“I know these are old and generic accusations, and I also know how high you’ve risen above those early scoundrels who populate your ethnic history. Only a fool would hold it against you. What a glorious heritage you have in the Staats family, paragons of religious liberty, vigorous giants of commerce, and yet there was old Jacobus Staats who scandalized his townsmen by marrying a squaw, did he not? Yes, he did, and so what? Who cares who marries whom if the bride and groom are blissful?”
Jacob squirmed, his mouth forming a rebuttal, but in his eyes the question: What exactly is this man saying? Edward poured three glasses of sherry as he spoke and, without losing a beat, put two of them in the hands of Jacob and Geraldine, downed his own, and stood and paced before them, a dynamo of pent energy made visible and audible.
“Henry James, the old man — you both know him, he went to Albany Academy before me — argues that Adam’s fall from Eden was necessary for Adam to achieve a higher plane of existence. And I mean to tell you that Katrina and I are now together at the gates of our own Eden, and we couldn’t be more sure of our happiness. If a fall is fated I believe we’ll rise to that higher plane, just as Adam did. We’ll thrive, we’ll transcend whatever society tries to do to us. We’ll move onto the grand stage and I’ll prosper formidably and achieve heights no lawyer or doctor who might court Katrina could ever know; for I have talent and I have energy and both will last me a lifetime.
“I have a name descended from Irish kings who preexist Oliver Cromwell by six centuries, and I fervently believe in the aristocracy of my lost ancestral world. I’m vividly aware also that your ancestors, Geraldine, going back as they do to Cromwell’s England, your ancestors, in the name of God, tried to eliminate the entire population of Ireland, and almost succeeded. Then I sit here and all that self-glorifying butchery leaps out at me from the pages of books in this room — clear proof the past is behind us, that we’re in a new world with a new light on our own days, and you, Jake, and you, Geraldine, have the strength and courage to keep—in your own library—the record of those unspeakable crimes. Hurrah, I say to this. Hurrah for you both, hurrah for facing the worst history has to offer, and moving forward to honorable success in every realm worth inhabiting — civic, business, ecclesiastical, social, but, most of all, success in conceiving and raising the peerless Katrina, icon of beauty and wisdom. And so my congratulations to you both, and don’t say anything yet. Just think on my words. Think on me as the husband of your sublime daughter. Consider the uncritical love she and I have for each other, and what a rare thing this is in anyone’s life.”
Then, as these final words of what Edward would come to call his Manifesto of Love and History hung in the air, he backed quickly away from Jacob and Geraldine (who still stared at him, gripping their sherry), found the library door and opened it, and then he was gone.
Katrina Visits the Angel of the Sepulchre, October 10, 1885
HEADACHES WERE COMING gradually to Katrina, then they became intermittent, and, after two weeks, incessant; and so she took to her bed with valerian drops, the only avenue to sleep. When the sedatives worked she slept day into night, read poetry (especially Baudelaire and Verlaine, who, she had learned in school, were abominable writers to be avoided), read them to tire herself with the pleasure of words, and told her family she was not ill, only full of bodily weariness.
Katrina took her meals from a tray and kept reading, marveling at Baudelaire’s misogyny: I have always been astonished that women are allowed to enter churches. What can they have to do with God?
God, on the arm of the Episcopal Bishop (very high church), came regularly to dinner at Katrina’s home. God ate well, stayed late, and the discourse, while boring, was not without merit: for it reinforced the family conviction that evil resided elsewhere, and that divine providence hovered just above the dining room chandelier.
One night she awoke dreaming of panthers running loose in the forest. Her vantage point from an upper story of her house gave her a full view of the threat, and then one of the panthers was inside the stable. Katrina went downstairs to the kitchen, and as she reached for the butcher knife to defend herself, a blue panther, jaws wide in a snarl, sprang out of the bread box. She sat up in a silent scream, her headache gone. She put on her night-robe, walked down to the kitchen, and opened the bread box. She found the butcher knife, cut a corner of bread, and ate it sitting at the window, staring out at that patch of her garden that was illuminated by streetlamps. She could see the Venus fountain, after Botticelli, that her father had bought in Italy, and, around its base, the yellow and orange leaves that were falling from the trees.
Of course the dream was Edward.
She got up from the window and boiled a kettle of water, then went to the china room and took down the Berlin cup and saucer that had belonged to the King of Holland, and the tea service owned by Oliver Cromwell. She made the tea, put the pot and china on a tray, carried it to the front drawing room. She had no precedent for her behavior, but she believed the rightness of every thought, every impulse that came to her.
She lit four candles in the candelabra her mother said was once owned by the Bonaparte family, and sat down for contemplative midnight tea amid family treasures: the Ismari vase mounted in ormolu, the Washington portrait by Rembrandt Peale; the Wentworth mirror, its border embroidered by Lady Wentworth; the portrait, as handsome widow, of Femmitie Staats, ancestor of her father, and direct descendant of Johannes Staats, who had been born in 1642 into Albany’s original settlement.
Femmitie’s and the Wentworths’ presences were reinforcements of family links to the origins of the city and the nation: American life predicated upon Dutchness without end, Albion evermore. I do believe this house is paradise, Katrina thought. I believe it is a palace of brilliant crystal, softest velvet, golden light, pervasive elegance; and memory overflows with beauty and the holiness of history. I see a proud elevation of spirit and mind in the splendid people of my life. I will lose my birthright to these things if I marry Edward.
She slept and at painless morning took breakfast in the dining room with the family, an occasion of relief for all, the cause noted by Katrina’s sister, Adelaide: “She’s gotten over her lovesickness.”
“That Daugherty is ruining the peace of this family,” Jacob Taylor said.
Katrina said nothing and after breakfast gave Cora, the chambermaid, her daily fifteen minutes of tutoring in elocution in Katrina’s sitting room.
“Is it true as Miss Adelaide says that you’re desperate sick in love with Mr. Daugherty?” Cora asked.
“I’m not such a fool,” Katrina said. “I know the difference between my body and my soul. Love is the soul’s business. I’m sick because my body seems to want this marvelous man. I would never call it love.”
“Oh, Miss Katrina, I think you got it backwards.”
“You’re an expert on love?”
“I’m commonsensical on it. I loved a boy well and do yet, and it’s body and soul, Miss, body and soul.”
“You do speak your mind, Cora.”
“I wouldn’t know what else to do with it, Miss.”
Katrina’s clearest memory of Cora McNally was of the white stone china cup with the broken handle, a memorable stub of unmanageable clay. It was the day Geraldine Taylor hired Cora for scullery work (from which she swiftly graduated), and cook was giving Cora her first lunch, setting her chair and dishes at a solitary place at the drainboard of the sink: a sandwich of turkey scraps and skin dabbed with cranberry sauce, and tea in that unforgettable stone china cup. Cora came in from the scullery, saw this offering, and said not to cook but to Katrina’s mother: