Ironweed

IV

Francis stood in the junkyard driveway, looking for old Rosskam. Gray clouds that looked like two flying piles of dirty socks blew swiftly past the early-morning sun, the world shimmered in a sudden blast of incandescence, and Francis blinked. His eyes roved over a cemetery of dead things: rusted-out gas stoves, broken wood stoves, dead iceboxes, and bicycles with twisted wheels. A mountain of worn-out rubber tires cast its shadow on a vast plain of rusty pipes, children’s wagons, toasters, automobile fenders. A three-sided shed half a block long sheltered a mountain range of cardboard, paper, and rags.

Francis stepped into this castoff world and walked toward a wooden shack, small and tilted, with a swayback horse hitched to a four-wheeled wooden wagon in front of it. Beyond the wagon a small mountain of wagon wheels rose alongside a sprawling scatter of pans, cans, irons, pots, and kettles, and a sea of metal fragments that no longer had names.

Francis saw probably Rosskam, framed in the shack’s only window, watching him approach. Francis pushed open the door and confronted the man, who was short, filthy, and sixtyish, a figure of visible sinew, moon-faced, bald, and broad-chested, with fingers like the roots of an oak tree.

“Howdy,” Francis said.

“Yeah,” said Rosskam.

“Preacher said you was lookin’ for a strong back.”

“It could be. You got one, maybe?”

“Stronger than some.”

“You can pick up an anvil?”

“You collectin’ anvils, are you?”

“Collect everything.”

“Show me the anvil.”

“Ain’t got one.”

“Then I’d play hell pickin’ it up.”

“How about the barrel. You can pick that up?”

He pointed to an oil drum, half full of wood scraps and junk metal. Francis wrapped his arms around it and lifted it, with difficulty.

“Where’d you like it put?”

“Right where you got it off.”

“You pick up stuff like this yourself?” Francis asked.

Rosskam stood and lifted the drum without noticeable strain, then held it aloft.

“You got to be in mighty fair shape, heftin’ that,” said Francis. “That’s one heavy item.”

“You call this heavy?” Rosskam said, and he heaved the drum upward and set its bottom edge on his right shoulder. Then he let it slide to chest level, hugged it, and set it down.

“I do a lifetime of lifting,” he said.

“I see that clear. You own this whole shebang here?”

“All. You still want to work?”

“What are you payin’?”

“Seven dollar. And work till dark.”

“Seven. That ain’t much for back work.”

“Some might even bite at it.”

“It’s worth eight or nine.”

“You got better, take it. People feed families all week on seven dollar.”

“Seven-fifty.”

“Seven.”

“All right, what the hell’s the difference?”

“Get up the wagon.”

Two minutes in the moving wagon told Francis his tailbone would be grieving by day’s end, if it lasted that long. The wagon bounced over the granite blocks and the trolley tracks, and the men rode side by side in silence through the bright streets of morning. Francis was glad for the sunshine, and felt rich seeing the people of his old city rising for work, opening stores and markets, moving out into a day of substance and profit. Clearheadedness always brought optimism to Francis; a long ride on a freight when there was nothing to drink made way for new visions of survival, and sometimes he even went out and looked for work. But even as he felt rich, he felt dead. He had not found Helen and he had to find her. Helen was lost again. The woman makes a goddamn career out of being lost. Probably went to mass someplace. But why didn’t she come back to the mission for coffee, and for Francis? Why the hell should Helen always make Francis feel dead?

Then he remembered the story about Billy in the paper and he brightened. Pee Wee read it first and gave it to him. It was a story about Francis’s son Billy, written by Martin Daugherty, the newspaperman, who long ago lived next door to the Phelans on Colonie Street. It was the story of Billy getting mixed up in the kidnapping of the nephew of Patsy McCall, the boss of Albany’s political machine. They got the nephew back safely, but Billy was in the middle because he wouldn’t inform on a suspected kidnapper. And there was Martin’s column defending Billy, calling Patsy McCall a very smelly bag of very small potatoes for being rotten to Billy.

“So how do you like it?” Rosskam said.

“Like what?” said Francis.

“Sex business,” Rosskam said. “Women stuff.”

“I don’t think much about it anymore.”

“You bums, you do a lot of dirty stuff up the heinie, am I right?”

“Some like it that way. Not me.”

“How do you like it?”

“I don’t even like it anymore, I’ll tell you the truth. I’m over the hill.”

“A man like you? How old? Fifty-five? Sixty-two?”

“Fifty-eight,” said Francis.

“Seventy-one here,” said Rosskam. “I go over no hills. Four, five times a night I get it in with the old woman. And in the daylight, you never know.”

“What’s the daylight?”

“Women. They ask for it. You go house to house, you get offers. This is not a new thing in the world.”

“I never went house to house,” Francis said.

“Half my life I go house to house,” said Rosskam, “and I know how it is. You get offers.”

“You probably get a lot of clap, too.”

“Twice all my life. You use the medicine, it goes away. Those ladies, they don’t do it so often to get disease. Hungry is what they got, not clap.”

“They bring you up to bed in your old clothes?”

“In the cellar. They love it down the cellar. On the woodpile. In the coal. On top the newspapers. They follow me down the stairs and bend over the papers to show me their bubbies, or they up their skirts on the stairs ahead of me, showing other things. Best I ever got lately was on top of four ash cans. Very noisy, but some woman. The things she said you wouldn’t repeat. Hot, hotsy, oh my. This morning we pay her a visit, up on Arbor Hill. You wait in the wagon. It don’t take long, if you don’t mind.”

“Why should I mind? It’s your wagon, you’re the boss.”

“That’s right. I am the boss.”

They rode up to Northern Boulevard and started down Third Street, all downhill so as not to kill the horse. House by house they went, carting out old clocks and smashed radios, papers always, two boxes of broken-backed books on gardening, a banjo with a broken neck, cans, old hats, rags.

“Here,” old Rosskam said when they reached the hot lady’s house. “If you like, watch by the cellar window. She likes lookers and I don’t mind it.”

Francis shook his head and sat alone on the wagon, staring down Third Street. He could have reconstructed this street from memory. Childhood, young manhood were passed on the streets of Arbor Hill, girls discovering they had urges, boys capitalizing on this discovery. In the alleyways the gang watched women undress, and one night they watched the naked foreplay of Mr. and Mrs. Ryan until they put out the light. Joey Kilmartin whacked off during that show. The old memory aroused Francis sexually. Did he want a woman? No. Helen? No, no. He wanted to watch the Ryans again, getting ready to go at it. He climbed down from the wagon and walked into the alley of the house where Rosskam’s hot lady lived. He walked softly, listening, and he heard groaning, inaudible words, and the sound of metal fatigue. He crouched down and peered in the cellar window at the back of the house, and there they were on the ash cans, Rosskam’s pants hanging from his shoes, on top of a lady with her dress up to her neck. When Francis brought the scene into focus, he could hear their words.

“Oh boyoboy,” Rosskam was saying, “oh boyoboy.”

“Hey I love it,” said the hot lady. “Do I love it? Do I love it?”

“You love it,” said Rosskam. “Oh boyoboy.”

“Gimme that stick,” said the hot lady. “Gimme it, gimme it, gimme, gimme, gimme that stick.”

“Oh take it,” said Rosskam. “Oh take it.”

“Oh gimme it,” said the hot lady. “I’m a hot slut. Gimme it.”

“Oh boyoboy,” said Rosskam.

The hot lady saw Francis at the window and waved to him. Francis stood up and went back to the wagon, conjuring memories against his will. Bums screwing in boxcars, women gang-banged in the weeds, a girl of eight raped, and then the rapist kicked half to death by other bums and rolled out of the moving train. He saw the army of women he had known: women upside down, women naked, women with their skirts up, their legs open, their mouths open, women in heat, women sweating and grunting under and over him, women professing love, desire, joy, pain, need. Helen.

He met Helen at a New York bar, and when they found out they were both from Albany, love took a turn toward the sun. He kissed her and she tongued him. He stroked her body, which was old even then, but vital and full and without the tumor, and they confessed a fiery yearning for each other. Francis hesitated to carry it through, for he had been off women eight months, having finally and with much discomfort rid himself of the crabs and a relentless, pusy drip. Yet the presence of Helen’s flaming body kept driving away his dread of disease, and finally, when he saw they were going to be together for much more than a one-fighter, he told her: I wouldn’t touch ya, babe. Not till I got me a checkup. She told him to wear a sheath but he said he hated them goddamn things. Get us a blood test, that’s what we’ll do, he told her, and they pooled their money and went to the hospital and both got a clean bill and then took a room and made love till they wore out. Love, you are my member rubbed raw. Love, you are an unstoppable fire. You burn me, love. I am singed, blackened. Love, I am ashes.

o o o

The wagon rolled on and Francis realized it was heading for Colonie Street, where he was born and raised, where his brothers and sisters still lived. The wagon wheels squeaked as they moved and the junk in the back rattled and bounced, announcing the prodigal’s return. Francis saw the house where he grew up, still the same colors, brown and tan, the vacant lot next to it grown tall with weeds where the Daugherty house and the Brothers’ School had stood until they burned.

He saw his mother and father alight from their honeymoon carriage in front of the house and, with arms entwined, climb the front stoop. Michael Phelan wore his trainman’s overalls and looked as he had the moment before the speeding train struck him. Kathryn Phelan, in her wedding dress, looked as she had when she hit Francis with an open hand and sent him sprawling backward into the china closet.

“Stop here a minute, will you?” Francis said to Rosskam, who had uttered no words since ascending from his cellar of passion.

“Stop?” Rosskam said, and he reined the horse.

The newlyweds stepped across the threshold and into the house. They climbed the front stairs to the bedroom they would share for all the years of their marriage, the room that now was also their shared grave, a spatial duality as reasonable to Francis as the concurrence of this moment both in the immediate present of his fifty-eighth year of life and in the year before he was born: that year of sacramental consummation, 1879. The room had about it the familiarity of his young lifetime. The oak bed and the two oak dressers were as rooted to their positions in the room as the trees that shaded the edge of the Phelan burial plot. The room was redolent of the blend of maternal and paternal odors, which separated themselves when Francis buried his face deeply in either of the personal pillows, or opened a drawer full of private garments, or inhaled the odor of burned tobacco in a cold pipe, say, or the fragrance of a cake of Pears’ soap, kept in a drawer as a sachet.

In their room Michael Phelan embraced his new wife of fifty-nine years and ran a finger down the crevice of her breasts; and Francis saw his mother-to-be shudder with what he assumed was the first abhorrent touch of love. Because he was the firstborn, Francis’s room was next to theirs, and so he had heard their nocturnal rumblings for years; and he well knew how she perennially resisted her husband. When Michael would finally overcome her, either by force of will or by threatening to take their case to the priest, Francis would hear her gurgles of resentment, her moans of anguish, her eternal arguments about the sinfulness of all but generative couplings. For she hated the fact that people even knew that she had committed intercourse in order to have children, a chagrin that was endlessly satisfying to Francis all his life.

Now, as her husband lifted her chemise over her head, the virginal mother of six recoiled with what Francis recognized for the first time to be spiritually induced terror, as visible in her eyes in 1879 as it was in the grave. Her skin was as fresh and pink as the taffeta lining of her coffin, but she was, in her youthfully rosy bloom, as lifeless as the spun silk of her magenta burial dress. She has been dead all her life, Francis thought, and for the first time in years he felt pity for this woman, who had been spayed by self-neutered nuns and self-gelded priests. As she yielded her fresh body to her new husband out of obligation, Francis felt the iron maiden of induced chastity piercing her everywhere, tightening with the years until all sensuality was strangulated and her body was as bloodless and cold as a granite angel.

She closed her eyes and fell back on the wedding bed like a corpse, ready to receive the thrust, and the old man’s impeccable blood shot into her aged vessel with a passionate burst that set her writhing with the life of newly conceived death. Francis watched this primal pool of his own soulish body squirm into burgeoning matter, saw it change and grow with the speed of light until it was the size of an infant, saw it then yanked roughly out of the maternal cavern by his father, who straightened him, slapped him into being, and swiftly molded him into a bestial weed. The body sprouted to wildly matured growth and stood fully clad at last in the very clothes Francis was now wearing. He recognized the toothless mouth, the absent finger joints, the bump on the nose, the mortal slouch of this newborn shade, and he knew then that he would be this decayed self he had been so long in becoming, through all the endless years of his death.

o o o

“Giddap,” said Rosskam to his horse, and the old nag clomped on down the hill of Colonie Street.

“Raaaa-aaaaaags,” screamed Rosskam. “Raaaa-aaaaaags.” The scream was a two-noted song, C and B-flat, or maybe F and E-flat. And from a window across the street from the Phelan house, a woman’s head appeared.

“Goooo-ooooooo.” she called in two-noted answer. “Raaaag-maaan.”

Rosskam pulled to a halt in front of’ the alley alongside her house.

“On the back porch.” she said. “Papers and a washtub and some old clothes.”

Rosskam braked his wagon and climbed down.

“Well?” he said to Francis.

“I don’t want to go in,” Francis said. “I know her.”

“So what’s that?”

“I don’t want her to see me. Mrs. Dillon Her husband’s a railroad man. I know them all my life. My family lives in that house over there. I was born up the street. I don’t want people on this block to see me looking like a bum.”

“But you’re a bum.”

“Me and you know that, but they don’t. I’ll cart anything. I’ll cart it all the next time you stop. But not on this street. You understand?”

“Sensitive bum. I got a sensitive bum working for me.”

While Rosskam went for the junk alone, Francis stared across the street and saw his mother in housedress and apron surreptitiously throwing salt on the roots of the young maple tree that grew in the Daugherty yard but had the temerity to drop twigs. leaves, and pods onto the Phelan tomato plants and flowers. Kathryn Phelan told her near-namesake, Katrina Daugherty, that the tree’s droppings and shade were unwelcome at the Phelans’. Katrina trimmed what she could of the tree’s low branches and asked Francis, a neighborhood handy man at sev enteen to help her trim the higher ones; and he did: climbed aloft and sawed living arms off the vigorous young tree. But for every branch cut, new life sprouted elsewhere, and the tree thickened. to a lushness unlike that of any other tree on Arbor Hill, infuriating Kathryn Phelan, who increased her dosage of salt on the roots, which waxed and grew under and beyond the wooden fence and surfaced ever more brazenly on Phelan property.

Why do you want to kill the tree. Mama? Francis asked.

And his mother said it was because the tree had no right insinuating itself into other people’s yards. If we want a tree in the sard we’ll plant our own, she said. and threw more salt Some leases withered on the tree and one branch died entirely. But the salting failed, for Francis saw the tree now, twice its old sue, a giant thing in the world, rising high out of the weeds and toward the sun from what used to be the Daugherty yard.

On this high noon in 1938, under the sun’s full brilliance, the tree restored itself to its half size of forty-one years past, a July morning in 1897 when Francis was sitting on a middle branch, sawing the end off a branch above him. He heard the back door of the Daughertys’ new house open and close, and he looked down from his perch to see Katrina Daugherty, carrying her small shopping bag, weanng a gray sun hat, gray satin evening slippers, and nothing else. She descended the five steps of the back piazza and strode toward the new barn, where the Daugherty landau and horse were kept.

“Mrs. Daugherty?” Francis called out, and he leaped down from the tree. “Are you all right?”

“I’m going downtown, Francis.” she said.

“Shouldn’t you put somcthing on? Some clothes?”

“Clothes?” she said. She looked down at her naked self and then cocked her head and widened her eyes into quizzical rigidity.

“Mrs. Daugherty.” Francis said, but she gave no response, nor did she move. From the piazza railing that he was building, Francis lifted a piece of forest-green canvas he would eventually install as an awning on a side window, and wrapped the naked woman in it, picking her up in his arms then, and carrying her into her house. He sat her on the sofa in the back parlor and, as the canvas slid slowly away from her shoulders, he searched the house for a garment and found a housecoat hanging behind the pantry door. He stood her up and shoved her arms into the housecoat, tied its belt at her waist, covering her body fully, and undid the chin ribbon that held her hat. Then he sat her down again on the sofa.

He found a bottle of Scotch whiskey in a cabinet and poured her an inch in a goblet from the china closet, held it to her lips, and cajoled her into tasting it. Whiskey is magic and will cure all your troubles. Katrina sipped it and smiled and said, “Thank you, Francis. You are very thoughtful,” her eyes no longer wide, the glaze gone from them, her rigidity banished, and the softness of her face and body restored.

“Are you feeling better?” he asked her.

“I’m fine, fine indeed. And how are you, Francis?”

“Do you want me to go and get your husband?”

“My husband? My husband is in New York City, and rather difficult to reach, I’m afraid. What did you want with my husband?”

“Someone in your family you’d like me to get, maybe? You seem to be having some kind of spell.”

“Spell? What do you mean, spell?”

“Outside. In the back.”

“The back?”

“You came out without any clothes on, and then you went stiff.”

“Now really, Francis, do you think you should be so familiar?”

“I put that housecoat on you. I carried you indoors.”

“You carried me?”

“Wrapped in canvas. That there.” And he pointed to the canvas on the floor in front of the sofa. Katrina stared at the canvas, put her hand inside the fold of her housecoat, and felt her naked breast. In her face, when she again looked up at him, Francis saw lunar majesty, a chilling fusion of beauty and desolation. At the far end of the front parlor, observing all from behind a chair, Francis saw also the forehead and eyes of Katrina Daugherty’s nine-yearold son, Martin.

o o o

A month passed, and on a day when Francis was doing finishing work on the doors of the Daugherty carriage barn, Katrina called out to him from the back porch and beckoned him into the house, then to the back parlor, where she sat again on the same sofa, wearing a long yellow afternoon frock with a soft collar. She looked like a sunbeam to Francis as she motioned him into a chair across from the sofa.

“May I make you some tea, Francis?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Would you care for one of my husband’s cigars?”

“No, ma’am. I don’t use ‘em.”

“Have you none of the minor vices? Do you perhaps drink whiskey?”

“I’ve had a bit but the most I drink of is ale.”

“Do you think I’m mad, Francis?”

“Mad? How do you mean that?”

“Mad. Mad as the Red Queen. Peculiar. Crazy, if you like. Do you think Katrina is crazy?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Not even after my spell?”

“I just took it as a spell. A spell don’t have to be crazy.”

“Of course you’re correct, Francis. I am not crazy. With whom have you talked about that day’s happenings?”

“No one, ma’am.”

“No one? Not even your family?”

“No, ma’am, no one.”

“I sensed you hadn’t. May I ask why?”

Francis dropped his eyes, spoke to his lap. “Could be, people wouldn’t understand. Might figure it the wrong way.”

“How wrong?”

“Might figure they was some goin’s on. People with no clothes isn’t what you’d call reg’lar business.”

“You mean people would make something up? Conjure an imaginary relationship between us?”

“Might be they would. Most times they don’t need that much to start their yappin’.”

“So you’ve been protecting us from scandal with your silence.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Would you please not call me ma’am. It makes you sound like a servant. Call me Katrina.”

“I couldn’t do that.”

“Why couldn’t you?”

“It’s more familiar than I oughta get.”

“But it’s my name. Hundreds of people call me Katrina.”

Francis nodded and let the word sit on his tongue. He tried it out silently, then shook his head. “I can’t get it out,” he said, and he smiled.

“Say it. Say Katrina.”

“Katrina.”

“So there, you’ve gotten it out. Say it again.”

“Katrina.”

“Fine. Now say: May I help you, Katrina?”

“May I help you, Katrina?”

“Splendid. Now I want never to be called anything else again. I insist. And I shall call you Francis. That is how we were designated at birth and our baptisms reaffirmed it. Friends should dispense with formality, and you, who have saved me from scandal, you, Francis, are most certainly my friend.”

o o o

From the perspective of his perch on the junk wagon Francis could see that Katrina was not only the rarest bird in his life, but very likely the rarest bird ever to nest on Colonie Street. She brought to this street of working-class Irish a posture of elegance that had instantly earned her glares of envy and hostility from the neighbors. But within a year of residence in her new house (a scaled-down copy of the Elk Street mansion in which she had been born and nurtured like a tropical orchid, and where she had lived until she married Edward Daugherty, the writer, whose work and words, whose speech and race, were anathema to Katrina’s father, and who, as a compromise for his bride, built the replica that would maintain her in her cocoon, but built it in a neighborhood where he would never be an outlander, and built it lavishly until he ran out of capital and was forced to hire neighborhood help, such as Francis, to finish it), her charm and generosity, her absence of pretension, and her abundance of the human virtues transformed most of her neighbors’ hostility into fond attention and admiration.

Her appearance, when she first set foot in the house next door to his, stunned Francis; her blond hair swept upward into a soft wreath, her eyes a dark and shining brown, the stately curves and fullness of her body carried so regally, her large, irregular teeth only making her beauty more singular. This goddess, who had walked naked across his life, and whom he had carried in his arms, now sat on the sofa and with eyes wide upon him she leaned forward and posed the question: “Are you in love with anyone?”

“No, m- no. I’m too young.”

Katrina laughed and Francis blushed.

“You are such a handsome boy. You must have many girls in love with you.”

“No,” said Francis. “I never been good with girls.”

“Why ever not?”

“I don’t tell ‘em what they want to hear. I ain’t big with talk.”

“Not all girls want you to talk to them.”

“Ones I know do. Do you like me? How much? Do you like me better’n Joan? Stuff like that. I got no time for stuff like that.”

“Do you dream of women?”

“Sometimes.”

“Have you ever dreamt of me?”

“Once.”

“Was it pleasant?”

“Not all that much.”

“Oh my. What was it?”

“You couldn’t close your eyes. You just kept lookin’ and never blinked. it got scary.”

“I understand the dream perfectly. You know, a great poet once said that love enters through the eyes. One must be careful not to see too much. One must curb one’s appetites. The world is much too beautiful for most of us. It can destroy us with its beauty. Have you ever seen anyone faint?”

“Faint? No.”

“No, what?”

“No, Katrina.”

“Then I shall faint for you, dear Francis.”

She stood up, walked to the center of the room, looked directly at Francis, closed her eyes, and collapsed on the rug, her right hip hitting the floor first and she then falling backward, right arm outstretched over her head, her face toward the parlor’s east wall. Francis stood up and looked down at her.

“You did that pretty good,” he said.

She did not move.

“You can get up now,” he said.

But still she did not move. He reached down and took her left hand in his and tugged gently. She did not move. He took both her hands and tugged. She did not move voluntarily, nor did she open her eyes. He pulled her to a sitting position but she remained limp, with closed eyes. He lifted her off the floor in his arms and put her on the sofa. When he sat her down she opened her eyes and sat fully erect. Francis still had one arm on her back.

“My mother taught me that,” Katrina said. “She said it was useful in strained social situations. I performed it once in a pageant and won great applause.”

“You did it good,” Francis said.

“I can do a cataleptic fit quite well also.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s when you stop yourself in a certain position and do not move. Like this.”

And suddenly she was rigid and wide-eyed, unblinking.

o o o

A week after that, Katrina passed by Mulvaney’s pasture on Van Woert Street, where Francis was playing baseball, a pickup game. She stood on the turf, just in from the street, across the diamond from where Francis danced and chattered as the third-base pepper pot. When he saw her he stopped chattering. That inning he had no fielding chances. The next inning he did not come to bat. She watched through three innings until she saw him catch a line drive and then tag a runner for a double play; saw him also hit a long fly to the outfield that went for two bases. When he reached second base on the run, she walked home to Colonie Street.

o o o

She called him to lunch the day he installed the new awnings. After the first day she always chose a time to talk with him when her husband was elsewhere and her son in school. She served lobster gratine, asparagus with hollandaise, and Blanc de Blancs. Only the asparagus, without sauce, had Francis ever tasted before. She served it at the dining-room table, without a word, then sat across from him and ate in silence, he following her lead.

“I like this,” he finally said.

“Do you? Do you like the wine?”

“Not very much.”

“You will learn to like it. It is exquisite.”

“If you say so.”

“Have you had any more dreams of me?”

“One. I can’t tell it.”

“But you must.”

“It’s crazy.”

“Dreams must be. Katrina is not crazy. Say: May I help you, Katrina?”

“May I help you, Katrina?”

“You may help me by telling me your dream.”

“What it is, is you’re a little bird, but you’re just like you always are too, and a crow comes along and eats you up.’,

“Who is the crow?”

“Just a crow. Crows always eat little birds.”

“You are protective of me, Francis.”

“I don’t know.”

“What does your mother know of me? Does she know you and I have talked as friends?”

“I wouldn’t tell her. I wouldn’t tell her anything.”

“Good. Never tell your mother anything about me. She is your mother and I am Katrina. I will always be Katrina in your life. Do you know that? You will never know another like me. There can be no other like me.”

“I sure believe you’re right.”

“Do you ever want to kiss me?”

“Always.”

“What else do you want to do with me?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“You may say.”

“Not me. I’d goddamn die.”

When they had eaten, Katrina filled her own and Francis’s wineglasses and set them on the octagonal marbletopped table in front of the sofa where she always sat; and he sat in what had now become his chair. He drank all of the wine and she refilled his glass as they talked of asparagus and lobster and she taught him the meaning of gratine, and why a French word was used to describe a dish made in Albany from a lobster caught in Maine.

“Wondrous things come from France,” she said to him, and by this time he was at ease in the suffusion of wine and pleasure and possibility, and he gave her his fullest attention. “Do you know Saint Anthony of Egypt, Francis? He is of your faith, a faith I cherish without embracing. I speak of him because of the way he was tempted with the flesh and I speak too of my poet, who frightens me because he sees what men should not see in women. He is dead these thirty years, my poet, but he sees through me still with his image of a caged woman ripping apart the body of a living rabbit with her teeth. Enough, says her keeper, you should not spend all you receive in one day, and he pulls the rabbit from her, letting some of its intestines dangle from her teeth. She remains hungry, with only a taste of what might nourish her. Oh, little Francis, my rabbit, you must not fear me. I shall not rip you to pieces and let your sweet intestines dangle from my teeth. Beautiful Francis of sweet excellence in many things, beautiful young man whom I covet, please do not speak ill of me. Do not say Katrina was made for the fire of luxuria, for you must understand that I am Anthony and am tempted by the devil with the sweetness of yourself in my house, in my kitchen, in my yard, in my tree of trees, sweet Francis who carried me naked in his arms.”

“I couldn’t let you go out in the street with no clothes on,” Francis said. “You’d get arrested.”

“I know you couldn’t,” Katrina said. “That’s precisely why I did it. But what I do not know is what will be the consequence of it. I do not know what strengths I have to confront the temptations I bring into my life so willfully. I only know that I love in ten thousand directions and that I must not; for that is the lot of the harlot. My poet says that caged woman with the rabbit in her teeth is the true and awful image of this life, and not the woman moaning aloud her dirge of unattainable hopes… dead, so dead, how sad. Of course you must know I am not dead. I am merely a woman in self-imposed bondage to a splendid man, to a mannerism of life which he calls a sacrament and I call a magnificent prison. Anthony lived as a hermit, and I too have thought of this as a means of thwarting the enemy. But my husband worships me, and I him, and we equally worship our son of sons. You see, there has never been a magnificence of contact greater than that which exists within this house. We are a family of reverence, of achievement, of wounds sweetly healed. We yearn for the touch, the presence of each other. We cannot live without these things. And yet you are here and I dream of you and long for the pleasures you cannot speak of to me, of joys beyond the imaginings of your young mind. I long for the pleasures of Mademoiselle Lancet, who pursued doctors as I pursue my young man of tender breath, my beautiful Adonis of Arbor Hill. The Mademoiselle cherished all her doctors did and were. The blood on their aprons was a badge of their achievement in the operating room, and she embraced it as I embrace your swan’s throat with its necklace of dirt, the haunting pain of young ignorance in your eyes. Do you believe there is a God, Francis? Of course you do and so do I, and I believe he loves me and will cherish me in heaven, as I will cherish him. We shall be lovers. God made me in his image, and so why should I not believe that God too is an innocent monster, loving the likes of me, this seductress of children, this caged animal with blood and intestines in her teeth, embracing her own bloody aprons and then kneeling at the altar of all that is holy in the penitential pose of all hypocrites. Did you ever dream, Francis, when I called you out of our tree, that you would enter such a world as I inhabit? Would you kiss me if I closed my eyes? If I fainted would you undo the buttons of my dress to let me breathe easier?”

o o o

Katrina died in 1912 in the fire that began in the Brothers’ School and then made the leap to the Daugherty house. Francis was absent from the city when she died, but he learned the news from a newspaper account and returned for her funeral. He did not see her in her coffin, which was closed to mourners. Smoke, not fire, killed her, just as the ashes and not the flames of her sensuality had finally smothered her desire; so Francis believed.

In the immediate years after her death, Katrina’s grave in the Albany Rural Cemetery, where Protestants entered the underworld, grew wild with dandelions and became a curiosity to the manicurists of the cemetery’s floral tapestry. In precisely the way Katrina and Francis had trimmed the maple tree, only to see it grow ever more luxuriant, so was it that the weeding of her burial plot led to an intensity of weed growth: as if the severing of a single root were cause for the birth of a hundred rootlings. Such was its growth that the grave, in the decade after her death, became an attraction for cemetery tourists, who marveled at the midspring yellowing of her final residence on earth. The vogue passed, though the flowers remain even today; and it is now an historical marvel that only the very old remember, or that the solitary wanderer discovers when rambling among the gravestones, and generally attributes to a freakish natural effusion.

o o o

“So,” said Rosskam, “did you have a nice rest?”

“It ain’t rest what I’m doin’,” said Francis. “You got all the stuff from back there?”

“All,” said Rosskam, throwing an armful of old clothes into the wagon. Francis looked them over, and a clean, soft-collared, white-on-white shirt, one sleeve half gone, caught his eye.

“That shirt,” he said. “I’d like to buy it.” He reached into the wagon and lifted it from the pile. “You take a quarter for it?”

Rosskam studied Francis as he might a striped blue toad.

“Take it out of my pay,” Francis said. “Is it a deal?”

“For what is it a bum needs a clean shirt?”

“The one I got on stinks like a dead cat.”

“Tidy bum. Sensitive, tidy bum on my wagon.”

o o o

Katrina unwrapped the parcel on the dining-room table, took Francis by the hand, and pulled him up from his chair. She unbuttoned the buttons of his blue workshirt.

“Take that old thing off,” she said, and held the gift aloft, a white-on-white silk shirt whose like was as rare to Francis as the fruits de mer and Château Pontet-Canet he had just consumed.

When his torso was naked, Katrina stunned him with a kiss, and with an exploration of the whole of his back with her fingertips. He held her as he would a crystal vase, fearful not only of her fragility but of his own. When he could again see her lips, her eyes, the sanctified valley of her mouth, when she stood inches from him, her hands gripping his naked back, he cautiously brought his own fingers around to her face and neck. Emulating her, he explored the exposed regions of her shoulders and her throat, letting the natural curve of her collar guide him to the top button of her blouse. And then slowly, as if the dance of their fingers had been choreographed, hers crawled across her own chest, brushing past his, which were carefully at work at their gentlest of chores, and she pushed the encumbering chemise strap down over the fall of her left shoulder. His own fingers then repeated the act on her right shoulder and he trembled with pleasure, and sin, and with, even now, the still unthinkable possibilities that lay below and beneath the boundary line her fallen clothing demarcated.

“Do you like my scar?” she asked, and she lightly touched the oval white scar with a ragged pink periphery, just above the early slope of her left breast.

“I don’t know,” Francis said. “I don’t know about likin’ scars.”

“You are the only man besides my husband and Dr. Fitzroy who has ever seen it. I can never again wear a lownecked dress. It is such an ugly thing that I do believe my poet would adore it. Does it offend you?”

“It’s there. Part of you. That’s okay by me. Anything you do, or got, it’s okay by me.”

“My adorable Francis.”

“How’d you ever get a thing like that?”

“A burning stick flew through the air and pierced me cruelly during a fire. The Delavan Hotel fire.”

“Yeah. I heard you were in that. You’re lucky you didn’t get it in the neck.”

“Oh I’m a very lucky woman indeed,” Katrina said, and she leaned into him and held him again. And again they kissed.

He commanded his hands to move toward her breasts but they would not. They would only hold tight to their grip on her bare arms. Only when she moved her own fingers forward from the blades of his back toward the hollows of his arms did his own fingers dare move toward the hollows of hers. And only when she again inched back from him, letting her fingers tweeze and caress the precocious hair on his chest, did he permit his own fingers to savor the curving flow, the fleshy whiteness, the blooded fullness of her beautiful breasts, culminating his touch at their roseate tips, which were now being so cleverly cataleptic for him.

When Francis put the new shirt on and threw the old one into the back of Rosskam’s wagon, he saw Katrina standing on her front steps, across the street, beckoning to him. She led him into a bedroom he had never seen and where a wall of flame engulfed her without destroying even the hem of her dress, the same dress she wore when she came to watch him play baseball on that summer day in 1897. He stood across the marriage bed from her, across a bridge of years of love and epochs of dream.

Never a woman like Katrina: who had forced him to model that shirt for her, then take it home so that someday she would see him walking along the street wearing it and relive this day; forced him first to find a hiding place for it outside his house while he schemed an excuse as to why a seventeen-year-old boy of the working classes should come to own a shirt that only sublime poets, or stage actors, or unthinkably wealthy lumber barons could afford. He invented the ruse of a bet: that he had played poker at a downtown sporting club with a man who ran out of dollars and put up his new shirt as collateral; and Francis had inspected the shirt, liked it, accepted the bet, and then won the hand with a full house.

His mother did not seem to believe the story. But neither did she connect the gift to Katrina. Yet she found ways to slander Katrina in Francis’s presence, knowing that he had formed an allegiance, if not an affection, for not only a woman, but the woman who owned the inimical tree.

She is impudent, arrogant. (Wrong, said Francis.)

Slovenly, a poor housekeeper. (Go over and look, said Francis.)

Shows off by sitting in the window with a book. (Francis, knowing no way to defend a book, fumed silently and left the room.)

In the leaping windows of flame that engulfed Katrina and her bed, Francis saw naked bodies coupled in love, writhing in lascivious embrace, kissing in sweet agony. He saw himself and Katrina in a ravenous lunge that never was, and then in a blissful stroking that might have been, and then in a sublime fusion of desire that would always be.

Did they love? No, they never loved. They always loved. They knew a love that Katrina’s poet would abuse and befoul. And they befouled their imaginations with a mutation of love that Katrina’s poet would celebrate and consecrate. Love is always insufficient, always a lie. Love, you are the clean shirt of my soul. Stupid love, silly love.

Francis embraced Katrina and shot into her the impeccable blood of his first love, and she yielded up not a being but a word: clemency. And the word swelled like the mercy of his swollen member as it rose to offer her the enduring, erubescent gift of retributive sin. And then this woman interposed herself in his life, hiding herself in the deepest center of the flames, smiling at him with all the lewd beauty of her dreams: and she awakened in him the urge for a love of his own, a love that belonged to no other man, a love he would never have to share with any man, or boy, like himself.

“Giddap,” Rosskam called out.

And the wagon rolled down the hill as the sun moved toward its apex, and the horse turned north off Colonie Street.