William Kennedy - The Flaming Corsage

Loretta came to take the soup bowls and Katrina introduced her to the table as “Loretta McNally, just here from Ireland. Cora’s youngest sister. Lovely Cora who died in the Delavan. Loretta isn’t a servant. She’s like family.”

Katrina: reconstituting Cora through her sibling, replaying the psychic games she invented for that bygone girl: taking Cora to tea at the homes of social friends, teaching her how to sit a horse, and the names of flowers and jewels, correcting her posture, her speech, coiffing her hair, giving her clothes, lifting Cora up from Irish peasantry into Katrina’s own shining world.

“You’re arousing expectations that can’t be fulfilled,” Edward had argued.

“Nonsense. When she knows how to move she’ll rise.”

“All she’ll have is a mask of pretense.”

“Then she’ll be like everybody else.”

And which mask are you wearing tonight, Katrina? Princess of the social elite? Benefactor of proles? Beloved of cats? Iconic prostitute before her mirror?

Loretta was serving individual silver bowls of cold crab-meat on beds of cracked ice, with the pale-green sauce Edward recognized as his mother’s, created for the Patroon’s table. Katrina, knowing the sauce pleased Edward’s palate, learned the recipe from Hanorah, then saw to it her own cook, Mrs. Squires, made it to Edward’s satisfaction.

“Let’s go back to your play, Edward,” Maginn said. “Why did you write it? I find its structure extremely strange.”

“You’ve read it?”

“I borrowed Melissa’s copy last night.”

Edward looked at Melissa, whose eyes were on the crab-meat. “That wasn’t for circulation,” he said.

“I cajoled her,” Maginn said. “I told her we were very old friends. I told her I was best man at your wedding and you wouldn’t mind. I know you’ve been working on it for years. Was it a major problem, getting the form?”

“It took the necessary time,” Edward said. “You can’t rush it. When the matter is ready the form will come.”

“I prefer to think that when the form is ready the matter will come,” Maginn said.

“I was echoing Aristotle. Your remark is pure Oscar Wilde.”

“There is no pure Oscar Wilde,” said Maginn.

“You don’t like my play?”

“It’s so ethereal,” said Maginn. “Where’s your trademark realism? Or those cherished political themes?”

“I left all that out.”

“But without that the play flies off into myth, and artsy romanticism.”

“You faulted The Car Barns for being too political. ‘Radical art,’ you called it. Now, with no radicalism, I’m artsy. I can’t find a happy medium with you, Maginn.”

“What is this play about?” Giles asked.

“It’s a somber love story,” Melissa said. “Beautiful and very romantic.”

“But what is it about?”

“It starts from the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe, Ovid’s version,” Edward said. “Two lovers, kept apart by their families, find a way to meet. Thisbe arrives by the light of the moon, sees a lioness who has just finished a kill and has come to drink at a fountain near the tomb where she is to meet Pyramus. Thisbe drops her veil and flees, the lioness finds the veil, mauls it with bloody paws and jowls, and leaves. Pyramus arrives, finds the bloody veil, and assumes Thisbe has been killed. Disconsolate, he kills himself with his sword. Thisbe emerges from hiding, finds her lover dying, and also kills herself. That’s the myth. I alter it considerably. No lioness, no sword.”

“But it’s so fated,” said Maginn, “all wrapped up in God’s intellect. God is mindless, Edward, don’t you know that? The random moment is what’s important, not the hounds of fate. It’s time we left Oedipus behind. We should be our own gods, not their pawns. I believe in whim, not wisdom.”

“Your random moment,” Edward said, “means to live like a blown leaf. I do believe in impulses, but I believe they come from something central to what we are, that they’re signals for action — a craving for sacrifice in exchange for love, an instinct for evil we can’t escape. We’re mostly ignorant of what’s really going on in our souls, but we should give the signals a chance.”

“Instinct for evil,” Maginn said. “You sound like a Catholic missionary saving heathens from original sin.”

“And you,” said Katrina, “sound like a misanthrope. What ever pleases you, Thomas?”

“You please me, Katrina, the way you please the world. I’m overcome with pleasure when I see beauty and wit come together. And I value our visiting Miss Melissa, a young woman with a future. I do have my moments, and they arrive quite randomly.”

“I remember one of your random moments,” said Giles. “Your date with the fireman’s wife.”

“You never forget that, do you, Fitz?”

“That was so funny,” said Felicity.

“Depending on your perspective,” said Maginn.

“Who is the fireman’s wife?” Melissa asked.

“An invention of these grown-up boys,” said Katrina, pointing to Edward and Giles.

“Consummate actors, both,” Maginn said. “They set out to humiliate me and they did it extremely well.”

“Humiliation wasn’t the intention,” Giles said. “It was a joke. If we weren’t close friends we wouldn’t have bothered.”

“They took advantage of Thomas’s infatuation with Felicity’s aunt,” Katrina said, “and convinced him she felt the same way.”

“I told my aunt all about it,” Felicity said. “She was amused and flattered, but she’d never cheat on her husband.”

“An exceedingly rare woman,” said Maginn. “Almost extinct in our time.”

“Oh, you are a wretched man,” Katrina said.

“Hateful,” said Felicity. “Devilish.”

“You know what Chaucer said, my dears. ‘One shouldn’t be too inquisitive in life either about God’s secrets or one’s wife.’ Do you hear what I’m saying about God, Edward?”

“I do hear,” Edward said.

“ Mundus vult decipi, ” said Giles.

“What’s that again?” Edward asked.

“The world wants to be deceived,” Giles said. “Don’t you think so?”

“What happened with the fireman’s wife?” Melissa asked.

“When Thomas went to meet her,” Giles said, “a jealous husband shot at him and he fled for his life. The husband was played by a friend of ours, Clubber Dooley He screamed at Maginn as a home-wrecker and fired blank cartridges. Grand melodrama, a high point of Clubber’s life.”

“Dooley is pitiful,” Maginn said.

“I wouldn’t say so,” said Giles.

“He drinks in Johnny Groelz’s saloon, morose, all but toothless, swilling beer till he’s senseless. Once a week a boy comes in and Dooley hands him money and the boy takes it home to Mother, a slattern who once indulged Dooley — what way, precisely, I’d rather develop bubonic plague than try to imagine. But ever since then she’s been on dreadful Dooley’s dole, and he dreams of another go at her someday, if he can only find a way to get off the barstool. Pitiful, needy sap.”

“That’s perverse,” said Giles. “That boy is related to Clubber. His mother raised Clubber.”

“Intimacy within the family is not a new thing in the universe,” Maginn said.

“Always sex,” said Katrina. “Thomas the satyr, eternally pursuing the nymphs.”

“The Greeks made bucolic gods of the satyrs,” Maginn said, “and I find it a jovial way of life, bouncing through the bosky with divine goatishness, spying one’s pleasure, taking it, then moving on to the next pasture. Is there a better way to spend one’s day?”

“You are moving into depravity,” Katrina said.

Edward saw she was smiling.