William Kennedy - Quinn's Book

As he walked, Quinn perceived that with a brusque offering of her hand, with a summons to come hither for a letter, with a decorous public invitation to chat in proper confines, Maud again proved herself a creature of quixotic ways, social fits. Quinn made the first turning on the mahogany staircase, that broad, expansive work of art that rose out of the foyer into the mystery of the mansion’s upper labyrinths, and he measured the distance from his last meeting with Maud: six years — the year 1858, when, as journeyman paragraphist and sometime essayist on sporting events, theater, crime, and judiciality for Will Canaday’s Albany Chronicle , he was present as Maud made her debut in Mazeppa.

This was a hippodramatic spectacle, an innovation within a hoary melodramatic theatrical corruption of a Lord Byron narrative poem that had been inspired by a passage in Voltaire’s history of Charles XII of Sweden; and it proved that Maud Fallon not only possessed a singular body but was willing to demonstrate said fact to the world at high risk to that very same singularity.

Lo, the poor Mazeppa. A Tatar foundling who comes to young manhood in the court of the King of Poland, he shares love with the King’s daughter, who is abruptly promised to the Count Palatine. Professing his love for the princess, Mazeppa assaults and wounds the Count in a duel and for his effrontery is strapped supine to the back of a wild horse. The horse is then lashed into madness, loosed upon the Ukrainian plains, and runs itself to death. Grievous torture is the lot of Mazeppa during this wild ride, but he survives, is discovered near death by his father (what a coincidence is here), who is the King of Tatary. And Mazeppa soon returns to Poland with the Tatar army to wreak vengeance on Poland and marry his beloved.

In early years of the play the Mazeppa ride had been accomplished onstage with a dummy athwart the live animal, the dummy role in time giving way to intrepid actors. But not until Maud’s day had the intrepidity been offered to a female, this the idea of Joseph K. Moran, Albany’s Green Street Theater manager and erstwhile tenor turned theatrical entrepreneur, who invited Maud (a horsewoman all her life, as well as a danseuse with acrobatic skills and risqué propensities — her famed Spider Dance, for example) to impersonate the male hero, ride supine and bareback upon Rare Beauty, a genuine horse, and to rise, thereon, up from the footlights and along four escalating platforms to a most high level of the stage, and to do this as well at a fair gallop while clad in a flesh-colored, skin-tight garment of no known name, which would create the illusion of being no garment at all. And so it followed that Maud, barebacked, perhaps also barebuttocked and barebusted, and looking very little like a male hero, climbed those Albany platforms to scandalously glamorous international heights.

Witnessing all this on opening night in 1858, Quinn confirmed his suspicion that he and the truest love of his life (whom he had not seen since she disappeared from Obadiah’s home in Saratoga eight years previous) were at this moment incompatible; for who could marry a woman of such antics? That raucous lasciviosity of the audience would madden Quinn in a matter of weeks. And so he called upon Maud in her dressing room, waiting for the wildness of her success to subside into a second day, to tell her as much.

“My God, Daniel, you’re my savior,” she said when she saw him, hugging him vigorously, talking as if only days and not years had elapsed since their last meeting. “You’ve come just in time to rescue me from this dementia. Can you imagine what this will do to my life?”

Quinn, nonplussed as usual, sat next to Maud, bathing in her presence and her gaze, and could say only, “You are quite spectacular. I love you incredibly. I’ll always love you.”

“I know that,” said Maud. “Never mind that now. How am I going to get out of this? They want me for as long as I’ll stay. They want a contract. They think they’ll draw capacity houses for weeks, or months. They say I’ll be rich in a trice.”

“Money is nothing,” said Quinn.

“Don’t be a nincompoop, Daniel,” said Maud. “Money is everything to me. How am I to live without money? I’ve schemed for years to accumulate wealth but it eludes me. I’m incompetent.”

“I’ll take care of you,” said Quinn.

“How much do you make?”

“Twenty dollars a week.”

“I’ll make four times that tonight,” said Maud.

“Then marry your horse,” said Quinn, and he left her.

Quinn made the second turning on the grand staircase, contemplating the nature of love and money, inquiring to an unknown authority whether there was such a thing as pure love, or was it as much an illusion as Maud’s sham nudity? If there was such, he wondered further, was it what he now felt? And if what he now felt was not love, could the real element ever be begotten by his like?

He repeated to himself:

I shall not die for thy sake ,

O maid with the swan-like grace. .

And then, trepidatious, he entered the sitting room of Maud the Brusque, and encountered her in a pale pink dressing gown, her auburn hair now flowing to her shoulders, her pink chemisette visible beneath her gown, and beneath that, three visible inches of cloven line between her breasts. Never before had Quinn seen this much of Maud’s flesh. Never before had he known it to be so abundant; and the sight of it stopped his movement.

“You have a letter for me?” he asked.

“I do,” said Maud, “but that’s not why I invited you here. I thought you might like to see my breasts.”

“Ah,” said Quinn, “have I at last become the equal of a cake?”

Maud loosened the belt of her dressing gown and moved closer to Quinn.

When she saw Quinn standing tall by the door of the mansion, Maud assumed he was a spirit, so certain had she been of his death; for she had seen in her mind how he crumpled when hit by the cannonball, and how he lay still. And from then forward she received no further visions of his distant life. She thought often of him, and wept always at the memory of his face, his infectious smile of the so-white teeth. And yet there he stood, not a spirit at all, so she knew she must act quickly.

From the first landing on the staircase she watched him as he talked with Gordon, ready to call his name if he started to leave. When she saw him enter the house she knew she had gained time, and so came to her rooms, found the letter she had written him in 1858, and prepared herself to greet him in the manner she had so long imagined. With the help of her serving maid, Cecile, she stripped off her clothing, then donned the chemisette and the robe, placed the letter on the long table, lighted the candles in the two candelabra to frame the letter (and in due course, herself), drew the drapes so the room would not be visible from the upper porch, and sent Cecile away.

She sat on the green velvet sofa, thinking of how angry with her Quinn would be after his talk with Gordon. But that anger would pass and she would impose on him a geis. He would then, in due course, be hers, never again to talk of money. They would live together, or separately, it would not matter, for they would be equals in love, something they never had been since love began.

When he came into the room she saw his expression was a stone of feigned wrath, which only made him more handsome, more appealing. Maud always saw through Quinn’s masks. He threw the cake up at her when she spoke of her breasts, but she pacified him by offering herself to his eyes. He will not resist me, was her intention. But one must not dismiss Quinn’s dispositions too easily, for he is a willful man and at times must be cajoled into the behavior he most desires. With him love must be sat upon, like an egg. It will hatch with warmth, with envelopment. On its own it could rot.