The Flaming Corsage (5 page)

“Who’s a mudhole mick?” Matty Lookup said a second time.

“I don’t remember,” Maginn said.

“He’s making a joke,” Edward said. Always explaining Maginn’s jokes.

“You calling me a mudhole mick?”

“I don’t even know you,” Maginn said. “Why would I call you anything?”

“You don’t like the Irish?”

“I am Irish.”

“You look like a goddamn Dutchman.”

“I don’t have enough money to be Dutch.”

“You talk like you don’t like the Irish.”

“Why don’t you go find a mudhole that’ll accept you, and lay down and take a bath,” Maginn said.

Matty Lookup grabbed Maginn’s throat with both hands, lifted him off his stool, then off the floor, and swung him around like the ball of a hammer. While Maginn the splinter flailed
helplessly with his fists (like pummeling a sack of grain), Jack came around the bar to pull the two apart but was staggered by Matty Lookup’s backhanded wallop. Matty was pinning Maginn to a
tabletop, positioning himself to bite off Maginn’s right ear, when Edward vaulted the bar, lifted the cauldron of bean soup off Jack’s stove with both hands, and moved with it toward
the unequal struggle. He yelled in his most urgent vibrato, “Look up, Matty! Look up!” and, as Matty’s teeth parted to release Maginn’s ear and his glance turned predictably
toward those mocking words, Edward hurled the boiling soup into his face; and Matty knew agony. He rolled off the table onto the sawdust of Black Jack’s floor, screeching the song of the
scalded beast. Edward stood over him, the pot raised above his head with both hands, ready to break the brute’s skull if his belligerence revived. Matty wailed in pain and Edward lowered the
pot. Jack, a short club in his right hand now, nudged Matty with his foot.

“Get out you crazy son of a bitch, get out,” Jack told him. “Come in again, you’ll get worse.”

Matty Lookup, whimpering out of his ruined flesh, stood up and shuffled his crumpled form out the door.

“How’s your ear?” Edward asked Maginn, who, with a handkerchief, was blotting the blood that oozed from his lightly chewed ear. “Did he eat much of it?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Maginn said. “I’ve got his nose in my pocket.”

“You hurt any place?” Jack asked him. “I thought you were all done.”

“I would’ve been, except for our nimble novelist here. Quick thinking, old man. I myself might’ve reached for a bottle to club him with, but I’d’ve never gone for
the soup. A genteel weapon. Your prospective in-laws would doubtless approve the choice.”

Don’t say anything, Maginn.

Jack tapped Edward’s arm with his club.

“Good, Eddie,” he said. “You did good.” Then he went behind the bar to get the mop.

The whistle blew in the Lumber District. Six o’clock. The men would be pouring in, any minute. Edward now hated this saloon, hated Matty Lookup, Matty Beansoup, Matty Noface, hated his own
savage response to the oaf. What was served by your attack and your sacrifice, Matty? What rubric of resistance did I serve with the soup? He held the empty pot in his hand. He looked at it: foot
and a half deep, blue enamel, chipped rim, charred bottom, implement of retribution. He looked up and saw Maginn staring at him and smiling, blotting soup from his coat. Jack came with the pail and
mop and went to work on the beans.

Edward could not now ask Jack to be his best man. A great fellow, Jack. A generous man if ever there was one, and now he’s got Ruthie all to himself. But he doesn’t approve of
Katrina. Everybody’s generosity ends somewhere.

Maginn was still smiling.

“Shut up, Maginn,” Edward said.

E
DWARD MOUNTED THE
stoop of Katrina’s home on Elk Street, a quiet shaded thoroughfare on Capitol Hill that because of its monied residents was known as Quality Row. This
was his first visit to this house since his proposal to Katrina. He’d seen her often, exchanged letters with her daily, but was
persona non grata
until her insistence wore down her
parents. She had written Edward this morning that her determination had triumphed, that they would talk to him about the future; and so now, at afternoon, when he rang the pullbell of the
Taylors’ Gothic Revival town house, Fletcher, the family butler these ten years, opened the door to him. As Edward entered the foyer, Fletcher took his hat, put it on the hall hat rack.

“Miss Katrina will meet you in the library, Mr. Daugherty.”

“Thank you, Fletcher. How goes the horseshoe season?”

Fletcher, a precise and florid man of some wit, and with
a day laborer’s constitution, was horseshoe champion of Elk Street servants. A summer-long competition ran in the court alongside the Taylor stables, and Edward, being of neither master nor
servant class, occasionally joined the games.

“Somewhat predictably, sir,” Fletcher said.

“You mean you’re ahead.”

“Yes, sir, I do mean that.”

“I almost beat you last time,” Edward said.

“You did, indeed. But, alas, you did not.”

“My turn will come, Fletcher.”

“It’s always good to believe that, Mr. Daugherty.”

Fletcher led him to the empty library and lighted the gas in the six globes of the chandelier. The library was part sitting room with tea table and cane-bottomed straight-backed chairs, walnut
bookcases with glass doors and perhaps two hundred books, blue velvet drapes on the windows, and Jacob Taylor’s orderly walnut desk, with two leather armchairs facing it. Edward sat in one of
these chairs, staring at the books. He waited, listened to the silence of the vast house, stood and searched for two particular books he’d read when he came here with Lyman years ago. He
scanned the English and Dutch history books, such a burden when he first opened them, and now they weighed on him again: all that confirmation of ancestry. But where are the books of
my
lineage,
my
ancient history? My history has not yet been written.

He found books on Albany’s Dutch origins, volumes in the Dutch language, studies of the first Dutch and Episcopal churches of seventeenth-century Albany, lives of the Van Rensselaers,
Albany’s founding family and its dynasty of patroons, lives of the Staatses, Jacob’s family, and shelves of Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray (which Katrina read avidly before she was
allowed to have them), Washington’s memoirs,
The Federalist Papers
, and books on the English in Ireland, yes: what Edward was seeking.

He took two volumes from the shelf and sat and skimmed them: “The Irish are abominable, false, cunning and perfidious people . . . The worst means of governing them is to give them their
own way. In concession they see only fear, and those that fear them they hate and despise. Coercion succeeds better . . . they respect a master hand, though it be a hard and cruel one . . .
Cromwell alone understood this . . .”

The same Cromwell, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, writing of his 1649 attack on Drogheda: “. . . the enemy were about 3,000 strong in the town . . . I believe we put to the sword the whole
number . . . I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the Town . . . about 200 of them possessed St. Peter’s Church-steeple . . . I ordered the steeple . . . to be fired, when one of
them was heard to say in the midst of the flames: ‘God damn me, God confound me; I burn, I burn.’ . . . I wish that all honest hearts may give the glory of this to God alone . .
.”

And then to Wexford to slaughter 2,000 more: “I thought it not right or good to restrain off the soldiers from their right of pillage, or from doing execution on the enemy.”

And Sir William Petty’s estimates: that the war reduced Ireland’s population from one million, four hundred and sixty-six thousand in 1641 to six hundred and sixteen thousand in
1652, much more than half exterminated; and three-fourths of Irish land and five-sixths of Irish houses taken over by British settlers; and, twenty years after Cromwell, three-fourths of the Irish
population existing on milk and potatoes, living in cabins without chimney, door, stairs, or window.

Wrote Gookin: “They were strong, they are weak; they were numerous, they are consumed by sword, pestilence and famine; they were hearty, they are out of courage; they were rich, they are
poor and beggarly; they had soldiers, they are left naked; they had cities, they have but cottages.”

“So,” Petty concluded on Cromwell’s achievement, “they will never rebel again.”

Cromwell: Lyman’s presumed ancestor. Geraldine’s. Katrina’s. And here you are, Edward, seeking the hand of a woman bred of Cromwellian dust, you, whose father, by memory passed
on, traces your lineage back to Connacht then and now.

Katrina entered the library and came to him, reached out her hand and stared into his eyes.

“I’m pleased you’re here at last,” she said. “Mother and Father will meet you alone, and I’ll come back when your conversation is over. I love how strong your
face looks today.”

“I hope it’s strong enough,” Edward said. “Will you be able to hear what is said?”

“Oh yes, I shall,” she said.

He watched her vanish beyond the doorway, stood with book in hand conjuring his own seventeenth-century forebears: more than two centuries gone since the ancestral Daughertys’ lands were
taken in Donegal, the clan reduced to lowly cottiers tilling the land of others; some of them turning into the plundering rapparees who preferred the pike to the hoe; but, in time, all of them
thrust into the barrens of western Connacht like flung dogs.

Whether my people were marked because they had slaughtered English landholders in the bloody rebellion of 1641, or were unslaughtered remnants-in-arms after Cromwell’s 1649 conquest, it
matters not, for they go into exile by Cromwellian fiat—the transplanting, he called it—to the far western part of Ireland’s most desolate province, without houses, adequate
clothing, cattle, or farm implements, prohibited from living within five miles of the River Shannon or the sea. Women and children perished in ditches, dead of starvation or eaten by wolves. In
their desolation the Irish fed upon dead bodies dug from graves, the survivors condemned to till the earth of Connacht’s hellish landscape and discover its essence: ubiquitous rock.

How goes the family lineage?

It hardens.

And how grows the rock’s foetus?

With neither tongue, nor brain, nor soul: doomed creature mutilated in the womb, conceived with one foot, webbed arm, vertical eyes, a row of teeth in its belly, suitable for frightening devils,
born on a rock so wide the people of Connacht made it the altar of Jesus, worshiped it in Gaelic prayer, lived off its might, starving as they prayed, their priests axed or hanged, their young men
and maidens sent to slavery in the Tobacco Islands where they toiled at a level below the Negro bondsmen; the leftover faithful withering by the tens of thousands, living amid a world of rock
fences, those man-high sculptures that ride the contours of hills and valleys still, lace-made to foil the wind, an endless, timeless memorializing of rock in order to live free of it: fences
visible for miles, miles, and miles beyond that, each rock a gravestone, each fence testament to the ingenuity of survival: leaving, where the rocks were liftable out of the earth, scrubby patches
of soil for planting.

The lineage leads from Connacht’s fences forward to famine, when even potatoes die, then into modern exile on Connacht Block in Albany, raucous overcrowded neighborhood at Madison Avenue
and Quay Street, where greenhorns cluster till they find footing, send money away for others to quit the rock, then move uptown, to the North End like the Daugherty brothers, Owen and Davy first,
then Emmett, or they rise like you, Edward Daugherty, to heights where you can court the modern get of an ancient devil.

I am demonizing my love, Edward thought, to make her the equal of what her parents think I am.

He returned the Irish books to their shelves, and he waited. Fletcher brought sherry and three glasses. Edward stared at it: Waterford crystal, brought here by Lyman.

“The Master thought you might like a bit of sherry,” said Fletcher, setting one glass apart.

“They
are
going to see me,” Edward said.

“They will be along presently,” said Fletcher, nodding.

“I’ve already read all the books.”

“You are accomplished at many things, Mr. Daugherty.” And Fletcher left the room.

Edward knew what Jacob and Geraldine would say to him, had long absorbed their hostility in the foreshortened glance, the abrupt tone, the bristling at his closeness to Lyman: for that closeness
differed in kind from Lyman’s behavior toward his children. It was Lyman’s duty as an unmurdered man to see that Edward escaped what fate had ordained at birth for his kind. Edward
was
transformed, and Lyman lived to know his godson had grown and flourished, would even publish a novel, though Lyman would not live to hold it in his hand. But what Edward’s
transformation would win him remains to be seen. Now here he sits, waiting to be judged, and he feels his brain on fire with ancient yearnings for justice and comprehension.

But I will not kiss their foot.

Well enough. Do you know what they’ll say to you?