Quinn's Book Page 15
To the servant who answered his knock he said he was a friend of Magdalena and Maud. The servant summoned John McGee to establish Quinn’s validity, which John did with a middling smile and a lifted brow.
“Damned if it isn’t Danny me boy.”
“I’m no boy of yours, and that’s the truth of forever,” said Quinn.
“Does he know Madame Colón?” the servant asked.
“He does. She knew him in Albany. We all knew him when he had no hat.”
At this Quinn doffed his hat and the servant made way for him to step inside. The servant took him to Obadiah in the library, where Quinn introduced himself as an emissary from the newspaper of Calvin Potts. Obadiah instantly recruited him as a witness to the proceedings upcoming with Maud the wondrous, who could converse with the insubstantial air.
“Do you believe she can do that?” inquired Obadiah.
“I believe she can do anything she sets her mind to,” said Quinn. “I believe she has the magic.”
“The magic?”
“Yes, sir. The magic.”
Here is what Maud was thinking as she entered Obadiah Griswold’s drawing room to face eleven witnesses, including one woman who would make a body search of her prior to her planned conversation with the voluble dead.
First came the vision of Daniel Quinn, whom she saw as soon as she entered the room, he sitting there with a broad grin on his young face, wearing well-tailored clothes, new boots, and waving his new hat at her, the ninny, as if she hadn’t seen him the instant she walked into the room. She nodded her awareness of his presence but refrained from smiling, for when one converses with the dead, one must observe proper decorum.
Second, she had the moving image of a tall, emaciated man riding a horse across an open field. Here is what she was seeing: When the man becomes aware of the two carriages coming rapidly along the road he is nearing, he leaps down from his mount and, at a run, climbs a slight incline. He halts in the center of the road so that the deadly onrush of horses and vehicles will run him over.
Third was her thought on the cause of this image, which was a mystery, for it was neither memory nor dream, but a fully developed panorama, even to the brightness of the sun and the brilliant green of the hills behind the oncoming carriages. It arrived in her brain in all fullness at the moment she saw Quinn enter the drawing room of the mansion. Quinn was none of the men in the image.
Maud nodded at Quinn and turned her mind to her inquisitors, who all looked to her to be believers in the plausibility of conversing with a spirit. Maud felt lost in such a world of belief. Her classics teacher in Madrid had spoken of enantiodromia, the ancient Greek concept of running in contrary ways: believing in the unbelievable, for instance. Maud could not so believe. She believed in noise but not in spirits. Dead is dead, she believed. Noise came from the living. Minds were as noisy as the howling of a terrifying windstorm. Minds made noise: the collision of minds—hers, Magdalena’s, Quinn’s across the room, the ninny. I love him and his mind.
With her vision of Quinn came the continuing visual story of the emaciated man, who was climbing now to the road as the horses bore down on his life. The noise came then, rappings synchronized with the thudding of the horses’ hooves, growing louder, louder, louder.
“Enough!” yelled Maud, jolting her witnesses in their silent seats.
And so began the séance.
Talking with spirits can be tedious, and so Maud quickly devised a code: one rap is yes, two is no, spell out the rest with numerical equivalents of the alphabet. The noise quickly understood this, and while Maud was establishing her rules, witnesses left their seats and sought out hidden rappers or rapping devices. They moved furniture in their search, kept vigil in rooms adjacent to, above, and below the drawing room, and they found nothing at all.
“Can you see this spirit?” Obadiah asked Maud.
“Not a shred of anything,” said Maud. “But it is sending me pictures.” And she told them of the emaciated man.
“There he is in the road,” she said, “and the horses are coming at a fierce gallop. The man is facing the horses and won’t budge. Now the driver of the oncoming carriage is veering the horses to avoid running the man down and the carriage wheel strikes a rock on the rough ground. The right carriage door, it’s flying open, and oh, a woman, a woman is thrown to the ground. Now we’re on the road again, and a second carriage and pair are coming at a furious pace, directly behind the first. The second driver reins in his steeds and comes to a stop just where the emaciated man is standing with his eyes closed. The man is standing there between the frothing mouths of the second team of horses. There, now, there comes the driver jumping down from the second carriage. He grabs the emaciated man by his shirt collar and drags him from between the horses. He punches him once in the center of his face, and the man falls backward and rolls down the incline. Now I can see the first carriage, halted in the distance. The punched man is rolling toward where the woman was thrown from the carriage and he bangs his head on a stone. Oh. Oh, oh, oh, the poor woman is impaled through the chest on a protrusion of rock. Oh dear, oh dear. She is dead.”
Here is what Maud and the spirit said to each other:
“Are you the dead woman?”
No.
“Are you one of the men in the vision?”
Yes.
“Are you the emaciated man?”
Silence.
“Was the dead woman your wife?”
Silence.
“Do you want to talk about this or don’t you?”
Yes.
“Then tell me something. Are you the driver who punches the man in the road?”
No.
“Then you must be the emaciated man.”
Silence.
“Goodbye, then, whoever you are.”
Yes.
“You are the emaciated man?”
Yes.
“You’re not proud of that.”
No.
“You were trying to kill yourself.”
No.
“Then what was it?”
L-o-v-e.
“Love. Pish-pish-pish, as my aunt would say. Love indeed.” L-o-v-e.
“You were chasing the woman because you loved her?”
Yes.
“And you tried to kill yourself because of her?”
L-o-v-e.
“Because of love.”
Yes.
“Instead of killing yourself, you killed her.”
Silence.
“Didn’t you?”
L-o-v-e.
“Yes, I understand the motive. But you can’t escape the facts. You killed the woman you loved.”
THUNDER.
Long rapping on walls, floors.
THUNDER.
“It upsets you to hear the truth. I can see that. Did you kill yourself after this?”
Silence.
“So. You didn’t. You couldn’t. Am I right?”
THUNDER.
“Do you tell this story to many people?”
No.
“Why me?”
L-o-v-e.
“Ah. So you love me the way you loved the dead woman.”
Yes.
“Then I’d better watch out.”
No.
“Suicidal people don’t care who dies with them. My mother was that way. She left me alone when I was an infant and when she tried twice to kill herself, I almost died both times.”
THUNDER.
“Maybe you stood in front of the carriage because you wanted it to go off the road and kill someone.”
THUNDER.
“I don’t believe you. I think you’re lying.”
THUNDER.
THUNDER.
THUNDER.
And down came the chandelier, only inches from Maud’s head.
“I knew it,” said Maud, and she left the room.
Here is what Quinn eventually decided he was thinking as he watched Maud conversing with the spirit of the emaciated man:
Her frown belongs to the devil.
Her frown is paradise lost.
Her left eye sees through brick and mortar.
Her mouth is cruel with love.
Her mouth is soft with invitation.
Her lips exude the moistness of temptation.
Her glance will break crystal.
Her nose is imperious.
Her eyebrows are mistrusting.
Her hair is devilishly angelic.
Her eyes are golden beauty.
Her eyes are as hard as Satan’s heel.
Her teeth are the fangs of a devil bat.
Her cheeks are the pillows of a kiss.
Her cheeks are the soft curves of abandon.
Her hair is full of snakes.
Her hair is a bed of warmth.
Her hair is a tiara of desire.
Her throat is the avenue to passion.
Her face is a white tulip.
Her face is a perfect cloud.
Her face is virginal.
Her smile is an oriflamme of lust.
Her smile is paradise regained.
Quinn, studying Maud’s face as she conversed with the spirit of the emaciated man, wondered whether all her talk, all her responses were an effort to create a reality superior to the one she was living.
If so, Quinn feared Maud was a candidate for madness.
You cannot talk to spirits.
Dead is dead.
Maud’s face is a dream that cannot be imagined.
Maud insisted on dining alone with Quinn in the gazebo of the upper gardens so they could speak without fear of being overheard. Together they left behind the witnesses to the séance, who were babbling with great verve. Maud refused to talk about the spirit with anyone, including Quinn. Instead, she talked to him of the decline of Magdalena into solitude, depression, and prayer of a peculiar order: asking God for the return of her lost lust, that electrovital force that made people pay to see her dance. She prayed that when it returned she would no longer lust for men seriatim, for she was weary of sex and longed to give her body a vacation from friction.
“How do you know these deeply personal things about her?” Quinn asked Maud.
“She confides in me,” said Maud. “She wants me to understand men.”
“And do you understand them?”
“I don’t understand what she has against friction.”
“Neither do I,” said Quinn, who did not understand why anyone would be interested in it to begin with. All it did was cause things to wear out, or break, or burst into flame. Even so, he perceived that Maud was learning things from Magdalena that he was not learning from anybody. Women handed their wisdom on to each other, but boys were supposed to discover the secrets of life from watching dogs fuck. Quinn listened to Maud with as much patience as he could tolerate, and then refused to hear another word about Magdalena.
“No more of that,” he said. “I want to kiss you.”
“It’s not the right time,” said Maud.
“Then until it is the right time, we’ll talk about how I’m going to kidnap you.”
“I can’t be kidnapped now,” said Maud. “There are too many interesting things going on.”
“You mean like talking to spirits?”
“There are no spirits,” said Maud.
“Then who were you talking to?”
“I don’t know. I might have been talking to myself.”
“You mean you made it all up?”
“That’s a possibility.”
“How do you do thunder? How do you make a chandelier fall?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t do that.”
“Then how can you say it wasn’t a spirit if you aren’t sure you did it?”
“There are no spirits.”
“That well may be,” said Quinn, admiring how deftly he was getting back to the point, “but even so, I want to kiss you. I didn’t move to Saratoga to be rejected.”
“You’re absolutely right,” said Maud.
She stood up and took his hand, and they walked across the lawn in the early darkness. They saw Magdalena sitting under an arched pair of trellises at the entrance to the lower gardens, with John the Brawn and Obadiah Griswold both seated facing her. They could hear John say, “All he wants is a bit of a look. He’s been a proper gentleman, and very accommodating, if I might say so.”
“No,” said Magdalena. “I can’t be immodest.”
“You can be the bloody whore of Babylon when you put your mind to it,” said John. “Give him a look. Go on. Get it out.”
Maud and Quinn watched as Magdalena stood up and, by the light of the early moon, and swathed in the shadow of a great weeping beech tree, undid her buttons. Then, holding her dress open with both hands, she allowed the men to violate her with their gaze. As she undulated her body ever so slightly, John the Brawn leaned back in his chair to take in the view of his eminent domain. Obadiah, seeking a more proximate vista, leaned closer to the subject at hand. Magdalena swayed on. Obadiah’s right hand moved toward her vestibulum gaudiae. Magdalena backed away, closed her dress around her, and sat down.
“That’s enough of that,” said Quinn, and he grabbed Maud by the arm and moved away from the tableau, down the long, sloping lawn toward the lake.
“She’s such a fool,” said Maud.
“She seems to have a body that men desire.”
“Men desire any woman’s body if it’s naked.”
“Would you ever be naked like that?” Quinn asked.
“I can’t predict what I’d do. I’m not ready for that. But I am ready to kiss you.”
She stopped at the edge of the dark water and turned her face to Quinn’s. Obeying an inherited impulse, he put his arms around her waist, thrust his face toward hers, and placed his lips upon her lips. They kissed, just as they had in front of the dusty soldier’s coffin, with lips tight. Then, with the lips loosened somewhat, with tension rising, with everything new and the pressure of each kiss increased, with Quinn’s teeth and gums turning to sweet pain, they broke apart, came together again, tight, loose, looser; and then Maud’s lips parted and she eased the pressure totally, without breaking the kiss, and Quinn found his own lips growing fuller and softer and wetter. Then Maud’s mouth was open, and so he opened his own, and here came revelation. He tasted her tongue. This so undid him that he stopped to look out over Maud’s shoulder, out at the lights playing on the dark water, and to whisper into her ear, “This is a terrific kiss. This is the best kiss I ever had.”
“Keep quiet and open your mouth,” said Maud, and she pressed her lips again to his.
At this point Quinn fell in love with the secluded night.
Obadiah decided the only way to lay hands on the flesh of Magdalena was to dance with her. He could hold her hand, perhaps stroke her neck, or, given the proper gown, even stroke her shoulder. He could press himself against her bosom, feel the full whirling weight of her body as they moved about the dance floor. And so he arranged for them all to attend the weekly ball given by the Union Hotel.
A month had passed since the séance, and Maud’s fame as a spiritualist had spread, fueled at first by a report on her behavior written by Quinn for Calvin Potts’s newspaper and reprinted by Will Canaday. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune sent a reporter to talk to Maud and to the witnesses to her séance, and in time published a lengthy story on the “miracle at the spa.” A scout came to hire Maud for P. T. Barnum’s museum of freaks, but upon discovering Maud’s lack of belief in the very spirit with whom she had talked, the scout decided such skepticism was commercially useless.
Magdalena received offers to perform in many places, and she sensed a rebirth of both her passion and her talent for seduction. Wriggling into the shoulderless pink dress Obadiah had bought her for the ball, she counseled Maud on the display of a bodice. “Precisely three inches of cleavage is proper,” she said. “Two inches is denial, and four is basely vulgar.”
Magdalena insisted t
hat Maud and John the Brawn attend the ball, and Maud chose Quinn as her escort. The five alighted from Obadiah’s splendid barouche and moved with sartorial elegance into the hotel’s vast lobby, where fashion ruled tyrannically and ostentation at its most fulsome was the crowd’s principal pleasure. John looked overdressed in cravat and tailcoat, Obadiah was original in black silk trousers and opera cloak, Maud virginal in white frock, and Quinn felt brand-new, wearing, for the first time, the gray dress suit Hillegond had bought him.
A group of men and women turned their full attention to our group upon a remark by one of the women. “There are those fraudulent spiritualists,” she said in stentorian whisper. “We saw them at the theater and nothing happened at all. They’re all charlatans.”
“How,” asked another woman, “are such low people tolerated here?”
“Ignore them,” said Obadiah to Maud and Magdalena. But John had already turned to address the insult.
“If I was you,” said John, “I’d keep that kind of talk to meself, ya old pissbats.”
A man whose brawn matched John’s, who wore a full beard and a dress suit, stepped in front of the women. “Hold your tongue, you pup,” he said to John.
“Hold me fist,” said John, and with the right jab Quinn had seen him deliver so often, the punch Quinn called The Flying Sledgehammer, John caught the whiskered man on, as they say, the button. The man fell like a wet sock, his legs betrayed by his devastated brain. On his back, the man found it difficult to believe such a thing had happened.
“No man knocks down Michael Hennessey,” he said.
“This man does,” said John the Brawn, “and if Michael Hennessey stands himself up from the carpet I’ll knock him down again.”
“He knocked Hennessey down,” said another man’s high-pitched voice from the crowd that suddenly surrounded the group.
“You knocked Hennessey down,” said the owner of the voice, a nattily dressed runt who grabbed John by the hand and shook it. “You put Hennessey on his back.”