one-man show, were benchmarks of liberation for this son and erstwhile artist manqué.
Peter moved to the Village in 1913 after a fight with Kathryn and his sister Sarah over the Daugherty family. Until 1912 the Daughertys had lived in the house next door to the Phelan homestead
on Colonie Street; but that year the Daugherty house burned and its only occupant of the moment, Katrina Daugherty, died on the sidewalk in her husband’s arms, victim of smoke, anguish, and a
prolonged marital emptiness.
One year later, on the anniversary of Katrina’s death, her husband, Edward, an established playwright, would celebrate her by staging the play in which their idyllic marriage and blatant
infidelities were dissected. This play, The Flaming Corsage , would run for two nights on the stage of Albany’s premier theater, Harmanus Bleecker Hall, and would be assaulted unto
death by critics, and by civil and ecclesiastical authorities, as a menace to the purity of the community. During this fated year the playwright would thus not only lose his wife, and see his
lifetime accumulation of papers and unpublished plays incinerated, but would also find his career halted, and his voice silenced at the peak of its eloquence.
Edward Daugherty would recover from this assault, but my father would not, quite. Exposed for a decade and a half to the chorale of vitriol directed against Edward and Katrina Daugherty by his
mother and sister—“a family of filth . . . an evil man . . . a low woman . . . a vile slut . . . a corrupter of innocents”—Peter at long last counterattacked, defending
Katrina, whom he had coveted as long as he could remember, as a splendid woman, whatever her peccadilloes, and the exemplary mother of his closest friend, Martin Daugherty; also defending Edward as
a genuine artist and the only real writer Albany had produced in the new century, this latter defense being as much an expression of the passion for art that lay within Peter’s own heart as
it was empathy for a friend. Peter stood up from the dining-room table, which gave a view onto the ashes and embers of the Daugherty house, and told his sister she would shrivel from the vinegar in
her veins, told his mother she was a wicked-tongued bigot whose poisoned thought came up from the cellars of hell, and told both that he would listen to them not a minute longer.
He climbed the stairs to his bedroom, pulled his steamer trunk out from the attic crawlspace, packed it (as he had planned to do five years earlier, when a similar impulse to escape was on him),
filled it with art implements, shirts, socks, and umbrage, hoisted the trunk onto his shoulder, and then in the midst of a rainstorm that would not only drench him to his underwear and the brink of
pneumonia, but would precipitate the worst flood in Albany’s modern history, walked twelve blocks to Keeler’s Hotel for Men Only, at Maiden Lane and Broadway, and there slept his first
night of freedom from the matriarchal whipsong.
The next morning his brother Francis, with his son, Billy, came for Peter in a rowboat, and they rowed up the two-foot-deep river that Broadway had become, to Union Station, where Peter boarded
the New York train. By prearrangement he settled in at the apartment of Edward Daugherty on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, those quarters not used by Edward during the year that he had
stayed in Albany to stage his play, and now the temporary home of Edward’s son, Martin. It was Martin who had convinced Peter that his future lay here among the artists, writers, political
rebels, freethinkers, unshockable women, and assorted social misfits and fugitives who were amorphously shaping Manhattan’s new bohemian order.
Peter found work illustrating reprints of children’s editions of James Fenimore Cooper, Jack London, and Mark Twain novels, and used a corner of the Daugherty kitchen to set up his easel
to begin anew the work of his life. But it would be a year before he
Peter moved to the Village in 1913 after a fight with Kathryn and his sister Sarah over the Daugherty family. Until 1912 the Daughertys had lived in the house next door to the Phelan homestead
on Colonie Street; but that year the Daugherty house burned and its only occupant of the moment, Katrina Daugherty, died on the sidewalk in her husband’s arms, victim of smoke, anguish, and a
prolonged marital emptiness.
One year later, on the anniversary of Katrina’s death, her husband, Edward, an established playwright, would celebrate her by staging the play in which their idyllic marriage and blatant
infidelities were dissected. This play, The Flaming Corsage , would run for two nights on the stage of Albany’s premier theater, Harmanus Bleecker Hall, and would be assaulted unto
death by critics, and by civil and ecclesiastical authorities, as a menace to the purity of the community. During this fated year the playwright would thus not only lose his wife, and see his
lifetime accumulation of papers and unpublished plays incinerated, but would also find his career halted, and his voice silenced at the peak of its eloquence.
Edward Daugherty would recover from this assault, but my father would not, quite. Exposed for a decade and a half to the chorale of vitriol directed against Edward and Katrina Daugherty by his
mother and sister—“a family of filth . . . an evil man . . . a low woman . . . a vile slut . . . a corrupter of innocents”—Peter at long last counterattacked, defending
Katrina, whom he had coveted as long as he could remember, as a splendid woman, whatever her peccadilloes, and the exemplary mother of his closest friend, Martin Daugherty; also defending Edward as
a genuine artist and the only real writer Albany had produced in the new century, this latter defense being as much an expression of the passion for art that lay within Peter’s own heart as
it was empathy for a friend. Peter stood up from the dining-room table, which gave a view onto the ashes and embers of the Daugherty house, and told his sister she would shrivel from the vinegar in
her veins, told his mother she was a wicked-tongued bigot whose poisoned thought came up from the cellars of hell, and told both that he would listen to them not a minute longer.
He climbed the stairs to his bedroom, pulled his steamer trunk out from the attic crawlspace, packed it (as he had planned to do five years earlier, when a similar impulse to escape was on him),
filled it with art implements, shirts, socks, and umbrage, hoisted the trunk onto his shoulder, and then in the midst of a rainstorm that would not only drench him to his underwear and the brink of
pneumonia, but would precipitate the worst flood in Albany’s modern history, walked twelve blocks to Keeler’s Hotel for Men Only, at Maiden Lane and Broadway, and there slept his first
night of freedom from the matriarchal whipsong.
The next morning his brother Francis, with his son, Billy, came for Peter in a rowboat, and they rowed up the two-foot-deep river that Broadway had become, to Union Station, where Peter boarded
the New York train. By prearrangement he settled in at the apartment of Edward Daugherty on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, those quarters not used by Edward during the year that he had
stayed in Albany to stage his play, and now the temporary home of Edward’s son, Martin. It was Martin who had convinced Peter that his future lay here among the artists, writers, political
rebels, freethinkers, unshockable women, and assorted social misfits and fugitives who were amorphously shaping Manhattan’s new bohemian order.
Peter found work illustrating reprints of children’s editions of James Fenimore Cooper, Jack London, and Mark Twain novels, and used a corner of the Daugherty kitchen to set up his easel
to begin anew the work of his life. But it would be a year before he
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