William Kennedy - The Flaming Corsage

The first diary: April 19, 1894

Mother sold her emerald last month. I’ve only now learned this. The house was in jeopardy and the emerald preserved it for at least four years. Father had far less than he let on, lost almost half a million in the panic of ’93, and gave more than anyone knew to Madame Baldwin. He came to Mother with his problem. Had he not given her the jewels? Were they not emblematic of lush times? But now, after the panic, the times have us in a precarious position. He did not mention Madame Baldwin. Mother yielded the emerald and kept his secrets, shoring up the facade of normalcy by forgoing travel to London and Paris for the year, limiting her shopping, and letting two of the lesser servants go. Of her truly valuable jewels only her black pearls and solitaire earrings remain, and, of course, her priceless tiara, which I covet.

Mother chaired her antisuffrage meeting today in our main parlor. Giles came, unable to resist Mother’s magnetism. Edward brought me, listened for ten minutes, amused, then left for the club. The room was filled with a hundred of Mother’s friends and peers, all so well educated, so certain of their position, so unified and uniformed in their spring bonnets against the amendment that would eliminate the word “male” from the State Constitution’s definition of suffrage. Mother was valiant, insisting an undesirable class of women would swiftly take advantage of the vote, that it is a man’s sphere for which women are unsuited. Could anyone, she inquired in her shrillest tone, imagine a proper woman serving in the militia, or on the police and fire departments? One wonders. But as B says: “I have no ambition. I am not base enough to hold a conviction.”

Giles, sweet Giles, ever the suitor. He persuaded me the antisuffrage papers the women were reading (“. . educated women would stay away from the polls. . present relations between men and women are all that could be desired. .”) were making me crimson with vexation, and he insisted we escape. We went to the dining room and sipped punch and he put down his cup and kissed me. “I want to embrace your unclothed body,” he said, his words squishing at me through the kiss. “I dream of your intimacy. I picture your head on my pillow. I don’t care a fig that you’re married. Edward is my valued friend and has nothing to do with this. I’ve loved you since we took dancing class together.” He tried to kiss me again but I twisted his ear. He yowled like a cat, yanked his head away and I left him by the punch bowl, sweet fool. Did Father treat Madame Baldwin this way? Probably so.

I have no desire for Giles, but the idea of a lover is taking hold. It has everything to do with resisting my age, for I will be thirty soon. I know how vain and foolish this is, but it is no less real for that. Also I must punish Edward for despoiling me. I sought it, yes, but he did it, as he should have, or I would not have married him. But I cannot forgive him. He does not yet understand the craft of dying. I wonder, shall I be truly beautiful all my life?

The second diary: October 17, 1908

Giles arrived this morning in a frenzy but would not say what was causing it. I made him tea to calm him, and it did. He asked for Edward and when I said he was in New York working on the production of his new play he responded, “As I thought. Are you separated?” I told him Edward and I had been moving apart with glacial slowness, and distance was having antithetical effects, a growing sense of peace, through solitude and the absence of an intolerable presence; but also a deepening fury at being abandoned, however justified the abandonment. I told him I loved Edward profoundly, that in his eyes was a melting tenderness I could find in no other man. Without a word Giles took a folded sheet of paper from his coat and handed it to me. At the center was a well-drawn cartoon of a minotaur cavorting on a theater stage with two near-naked women with the heads of cows, while another and smaller minotaur with excessively large horns was watching from the theater’s front row. Beneath the cartoon were six lines of verse:

Your little wife’s gone to the city again

To dance on the stage with her partners in sin.

So she and the scribe and the actress will play

Their bovinish games in Gomorrah today,

The ladies disporting like September Morns,

While you sit at home cultivating your horns.

Of course the verse concerns Edward and Melissa Spencer, common gossip by this time, and I have ignored it. But the involvement of Felicity comes as a shock to Giles and a surprise to me; and I saw his frenzy return as a twitch in his left eye. He found the poem in his mailbox this morning. And during the night someone put a severed bull’s head on his porch. I wept for the shame of it, for all our shame. I felt extremely close to Giles at this moment, as if what was happening to us with such sudden force was a form of transcendence, thrusting us naked together into some underworld dungeon for abuse by obscene devils. Giles’s face was collapsed and flushed with tears, and I then decided to disrobe for him, rid myself of blouse, skirt, petticoat, knickers, shoes, stockings, all. I stood before him as he once said he wanted me, and his weeping ceased. I sat and let him study me, giving him not my body, but the part of my soul that lives in shadow. I told him not to touch me; nor had he betrayed any such plan. He stared at me and we didn’t speak, but I felt glorious, basking in the light of my dear friend’s wan smile. He stood up and took my chin in his right hand and kissed me just once, then said, “You are the vestal goddess of sublime pain.” I had banished his frenzy.

IT WAS ALREADY late afternoon when Edward closed Katrina’s diary. He hitched up the horse he called Galway Kate to his demil-andau and rode out to the Cudahy slaughterhouse in West Albany. Cattle were being led out of a storage pen and up an inclined wooden runway onto the killing floor of the huge wooden shed, where Edward told a foreman he had urgent business with Clubber. Clubber, the foreman said, worked as a splitter, and Edward found him, heavy cleaver in hand, halving the backbone of a dead cow. Edward called his name, and Clubber turned and stared at Edward, then finished cutting the beast and handed the cleaver to a man beside him to cope with the next carcass. Clubber spoke to the foreman, then limped toward Edward, who was trying not to retch from the stench of the gutted animals. Clubber rinsed blood off his hands with a hose, and dried them on his trousers, which were full of bloodstains.

“Hey, Ed, what got you out here? I ain’t ever seen you out here.”

“You got a few minutes, Clubber?”

“I can take ten minutes.”

They walked out of the shed to Edward’s carriage.

“We’ll go have a drink.”

“Quick one’s all,” said Clubber.

“Get up here.”

They rode to George Karl’s saloon and Edward bought the beer. Clubber pinched himself a piece of beef on an onion slice from the lunch counter and sat at a table.

“Putting the bull’s head on Giles’s porch, what exactly happened? Tell it again, Clubber.”

“I told it twenty hundred times.”

“Once more.”

“Cully Watson says help him with the joke. Kill the bull, cut its head, leave it down at Giles’s, hell of a joke, you know it, he’ll wake up and say, ‘Hey, that’s a dead bull on my porch. Son bitch,’ he’ll say, ‘who’d do a thing like that?’ ”

“What did Cully do on the porch? Anything you remember?”

“Lifted the head with me.”

“What else?”

“Said where to set it.”

“Did he have a piece of paper?”