William Kennedy - The Flaming Corsage

SHE WAS THERE when I came into the apartment, wearing that exotic cloak and mask, moving nervously around the parlor, and exploding with her story. She said she was napping on the sofa in her room, fully dressed, when she saw a man crawling over the transom, half into the room through the fanlight’s opening; and what awakened her was the sound of his shirt buttons scraping on the wood.

“I would have screamed,” she said, “but he waved a knife at me in silent warning. I ran to the buzzer to ring for help, but he was at me before I got to it, and he searched my purse and valise. He took all the cash I’d drawn from the bank in Albany, more than three hundred dollars, and he touched the long strand of pearls I was wearing, the ones Giles gave me. He seemed to know jewelry. ‘Now,’ he said to me, ‘get out of your clothes.’ ”

She wept as she said this, lifting her eye mask to dab at her tears. I asked her why she was wearing the mask but she just waved both hands impatiently.

“He led me to the bedroom and pushed me onto the bed and raped me, hurt me so much I thought I must be bleeding. When he was done he made me draw water for a bath and told me to sit in the water and soap myself. He knelt by the tub and lathered me with one hand, his knife always at me. He helped me out of the tub and handed me a towel to dry off, then opened the wardrobe and took out this mask and cloak. I never saw them before and can’t imagine how he knew they were there. Maybe he’d put them there.

“He told me, ‘Lady, you got one great shape,’ and made me put on the mask, cloak, and shoes and walk across the room, holding the cloak open while he looked at me. Then he pushed me down on the sofa and raped me again. And he left. I knew you [me] had an apartment here, and this morning I saw Melissa in the lobby and I assumed she was visiting you. So when he was gone I grabbed my clothes and came straight here, afraid he’d come back for another go at me, or even kill me, that’s how these men are. Oh the foul dog.”

Melissa told me she was shocked to see a masked woman at the door, and wasn’t sure it was Felicity until she spoke. Felicity’s arrival was a quarter hour before my own, and all that time, Melissa said, she was hysterical, talking of being raped and robbed of her money and pearls by a man she’d seen working in the hotel. When I arrived Felicity told me the rapist looked like one of the gang who beat up the policemen on the barge. When she described him I knew it was Cully Watson. Melissa knew Cully only as Hopkins, a sometime hotel elevator operator.

Melissa, Felicity, and I were together half an hour, sifting what had happened, when Giles arrived. Never has a man been more deceived about what he thought he was seeing. Such costly, ghastly error. The questions remain: What led to his insane behavior? How did he know Felicity would be in my room at that moment, when neither we nor Felicity could have predicted it?

Cully Watson: From His Statement to Police

I was in Ohio first I heard of those killings. It was the Doc’s wife and the actress, and Daugherty. Something going on there. Same day as the killings a guy says the Albany cops are looking for me, want me for trial, so what I needed was a bundle to get gone. The Doc’s wife liked me, so when I took her stuff up to her room I parted her on the ass. She opened her bag to duke me and I saw a fold of bills thick as a steak. I told her, “I don’t want money, just a little lovin’.” I already had her three times before when she was at the hotel, so I muzzled her up. Not now, somebody’s comin’ to see me, she said. I said I’ll be quick, and I opened her up some and she let me do this and that but pushed me away.

“We’ll do it all later,” she said, but I’m hot so I kept going and we did it on the davenport.

She liked it but she was pissed at me mussing her hair, she’s got company coming. Then the door opened and in came the actress. She didn’t know what to make of us, both half naked, and she backed out, but the Doc’s wife said, “He’s raping me, don’t go.”

I said, “No, I’m just fucking her. We’re friends.” And I pulled out of her.

“I wanna take a bath,” the Doc’s wife said, and she turned on the tap in the tub, bare-ass, except for that long string of pearls. I told her I liked the way she looked in ’em so she took ’em off to spite me and threw ’em on the bed. They said I took ’em but that ain’t so. Fencing jewels on the run, you gotta be stupid. The other woman kept looking at me and she wasn’t afraid.

“Are you busy?” I said.

“Forget it,” she said.

“Maybe you wanna take a bath too.”

“No thanks,” she said, but I pulled her clothes off. She fought me pretty good, but I got it into her too, short time, just to say I did it, a hell of a sweet-looking bitch. I put ’em both in the tub, soaping each other up. I coulda diddled the two of ’em all day, but with the cops after me I slipped out, took the cash from the purse, and left the women playing foot-in-the-crotch. I don’t know who was doing what to who in that crowd. Maybe everybody was doing everybody. For me, I was long gone before the killings. When I heard about them I didn’t blame the Doc. His wife was no good. But she was a pretty good fuck.

MISS INNOCENCE OF America. If a headbirth by Aphrodite and The Prince were possible she could have been the progeny: born with passion’s mouth and sacred swath, and wisdom from below. There are lessons to be learned by brushing a wing against such as she, and the lessons continue. In Melissa’s nest of tinder I remembered Rose from tent city: vivacious, talented, driven, exuberant, bright, cunning strumpet. She answered when I wrote that I wanted to talk about Felicity.

Can you remember the dress I wore when we met? It no longer fits me, I’m so thin. The Kinegraph people think I’m ill or dying. They even say it to my face. I still wake up calling your name over and over. You’ve never left me. Some weeks I hardly eat anything. I’m wasting away, they tell me, and you know an actress can’t afford to lose her profile.

Sickness plagues her imagination. She falls mortally ill when life goes awry, when fortune balks, when love loses its luminescence; for if you are ill, God cannot refuse you sustenance. It was because I genuinely believed her inability to either sleep without night sweats, or draw breath without pain, that I was with her when death came at us out of Giles’s pistol. She and I were finished, but I had been unable to reject that face: not beautiful, but so robustly young, and illusory. Believe that face and lose your way. Study the transformation as she applies the powders, rouges, and charcoal stripings. Discover in that colored mouth, in those magnified eyes, the lure of the virgin-into-vixen: kill my innocence and I’ll reward you with my fur.

I’ve made thirty-five films this year and until two months ago nobody knew my name. And I thought I’d be anonymous forever. Of course I’d love to see you. Always. I was supposed to make two films last week and I missed both because of my weakness, but now that we’re leaving the city I’m wonderfully well, for we’re going to a marvelous lake with wild woodland. Do you know where I’m talking about? I can’t believe it. I’m so excited. I told them everything I knew about the place, and my director couldn’t wait. We’ll be at our hotel four weeks, so come, love, please come, and everything will be just as it was.

Her success as my Thisbe had been supreme, she famous overnight, her photo in all the magazines. The play ran five months and when it closed Flo Ziegfeld was ready to put her in his Miss Innocence to replace Anna Held, but along came Giles’s Wild West performance and Ziegfeld said nobody tainted by scandal would ever be in a show of his. For a time no one in theater would hire her, but the scandal faded into gossip and instead of being branded as the vixen she emerged as destiny’s waif, the innocent darling corrupted by the “eater of broken meats,” as the Police Gazette labeled me.