The Flaming Corsage Read Free

boy.”
    “There goes Rose.”
    “Cute boy is gone.”
    “And Rose?”
    “Rose is where she is.”
    At the crowded bar in the Bull’s Head tavern, Maginn greeted Edward with a triumphant smile.
    “Two for the price of one,” he said. “I went back to the first tent and opted for the bung-eyed bitch, but she was so lackadaisical I departed her corpus and threatened not to
pay for such inertia. Her tenting twin—Nellie, wasn’t it?—came to the rescue. Very vigorous, Nellie. Bicameral bawds. Unexpected dividend. How was Rose?”
    “Splendid.”
    “In what way?”
    “In all ways.”
    “You went all ways?”
    “She was splendid. Let it go at that.”
    “The details are important, Daugherty. As a reporter you should know that.”
    “This place is too noisy,” Edward said. The bar was two deep with drinkers, fogged with cigar and pipe smoke, and in a corner a fight seemed about to happen. “Let’s go
someplace quiet. I’m hungry.”
    “Venereal delight stokes the appetite.”
    They took the West Shore train from the Fairgrounds to downtown Albany, and at Edward’s insistence walked up from the station to the Kenmore for dinner.
    “I can’t afford their prices,” Maginn said. “I’m not yet part of the plutocracy, like some of my friends.”
    “It’s good that I am,” Edward said. “I’ll buy dinner.”
    “Done,” said Maginn. “A plutocratic gesture if there ever was one.”
    In addition to wages from The Argus , Edward had an annuity from birth given to him by Lyman Fitzgibbon that would keep him from starving until he reached age thirty, four years hence, and
this allowed him to keep rooms on Columbia Street, close to the newspaper and just up from the Kenmore, where, unlike Maginn, he dined often.
    He went to the men’s washroom and soaped off the residue of Rose’s body from his hands and his privates. Then he went back upstairs and with Maginn sat in the tan leather chairs of
the hotel’s lobby lounge while they waited for a table. Maginn bought a cigar at the newsstand, bit off the end and spat it into the brass cuspidor, then lit the cigar with a match he struck
on the sole of Edward’s shoe.
    Edward saw Katrina entering with her parents through the hotel’s side door on Columbia Street, avoiding the lobby and the vulgar stares of the loungers. The three went directly to the
dining room—reserved table, of course.
    “Isn’t that the magnificent woman you proposed to?” Maginn asked.
    “That is she. With Mama and Papa.”
    “Her beauty is exhilarating.”
    “I agree.”
    “I wonder how she compares with Rose.”
    “Wonder to yourself,” Edward said.
    “Protective already,” said Maginn. “I can see the transformation. ‘Once the favorite of whores of all ages, Edward Daugherty has evolved into the perfect husband.’
”
    Edward perceived that Maginn, the gangling whoremonger, was miffed that women in both tents had given their preferred eye to Edward; and he would, in a later year, remember this day as the
beginning of his relationship to Maginn’s envy and self-esteem, the beginning of competitive lives, even to evaluating the predilections of whores (“They picked you because you picked
them, no trick to that”). It would be Maginn’s oft-repeated credo that “the only thing that can improve on a lovely whore is another lovely whore.” Edward’s unspoken
credo toward Katrina-as-bride-to-be was: “If she becomes my wife, then my wife is my life.”
    The Kenmore’s maître d’, a light-skinned Negro, came toward them. “Your table is ready, Mr. Daugherty,” he said.
    “Very good, Walter.”
    He led them to a table next to Katrina and her parents. But Edward asked for one at the far end of the crowded dining room, Albany’s largest, where Parlatti’s orchestra was playing a
medley from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado , all the rage.
    “I’d like to meet your bride formally,” Maginn said. “Will you introduce me?”
    “Another time. And