William Kennedy - Quinn's Book

“A pair of owls are roosting in Hillegond’s room,” said Will.

“I would like to see that,” said Quinn.

“They’d be asleep now,” said Moran. “Owls sleep in the daytime.”

“Even so,” said Quinn.

“I see no reason not to see them, even if they’re asleep,” said Maud, who stood up from her bench and led the way out of the music room. Quinn put his disk into his sack.

“Are you coming, Joseph?” Maud asked at the foot of the stairs.

“What is the point of looking at owls?”

“Indeed there is none,” said Will.

“But they must be a sight to see,” said Quinn.

“They’re quite beautiful,” said Maud.

“I have no objection,” said Moran.

And so up the great staircase they went to Hillegond’s room, whose six windows offered a view of the river and the sunrise, and where the pair of owls were asleep on the valance above the glass doors to Hillegond’s balcony. The room was a vista of peace and order. Murder was nowhere to be seen, though the aroma of villainy hung in a vapor alongside the lushly canopied bed, and all four visitors to the room walked ’round it.

They stood by the glass doors and stared up at the sleeping owls, which were two feet tall, one a bit taller, being female. The birds were both solidly pale gray, great soft puffs of matching and matchless beauty, both feathered to their talons and sleeping side by side, facing into the room with closed eyes.

“They’ll die in here,” Quinn said.

“They go out to eat,” said Maud. “The servants open the doors for them at dusk and again at dawn. They know no one lives in this room anymore, and we all welcome their presence.”

“An owl can turn its head completely around and look backward,” said Moran. “I once made a study of birds.”

“The room isn’t quite like it was,” said Maud. “The Delft vase and the double-globed lamp with the lilacs were both broken when Matty came in and fought for Hillegond’s life.”

“I thought they found Matty on the stairs,” said Quinn.

“The struggle carried out of the room. Matty fought fiercely. She was a strong woman and she loved Hilly.”

“She heard the fighting going on?” asked Quinn.

“She only heard the pitcher fall and break,” said Maud.

“You know it all, don’t you?” said Moran.

“Yes,” said Maud. “I also know it wasn’t Finnerty.”

“You can hold these owls when they’re asleep, and they won’t wake up,” said Moran. He carried Hillegond’s baroque silver dresser bench to the glass doors and stood on it. He reached up and grasped the sleeping female owl with both hands and stepped down from the bench. The owl slept on.

“That’s quite a trick, Joseph,” said Will.

“Not a trick at all if you know anything about owls,” said Moran.

Maud opened the double doors to the balcony and the breeze of summer afternoon came rushing into the room. Quinn studied the behavior of the owl held by Moran and observed that owl sleep is comparable to coma, a step away from death. He studied the behavior of Moran and marveled at the man’s concentration on the bird: eyes as hard as iron spikes. Quinn felt his old resentment at Moran’s ability to differentiate himself from the normal run of men.

“Joseph and I became lovers during my time here as Mazeppa,” said Maud. “Everybody knew, didn’t they, Will?”

“Joseph tends to boast about his conquests,” said Will.

“He was very attentive in those months,” said Maud, “but I don’t think I made him happy. As soon as I left the city he began to court Hillegond.”

“Assiduously,” said Will. “It was peculiar.”

“Which of your six was he?” Quinn asked.

“Number three,” said Maud, “and the only one in theater.”

“Joseph wanted to marry Hillegond,” said Will, “and she considered it for a time. But finally she wouldn’t have him.”

“We remained great friends,” said Moran. “May we change the subject?”

“He loved this mansion,” said Maud, “and all that went with it. And all that went with Hillegond.”

“Then he saw he couldn’t have it,” said Will.

“Hillegond came to think it was ridiculous, the idea of them marrying,” said Maud.

“It was not ridiculous,” said Moran. “Profound aspirations must not be mocked.”

“How lofty of you, Joseph,” Maud said.

“I admit error.”

“The news will thrill Hillegond in her grave.”

“It’s a great pity,” said Moran, “all this plangency so close to the heart.”

“Closer to the throat,” said Maud.

Quinn pondered these remarks and concluded that for some men a fatal error is the logical conclusion of life, and may not really be an error at all but the inevitable finale to an evolutionary evil. He watched as Moran the covetous sat on the bench, holding the owl aloft above his lap. Suddenly the bird was awake and staring, and Moran instantly released her upward. Perversely, she settled downward and sank her talons through his trousers and into the tops of his thighs. He screamed pitifully as he fell backward, and at the sound of flowing blood the male owl’s eyes snapped open. Soundlessly he flew down from the valance and, in an act of providential justice, drove his talons into Moran’s face and neck.

HORSELESS NOW, I, Daniel Quinn, that relentless shedder of history, stepped aboard the horsecar, the first of three conveyances that would take me to Saratoga Springs and Maud and the others who had gone before me, and I sat beside a Negro man in whose face I read the anguish of uncertainty, an affliction I understand but not in Negro terms. The man was bound for a distant place, his bundles and baggage revealing this fact, and I began to think of Joshua. I then tried to put Joshua out of my mind and opened the satchel containing my disk. I studied the disk rather than people who would take me where I did not want to go again. I discovered the disk looked Arabic with all that cursiveness in its design. Were the Celts really Arabs? Perhaps they were Jews: the lost tribe of Tipperary. The lost tribe of Ethiopia, some say. Go away, Joshua. I will remember you when I am stronger. I concentrated on my disk and it changed: convexity into concavity — a fat tongue into a hollow mouth; and in this willful ambiguity by the Celtic artist I read the wisdom of multiple meanings. Avoid gratuitous absolutes, warned Will Canaday. Yes, agrees Quinn, for they can lead to violence.

How had Maud known about the violence to Hillegond? Well, she knew. Psychometry is the most probable. How did she make the chandelier fall? Psychomagnetic pulsation, most likely. Quinn has neither of these gifts. Quinn is a psychic idiot. Quinn experiences everything and concludes nothing. Tabula rasa ad infinitum. Still, when the owl tore out Moran’s throat there was a purgation of sorts. Quinn perceived that he himself had wanted the mansion as much as Moran did, but so hopelessly that he did not even know that he wanted it. What good is your brain, Quinn, if you can’t even read your own notes? Yet, once free of secret covetousness, Quinn moved outward: another leaving off of false roles, false needs. In beginnings there is all for Quinn, a creature of onset. Will Quinn ever become a creature of finalities?

For this newest onset I was, as usual, unprepared except financially. I’d used less than a thousand dollars of what Dirck had given me over the past fifteen years and had allowed the rest to mount up in Lyman Fitzgibbon’s bank; and so for a reporter I was a modestly wealthy man, without need of work for hire.

Freed from the history and the penury of war, at least for the moment, Quinn was about to embark on a life of thought, or so he thought. And there he went, west on the train to Schenectady and north on another to Saratoga, crowding his brain with unanswerable questions and banishing unwanted memories that would not stay banished, especially since he was about to enter the gilded and velvet parlors of John McGee, the gambler who could fight, and would, and did, and whose life is not separable from Joshua’s anymore.