The Flaming Corsage

Edward Goes to the Tenderloin at a Late Hour

DIVISION STREET, FIVE blocks long, ran west from Quay Street on the river, then crossed Broadway, Liberty, Dallius, and Green Streets, which at this hour formed a neighborhood grid thrumming with the revels and lusts of the night city. This was Albany’s Tenderloin, and life was open, the streets full of motion, the Palace Lodging House catering to quick turnover, Scambelluri’s and Marino’s poolrooms, side by side, both busy, Dorgan’s Good Life Saloon, which called itself a concert hall, thriving on music for illegal dancing, for thou shalt not dance in a saloon in Albany. And on the stoops of houses with telltale awnings on their windows (business was so good Jidgie Shea had opened an awning shop on the street), whores of the white race, and one mulata on the stoop of the Creole house, were taking the air this stifling night; and together they formed a tableau of discrete enticements. Youths too poor to buy any of their offerings walked Division Street, hoping for a charitable glimpse of raised thigh, unsequestered breast.

“Come and get it,” one whore said to Edward. “Anything you want you can find right here. You don’t find it, you ain’t lookin’ for it.”

Sixty-five Division Street, a three-story brick dwelling, gave entrance off street level. It adjoined the Good Life, and Edward heard the saloon piano and banjo ringing out a ragtime melody he could put no name to as he rang the bell. A well-shaped woman in her forties, wearing high-necked blouse and long, black skirt, greeted him. Edward flashed that she should have one crossed eye, but she did not.

“You looking for company?” she asked.

“I’m looking for Maginn. Is he here?”

“He’s here,” she said, gesturing for Edward to enter.

“My name is Edward Daugherty.”

“I know who you are.”

“How is that possible?”

“He talks about you.”

Maginn talks about you, of course. He plots to destroy you. Why didn’t you know this the instant Giles blew Felicity into naked infinity? Who profited from that explosion? Yes, the cur Cully was a likely avenger. But when myopia wanes, Maginn, without doubt, emerges as the epiphanic presence at the slaughter. And you, Edward, the true target, you couldn’t see that; you and Maginn such great friends, brothers of the ink stain, comrades of the imagination. Gainsaying fool is what you were. Now here you stand, believing you can goad evil into explaining itself, wondering what the whore of justice looks like, wallowing in your pathetic desire to mean.

“He’s at the bar,” the woman said, and led the way to a large parlor furnished with two sofas and three armchairs of dark red plush, a scatter of Oriental rugs, maroon drapes on the two windows, and lighted by four electrified gas lamps with pale-blue taffeta shades. Music and tobacco smoke came through a half-open door that led to the dance floor of the saloon (Edward could see two women and two men dancing), and at the small bar at the end of the parlor a very young, carrot-haired woman, wearing a blouse that covered little of her large, shapely breasts, was pouring liquor for a man in shirtsleeves who was smoking the butt of a thin cigar. Maginn.

“Ah, Daugherty, you worthless mutt,” Maginn said, “you’re here at last. You look well for a man whose life has been destroyed.”

“You don’t look well at all, Maginn. You look shriveled. You look like a chimney sweep’s brush. Are you dying?”

“Aren’t we all? But I’ll live out the week.”

Maginn had lost hair on his head and had blackened his mustache. His skin was sallow and he was thinner by fifteen pounds from Edward’s last vision of him. A broomstraw of a man, probably venereally ravaged. His sickly look delighted Edward.

“Have you met Nell?” Maginn asked.

The woman who’d brought Edward in stood next to Maginn.

“Nell runs this emporium,” Maginn said. “She’s also my wife, my strong right arm, my favorite toss, and a font of money and strumpet wisdom. I love her like a sister. I’d be lost without her. Do you remember her?”

Edward looked at Nell and again recognized something but did not know what.

“You met in that tenebrous tent city we visited during the State Fair. You fancied her and she you, but you went forward to a more elderly crotch, while I regressed to the nubile Nell, a relationship that’s endured for, what is it now, sweet suck of my life, twenty-seven years, on and off? Nell remembers you, Edward. I reminded her how she upped her skirt for you. Would you up it again, Nell? Give him a new look at the old puss?”

“He looks like a real gentleman, is what I say. Such fine duds he’s got. The genuine article.”

“A gentleman, oh yes.” And Maginn, visibly perturbed by the remark, turned to the barmaid. “And this is Cherry. Say hello to Edward, Cherry.”

“Howdja do, Edward,” Cherry said.

Edward smiled at Cherry.

“And pour him a brandy, the best we have for this gentleman. Cherry, Edward, played the twelve-year-old virgin in the last house she worked. But she swiftly aged into this million-dollar set of tits, with only irony for a hymen. Does Cherry interest you, Edward?”

Edward said nothing.

“Let the gentleman sit down with his drink,” Nell said. “Let him get a word in.”

“Of course. Sit, Edward, sit. Get a word in, if you have any left after that theatrical debacle.”

Edward and Maginn sat in the plush, facing each other.

“Gentleman. You called him a gentleman,” Maginn said to Nell. “This is Eddie, a mick to the heel of his boot, transformed by adroit social maneuvering into the elite, affluent Edward Daugherty, Esquire, famous playwright, a bit infamous lately, though. He recently had a major opening night with his new play, staged with considerable fanfare at the Hall. But, alas, it was only another facade, a mongoloid mishmash, an ambitious botch that closed with a wail and a snivel after one performance. My condolences, Edward. Did you like my critique of it?”

“At what point did you become an assassin, Maginn?”

“Uh-oh, he’s getting personal, Nell. Time for the parade, get a bit of life in this party.”

Nell left the room, and Maginn dropped his cigar into the spittoon by his chair, then coughed and spat into it, the spew of rotted lungs, Edward hoped.

“You haven’t touched your drink, Edward, and you seem depressed. I can’t blame you, given the burden you carry, some of it my doing, I fear. Truly sorry, old fellow. I berate myself constantly for what I did. You can see how I’m suffering here. But listen, when you see the parade you’ll perk up, old Edward Edward Edward. But tell the truth, now. Isn’t that name a sham all by itself? Why not call yourself Eduardo, or Edmundo, or Oedipus, for chrissake? You always went for older women, didn’t you? Why not just be Eddie, like other micks? Edward exudes pretense. But I’ll wager it wears well in your social set.”

“You invented a brilliant scheme, Maginn — bravura insight into the very worst human impulses. And I actually might’ve died, except for Giles’s faulty aim.”

“I appreciate the compliment,” Maginn said, “but you overestimate my intention. It was a clever scheme, and I revel at the genius in it. But I was only answering Giles’s little joke — at least you got that right in your wretched melodrama. Who knew Giles harbored such violence? I saw him as one of the more gentle bigots of his tribe. Remember his joke about the Irishman whose cousin suffered two heart attacks and died, and the mick asked, ‘Did he die of the first attack or the second?’ Giles enjoyed jokes at the expense of others. A pity he didn’t live to enjoy mine.

“My plan was to repay your joke with my own, but then Giles decides to atomize the useless Felicity bitch, and his own vapid self. What an oblique bonanza! Sorry he got a bit of you in the doing, but look at you! You’ve recovered splendidly. And I knew our lovely Melissa would survive, of course. The world loves soiled innocents, when they’re beautiful and repentant of their sin. Melissa, it must be said, repents well, but doesn’t know what sin is, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I’m surprised she’s not here working for you.”

“She’s beyond my means and always was,” said Maginn. “But not beyond yours. Did you know she put Cully up to that rape of Felicity? Perverse little twat. She told Cully she’d be his if he’d rape Felicity with her looking on. She wanted to watch, and then comfort the poor, ravaged victim.”

“More lies, Maginn.”

“Cully told me this himself the day he left New York. I was with him before and after his little orgy. I even put him on the road with that story about the Albany police being after him. It was time to be rid of the lowlife pest. Didn’t Melissa tell you any of this? I was with her too, earlier that day. In your room.”

“If your fiction was half as imaginative as your lies, Maginn, you’d have been famous years ago.”

“You don’t know the truth when you hear it, Edward. You never did. But forget that and cop a sneak at these wenches.”

Nell entered ahead of three women, drew Cherry into the head of the line, then stood aside and let the four whores parade for Edward. Cherry opened her blouse, raised her offerings with her hands.

“We have two more in the stable,” Maginn said, “but they’re busy at the moment,” and he walked to the second whore and caressed her belly. “This one carries her snake-head dildo at the ready and wears an Egyptian headdress, suitable for the moving pictures. I call her Putonalissa. A French artist I met in New Orleans sketched her costume for me on a bar towel.”

“New Orleans,” Edward said. “When you went down to settle up with Cully?”

The remark stopped Maginn’s spiel, and he gave Edward a twisted look; then continued.

“This young lady with the mask and open robe we call Complicity,” he said, parting the whore’s robe with both hands. “Sweet young thing, but she carries a whip. You don’t know what to expect from Complicity.”

The third whore, a blonde, wore only a gown of transparent white chiffon, and Maginn lifted the chiffon to pat her bush. “You probably guessed the name of this fair-haired beauty already,” he said. “The lovely Beatrina, our pièce de résistance, by far our prettiest, and most angelic. I’d say her dress was suitable for a trip to Paradise, or even a walk down the old church aisle.”

Edward drank his brandy in two gulps to be rid of it. Maginn, seething with archaic rage against the divine arbiter of talent, trying to commit murder-by-whores to avenge his meager inheritance of the myth, droned on, urging the women to display themselves, even Nell, who did up her skirt, and whose freckled thighs, Edward thought with faded memory, had widened since the State Fair.

“So there you have it, Edward. Which one would cheer you most? Or would you like two? Or all five? It’s on the house, you know.”

The whores seated themselves on the sofa to await Edward’s decision and Cherry went back to the bar, her blouse askew. Nell poured Edward a new brandy and brought it to him. He sipped it, smiled at Maginn.

“I can’t tell you how much it’s meant, Maginn, seeing all this,” he said. “Ever since I met you I’ve overpraised you, especially that beastly fiction no one ever published. I got you a job you weren’t equal to, and even abided your envious tirades. I concluded you were the eternally inadequate man, Homo invidiosus, but all things keep striving for that higher form that nature designs for them, and I see tonight that you’ve climbed up from pigsty to pimpdom, up from creative myth to a career in vice, up from skulking whorehound to grand cuntmaster with a troop of trollops. Do you like that phrase? It’s very Maginnish. Vaudeville tonight! The Grand Cuntmaster Maginn and His Troop of Twisted Trollops. One night only! When the matter is ready the form will come, as I’ve been saying for years, Maginn, and you’ve evolved into absolute parity with nullity. In any world worth inhabiting, you now mean nothing at all.”

“Very good, Edward, very droll. Are you finished?”

“Not quite. There’s Cully’s confession that you incited Giles to murder. Poor Cully. He asked you for bail money and you failed him.”

“I didn’t have it. And there is no confession.”

“True, his confession disappeared from the New Orleans police files, in the same way you disappeared when police came to The Argus to ask you about Cully. But my investigator turned up the detective who took Cully’s confession, and he’s got his notes and he’ll testify. So will Clubber. So will I. And I wouldn’t put it past Melissa to put in a good word for you. My man also found a fellow who says Cully’s killers were paid to hang him, paid by somebody who looked like you.”

“You’re pathetic, Daugherty.”

“I often tell myself that. Even so, I’ve documented this, and when I got your letter I gave my report to The Argus. They’ll print it this week, with an editorial urging the case be reopened.”

Maginn picked up the spittoon beside his chair and heaved its cigar butts, slops, and globs of phlegm in Edward’s face. Edward snatched the spittoon from Maginn’s hand and swung it in a backhanded smash against his head. As Maginn staggered, Edward swung forward and smashed him full in the face, and Maginn’s face exploded with blood.

“Nell!” Maginn called up out of his weakness, collapsed sideways over his armchair, spitting out pieces of broken teeth, “Nell, do him! Do him!”

Edward turned to look for Nell and saw her right arm swinging a piece of lead pipe. It hit high on the left side of his head, and as he went down he saw Cherry moving toward him with a rag and a bottle of what he already knew was their chloroform.