William Kennedy: Quinn's Book

I, DANIEL QUINN, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinns, set eyes on Maud the wondrous on a late December day in 1849 on the banks of the river of aristocrats and paupers, just as the great courtesan, Magdalena Colón, also known as La Última, a woman whose presence turned men into spittling, masturbating pigs, boarded a skiff to carry her across the river’s icy water from Albany to Greenbush, her first stop en route to the city of Troy, a community of iron, where later that evening she was scheduled to enact, yet again, her role as the lascivious Lais, that fabled prostitute who spurned Demosthenes’ gold and yielded without fee to Diogenes, the virtuous, impecunious tubdweller.

This crossing was vexatious to all logic, for earlier in the day, before the wildness came, she might have crossed far more safely farther north via the dependable, strong-hulled ferry that would have carried her over a narrower and calmer band of the Hudson without incident and deposited her upon the steps of the Troy wharf. But recklessness was far likelier to send the shiver of lust through the spines of men, fire envy in the livers of their wives and daughters, and set tongues to gossipaceous clacking that would pack the hall for La Última’s next performance; and so she had advertised in the Albany Chronicle that she would pay one hundred dollars, a bloody fortune, to any boatman who would, at four in the afternoon, take her, her luggage, her serving maid, and the child who traveled with her across the river from Albany to Greenbush, where she would board a carriage bound overland to Troy.

Her advertisement appeared at the end of a week’s spell of unseasonably balmy weather. She’d been in Albany five days, enthralling theatergoers with her acting and dancing, her beauty and sensual aggression. (Indeed there were some in the city who blamed her not only for the warm spell but even for the evil and grief that would befall us all on the day of her leave-taking.) The balminess had brought on the partial melting of the river’s heavy ice, and had also halted all crossings by sleigh. A sizable channel opened in the river’s center and a few sloops went straightaway downriver with little trouble. But cutting crosswise into that current and its ice floes with a skiff was another matter.

The skiffmen had come out in number at the hour specified in La Última’s advertisement and clustered under the Great Albany Pier with their craft, at rest on the shoreline’s ice. But as the warmth of the day deepened, those wary Albany water rats (I include my master) were in agreement that the floes’ growth in size and frequency, indeed the whole river’s present nature, which was one of mild flood, argued that skiffs had no function on water such as this; all agreed, I say, except Carrick, the rotten Scottish hunchback of syphilitic mien, no longer welcome in the brothels of Albany, who had reached no such decision and was firm in his life’s role as Albany’s undauntable ferryman, ready to carry the urgent mail, the woeful news, or the intrepid passenger across the waters during storm or flood, and now the only soul at the pier willing to transport this plumed cargo to the far shore.

La Última’s crossing had attracted such crowds that the bridge from the Quay Street shore out to the Great Pier (which paralleled the quay thirty yards from the shore) creaked with the weight of hundreds as La Última, her maid, and the child arrived in their carriage. A dozen men on the quay shoved aside the mob of ill-clad urchins who were vying for the right to carry La Última’s trunk and to escort, hand-by-glove, the grand señora (for she had lived through three legitimate husbands, plus several hundred lovers). As she dismounted from the carriage she took command of the raffish disorder, singled out two muscular men, and gave them five dollars each (thus ensuring the security of two families, or at least the slaking of two thirsts, for the ensuing fortnight) to carry her trunk and hand luggage. She strode ahead of her entourage straight into the crowd, which parted at her advent to allow her entry to the steps leading down to the boats. There, standing on the ice in front of his skiff, Carrick greeted her, scraping obsequiously and explaining that only he was willing to cross these waters with her valuable self, prompting La Última to sniff in the direction of the other boatmen and give us all the flick of her chin in contempt for our lack of courage.

“It eees a pleasure to meet a rrreal mon,” she said in her fraudulent, Hispanicized English (she was of Hibernian stock and spoke the language perfectly). She lifted Carrick’s woolen hat and kissed him on his lumpy forehead as she might a pet piglet, then handed him, most ostentatiously, the promised one-hundred-dollar bill. The crowd cheered the hunchback, who flashed his toothless smile, pocketed the bill, and then gave La Última his hand to help her into his craft. The child and the maid followed (the maid in height, facial contours, and hair color being very close to a duplicate of the actress, it being commonly known that for special suitors the women dressed like twins). Carrick and his helper then lifted the skiff’s line from its mooring post and pushed off from the shoreline’s ice out onto the water. The boatmen stood up in the skiff and poled like gondoliers past the end of the Great Pier, Carrick poking the water ahead of the bow, seeking the floes, guiding them out of the way with the poling oar. And thus did the crossing begin and the skiff move out into open water on this dusky afternoon of high tragedy.

The skiff had reached the center of the river when we saw it wedge into a floe that would not yield to the prickings of the poles, saw it go crooked in the current and move slowly downriver backward, out of the hunchback’s control. I could see La Última tightly gripping the side of the skiff with one hand, holding her hat with the other. The great, unseasonal feathered and amber plume in that hat, a match to her amber coat with the beaver collar, is as indelible in my memory as is the vision of her maid holding tightly to the child, and of Carrick and his helper poking the ice with their long sticks, a pair of needles attacking an iceberg, as the boat floundered like a toy.

My master and another boatman, named Duff, immediately shoved off into the water — I was sitting in our craft but not consulted — and we headed out for the rescue, proving, I thought, that virtue needs only a challenge to be awakened from dormancy. But my master was moved for quite another reason, and we were halfway to the trapped boat because of that reason when we saw a large hillock of ice smash into Carrick’s craft and stove in its side, causing it to instantly list and take in water. We reached it too late to save Carrick, his helper, or the maid, who were knocked out of the boat when the hillock struck. It was I, however, who reached the child about to go under and hoisted her into our own skiff, while Duff behind me held off the flowing ice to guard my flank in the racy waters. And then my master, John the Brawn, caught the beaver collar of La Última’s coat with his boat hook, and with one mighty lift, hauled her and her sodden plume up from the current, alas beyond our help.