The Flaming Corsage

Katrina at Emmett’s Sickbed, July 17, 1903

THE DAY WAS warm and brilliant with light when Katrina entered the Daugherty house on Main Street with a bouquet of asters and zinnias just cut from her garden on Colonie Street: reds, oranges, pinks, and yellows to brighten the sickroom where Emmett Daugherty, eighty-one, lay dying of decay and disuse.

Katrina had come to see this as a house of death, for just before she and Edward stayed here, in the months the Colonie Street house was being renovated, Hanorah died of a heart seizure. And they were still here when Adelaide, Jacob, Cora, and all the others died from the fire. Now death was claiming yet another soul, and the imminence was giving meaning to Katrina’s life in the way her vigil at Cora’s exhumation had vitalized her days. The sun was shining brightly on this latest visitation.

The front door was open (Emmett had not locked it since he built the house) and Katrina strode into the hallway and past the front parlor, which had gone all but unused since Hanorah died. The parlor always seemed to Katrina to be Hanorah’s museum: the rocking chair where she sat to sew, and to monitor the passersby on Main Street; the huge wood-stove she always tended that was now ornamental with the advent of the coal furnace; the dusty valances, the chair doilies — when were they last washed?

She walked down the hallway into the kitchen, found two empty milk bottles in the pantry, and filled them with water and flowers. A woman in a housedress and a clean white apron that covered the dress from waist to ankle came in through the kitchen door. Who is she? A face Katrina knew. Annie Farrell, from next door, that’s right. I haven’t seen her since ’95. So pretty So plain. And not Farrell anymore.

“Mrs. Daugherty, I’m not interrupting, am I?” Annie said.

“Oh, hello, hello, not at all,” said Katrina. I can’t call her Annie. Mrs. Phelan? No. “I brought some flowers.”

“So beautiful,” Annie said. “And I baked some beans and bread, just out of the stove. I know nobody cooks in this house.”

“That’s sweet of you,” said Katrina. She thinks I should come every day and cook?

“With all the sickness and trouble, I mean,” Annie said. “How is he?”

“I just this minute got here. But I know he had a very bad night. Go up and say hello.”

“I wouldn’t intrude,” Annie said.

“He’d love it. He speaks so fondly of the Farrells next door.”

“There’s always been a closeness. He and my father helped each other build their houses.”

“But you’re not a Farrell anymore,” said Katrina.

“Right you are, Mrs. Daugherty. I’m a Phelan these four years. Francis, you know. He worships your husband.”

“Yes.” And I worshiped him. Worshiped Francis. Before you did, Mrs. Phelan.

“He always mentions your kindness when you were neighbors and he worked for you,” Annie said.

“Does he? That’s nice.” Kindness he thinks it was?

Katrina picked up the two bottles with the flowers.

“We’ll go see Emmett,” she said, and Annie followed her up the stairs to the sickroom, where Edward, in his late-afternoon ritual, was sitting with Frank McArdle, the Daugherty family doctor, an ample-bellied man with a white brush of a mustache, here on his daily visit. Edward and the doctor were delivering up stories and gossip to keep Emmett alive with words alone. As the women entered they saw Emmett, raising phlegm from his ruined lungs, propped on pillows under a large colored likeness of Pope Leo XIII, the man Emmett loved better than Jesus.

Katrina remembered an angry Emmett invoking Leo when the trolley strike of 1901 was looming. He would rant over supper about the injustice of the traction company for bringing in scab labor and not only refusing its workers a pittance of a wage increase, but cutting their wages and extending their workday. She could see him pounding the table, bouncing potatoes out of the dish, declaiming to all: “Don’t take my word. The Pope of Rome himself said it. Workers are not chattels, and it’s shameful to treat them like that. Shameful, that’s the Pope’s word for those traction company frauds. ‘To defraud anyone of wages that are his due is a crime that cries out to the avenging anger of heaven.’ There’s Pope Leo for you, a real man he is, and by the Jesus, no man ever spoke truer. Amen to Leo, I say. Amen to Leo.”

Now Emmett lay beneath the image of the Workingman’s Pope, his eyes half closed, giving fading attention to Dr. McArdle, who was talking of a woman who married a man for his money and the man then went bankrupt and stayed that way twelve years.

“It’s a rare day,” said the doctor, “that people marry for love anymore, the way you and I did, Emmett, and the way Edward did. Am I right, Edward?”

“I hear you, Frank,” Edward said. “But love isn’t enough, and anybody who thinks it is, is demented.”

Katrina, hearing this as she entered, said, “You are so right, my love,” and she put one bottle of flowers on Emmett’s dresser, the other on his bedside table.

Edward took her aside, held her hand.

“There are impediments to love,” she said softly.

“How well I know that,” he said.

“I’m glad you accept it.”

“I don’t accept it.”

“But you must,” she said.

Edward pushed love away, whispered to her that Emmett was very weak, and that they had decided to go for the priest. Emmett heard him.

“Yes, get Father Loonan,” Emmett said with more strength than Katrina expected. “And have a pitcher of ale to pour when he gets here.”

Annie Farrell walked to Emmett’s bedside, touched his hand with her fingertips, shook her head.

“Giving drink to the priest, now is that a good thing, Emmett?”

Emmett almost smiled and answered her in such a scratchy whisper that Annie had to lean over to hear him.

“He says ale is God’s greatest handiwork,” Annie said.

“Then we should get some right away,” said Edward.

“I’ll get Father Loonan,” Katrina said, “and then I’ll stop for the ale.”

“You?” said Annie. “You surely wouldn’t be seen in a saloon.”

“It’s time I would be,” Katrina said, and she bent over Emmett and kissed his forehead. “Don’t you dare go anywhere till I get back,” she said.

“I’ll get the ale,” Edward told her, “you get the priest.”

“I’ll get both,” said Katrina. “You stay here with your father, where you ought to be.”

In the kitchen Katrina rinsed out Emmett’s two-quart pewter growler with the snap-on cover and put it in a wicker handbasket. Edward was right about love. The impulse to love is a disease. Is disease a proper reason for marrying? No sane person would do anything for such love. What had loving Francis meant? When he went away she was left with dead memories, cold as a corpse. Try drawing love out of a corpse. It’s never who or what you love that drives you, Katrina, but who or what loves you. A cat. If a cat loves me, I am alive.

She left the house and walked the two and a half blocks to Sacred Heart church on Walter Street, the church Emmett helped build with his monthly payments and the strength of his back. She rang the parish house bell to rouse Father Loonan, who had performed the marriage ceremony for Edward and Katrina seventeen years ago. He opened the door, fresh from his prayers, or was it a nap? Well, he seemed to be elsewhere.

“Emmett Daugherty is dying, Father. He needs you. He needs the sacrament.”

“Ah, the poor devil, he’s all done, is he?”

“He’s no devil, Father. He’s a virtuous man.”

“Oh he is, he is. I’ve got someone coming in ten minutes, my dear, and then I’ll be along.”

“Emmett can’t wait ten minutes, Father.”

“He can’t. It’s that way, is it?”

“Your visitor can wait, but Emmett is losing the light.”

“Then I’ll be right along, dear, right along.”

“Excellent, Father,” Katrina said, and turned to leave.

“Have you candlesticks in the house?” the priest asked.

“I believe we do.”

“And a crucifix. You must have a crucifix.”

“We have one.”

“Holy water. Do you have that?”

“We do.”

“And the chrism?”

“The what, Father?”

“The chrism, child. The holy oil.”

“I never saw any.”

“Then I’ll bring it. And a piece of palm from Palm Sunday. You must have that.”

“There’s some stuck behind Jesus on the crucifix.”

“All right. And a lemon, do you have a lemon?”

“I’ll buy one if we don’t.”

“And water, and a spoon, I’ll need that.”

“Are you going to make lemonade, Father?”

“Don’t get flibbertigibbet on me,” the priest said. “And a piece of cotton. And some bread. And salt.”

“We’ll have it all,” Katrina said.

“Then we’ll get Emmett ready for his journey,” Father Loonan said.

Katrina left him in the doorway and walked toward Jack McCall’s saloon on Broadway. Lemon and cotton and salt and oil. What a peculiar religion she had joined, its mysteries endless. She walked with a dynamic erectness, straight back, narrow waist, wide-brimmed straw hat flat on her yellow hair, her walk, almost a military pace, surging with the energy of youth, though she was now thirty-seven. She moved toward McCall’s with an all-but-visible purpose, a change of mood for Katrina, who did daily battle with absence of purpose, boredom, pervasive ambivalence toward every waking act. Why should I get up? Why go to bed? Why try to reimagine Francis? Why write the diary? Why not? It’s as meaningful as anything else you might do, and as meaningless. You have a lazy soul, Katrina. You will die with such slowness, such slight daily reduction, that no one will notice that you’ve left the room until the clusters of dust accumulate around your empty chair.

But today could be different: today on Main Street, at the parish house, heading for the saloon, immersed in the life of the people you inherited when you wed Edward, today you know that change is so real it can almost be touched. You will be free, Katrina, when you know what drives you. When Emmett, that wonderful man, at last ceases to linger, you will be liberated from the street that marriage has imposed upon you. Won’t you be free? I do love my husband and his family. I do, I do. And I do think them alien to all that I am or will be.

There were no saloons like McCall’s in Katrina’s private domain. She entered it through the front door, walked to the bar and put the basket on top of it. As she lifted out the growler, the bartender and six men at the bar stared at her. This was a small, two-room saloon with black window curtains that were closed only on Sunday mornings, when it was illegal to serve spirits to any but the neediest cases. Such cases entered as quickly as possible through the side door, for you wouldn’t be seen going into a saloon’s front door on a Sunday. Also, women always entered through that same side door, the ladies’ entrance, and sat at one of three tables in the back room, where ladies were supposed to sit. And not for long.

“We don’t have women at the bar, Ma’am,” the bartender said. His name was Jimmy McGrath and he had managed the saloon for Jack McCall ever since Jack became a county under-sheriff. Jimmy was known as the most honest bartender in Albany, for no drunk ever lost the money he didn’t know he’d left on Jimmy’s bar. Jimmy would put it in the register, with a note specifying the credit, and he’d tell the drunk about it on his next visit. Katrina did not know such things about Jimmy, but she liked his kindly face, and the clever way he parted the remains of his silky white hair.

“I don’t plan to stay,” she said to Jimmy. “I only want this filled with ale,” and she pushed the growler toward him. He didn’t touch it.

“Ladies generally come in the other door and sit in the ladies’ section,” he said. “And ladies never come in without an escort. For politeness and protection.”

“I shall be very polite, I assure you. And I need no protection.”

“Ladies sit back there, Ma’am, no matter what.”

“Is there a bar back there where I can get my ale?”

“No, Ma’am. This is the only bar.”

“Then I’ll stay here, and when I get it I’ll leave.”

“But we don’t serve ladies here, Ma’am. House rule.”

“And a silly one, I must say. My father-in-law is dying, and the ale is for him, and for Father Loonan when he comes to perform the last rites, ten minutes from now.”

The men nodded at the solemnity of use to which this ale was about to be put.

“You probably know the man who’s dying,” Katrina said. “Emmett Daugherty is his name.”

“Ah, Emmett. So that’s who it is,” Jimmy said. “I knew he was ailing.”

“Emmett is dying?” said one of the men. He was tall and brawny and wore a brown derby with a hole in it. He took off his hat, looked at it reverentially, then put it back on. “I’ve known him all my life. A grand man.”

“He’s very close to death,” Katrina said. “Now may I have this container filled?” She put a dollar on the bar.

Jimmy McGrath uncovered the growler, put it under the ale spigot, and pushed the dollar back to Katrina.

“Tell Emmett this round is on Jimmy,” he said.

He capped the full growler, put it in Katrina’s basket, lifted it and came around the bar to hand it to her.

Outside, a dog yelped in pain. Katrina looked out to see a man kicking a collie dog tied to the tailgate of a wagon loaded with red bricks.

“That man is kicking a dog,” Katrina said, and all the men came to the window to look at the spectacle. The man kicked the dog again. A heavyset woman, sitting on the wagon and holding the reins of the two horses, watched the kicking.

“Somebody should stop him,” Katrina said. “Help that poor animal that can’t help itself.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” said the tall man with the derby. He went out the saloon’s screen door and spoke to the dog-kicker.

“You oughtn’ta kick that dog,” said the tall man.

“It’s my dog. I’ll kick him all I want,” said the dog-kicker, and he kicked the dog again. He was short and muscular from lifting bricks, and he wore a sleeveless undershirt.

The tall man effortlessly shoved him to one side, then reached down and untied the rope that held the dog. The dog ran away. Katrina came out of the saloon with her basket.

“You did very well,” she said to the tall man. “I thank you, and I’m sure the dog does too.”

“You better go bring my dog back,” the dog-kicker said.

“No, I ain’t gonna do that,” the tall man said. “You’d only kick him some more.”

The dog-kicker swung his fist, but the blow only reached the left side of the tall man’s neck. The tall man threw two short, powerful punches, one with each hand, and knocked the dog-kicker backward into the street. When he went down, the back of his head hit the granite-block pavement. He started to sit up but fell back and stayed down. Everybody stared at him. The woman climbed off the wagon. She was as burly as the man on the ground (Katrina thought of them as a matched pair), and wore a man’s shirt with sleeves rolled, her muscular arms bare well above the elbow. She lifted the fallen man up onto the sidewalk and raised him with a hand under his back. His head wobbled.

“You killed him,” the woman yelled at the tall man.

“I didn’t kill him,” the tall man said. “He hit me and I hit him.”

“He shouldn’t have kicked the dog,” Katrina said.

“Who asked you?” the woman said. “Maybe he shoulda kicked you. Maybe I oughta kick your tail across Broadway.”

“I’m harder to kick than a tied-up dog,” Katrina said.

“You think so?” the woman said, and she flexed her right bicep, the size of a grapefruit, and walked toward Katrina. She tightened the muscle and held it and the veins stood out like branches of a tree. She stared at Katrina and tensed the muscle, splitting a vein and spurting blood onto Katrina’s yellow dress; then she raised the bloody bicep in front of Katrina’s face.

“I don’t have to kick you,” the woman said. “I’ll squeeze you like a bunch of grapes.”

The tall man stepped between the women. “Nobody gonna squeeze this lady.”

“I’m gettin’ the cops after you, Mister,” the woman said.

“That’s good,” said the tall man. “I’ll be waitin’ for ’em here in the saloon. You go along, now, Miss,” he told Katrina. “This ain’t your business to worry about.”

“If you need a witness, my name is Katrina Daugherty. Second-last house on Main Street.”

“Okay, Miss Daugherty, and we thank you,” the tall man said. He tipped his hat. “You tell Emmett, but only if he’s really dyin’, that Hoggie Ryan wishes him a happy death.”

“Does he know you, Mr. Ryan?”

“He seen me fight bare-knuckle many a night.”

“I shall certainly tell him. Hoggie Ryan. Thank you.”

Katrina shook hands with Hoggie and then walked toward Ronan’s grocery to buy a lemon. She saw the collie sitting in the shade of a porch. As she passed, the dog wagged its tail.

Katrina put a chiffon scarf around her shoulders to hide the blood on her blouse; then she and Annie carried the ale and three glasses to Emmett’s room. Katrina gave a glass to Edward, one to Dr. McArdle, and put one on a table for Father Loonan, drawing an instant rebuke from Emmett.

“Do you think I wouldn’t have a glass meself?” he asked. “And one for each of you.” The speech cost him strength, and he coughed, and slumped, then closed his eyes to rest for the next challenge.

“I’ll go,” Annie said, and while she went for more glasses, Katrina spread a white table scarf on Emmett’s bedside table, then set out the paraphernalia Father Loonan requested: the holy water, a tablespoon, glass of water, wad of cotton, salt cellar, heel of bread, lemon sliced in two, two candleholders with blessed candles, the crucifix, and the palm fronds she undid from behind the torso of Jesus. The table was so crowded that she and Edward brought down a long table from the attic to give proper space to the final necessities.

When Annie came in with the glasses Emmett opened his eyes. “Is no one goin’ to pour the ale?” he asked.

“At your service,” said Dr. McArdle, and he poured for those in the room, giving the first to Emmett, who took the glass and looked at it, then set it beside a blessed candle.

“I think you did this just to have a drink your doctor couldn’t object to,” Katrina said. “You don’t look like you’re dying.”

“Half me life I didn’t look like I was livin’. It evens out,” Emmett said. And he closed his eyes again.

When Annie came back with Father Loonan, Doc McArdle poured an ale and handed it to him.

“What’s this?” the priest asked.

“I know you like your ale,” Emmett said.

“I never denied it,” the priest said. “But I never had any with the last rites.”

“It goes good with everything,” Emmett said.

“Emmett Martin Daugherty,” Edward said, “we’re all present and accounted for. What’s your pleasure? Where would you like your body anointed first, on the inside or the outside?”

“First I want to know what he does with that lemon,” Emmett said.

“It cleans the oil off my fingers,” the priest said.

“That’s clever,” Emmett said. He reached for the ale and raised the glass to the light. “By God that looks good. We’ll just have a taste.” He took a sip and others in the room did likewise. “All right,” Emmett said, “get it over with.”

“I was told you were dying,” the priest said. “But I’m not sure you’re dying.”

“That’s what I told him, Father,” Katrina said.

“I’m dyin’ nevertheless,” Emmett said. “I can’t stand on me pins anymore, and with every breath there’s a pain, and when I close me eyes I see somethin’ comin’.”

“What does it look like?” the priest asked.

“Like the inside of a fireman’s boot.”

“That’s not what heaven looks like.”

“Then I’m goin’ someplace else.”

“Since you’re able to talk, we’ll want to have a confession,” the priest said, and turning to the others he said, “If you’d all please leave the room. .”

“There’s no need,” Emmett said. “I’ve nothin’ to confess.”

“You’re a saint, then, is that it?” the priest said.

“Not hardly, but I’ve nothin’ to confess.”

“Confess the sins you forgot and I’ll forgive those.”

“I forgot none I ever committed. The memory of them kept me smiling for forty-five years.”

“I’ll forgive those. Anything else?”

“I let my wife work too hard.”

“You’ve got company on that one.”

“And I thought too little of meself,” Emmett said. “I paid too much attention to the work, and the trees in the yard, and Reilly the dog, God rest his soul.”

“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.