Quinn's Book

by William Kennedy

  She kissed me, she kissed me, and I kissed in return, quite well, too, I thought; for in one sweet instant she had taught me the true purpose of the lips in matters of profound affection. The dust was falling onto our heads and shoulders, the air slowly clearing; and though we did not interrupt our kissing, I could see from my eye’s corner that the face of Amos was gone, as were his hands. His chest had collapsed, as had his legs, so that the uniform seemed to have lost its inhabitant entirely, replaced by a skeletal stranger. Having seen this and understood none of it, I returned my eyes to Maud and kissed on until we were pulled apart by angry hands and a wild woman’s scream; and I turned to face Magdalena, who slapped me viciously across the cheeks: front of the hand, back of the hand.

  “Loutish child,” she yelled.

  I forgave Magdalena her anger but I ripped myself away from her and again thrust my face against Maud’s, kissing with all my soul until they rent us yet anew. In the frenzy that followed I remember uppermost a remark by Hillegond. “They are fortunate children,” she said. “They know love.”

  But fortunate was not the word for what was to become of us.

  THEY SEPARATED US that night, Maud and me, and we slept in isolation with our newborn love. I made no protest. I had no rights where she was concerned, though I cared nothing at all for rights when it came to her presence in my days. She, contrarily, complained vigorously about her aunt’s behavior toward me, argued that I, more than anyone else alive, had the right to her company, for without me she would have been on the river bottom with Magdalena’s doll. In outrage over the situation she refused to eat.

  I came to this information belatedly, for no one told me what was afoot. Hillegond spoke sweetly but inconsequentially to me, Magdalena was remote and growing more ill, and John the Brawn sold his boat and told me he was done with the river. I asked if that meant I was out of a job and he said, “We’ll see.” He patted my head and said, “Don’t worry, lad. You’ll get your crust of bread.”

  Magdalena grew so monstrously ill from her wound that she ceased coming to table and remained abed. Feverish, and in hellish pain, she was the belated victim of her attacker’s vile mouth. Her room’s door was ajar when I once passed it and I peered in to see the wound, having only heard of its festerment second-hand. The bite had swelled into a yellow-and-purplish horror and was oozing a green slime that filled the room with a repellent odor. Hillegond took to burning incense of two kinds in the room: one to keep down the odor, another to ward off the blood devils that threatened Magdalena. But the combination produced a new mélange of smells that was miasmic in its effect on the patient, and so out went the incense, worse grew the stink. The wound was a menacing sight and made me wonder how any of us ever survive our own interior poisons. With ghastly speed the beauteous Magdalena had been transmogrified into a rancid hag, sister death beginning yet again to take residence in her eyes. My brief glances at her satisfied my inquisitiveness, for none but the perverted could have long fastened an eye on that befoulment.

  It fell to the Negro servant, Matty, to bathe and dress the wound according to the doctor’s instructions. But when the treatment failed of healing, Matty began a treatment of her own: a poultice of herbs, flowers, dried goat dung, minced crickets, and other improbable ingredients, all boiled, strained, reduced to a powder, mixed with the whites of two duck eggs, and then applied to the infection beneath a bandage made from a fresh bedsheet. Within two days healing began. Within a fortnight Magdalena was growing new tissue, which would in time leave only the slightest evidence of what had once prevailed beneath her skin. I saw the miraculous improvement when I eavesdropped on her lecture to Maud about the evils of Maud’s fast (which I persuaded Maud to rescind, for my sake as well as her own; for of what value would my love be if it had no object upon which to resplend itself?). I saw the radiant Maud standing attentively by the sickbed and my heart sped.

  “How dare you put your life in such jeopardy?” said the angry Magdalena. “How dare you, when I am so hounded by fate. Clara, my own sweet serving girl, uselessly drowned, my face almost the ruination of us all, for where would any of us be without it? And you, spiteful child, you take it upon yourself to starve your body, your only salvation. Do you think men care for a woman’s mind, especially the mind of a wicked twelve-year-old like you? Do you think you can live by your wits alone, with no help from the talents you inherited with your flesh? Do you think that silly canal boy can save you from ruination, when he cannot even save himself? He’s a penniless orphan, seeking to steal you away from me with his urchin ways.” (This remark cut me deeply.)

  “You fail to see in him the high quality I see,” said Maud (and I recovered immediately from La Última’s cut).

  “Child,” said the courtesan, “you have a strong mind, but you are little schooled in the ways of men. And now it is you who must take Clara’s place as my social companion. It is you whom I must dress as I dress myself. It is early for you, but this is an inheritance we must learn to accept.”

  “You want me to love men for money?” asked Maud.

  “I shall teach you to talk to men, to disarm them of their harsh moods, to entice them into sweetness, to pleasure them. I shall turn you into a songbird, a dancing swan. I shall teach you how to survive this life, child Maudie.”

  “Dear Auntie,” said Maud in a tone of affectionate iron, “I am your niece of blood and I love you more than I ever loved my mother. But I won’t be a carnal woman for you, or for us, or for me. I love only Daniel Quinn and I want to give him half or more of my life.”

  Was ever a more precisely self-apportioning line uttered by woman? But Magdalena was not as impressed by it as I. “Oh pish, child,” she said. “Pish, pish, pish.”

  I saw that I was not a consideration in Magdalena’s plans. John the Brawn continued his dalliance with Hillegond, their periodic thumpings a comic ritual to the entire household, and he paid me small heed. I gravitated to our neighbor Will Canaday, who visited us often, first to rid us of the dead Swede, then to aid in the reburial of Amos’s dusty skeleton, and more mysteriously to spirit away Joshua from his hiding place in the netherworld of the mansion, an event I witnessed without Will’s knowledge during my exploration of the great house (an entity of such enormousness that one needed one’s wits always at full brim to avoid being lost in the maze of corridors, tunnels, staircases, chutes, dropaways, cul-de-sacs and other oddities—unopenable doors without handles or locks—that abounded in the multiple wings, towers, and catacombs of the place).

  “Where did you take Joshua?” I asked Will the day after I saw them leaving. “Did you take him to the doctor?”

  “Master Quinn,” Will said to me, and I knew from this formality, as well as from his tone, that seriousness was about to descend upon me, “you will put Joshua out of mind and forget you saw him here if you want to preserve his life.”

  I nodded instant agreement to this and Will smiled at me. He inquired of my family, which was the beginning of my friendship with this splendid soul, an irregular man of this world, cut to no cloth save his own, neither in his garments, which rarely matched or fit him, nor in his morality, which was vigorous, impious, peculiar, and steadfast.

  I told Will I had no family, that I’d gone to work as a canal boy for four months and run away from a master who not only beat me but refused to pay me for my work, that I’d met John the Brawn and liked him by contrast, since he never hit me, that I’d worked with him three months on the canal till his boat sank, and lately as a river rat, but was now a waterless orphan with a most uncertain future.

  Will began instantly with his generous counsel, telling me of my need to keep working, fanning my already burning dread of orphanages, which were proliferating not only in the wake of the cholera but as havens for children, safe retreats from parents ready to murder them rather than feed another mouth. Will also decided I should know more about the world than I did (he was appalled that I thought the Mexican War had taken place over the border in Canada)
and he counseled me on books to read—storytellers and poets, historians and playwrights of ancient days. I had learned to read from the nuns in school, and liked it well enough. These books from Will were much beyond my ken, but I plunged into them with a duty that in time became the most subtle of my pleasures in this world. Will also saw to it that his newspaper turned up at the Staats mansion every day so I might educate myself. The newspaper’s arrival was anomalous in the home of Hillegond, who cared little for any world outside her own mystical province, even though her son, Dirck, was an editorial employee of Will’s. I loved and devoured the paper, reading of murders and thievery, rapscallions and heroes. I read the commercial notices for pianofortes, ever-pointed pencils, and remedies for evil results arising from early abuse and unhappy contamination. The endless political bickering over issues that I could not follow bored me, but I grew fascinated with the wars between Spaniards and Arabs, between Britons and Kaffirs, between Ch’ing dynasty and the Taiping rebels. I cheered for fugitive slaves in the Carolinas and for the rebellious farmers of Ireland who, under the leadership of one William Smith O’Brien, were defying the English (my father’s father had lost his land to the English). But my partisanship aroused no serious animosity toward the forces that opposed my favored side, I being smug and comfortable, far from such violence. But I did begin to see that violence was the norm of this bellicose world.

  Will took me on my first visit in sunlight to the city of Albany several weeks after The Great Fire. The weeks of the new year had been deep with cold, snow, and ice that was at last giving way to a spring thaw, permitting a view of the cold ashes of disaster: the center of Albany’s ancient commerce and density, its quays, its Great Pier, so many canalboats and sloops, all reduced to char and cinders save for an odd chimney fragment untoppled, or a lone house standing because of its owner’s grit in bringing hundreds of buckets of water to wet down his walls and to douse the blankets on his roof, upon which flying embers would futilely spend their heat.

  The good weather was also catalyzing the area’s charred garbage, sending aromatic blossoms abroad to the citizenry, and this brought out packs of dogs and cats, and herds of roaming pigs, those enduring scavengers who joined the city workers in the ruins. The searchers sought three citizens still unaccounted for, and about whom I had read in Will’s newspaper. Then, as Will and I picked our steps through the soft rubble, there before me rooted a pig, snuffling in the sludge. The animal brought forth with its jaws first the arm of an infant and then the attached torso, dragging it up from the dire muck and about to make off with it when I intervened, whacked the waddling ghoul with a charred board, distracting it, but insufficiently, for it would not open its jaws. I struck again and again at its back, but its jaws remained clenched, and then in desperation I kicked at its throat, whereupon it yielded up its booty and squealed off into deeper ashes, soon slowing to a lope and snuffling once again in the ruins.

  Will and I stared down at the infant corpse, a black doll, rigid with ice, more rigid with death: hairless, faceless, sexless, yet a residual presence demanding attention. Will summoned a constable patrolling the erstwhile street and the dead child was taken by authority to a place of more secure rest.

  “The child’s father will thank you for what you did,” Will said to me. “I know the man. His name is Bailey.”

  “How could anyone know whose child that was?”

  “Only one child is missing. Would you object if I included a report of what you did in the newspaper?”

  “It’s what anyone would have done.”

  “Perhaps. But you did it, and there are people who loathe the pigs, and fear them, and would never do such a thing. Pigs can be nasty.”

  We walked to Will’s newspaper office on lower Broadway, a street that sometimes flooded when the river overflowed its banks, but the newspaper was safe on the second floor. Three young printers were actually bouncing as they worked at the typecase and stones, and among the tables that bore long metal galleys of copper-faced type. They all wore long white smocks and black derby hats, the smocks as protection against ink stains, the hats against the crumbling ceiling’s falling plaster, which, as all know, rots the follicles in the scalp and, as some say, sends carbonic acid to the brain.

  Will led me into his own work area, where his desk stood under a gas jet, next to a window, and beneath a vivid assemblage of chaos. Atop, beside, and on shelves adjacent to his desk lay a strew of magazines, clippings and letters, stacks of encyclopedias, dictionaries, new books, old books, boxed files, files not-so-boxed, with dust on some but not much of this clutter, and in the center of it all, an unopened copy of the morning Chronicle: the perfect centerpiece for the anarchy out of which it had come.

  At an adjacent slanted desk, a model of neatness, sat a man writing in a ledger. Will introduced me and I made the acquaintance of Dirck Staats, the son of Hillegond. Will said to him, “Dirck, this young man is one of the guests in your house.”

  I extended my hand and said, “Daniel Quinn is my name, sir, and I am enjoying your house.”

  “I wish I could say the same,” said Dirck, “but that she-devil of a mother of mine won’t allow it.”

  “I recognize you from your portrait,” I said to him.

  “I was told she had my portraits turned to the wall.”

  “Oh, she has,” I said, “but I turned one about to see the looks of a man who could rile a woman to such a point.”

  Dirck smiled at Will. “You speak directly,” he said to me. “Are you a devotee of the word?”

  “I can’t be sure,” I said, “since I don’t know what ‘devotee’ means.”

  “It means you like something quite well and you pay close attention to it. Something such as words. I myself am such a devotee of words that I’m writing a book full of them.”

  “Words are useful,” I said. “My dog might not have died if he’d been able to tell us what ailed him.”

  Dirck laughed at that and said, “Yes, yes, yes,” and I was equally amused, for I’d never owned a dog.

  Dirck Staats: if Will Canaday was a slender citizen, then Dirck was Will halved. He had a wild crop of dark hair around the back and sides of his head, his legs were long, his trousers not long enough, his waist no larger ’round than my own, and as a result of this design he looked as top-heavy as a hatstand. His face and high forehead were half as long as his chest, he wore unusually small spectacles across the top of his broad forehead when he was not reading, and, if such a thing were possible, his clothes fit him worse than did Will’s. But I liked Dirck Staats during our meeting, and I liked even more the ambition with which he confronted the arcane elements of the life around him.

  “What is your book about?” I asked.

  “It reveals a mystery,” he said, “but the people in it would like to keep it a mystery.”

  “Give the boy something to read while I write a piece about him,” said Will. “He retrieved a child’s corpse from the pigs awhile ago. A hero in the city’s ashes.”

  “I am always glad to meet a hero,” said Dirck, bowing profusely before me, offering me his chair at the desk. “By all means read what I am writing and give me your candid opinion. I confess I am at a loss for an intelligent response.”

  He went off then and I sat down in front of his two large red ledger books and looked at his writing. It is now, in memory, very like the mirror writing of da Vinci, the runes of the old Norsemen, the cuneiform writing of the Assyrians. It had about it a world of its own design, an impenetrable architecture that was a fascination by itself. What eventually I came to know was that this was his own language, invented for the purpose of composing this secret book about the secrecy that had come to obsess him. I studied his figures and letters-of-a-kind but could understand nothing. He came back at length and smiled at me.

  “What have you discovered?”

  “That I cannot read even one word.”

  “Excellent.”

  I stood up and offered him his chair, but he
reached for his coat, which hung on a hook beside his desk. “We must to lunch,” he said, and I knew not whether this included me and Will, whether he was speaking of another group entirely, or of himself as the collective.

  “Is it all right that I can’t read a word?” I asked.

  “Of course it is.”

  “I do understand the print in Will’s newspaper.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “Why do you draw pictures when you write?”

  “So no one will understand what I say.”

  “If you don’t mind my saying so, that is an odd reason to write things.”

  “I am as odd as ripe birdseed,” said Dirck.

  That was the last word Dirck spoke personally to me, for people were coming up the stairs and as Dirck made ready to leave he was confronted by a man I knew later to be the sheriff. Two other men were with him, one a deputy, the other a citizen of Utica named Babcock. The latter seemed to be the cause of this doing in that he claimed Dirck owed him four dollars, the value of a shirt and cravat Dirck had borrowed from him two years previous and not returned. Will Canaday heard the commotion and joined it, and I hung back and listened.

  Questions flew: Could this good man Dirck really be a petty thief? Why was such a paltry event now the occasion for his arrest? Why was this happening now and not two years ago? Could Babcock be serious? Could the sheriff? Dirck offered to pay the four dollars, but the sheriff said that was no longer possible, that he must go to Utica to stand trial for petit larceny. Will offered double payment for the shirt and cravat, but the sheriff was negatively adamant and ordered Dirck taken down the stairs. We all followed to the street, where a carriage waited with two more men. One of the men wore a memorably drooping mustache and was sharpening a long knife on a small whetstone in the palm of his hand. Will pointed to the man and called out, “Aaron Plum,” and he turned swiftly to the sheriff and told him Plum was one of the toughs who had stoned the newspaper’s windows two days earlier and then fled when Will fired a pistol over the heads of the toughs. The sheriff said this was nonsense, that the man had showed him credentials and was a deputy sheriff from Utica. But I knew Will was right, for I had met Aaron Plum on John the Brawn’s skiff when we carried four crates of harnesses for him from Troy to Albany. John told me the harnesses were stolen, and so we made the run at night to avoid spectators. I learned Aaron Plum’s name because he had his brother with him as a helper, Eli Plum, a schoolmate of mine. We called Eli Peaches after they caught him filling a sack with peaches from the Corcorans’ tree.