“Beauty regards beauty,” came Edward’s voice, and Katrina turned to see him in his phaeton two-seater, looking so spirited, so ebullient, even sitting stilclass="underline" as fine a figure, she suddenly decided, as she would find this side of the angels. She walked toward him and he took off his hat to greet her and leaped down to take her hand, help her up into the seat beside his own.
“I didn’t expect this day,” he told her. “Your invitation thrilled me. But how did you get here?”
“I have my slaves,” she said.
His dark-brown eyes focused only on her and she thought he owned the handsomest head of brown hair imaginable, and she thought: I’ll bet he took off his hat to woo me with his hair.
“Do we have a destination?” he asked.
“Where the road leads,” she said, and Edward told his horse to take them along it.
Katrina could navigate all of the cemetery’s vast natural beauty, knew each vale, brook, and ravine, knew the cypress grove, the pond by the elm woods. And she knew many of its residents, could identify the replica of Scipio’s tomb where Jared Rathbone, Lyman’s old friend and business enemy, was buried, and the thirty-six-foot Doric column commemorating Albany’s heroic Revolutionary general, Philip Schuyler, and the granite sarcophagus of General James Rice, once of Elk Street, who, dying at Spotsylvania, said, “Let me die with my face to the foe,” and Thurlow Weed, founder of the Albany Evening Journal, whose Republican politics her father detested, and the very, very rich William James, whose grandson Henry wrote novels of great convolution that intimidated Katrina, and the banker Billings Learned, Katrina’s favorite capitalist, who wrote on his wife’s headstone: “Wife, I thank my God upon every remembrance of you.”
These notable graves gave comfort to Katrina in her pursuit of love, perhaps marriage. This gilded world of the familiar dead, a world into which she had been born and raised, filled her soul with cultivated joy, for her mother had sensitized her to the splendor of an eminent death, which, as all know, perpetuates an eminent life.
But now the beat of her heart also importuned Katrina, and as they came to a grove of blue spruces, with no monuments or people in sight, she said to Edward, “Stop here. It’s all as I remember. No corner of the world more beautiful.”
While Edward tethered his horse, Katrina climbed down from the carriage and, with blanket in hand, walked to a shaded place beneath the holy trees, whose wood was one of the principal sources of her father’s abundant wealth. The tall spruces had shed needles and cones in a soft carpet upon the earth, and atop this carpet Katrina spread Giles’s blanket. She unpinned her hat and set it on the blanket, then sat and looked up at Edward, who was watching her private drama play itself out.
“Come and sit,” she said.
“You seem to know exactly what you’re doing,” Edward said. “This is indeed a secret place.”
“I’ve been thinking about it endlessly, ever since your talk with my parents.”
“The hymeneal event,” he said. “Does this mean you finally have an answer to my question?” He took off his coat and sat beside her.
“Put your face near mine,” she said. “I want to know how I’ll react.”
Edward moved close and, when their noses almost touched, he smiled.
“Stop smiling,” she said.
They studied each other’s eyes, mouth, hair. She parted her lips and moved her mouth onto his. She held the kiss, stopped it, withdrew to a distance of inches.
“I like it,” she said.
He took the game away from her and kissed her, as he well knew how to, and she folded herself into a condition for which anterior planning could not have prepared her.
“Oh that is very good,” she said, and she resumed the kiss. When it came to a stillness she stared for a long time at Edward, decisions being made by her eyes and by a pervasive bodily tension that was thrilling.
“It’s clear,” she said, “that we now have to do the rest. I’ve worn as few garments as possible.”
“The rest?” Edward said.
“I’ve read all about this,” Katrina said. “It’s nineteen days since my time. I now have nine days when I cannot conceive. It’s an ideal moment for the estrus to strike, and strike it has.”
“This is a very bold act, Katrina.”
“You don’t accept me?”
“I accept with great heart but wild misgiving. We’re marked forever if something happens.”
“I sense the ecstasy I’ve heard about. I want to be certain it exists.”
“I love you for this, Katrina, more than I loved you yesterday, and I didn’t think that possible. You’re a wonder.”
“You’re all the world to me now, Edward. But I must confirm that you are truly real. Do you understand?”
“I don’t think I understand why we’re establishing my reality in the cemetery.”
“We’ll die before we get to it if you don’t shut up,” and she arched her buttocks off the blanket, raised her skirts to her waist, and unbuttoned the top of her dress as Edward fell on his knees in front of her.
“Why seek ye the living among the dead?” the Angel asked Katrina, and her answer came that, in her, there had taken root the truths of her poet: that death is the divine elixir that gives us the heart to follow the endless night, that it is the mystical attic, the poor man’s purse, the mocker of kings, the accursed’s balm, the certain loss that vitalizes possession. She feared it not at all, and chose to behave as if each moment were the ultimate one; and this consistency, to the end of her days, would astonish all who knew her.
Edward, who had won her eye with his brash flirtation, and now was gaining her virginal body, believed he was the privileged one to be given such a sumptuous gift as the mythic ideal that was Katrina. And he told himself: You, Edward Daugherty, you, now prostrate on this exquisite altar, you own a fortunate heart.
After a time that he would remember not by its length but by the intensity of his joy, he felt and heard her approaching her peak, felt it also in himself, and he moved out from her sweet place to spill his seed on the carpet of brown pine needles; for God can be tempted only so far.
“Are you always so cautious with life?” Katrina asked.
“I don’t want to lose you, now that I have you,” he said.
“Because you did that, did you love me less?”
“Because you court danger,” he replied, “do you love me more?”
“You don’t understand,” Katrina said.
“Perhaps it’s you who don’t understand.”
“We’ll marry in the spring, I understand that,” she said.
“People are already trying to stop us.”
“We’ll overcome them.”
“Love will prevail over everything.”
“We’ll live like no other people ever lived.”
“Only death will undo us,” he said.
“Amen,” she said.
Confirmed anew that a voluptuous woman is the universe’s greatest gift to a man, Edward turned back to Katrina, bent low and kissed her mouth. Stroking himself then, because this must not end, and seeing and feeling Katrina’s blood on his hand, he made his inward thrust, thinking: Do whatever you will, Lord. This is worth it.
Edward Brings Katrina Home to Main Street, October 20, 1885
MAIN STREET WAS the second-last street in the North End, one of five block-long streets that sloped down from Broadway to the railroad tracks and the Lumber District. After these streets only a few isolated houses dotted Broadway before the Bull’s Head tavern and Island Park racetrack, and then came the open road that ran north toward Troy Houses stood only on the north side of Main, the south side as wooded with oak and maple and elm as it had been the day Dutchmen first left their boat to set foot on this land of the Mohawks. The five small streets were a community to Edward, a cul-de-sac of rustic, harmonious life, lived adjacent to the chug and clatter of Albany’s three lifelines: the rail, the canal, and the river. As he turned the corner in his carriage, Edward saw his mother and the Whites standing in front of the Daugherty house, then saw his father’s head halfway out the bedroom window.