The Flaming Corsage (14 page)

“Dogs don’t have souls,” the priest said.

“This one did,” said Emmett. “He went to mass every Sunday with me. And he never ate meat on Friday.”

“And did he do his Easter duty?”

“He did. On the parish house lawn.”

“Is that all the sins?”

“I could make some up,” Emmett said.

“No need for that,” and he made the sign of the cross, saying, “
Te absolvo in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.
For your penance say one Hail Mary and have some
more ale.”

Emmett blessed himself, closed his eyes for a ten-second prayer, then reached for his glass and took one long swallow, all he could tolerate. Father Loonan did likewise, then opened his prayer
book and said, “Now we’ll get on with it,” and, holding the holy oil, read in the Latin: “
Per istam sanctam Unctionem, et suam piissimam misericordiam, indulgeat tibi
Dominus quidquid deliquisti
. . .”

Emmett said to him, “Will ye say it in English so I know what’s goin’ on.”

And the priest spoke the formal prayers of Extreme Unction, anointing, with holy oil on cotton, Emmett’s eyes, ears, nose, lips, hands, and feet, the sensory entrances of sin, saying to
him, “Through this holy Unction; and of His tender mercy, may the Lord pardon thee whatsoever sins thou hast committed by thine eyes . . . thine ears,” and repeating it on through to
the chrismal swabbing of the foot from heel to toe, whereupon Emmett spoke up and said, “There’s no need to bother with the toes. I never sinned with any of them.”

Katrina giggled, then broke into sobs she tried to stifle. This gallant man really was dying and by loving him she felt like a traitor to her own dead, for he loathed her father and spiritually
worked against him all his life, and against the world that had shaped her family and her life. She looked at Edward and her sobbing intensified: my husband who put my sister and father in their
graves, guiltless, honorable man now losing his own father. And all her love for Edward seemed remarkable and perverse. This Main Street, this North End, where the Daugherty seed took root, was, in
all its guises, a foreign place, and yet its river and its foundries and its traction barns and its Lumber District and its dying canal were the sources of life that sustained
her
family in
all its lineages—the Staatses, Bradfords, Taylors, Fitzgibbons, Van Slykes. Here were the wellsprings of power and wealth that had gilded the heart, soul, and lifetime of Katrina Taylor
Daugherty, weeping child of the new century, wounded by the flames of hellish flowers, who can now find no substitute in life for her loss, her diminishment, her abasement known so intimately:
loving and losing Francis Phelan, that angry, lovely boy who defeated the abstraction of power with a flung stone. Katrina, faithless, sobbing wretch, you are adrift in this Irish Catholic fog that
envelops your elegantly patrician self. (That woman with the bloody bicep must be Catholic. She would be all wrong as an Episcopalian.) What does your poet say to you now, Katrina? He says that the
world goes round by misunderstanding, the only way people can agree: for if they understood each other they would never agree on anything, such as marriage to the enemy: that man across the room
whom you say you love, who woke you into a terrifying nightmare, who had you screaming for release before you even made the bond with him, who led you, docile woman, out of fire into salvation;
that man who is the son of this virtuous man dying in front of you. What part of this dying father has passed into that living son, do you know? When the soul’s light goes out forever, what
is the loss to those who have stood for so long in that light? Your sobs are evidence of an uncertain mind, Katrina. You should not cry at the death of a beloved man to whom you once gave only
hostility. Your allegiance is as fickle as the rain. Your giggle at his sinless toes is a proper response.

The priest ended the sacrament and made the sign of the cross over Emmett. Katrina breathed in, straightened her back, and raised her glass in emulation of Edward’s celebratory
gesture.

“All praise to Emmett Daugherty,” she said. “All praise to a great man, I say. The truly great men are the poet, the priest, and the soldier, and Emmett Daugherty is a soldier
of the righteous wars.”

Then, between sobs, she willfully drank all of her ale.

C
ULBERT
(C
ULLY
) W
ATSON
, known in Albany for years as a hotel sneak and petty hoodlum, was hanged from a
telegraph pole in the French Quarter of New Orleans last night after being taken off a train at gunpoint by four men in kerchief masks. Watson was en route to New Orleans for trial on an
attempted-murder charge, and was in custody of two New Orleans detectives when the four masked men disarmed and tied up the detectives, and fled the train with Watson.

His corpse was found hanging on Bourbon Street, near the hotel where ten days ago, police say, he raped, robbed, and left for dead a twenty-seven-year-old woman. She had been smothered, but
revived to find the room filled with gas from an open jet. She said she’d seen her attacker working at the hotel desk as night clerk. Police said the attacker had gained entry to and left the
woman’s room through the transom, and that Watson was slim and agile enough to accomplish this. He has a known history of such unlawful entry and assault on women.

Police caught Watson with the woman’s diamond brooch and $2,000 in cash as he stepped off a train at Memphis. To bargain with police, Watson told of his connection to the infamous Love
Nest killings of 1908, when a prominent Albany physician, Giles Fitzroy, murdered his wife, shot and wounded the Albany playwright Edward Daugherty, then killed himself. The shootings took place at
the Millerton House in Manhattan, where Watson was then working. He disappeared after the killings.

Police said Dr. Fitzroy and Daugherty testified against Watson at a hearing into a river-barge brawl in 1906, and Watson may have held a grudge against them. Police have a lengthy statement from
Watson about the Love Nest case but have disclosed no details about Watson’s role in it; but they did say that others may be involved.

E
DWARD
,
IN HIS
white suit and white Panama with the flowerpot crown, walked at sunbright morning with a stream of other men,
women, and children down Columbia Street past the new Union Station. Where the goddamned Delavan stood. Handsome new building and they used plenty of the Delavan’s scorched bricks. Some
things can be salvaged from any wreckage. Katrina?

He headed toward the old red bridge that spanned the Albany Basin, then out toward the pier, where two covered, double-deck barges, and the tug that would pull them, rested at anchor in the
placid water of the Hudson. He saw Maginn coming toward the bridge from another direction, and he waited for him.

“You’re alone,” Maginn said.

“So are you,” said Edward.

“I’m always alone, except when I’m with a beautiful and accessible woman, which I fully expect to be before this day is over.”

“My own beautiful woman decided not to come.”

“That’s truly a pity,” Maginn said. “How is she? I haven’t seen her in months.”

“She’s all right. You know she doesn’t favor the drinking.”

Despite Edward’s arguments to Katrina that today they could celebrate something
together
for a change—the river’s summer glory, the gift of a lustrous day—she said
she couldn’t abide all that family sweetness, all those dowdy biddies, all the rowdiness. So she stayed home. Avoiding the class struggle.

“Then we’re a couple of bachelors for the day,” Maginn said. “Like the old days. Tent city at the State Fair, when you were still a lowly reporter? Remember?”

“Things have changed since then,” Edward said.

“Not I. I find myself a lowly reporter still. And I still dandle the doxies, don’t you, old man, once in a while, just for the hell of it? Tell the truth.”

“Part of my past,” Edward said.

“You’ve tamed the tendril. How resolute.”

At the gangway, a policeman was backing a man down the ramp, poking his chest with a billy club. Five others backed down behind him. Edward recognized the cop, Willie Glass.

“It’s not a free ride,” Glass said. “Buy a ticket.”

“Go scratch your ass, Glass,” said the ejected man, who was short, wiry, and thirtyish, with long black hair parted in the middle, a full mustache, and sufficiently irregular good
looks that Edward judged him a pimp. He mumbled to the men with him and they went away.

“Sheridan Avenue boys,” Maginn said. “The one sassing the cop is Cully Watson. He doesn’t like to pay for things.”

“He has the look of a man who uses women,” Edward said.

“Very perceptive,” Maginn said. “He’s also very wild.”

Edward and Maginn boarded the barge for the impending voyage, a neighborhood outing of North and South End church groups, social clubs, and singing societies. They’d all been accumulating
food in their club rooms and vestries for days for this, the Eintracht excursion, which took its name from the city’s premier choral group, the Eintracht Singing Society, a mix of working and
professional men, Protestants and Catholics, Germans, Dutch, English, and Irish, who once a year embarked together on this exercise in social leveling.

The excursion was financed by boarding tickets, and the sale of prepaid tickets for beer and soft drinks. People had been boarding since eight o’clock, fifty cents a head; and the two
barges (used to haul ice, hay, or produce on weekdays) were already a floating small town. At ten-thirty, with more than two thousand aboard, the sailors hauled up the gangway.
Old
Hellhound
, the tug, towed the first barge under and past the narrow draws of the Maiden Lane and South Ferry Street bridges, then went back for the second barge; and when the two were side by
side, sailors lashed them together, then opened the rails of their top decks so the two boats became one, doubling the conviviality. Then the tug moved them downriver at low speed, toward the
Baerena Island picnic grounds.

Edward and Maginn searched for a table on a lower deck, where women were already passing out knockwurst, pork sandwiches, plates of beans and cabbage, and men were clustered at the bar, where
two bartenders steadily drew mugs of beer from tapped kegs. Johnny Daugherty, the famous fiddler, Edward’s distant cousin through unchartable family links in Spiddal, broke into “The
Wind That Shakes the Barley” for anyone ready to jig this early in the day, and there were a few. Card games proceeded, and Edward saw Midge Kresser unfolding his portable three-card-monte
table, about to begin his day’s work parting suckers from their nickels and dimes. Ministers and priests were eating with their flocks. Policemen Willie Glass and Joe Anthony strolled the
deck, keeping the peace.

“I see Giles,” Edward said, and they found him in line for drinks, wearing his commodore’s cap and lemon-yellow vest.

“Felicity come with you?” Edward asked, expecting Giles’s wife would have absented herself today for the same reasons as Katrina.

“She did,” Giles said, and he pointed toward a table where Felicity was sitting with a woman in her late forties. Felicity was quintessentially summery in a white linen frock and
white straw boater with pink ribbon. The other woman was older, slender, bosomy, and narrow-waisted, her pale-green dress subtly décolleté.

“That woman with your wife,” Maginn said, “she’s suitable for a saddle, wouldn’t you say, Fitz?”

“I knew you’d notice her, Maginn,” Giles said. “Felicity’s Aunt Sally, a handsome woman. To tell the truth, I wouldn’t be surprised if she went for you. She
has a weakness for your type.”

“What’s my type?”

“Worthless lout with a wit,” Giles said. “Her husband has no sense of humor.”

“She has a husband but fancies witty men.”

“I hear he’s not much of a husband. He’s a fire chief down in Westchester. You see before you the fireman’s wife.”

“The fireman’s wife. And why is she here?”

“Visiting Felicity. The fire chief rents a summer place near Glenmont, and Sally stays there all summer. The chief comes up weekends.”