(KATRINA picks up photo album, raises it for EDWARD to see.)
KATRINA: Yes, Peer Gynt. Look at this wonderful picture of Adelaide and me up at Schroon Lake. What a wonderful summer that was. It was my fault she died.
EDWARD: More madness. You stay alive through the death of others. Pain and guilt, romantic despair, the tragic dimension. If you’d abandon this melodrama and let the dead stay dead, we’d be happier.
KATRINA: I should have died in the Delavan.
EDWARD: I should have died when Giles shot me.
KATRINA: Giles wasn’t your fault. You behaved admirably during that terrible episode. Admirably.
EDWARD: I behaved like a fool, the only way I knew how. Look at me, Katrina. Leave the dead. Let’s salvage the time left to us.
(KATRINA walks to the drawing room mirror, looks at her reflection.)
KATRINA: How much time do we have, Edward?
(EDWARD comes up behind her, looks into the mirror over her shoulder.)
EDWARD: You know more than I about such things.
(KATRINA turns and faces EDWARD, their faces very close.)
KATRINA: If I fainted now, would you unpin my corsage? Would you undo the buttons of my bodice to help me breathe?
When the cab was halfway down Main Street, Edward saw he had left a light on in the parlor. His pain was leveling, but would not go away. He went to the bedroom for money he kept in a jar, paid the driver, then went to the icebox. The ice was almost gone. With the pick he chipped some ice into a glass, then half-filled the glass with whiskey. Quarter to five. The whiskey and powders would take away the pain. He stared out the kitchen window at the canal and remembered Emmett in his days as the lock tender, standing here watching the boat traffic, waiting for trouble and grievance from the canalers, his problem as well as theirs to solve. It may be that the existence of the planet Neptune does not contradict the design of the solar system. How can it if it is really there?
Edward walked out the back door to Emmett’s toolshed and found the bullets and broken pieces of the pistol in the waste bucket. He picked them out and carried them to the kitchen.
“Did you ever consider,” he said to Emmett, “that I never was the Irishman on horseback? It may be I was free of racial and social destinies, and that what I wanted was altogether different from what had gone before.”
He put the bullets and pistol on the kitchen table, where Hughie Gahagan would have been sitting. The dead pistol meant something simple: sycophancy, scorn, false praise, cruelty, rage, narcissism, pain, prayer. Maginn was innocent of everything relating to success. He contrived complexity as a substitute for disuse. “If you don’t find her in one room, try the other,” he wrote on his note with the passkey.
It may be that after the worst has happened, you see that Neptune was there from the beginning, problematically, and the old orbit of death is superseded. Then you see that faith, or its mathematical equivalent, has to do with your discovery.
When Emmett wanted anything he invoked Connacht.
Booming voice.
Shorn of sustenance, shorn of the past, of love, of the theater of action, what’s left to a man? The answer, son, is the necessary sin. You won’t name it. It’s written in a forgotten code. The light’s still on in the parlor.
(The FIREMAN, a handkerchief over his mouth and nose, carries KATRINA out of the burning house in his arms and crosses the street to where EDWARD is standing. The FIREMAN lays her down on the street, unbuttons her bodice, puts smelling salts under her nose. She does not move. The FIREMAN puts his mouth on hers, breathes into her. She opens her eyes, looks at the FIREMAN, then looks past him at edward, who moves closer to her.)
KATRINA: I can see you.
EDWARD: I thought you were lost.
(The FIREMAN lifts himself away from KATRINA and exits. He waves at her as he goes. edward kneels beside KATRINA, raises her head and kisses her.)
KATRINA: I remember a poem, a woman dying in her lover’s arms. She has come down from the mountain of gold and as he holds her she turns to ashes.
EDWARD: You won’t die, Katrina. It’s wrong to die now. You won’t die, Katrina. You won’t die.
KATRINA: Life is something that should not have been.
EDWARD: I loved life when you loved me.
KATRINA: I loved you?
(Pause.)
Quite likely. I forget.
(KATRINA dies in his arms.)
Edward picked up his whiskey and walked to the front porch. He sat in the chair beside Emmett and decided mockery was a more exalted mode of behavior than was generally assumed. He sat on the porch drinking whiskey with Emmett until he grew ravenous. He thought of what he would cook.
He would fry bacon.
He would stay up and outlast Emmett. He had outlasted Martin, and the boy went back to New York. That was part of their problem. The father’s energy acknowledged the irrelevance of the future, the worship of the present tense.
He could almost smell the bacon. A pig is turned into bacon, bacon becomes food that gives unity and purpose to the imagination. Brother William died in the fire, kneeling, turned into a bent cinder. Katrina, heroine of neighborhood children, had walked into the classroom and whipped William with the same stick he’d been using to whip a boy. Katrina understood the nature of fire.
Edward, seeing the earliest blue line of things to come, finished his whiskey. Then he went to the icebox for the bacon, which will always be with us.