The Flaming Corsage by William Kennedy Read Free Book Online

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.

H EADACHES 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