William Kennedy - The Flaming Corsage

“How might you know that?” the foreman asked him.

“I gave it to him,” the man said. “He’s my son.”

“I’m sorry for that, Mr. Myers, but we won’t be digging him up tonight.”

“Why not, in heaven’s name?”

“Just too dark. These men been here eleven hours, and I hate to say this, but the smell up from there is tough to work in. We’ll let the grave here air out and get back at it in the mornin’.”

Most workers were smoking pipes to mask the odor of the malignant vapor that rose from the ruins. To Katrina the odor had been an onset of reality, a proof that death was more than an assumption. Workers put the lanterns in a circle around the open grave and the coroner ordered police to guard the dig. Twice during the night they chased away a bulldog.

On the next morning at half after midnight, the seventh day after the fire, Adelaide died in the hospital. Katrina and Geraldine were with her. Jacob, on the floor above, was unaware she’d been readmitted, for Dr. Fitzroy cautioned against shocking him. He would sedate Jacob when it came time to tell him his daughter died of a ruptured spleen, suffered in her leap from the window. Edward brought the carriage to take Katrina and her mother home. Katrina put her mother to bed and told Edward she would stay the night at Elk Street.

She lay on the canopy bed in Adelaide’s old room, a room of memory now: her old hobbyhorse, and the dozen and a half dolls of all nations, a new one every Christmas, and the Phrygian cap of liberty that was a gift from the French Ambassador when he came to the Taylor home for a dinner in his honor (the cap was supposed to be Katrina’s but was handed to Adelaide by mistake), and the Cleveland for President poster, and the toy sailboat, differing only in color from Katrina’s, that the sisters had sailed together on Washington Park Lake.

Katrina, incapable of sleep, imagined how she might have diverted the course of life from the dreadful conclusion it had come to this night: by not letting Adelaide run away from them at the fire, by not siding with her parents against Edward, by not yielding to Edward’s plan to win back their goodwill with his dinner and gifts. By not marrying him.

She told her mother’s servants to monitor Geraldine, make her breakfast, keep her in bed through the morning. Then she dressed, ate freshly baked bread with butter and coffee, and walked down Elk Street, past the city high school, and down Columbia Street to the Kenmore Hotel, where she bought an Argus at the hotel’s cigar stand. The paper reported there would be a Catholic mass for the dead at St. Mary’s Catholic church. Eleven of the dead were Catholic, three Protestant. Protestant ministers and mourners would be welcomed. When all bodies were presumed recovered they would be buried in a mass grave at St. Agnes Catholic Cemetery unless relatives claimed the remains. But who could say whose remains were whose?

Toby Pender might have been buried in an unmarked grave had not Edward bought not only a grave but a sculpted sword-bearing granite angel to mark the resting place of the fire’s principal hero, the man who saved Geraldine, among many, and who deserved more than anonymity in death. When he first discovered the smoke, Toby rode his cab to every floor to alert all in earshot, picked up passengers, returned for stragglers, returned again, and yet again on a fourth trip, and was rescuing a lone woman guest when the blast of fire incinerated them both. Toby’s and the woman’s presences were verified four weeks later, in the final stages of the dig, days after the mass burial, when the woman’s melted diamond ring and Toby’s tiny crooked spine were found at the bottom of the shaft, along with fleshless, disheveled bones that crumbled at the touch.

Katrina left the Kenmore and walked down to Broadway and stood at her post by the ruins. She was there ten minutes before the digging resumed at eight o’clock. By ten-thirty parts of eight bodies had been resurrected: part of a thighbone and a pelvic bone, both looking like coal; a wristbone with crisp flesh; the cloth of two dresses, one brown, one black with a weave of dark blue on the skirt’s hem, both fragments of cloth found adhering to the same flesh.

“It looks to us that these two died in each other’s arms,” said the coroner to a group of reporters, Maginn among them. “We guess they were under the bed, and fell through to the kitchen, where the fire was hottest. The kitchen and bakeshop were both full of grease and just fed the fire.”

“Those dresses may have belonged to the McNally sisters,” Maginn said to the coroner. “Her husband here recognizes the design in the black one.”

Katrina approached Maginn and Cora’s husband. She stared at the husband, who was holding the piece of dress and weeping. She touched the man’s arm.

“I knew Cora very well,” she said. “Please let me help you bury her and her sister.”

The husband looked at this stranger, then at Maginn.

“This is Mrs. Daugherty,” Maginn told him.

“We can’t help whom it is we love,” Katrina said to the man. “We must learn to avoid love. Love is a mask of death, you know.”

“What’s that?” asked the husband.

“Death is venerable. You can always count on death.” Katrina began to weep, dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, saw Edward pushing through the crowd toward her.

“Forgive me,” she said to Cora’s husband. “I weep all the time lately. I weep for everybody. It’s a pity what people come to be.”

“What’s going on?” Edward asked.

“I think you should take her home,” Maginn said.

“Yes,” said Katrina. “There’s other death at home, isn’t there, Edward?”

“Yes, there is, my dear,” Edward said. “I know how you love death, how you need it,” and Katrina smiled at him and wept anew. Maginn and Cora’s husband could only stare at the two of them.

In a subsequent diary entry Katrina fixed on the fire as the point of transformation of Edward’s and her lives into a unity that transcended marriage, love, and a son:

We were united through the fire in freakish fusion, like Siamese twins with a common heart that damned us both to an intimacy that not only knew the other’s every breath, but knew the difference between that every-breath and the signal breath that precedes decision, or unbearable memory, or sudden death. We now live out an everlastingly mutual curse: “May the breath of your enemy be your own.”

Two months after the fire, in the unbanishable melancholia that followed the death of his daughter, Jacob Taylor died of a massive heart attack. Katrina was not the one to articulate the accusation, but she came to believe what her mother had said first: Edward killed Adelaide and Jacob.

THE DAY WAS warm and brilliant with light when Katrina entered the Daugherty house on Main Street with a bouquet of asters and zinnias just cut from her garden on Colonie Street: reds, oranges, pinks, and yellows to brighten the sickroom where Emmett Daugherty, eighty-one, lay dying of decay and disuse.

Katrina had come to see this as a house of death, for just before she and Edward stayed here, in the months the Colonie Street house was being renovated, Hanorah died of a heart seizure. And they were still here when Adelaide, Jacob, Cora, and all the others died from the fire. Now death was claiming yet another soul, and the imminence was giving meaning to Katrina’s life in the way her vigil at Cora’s exhumation had vitalized her days. The sun was shining brightly on this latest visitation.

The front door was open (Emmett had not locked it since he built the house) and Katrina strode into the hallway and past the front parlor, which had gone all but unused since Hanorah died. The parlor always seemed to Katrina to be Hanorah’s museum: the rocking chair where she sat to sew, and to monitor the passersby on Main Street; the huge wood-stove she always tended that was now ornamental with the advent of the coal furnace; the dusty valances, the chair doilies — when were they last washed?