William Kennedy - Quinn's Book

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 that 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.”

“I see that I did,” said John.

“Do you know he’s the champion?”

“No.”

“Well, he is.”

“Champion of what?”

“Of the world entirely.”

“Is that a fact?” said John.

“It’s a positive fact,” said the runt.

Hennessey was up then, and smiling.

“You’ve a grand right hand there, bucko,” he said.

“I don’t deny it,” said John.

“There’s damn few right hands like that,” said Hennessey.

“There’s none at all that I know of,” said John.

“There’s one or two,” said Hennessey, extending his own right hand for a handshake. The two men shook hands and smiled at each other. Then Hennessey swung a left and caught John on, as they say, the button, and he went down like a wet sock.

“You see what I mean,” said Hennessey. “They’re here and there, and sometimes they’re on the other fist.”

John smiled and picked himself up.

“If you get rid of those old bats you’re with,” said John, “I’ll buy you the best drink in this house.”

“You’re a drinkin’ man, are you?” said Hennessey.

“It runs in me family,” said John.

“What a coincidence,” said Hennessey. “It runs in me own as well.” He clapped a hand on John’s shoulder and the two men went off to the bar, leaving the ladies and the younger folk to fend for themselves in this argumentative world.

At the ball Quinn and Maud danced all dances that required no special skills, since Quinn had none. They danced what they knew until boredom ravaged their legs, and then they sat. At this point, and with ritual avuncularity, Obadiah asked Maud to pursue a schottische with him, and she accepted. As she danced with Obadiah, Maud realized she had never been alone with him in the months they had lived at his house. She looked at him and saw a skull being abandoned by its hair, revealing bony lumps that had the fascination of a mild deformity. Obadiah was a creature unlike most. Maud thought he would be much at home in an aquarium. He danced much worse than Quinn, and he told her she was a remarkable child, that few in this world had her gifts.

“Such people as you make the world spin on its axis,” he told her.

“You’re very nice to say that,” said Maud, “but I am not a child. I’m thirteen years and two months old.”

“Well, of course you are. But in a way—”

“Not in any way,” said Maud.

“Of course not.”

They danced in silence. Maud saw Magdalena dancing with Quinn and talking to him with her eyes closed, and jealousy rose up in her.

“There is a difference between a child and a woman,” said Maud. “I can’t say I’m a woman yet.”

“When do you become a woman?” Obadiah asked.

“When I make love to a man.”

“Have you chosen the man?”

“I may have.”

“I presume young Mr. Quinn is the lucky one.”

“He may be.”

“If he is not. .”

“If he is not I will find someone equally exciting.”

“Yes,” said Obadiah with a sigh. “Exciting. I’m not sure I was ever exciting.”

“What an unusual thing to say,” said Maud.

“What?”

“That you were never exciting. People don’t say that about themselves.”

“They do if they are me.”

Obadiah was a uniquely homely and boring rich man, but his abnegation thrilled Maud, gave her gooseflesh. She said to herself: I love Obadiah. I love what shall not be. I am never what I was. I am always new, always two. I am, and I am, and so I am.

After Maud accepted Obadiah’s invitation to dance, Quinn, obligated in the breach, asked Magdalena to dance. He found his feet not nearly so bored, and Magdalena floated in his arms. He told her as much and she told him he was a sweet boy. She apologized for John the Brawn’s throwing him off the canalboat like a sack of oats. Quinn’s newly assured self had already decided to relegate that event to useless memory, especially after watching John knock down the world champion, and so Quinn smiled and said of his canalside odyssey, “It was nothing. I just walked home and it was fine.”

The dimension of this lie convinced Quinn he had a future as a confidence man. He’d always felt bound for hell, convinced of it by his early confessors, and also by his great maiden aunt from Ireland who told him he was “a devil dog if I ever saw one,” when what he was doing — cutting his dead cousin’s hair with his father’s knife — was not devilishness but tidiness, for the boy’s hair was full of nits and cockleburs. And what way was that to bury anybody?

“You are becoming a reporter for the newspaper, I understand,” Magdalena said.

“I’m trying,” said Quinn.

“I, too, write,” said Magdalena.

“I thought you were just a dancer.”

“Dancers have souls with myriad planes,” she said. “Every step of the dance is like a line from a poem.”

“I didn’t think of that,” said Quinn.

“I write poetry that dances.”

Quinn nodded and danced on, fearing she would recite to him.

“Would you like to hear some of my poetry?” she asked.

“Oh, that would be fine indeed.”

Magdalena cleared her throat and prepared to recite and dance all at once.

“The moon followed me home,” she began, her grip on Quinn tightening.