Quinn's Book Read online

  Emmett told me stories of some of these people. He had been moving among them for a week to hear their tales, discover news from Ireland, help where and how he could. His concern for them was missionary: he had been one of them himself when he came here. His fervor to work for their betterment would grow in him with the passing years and affect my life profoundly. He told me of one man who stole a sack of horsehides, was arrested trying to sell them back to their owner and went to jail for it, leaving his family destitute. He told of a man long off the whiskey who came home drunk and singing and urged his sullen wife to sing with him, but she would not, and so he beat her with a crock and went to jail for it, leaving her destitute.

  “They’re lost, most of them,” Emmett said to me. “And who wouldn’t be? They’ve left all they knew, and all they’ve got is what they can wear and carry. But if lost it is, then some say this is the land to be lost in, for it all comes right again here. Would you agree to that, lad?”

  I nodded my head yes, but I thought of Dirck and his absent tongue, and of lost Joshua and his fugitive life, and of the dead Swede who could no longer agree life would come right again; and it remained to be seen whether the lives of the Ryans would ever again be other than a tissue of days with open sores.

  “Look at them,” Emmett said to me. “Study the face and the eyes and the gait of the walking misery that’s come to visit.”

  They passed on then, the last of them, and Emmett followed their steps with his horse and wagon. Ahead we could see them climbing into the railroad carriages that would take them west, the carriage windows down, some wet wash and portable bedding already getting the air, the children barefoot and on holiday, racing on the cobbles and gravel, a snarling dog clubbed by a militiaman’s rifle, a piglet dropped and running loose beneath a carriage. I scrambled under the car to catch it, but the pig could run faster than I could crawl, and it ran into the tall grass by the tracks, lost forever to the old man who dropped it.

  Thirty-four cars they occupied, not the longest train I ever saw but the one whose memory is vivid still. We watched until they were all on board. A man of middle years, his shirt in tatters, a half-eaten chicken leg in his hand, stood alone on the steps of the train and began a song in the Gaelic, that strange tongue rendered brilliant by the man’s plaintive voice. Silence came onto the crowd and we listened to the minstrel, I with a growing wonder in my heart at all the joy and misery that simultaneously commanded so many unknown lives. The train whistle interrupted the sound of the song but not the singer, and as the cars moved out, his voice reached us in fragments, audible between the whistle blasts, a fervent melody struggling to be heard. And then it was gone.

  While we waited for my train Emmett and I talked of Ireland, and of family, and of my future, and of how I was always welcome at his home, which I well knew, and then my train was there, bound for Saratoga.

  I boarded knowing, with every willful step, that I had once and for all obliterated the image of myself as helpless, hapless orphan, tossed off a canalboat like so much off al. Nor was I a greenhorn victim, not anymore. I still do not know why I knew this so firmly, but it was true. It remained to be seen whether fate would again ravage my life, but at the moment luck was with me, and I felt an extraordinary rapture, full of the music of sunrise. As I waved farewell to Emmett, I and my train moved northward with that same boiling energy that we had, at the dawn of the light, stolen from the gods.

  WHEN MAGDALENA COLÓN stepped onto the stage at Utica, her first public appearance after leaving Albany, her overarching impulse was to tell the audience of her death and resurrection. But with John’s words strong in her brain, she stifled the urge. What John had said to her was, “You talk of that and they’ll think you’re daft as a bloody owl.”

  By Syracuse Magdalena could stifle herself no longer. In a voice reverberating with all the humility of a heavenly choir’s frailest angel, she stepped delicately to center stage and offered her thanks to God for resurrecting her from the dead. She told her story of the child at the bottom of the river who had welcomed her to the birthplace of dreams. She expatiated on her pleasant time under water in the land of luminous dolls and, with a great surge of her mystical wisdom, told her listeners they should not fear crossing over into death, because it was so attractive over there. “Also,” she said, “there is always the chance of turning around and coming right back.” She concluded by saying, “I can’t imagine a more pleasant experience than dying.”

  She then went into her performance: a song first, then her famed Spider Dance, in which she shook off an attack of imaginary arachnids that were climbing her skirts and bodice, and in so doing revealed more flesh than was generally provided to American audiences outside of brothels. Alas, her report on the beyond had taken its effect. The audience tittered at her dancing, and her vaunted sinfulness was paled over with an aureole of humbug sanctity.

  A Syracuse newspaper reported on Magdalena’s disquisition:

  DANCER CLAIMS RESURRECTION

  The Spanish dancer Magdalena Colón, who calls herself La Última, performed for an overabundance of spectators last night but failed to arouse either the condemnatory or the lascivious reactions her dancing has produced in other cities. After evoking the Deity by describing Him as a small female child clutching a doll, the dancer spoke of her own experience drowning in the river and of being resurrected from death at a much later hour by the ministrations of love. It might be said of her performance that while it, too, perished, resurrection was not a consequence.

  Magdalena, undaunted, repeated her tale to a Rochester audience. By then the word of her bizarre story, and not her sensuality, sold out the house. Hearing the laughter and hooting that met her remarks about resurrection, Magdalena swirled in frenzied pirouettes across the stage and fled into the wings. Witnessing this, hearing the hoots, Maud walked onstage and faced the hostile audience, whose derision subsided at her advent.

  “Only fools and martyrs laugh at death,” she said to them. “Which are you?”

  She then asked the orchestra leader to play the music for the Spider Dance, and in learned emulation of her aunt she whirled about in recklessly flying skirts, her wild abandon silencing all hooters, and at length provoking them into cheers and long applause as the curtain fell. She took no curtain call. Backstage the wounded Magdalena embraced her, saying, “What a wonderful child you are.”

  “I’m not a child any longer, Auntie. No child could dance as I just have.”

  “Whatever you are, Maudie mine, I love you.”

  “You needn’t go on about that. Go out there now and sing your songs or the theater manager will deny us our money.”

  Thus began the stage career of Maud Fallon.

  La Última, in subsequent days, experienced a falling off, an attack of despair that prevented her from venturing on to Buffalo. She stopped eating and faded languidly into a vale of melancholy.

  “I have lost the voluptuary in me,” she kept saying. “My life is a bore, and in boredom I shall surely die.”

  She did not say this to John McGee, especially when he was providing her with the only kindness he fully understood: the thrust of his pelvic appendage. She received his thrust with artificial passion, but such politeness also bored her, and so she eventually accepted John’s largess in immobilized silence.

  “You had more life when you were dead,” John told her.

  She arose one day from her passionless bed to perform the usual ablution, and the coolness of the water between her legs seemed to renew her spirit. The idea of the healing power of water, so capable of assuaging even the agony of death, preempted all her thought.

  “I must have a lake,” she said to John.

  “A lake, is it?”

  “I must lie in a lake and recover my passion,” she said.

  “By the Jesus, I’m all for that,” said John.

  And so Saratoga Springs, famed for its lake and its healing spas, famed also as a place where voluptuaries were as commonplace as clov
er, became the destination of Magdalena, of John the Brawn, and of that chrysalid creature of the future, Maud Fallon.

  Upon arriving in Saratoga, Daniel Quinn bought a newspaper and read of the cancellation of Magdalena Colón’s performance that night at the Union Theater. The brief story referred to unexplained noises in the theater during an earlier performance. Quinn went to the theater and found it closed. He went to the print shop where the newspaper was printed and confronted its publisher, Calvin Potts, a small man with a white pigtail, who was wearing an apron stained with a generation’s worth of ink. Potts was working at a type cabinet, a stick of type in his hand, when Quinn introduced himself and handed him the letter Will Canaday had written on his behalf.

  “A man of substance, Will Canaday,” Potts said. “You must be worth a scrap of something if he thinks well of you. Did you ever set type for him?”

  “Setting type isn’t what I want to do,” said Quinn, and he groped for the word that would define his goal. Editor? Not likely. Writer? Too ambitious. “I think just now I ought to learn how to be a paragraphist,” he said.

  “You’d best learn to set those paragraphs in type if you want to earn a living, boy. Words are flimsy things. Type is solid and real.”

  “I can see that,” said Quinn. “But paragraphs are also real in their way. I’ve seen how they can change things.”

  “Ah, so you’re out to change things.”

  “No, sir. I just want to write paragraphs and see what happens. I thought I might write one or two for you about Magdalena Colón, the dancer. I know her quite well and I saw this story about her in your newspaper.”

  “Did you read that about those noises? Folks think spirits made them.”

  “Yes. Magdalena is quite good with the spirits.”

  “You talk to spirits too, do you?”

  “No, sir. I talk only to living people.”

  “A blessing if you want to be a reporter.”

  “I don’t know where to find Magdalena, though.”

  “She’s out at Griswold’s place, but I don’t know as they’ll let you in out there.”

  “I’m expected,” said Quinn.

  “You certainly do come equipped,” said Potts, and he told Quinn how to find Griswold’s. “I’ll look at your paragraphs, if you write any,” he added, “but hold down that spirit nonsense. People want real stuff, not all that folderol about spooks.”

  Quinn nodded as he went out, not quite agreeing.

  Calvin Potts gave Quinn directions to the home of Obadiah Griswold, the carriage and sleigh manufacturer at whose home on the shore of Saratoga Lake Magdalena Colón and her entourage were guests. Obadiah had become smitten with Magdalena after seeing her dance in New York, and offered her the run of his mansion, his stables, his vast acreage, and his lake whenever she cared to visit. In her melancholy period at Rochester she remembered Obadiah and wrote him, accepting his invitation.

  Obadiah welcomed his guests with one proviso: that Magdalena alone occupy the room next to his own. He kept her constantly in his sight during the first days of her visit, catering to her every whim. Magdalena accepted him as an oddity, a foppish middle-aged widower who frequently wore an ankle-length robe to hide his bowlegs, a descendant of English Puritans who had long ago rejected all Puritanical inheritances. Anticipating Magdalena’s early capitulation to his desire, Obadiah took her on a tour of his secret thirdf-loor room that housed his erotic sculpture, paintings, etchings, and pornographic books dating to the dawn of printing. Magdalena relapsed into melancholy at the sight of so many erect phalluses and lubricious vaginas, and she retreated to her room, insisting that only Maud and John the Brawn attend her bedside.

  Obadiah took up a vigil outside Magdalena’s door and left it only to eat, sleep, and perform bodily functions, a gesture of concern that so bored Magdalena that she sent John theater-ward to book her a performance as soon as possible as a means of escape. John returned, accomplished, but warned her the theater manager would brook none of her humbuggery.

  “Just keep mum on what you found at the bottom of the river,” John told her, “or he’ll throw us all out in the alley.”

  And so Magdalena performed as she had prior to her death: a blithe entrance to the orchestral melody, several pirouettes of restrained torsion, then a medley of French and Spanish songs. She followed with her interpretation of a Viennese waltz, andante, and concluded with the Spanish tarantela, her spectacular Spider Dance, allegro—oh yes, quite. Hisses, hoots, wild applause, and huzzahs, the miscellaneous wages of Terpsichore, followed her performance.

  On the next night Magdalena had barely begun her Spider Dance when a thunderclap shook the theater, vibrating orchestra seats, rocking the boxes, loosening plaster dust from the ceiling, and spilling oil from the burning wall sconces into running pools of fire onstage. Maud, standing in the wings, swiftly smothered them all with a piece of canvas.

  Magdalena was convinced an earthquake was in process, but then calm returned, audience panic and screaming subsided, and except for a few who fled at the threat of fire, people returned to their seats. Magdalena signaled the orchestra to resume, and she began her dance anew. At her initial steps another noise erupted, smaller of force, but formidable even so; and then another, and another. Magdalena stood frozen, and the orchestra trailed off. The booming from above, fixed in no single area, seemed to be a storm floating free inside the theater. The concussions came yet again, four this time, and rhythmic; then three more, and rhythmic. Such noises were man-made, were they not? Earth had never quaked in regularized tempo, had it?

  Magdalena knew only confusion in that moment, and then she saw Maud walking onto the stage and staring up at the theater’s stormy ceiling. Maud clapped her hands four times, then three. The noise instantly echoed: four sounds and then three, all subdued in keeping with the softness of Maud’s clapping. Maud clapped twice more, then once, and the source of the noise responded in precise kind.

  “What are you doing?” Magdalena asked.

  “I’m having a conversation with the noise,” said Maud.

  People in the audience began to clap their hands, but the noise would not echo them. When audience clapping subsided, Maud looked toward the nearest ceiling and wall from which the noise seemed to come, and said, “Are you a human being making these noises? If you are, then rap once.”

  No rap followed.

  “Then are you a spirit? If so, rap twice.”

  Instantly two raps were heard, along with gasps from the audience and the swift exodus of the timid and the incurious. But most of the audience stayed, fully as transfixed by Maud’s performance as was Magdalena, who atavistically blessed herself.

  “Good Lord, Maudie, what’s going on?”

  “How many letters in my first name?” Maud asked the wall.

  Four raps followed, and Magdalena immediately told the audience, “That’s true. Her name is Maud.”

  “How old am I?” asked Maud, and thirteen raps followed.

  “Correct again,” said Magdalena.

  “Now, how old is La Última?”

  “No, no,” said Magdalena, but there followed then a rapid series of raps like the long roll of a drum (forty-one in all) and the audience exploded with laughter. At this Magdalena shook the front of her skirt, exposing her saucy response to mockery, and won applause from the crowd. But from the wings came another response: the hisses and wild fulminations of the theater manager, demanding a resumption of music and dance. Nonplussed by the condition of life around her, Magdalena gestured her agreement. Maud shrugged, nodded to the audience, and walked off the stage. The orchestra resumed the music of the Spider Dance, but before Magdalena could begin, a thunderclap descended with more power than at first, swaying the chandelier in a dangerous arc and scattering the audience beneath it. The thunder clapped a second time, then a third, and more of the timid folk took their exit. Only when Maud walked back onstage and clapped three times at the noise did it clap thrice in return. Lento. Politely lento
.

  Thus began the spiritualistic career of Maud Fallon.

  Throngs came to the theater on subsequent nights to hear the indoor thunder, but after three nights of only pregnant silence the crowds dwindled and the accusation of humbug again attached itself to Magdalena. She cancelled all performances and reluctantly retreated to Obadiah’s lakefront sanctuary.

  Four days after the first onset, the noise returned, this time at morning in Obadiah’s plant-ridden conservatory-breakfast room. Maud paused in the midst of her shirred eggs and told the noise to mind its manners and not interrupt her and her aunt’s breakfast.

  The noise desisted but returned at midafternoon, sliding an empty chair across the porch and thumping lightly on its wooden back. Maud spoke to it in French and Spanish, and the noise responded in a way Maud found unintelligible. The following day the noise returned while Maud was in the kitchen talking to the cook and the scullery maid. She told it to go away and stop bothering people, and it exploded with a thunderbolt that broke four teacups.

  Word of all this spread through Saratoga and crowds converged on the Griswold property, cluttering the road and carriageway, many asking to see Maud in action. Obadiah posted servants outside to deflect the crowds. He also invited the mayor, the constable, two bankers, four judges, the head of the women’s auxiliary of the county orphan asylum, and asked them to help define the nature of this visitation.

  It was at this point that Quinn arrived at the mansion. Having left his traveling bag at Mrs. Trim’s rooming house on Phila Street, he hired a cab to take him to Obadiah’s home, his first expenditure of money from the Dirck annuity. He arrived quite the young gentleman, thinking of himself for the first time as a journalist of independent mind and means, in debt to no man, woman, or relative, and full ready to carry out the task at hand, the nature of which eluded him utterly.