William Kennedy - Quinn's Book

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.