Quinn's Book

by William Kennedy

  I had no chance to do this, for by then our guests had filed into the music room, a polygonal extension from an eastern wall of the mansion, a semicircular room with mullioned windows and an intricately carved oak ceiling that gave one the sense of being in the apse of a cathedral. The guests besat themselves on plush mahogany benches beneath a pair of murals painted by Ruggiero and depicting the contemporary Staatses: Petrus and Hillegond, whose peripatetic excursions in Europe (in company with the Fitzgibbons) had been the source of many of the works of art, and not-art, that abounded in the mansion. In his portrait Petrus played a great gilded harp (which remained in the far corner of the salon, as Petrus did not), and the image of Hillegond ebulliently fingered the pianoforte, from which she was, in life, incapable of extracting even minimal musical coherence.

  Joseph K. Moran saw me and waved from the front of the room. Our plans to do the tenor-to-the-rescue act for Dorf had collapsed when I became linked to Dirck in his infirm time, and well enough so, for Joseph needed no collaborators. His two songs on the opening night of Tambo and Paddy had engendered two encores, so Dorf gave him four songs the second night, engendering four encores; and even that left the audience unsated. The talk abroad in the city was that Joseph Moran would be a performer of great magnitude ere long.

  “We meet again,” Joseph said, coming over to me. “I have something for you,” and he handed me a letter, the first article of mail I had received in my fifteen years of life. “It came from Rochester,” he said. “I mentioned to a traveling actor your interest in La Última, and when he met her he spoke of you.”

  I took the letter in hand and at the sight of the handwriting the life within me gathered great potency. I knew the letter was from Maud, for in my possession since before she left were four words she had written on a piece of stationery in a near-perfect hand: “The sadness of bumblebees”—this meaning I knew not what. When I saw her throw it away, I salvaged and kept it.

  “I’m very grateful to you,” I said.

  “We must keep track of our friends,” Joseph said.

  He spoke of my rescue of Dirck, said he adjudged me a hero and was proud to know me. He carried on in that vein, asking me questions as Dirck thrust more messages into my fist (“Ask her age . . . where she lives . . . what her religion . . . her favorite flower . . .”), and so, with my head full of questions and my hand full of scraps of paper, I had to relegate Maud’s communiqué to my trouser pocket.

  “What a grand house this is,” said Joseph Moran. “I would like to live in it one day.”

  “Yes,” I said, feeling possessive, “I live in it now.”

  Dorf set his tambourinist and banjoist to playing and followed their medley with an introduction of Heidi Grahn singing an air from The Marriage of Figaro that Jenny Lind had often sung, and in truth I know not how the Swedish Nightingale could have sung it more melodiously. Dirck’s pencil fell silent at last, he in rapture at the sound of the young woman’s voice, and I, at last, was able to open Maud’s letter and read her salutation, “Dearest Daniel,” at which my heart began a percussive thumping. My eye followed down the page, running ahead of itself too quickly to allow me to make sense of anything. But then I read these words: “am awaiting the fulfillment of your promise to steal me,” and I could read no further, so rich was my excitement. Then the ecstasy was violated by a loud knocking that intruded as well on Heidi’s melody.

  We turned to the foyer to see Capricorn admitting, to my great surprise, a most serious-visaged Emmett Daugherty, and with him a weeping girl of perhaps eight years, a boy somewhat younger than myself who was tilting his head back and blotting his nose with a filthy and bloody rag, and a woman, the children’s mother, in a state as wretched as womanhood can inhabit. The music trailed off as we stared at these representatives of a gravely negative unknown.

  Emmett led the woman and children to a sofa in the foyer, then asked to speak with Lyman, who heard Emmett’s request and rose from his seat in the music room. I followed but kept my distance, seeing Matty run to the kitchen and return with a wet towel to clean the boy’s bloody face, take the old rag from him, and lay him full-length on a bench with his head back.

  “It’s a tragic thing,” Emmett said. “Alfie Palmer, one of the moulders let go in the layoff, he did this to them.”

  “Why do you bring them here?” Lyman asked.

  “It’s a foundry matter, Lyman,” said Emmett. “And it’s your foundry.”

  “Does Harris know about this?” Lyman asked, Harris being the Yankee engineer who ran the foundry in Lyman’s absence.

  “I’ve no use for that man, Lyman. It’s his layoffs began this trouble. Your good self is what’s needed. None other. Alfie was always a hard-luck man, and with the layoff he had no doctor money when his son got sick, and he could only watch the boy die. It maddened him, as it would any man, and he took to the drink, though I don’t know where he got money for that. And there’s been fights—dozens—between the new hired men and the old let go, and Alfie in more than his share of those. But he went beyond a punch-up tonight. He followed Toddy Ryan home when Toddy left the foundry, giving him heat, don’t you know. But Toddy’s only the half-pint, with no health to him at all, and he knew if he fought Alfie he’d be killed sure as sure is, and so he ran to his shack and barred the door, but Alfie broke it in and split Toddy’s skull with an ax handle. Then he went after young Joey here, and it looks like he broke the lad’s nose. Toddy’s wife throws the boilin’ tea in Alfie’s face, gets the children out, and brings them to the foundry to find me. But her Toddy’s dead on the floor and there’s no peace for it now, Lyman, no peace. Alfie’s on the run and the men are in camps, the old and the new. They’ll fight in bunches, and they’re forming already. There’ll be blood in the streets by morning.”

  Emmett, his craggy face overgrown with two days’ stubble of beard, was a scolding presence. He was foreman at Lyman’s North End foundry, and had risen in eleven years, despite his lung ailment, from apprentice to moulder to chief grievance spokesman, a voice of righteous reason from below. His rise in status began when he hired on as coachman for Lyman on an expedition to buy land in the Adirondack region for a new railroad line. Animosity toward the venture was strong, the natives convinced the railroad would before long destroy their pristine world (and so it would), and the animus peaked when half a dozen mountain men set upon Lyman and his lawyer with plans to tar and feather both.

  While Lyman contemplated probable death by absurdity, Emmett garroted one of the attackers and bargained the man’s breath for the two captives, an act of bravery that ensured not only his own security ever after through Lyman’s gratitude, but also the education of any Daugherty heir not yet born, or even conceived, on this night of tribulation in the foyer of Hillegond’s mansion.

  Maud, I speak to you now of the Irish, knowing you are in my pocket, to tell you of the Ryans and their misery and how it distracts me, for it is part of me: Joey Ryan—with broken nose, dead father, sickly mother—is surely myself in another guise, just as Molly Ryan, that tiny waif, could be you. They are the famine Irish, Maud, and they are villains in this city. It wasn’t this way for the Irish when I was little, but now they are viewed not only as carriers of the cholera plague but as a plague themselves, such is their number: several thousand setting up life here in only a few years, living in hovels, in shanties, ten families to a small house, some unable to speak anything but the Irish tongue, their wretchedness so fierce and relentless that not only does the city shun them but the constabulary and the posses meet them at the docks and on the turnpikes to herd them together in encampments on the city’s great western plain. Keep them moving is the edict of the city’s leaders, and with obscene pleasure the Albany wharf rats and river scum (some Irish among these, preying on their own) carry out this edict by stoning the canalboats that try to unload newcomers here. It is no wonder the greenhorns grow feral in response, finding in this new land a hatred as great as that which drove them out of Ireland,
that suppurating, dying sow of a nation.

  Looking at the Ryans one could believe them carriers of any perniciousness: defeated, low in spirit, clad in rags, their skin flaked, pale, and dirty, their hair matted, their eyes raw with the disease of all victims. Who would invite their like? Who would give them bread or bed? None in this city today, and yet not quite none, for Hillegond is doing for them what she did for us: telling Capricorn to find them street and bed clothes; telling Matty to cook for, cleanse, and accept them on their night of trouble here in this haven for ravaged souls.

  People are breaking into groups in the mansion, Maud. In the east parlor Emmett, Will, and Lyman are in dark communion. In the music room Dirck is boldly handing notes to Heidi Grahn. In the foyer Joseph Moran is extolling to Hillegond the virtues of her home. “It’s more splendid than any house in Utica,” he coos, and she receives his word as if he mattered. I want with desperation of heart to read the rest of your letter and yet I cannot. I am beginning to sense what it will say and I choose postponement until I have intuited your full message, believing if I am right in my intuition we will be closer than ever and this communion across the miles will be with us for the rest of our lives.

  And so I have sought out the person with whom I have most in common: Joey Ryan of the bleeding nose—but bleeding no more—seated now at the kitchen table eating Matty’s chicken soup and corn bread. I told him I was sorry for his trouble and that my father was dead also, and at least he had his mother with him, but that my mother was dead and so was my sister.

  “You’re an orphan, then,” he said.

  “I am.”

  “What do they do to orphans? Do they kill them?”

  “I’ve never heard of that,” I said, “and they haven’t killed me yet. But sometimes they put them in orphan homes, and sometimes they let them run loose.”

  “I’d fancy to run loose,” he said.

  “I would too,” I said.

  “Run loose till I grow up enough to solve the man who killed me father.”

  “How will you solve him?”

  “I’ll break his skull.”

  “You aren’t big enough for that.”

  “I’ll get bigger and find him and break his skull like he broke me father’s.”

  “They’ll hang you.”

  “Do they hang orphans?”

  “They hang you for breaking a man’s skull.”

  “Will they hang the man that killed me father?”

  “If they catch him they might.”

  “I’ll hang him meself, and then I’ll cut off his head.”

  Maud, the boy is a little fellow, no bigger than yourself. But vengeance burns in his eyes, and if he doesn’t break one man’s skull before long, he’ll break another’s. Anger took seed in him farther back than the clubbing of his father, as I learned when I asked where he came from in Ireland.

  “From a ditch near Cashel,” he said. “The landlord tumbled our house and put us off our land, and me father piled all we owned in a cart and we pushed it till we couldn’t climb the hill. Then we lived in the ditch and used the wagon as a roof. We could see the Galty Mountains from the ditch. They tumbled our house to make room for the landlord’s cows. ‘They’re in grave need of pasture,’ the landlord told me pa. Then we left the ditch, threw things away to lighten our load, and the three of us hauled the cart up the mountain, a terrible high mountain of four hundred feet it was, and me sister settin’ the block at the wheel. We done it at last and got over the mountain, but goin’ down the back side was near as troublesome as goin’ up the front, and we almost lost the cart two or three assorted times. We begged food, and when we couldn’t get any we stole it, or we ate grass. Then we went to me uncle’s place on the road to Tipperary and he took us in and paid for Pa to go to America. Pa himself is all of us that went over. The night before he left we had a wake for his leavin’, with me ma keenin’ for hours over his goin’. ‘Ye won’t come back for us,’ she kept saying. It was near to bury him, is what it was. But he sent remittances and got us all over here, me and me sister and me mother. And didn’t we all come to this town of Albany, because we couldn’t fit in New York in the wee room Pa lived in. We was here just a few weeks and no money left when he got the foundry job, and then, a little after that, they broke his skull, the man did, the bastard man.”

  I talked more with him, Maud, but it was so painful I soon left him and thought of going to bed, for I could find no one else to talk to. People were all over the house talking of the coming fight and how awful it would be, and I knew I would watch it when it came. More death is what I thought, and that put me in mind of the Dood Kamer, where you and I watched John and Magdalena and Hillegond love each other, after a fashion, and that was where I sat and read your letter.

  Dearest Daniel [you began],

  I write to you because a person named Joseph K. Moran has said he met you and that you asked for my well-being, for which I send gratitude. I worry, too, about your well-being, for you know I consider you my true love for all time and ever after, and am awaiting the fulfillment of your promise to steal me away from my loving but inconstant aunt and her companion, the ridiculous John McGee. That man had the boldness to tell me you stole money from us, then jumped off the canalboat and ran away. I told him he was a poor liar and a worse scoundrel, and when I received the full impact of your absence I went into a swoon and as in the past I refused to eat, coming so near to death I terrified everyone. I think you would have been quite proud of me. A most peculiar thing happened in my starving condition. I could see what people around me were thinking, not an uplifting thing to be able to do. I also was able to communicate with spirits of the dead, or at least I think they are dead. They certainly seem to be spirits, for no one can see them, not even I. Yet they make violent sounds, of which everyone save myself is terribly frightened. I rather like their rhythms.

  Please note that we will soon be in Saratoga Springs, where my aunt is to perform her dancing. I have assisted in some of her performances and may again, but will not now say how, as I wish to surprise you. We arrive in Saratoga May 30th, and I expect to see you soon thereafter, at which time we shall make plans for you to steal me. You have my love forever and a day, and another forever and another day.

  Maud

  P.S. I saw Joseph K. Moran perform in Utica and thought him an affecting person. Please thank him for putting me in touch with you. I await you, Daniel Quinn.

  Maud, nothing in my life has been equivalent to the thrill of reading this letter. I confess I had hoped for a hint of your affection, but am overwhelmed by what you have said. I must add that your meetings with spirits and your plans involving me give me great unrest that I cannot solve of the instant. You consider me more powerful than I am. However, I will do what I am capable of doing.

  Maud, I send you love.

  Capricorn brought the news that the warring factions from the foundry were assuming positions. Lyman said he feared that if word of the presence of the Ryans in the mansion reached Alfie, he and his cronies might seek satisfaction of the bloodlust that was upon them. Before sunrise the call went out for all in the mansion to be ready, and so Hillegond took Petrus’s pistol from its case, loaded it, and sat with it in the lap of her night robe; and Capricorn laid four rifles and two more pistols on the dining table. I could not believe we were anticipating that men from the foundry would invade this grand home to kill children.

  As for Joey, he kept himself busy through the night creating a slungshot, a bludgeon fashioned from a rock wrapped in oilcloth and wound tight with string. I saw him in an upstairs hallway flexing his creation cleverly: slapping it with thuds against his left palm. When I saw his mother, Margaret Ryan, and his sister, Molly, at morning, they looked no less affrighted than they had the previous evening, but immeasurably more comely with clean skin and hair and fresh clothing.

  Dorf Miller and his company, as well as Emmett and Will, had left the mansion during the night. Lyman stayed in the room long reserved fo
r him on the fourth floor—his aerie, he called it—which gave him his preferred morning view of the Staats woodland and creek, and of the pond Petrus built when Hillegond first became enamored of the wild ducks that inhabited the swamp.

  By the first rays of the morning sun the tea was steeping in the kitchen, Matty was taking bread from the oven, and our cluster of souls was gathering near the warmth of the fire. The good feeling among us all seemed inappropriate with a death struggle in the offing, but I attest that thirteen years hence the same feelings would prevail in me when, as a correspondent in the war, I’d speak with soldiers and other journalists around a fire. We would drink coffee of the rankest order and convince each other it was fitting nectar for those about to conquer, or die, or both, or neither.

  I must convey now that the fated stroke that aligned Alfie Palmer against the Ryans was an event of historical moment in Albany, for it defined boundaries, escalated hatreds, and set laboring men of near-equal dimension and common goal against each other. In years to come, periodic battles would be waged anew as a consequence of what was about to happen this day. These battles, which invariably took place on Sundays, when men were off work and free to maim one another, raged for hours without interference from the constabulary. The battles (the first was called the Ryans against the Palmers) were in time called the Hills against the Creeks, the Hills being the neighborhood to which Alfie Palmer, and others like him, had risen: high ground that represented a social ascendancy from where the Creeks lived—the low-lying slums, the mean and fetid nest of hovels on the shores of the Foxenkill, that foul creek where the shacks of the Irish erupted overnight like anarchic mushrooms and where the killing of Toddy Ryan took place.