William Kennedy - Quinn's Book

“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.