William Kennedy - The Flaming Corsage

“I like Rose so much I’m taking her for a ride.”

“That’s my cute boy.”

“This train is moving.”

“All aboard. Going home to your best girl.”

“Rose is my best girl.”

“Rose is the only girl you ever wanted.”

“Rose is there from the first day.”

“You couldn’t go no place without Rose.”

“We’re going to heaven, me and Rose.”

“This boy is so nice that Rose is in love.”

“I’m in love with Rose.”

“The cute boy’s in love with an old whore.”

“Rose isn’t old.”

“The cute boy’s in love with an ugly old whore.”

“I’m in love with a beautiful whore named Rose.”

“The cute boy makes Rose happy.”

“Is Rose happy making love?”

“Rose is happy making money.”

“Which comes first, the money or the love?”

“They all come before Rose.”

“Gotta go, Rose.”

“Not yet, cute boy.”

“Rose is so nice it’s nice, but I’m going away.”

“It’s not two hours.”

“Two hours couldn’t be better than now.”

“My cute boy.”

“Goodbye, Rose.”

“There goes the cute boy.”

“There goes Rose.”

“Cute boy is gone.”

“And Rose?”

“Rose is where she is.”

At the crowded bar in the Bull’s Head tavern, Maginn greeted Edward with a triumphant smile.

“Two for the price of one,” he said. “I went back to the first tent and opted for the bung-eyed bitch, but she was so lackadaisical I departed her corpus and threatened not to pay for such inertia. Her tenting twin — Nellie, wasn’t it? — came to the rescue. Very vigorous, Nellie. Bicameral bawds. Unexpected dividend. How was Rose?”

“Splendid.”

“In what way?”

“In all ways.”

“You went all ways?”

“She was splendid. Let it go at that.”

“The details are important, Daugherty. As a reporter you should know that.”

“This place is too noisy,” Edward said. The bar was two deep with drinkers, fogged with cigar and pipe smoke, and in a corner a fight seemed about to happen. “Let’s go someplace quiet. I’m hungry.”

“Venereal delight stokes the appetite.”

They took the West Shore train from the Fairgrounds to downtown Albany, and at Edward’s insistence walked up from the station to the Kenmore for dinner.

“I can’t afford their prices,” Maginn said. “I’m not yet part of the plutocracy, like some of my friends.”

“It’s good that I am,” Edward said. “I’ll buy dinner.”

“Done,” said Maginn. “A plutocratic gesture if there ever was one.”

In addition to wages from The Argus , Edward had an annuity from birth given to him by Lyman Fitzgibbon that would keep him from starving until he reached age thirty, four years hence, and this allowed him to keep rooms on Columbia Street, close to the newspaper and just up from the Kenmore, where, unlike Maginn, he dined often.

He went to the men’s washroom and soaped off the residue of Rose’s body from his hands and his privates. Then he went back upstairs and with Maginn sat in the tan leather chairs of the hotel’s lobby lounge while they waited for a table. Maginn bought a cigar at the newsstand, bit off the end and spat it into the brass cuspidor, then lit the cigar with a match he struck on the sole of Edward’s shoe.

Edward saw Katrina entering with her parents through the hotel’s side door on Columbia Street, avoiding the lobby and the vulgar stares of the loungers. The three went directly to the dining room — reserved table, of course.

“Isn’t that the magnificent woman you proposed to?” Maginn asked.

“That is she. With Mama and Papa.”

“Her beauty is exhilarating.”

“I agree.”

“I wonder how she compares with Rose.”

“Wonder to yourself,” Edward said.

“Protective already,” said Maginn. “I can see the transformation. ‘Once the favorite of whores of all ages, Edward Daugherty has evolved into the perfect husband.’ ”

Edward perceived that Maginn, the gangling whoremonger, was miffed that women in both tents had given their preferred eye to Edward; and he would, in a later year, remember this day as the beginning of his relationship to Maginn’s envy and self-esteem, the beginning of competitive lives, even to evaluating the predilections of whores (“They picked you because you picked them, no trick to that”). It would be Maginn’s oft-repeated credo that “the only thing that can improve on a lovely whore is another lovely whore.” Edward’s unspoken credo toward Katrina-as-bride-to-be was: “If she becomes my wife, then my wife is my life.”

The Kenmore’s maître d’, a light-skinned Negro, came toward them. “Your table is ready, Mr. Daugherty,” he said.

“Very good, Walter.”

He led them to a table next to Katrina and her parents. But Edward asked for one at the far end of the crowded dining room, Albany’s largest, where Parlatti’s orchestra was playing a medley from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado , all the rage.

“I’d like to meet your bride formally,” Maginn said. “Will you introduce me?”

“Another time. And she’s not yet my bride.”

They walked past the Taylors without a glance. After they’d been seated beside a thicket of ported palms, Edward walked back and greeted Katrina, Geraldine, and Jacob Taylor. He stared at Katrina, her golden hair swept into an almost luminous soft corona, and was about to bend and kiss her hand; but then he thought of his mouth on Rose’s body, and only bent and nodded and smiled his love toward her.

“Your friend Giles Fitzroy won two gold medals today at the Fair, for his saddle horses,” Edward said to her.

“The Fitzroys do breed champions,” Jacob Taylor said.

“I’ve been reading what you write about the Fair,” Katrina said. “You make it so exciting. I want to see it.”

The sound of her voice, the cadence of her speech, seemed musical to Edward, a fragment of a Mozart aria. Everything about her had the aura of perfection. He knew his perception must be awry, and he thought he should try to find flaws in the woman. But to what end? Is it so wrong to embrace perfection? Am I a dunce to believe in it?

“Come tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll give you an insider’s tour. You come with her, Geraldine; you, too, Jake.”

“I think not,” Geraldine Taylor said. “I’m told it’s overrun with a vulgar crowd.”

“There are some of those,” Edward said, and he understood that Geraldine could accept no generosity, not even a meaningless invitation, if it came from beneath her station.

“People like the Fitzroys and the Parkers and the Cornings are exhibitors,” Edward said, “and they’re frequently around. I’ll stop by in the morning, Katrina, and see what you decide.” He nodded farewell and went back to Maginn, who was buttering a biscuit as a waiter poured his wine.

“I sit here and look at these good burghers with their gold watch chains dangling over their pus bellies,” Maginn said, “and I all but drown in my loathing.”

“That’s juvenile,” said Edward. “They’re only people who’ve found a way to make some money.”

“Come on now, Edward. They’re another breed. With them and us it’s like thoroughbreds and swine. Those mosquito-loving Irish canal diggers in your novel are sewer rats to them. But I loathe them just as much as they loathe me. Is there one of them in this dining room who’d invite you home if they knew you drink in a saloon that has an encampment of whores in the backyard? Or me — if they found out my old man salvages hides and bones of dead horses and sells their flesh to pig farmers?”