The Flaming Corsage

Edward Rediscovers Katrina, November 1884

EDWARD HAD ENTERED Katrina’s world at the adolescent moment when he registered at Albany Academy to begin the education Lyman Fitzgibbon, Geraldine Taylor’s father, had ordained for him. Edward’s father, Emmett Daugherty, came to this country from County Galway in 1836 at age fourteen, and at eighteen hired on as coachman for Lyman’s Adirondack expedition, an extended trip to acquire land for the railroad, lumbering, and mining interests that were central to Lyman’s bountiful life. The expedition encountered hostility in a remote Warren County hamlet that was so new it lacked a name. Lyman and his lawyer were taken captive by townsmen, who foresaw accurately that these interlopers were about to change life as they knew it; and they prepared tar and feathers for them. Young Emmett Daugherty, as truculent as the next man when called upon, picked up a fallen tree branch and felled the townsmen’s ringleader, then garroted him with a horsewhip and, by legend, told the man’s cronies, “Turn those men loose or I twist the tongue out of his head,” the tongue already halfway out.

That was July 1840, and Lyman vowed Emmett would never want for anything again, and that his children would have the best education available.

Edward was born to Emmett and Hanorah Sweeney on Main Street in the North End in 1859, went to the North End public school for five years, then three years to the Christian Brothers boys’ school on Colonie Street in Arbor Hill, Emmett insisting that Edward first discover the workingman’s God before going off to study among pagans and Protestants.

Lyman Fitzgibbon was London-born (1805), Oxford-educated, a translator of Tacitus’ Germania, wealthy early in life, a British diplomat at midlife, and, as British consul in France, rescuer of Louis-Philippe in the revolution of 1848. For his inventions relating to metalworking machinery he was called “the merchant-scientist” and, along with his stove-making foundry and investments, he became not only Albany’s richest man, but its most variously eminent. He was also Edward’s godfather.

Through the benediction of this eminence, Edward, when he enrolled in the Academy, entered the elite circle of Albany’s social life, became close friends with boys whose fathers ran the city, was invited to dances with debutantes, sleigh rides and tobogganing expeditions out to the Albany County Club, and dinners at the Fort Orange Club as Lyman’s guest. On such occasions he came to know the young Katrina Taylor, Lyman’s granddaughter, but she was six years his junior, a child. They grew up as friendly “common-law cousins,” as he called their relationship. They were separated by Edward’s years at Columbia College, when he lived in New York City, and later by his western trip to research the lives of the Irish workers who had built the Erie, men whose achievement his father had invoked often, and about whom Edward was writing his first novel. And so it was not until the night the Democrats marched in the vast torchlight parade celebrating Cleveland’s defeat of Blaine in the presidential election that Edward encountered the maturing Katrina.

The city was explosive with lights, bonfires, fireworks, and parties to hail the new chief of state from Albany, and a line of thousands of marchers, their oil-lit torches creating a dancing serpent of lights, moved past more thousands of cheering spectators in a triumphal procession up State Street’s steep incline. Edward watched from the stoop of Lyman’s home, an august four-and-a-half-story brownstone facing on State Street and, like other homes on this night, festooned with Chinese lanterns. More lanterns bloomed like bizarre forms of fruit on Lyman’s trees, and buildings across the street displayed the American and Irish flags, and huge images of Grover Cleveland.

In the crowd on the sidewalk a woman caught Edward’s eye when she opened a yellow parasol and held it aloft over her yellow bonnet as the parade approached. The band played and the marchers yelled in left-right cadence: “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of Maine,” and Edward recognized the woman with the yellow bonnet as Katrina. He went down the stoop and stood behind her and parted her shoulder. When she turned to him he saw a Katrina (she was “Katch” to him as a child) he’d never known.

“My God, how lovely you look, Katch,” he said. “What have you done to yourself? You’re positively beautiful.”

“I suppose I’ve grown up. But so have you. You look very much a man of the world, Edward.”

“And so I like to think that I am. But even as a man of the world I don’t understand why you open your parasol when it is neither sunny nor raining.”

“It well might rain oil on my new bonnet from those dreadful torches. And I would not like that at all.”

The marchers broke into a new chant: “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?” a Blaine campaign slogan about Cleveland’s bastard son. But the electorate shrugged off this scandal, and the marchers now voiced the new, answering gibe: “Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!”

“That is so funny, and so just,” Katrina said.

“Didn’t his fathering a child out of wedlock scandalize you?”

“He never denied the boy, and he took care of him. He’s a courageous man, Mr. Cleveland.”

“You have a modern outlook on the matter, for a woman.”

“I am a modern woman.”

“So you say. And so you may be.”

Katrina spotted Giles Fitzroy riding with a dozen men from the Jacksonians. She called his name and waved to him.

“It’s Giles,” she said. “He’s riding Phantom Guest. What a beautiful horse. This is all so wonderful. We really, really, really won. It’s staggering, isn’t it?”

“Cleveland owes his election to me, did you know that?”

“No, you must tell me. Did you vote a thousand times?”

“Not quite. Are you going to Lyman’s party?”

“Of course.”

“Then I’ll tell you there.”

They watched the paraders: all the Democratic clubs, many carrying brooms for a clean sweep, and the Irish-American Association (with which Emmett Daugherty marched), and the German Democratic Business Men, the Dry Goods Cleveland Club stepping to the rhythms of the Tenth Infantry Band, and the Flynn Fife and Drum Corps, and so many more, moving up to Capitol Park, where the President-elect waved down from his executive chamber.

When all paraders had passed, Edward and Katrina went into Lyman’s house, where bustling servants were setting out punch bowls and placing vases of flowers on tables and mantels.

“We’re early,” Edward said, and he greeted the servants and steered Katrina by the arm into the conservatory. She sat on a bench with her parasol in her lap, and Edward looked long at her and studied the phenomenal change in her face, the way she combed her hair, the way she held herself with such poise, such an air of certainty about who and what she was.

“You are dazzling tonight, Katch,” he said. “How old are you now?”

“I’m about to be nineteen, thank you.”

“Is anybody paying court to your radiant self?”

“I have my admirers.”

“Permit me to join their number. Where have I been?”

“You should control yourself and tell me how you elected the President.”

He leaned on the back of her bench and put his eyes in line with hers. Looking at her face silenced him.

“Well?” she said.

“Yes, the election. I’d much rather look at you. I went to a dinner party at the Fort Orange Club to meet the Governor, and Lyman introduced me as ‘the talented son of a fine Irishman whose vote you need.’ Mr. Cleveland agreed the Irish vote was important and asked who my father might be.

“ ‘Emmett Daugherty, foreman at Lyman’s foundry,’ I told him, ‘but I doubt he’ll vote for you, Governor. He’s very angry with all politicians, and so is the whole North End. Father Loonan, the pastor of Sacred Heart church, talks of it every Sunday from the pulpit, and a North End saloonkeeper with a keen political eye says his customers are talking Blaine. North Enders are Democrats, but this year it’s up for grabs.’

“ ‘Why are they so angry with me?’ the Governor asked me.

“ ‘You, the Mayor, the aldermen, everybody who forces them to live in mud,’ I said. ‘Anybody who hasn’t delivered any pavement to North Albany’s streets or sidewalks. It’s an old, old promise nobody’s ever kept. They see Elk Street, where your wealthy friends live, being paved with granite blocks, while they’re still riding on rotting planks in a sea of mud. After a rain they have to put bog shoes on their horses to get home. And they blame you.’

“ ‘Do you know Father Loonan?’ says the Governor.

“ ‘I do,’ says I.

“ ‘Bring him and this saloonkeeper — what’s his name?’

“ ‘Jack McCall. Black Jack, they call him.’

“ ‘Bring Black Jack and the good father up to see me. We’ll have a chat.’

“ ‘I’ll do that tomorrow,’ says I.

“ ‘Do you know anybody else who doesn’t like me?’ the Governor says.

“ ‘Aren’t the North End Irish enough?’ says I.

“I had no trouble convincing Jack and Father Loonan to visit the Governor. He saw us straightaway and had Mayor Banks in the office with him. They listened to the complaints about mud and the Governor asked the Mayor could he get the contractor paving Elk Street to start on Broadway in North Albany? The Mayor said the city had let no contract to pave Broadway.

“ ‘Well, let one,’ said the Governor. ‘We’ll get you reimbursed. But get the crews out there tomorrow.’ And the Mayor said he’d get on it.

“The Governor thanked me for my enterprise; then he and Black Jack got off on fishing and it was as if they’d known each other forever. ‘We’ll have to go to the mountains one day and get some trout,’ the Governor said, and on the way out Father Loonan told me I ought to run for governor when Cleveland leaves. I said I couldn’t, that I was a writer.

“The next day, workers put granite blocks on Broadway, starting in front of Sacred Heart church. We had a rally five nights later and five hundred heard Jack’s speech. They marched and chanted against Blaine, the highway robber from the state of Maine. It was the biggest political turnout in neighborhood history. And Blaine’s support went the way of North Albany mud.

“Cleveland carried the state by one thousand one hundred and forty-nine votes,” Edward said. “Only five hundred and seventy-five votes would have reversed those results, and the Democratic plurality in North Albany was six hundred and seventy-seven.”

“Why, you’re a miracle worker,” Katrina said.

“I’m glad you understand that about me,” Edward said.

People were arriving from the parade, and Lyman’s valet was helping him down the stairs to the parlor to greet them.

“He looks so frail lately,” Katrina said.

“Only his body. His mind is very astute.”

“He’s terribly fond of you,” Katrina said.

“He’s like a second father,” Edward said. “And he’s crazy about you. But right this minute I’m crazier about you than he is.”

“You are turning this girl’s head, sir.”

“I mean to do nothing else, as soon as I’m able. I have obligations for a month or two.”

“I’m abandoned before I’m courted.”

“You will not be abandoned. I intend to pursue you with a fervid Irish passion, unlike anything you’ve ever imagined. But I must finish what I’ve begun.”

“And what is it you’ve begun?”

“A novel I’ve been writing for more than a year, the key to my new life. One key. You are the other.”

“You’ve become an impetuous man, Edward.”

“I am a man instantly in love. Do you mind if I love you?”

“I have never been so flattered, or so quickly.”

“I have just begun to flatter you. I have just begun to worship you.”