The Flaming Corsage (25 page)

“The shame of Albany” is what Bishop Sloane called the play; Bishop Burke said such a writer should be “damned to hell for such public sin”; and the Mayor, who had not
seen the play, said, “From all accounts it is a degenerate assault on American womanhood. And we won’t stand for that in this city.”

It was agreed yesterday by seasoned theatergoers who saw the play that it is little more than a self-exculpation by the playwright, an apologia for his involvement in the Love Nest Scandal of
1908 in Manhattan, whose events closely parallel those of the play, with names of the characters changed so slightly from their real-life counterparts that all are recognizable. And so the old
scandal is rekindled to a bright flame.

Dear Sir,

I rush to correct the general misapprehension of the play
The Flaming Corsage
, which closed after a single performance on Saturday. The play is seen as a violation of our Magnificent
Municipal Moral Code (would that it were!). But it was not that at all, and judgment of it on that basis should be left to the philistines. The play will have, most certainly, a secure place in the
history of American theater, as a curiosity. It has kinship with dreadful Ibsen’s one great achievement,
Peer Gynt
, and may be as great a literary benchmark as
Beowulf
, that
ossified ostrich egg of fictional narrative, though the Daugherty play resembles neither work.

The Flaming Corsage
must be judged a failure, a great botch of a work that should probably have been a novel, just as Chekhov’s plays, overstuffed with characters and incident,
would have shone as novels. Daugherty, the playwright, was, potentially, a novelist of the first rank, but abandoned the genre for playwriting, a major mistake, the success of his last play
notwithstanding. That play,
The Masks of Pyramus
, owed its success to its paralleling of
Romeo and Juliet
, just as the Shakespeare work owed its nucleus to Ovid’s
Pyramus and
Thisbe.
Plagiarism in the arts continues apace.

But
The Flaming Corsage
does have its merits. It casts aside the weeping and wailing of our mouldy melodrama and the contrived realism of our present potpourri of pygmy playwrights, and
instead it offers up scenes rich with raw realism, as well as stinging satire of a high order. The bovinish women of the piece, and their hopeless husbands and lovers, all struggle between lofty
intentions and hidden animal instincts, much the way Peer Gynt confronts the evil trolls of his life in the Ibsen play.

No one in American theater has ever written with as much insight into the dark quotidian reality as Edward Daugherty. It is a great pity that he is such a paltry buffoon when it comes to
organizing his play, and sorting out the fates of his characters. He creates fine china, then destroys it all with his unruly hindquarters.

Like
Beowulf
, which was fated to be unreadable, this play is fated to be judged unplayable by future generations. But it will also be studied as a grotesque curiosity that broke new
theatrical ground. It does not surprise me that it was closed, but it was closed for the wrong reasons.

E
DWARD SAT NOW
in a long pause, staring out the second-floor window of his workroom at another grotesquely shadowed evening that had become abominably
hot. The pages of his nameless play-in-progress lay on the desk beside the marble bust of Persephone, the only artifact of value to survive the fire. And beside that lay Emmett’s loaded
.32-caliber revolver.

Emmett had bought the pistol to defend himself during labor trouble at the Fitzgibbon foundry, protection against men he’d fought for all his life; for when he became foreman, he became
their enemy. Rise in the world and count your friends on your thumb.

“I could shoot it and hit what I shot at,” Emmett said, “but I never pulled the trigger in anger, or in fear. It was a useless damn gadget and I knew that the day I bought
it.”

Edward looked at the pistol. He looked at his pages. He picked up his first page, read the opening scene. Sweat dropped from his forehead onto the paper.

Edward stopped reading. He ordered the pages of the play and walked downstairs to the kitchen, the heat no longer tolerable. He pumped water, wet his face, hair, arms. He
walked, dripping, to the front porch, sat in his father’s rocking chair, and stared at the corner of the porch. The flood this spring had tilted it another fraction of an inch eastward:
fittingly askew.

He stared up the empty street and saw his young self walking off it forever (oh yes) and out of this city into worlds no boy, no man on this block, except his father, could even have imagined.
Now he was back, solitary Main Streeter: no visitors, curtains drawn, answering no rings of the bell, no knocks, reading no mail, food delivered by Drislane’s.

The oaks and the elms are in full leaf, the honeysuckle bush his mother planted in 1859, when the house was new, when Main Street and Edward were new, is a tree now, yielding berries, and the
robins are eating them. Nobody hates these leaves, these berries, these robins, the way people hate Edward. Neither will Edward love any of them for their overrated glory, their vaunted beatitude.
You think such mindless things deserve love? Love is what you feel during yesterday’s lightning storms. And then here come the dogs.

He saw two boys with sticks running down from Broadway, chasing a dog that was leaving them behind, that ran into the horse-shoe court between Joe Farrell’s and Edward’s houses,
across Francis Phelan’s backyard, and was gone.

“You won’t catch him now, boys,” Edward said, and the boys stopped and looked at him. “And there’s gardens back there. You wouldn’t want to run through
them.”

“He bit me,” one boy said.

“Did he draw blood?”

The boy, in short pants, looked at his bare leg. Edward could see a line of blood from calf to ankle.

“Yeah, he got me,” the boy said.

“You should go see Doc McArdle,” Edward said. “You know where he lives?”

“Doc McArdle is dead,” the boy said.

“Is he?”

“His horse kicked him in the head.”

The boy bent his leg to look at the wound, spat on it, and rubbed up the trickle of blood with two fingers. He snapped the spit and blood off the fingers, pulled a leaf off an oak tree and wiped
the wound.

“I’ll put a bandage on it,” the second boy said, and he took off the red bandanna he was wearing on his neck and tied it around his friend’s wound. The boy who’d
been bitten took a few steps, limping.

“It hurts,” he said.

He picked up a stone and hurled it at the garden where the dog had fled. The second boy picked up two stones and threw them at the eastern sky that arced toward the bed of the Erie Canal that
was: whelps all: the dog, the boys, Edward.