The Flaming Corsage

Edward Writes a New Play”, July 15, 1912

EDWARD SAT NOW in a long pause, staring out the second-floor window of his workroom at another grotesquely shadowed evening that had become abominably hot. The pages of his nameless play-in-progress lay on the desk beside the marble bust of Persephone, the only artifact of value to survive the fire. And beside that lay Emmett’s loaded.32-caliber revolver.

Emmett had bought the pistol to defend himself during labor trouble at the Fitzgibbon foundry, protection against men he’d fought for all his life; for when he became foreman, he became their enemy. Rise in the world and count your friends on your thumb.

“I could shoot it and hit what I shot at,” Emmett said, “but I never pulled the trigger in anger, or in fear. It was a useless damn gadget and I knew that the day I bought it.”

Edward looked at the pistol. He looked at his pages. He picked up his first page, read the opening scene. Sweat dropped from his forehead onto the paper.

Scene One

(The execution chamber of Sing Sing prison. Six WITNESSES sit on folding chairs facing the empty electric chair. EXECUTIONER stands near large-handled switch that will activate electric current.

WARDEN and PRIEST enter with THOMAS MAGINN, the prisoner. Two GUARDS, escorting MAGINN, seat him in electric chair, strap him into it, apply one electrode to calf of his right leg, another to cover his forehead and shaved temples.

DR. GILES FITZROY enters, walking ahead of stretcher wheeled in by another guard, and upon which lies the pale corpse of EDWARD DAUGHERTY. GILES motions to GUARD where to put stretcher: GUARD tips stretcher on its end so that DAUGHERTY corpse stands upright, facing the electric chair.)

GILES (TO WARDEN): Is the condemned ready?

WARDEN (TO PRIEST): Is he ready, Father?

PRIEST: Frankly, I don’t think he has a prayer.

WARDEN: Are you ready, Mr. Maginn?

(MAGINN breaks into hysterical laughter, which continues as he speaks.)

MAGINN: My father collected dead horses for pig food. My mother was a one-armed bitch who took in washing for cowboys. My sister was a whore at age six. My kid brother tortured cats with hatpins. My uncle gouged eyes for a dime. My family was saintly in the extreme.

(His laughter subsides somewhat.)

I’m a lucky man, the first in my family to be executed for his intelligence. The world will mark today as the day they uselessly martyred a beloved hero, and it will await my resurrection. There’s no doubt I’m the smartest man on the North American continent, given to humility at all hours, ready to play the fool for any woman with pubic hair. I also admire them shorn.

(MAGINN’s laughter is gone, his face saddens gradually. He weeps, then cries openly.)

The worth of my being is proportionate to the weight of my written work. The essence of all power in this life is defiance, malfeasance, the pox, the smile, the dollar, and comprehension of the nature of time, which is running short. In sum, I’m as unprepared for death as I was for life. But let’s get on with it.

(MAGINN is now sobbing, breathing with difficulty.)

Red pig blood, orange sunset and evening star, pale-yellow pig shit, lime-green urine, blue sky and meadow, indigo clouds, violet pussy, white horses, whiteness whitening the white white. .

(He stops sobbing, laughs hysterically.)

WARDEN (TO GILES): The condemned is ready.

GILES: Are you ready, Mr. Daugherty?

DAUGHERTY: I am.

GILES: Let it be noted for the record that the eyes of the dead Daugherty have been sewn open to enable him to witness the execution of his murderer, the fugitive whoremonger, the unrequited narcissist. Now, let us proceed. (He waves his hand to executioner, who pulls switch, sending current into maginn, who stiffens. Steam rises from his skull and from his leg. giles, checking his pocket watch, waves to executioner, who turns switch off. giles examines maginn with stethoscope and holds thermometer against his leg.)

GILES: Let it be noted that auscultation indicates the condemned still has a pulse, and the temperature of the skin is one hundred eighty degrees. All skin contacts show notable burn marks. How are you feeling, Mr. Maginn?

MAGINN: Tip-top.

GILES: Then let us continue.

(He gestures again to EXECUTIONER, who pulls switch, with same reaction from MAGINN. Not steam but smoke rises from burned flesh. GILES times this jolt with his watch, waves to EXECUTIONER, who turns off current. GILES examines MAGINN.)

GILES: The condemned heart still beats. Temperature at contact points now two hundred fourteen degrees, nicely above boiling point. Crepitation noted throughout. Anterior epithelial cells of the cornea have desquamated from the action of heat. Sclera of left eye bulges at its left corneal junction. Scalp and skin of neck have a dull, purplish hue, with blisters on temples, cheeks, and eyelids. Epidermis at flexure of knee joint has been torn away. How are you feeling, Mr. Maginn?

MAGINN (Weakly): Violet piss, golden pigs.

GILES: Then let us continue.

(He waves hand again to EXECUTIONER, etc.)

Edward stopped reading. He ordered the pages of the play and walked downstairs to the kitchen, the heat no longer tolerable. He pumped water, wet his face, hair, arms. He walked, dripping, to the front porch, sat in his father’s rocking chair, and stared at the corner of the porch. The flood this spring had tilted it another fraction of an inch eastward: fittingly askew.

He stared up the empty street and saw his young self walking off it forever (oh yes) and out of this city into worlds no boy, no man on this block, except his father, could even have imagined. Now he was back, solitary Main Streeter: no visitors, curtains drawn, answering no rings of the bell, no knocks, reading no mail, food delivered by Drislane’s.

The oaks and the elms are in full leaf, the honeysuckle bush his mother planted in 1859, when the house was new, when Main Street and Edward were new, is a tree now, yielding berries, and the robins are eating them. Nobody hates these leaves, these berries, these robins, the way people hate Edward. Neither will Edward love any of them for their overrated glory, their vaunted beatitude. You think such mindless things deserve love? Love is what you feel during yesterday’s lightning storms. And then here come the dogs.

He saw two boys with sticks running down from Broadway, chasing a dog that was leaving them behind, that ran into the horse-shoe court between Joe Farrell’s and Edward’s houses, across Francis Phelan’s backyard, and was gone.

“You won’t catch him now, boys,” Edward said, and the boys stopped and looked at him. “And there’s gardens back there. You wouldn’t want to run through them.”

“He bit me,” one boy said.

“Did he draw blood?”

The boy, in short pants, looked at his bare leg. Edward could see a line of blood from calf to ankle.

“Yeah, he got me,” the boy said.

“You should go see Doc McArdle,” Edward said. “You know where he lives?”

“Doc McArdle is dead,” the boy said.

“Is he?”

“His horse kicked him in the head.”

The boy bent his leg to look at the wound, spat on it, and rubbed up the trickle of blood with two fingers. He snapped the spit and blood off the fingers, pulled a leaf off an oak tree and wiped the wound.

“I’ll put a bandage on it,” the second boy said, and he took off the red bandanna he was wearing on his neck and tied it around his friend’s wound. The boy who’d been bitten took a few steps, limping.

“It hurts,” he said.

He picked up a stone and hurled it at the garden where the dog had fled. The second boy picked up two stones and threw them at the eastern sky that arced toward the bed of the Erie Canal that was: whelps all: the dog, the boys, Edward.

The moon sent down its light to weave an image in the branches of an oak tree, and Edward saw in it Emmett’s face: a grid of sinew and wisdom that would not stay in the grave. There, perfectly etched by leaf and moonlight, were the lines of the Emmett nose and jaw, the wry slash of smile, vanishing, then reappearing in the flickering light’s gestalt. Keeper of the flame. But there is no longer a flame. Your father is preparing for your departure, Edward.

Under this July moon, now shaped like a battered face, Edward left the porch, walked past the lot where the cattle pens used to be on Champlain Street, parallel to the tracks and the all-but-dead canal. Beyond the canal half a dozen of forty-two sawmills were still active in the Lumber District, which was dying from want of softwood: so many Adirondack pine forests denuded, so few people working in the District that for sixty years gave jobs to men by the swarm: now a zone of quiet. No more overflowing lunch crowds in Black Jack’s, no more cardsharps at the tables, no more brawls, no more dead horses in the canal, all work in the foundries now, or over the hill in the West End, at the Central’s railroad shops. Purpose vanishing from North Albany, eclipsed like the dead Irish of Connacht. Potential actualized into a living neighborhood. And then? Yes. What, then, is the potential of the new actuality?

He walked up Erie Street past the icehouse, and the site of the old wooden Sacred Heart church, where pigs and chickens came to mass, now a vacant lot. He passed the car barns. When he read the Car Barns play to his father in his sickbed (for he would not live to see it performed) Emmett had asked:

“Is that fella in the play supposed to be me?”

“Does he sound like you?”

“He does.”

“Did you say those things he says?”

“Never.”

“So there you are. You and not you, reality and fantasy in one package.”

“You’re a glib man. If you don’t change your ways you’ll come to a bad end.”

Prophetic.

He turned onto Broadway, bats swooping through the glow of streetlamps, and saw Cappy White with a growler under his arm. Edward hadn’t seen Cappy since his son, Bitsy, a softspun boy born without ears, who’d earned candy money eating live frogs for a nickel, went up in flames in church while lighting a candle for his mother, Mamie. Mamie weighed maybe five hundred pounds — nobody ever found a way to weigh her — and grew wider with the years. When Doc McArdle came to examine her dropped stomach she refused him access: “I never showed my front end to anybody but Cappy White. He was the first one, he’ll be the last one.”

Mamie stayed in the house, could not leave it even for Bitsy’s funeral, did not fit into the stairwell. When she died Cappy knocked out siding and two windows, then backed up a derrick to lift her out of bed and carry her to her own funeral. After that he took himself to bed and stayed there, leaving it only to buy food and beer. Hermit of Main Street, punished by the gods for marrying fat and cherishing a freakish child. What peculiar shapes love takes.

“Hi ya, Cappy,” Edward said.

“Who’s that?”

“Eddie Daugherty.”

“Eddie, yeah, you’re back. I heard you lost everything.”

“That’s right, Cappy.”

“So did I.”

“I know.”

“How you livin’?”

“Best way I can.”

“You still got your son,” Cappy said.

“I guess you could say that.”

“I lost my son.”

“I know you did. I hate that, Cappy.”

“So do I.”

“You get out much, Cap?”

“Nope. No reason to.”

“Maybe it’ll get better.”

“No, it won’t get no better. You oughta know that.”

“I keep wondering whether it’s finished.”

“It’s finished.”

“How do you know?”

“They ain’t nothin’ worth doin’.”

“It seems like that, all right.”

“You came back to North Albany.”

“I did,” said Edward.

“What for?”

“No place else to go.”

“That’s a good reason. So long, Eddie.”

Cappy turned toward his house and Edward thought: Now Main Street has two hermits. He walked to Jack McCall’s saloon for an ale. Respite. But maybe not. The night he moved back to Main Street he stopped at Jack’s for an ale. Smiler McMahon and Petey Parker were at the bar when he came up beside them.

“Something stinks,” Petey said.

“Yeah. We don’t need that around here,” Smiler said, and he and Petey crossed the room and sat at a table.

“I’ll have an ale,” Edward said to the bartender, a man he didn’t know, but who obviously took his cue from Smiler.

“One’s all you get,” said the bartender.

Edward let him draw the ale. He picked it up and poured it onto the floor, then let the glass drop and shatter in the puddle.

Now, through the screen door, he saw Jimmy McGrath behind the bar. Four men looked at him when he entered, then went back to their beer. Had he ceased stinking after only a month?

“What’ll it be, Eddie?” Jimmy asked.

“I’ll try an ale. The last glass I had here I never got to drink.”

“I heard about that,” Jimmy said. “And so did Jack. He fired that stupid son of a bitch. ‘Nobody tells Eddie Daugherty he can’t drink in my saloon,’ Jack said.”

Jimmy set an ale in front of Edward, then sat on his stool behind the bar.

“Here’s to Jack,” Edward said, taking a mouthful. “I thought you retired, Jim.”

“I did. Had two toes taken off from the sugar. But I come in nights when Jack needs help. Business is kinda quiet, and I’m next door. Long as I don’t stand up too long.”

“The whole neighborhood’s quiet.”

“Right. But the Tablet Company’s comin’ in up the road. They’re hiring men, and women too, they say.”

“That’ll be good for business.”

Edward took another mouthful of ale.

“Eddie,” said Jimmy, “I’m sorry about the fire, and your wife. They hit you hard.”

“That they did.”

“I remember her coming in after some ale when Emmett was dying. I didn’t serve her first, but she kept at me. She knew what she wanted, that one.”

“You could say that,” Edward said.

“The fire take everything, did it?”

“I saved some journals, inside a trunk in the cellar. They got wet but I can read them. A few books, some silver, odds and ends, a piece of marble. The rest is ashes.”

“How you gonna live now?”

“That’s a hell of a question, Jimmy.”

“People know you’re holed up down there in the house. They see the ice and the food going in. Freddy Doran, the mailman, says the letters he delivers are gone outa the box the next day.”

“I don’t read letters. They’re all about yesterday.”

“We got a letter here for you,” Jimmy said.

He went to the back bar and opened a drawer, handed a letter to Edward.

“Came about a month ago. ‘Hold for pickup,’ it says.”

When Jimmy drew beer for the men down the bar, Edward looked at the letter. Maginn’s hand. He opened it.

Old Chum Edward,

Missed you at your opening night. If you’re up for a bit of a chat, look me up at 65 Division Street, any time. Always a pleasure to see you.

M

Edward pocketed the letter, finished his ale.

“Another?” Jimmy asked.

“I’ll move along,” Edward said.

“Anything I can do, say the word,” said Jimmy.

“If I ever figure out the word I’ll let you know.”

He walked back to Main Street and climbed the stairs to his workroom. He noted the time, nine-forty-five on the mantel clock, as he picked up the revolver from the desk. He put it in his back pocket and walked down the stairs, feeling the bulk of the pistol, opened the front door and stepped onto the porch. He stared at the long shadows the trees made on Main Street’s bricks, at the sky incandescent with moonlight. The brilliant blackness was suffusing his being like an elixir of resolution. He took the pistol from his pocket and stared at it. He saw Emmett’s finger on the trigger. There is a reason for everything.

He walked into the house and through the hallway to the kitchen, down the back steps and across the yard to Emmett’s toolshed. He found matches and candle and lit them. He saw Emmett’s vise covered with dust. He broke open the pistol and let the six bullets fall onto the workbench. He opened the vise jaws and put the pistol barrel between them, tightened the jaws. He took down a small sledgehammer from its hook and swung, then swung it again, and again, until the pistol broke in three pieces. He opened the vise jaws, tossed the pieces and the bullets into the trash bucket.

Giles, Felicity, and I bring you greetings even so, Maginn.