“You bought me a horse?”
“He’s in Baltimore,” said Edward. “And he’s yours. We can have him brought up now, or wait for the spring meeting at Island Park, whatever you prefer. He’s a handsome animal, and a winner if there ever was one.”
“Gallant Warrior is a very classy animal, Jake,” Archie said. “He did very well on the circuit this year. He ran second in the Kentucky Futurity.”
“Where did you get the money?” Jacob asked Edward.
“You’d be surprised how much novels and plays earn when people like them.”
“Which play?”
“Several. Does it matter?”
Jacob smirked, then looked again at the sketch. “You bought me a horse,” he said.
From the inside pocket of his coat Edward took a fold of papers and set them in front of Jacob.
“The bloodline, and the ownership papers in your name.”
“This is astounding,” said Jacob. “Gallant Warrior. He must have cost you a fortune.”
“What good is money if you don’t spend it on something of value?” said Edward, and he raised his wineglass. “And now, may I wish a joyful holiday to all here, with the sincere hope that harmony settles on our lives in the new year.”
The others answered his toast, amid small smiles and waning tension. Katrina surreptitiously patted her husband’s hand.
“I must add,” said Edward, “that the last play I wrote will earn neither me nor my producers any more money. When its run ends next month in Philadelphia, I’m withdrawing it from performance forever. You probably know which play I’m talking about.” He stared at Jacob Taylor.
“You’re a clever fellow, Daugherty,” Jacob said. “A very clever fellow.”
“So they tell me,” Edward said.
The play was Edward’s latest work, The Baron of Ten Broeck Street, a satiric social comedy about a wealthy lumber baron (very like Jacob Taylor) that had earned Edward considerable money and a notable increment of theatrical fame. It owed its existence to Edward’s quest to balance his bias; for his previous play, The Stolen Cushion, had satirized Albany’s lofty Irish bourgeoisie as they were reduced socially by an influx of crude Irish immigrants. Those Irish vied with the Negroes for the nadir of American social status, and, some thought, won. In the play Edward mocked social rising based solely on money. His private quest, he told himself, was to raise the Irish to the intellectual level of nativist Americans, prove the educability of greenhorn multitudes, as he had proven his own, and show those same multitudes how to transcend the peasant caste into which they’d been born.
Instead, the Cushion brought down on his crown not only the wrath of the acquisitive Irish, which he had expected, but also the hostility of his father.
“Who isn’t looking for a better life?” said Emmett, who had never forgiven Dickens (“that arrogant beggar”) for his scurrilous portrait of Irish peasants near Albany in 1842, a year when Emmett himself was struggling upward from the shame of being least; and he now found it necessary, half a century later, to scold his son for the similar dishonor the Cushion represented.
Edward had written the Baron in part because of Katrina’s estrangement from her father, not only for her marriage, but for converting to the Roman Catholic faith. Despite the family hostility, Katrina clove to Edward with fierce loyalty, and married him in Sacred Heart church. Her father endured the formalities of the wedding and gave Katrina away, but as the meaning of her decision pressed in on him he grew more hostile and distant. Because of this, writing a satire on Jacob Taylor’s image had seemed to Edward not only apt, but safe. But when the play appeared to resounding huzzahs, first in Albany, then New York and Boston, Katrina quixotically reembraced not only her father, but also the lush comforts of the house on Elk Street, where he had raised her with nannies and servants; and she now yearned for this house in ways Edward judged to be nearly irrational.
Withdrawing the Baron from performance was a small loss, a stroke that Edward hoped would render all Taylors respectful of his apparently selfless ways. But in fact he was done with satire and social tracts that aim to reform scoundrels and pave the way to proletarian heaven. Changing the world is elevating work, but better if he could dramatize the mind of Katrina, that complex creature who so dominated his life.
He looked at her sitting beside him, in awe, as always, of her gifts: that serene beauty which masked such lambent passion, those prismatic charms that had taken root in his soul and made him her slave: as a whip makes a cur.
“Are you enjoying your dinner, Katrina?” he asked her.
“You were quite brilliant, my love,” she said softly. “You did it all with such panache.”
I did it all for the venal streak at the bottom of your elegant heart, he said silently; for his capitulation to Jacob Taylor was, above all, his recognition that unless he acted swiftly, his marriage would bleed to death from Katrina’s imagined wounds. He had built their house on a Colonie Street plot next to the Christian Brothers school he had attended. Jack McCall touted him to availability of the land and also built his own home on the same street.
Colonie was an Irish street in the erstwhile aristocratic neighborhood of Arbor Hill, where many of Albany’s lumber barons lived. Edward built the house for Katrina as a scaled-down replica of the Taylors’ Gothic Revival town house, and, to assuage her loss of the resplendencies she had left behind, he was now refurnishing the interior of the Colonie Street replica in that halcyon Elk Street image — crystal, engravings, chairs, fabrics, lamps — all in the Taylor mode, so that she might simulate her past whenever her fits of neurasthenic nostalgia descended.
While the remodeling proceeded, Edward, Katrina, and their seven-year-old son, Martin, were staying on Main Street with Emmett, who was alone there since Hanorah’s death in the spring of ’94.
Since the Baron’s first production, in spite of Edward’s elaborate efforts to comfort her, Katrina had lapsed into prolonged silences, offered him vacant stares and listless, infrequent sex. Edward at first perceived these as her quirkish reaction to his play, but came to believe in a deeper cause: her vengeance against him for luring her away from her maidenly joys with his eloquent tongue, his hot love.
Now his resentment was growing: a muffled fury accumulating toward his wife of eight years. He was stifling it at this instant, admiring the assertive swatch of color the corsage of violets made on her breast, when the waiter served the lobster gratiné. For no reason except his strange intuition to monitor portent, Edward then took his watch from his waistcoat pocket and noted the hour, eight forty-one o’clock, and that Toby, the elevator operator, was waddling, at the highest speed his stubbiness allowed, across the dining room to the maître d’. Edward saw Toby whisper a message, and then return on the run to the hallway, from which Edward now saw smoke entering the dining room.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the maître d’ announced in a loud but thoroughly courteous voice, “I suggest that everyone leave with all swiftness. The hotel is on fire.”
Edward grabbed Katrina and Adelaide by the arm and moved rapidly away from their table toward the rushing and already whimpering throng that formed an instant clot in the dining room’s double doorway. Edward saw the maître d’ and Maginn already in the hallway beyond the clot, turned to see Jacob and Geraldine just behind him, and then he rammed himself into the edge of the clot, his force breaking the impasse and sending people stumbling into the hallway toward the stairwells.