Quinn's Book

by William Kennedy

  “Is that one your ma?” he asked, and that roused Maud.

  “She was my aunt,” said Maud, “and vastly superior to Mother as a human being.”

  “Where is your dastardly mother?”

  “She is with the King.”

  “Ah, the King,” said John. “She’s a queen, is she?”

  “She’s the King’s companion,” said Maud.

  “And which king might it be that’s keen on your ma?”

  “The King of Bavaria.”

  “Bavaria, a grand little place, so they say. And is the King, like yourself, stopping here in Albany for a bit of a visit?”

  “They are both in Bavaria. The King has gone into exile,” said Maud, whose want of childish speech was giving me the image of myself as a tongue-tie, and I being almost fifteen, two years and three months older than she.

  “Your auntie’s fair croaked and your ma’s in bloody exile. So where might your da be, then?”

  “My mother always said she didn’t know for certain where he was. But she’s a liar.”

  Just then, with those poor souls who were clutching the bridge’s far segment sending up their continuing chorale of dangling doom, and with the living onshore throwing themselves into furies of grief over the dead and the missing, a woman whose husband, or perhaps brother, lay inert on the quay looked at us and recognized the corpse of Magdalena, her amber plume, sodden and bedraggled (but a swatch of autumn nevertheless), still jutting markedly from that dead skull. And that woman then rose up from beside her inert man, let seethe through her teeth a single word—”Herrrr”—and, following upon this with the maddened and throaty growl of a jungle feline, flew across the space that separated us, pounced upon the courtesan’s lifeless body, sank her teeth into that pallid cheek, and came away with a blooded wad of flesh in her mouth, which she savored with a bulging smile and then spat onto the dead actress’s chest. Stiffened with loyalty to our corpse, I leaped into the tableau and yanked the toothy bitch by the arm, flinging her aside so that John the Brawn might lift our dead lady out of more harm’s way.

  John carried her to where a policeman stood guard over the lengthening row of the congealing dead, while other police pressed cabmen and private carriages into hauling the freezing victims to the city’s clinic. My master lay the dead woman down, straightened her dress over her legs with a show of modesty I would not have predicted, and gently stroked her hair out of her face with two fingers.

  “They mean to eat her like wolves,” said my master to the police officer.

  “Move along, don’t handle the dead,” the policeman told him.

  John tipped his hat and smiled through his light-brown teeth, not one to argue with the law; for indeed John was fugitive from trouble in a dozen towns along the canal, his last excursion with the bottle ending in the destitution of Watervliet’s Black Rag saloon, even to the felling of the four pillars that supported the tavern’s second-story porch.

  We went back for the wardrobe trunk, and only when my hands were full did Maud release her grip on me. She had watched the cannibalizing of her aunt without a word and offered nothing but a mute stare at that supine form, one among many. But as we walked from the edge of the quay with the trunk (I knowing nothing of John’s next intentions), Maud halted and said, “We can’t leave my aunt lying there in the cold. It isn’t civilized behavior.”

  “We’ll not leave her,” said John, who hailed a close carriage that was moving toward us. As the driver slowed, John grabbed the reins of the horse. “We’re sore in need of your service,” he told the driver.

  “I’ve orders to do what the police want, them and none other,” retorted the driver.

  “You’ll succor us or I’ll maim your horse and splinter your backbone,” said my master, and the driver grumbled his comprehension of the priorities. With the cabman’s help I put the trunk on his luggage rack and helped Maud into the cab, thinking John would enter with us. But he called to the driver to wait and went back to the quay’s edge, returning with the limp form of Magdalena Colón across his outstretched arms. I had a sudden vision of my sister being so carried in from the street by my father, she then dying from the same cholera that would strike both him and my mother within a week, thus setting me on the road toward my rendezvous with John the Brawn. John was a man I thought I knew after my time on the canal under his heavy hand. I even once thought I was rid of him when his rotted canalboat sank in a storm near Utica, and glad I was of it. But I was not rid of him, and as he walked toward me now with the dead woman in his arms, I realized how little I really knew about him, or about any man. I especially could not find a place for the tenderness he displayed in stroking the hair out of La Última’s eyes with his two callused fingers.

  “Is she dead?” the driver asked him.

  “Dead as dead ever gets,” said John. “A dead slut with a hole in her face.”

  And he thrust La Última into the carriage with us, sat her across from Maud, and flopped into the seat opposite mine, holding the corpse upright with his arm around her shoulder. Had she not been so wet they might have been taken for lovers bound for an escapade. Maud had taken my hand as soon as we sat beside each other, and I’d smiled at her. But she had only fired her eyes and turned her head, keeping hold, nevertheless, of my hand.

  “Well, Miss, what shall we do with her? Take her up to Congress Hall and auction her off to the politicians? Put her on view at The Museum? Or is hers a Christian body crying for six feet of holy dirt?”

  “Mrs. Staats will know what to do,” Maud said. “My aunt was fond of her.”

  Maud looked intently at La Última’s face, then reached over and touched the dead woman’s cheek near where it had been bitten. “It’s so sad,” she said. “She cared about her face above everything.”

  “She had a pretty little face,” said John. “We couldn’t let them have it all.” He stroked around the raw wound with a single finger.

  “Did you know her?” asked Maud. “I never saw you with her.”

  “I knew her,” said John. “Saw her in New York, months ago. She acted, danced, sang. I saw her do her Spider Dance. Now there was a picture. A woman to remember, she was.”

  “You would probably want to kiss her. Men always wanted to kiss her.”

  “You’re a bright-spoken, savvy child,” said John, and he turned his face to La Última, gripped her jaw between the thumb and first finger of his right hand, and kissed the dead woman long and vigorously on the mouth.

  “You’re a wicked man,” said Maud.

  “They’ve told me that,” said my master, smiling and settling back into his seat. “But have ye never seen anyone kiss the dead? They all do it.”

  We’d ridden two blocks off the quay when the carriage driver stopped and called down to us, “Where do we be goin’?”

  We all then looked to Maud, who said staunchly, “To the home of Mrs. Hillegond Staats.”

  “Do ye know that place?” John asked the driver.

  “There’s none in Albany doesn’t,” came the ready answer, and the driver sped away toward the Staats mansion, a dwelling place of exalted lives, and a safe harbor as well for certain desperate souls who’d been chilled, like ourselves, by the world’s bitter ice.

  As we rode, Maud fixed silently on the face of her aunt, occasionally looking to me for solace, or perhaps wisdom of the instant, as if I and not my master were the source of power in this quartet of misfits. Maud took my free hand in her own (we now holding both each other’s hands) and whispered to me, “We must patch her cheek before we bury her, for she’ll have no luck in the next world with her face like that.” And then she added after a pause, “And we must bury her beneath a tree, for she loved trees almost as much as she loved men.”

  I nodded my agreement and Maud smiled, the first smile of hers I had ever seen, and I have remembered it all my days. But I knew nothing of patching flesh. With what did you patch it? As to burial, it had not crossed my mind that any portion of the task would eve
r fall to me. But I had already twice assented to Maud’s will, which, I would come to know, was an element very like Roman cement once it had assumed a shape.

  Our driver turned onto the carriageway that led to the Staats mansion and called to us that we’d arrived. Maud and I held silence. John the Brawn grumphed and let Magdalena fall sideways, her head striking the carriage wall with a memorable thump; and he said he’d see who was at home.

  “You’re sure she knew this Staats woman?” he asked Maud.

  “We were her guests for two evenings,” said Maud.

  John opened the carriage door and the encroaching night reached in for us with a profound chill, a blast of northern air that had dropped the temperature perhaps twenty degrees in as many minutes. As John walked off in the half-darkness our eyes played the night’s game and we saw that a half-moon was sending a straying gleam into one of La Última’s eyes, now fully open and staring at us.

  “Close her eye,” said Maud, gripping my hand as if she felt herself still in the wild river. “You must never let the dead look at you.”

  I dutifully moved the eyelid down over the eye, feeling the flesh soft, pliable, and without warmth, but not yet chilled, somewhat like the loose skin of a chicken dead thirty minutes.

  “What can the dead see?” I asked Maud when I’d done her bidding.

  “If you look in their eyes you see your fate. And one must never know one’s fate if one is to keep sane.”

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing my fate,” I said, “for then I’d know how to avoid it.”

  “You can’t avoid your fate, you goose. That’s why they call it your fate.”

  I let her have the argument, for I noted that Magdalena’s eye was quavering, and I grew fearful. Slowly that same eyelid slid open, back to the point from which I had closed it, and the eye again fixed upon Maud and me. I leaned forward for a look but Maud tugged me back with her urgent bulldog grip. I broke her hold and looked squarely into La Última’s eye by the light of the brilliant half-moon, at first seeing the conventional human orb: the maroon iris, the deep-brown pupil, the soft white transparency of the conjunctival membrane striped with the faintest of frigid purple rivers and tributaries. And then in the center of the suddenly luminous pupil I saw a procession of solemn pilgrims moving through a coppice: night it was, but snowing, and as fully bright as this true night that surrounded us. And there was Maud, her hand held by an old woman. There, too, moved John the Brawn, ahead of a figure wrapped in furs. I myself trudged forward alongside a black dog and I sensed that this was the funeral procession of Magdalena, made visible for us by her own dead eye. Her body, however, was not in portage, nor was it anywhere to be seen.

  I intended to say nothing of this to Maud, having no wish to confirm the superiority of her mystical knowledge to my own. But she knew from my steady gaze into that dead eye that I had indeed seen something queer, and so at her earnest tugging of my sleeve I reported the scene to her, was narrating the cortege’s route, when the vision abruptly changed to an even darker night, with a ragtag troop of men swarming down a city street and smashing the windows of a newspaper office with stones and clubs. It changed a second time and a young man, his face familiar but to which I could attach no name, emerged from the same building in bright daylight, talking soundlessly but volubly to two men who held him by the arms as they walked. Suddenly he was thrown into a carriage, which swiftly wheeled off behind a matched pair.

  I had no time to speak of this to Maud, for John the Brawn opened our own carriage door with a bravissimo shout: “Out and down with you both. We are welcome guests of the mistress of this grand place.” And when he hauled both of us out, he lifted the trunk off the luggage rack, plucked Magdalena out of the cab, and threw her over his shoulder like a sack of barley. Then, with a dismissing wave to the carriage driver in lieu of a gratuity, he led us up the gravel pathway to the house, dragging the trunk. Maud held me back a few paces and whispered to me in a desperate tone of voice, saying I must always remember she was never going to marry anyone, was never going to grow up to be like her hated mother, or even like her saintly whore of an aunt, and that I must promise to steal her away from this house if it should come to pass that the Staats woman, or some other hateful adult, should try to take charge of her life.

  “It’s you who have first right to my life,” she told me, “for it was you who kept me from sliding to the bottom of the river. Will you promise me—promise on your heart’s blood—that you’ll steal me, whatever the cost?”

  Her vehemence took me over, and I swiftly and foolishly promised: I will steal you, if need be, no matter what the cost, no matter how long it takes.

  “Now kiss me,” she said, and I kissed her on the cheek, the first female flesh other than my mother’s and sister’s to ever brush my lips. I also tasted a wisp of her hair and found the whole sensation surprisingly exciting to my mouth and lower intestines.

  “Hurry along,” John said to us, and we mounted the steps of the canopied porch to see him with Magdalena slung over his shoulder, standing now beside a strapping woman whose stature seemed not to pair with the wrinkles of her skin: as if she had not shrunk with age but had grown muscular. Her cheeks were rosy coins of paint and from her naked ears dangled earrings that looked very like church bells. She was still formidably handsome despite the wrinkles and the grotesque nature of her adornments, and as we stepped into the first warmth any of us had known in what seemed like an age of icy blasts, she squatted to greet us. This hothouse crone—Hillegond Staats was her name—embraced both Maud and me together with those powerful arms, pulled us to her wrinkled, half-draped, and formidable bosom, which smelled of corn powder and myrrh, and wept rhinoceros tears of gratitude that an adventure of the heart was entering into her life. She said as much in words I cannot precisely recall, for the degree of their welcomeness crowds out their sound and shape in my memory. This giant creature, Hillegond, had us in her power, which was very old power and reeked of money and leisure and exploitation and looked for its deeper meaning in the eyes of madmen, dead whores, and children of the wild river.

  “Come in, come in, my frozen dears,” the great crone said to us. John the Brawn shoved the door closed behind us and we stood in that grand entrance hall, dwarfed by the unknown, which billowed crazily through that mansion like the lovely heat that was already warming our souls.

  WHEN HILLEGOND CEASED to squeeze the frigidity and the breath out of Maud and me, she shooed us into the care of a black man named Capricorn and a black woman named Matty, both of them slaves in their youth. Capricorn wrapped me in a blanket, took me to the kitchen, sat me in front of the huge gray brick kitchen fireplace, and fed me Dutch soup with apples, potatoes, carrots, and the livers of certain undesignated creatures, unarguably the most important meal of my life, while Matty took Maud elsewhere for a change into dry clothing. Capricorn, who as a freed slave thirty years earlier had been a man of social eminence among Negroes, was kindly toward me without undue deference. Meanwhile, Hillegond, my master, and the residual elements of Magdalena found themselves together in the Dood Kamer, or dead chamber, the room set aside in substantial homes of the old Dutch to accommodate death.

  Hillegond’s house was indeed old Dutch, and substantial. She was born Hillegond Roseboom, daughter of an Albany tavern-keeper of bibulous repute; and it is known that she said farewell to maidenhood at age sixteen (some insist she voyaged out years earlier) by marrying Petrus Staats, son of Volckert Staats, grandson of Jacobus Staats, great-grandson of Dolph Staats, great-great-grandson of Johannes Staats, great-great-great-grandson of Wouter Staats—all of these descended from a pre-Christian or perhaps even a primal Staatsman, though the voluminous family records (initiated by Volckert, preserved by Petrus) trace the family only to the sixteenth century about the time Holland was declaring itself independent of Spaniards and preparing to shape the New World in the image of Dutch coin.

  The first to reach the New World was Wouter Staats, who gained renown as a trad
er by perfecting counterfeit wampum (polished mussel shells with a hole in the center, strung on a string). Wouter arrived with his wife at Fort Orange, the early name of Albany, in 1638, and in 1642 fathered Johannes, the first born-American Staats, a noble-headed youth who grew up to serve in the militia as an Indian fighter, gaining knowledge of the wilderness and its inhabitants to such a degree that upon leaving the military he entered the fur trade (beaver pelts) and earned the wealth that began the family fortune.

  Johannes was everywhere praised for his honesty but suffered the taint of a curious wife, Wilhelma, who worked as a produce trader during Johannes’s long absences in quest of furs, and incorrigibly sold her customers sported oats and blue wheat. Johannes retired Wilhelma when his wealth permitted, and through his charities erased her stain from the family reputation. He also became a zealot of religious liberty, championed the right of Lutherans, Huguenots, and Jews to worship in Albany, and, upon the appearance of Newton’s comet, arranged the day of prayer and fasting that was credited with persuading the Deity to banish the dread missile from Albany’s skies.

  Dolph Staats, eldest of Johannes’s six children, was born in 1664, the year English military might sublimated Dutch power without seriously altering the daily life of Albany Dutchmen Commerce proceeded apace, pigs roamed the streets, and the old burghers in their cocked hats and worsted caps still filled the air of the town with pipe smoke and, as one English visitor noted, with phlegmatic gravity as well. Dolph Staats came to enjoy the energetic English and traded profitably with them, expanding his father’s moderate fortune through mercantility, selling the productions of Europe—Bibles and snuffboxes, fiddle strings and China teapots, love ribbons and dictionaries, satinets and shalloons—to his townfolk. His concern with garmenting impelled him to ask the governor of the province to take pity on the ill-clad English soldiers garrisoned in the town, their tatters so advanced that ladies were advised to avert their eyes when passing lest their gaze intersect with the soldiers’ private physical portions. It was also Dolph who left the family signature on two stained-glass windows of the old Dutch church: one the family coat of arms in four colors, and, uniquely, the glazened image of a supine infant whose physiognomy combined the blond ringlets and eyebrows of a Dutchified Jesus, with the crossed eyes of Dolph’s only son, Jacobus.