William Kennedy - The Flaming Corsage

She sought work in the pictures, brought her photographs to Kinegraph, and was hired at fifteen dollars a week. Her salary rose to six hundred a week and is still climbing. She’s become Kinegraph’s chief asset: The Kinegraph Girl, nameless, chameleonic face of sorrow and rapture and fury and terror and wickedness and determination and invitation.

During one of her illnesses rumors spread that she’d been killed by a burglar, or run down by a drunken motorist. The public wondered: Where has our girl gone? Kinegraph publicists advertised in the newspapers to disprove the lies about her death, and announced she was coming to New York for a new picture. Squadrons of police had to hold back fans waiting for her train at Grand Central — a greater crowd than greeted the President the previous week. Kinegraph promptly abandoned its policy of anonymity for actors and agreed the public should know the Kinegraph Girl by name: Melissa Spencer. . Melisssssssssa Ssssssssspenccccccccer, how sweet the sibilance!

My sickness flared up when the police came to talk about Cully Watson. All lies. How can such a man be believed? If they put it in the papers again my career is ruined. Why would he slander me? I never said a word to him, and I swear this on my breasts, which you know how much we both value. Please meet me at Cooperstown and we will erase the horror and relive our loving days there and I’ll be well again just from the sight of you.

Her film-in-progress was The Deerslayer , Cooper’s five-hundred-page Natty Bumppo novel condensed to a twenty-minute movie. Her role was Hetty, the simpleminded daughter of scalp hunter Thomas Hutter. When I found my way to the village and then to the set, there she was, Melissa-into-Herty, lying on her bed beneath a quilt, her face powdered into a death pallor; for Hetty had been shot by a stray bullet as the British troops rescued Deerslayer and Hetty’s sister, Judith, from torture at the hands of the Huron Indians. Hetty was dying, and her secret love, Hurry Harry, another scalp hunter, was by her deathbed, along with Judith, heroic Deerslayer in his fringed buckskins, and his bare-chested Indian friend Chingachgook, noble Delaware chief. The actors mouthed Cooper’s cumbersome dialogue as if it meant something to the film.

“How come they to shoot a poor girl like me and let so many men go unharmed?” Hetty wondered.

“ ’Twas an accident, poor Hetty,” said Judith.

“I’m glad of that — I thought it strange: I am feeble minded, and the red men have never harmed me before. . there’s something the matter with my eyes — you look dim and distant — and so does Hurry, now I look at him. . my mind was feeble — what people call half-witted. . How dark it’s becoming!. . I feel, Deerslayer, though I couldn’t tell you why. . that you and I are not going to part forever. .”

“. . Yes, we shall meet ag’in, though it may be a long time first and in a far-distant land.”

“Sister, where are you? I can’t see now anything but darkness. .”

“Speak, dearest,” said Judith. “Is there anything you wish to say. . in this awful moment?”

Cooper has Hetty blush, which to Judith means Hetty is undergoing “a sort of secret yielding to the instincts of nature,” and, on cue from Judith, Hurry Harry, nature’s lusty pawn, takes Hetty in his arms. She utters her love for him, then dies.

Melissa, no stranger at death’s door, rose up from Hetty’s bed twice, fell back twice to die twice, one of the film’s notable scenes. When it ended and the camera ceased its clatter, she rose up again to embrace me, kiss me lightly but with promise. The director eyed our kiss with disapproval, and I sensed he was Melissa’s new conquest. He was early thirtyish, boyish, and rumpled.

“Our next film’s in California, where we’ll never have to worry about the weather,” he said. “And it gets us away from the patent wars — movie companies suing each other over who owns the camera technology. You know about that, I guess.”

“Of course,” I said, knowing nothing of such wars.

“Melissa has no interest in these things,” said the rumpled boy, “but she’ll thrive in California. Inspiration under the sun. You’ll have that every day, Mel.”

“A life of sunshine,” Melissa said. “What luxury.”

When Rumples ended the day’s filming, Melissa changed clothes, leaving Hetty’s shroud and heavy eye makeup behind, converting that face that launched a thousand nickels (ten thousand thousand nickels) back into its faux pristinity. We went to the hotel and found our way to the rear piazza with its same rockers, same hammock, same view of the lovely lake that Cooper called Glimmerglass, and its vast, lush forests. Here we had spent ten idyllic days in the summer of 1908, convinced life was a dream of sensual indolence.

Melissa took up her familiar position in the hammock, and we ordered the same drinks (gin and quinine water), set them on the same wicker table, and we studied each other as if the 1908 dream had not dissolved in cordite reek and blood spew. Two years gone and the residual bone pain from the bullet (which had entered my left chest where the burning stick pierced Katrina: God’s own symmetry) continued to plague my sleepless nights. Yet it was the forgotten wound, spoken of by neither Katrina nor Melissa; for I’d behaved badly, had not summoned the penitential grace to die from my bullet.

“Tell me about your play,” she said. “Am I in it?”

“Someone like you is in it, but it isn’t you.”

“But I could play the role.”

“You could if I cast you.”

“Of course you’ll cast me.”

“Maybe you won’t want this role.”

“If you wrote it I want it.”

“That’s your only interest, a role. You don’t even know what the play is about.”

“What is it about?”

“It’s about a marriage that fails and the partners stay together but take lovers, not very original. Then the husband is caught with his mistress in a love nest, there’s a shooting and two die. The husband is shot but doesn’t die. People wish he had. He is condemned as a lecherous cad by priests, newspaper editors, and other custodians of the high moral ground. His son abandons college to escape his father’s scandal. Thoughtless of the father not to perish from shame. To spite others, the man lives on. His life grows bleak. He can’t understand why this tragedy happened, why people died. It’s a mystery. He begins a journal, fills ledgers with ruminations, theories, then decides writing a play will combat the lethal determinism of the universe. He fills his imagined stage with a riot of scenes that synthesize events, discover answers. He discovers little and falls depressed at the pointlessness of wild endeavor. In time he humbleheartedly reunites with his estranged wife as a way of saving his soul. Magnanimous woman, she doesn’t loathe him. She has her own sorrows. She has always loved him and he her. This is such a commonplace story. It happens to everybody, don’t you think? Finally, as he’s framing a conclusion on the cause of the killings, he turns up facts that dramatically contradict his conclusion, so he visits his old paramour to confront her with the news. That’s as far as I’ve gotten.”

“When he goes back to his wife, do they make love?”

“I haven’t decided if love is what they make.”

“But they do sexual things.”

“I haven’t decided if what they do is sexual.”

“You’ve forgotten what’s sexual.”

“Not at all.”

“Do you remember me making myself sexual in this hammock?”

“I do.”

“Shall I do it again?”

She was nuding herself belowskirts. She could do this expeditiously.

“Is anybody watching?”