The Flaming Corsage
Read The Flaming Corsage Online
Authors: William Kennedy
Praise for William Kennedy:
“Kennedy is a writer with something to say, about matters that touch us all, and he says it with uncommon artistry”
Washington Post
“Kennedy’s power is such that the reader will follow him almost anywhere, to the edge of tragedy and back again to redemption”
Wall Street Journal
“Kennedy’s art is an eccentric triumph, a quirky, risk-taking imagination at play upon the solid paving stones, the breweries, the politicos and pool sharks of an
all-too-actual city”
The New York Review of Books
“His smart, sassy dialogue conveys volumes about character. His scene setting makes the city throb with life”
Newsday
“What James Joyce did for Dublin and Saul Bellow did for Chicago, William Kennedy has done for Albany, New York: created a rich and vivid world invisible to the ordinary
eye”
Vanity Fair
“His beguiling yarns are the kind of family myths embellished and retold across a kitchen table late at night, whiskified, raunchy, darkly funny”
Time
“William Kennedy’s
Albany Cycle
is one of the great achievements of modern American writing”
Daily Mail
“William Kennedy is pre-eminent among his generation of writers . . . Kennedy is peerless in the depth and acuity of his sustained vision, and the lost, past world of
Albany says more to us today about the current state, about the heart and soul, of American politics than any recent bestselling, Hollywood-pandering political thriller has ever done”
Spectator
“Kennedy’s writing is a triumph: he tackles topics in a gloriously comic, almost old-fashioned language. You feel Kennedy could write the Albany phone book and
make it utterly entertaining”
Time Out
“Kennedy proves to be truly Shakespearean”
The Sunday Times
“Kennedy is one of our necessary writers”
GQ
ALSO BY WILLIAM KENNEDY
FICTION
The Ink Truck
Legs
Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game
Ironweed
Quinn’s Book
Very Old Bones
Roscoe
Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes
NONFICTION
O Albany!
Riding the Yellow Trolley Car
WITH BRENDAN KENNEDY
Charlie Malarkey and the Belly-Button Machine
Charley Malarkey and the Singing Moose
First published in the USA by Viking Penguin Inc. 1996
This ebook edition published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2011
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © WJK Inc. 1996
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of William Kennedy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
1st Floor
222 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8HB
Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, Delhi
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-84983-846-7
eBook ISBN: 978-1-84983-847-4
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CRo 4YY
Here’s a how-de-do!
If I marry you
,
When your time has come to perish
,
Then the maiden whom you cherish
Must be slaughtered, too!
Here’s a how-de-do!
. . . . . .
With a passion that’s intense
I worship and adore
,
But the laws of common sense
We oughtn’t to ignore.
If what he says is true
,
’Tis death to marry you!
Here’s a pretty state of things!
Here’s a pretty how-de-do!
— Gilbert and Sullivan
, The Mikado
ONTENTS
Edward Begins a Serious Dialogue with Katrina, While Dancing
Katrina Visits the
Angel of the Sepulchre
Edward Brings Katrina Home to Main Street
Dinner at the Delavan is Interrupted
The Rape of Felicity: Two Versions
Katrina’s Diary and the Bovine Poem
Edward Goes to the Slaughterhouse
Katrina in the Drawing Room Mirror
Katrina Sits for her Portrait, with a Flower
Katrina Deposits some Valuables in the Bank Vault
Katrina Watches
The Flaming Corsage
Katrina Ruminates on what She has Seen
Edward and Katrina Revisit the Cemetery
Edward Completes his Play at the Kenmore Hotel
Edward Goes to the Tenderloin at a Late Hour
Edward Wakes in the Moonlight at Three o’Clock in the Morning
Edward Concludes a Dialogue with Katrina on his Front Porch
W
HEN THE HUSBAND
made his surprise entrance into the Manhattan hotel suite, his wife was leaning against a table, clad in a floor-length, forest-green
velvet cloak, and wearing a small eye mask of the same color, her black hair loose to below her shoulders.
The second woman, her light-brown hair upswept into a fuss of soft curls that bespoke an energetic nature, and wearing a floor-length, peach-colored evening gown embroidered with glass pearls,
was in conversation with the man who had rented this suite months earlier, and who at this moment was wearing a frock coat, evening trousers, wing collar, gray ascot and pearl stickpin, the two
dressed as if for a social evening. They were standing near the window that gave a view at dusk of the falling leaves and barren branches of the elms and maples of lower Fifth Avenue.
The husband’s entrance to the suite was made with a key. How he came into possession of the key has not been discovered. The husband spoke first to his wife, saying, according to one
witness, “You Babylonian whore, everything is undone”; or, according to the other witness, “Babylon,
regina peccatorum
, you are gone.” Turning then to both the man in
the wing collar and the second woman, the husband spoke of “traitors” and “vixen,” his exact phrase unclear to both witnesses. The husband then opened his coat, drew a
.45-caliber Colt revolver from his waistband, parted his wife’s cloak with its barrel, placed the barrel against her left breast, and shot her precisely through the heart. The position in
which she fell onto the carpet revealed that she wore nothing beneath the cloak.
The husband turned to the man by the window and fired two shots at him, hitting him with one, the force of which propelled him backward into the windowpane, which shattered. The second woman
screamed, ran into the bedroom, and locked its door. The wounded man watched the husband staring at his pistol and heard him mumble, “Confido et conquiesco,” which translates from the
Latin as: I trust and am at peace. After saying this, the husband put the revolver barrel under his chin, pulled the trigger, and fell dead beside his exposed wife.
I
T WAS THE
year the State Fair came to Albany, and as Edward Daugherty walked through the vast city of tents and impromptu structures that had sprung up
in a matter of weeks at the Fairgrounds on the Troy Road, he felt a surge of strength, a certainty that he was changing substantially, at the breaking dawn of a creative future.
He could see the tents on the midway where seven newspapers had their offices and seven sets of reporters wrote yards of daily copy about Shorthorns and Clydesdales, Cotswold sheep, and Poland
China swine. In the
Albany Evening Journal
’s tent he found Maginn writing at a table.
“What news do you have of the swine?” Edward asked.
“What a coincidence that you ask,” Maginn said, and he thrust what he was writing at Edward, who read:
Country maidens in their best bib and tucker shot coy glances at robust lads of brawny arm and sun-browned face as a brilliantly sunny day brought thousands to the midway
of the Fair yesterday. Flirtations were numerous and many lords of creation succumbed before batteries of sparkling eyes.