Quinn's Book

by William Kennedy

  “She’s strong as an ox,” said Obadiah.

  “You shut up about how strong I am. I’m weak as a kitten.”

  “Did that letter in the paper this morning disturb you?” Gordon asked.

  “I don’t bother with such tripe,” said Magdalena.

  “Good for you,” said Gordon.

  “What did it say?”

  “It was just tripe, as you say,” said Gordon.

  “I thought so. Did they mention me by name?”

  “No names were used. Even the signature was a pseudonym. Purity Knickerbocker.”

  “They’re all cowards,” said Magdalena.

  “Precisely,” said Gordon.

  “They said I should watch out for something.”

  “They implied that,” said Gordon.

  “Extremely silly. What do you suppose they meant?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” said Maud.

  “It’s totally ridiculous,” said Obadiah.

  “It’s ridiculous when you open your mouth,” said Magdalena.

  At this point I decided to maintain my sanity by separating myself from Magdalena’s quixotry. I stood up and suggested to Gordon, who was beginning to take on the appearance of a loathsome animal of indeterminate species, that we should go to bid on the race.

  “I want to go, too,” said Maud.

  “No,” I said. “You stay and keep your aunt company.”

  “I want to bid. I want to buy a pool on the Warrior.”

  “I’ll buy one for you,” said I.

  “I’ll buy one for you, never mind him,” said Gordon.

  “I’ll buy it myself,” said Maud.

  “Then go by yourself,” I said and I sat back down.

  “You’re a mule, Daniel,” Maud said.

  “If I were a mule I’d be in battle at Atlanta,” I said.

  Maud chose to stay, at end, and Gordon and I walked off like school chums.

  “Is it true you’re going to run for Congress?” I asked him. I had no need to be sociable with him, but Will Canaday had told me he truly was a man of decent principle, a Unionist, staunchly (though belatedly) for Lincoln—unlike his father, Lyman, who thought Lincoln a tyrant and usurper—and good with the workers at the Fitzgibbon foundries. I thought him a bit too full of himself, but he did have the good taste to pursue Maud.

  “I probably will,” he said. “The party offered it to me.”

  “The Republicans?”

  “Of course.”

  “You may find yourself running against John. The Democrats are talking of him as a candidate, too.”

  “I’ve heard that. I’m afraid I can’t worry about the Irish.”

  The idea of a man entering into a new career at midlife was strange to me, and appealing. I had thought only of continuity since I began educating myself, and so the idea of a mind change—industry into politics, in Gordon’s case—seemed like a mutation of the species; and I date to this moment my change of mind on the word.

  All that I had written for Will and for the Tribune seemed true enough, but a shallow sort of truth, insufficiently reflective of what lay below. Joshua’s life, or John’s, or my own could only be hinted at by the use of the word as I had been practicing it. The magnificent, which is to say the tragic or comic crosscurrents and complexities of such lives, lay somewhere beyond the limits of my calling. My thinking process itself was inhibited by form, by the arguments and rules of tradition. How was I ever to convey to another soul, even in speech, what I felt for and about Maud, what grand churnings she set off in my inner regions? How could I know those workings, even for myself alone, without a proper language to convey them? I was in need of freedom from inhibition, from dead language, from the repetitions of convention.

  If I had not left my disk at the hotel, I would have taken it out of its sack and studied its mystery. And with that thought I knew that what was wrong with my life and work was that I was so busy accumulating and organizing facts and experience that I had failed to perceive that only in the contemplation of mystery was revelation possible; only in confronting the incomprehensible and arcane could there be any synthesis. My wretched inadequacy in achieving integrity of either mind or spirit after having witnessed so much death, deviltry, and treachery was attributable to this. I had become a creature of rote and method at a time when only intuitions culled from an anarchic faith in unlikely gods could offer me an answer. How could I ever come to know anything if I didn’t know what I didn’t know?

  “Well,” I said to Gordon as we neared the betting enclosure, “I hope you’re getting used to my plan to kidnap Maud.”

  “You haven’t gone soft in the brain, have you, Quinn? Kidnapping is a serious affair.”

  “They have to catch you, and I can’t conceive of that.”

  “You’re unorthodox, all right. I can say that after hearing you talk at the bazaar. But you know I intend to marry the girl.”

  “Does she intend that as well?”

  “We’ve talked of it often.”

  “I don’t think Maud is very taken with marriage,” I said. “I think she much prefers to live in sin.”

  “You’d best watch your language, fellow.”

  “You’re totally correct. I was just telling myself the same thing.”

  We were by then at the center of the exquisite vice of gambling on Thoroughbreds, the auctioneer standing on an elevated platform with a pair of spotters watching the crowd of about three hundred for their bids. Bidding on the pools had been frenzied since early morning at John McGee’s local gambling house on Matilda Street in the Spa, but now it was reaching an apex of zeal at the track. As post time neared, a chalkboard gave the bids on each horse in the first pool. And now each horse was being auctioned separately, yet again, the folks with the fat bankrolls raising the bid on their favorites to levels beyond the reach of everyday gamblers. John held all bets, giving the winning bidder a ticket on the horse of his choice, with which he might claim all the money bet on his particular pool if his horse won. John took three percent of all bets, and so stood to win perpetually and lose never a whit—odds that pleased him quitesome.

  There would be two races today, the first and most important being the Griswold Stakes, named for Obadiah: best two out of three heats, each heat one mile, carry ninety pounds, $50 entrance, purse $1,000 added, for all ages. These were the entries:

  Lord Cecil Glastonbury’s ROYAL TRAVELER, four-year-old, highest pool price thus far $1,200

  Maud Fallon’s BLUE GRASS WARRIOR, five-year-old, pool price $950

  Wilmot Bayard’s BARRISTER, four-year-old, pool price $600

  Bradford and Phoebe Strong’s COMFORT, five-year-old, pool price $255

  Price McGrady’s TIPPERARY BIRDCATCHER, three-year-old, pool price $180

  Abner Swett’s ZIGZAG MASTER, four-year-old, pool price $60

  By the time Quinn and Gordon focused on the betting the Warrior was up to $1,100. Quinn bid $1,150 and was topped by a Negro woman with a fistful of money who bid $1,175. Quinn went to $1,200, the Negro woman to $1,225, Quinn to $1,250 and quiet. And so Quinn took the ticket, knowing it was madness to spend so much money. But spending it on behalf of Maud reduced the madness substantially. Also, the total for his pool was $3,805. So if he won, as he intuited, he would triple his money.

  “I’m glad you didn’t fight me,” he told Gordon.

  “I wasn’t tempted.”

  “There’ll be other chances,” said Quinn.

  They observed the presence of five-hundredand thousand-dollar bills in hands of newcomers bidding feverishly on the next pool. The two men observed the selling of this last pool before the first heat and noted Maud’s Warrior moving into favored position, the pool now bringing $ 1,050 on the Warrior, and only $990 on Royal Traveler, the other horses standing more or less the same; and then the pair walked back toward their party, observing the jockeys sitting in wire baskets to be weighed, the horses in the paddock circle waiting to enter the track, and on to the g
allery to see the first horse already on the track with jockey up and stewards leading the parade past all connoisseurs and ignoramuses in residency on the subject of horseflesh. The buzz of the crowd was growing in volume, the judges alert in their elevated viewing stands on either side of the finish line, the track a mix of sandy loam and clay, sere and pale now from the long drought. It was blazing noon on this inaugural racing morning of August third, and the five thousand all looked out from their privileged galleries, out from the less-privileged standing area below, and still more looked on from perches in trees or atop tall wagons parked on the periphery of the mile-long track, sandy scrub pines visible in all directions beyond the sea of grass planted in the center of the track’s oval.

  Looking down from his perch between Maud and Magdalena, Quinn saw the Negro woman he had outbid standing with a group of Negro men and women in their own preserve along the rail’s final edge, the woman with an unobstructed view of the race. She and her male companion had been the lone Negroes in the betting enclosure, and Quinn now sought to define her from a distance. Her ample self was singular, to begin with; her aggressive presence here a fact that set her apart from the four million slaves and the half-million free Negroes in this divided Union. How does she come to be here when war rages around the heads of her enslaved kith and kin? Why are any of us here, for that matter? Quinn would take bets that the prevailing evaluation would be that she was a madam. She well may be. Quinn knew such madams in New York, drank in their establishments, knew their girls. But Quinn knew also that the woman could be a gambler on the order of Joshua, an entrepreneur who saw her chances and understood them. She could be the inheritor of a fortune left by a guilty white man, or a queen of industry in the great Negro netherworld so little understood by white entrepreneurs. Or was she a mathematical wizard who had discovered the investment market? Well, Quinn had a good time trying to place her in the cosmos, and knew he’d be wrong no matter what he decided, just as no man alive looking at Joshua could imagine his achievement in money and survival skills. Was the woman a sculptress from the Caribbees? A sorceress from Sierra Leone?

  Joshua’s father, known as Cinque, had been stolen by slavers from Sierra Leone, but offshore from Puerto Rico he led a revolt of slaves on board the ship, killed the captain and mate as other crewmen fled in small boats, then with one sailor’s help sailed eight weeks toward America and freedom, landing in starving condition at Virginia, where the sailor had vengefully steered them, and there Cinque and other surviving slaves were charged with murder. But instead of trial, and because of his physical value, Cinque was sold to a planter with a reputation for curbing arrogance. In time Cinque found a woman, sired Joshua, and after an escape attempt was hanged by his feet and whipped until he bled to death through his face, leaving a legacy of rebellion and unavengeable suffering for the three-year-old Joshua to discover.

  When his own time came for rebellion, Joshua, who had educated himself in stealth, had no need of murder. He fled from master in the night and made his way north to New York, where he gravitated to the first cluster of Negroes he found, that being at the Five Points, the pestilential neighborhood dominated by the Irish, but where Negroes and Italians, in smaller numbers, also lived and worked in the underworld that that neighborhood was, where every stranger was a mark, and where no human life was safe from the ravagements of the street and river gangs: the Daybreak Boys, the Short Tails, the Patsy Conroys.

  Joshua learned rat baiting at the Five Points, learned how to draw blood from bare-knuckle wounds with his mouth, this taught to him by an expert named Suckface, a member of the Slaughterhouse gang, who for ten cents would bite the head off a live mouse, and for a quarter off a live rat. Joshua learned to deal cards in a Five Points dive owned by a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound Negro woman called The Purple Turtle. She, like Joshua, lived on a street called Double Alley, and when Joshua told all this to John McGee in a later year, an enduring bond was forged between them; for John knew the Five Points intimately, had cousins there from Connacht (considered by some the lowliest place in Ireland, although not by the people from Connacht), had been in The Turtle’s place often, and for years sang the song of Double Alley and its poetic alias, Paradise Alley.

  Now Double Alley’s our Paradise Alley,

  For that’s where we learned how to die.

  We suckled on trouble and fightin’ and gin,

  And we loved every girl who was ready to sin.

  Old Double Alley’s our Paradise Alley

  For nobody ever got old.

  We fought for a nickel and died for a dime,

  We knew there was nothin’ but havin’ a time.

  Oh, I’d sure love to see the old place in its prime,

  Double old Paradise Alley.

  The Five Points harmony, though quitesuch it never was between the Negroes and the Irish, waned perceptibly when the war fever came on. The fight to free the niggers was all idiot stuff to the Five Points paddies, whose principal interest was freeing themselves from the woes that ailed them. And so it happened that many Negroes wisely moved out of Paradise to less hostile quarters. Joshua, by then, was long gone from Double Alley, and by the time the war erupted he’d been conducting on the Railroad for more than a decade.

  At a brisk tap of the drum the Griswold Stakes got off with as even a start as ever was. Blue Grass Warrior and Tipperary Birdcatcher led a tight pack by a pair of noses, Barrister and Royal Traveler neck and neck behind the leaders, Zigzag Master two lengths off, and Comfort trailing. So it went until the half mile, when Zigzag made his move and challenged the leading duo, his nose at the Warrior’s saddle girths, Barrister falling back after a spent burst of speed, and Comfort trailing. At the top of the stretch the Catcher lost wind, and Zigzag took the lead by a head, but the Warrior on the outside, attentive to the Negro jockey’s whip and whisper, moved alongside Zigzag, and then with a surge of power moved in front by a full length, then two, and in the stretch was going away to win the heat. The results:

  Blue Grass Warrior

  1

  Zigzag Master

  2

  Tipperary Birdcatcher

  3

  Royal Traveler

  4

  Barrister

  5

  Comfort

  6

  The betting was scrambled for the second heat, Comfort and Barrister withdrawn by their owners. Grooms started their rubdowns of the horses as soon as they left the track, and a keen-eyed steward, by chance and nothing more, noted that a long white marking in Zigzag’s nose had taken a shape different from what it had been at the start of the race; whereupon the overheated animal was examined and found to have been dyed. Under interrogation, owner Abner Swett professed ignorance. But it was quickly learned he was the brother-in-law of Jeremiah Plum, the patriarch of the notorious Plum family, which was famed throughout northeast Christendom for dyeing stolen horses to prevent them from being identified and reclaimed. Before the day was out we would all learn that Zigzag’s record had been fabricated as well, that his true name was Wild Pilgrim, and that he was a four-year-old with so many victories that he would have been at least a co-favorite (at much lower and less profitable odds) with the Traveler or the Warrior had his true history been known. The Pilgrim had beaten the Traveler twice, and so only Maud’s Warrior was feared as his competitor on this sunbright noonday, which was why John’s investigation into the doping of the Warrior focused on Abner Swett of Watervliet, a man of irregular values.

  As the horses were about to enter the track for the second heat, a carriage drawn by a single horse, and another horse and rider behind it, came onto the track from a gate at the top of the stretch, and at moderately high speed they approached the finish line, there slowing enough for the crowd to view them in full detail. In the carriage, an old demi-landau gilded like Obadiah’s masterwork, and with the letters M.C. painted on the door, rode a Negro wearing women’s clothing, including an unmistakable copy of Magdalena’s hat with a scarlet plume
rising from it, the plume and the Negro waving to the crowd as they passed. Behind him, clad only in long white underwear and a woman’s red wig, and riding backward and belly-up in the pose well known to multitudes from newspaper advertisements and theater posters-Maud as Mazeppa—rode another Negro, who also waved at the crowd and showed them his backside, to which was pinned a large green shamrock. Then, with a trick rider’s expertise, he righted himself, and the two Negroes galloped down the track and out the gate by the far turn before anyone had the wit to stop them.

  In the upper gallery, while the crowd exploded with laughter, Magdalena fell unconscious in Quinn’s arms.

  Soon after the mockery of Maud and Magdalena, the second heat of the Griswold Stakes was run. Three horses were entered: Blue Grass Warrior, Tipperary Birdcatcher, and Royal Traveler. They finished in that order, the Warrior winning by a length, the Traveler a far third. After crossing the finish line, Maud’s horse stepped into a hole in what seemed like a perfectly smooth section of the track, twisted its left foreleg, and broke it. The jockey pulled him up and the Warrior stood with his leg bent and dangling. Track handlers went to him and wrestled him down onto his side atop a tarpaulin; then they strapped him into the tarp and dragged him away. After discussing the matter with Maud, John McGee went to the barn where they had taken the Warrior and personally fired two bullets into the animal’s brain.

  QUINN AGAIN PERCEIVED inevitable death in the dangling leg of Blue Grass Warrior, just as he had seen it in 1863 during the second day of a week of violence now known as the New York Draft Riots. Rioting was entering into a crescendo on that day as Quinn and John McGee turned a corner onto Ninth Avenue, heading for the house where Joshua was waiting out the riots with another man, a newly arrived fugitive slave.

  Quinn himself had arrived only a week earlier, back from the battle of Vicksburg to write his personal tale of that ordeal, and having done that, he rested, sipping lager and communing with other ink-stained wretches at Charlie Pfaff’s Cave at Printing House Square about the nuances of war correspondency, literature, and Charlie’s German pancakes. Quinn’s time spent with the lower orders at the Five Points worked against his need for rest, and a doughty Tribune editor tracked him down and assigned him to roam the Five and assess the rampant resentment to the draft, the first list of conscripts having just been released by the federal government.