Quinn's Book

by William Kennedy

  “A very good likeness, that,” said Quinn, perceiving the jaw in the portrait to be stronger than the jaw beneath it. Of Gordon’s past he remembered only Yale law school, but he would come to know the man as the successor to his father in running the family foundries, a serious churchgoer who abandoned his father’s Presbyterian life for the Episcopal high church, who translated Vergil’s Aeneid from the Latin and then dramatized the story of Aeneas and Dido for the stage; a man of many interests. One too many: Maud.

  “It’s only been up a week,” said Gordon of his portrait, “but I am pleased with it. The artist worked on it five months. He began it even before I took title to this place.”

  “You were very sure of yourself.”

  “Once I heard Dirck was selling it, I had to have it. I bought it for Maud, really. She’s mad about being here.”

  “It was quite a surprise to see Maud.”

  “She’s spoken of you, but then again, who hasn’t? She’s here only a few days and then we’re going to Saratoga for the racing. She has a relative up there.”

  “She looks well.”

  “Indeed she does. She’s dazzling. We’ll be married soon.”

  “Now, that’s a surprise, Maud married,” Quinn said, reaching for the grapes.

  “She’s trepidatious about it.”

  “Maud is always trepidatious about relationships,” said Quinn, popping grapes into his mouth.

  “We’re solving it,” said Gordon.

  “You’re a sturdy fellow,” said Quinn.

  Quinn popped his final grape, then stood up and drank his whiskey in a gulp. “I must be going,” he said, “but first tell me about Hillegond.”

  “The killer went upstairs and found her sleeping, looped the garrote around her neck and dragged her from the bed with it. It was clear she died in a moment and did not suffer.”

  “Some suffer in a moment what takes others twenty years to feel.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” said Gordon, and his voice was receding for Quinn, only sporadic words registering: “. . . strangled Matty . . . the stairs . . . she fought . . .” For Quinn there was only Maud’s coldness, and he silently recited the old Irish poem of warning:

  Wherefore should I go to death,

  for red lips, for gleaming teeth? . . .

  Thy pleasant mien, thy high mind,

  Thy slim hand, O foam-white maid,

  O blue eye, O bosom white,

  I shall not die for thy sake.

  Repeat it now. Repeat.

  For this is your fate.

  “. . . the fellow was shameless . . . dressed like a priest . . . Hillegond’s young lover, can you imagine? . . . But he shows up in no records as a priest . . . Did you know him?”

  “Who?” asked Quinn.

  “The priest fellow. Finnerty, if that’s his name. It’s what he went by in the theater. A bad apple, to say the least.”

  “What about him?”

  “Aren’t you listening, Mr. Quinn? He’s in jail. They’ve charged him as her killer. He had her jade ring. He said she gave it to him.”

  “Hillegond?”

  “Damn it, Quinn, are you all there? I took you to be acute. Are you ill, or what ails you?”

  “I’m distracted, forgive me,” and he turned to leave, turned back. “Thank you for the whiskey.”

  “I hoped to hear of your war experiences.”

  “Another time.”

  “Perhaps tonight if you’re not busy. Join us at the Army Relief Bazaar.”

  “Perhaps,” said Quinn, straining.

  “It’s for the sick and wounded, you know. I’m chairman of the thing. I’ve been so involved with the war that my father considers me a practical amalgamationist. I actually recruited an entire company of army volunteers out of our two foundries. A good many were Irish.”

  “That’s very patriotic,” said Quinn.

  “You must come to our bazaar,” said Gordon. “We’ll lionize you if you’ll let us.”

  “I doubt I could handle that.”

  “We’ll be going at seven. We could pick you up. Where are you staying?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You mean you don’t have a place? Why, stay here, then.”

  “That’s generous, but I think—” and Quinn, in this instant, could not think at all.

  From the doorway Capricorn intruded on the hesitational moment. “Mr. Quinn, Miss Maud say she got a letter she want you to read. She be upstairs in the sittin’ room.”

  Quinn turned to Gordon, who was smiling.

  “It’s pleasant in Maud’s sitting room,” Gordon said.

  Quinn returned Gordon’s smile, feeling the sudden urge to stuff several grapes up the man’s nose. Then he followed Capricorn out of the room and up the stairs.

  As he walked, Quinn perceived that with a brusque offering of her hand, with a summons to come hither for a letter, with a decorous public invitation to chat in proper confines, Maud again proved herself a creature of quixotic ways, social fits. Quinn made the first turning on the mahogany staircase, that broad, expansive work of art that rose out of the foyer into the mystery of the mansion’s upper labyrinths, and he measured the distance from his last meeting with Maud: six years—the year 1858, when, as journeyman paragraphist and sometime essayist on sporting events, theater, crime, and judiciality for Will Canaday’s Albany Chronicle, he was present as Maud made her debut in Mazeppa.

  This was a hippodramatic spectacle, an innovation within a hoary melodramatic theatrical corruption of a Lord Byron narrative poem that had been inspired by a passage in Voltaire’s history of Charles XII of Sweden; and it proved that Maud Fallon not only possessed a singular body but was willing to demonstrate said fact to the world at high risk to that very same singularity.

  Lo, the poor Mazeppa. A Tatar foundling who comes to young manhood in the court of the King of Poland, he shares love with the King’s daughter, who is abruptly promised to the Count Palatine. Professing his love for the princess, Mazeppa assaults and wounds the Count in a duel and for his effrontery is strapped supine to the back of a wild horse. The horse is then lashed into madness, loosed upon the Ukrainian plains, and runs itself to death. Grievous torture is the lot of Mazeppa during this wild ride, but he survives, is discovered near death by his father (what a coincidence is here), who is the King of Tatary. And Mazeppa soon returns to Poland with the Tatar army to wreak vengeance on Poland and marry his beloved.

  In early years of the play the Mazeppa ride had been accomplished onstage with a dummy athwart the live animal, the dummy role in time giving way to intrepid actors. But not until Maud’s day had the intrepidity been offered to a female, this the idea of Joseph K. Moran, Albany’s Green Street Theater manager and erstwhile tenor turned theatrical entrepreneur, who invited Maud (a horsewoman all her life, as well as a danseuse with acrobatic skills and risqué propensities—her famed Spider Dance, for example) to impersonate the male hero, ride supine and bareback upon Rare Beauty, a genuine horse, and to rise, thereon, up from the footlights and along four escalating platforms to a most high level of the stage, and to do this as well at a fair gallop while clad in a flesh-colored, skin-tight garment of no known name, which would create the illusion of being no garment at all. And so it followed that Maud, barebacked, perhaps also barebuttocked and barebusted, and looking very little like a male hero, climbed those Albany platforms to scandalously glamorous international heights.

  Witnessing all this on opening night in 1858, Quinn confirmed his suspicion that he and the truest love of his life (whom he had not seen since she disappeared from Obadiah’s home in Saratoga eight years previous) were at this moment incompatible; for who could marry a woman of such antics? That raucous lasciviosity of the audience would madden Quinn in a matter of weeks. And so he called upon Maud in her dressing room, waiting for the wildness of her success to subside into a second day, to tell her as much.

  “My God, Daniel, you’re my savior,” she said when she saw him, h
ugging him vigorously, talking as if only days and not years had elapsed since their last meeting. “You’ve come just in time to rescue me from this dementia. Can you imagine what this will do to my life?”

  Quinn, nonplussed as usual, sat next to Maud, bathing in her presence and her gaze, and could say only, “You are quite spectacular. I love you incredibly. I’ll always love you.”

  “I know that,” said Maud. “Never mind that now. How am I going to get out of this? They want me for as long as I’ll stay. They want a contract. They think they’ll draw capacity houses for weeks, or months. They say I’ll be rich in a trice.”

  “Money is nothing,” said Quinn.

  “Don’t be a nincompoop, Daniel,” said Maud. “Money is everything to me. How am I to live without money? I’ve schemed for years to accumulate wealth but it eludes me. I’m incompetent.”

  “I’ll take care of you,” said Quinn.

  “How much do you make?”

  “Twenty dollars a week.”

  “I’ll make four times that tonight,” said Maud.

  “Then marry your horse,” said Quinn, and he left her.

  Quinn made the second turning on the grand staircase, contemplating the nature of love and money, inquiring to an unknown authority whether there was such a thing as pure love, or was it as much an illusion as Maud’s sham nudity? If there was such, he wondered further, was it what he now felt? And if what he now felt was not love, could the real element ever be begotten by his like?

  He repeated to himself:

  I shall not die for thy sake,

  O maid with the swan-like grace . . .

  And then, trepidatious, he entered the sitting room of Maud the Brusque, and encountered her in a pale pink dressing gown, her auburn hair now flowing to her shoulders, her pink chemisette visible beneath her gown, and beneath that, three visible inches of cloven line between her breasts. Never before had Quinn seen this much of Maud’s flesh. Never before had he known it to be so abundant; and the sight of it stopped his movement.

  “You have a letter for me?” he asked.

  “I do,” said Maud, “but that’s not why I invited you here. I thought you might like to see my breasts.”

  “Ah,” said Quinn, “have I at last become the equal of a cake?”

  Maud loosened the belt of her dressing gown and moved closer to Quinn.

  When she saw Quinn standing tall by the door of the mansion, Maud assumed he was a spirit, so certain had she been of his death; for she had seen in her mind how he crumpled when hit by the cannonball, and how he lay still. And from then forward she received no further visions of his distant life. She thought often of him, and wept always at the memory of his face, his infectious smile of the so-white teeth. And yet there he stood, not a spirit at all, so she knew she must act quickly.

  From the first landing on the staircase she watched him as he talked with Gordon, ready to call his name if he started to leave. When she saw him enter the house she knew she had gained time, and so came to her rooms, found the letter she had written him in 1858, and prepared herself to greet him in the manner she had so long imagined. With the help of her serving maid, Cecile, she stripped off her clothing, then donned the chemisette and the robe, placed the letter on the long table, lighted the candles in the two candelabra to frame the letter (and in due course, herself), drew the drapes so the room would not be visible from the upper porch, and sent Cecile away.

  She sat on the green velvet sofa, thinking of how angry with her Quinn would be after his talk with Gordon. But that anger would pass and she would impose on him a geis. He would then, in due course, be hers, never again to talk of money. They would live together, or separately, it would not matter, for they would be equals in love, something they never had been since love began.

  When he came into the room she saw his expression was a stone of feigned wrath, which only made him more handsome, more appealing. Maud always saw through Quinn’s masks. He threw the cake up at her when she spoke of her breasts, but she pacified him by offering herself to his eyes. He will not resist me, was her intention. But one must not dismiss Quinn’s dispositions too easily, for he is a willful man and at times must be cajoled into the behavior he most desires. With him love must be sat upon, like an egg. It will hatch with warmth, with envelopment. On its own it could rot.

  She let her robe fall open, revealing the chemisette, the same order of undergarment Magdalena had worn the night of her death in the river of ice. It clung to Maud from shoulder to middle thigh. Maud imagined herself floating to the bottom of the icy river, snared by John’s hook, lifted aboard a skiff, then dragged, bitten, and bounced through the night toward this mansion, which Maud ever since had known as a place where the miracle of love rises gloriously out of death, relinquishes its scars, and moves on to the next order of fulfillment.

  She opened the tie of her robe, cradled her breasts with both hands, removed them from constraint, and introduced Quinn to her matured bosom.

  He stared.

  He almost smiled.

  He looked at her eyes.

  He looked again at what was revealed.

  He kissed her on the mouth.

  He held her shoulders.

  He stepped back from the kiss.

  He touched her left nipple with his right fingertips, lightly. It was the color of cinnamon sugar.

  He put his lips on her left nipple, tasted it.

  He lifted her left breast in his right hand, moving it slowly from east to west, then west to east.

  He attended her right breast with his left hand.

  He put his lips on her right breast.

  He lightly bit the nipple of her right breast.

  He kissed her on the mouth, holding both her breasts in both his hands.

  He stepped back from the kiss, levitating both breasts, moving them from west to east, north to south, and so on.

  He kissed the cloven line between her breasts.

  He licked the line and tasted her salt.

  He held both her breasts with both his hands and pressed their softness against both sides of his face.

  He raised his face to hers and kissed her on the mouth.

  “Do you like me?” she inquired.

  “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard you say, and I’ve heard several.”

  “Have you known a lot of women?”

  “A fair number. It’s been a bazaar of enticement, you might say.”

  “I’ve had six men.”

  “A round number.”

  “And several hundred suitors.”

  “The fellow downstairs is one of the privileged half dozen, I presume.”

  “He is not.”

  “Has he ever put his mouth on your body?”

  “Never. But even so, he is quite jealous. We must hurry. I want you to see all of me.”

  “You’re very determined.”

  “Only fools are otherwise.”

  She picked the letter off the table and stuffed it into Quinn’s trouser pocket, then moved the candelabra farther apart and sat on the table.

  “Do you remember how John came to Magdalena when she was dead, how he raised her clothing?”

  “I remember it vividly.”

  “I want you to do the same with me now. My breasts are blushing. Can you see?”

  “I can.”

  “I feel a sharp rush of blood to them when I get excited.”

  “I could feel their pulse when I touched you.”

  “They make the rest of me function. They’re the brains of my sex.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “Now, I want you to look at me, but you must be precise in what you think. I’m accessible to the man who knows exactly how he loves me. No voyeur will ever reach me.”

  She lowered herself into a supine position on the table, freeing up her robe and chemisette. Quinn, seeking precision but astonished by Maud’s behavior, could only watch with awe her reenactment of Magdalena’s posture, the arra
y of her apparel before resurrection.

  “For God’s sake, hurry up,” Maud said, and Quinn folded her robe and chemisette upward to reveal the inversely triangulated center of his dreams, more striking than he had imagined, more symmetrical, the auburn crest of it an arc, an emerging sunrise of irresistible invitation. Maud closed her eyes and let her arms fall into the same position as Magdalena’s of yore. Quinn put the palm of his hand on her sunrise and she opened her eyes.

  “No,” she said. “We’re not ready.”

  “Who says we’re not?”

  “My blood.”

  “Why are you with him?” Quinn said.

  “I have to be with someone once in a while. He’s bright.”

  “And he’s rich.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “It used to.”

  “Why are you talking about money when I’m in this position?”

  “You should leave him.”

  “Why don’t you take me away from him?”

  “I wondered when you’d get around to kidnapping.”

  “Look at me, Daniel,” she said, and she spread herself.

  Quinn looked. “You are a most willful woman,” he said.

  “Everyone has a right to a willful life,” said Maud. “I dare you to take me away.”

  “And so I shall,” said Quinn. “But first I must know. Have you ever done this in front of a cake?”

  She sat up and covered herself, moved the candelabra to where they had been before her ritual, snuffed the candles, opened the drapes to the upper porch, and sat on the velvet sofa precisely where she had been prior to Quinn’s arrival. Gordon then knocked on the door of the sitting room.