meeting him?”

“At the cemetery. By the Angel of the Sepulchre. ”

“This is ridiculous. I feel like a fool.”

“But aren’t you my slave?”

Giles fell silent and they turned and drove along the crest of the hill that was Rensselaer Avenue, past the Fitzgibbon country mansion, where her mother’s eccentric brother Ariel dwelled in baronial excess, and where Katrina had never been at ease. When she saw that Giles’s silence had become a sullen pout, she reached over and took his hand in hers. By the time they passed through the south gate of Albany Rural Cemetery and were approaching the Angel, his pout had melted into an abashed smile.

“Come back for me at four o’clock,” Katrina said as she stepped down from the cabriolet near the statue of the Angel. She folded Giles’s blanket over her arm. “I’ll take this in case I have to sit somewhere and wait.”

“Why are you meeting him?” Giles asked.

“I’m not sure. If I find out I may tell you.”

“You know he just writes for the newspaper. He’s only a writer.”

“I read him with great appreciation for his intelligence. Have you read the novel he just published?”

“I don’t bother myself with novels. But I’ve heard it said he keeps fast company.”

“There is none faster than I,” Katrina said.

“At that the slave exits,” Giles said, urging his horse forward.

A quarter hour early for Edward, Katrina walked to the Angel, who was sitting on the rock he had rolled away from the sepulchre of Jesus, atop the gravestone of the Banks family from Albany. Since his arrival in 1868, this heavenly, white-marble emissary had become the best-known resident of the cemetery, eclipsing magnates and governors, even heroes of the Revolution, and daily drew crowds of the curious and the reverential, although today only two women were standing off, staring at him. The Angel had also enhanced the fame of his creator, Erastus Dow Palmer, neighbor of Katrina’s for as long as she had been able to look out the window and see him striding along Elk Street with his walking stick and his great white beard. Instrument of the resurrection, the Palmer Angel, in flowing white nightshirt, hair of Jesus length, folded wings as tall as his seated self, stared out into Katrina’s afternoon and thrilled her, bringing her again to the edge of tears with the beauty of his irreality, the perfection of his fingers and toes, the strength and certainty in his mouth and eyes. He was speaking to the known and unknown Marys who had come to weep over the dead Jesus: “Why seek ye the living among the dead?” he asked them.

Sentinel of salvation, rock of redemption, he knew what he was about. No perfection in bedridden indecision, Katrina. The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to the clear of heart; you know that. (Yes, yes, of course. But what, besides clarity, inhabits the heart of an angel?)

“Beauty regards beauty,” came Edward’s voice, and Katrina turned to see him in his phaeton two-seater, looking so spirited, so ebullient, even sitting still: as fine a figure, she suddenly decided, as she would find this side of the angels. She walked toward him and he took off his hat to greet her and leaped down to take her hand, help her up into the seat beside his own.