She entered her empty house, the servants gone until dinner, and left her bag and her hat in the drawing room. She made tea for herself in the kitchen and carried it on a tray to Edward’s office, where she set it atop his desk. She sat in Edward’s chair and took one of his lined tablets from the drawer. She sipped the tea as she considered the questions she would write answers to on the tablet.
“What, really, was my destiny?” she wrote.
She put her head down on the desk in acquiescence to the drowsiness the question evoked in her. She slept for she knew not how long, and awoke smelling smoke. She went to the window of the office and parted the curtains to see the Christian Brothers school next door in flames. It was clear to her that the fire would make the leap to this room in a matter of minutes. She went back to Edward’s chair and put her head down on his desk. The smoke was familiar in her mouth. She had breathed fire before.
Edward and Katrina Revisit the Cemetery, May 10, 1912
AFTER THE HOUSE burned, and Katrina died in his arms, Edward moved what was left of his life into a parlor suite at the Kenmore Hotel and began the process of gently evicting the Cohallon family from Emmett and Hanorah’s Main Street house: his house now, his only house now. He put Katrina in the hands of Ebel Campion, whose undertaking parlors were only two blocks from where she died, with instructions that there would be no wake, only a funeral mass in Sacred Heart church, and then private burial. He would not abide strangers ogling her corpse.
The buzzards were already at work on the leftover carrion from the Love Nest scandal, writing how the debauchery of the ogre Daugherty had shamed Katrina, hastened her death; and cheering — were they not? — for the innocent Melissa, who had replied to the evil done her by gaining much-deserved movie stardom. There they perched, at the edge of Edward’s life, anticipating new morsels from The Flaming Corsage, which would open May 11, the fourth day after Katrina’s death; for the show must go on now, Mr. Ogre, or not at all.
Sacred Heart church was filled, even to standing room, and hundreds more jammed the church steps, and Walter Street’s sidewalk, twenty minutes before the small cortege arrived. Six bearers carried Katrina’s coffin up the steps into the church, photographers recording her ascent, then moving their tripods to focus on Edward, impeccably tailored in black suit with cutaway coat and beaver hat, stepping down from the first carriage, with Martin next, dressed like his father, and then the heavily veiled Geraldine, triadic study in family distance. Geraldine’s brother, Ariel, and Archie Van Slyke came in the second carriage, then other relatives, friends.
As they entered the church in procession, Edward saw, first, the blaze of color on the altar: the dozen baskets of yellow flowers he had sent to brighten the solemnity for Katrina, then saw, with sharper focus, faces from North Albany, Colonie Street, Elk Street: Francis and Annie Phelan, and old Iron Joe with them; and Jack and Ruthie McCall, she refusing to measure his eye; and the Phelans: Peter, Chick, Molly, and Tommy, all in one pew; and Bishop Sloane, flanked by a brace of Minor Canons, bowing ecclesiastically to Geraldine as she passed him; and so many, many more neighbors and forever-nameless witnesses to the lamentable truth: that Katrina Selene Taylor Daugherty is no more.
Father Loonan, without the stamina to say mass, sat in trembling witness on the altar, as Edward had asked of him: Katrina’s counselor in the faith when she converted. Three other priests would celebrate Katrina’s passing with a solemn high mass, and Father Loonan, at the proper moment, feeble but clear of speech, and wearing his simple cassock and surplice, would stand and read the Gospel, not only from the mass for the dead, but also from the mass for the previous day on the liturgical calendar, as if the two Gospels were one; and Edward found the addition of the latter Gospel more than accidental redundancy: “. . You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt lose its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is good for nothing any more, but to be cast out, and to be trodden on by men. You are the light of the world. A city seated on a mountain cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but upon a candle-stick, that it may shine to all that are in the house. .”
Yea, verily, Father. Edward will make Katrina shine for all in the house. Come and see his play.
Ebel Campion and his bearers carried Katrina’s coffin out of the church to the hearse, then drove it not to St. Agnes Cemetery, as expected, but back to the funeral home, where it remained for hours, until the last of the snuffling press had abandoned its watch. The undertaker then put the coffin into the closed wagon he used for picking up corpses, a vehicle never pressed into cemetery service before; then, with one bearer who could be trusted to keep his mouth shut, rode to the Kenmore to pick up Edward and Martin, and transported the Daugherty family to Albany Rural Cemetery, to the plot Edward had bought for Katrina, twenty yards from the grove of blue spruces where she had offered up her virginity to him.
Without prayer, the four men lowered her into the newest grave in this gateway to the Protestant beyond, the heaven where Katrina would be most at ease, and watched silently as two gravediggers arrived to bury the coffin and fill the grave with fresh earth. When the workers departed, Edward asked his son, “Do you want to say anything?”
Martin shook his head. “You really need a ritual at this point?”
Edward smiled at the new clarity in Martin, done with adolescence at last, his face refined to a mature handsomeness, a young man who speaks with a quiet fluency that belies the anger Edward sees in him.
“You’re a man who uses words, as am I,” Edward said.
“I’ve already spoken my words to her,” Martin said.
“Before or after she died?”
“Before.”
“That smacks of excellence,” Edward said. “I applaud your initiative.”
“Your applause sounds like parental pride for what you’ve instilled in me.”
“I think your mother would not want us to argue at her grave.”
“She wanted us reconciled.”
“And so we are,” Edward said. “We’re together. We have each other. We have no one else.”
“I don’t feel reconciled,” Martin said. “I seem unable to forgive what you did to us.”
“Understandably so. But it’s a pity you see the world from only one perspective.”
“You mean I should take her madness into consideration? I’ve watched it since I was a child.”
“She wasn’t mad, she was original.”
Edward took a step forward and spoke to the grave.
“I don’t know what she believed,” he said, “but it was a belief like none other. She began with God and moved on to death, and made them part of her being. But she abandoned both to astonish her soul. She sought something no one expects out of this life, and sought it with a firm purpose that she defined and executed without the advice or consent of others. She might have been judged an ascetic in another time, for she was much in love with suffering, her own and others’. She was also seraph and voluptuary, of such uncommon ways she seemed to preexist the fall; and there is no name for such a hybrid in our limited world, or our limited heavens. But she does not need justification. Katrina dwelled among us, and we are thankful for that. We will regret forever that she has willfully left us.”
“Willfully?” said Martin. “What do you mean?”
“Her time had ended. She knew it.”
“The fire killed her.”
“Of course it did,” said Edward. “It was her element.”
Edward Completes his Play at the Kenmore Hotel
IN THE SPRING months when he was trying to finish The Flaming Corsage, Edward was accumulating evidence that he owned only half a brain, half a heart, that his talent had decayed, all fire gone from his imagination. With his early plays he had run blindfolded into the unknown and come away with the prize, or believed he had. But now he knew that despite his relentless work, something was missing. This play did not end, it aborted. Three years of writing and he had produced a ridiculous lie, an evasion, a travesty of the truth. Nothing will save it from savagery by all who see it.