William Kennedy - The Flaming Corsage

“Which is your church?” Katrina asked Edward.

“Sacred Heart, here in North Albany.”

“Then we’ll marry there. Will that solve it?”

“Are you sure about this?”

“You can’t marry in the church if you’re not Catholic,” Emmett said.

“Then I’ll become Catholic. How long does it take?”

“You have to take instructions,” Edward said. “A few months, maybe?”

“That’s fine. I was thinking of a spring wedding anyway, weren’t you?”

“Just like that, you become a Catholic?” Emmett said, snapping his fingers.

“I don’t believe it matters which language we use when we talk to God. It’s possible I’m really a pagan. If so, I shall now be a pagan Catholic.”

“What will your parents say?” Hanorah asked.

“They’ll be furious.”

“You certainly make quick decisions,” Emmett said.

“I do what I think I should do, so I can become what I feel I must be.”

The Daughertys fell into silence. Edward stared at Katrina, understanding that with a few words she had transformed herself, become as rare to his parents as he already knew her to be, yet he could not have predicted any word she said. Emmett and Hanorah stared at her, rancor gone from Emmett’s face, Hanorah a study in bewilderment. What Katrina had done was akin to her action at the cemetery, and Edward now knew she would have this effect on everyone, that the directness of her idiosyncratic behavior was a singular gift. He coveted it, felt the young man’s ambition to conquer life with a stroke, as Katrina just had. But he knew he would live a long time before he understood even where to direct such a stroke. Yet, credit where credit is due, Edward: you intuited the rightness of bringing her here unannounced, and for that much you should congratulate yourself. Blind navigation, a maestro’s talent, won the battle for today.

The bells for the noon hour rang in the church belfry.

“Those are the bells of Sacred Heart,” Edward said.

“It sounds like a requiem,” Katrina said.

“No, just the time of day, the noon hour, time for the Angelus.”

Katrina framed a question in her eyes.

“A prayer to the Immaculate Conception and the mystery of the Incarnation,” Edward said. “ ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done unto me according to thy word. And the Word was made flesh. And dwelt among us.’ ”

“It sounds like bells I heard at a neighbor’s funeral,” Katrina said. “I remember his widow getting out of a carriage in front of St. Peter’s church just as the bells began, and, as she stopped to listen, she swooned and fell on the sidewalk. I thought the slow pealing of the bells was very sorrowful, and yet it was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard. Will they ring that way for our wedding?”

“I’ll see that they do,” Edward said.

And he remembered Aristotle: as the eyes of a night bird relate to the bright glare of day, so the soul’s understanding relates to those things that are the clearest and most knowable of all. Oh, Katrina, most knowable, you speak the dead language of the soul with dazzling fluency.

FINTAN (CLUBBER) DOOLEY, a butcher living on Van Woert Street in Albany, came forward to reveal his role in the decapitation of a bull the day before the Love Nest killings. This was, he said, a practical joke popularly known as the “Bull-on-the-Porch Joke.” The bull’s owner, Bucky O’Brien, told an interrogator he was asleep upstairs over his Bull’s Head tavern on the Troy Road (where drovers had penned and watered Boston-bound herds of cattle in years past) and did not hear the rifle shots that killed his bull. He was awakened by raucous singing, accompanied by the banging of a dishpan as percussion, but O’Brien judged this a normal happening in the vicinity of his tavern, and he went back to sleep. Dooley said he had banged the dishpan while singing the song “I Want My Mommy” to cover the sound of the rifle shots.

The bull, named Clancy, a long-familiar denizen of the pasture behind the tavern, had only one eye and was known as a peaceful animal. Dooley said Culbert (Cully) Watson, a sometime hotel clerk, known pander, and erstwhile member of the Sheridan Avenue Gang, shot the bull, whereupon Dooley climbed the pasture fence and, with cleaver, handsaw, and knife, and the expertise gained in the slaughterhouses of West Albany, cut off the bull’s head and lifted it by the horns over the fence to Watson, who put it in the back of Dooley’s wagon. Dooley and Watson then rode down the Troy Road to Albany and left the head on the stoop of the Willett Street home of Dr. Giles Fitzroy. Dooley said he had known Dr. Fitzroy for many years, that the doctor was a noted practical joker, and that, in a bygone year, Dooley had helped the doctor stage the elaborate “Fireman’s Wife Joke.” Dooley was persuaded by Watson that putting the bull’s head on the doctor’s porch was a hilarious way of joking the joker. Dooley was unaware that the presence of the head might have other than comic implications.

The whereabouts of Culbert Watson are unknown at this time.

“EVENING, MR. DAUGHERTY,” the hall porter of the Delavan House said to Edward.

“Evening, Frank. Cold as hell out there tonight.”

“Back again, Mr. Daugherty,” said Willie Walsh, the liveried bellhop.

“Only place to be on a night like this, Willie,” Edward said, guiding the golden-haired Katrina to the door of the elevator, her hair swept upward into a brilliant soft bun atop her head, the lynx collar of her coat high around her exposed ears. Toby the dwarf, also in livery, gave the Daughertys a half-bow, and bade them enter his elevator.

“Going up, Mr. Daugherty?”

“Indeed we are, Toby,” Edward said.

Toby closed the door of the small wooden cubicle that accommodated himself and four people, no more, and the car moved upward. Edward and Katrina stepped out at the second floor, walked toward the dining room, and were greeted by a plump and pretty housemaid, in black dress and starched white apron, sitting on a chair just inside the cloakroom doorway.

“Why it’s Cora,” Katrina said.

“Miss Katrina,” said the housemaid, standing to greet them. “Mr. Daugherty.” She curtsied and smiled. “Don’t you both look elegant. Let me take those coats from ye.”

“Welcome to them,” said Edward.

“Oh it’s terrible frigid out, isn’t it, sir?”

“Even polar bears are inside tonight,” Edward said.

“Is your sister well?” Katrina asked Cora.

“Oh she is, Miss, she’s just fine. Your sister and parents and all, they’re inside already.”

“They all miss you, Cora. And so do I. I have no one to tell my secrets to anymore.”

“Them were good times, Miss Katrina. I’ll never, never forget them. I miss you all so much, but isn’t that just the way it is?”

Katrina kissed Cora on the cheek. Edward pressed a dollar bill into Cora’s hand and then took Katrina’s arm and walked with her into the dining room. People were eating at all but two of the dozen tables, and in one corner a harpist and violinist were playing “After the Ball,” a song Edward loathed and Katrina loved. Edward saw Tom Maginn across the room, dining with two couples, and recognized one of the men as a powerful New York City Assemblyman. Edward caught Maginn’s eye, waved. Katrina nodded to Maginn and smiled.

“Maginn,” said Edward. “Busy at work.”

Edward’s dinner guests were already seated at a round table in the far corner. The party numbered six: Edward and Katrina, Jacob and Geraldine, Katrina’s sister, Adelaide, and her new husband, Archie Van Slyke, bright young man out of Harvard Law School, now an assistant vice president of the State National Bank, and whose great-grandfather, in collaboration with Jacob Taylor’s grandfather, had assembled a pair of family fortunes by confiscating Tory estates after the Revolution.