The Flaming Corsage Read Free Page B

mick. I’ll buy the wine.”

E DWARD HAD ENTERED Katrina’s world at the adolescent moment when he registered at Albany Academy to begin the education Lyman Fitzgibbon,
Geraldine Taylor’s father, had ordained for him. Edward’s father, Emmett Daugherty, came to this country from County Galway in 1836 at age fourteen, and at eighteen hired on as coachman
for Lyman’s Adirondack expedition, an extended trip to acquire land for the railroad, lumbering, and mining interests that were central to Lyman’s bountiful life. The expedition
encountered hostility in a remote Warren County hamlet that was so new it lacked a name. Lyman and his lawyer were taken captive by townsmen, who foresaw accurately that these interlopers were
about to change life as they knew it; and they prepared tar and feathers for them. Young Emmett Daugherty, as truculent as the next man when called upon, picked up a fallen tree branch and felled
the townsmen’s ringleader, then garroted him with a horsewhip and, by legend, told the man’s cronies, “Turn those men loose or I twist the tongue out of his head,” the
tongue already halfway out.
    That was July 1840, and Lyman vowed Emmett would never want for anything again, and that his children would have the best education available.
    Edward was born to Emmett and Hanorah Sweeney on Main Street in the North End in 1859, went to the North End public school for five years, then three years to the Christian Brothers boys’
school on Colonie Street in Arbor Hill, Emmett insisting that Edward first discover the workingman’s God before going off to study among pagans and Protestants.
    Lyman Fitzgibbon was London-born (1805), Oxford-educated, a translator of Tacitus’ Germania , wealthy early in life, a British diplomat at midlife, and, as British consul in France,
rescuer of Louis-Philippe in the revolution of 1848. For his inventions relating to metalworking machinery he was called “the merchant-scientist” and, along with his stove-making
foundry and investments, he became not only Albany’s richest man, but its most variously eminent. He was also Edward’s godfather.
    Through the benediction of this eminence, Edward, when he enrolled in the Academy, entered the elite circle of Albany’s social life, became close friends with boys whose fathers ran the
city, was invited to dances with debutantes, sleigh rides and tobogganing expeditions out to the Albany County Club, and dinners at the Fort Orange Club as Lyman’s guest. On such occasions he
came to know the young Katrina Taylor, Lyman’s granddaughter, but she was six years his junior, a child. They grew up as friendly “common-law cousins,” as he called their
relationship. They were separated by Edward’s years at Columbia College, when he lived in New York City, and later by his western trip to research the lives of the Irish workers who had built
the Erie, men whose achievement his father had invoked often, and about whom Edward was writing his first novel. And so it was not until the night the Democrats marched in the vast torchlight
parade celebrating Cleveland’s defeat of Blaine in the presidential election that Edward encountered the maturing Katrina.
    The city was explosive with lights, bonfires, fireworks, and parties to hail the new chief of state from Albany, and a line of thousands of marchers, their oil-lit torches creating a dancing
serpent of lights, moved past more thousands of cheering spectators in a triumphal procession up State Street’s steep incline. Edward watched from the stoop of Lyman’s home, an august
four-and-a-half-story brownstone facing on State Street and, like other homes on this night, festooned with Chinese lanterns. More lanterns bloomed like bizarre forms of fruit on Lyman’s
trees, and buildings across the street displayed the American and Irish flags, and huge images of Grover Cleveland.
    In the crowd on the sidewalk a woman caught Edward’s eye when she opened a yellow