William Kennedy - The Flaming Corsage

“Paper?”

“With some lines of verse on it.”

“What verse?”

“Any verse at all. Whatever you remember.”

“Verse.”

“What about the paper?”

Clubber drank some beer and searched for the paper.

“I guess he coulda had a paper.”

“What’d he do with it?”

“I don’t know. Put it in the mailbox?”

“That’s right. He put it in Giles’s mailbox.”

“Yeah. That’s it. It was part of the joke. Like a valentine, Cully said. He’ll get a valentine in the morning. I forgot that.”

Edward handed Clubber the verse he’d copied from Katrina’s diary. “Here’s what that valentine said.”

Clubber’s eyes moved across and down the page, up and across, down again, up and across again.

“What’s this stuff say?”

“It says in a roundabout way that Giles’s wife is down in New York having sex with two people, a man and a woman. The man is meant to be me. The scribe. That’s what it means.”

“That ain’t true.”

“You’re right. It’s all wrong.”

“No, that ain’t true on the valentine. It was a joke.”

“Wasn’t a joke, Clubber.”

“It was a joke, I’m telling you. Cully said it was a joke. We laughed like hell at the joke. Just a goddamn dead-bull joke, Ed. That’s all it was, a dead-bull joke.”

“When Giles read it he went to New York and murdered his wife, shot me, then blew his own brains out through the top of his head. Nobody thought that was a joke.”

“That couldn’ta been why he done it, not the joke. It ain’t possible, Ed. He gotta had somethin’ else on his mind.”

“It was this, Clubber, it was this.”

Clubber suffered Edward’s words as a succession of blows, a whipped cur cowering from an affectionate hand. He pulled in his shoulder and cried, making no noise. He tried to remove the evidence of such unmanly behavior by rubbing the water off his face, wiping his fingers on his pants. When he did it again, he spread pink streaks of the damp cow blood on his cheeks and around his eyes.

“Couldn’t be. It ain’t true.”

“Wasn’t a joke, Clubber.”

“I wouldn’ta hurt Giles or ’specially you. You know that, Ed.”

“I know that, Clubber.”

Clubber made a noise in his throat, an involuntary blubbering, and ducked his head below table level so none could see. He coughed, a fake cough, and smeared his face in new places with the pink cow blood.

“Who put Cully up to it?”

Clubber only stared.

“Was it Maginn?”

“Maginn?”

After Edward revealed to Clubber the valentine’s fatal message, Clubber hid himself in the darkest corner of the attic of his two-story home on Van Woert Street. His sister Lydie saw his lunch pail and knew he’d come home but could not find him. When Clubber heard her step on the attic stairs he climbed out the window and leaped off the roof to kill himself. He broke an arm and an ankle, and sprained a shoulder, all of which were put in casts or wrapped by Doc Keegan at St. Peter’s Hospital. Lydie took her brother home from the hospital and when she went to sleep he crawled back up to the attic and threw himself off the same roof, breaking a leg and a hip, and earning his ticket to the asylum at Poughkeepsie.

SHE STOOD BEFORE the gilt-framed mirror in the drawing room of her home, primping, reimposing a straying hair, ordering the lines of her solid-gray, V-necked satin dress, its skirt gathered into soft billows at the front to reveal stockinged ankles, the shocking fashion at Auteuil this year. She studied what remained of the forty-seventh year of her beauty. It was persistent, vegetative, clarion. In her own reversed eyes it seemed less fragile now than when she married him and had worried about her too-emphatic cheek-bones, the early lines at the corners of her eyes. Such empty concern. What does all that mean to anyone now? To him? To other men?

The men in the mirror, behind her. At her. Always at her, in memory or dream, or with their need, or their plangent sorrow at the leave-taking, or their eyes that improve with reversal. And their alcoholic breath on your neck.

She has known the joy of beauty. But, he wrote, joy is one of her most vulgar adornments, while melancholy may be called her illustrious spouse, a strain of beauty that has nothing to do with sorrow.

She had begun the day knowing her obligations and desires, an unusual rising, life rarely so orderly for Katrina. She remembered seeing her father, and dreaming of a monkey, knew what Mrs. Squires should make for breakfast: turkey hash, her mother’s favorite, and pumpkin parties, knew the tasks of this consequential morning, knew that revelation would greet her afternoon.

She had bathed, dressed, and, first order, taken down her large black leather shoulder bag and opened it on the bed. From her clothes hamper, where she had put it for safekeeping last night, she took her mother’s jewel case and put it in the bottom of the bag. She walked to the third-floor storeroom and unlocked the steamer trunk her father had bought for her trip to London and presentation at court. She rummaged under that famous dress of white chiffon over white silk in which she had made her deep curtsy before Queen Victoria, and she lifted out the seven identical leather-bound diaries of her life. She dropped the key inside the trunk, closed it.

In her room she put six of the dairies in her bag. The remaining one (1896–98) she opened to the page where lay a newspaper clipping of a baseball player photographed in close-up as he throws a ball. Francis of the excellent face.

She raised her glance to the window and looked out at the maple tree in the garden where she’d seen him perched on a branch, sawing another branch above his head. Her valentine in the tree. And she had immediately, then, dressed herself naked, in sun hat and evening slippers, and walked out onto the back piazza to induct the young man into her life. And didn’t they love each other so well after that induction? Oh they did.

She built shrines to their love: in her bureau, on her dressing table, on the shelf above the bathtub: a piece of paper on which he’d written both their names: Francis Aloysius Phelan and Katrina Selene Taylor, a snippet of the green canvas he’d wrapped around her when he carried her naked in from the piazza, coins he’d held in his hand, a rag of a shirt he’d left with her, a book with the poems she’d read to him, a handkerchief stained with their love. The shrines were palpable proof of time memorious, when love lived in the next house and came to call.

Until one day it did not. And she destroyed the shrines.

She looked at the clipping, his face scowling at the unseen baserunner he is about to throw out at first, scowling at the hidden Katrina he is about to throw out of his life.

She read the open page of the diary:

The end of summer, 1898:

If you saw me plunge a knife into myself would it baffle you? Would you think it a miracle? Do you understand what I mean when I say I have no ability to slide in and out of love? Would you be tempted to pull the knife out of me and cut off my face? Would you kiss me while I bled through my eyes?

She considered ripping the clipping in half, but did not. She put it between pages of the diary, put the diary into the bag, and went downstairs to breakfast.

“I dreamed of pumpkin last night,” she said to Mrs. Squires, who was serving her breakfast. “Does that mean anything?”

“Did you eat the pumpkin?” Mrs. Squires asked.

“No, it was just pulp and I threw it at a monkey.”

“Monkeys could mean sharpers are after you, so watch out, Mrs. D. But pumpkin is nice. Pumpkin means happiness. Unless you eat it, and then I’m afraid it means trouble’s coming.”