William Kennedy - The Flaming Corsage

“The fireman’s wife. And why is she here?”

“Visiting Felicity. The fire chief rents a summer place near Glenmont, and Sally stays there all summer. The chief comes up weekends.”

“Weekends,” said Maginn. “Is that a midweek knock at the door I hear?”

“I wouldn’t go so fast,” Giles said. “She’s a proper lady all the same.”

“Of course. Aren’t they all?”

Giles’s procuring for his wife’s aunt at first mention of her existence baffled Edward. It was out of character for the man, but it certainly energized Maginn.

“What do you want to do, Maginn? As if I didn’t know.”

“I’ll go chat with Giles,” Maginn said.

“You do that,” Edward said. “I’ll see you later.”

And Edward then roamed the barge alone, seeing who was aboard. He saw Jack McCall sitting with Ruthie, and Father Loonan with a glass of ale in front of him, and men Edward knew from the Eintracht, to which he, Giles, and Maginn all belonged. Lyman had initiated Edward into the singing group at age sixteen (“The Daughertys always had the music” was Emmett’s line), but as he grew older, traveling as a writer, Edward lost connection with the group, except for this excursion. He had no desire now to join anybody’s company. The fraternal impulse to spend the day with his fellow Eintrachters and North Enders, to celebrate family serenity and midsummer’s sweet pleasures, had faded totally. If he could get off the barge now, he would.

He heard half a dozen singers in an impromptu rendering of “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms,” Tom Moore’s ballad about the constancy of love:

Thou wouldst still be adored,

As this moment thou art,

Let thy loveliness fade as it will. .

He walked to the rail and felt the day warming, saw the sky as a wash of peaceable blue. He stared out at a field full of grazing cows, at the great trees along the river’s edge, at the riverfront mansions, and fields of early-sprouting corn growing above the flood-plain, and he felt invincibly depressed, trapped in his shriveling skin: a man in motion to save himself from stasis. Tom Moore’s song mocked what he felt about his increasingly silent marriage. The only constancy was Katrina’s steady withdrawal into her world of poetry and fantasy, the endless interiorizing of her life in diaries, which she did not hide, but which Edward would not intrude upon. Her behavior had been eccentric always, but after the Delavan she backpedaled into silence, her life a chamber of secrets and venerations of all that is sad and solitary: in communion is contamination; in isolation the suffering soul’s beauty is enhanced.

“Where have you gone?” he had asked her this morning after she decided not to join him on the excursion.

“Where I have to be,” she said.

“You should be here with me.”

“I am here.”

“You’re not.”

“Let me be.”

“I apologize for trying to make you look at us as we are, and what we have become. I know it’s terrible to force someone to accept reality.”

She smiled and grew more beautiful.

Francis Phelan tapped him on the shoulder.

“You ain’t thinkin’ of jumpin’ overboard, are you, Ed?”

Edward shook hands with Francis.

“Just thinking about things that can spoil a great day,” Edward said. “How come you’re not playing ball?”

“We got us a day off and Annie wanted to spend it on the river.”

Francis, maybe the best baseball player in the city, played shortstop for Albany in the New York State League. Edward had written a play, The Car Barns , about the Albany trolley strike of 1901, and modeled his hero on Francis, a young man who, with uncanny accuracy, threw a stone the size of a baseball and killed a scab motorman, an action that started the riot in which the militia killed two men, unacceptable violence in defense of scabs that hastened a strike settlement and made Francis a hero of the strikers.

“Your family all okay?” Francis asked. “Katrina and Martin?”

“They’re fine,” said Edward, looking at Francis now as Katrina seemed to see him: her bauble when he’d lived next door to the Daughertys on Colonie Street, before he married Annie Farrell: handsome young handyman in whose presence Katrina went fluttery. Very thrilling, no doubt. You know, said La Voluptueuse, I’m only interested in youth.

“Martin’s started to write stories, father’s footsteps,” Edward said.

“He can do it. Smart kid like Martin puts his mind to it, he could stand on his ear, do anything he wants.”

“Sometimes it’s not that easy.”

“Maybe not,” Francis said. “Can I buy you a beer? I got too many tickets in my pocket.”

“No thanks, Fran.”

“That play you wrote,” Francis said. “People always tell me it’s me and your father.”

“It’s some of you and him, all right, but not really.”

In the play the hero is counseled by a labor organizer, as Emmett had counseled the young Francis, told him about the Pittsburgh steel mills, and the Sons of Vulcan Emmett had helped organize to give voice to the workers. “Identify the enemy,” the organizer keeps saying in the play, and the hero identifies one with a stone.

“I ain’t no godalmighty hero for what I did and never thought I was,” Francis said. “I had a good time watchin’ your play, but I sure don’t talk like that hero.”

“You have your own eloquence, Francis, and people know it. You’re a fellow to reckon with.”

“I learned a lot from Emmett. Most clearheaded man I ever come across. Anything I asked him he had an answer. You don’t find people like that. They’re a gift. One day you get lucky and meet one, and after a while you find out you’re halfway smart, smarter’n you ever thought you’d be.”

“Emmett was serious about every day of his life.”

“That’s the truth. I’m serious too. If the Daughertys ever need anything, I’m there.”

Edward nodded and thought: I’ll pass the word to Katrina.

When he went back to Giles’s table, the women were gone, Maginn and Giles were sitting with Jimmy Cadden, another Eintrachter, a prankster who battened on the comic discomfiture of his friends, especially Maginn.

“Where’s Aunt Sally and Felicity?” Edward asked.

“Maginn chased them away,” Cadden said.

“Not true,” said Maginn. “I paid them such compliments they couldn’t sit still. Sally is crazy about me.”

“She thinks Maginn is demented,” Cadden said.

“We’ll see what she thinks,” Maginn said.

“Let’s say Sally was amused,” said Giles.

“I saw you talking to the hero of your play,” Maginn said to Edward.

“If you mean Francis Phelan, get it right,” Edward said. “He inspired part of the hero’s character, but only part.”

“The radical part,” Maginn said.

“Some of that, yes,” Edward said.

“How’s that play doing?” Giles asked.

“Played to sold-out houses in Albany for a month and a half last year,” Edward said. “Did well in Boston and Philadelphia, and it’s still running in New York.”

“I’m writing about it for the Century ,” Maginn said, “an article on using fiction and theater for political ends, writers telling us how the world ought to be. I seriously warn you against running with those pimps of transformation, Edward. You’re a talented man, and The Car Barns is a talented play, but radical work like that strikes me as a justification for labor violence. I’m fond of politics, but let’s not call it art.”

“Some art is political, whether you like it or not.”

“And some plays are so political they cease to be art.”

“I write what I believe. My soul is open for inspection.”