William Kennedy - Quinn's Book

“Leave for where?” Will asked.

“For Saratoga, to the north.”

“I know where Saratoga is. Have we treated you so poorly here?”

“No, sir. I feel very happy here. Nobody is more grateful than I for what I’ve been given, but I have to meet someone.”

“A relative?”

“No,” I said, almost adding, “not yet.”

Will sat down in the chair beside Dirck and stared at me with what I took to be incomprehension compounded. I believe he felt me bereft of common sense. “When does this departure take place?” he asked.

“About two weeks,” I said.

“You’ll stay in Saratoga? Live there?”

“I’m not sure.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“I really can’t say.”

“Do you plan to look for another job?”

“I was hoping,” I said, “that you would help me figure that out.”

“Ah,” said Will. “So I’m to be an accessory to your flight.”

“I would rather work here for the Chronicle than anywhere else in the world. But I have to help this person.”

Dirck scribbled a note and handed it to me. It read: “Maud?” I nodded and handed the note to Will.

“Then your journey is really a romantic quest,” said Will.

“She asked me to meet her. She seems desperate,” I said.

“Of course you’re fully equipped to solve all the random cares of desperate young women.”

“Probably not any of them,” I said, “but I promised to try.”

Will and Dirck then listened with mock solemnity while I spoke about Maud’s life with La Última and John the Brawn. But the more I talked the more I saw how ignorant I was of everything about Maud except her desire to be stolen by me. I did not say this. I said in summary that I couldn’t be sure when I’d return to Albany. At that moment I saw in Dirck’s face his realization that he was losing his voice yet again. I had become adept as his surrogate, but surely others could replace me; and I couldn’t say the same for Maud’s role in my affection, or mine in hers.

Will raised the question of my disk and I said I’d leave it in his safe, but he said no. What if they burgled the safe? What if the place caught fire? What if he died? No. We needed proof of my ownership, and then safekeeping for the disk in a bank vault, in my name. As usual, Will was thorough.

During subsequent days my departure was much discussed, especially by Hillegond, who couldn’t believe I was going off on my own. She stared me up and down and said, “If you are going to be an adventurer, you must stop looking like a crossing sweeper,” and she summoned a tailor to the mansion to measure me for wool and linen trousers, dress coats (the wool coat had a velvet collar), two silk damask waistcoats to match and contrast with the dress coats, and a long gray frock coat for cold weather. She personally took me to the city for dress shoes and shoeboots, six new shirts, six cravats, two pairs of braces, and an abundance of stockings and undergarments. All this was topped off with a tall black hat that I thought somewhat silly, but that Hillegond insisted was the true mark of a young gentleman.

“I only wish Dirck had been like you,” she said to me.

When we had done with clothing she took me to the stationer’s and fitted me out with a writer’s travel kit that included a writing box, a portable lamp, candles and holder, two everpointed pencils, a dozen pen points with pen, ink, and inkwell, and a roll of writing paper.

“Now you are a writer,” said Hillegond.

“I think I will have to write something first,” I said.

I came back to my room in the mansion, marveling at all my acquisitions. But one may be an acquisitor for only so long, and then the emptiness of it comes to the fore. And so I went down to the kitchen to see Matty and Capricorn, who had become my friends. I always wanted to hear their stories of Negro life in old Albany, and their tales of fugitive slaves, which sometimes were happy stories of escape, sometimes tragic with death and separation. I wanted to know what had happened to Joshua, and so I asked them how he was getting on after his ordeal and where he was. This won me a profound silence and brought our talk of slavery to an abrupt end.

Two mornings before my leave-taking I was breakfasting in the dining room with Dirck when he placed a message alongside my plate as we finished our tea. I read:

Daniel,

Our society seems ever to be confessing its flaws to you, just as you seem to have been born to witness tragedy and to elevate people from trouble. I owe you my life. My banker is setting up an account in your name and will be here today to talk with you. You will now have an income for the next fifteen years of your life. By then you should be wealthy in your own right.

Luck,

Dirck

When I realized what he had written and raised my head in grateful wonderment, Dirck was gone. As good fortune embraced me, baleful new shadows fell upon the Ryan family. The young Molly erupted with sores and boils over her entire body, a disease of no ostensible origin that was finally ascribed to the terrors that had taken seed in her upon her witnessing Toddy’s murder. Joey Ryan was set upon twice as he ventured little distances from the mansion, and one boy sought to pluck out his eyes. Hearing this, Margaret Ryan ran to Hillegond and fell prostrate on the parlor rug, cursing the enemies of Ireland, cursing America, cursing God and His mother, cursing the murderer of her husband and all his heirs and ancestors, cursing the curse that was on her and her children. She stopped cursing when Hillegond patted her head and cooed at her; then she sat up and swore she would leave Albany for a new place, swore it on the suffering body of Molly Ryan, on the threatened eyes of Joey Ryan, on the hate that lived in her own body and which was the blood, fire, and venom of her will to survive this hell of black devils.

Lyman Fitzgibbon rescued the Ryans from family dementia by finding Margaret a charwoman’s job in a Syracuse orphan asylum, where her children could find haven away from Albany; and so one day they were gone from the mansion, yet frozen forever in my memory as paradigms of helpless, guiltless suffering. I sensed in the days after they left that a life such as theirs would probably not be my lot, that any troubles befalling me in later days would emanate more from my own willfulness or sapheadedness; that I was not destined to be a passive pawn of exterior forces. One exposes great hubris with such confession, but there was truth in my intuition.

On the day I was to leave, Hillegond supervised the farewell breakfast, for which she baked bread from an old Dutch recipe. Laden with cheese, raisins, sugar, and walnuts, the bread, for Hillegond, was symbolic of plenty, her parting wish for me. Dirck kept his farewell as brief as he could, but his handshake was as strong as a bear’s trap as we separated.

Will, who had already given me a letter recommending me as a gracious, trustworthy young soul of plentiful talent and potential, an effusion of praise I was sure no one would believe, came to pick up Dirck and report to us that Lyman had sent him a letter, to be printed in the Chronicle , publicly repudiating The Society and resigning from it.

Will gave me his personal copy of Montaigne’s essays, telling me it contained enough wisdom for several young men like myself, and he urged me to read it constantly and in small doses. He also gave me some agates of advice. Sitting at the end of the dining-room table, where Hillegond and I were eating alone, holding his hat in one hand and his walking stick in the other, he delivered his message to me in words whose precise shape I cannot reconstruct, for I felt terrible leaving Will’s newspaper, which had become the home of my soul; and the thought of departure clouded my memory severely. Though I searched for those precise words all the rest of that day, my findings fell far short of Will’s impromptu eloquence. What he said, as best I could reconstitute it, was this: