William Kennedy - The Flaming Corsage

She walked down the hallway into the kitchen, found two empty milk bottles in the pantry, and filled them with water and flowers. A woman in a housedress and a clean white apron that covered the dress from waist to ankle came in through the kitchen door. Who is she? A face Katrina knew. Annie Farrell, from next door, that’s right. I haven’t seen her since ’95. So pretty So plain. And not Farrell anymore.

“Mrs. Daugherty, I’m not interrupting, am I?” Annie said.

“Oh, hello, hello, not at all,” said Katrina. I can’t call her Annie. Mrs. Phelan? No. “I brought some flowers.”

“So beautiful,” Annie said. “And I baked some beans and bread, just out of the stove. I know nobody cooks in this house.”

“That’s sweet of you,” said Katrina. She thinks I should come every day and cook?

“With all the sickness and trouble, I mean,” Annie said. “How is he?”

“I just this minute got here. But I know he had a very bad night. Go up and say hello.”

“I wouldn’t intrude,” Annie said.

“He’d love it. He speaks so fondly of the Farrells next door.”

“There’s always been a closeness. He and my father helped each other build their houses.”

“But you’re not a Farrell anymore,” said Katrina.

“Right you are, Mrs. Daugherty. I’m a Phelan these four years. Francis, you know. He worships your husband.”

“Yes.” And I worshiped him. Worshiped Francis. Before you did, Mrs. Phelan.

“He always mentions your kindness when you were neighbors and he worked for you,” Annie said.

“Does he? That’s nice.” Kindness he thinks it was?

Katrina picked up the two bottles with the flowers.

“We’ll go see Emmett,” she said, and Annie followed her up the stairs to the sickroom, where Edward, in his late-afternoon ritual, was sitting with Frank McArdle, the Daugherty family doctor, an ample-bellied man with a white brush of a mustache, here on his daily visit. Edward and the doctor were delivering up stories and gossip to keep Emmett alive with words alone. As the women entered they saw Emmett, raising phlegm from his ruined lungs, propped on pillows under a large colored likeness of Pope Leo XIII, the man Emmett loved better than Jesus.

Katrina remembered an angry Emmett invoking Leo when the trolley strike of 1901 was looming. He would rant over supper about the injustice of the traction company for bringing in scab labor and not only refusing its workers a pittance of a wage increase, but cutting their wages and extending their workday. She could see him pounding the table, bouncing potatoes out of the dish, declaiming to all: “Don’t take my word. The Pope of Rome himself said it. Workers are not chattels, and it’s shameful to treat them like that. Shameful, that’s the Pope’s word for those traction company frauds. ‘To defraud anyone of wages that are his due is a crime that cries out to the avenging anger of heaven.’ There’s Pope Leo for you, a real man he is, and by the Jesus, no man ever spoke truer. Amen to Leo, I say. Amen to Leo.”

Now Emmett lay beneath the image of the Workingman’s Pope, his eyes half closed, giving fading attention to Dr. McArdle, who was talking of a woman who married a man for his money and the man then went bankrupt and stayed that way twelve years.

“It’s a rare day,” said the doctor, “that people marry for love anymore, the way you and I did, Emmett, and the way Edward did. Am I right, Edward?”

“I hear you, Frank,” Edward said. “But love isn’t enough, and anybody who thinks it is, is demented.”

Katrina, hearing this as she entered, said, “You are so right, my love,” and she put one bottle of flowers on Emmett’s dresser, the other on his bedside table.

Edward took her aside, held her hand.

“There are impediments to love,” she said softly.

“How well I know that,” he said.

“I’m glad you accept it.”

“I don’t accept it.”

“But you must,” she said.

Edward pushed love away, whispered to her that Emmett was very weak, and that they had decided to go for the priest. Emmett heard him.

“Yes, get Father Loonan,” Emmett said with more strength than Katrina expected. “And have a pitcher of ale to pour when he gets here.”

Annie Farrell walked to Emmett’s bedside, touched his hand with her fingertips, shook her head.

“Giving drink to the priest, now is that a good thing, Emmett?”

Emmett almost smiled and answered her in such a scratchy whisper that Annie had to lean over to hear him.

“He says ale is God’s greatest handiwork,” Annie said.

“Then we should get some right away,” said Edward.

“I’ll get Father Loonan,” Katrina said, “and then I’ll stop for the ale.”

“You?” said Annie. “You surely wouldn’t be seen in a saloon.”

“It’s time I would be,” Katrina said, and she bent over Emmett and kissed his forehead. “Don’t you dare go anywhere till I get back,” she said.

“I’ll get the ale,” Edward told her, “you get the priest.”

“I’ll get both,” said Katrina. “You stay here with your father, where you ought to be.”

In the kitchen Katrina rinsed out Emmett’s two-quart pewter growler with the snap-on cover and put it in a wicker handbasket. Edward was right about love. The impulse to love is a disease. Is disease a proper reason for marrying? No sane person would do anything for such love. What had loving Francis meant? When he went away she was left with dead memories, cold as a corpse. Try drawing love out of a corpse. It’s never who or what you love that drives you, Katrina, but who or what loves you. A cat. If a cat loves me, I am alive.

She left the house and walked the two and a half blocks to Sacred Heart church on Walter Street, the church Emmett helped build with his monthly payments and the strength of his back. She rang the parish house bell to rouse Father Loonan, who had performed the marriage ceremony for Edward and Katrina seventeen years ago. He opened the door, fresh from his prayers, or was it a nap? Well, he seemed to be elsewhere.

“Emmett Daugherty is dying, Father. He needs you. He needs the sacrament.”

“Ah, the poor devil, he’s all done, is he?”

“He’s no devil, Father. He’s a virtuous man.”

“Oh he is, he is. I’ve got someone coming in ten minutes, my dear, and then I’ll be along.”

“Emmett can’t wait ten minutes, Father.”

“He can’t. It’s that way, is it?”

“Your visitor can wait, but Emmett is losing the light.”

“Then I’ll be right along, dear, right along.”

“Excellent, Father,” Katrina said, and turned to leave.

“Have you candlesticks in the house?” the priest asked.

“I believe we do.”

“And a crucifix. You must have a crucifix.”

“We have one.”

“Holy water. Do you have that?”

“We do.”

“And the chrism?”

“The what, Father?”

“The chrism, child. The holy oil.”

“I never saw any.”

“Then I’ll bring it. And a piece of palm from Palm Sunday. You must have that.”

“There’s some stuck behind Jesus on the crucifix.”

“All right. And a lemon, do you have a lemon?”

“I’ll buy one if we don’t.”

“And water, and a spoon, I’ll need that.”

“Are you going to make lemonade, Father?”

“Don’t get flibbertigibbet on me,” the priest said. “And a piece of cotton. And some bread. And salt.”

“We’ll have it all,” Katrina said.

“Then we’ll get Emmett ready for his journey,” Father Loonan said.

Katrina left him in the doorway and walked toward Jack McCall’s saloon on Broadway. Lemon and cotton and salt and oil. What a peculiar religion she had joined, its mysteries endless. She walked with a dynamic erectness, straight back, narrow waist, wide-brimmed straw hat flat on her yellow hair, her walk, almost a military pace, surging with the energy of youth, though she was now thirty-seven. She moved toward McCall’s with an all-but-visible purpose, a change of mood for Katrina, who did daily battle with absence of purpose, boredom, pervasive ambivalence toward every waking act. Why should I get up? Why go to bed? Why try to reimagine Francis? Why write the diary? Why not? It’s as meaningful as anything else you might do, and as meaningless. You have a lazy soul, Katrina. You will die with such slowness, such slight daily reduction, that no one will notice that you’ve left the room until the clusters of dust accumulate around your empty chair.