The Flaming Corsage

Edward Completes his Play at the Kenmore Hotel

IN THE SPRING months when he was trying to finish The Flaming Corsage, Edward was accumulating evidence that he owned only half a brain, half a heart, that his talent had decayed, all fire gone from his imagination. With his early plays he had run blindfolded into the unknown and come away with the prize, or believed he had. But now he knew that despite his relentless work, something was missing. This play did not end, it aborted. Three years of writing and he had produced a ridiculous lie, an evasion, a travesty of the truth. Nothing will save it from savagery by all who see it.

There is blood in your mouth, Edward.

The enemy applauds your fate.

He decided Maginn must have lived all his life in this condition: full of desire and effort, but a creative cripple: inadequate strength to imagine the substance of the work, and an intelligence too arrogant to shape it. The love song of the wrong word.

Then Katrina died, and Edward sat at the desk in the parlor of his hotel suite and began a new ending for the play — already in production with the flawed ending. He wrote the night she died; wrote most of the following two days, except for some time with Martin, and arranging the funeral. After the mass, while waiting for the undertaker, he began yet another version of the final scene, one with promise. After the burial he reread the scene and let it stand.

The two as measured distance. The absence that grows in the fertile earth.

He hired the young woman typewriter-copyist in the hotel’s office to make three copies, and was at the theater to hand them to the director and actors when they arrived in the evening for the final run-through.

Too late to change this much dialogue, the director said. It absolutely must be changed, Edward said. I’ll never memorize it in time, the lead actor said. Oh yes, you will, said Edward. And the play opened Saturday night with the final dialogue dictated by Katrina.

Edward watched the performance from the aisle of the parquet. When the houselights went up on the clamor that greeted the end of the play, Edward saw Maginn in a forward box with a woman, and moved toward him immediately. But he was met by the exiting throng and lost Maginn in the crowd.

The play closed after one performance.