After a discreet space of time, the Baron went to the door, rapped lightly upon it, and, turning the knob (which he halfway feared might be locked against him—for that had happened once before), called out to his bride in as controlled a voice as he could manage: “You have no objection, my dear Constance Philippa, if I now join you?”—and, receiving no reply, he added in jest: “Maidenly delicacy, even yours, my dear wife, exerts but a limited charm—and the hour is late.”
He believed he heard her voice, and as it did not seem she was asking him to wait, he slipped quietly into the candlelit room, closing the door behind him, and locking it; now beginning to tremble with a necessary and altogether natural masculine desire, lustful only if one subscribes to the scruples of our Puritan ancestors, but entirely normal if one recalls the admonition that Male and Female reproduce their kind, and populate the Earth, under God’s command. That the desire to reproduce the human species is native to the masculine sex, and by no means an aberrant tendency, still less an inclination of disgusting perversity, must be kept in mind by the reader, else the behavior of our Constance Philippa will not seem so blasphemous as in truth it was.
The bride had already retired, and lay motionless in the recesses of the handsome canopied bed, near-lost in shadow, and in the flickering phantasmagoric light cast by the candelabrum, upon which twelve candles burnt to great effect. The Baron loosened his cravat, and, taking care to walk lightly around the various items of luggage, so as not to disturb his bride, locked both remaining doors of the bridal chamber—for, upon the occasion of his first marriage, now many years back, an unfortunate incident had transpired, owing to the infelicity of an unlocked door. He then retired to his dressing room where, quickly stripping himself of his numerous garments, he felt his manly lust grow, and could not resist glancing at himself in a mirror, which, tho’ dim, presented a countenance of small but regular features, and a mustache of striking fullness, wonderfully black.
Past experience had taught him that it was far more pragmatic to act boldly, than to continue with a pretense of drawing-room manners, and so the Baron strode to the bed, and threw off the heavier of the covers, and, now nearly overcome by his natural masculine inclination, and by the labored dryness of his breath, he slid as adroitly as possible beneath the sheet, embraced his unresisting bride, mounted her, and, in a single gesture of great force and authority, made her his wife in the Flesh, as the Reverend Hewett had made her his wife, in Spirit.
Grunting, he then flung himself from her, and lay, panting, on the pillow beside hers, one forearm across his face, his eyes half shut, in an effort to recover himself; and, it may have been, the Baron murmured words of comfort or even of love to his spouse, in the throbbing tumult of those minutes; but none has been recorded. After a brief space of time the gentleman’s breathing grew more regular, and he bethought himself to glance at his bride, who had, all this while, continued to lie motionless, with infinite tact, not disturbing the sanctity of the rite by moaning or sobbing, as others had done in the past—and I am scarcely able to force myself, to reveal what the Baron Adolf von Mainz saw: not the face of his belovèd bride, and not even her head: but only the naked pillow.
With a muttered exclamation he pulled the sheet away, and discovered, to his utter astonishment—alas, was ever a Christian husband so ill-treated?—that no woman lay beside him, no trembling Constance Philippa, nay, not even a human being, but a dressmaker’s dummy: headless, armless, and possessing no nether limbs!
TWENTY
Not two mornings after the furious Baron von Mainz sent word by special messenger to Mr. and Mrs. Zinn, that his bride had disappeared from the Hotel de la Paix, on the very night of the wedding, and that he intended not only to demand an annulment of the marriage, but to seek such financial restitution as his legal advisors thought just, the following missive arrived at the Octagonal House, addressed likewise to Mr. and Mrs. Zinn, and hastily dashed off in Malvinia’s graceless hand:
Dearest Mother & Father,
Forgive me, by the time you read this I will have left Philadelphia—it may be forever!—I had not wanted to disturb plans for the Wedding, & am now satisfied that my action cannot involve any save myself—but I have fallen in Love with the most talented & prodigious Man of our time—who has persuaded me, both to leave Philadelphia under his protection, & to embark upon a career on the stage, for which I have yearned throughout my life tho’ hesitant to express my secret wishes, since I know of dear Father’s displeasure in Entertainment & the family’s disapproval of all Actors & Actresses. I scarcely know how to continue, dear Mother & Father, except to say that I am in love & very, very happy—for the first time in my somewhat troubled life—& a stage career now beckons, to pursue as I wish—for it is none other than the great ORLANDO VANDENHOFFEN under whose protection I am traveling at this very moment (for we wish to make our alliance a fact known to all the world, & not a contemptible Secret). I know you cannot so soon rejoice in my happiness, dear Parents, but I ask you to think no ill of me, nor of Mr. Vandenhoffen, & I beg you not to attempt to dissuade me from my Destiny, which lies, tho’ it grieves me to be so blunt, not in Bloodsmoor, but in the great great World beyond!
Yr loving Daughter,
Malvinia
A less sensitive chronicler might attempt to convey to the reader, some measure of the heartbreak and anguish experienced by the parents of these two vicious creatures: but I confess myself incapable of such. Constance Philippa and Malvinia!—scarce am I able to utter their names!—but must content myself with a meditation upon the nature of God’s paradoxical plan, and the transience of all things under the Sun, and the wisdom of this poem by the great Mr. Emerson, which Mr. Zinn, on the occasion of his and his family’s double affliction, recited in a voice of bell-like clarity for his weeping family to ponder—
Illusion works impenetrable,
Weaving webs innumerable,
Her gay pictures never fail,
Crowds each on other, veil on veil,
Charmer who will be believed
By man who thirsts—to be DECEIV’D.
IV
The Yankee Pedlar’s Son
TWENTY-ONE
Exemplary as John Quincy Zinn himself was, and as upstanding a citizen of our nation as might be found anywhere, it must be stated that his background was somewhat inglorious: and that, as a young man new to Philadelphia in the 1850’s, his head slightly turned from all the excited attention he received, he had, perhaps instinctively, shrunk from revealing the entire truth about his family—and about himself.
Summoned to the city by Mr. Bayard, the State Supervisor of Public Education; taken up by the Arcadia Club; written about in the papers; a frequent guest of the Bayards, the Brownrriggs, the Kiddemasters—the twenty-six-year-old John Quincy Zinn had naturally avoided personal revelations, with the modesty of the born Transcendentalist: for one should after all dwell upon the Universal, and not upon the Particular. “Zinn, like any of us, might have been born the day before yesterday,” he said with his boyish, disarming smile, “in the very Garden of Eden itself, which surrounds us, and is never new.”
Even the outspoken Miss Prudence Kiddemaster failed to draw out of him anything like a complete history, which frequently exasperated her, and qualified the wild tone of her praise for him: and then again, as her fancy roamed, argued for his inviolable mystery—and his integrity. “You cannot anticipate marriage with a man about whom so little is known,” her father said, badly shaken by Prudence’s conversation with him, after the dramatic occasion of her fainting fit at the Bayards’, “even if—as you say—he has stepped forward in public to ‘claim you.’ We are not, I hope, barbarians here in Philadelphia!”
“And yet, dear Father,” Prudence said, “I do anticipate—a great deal. But we shall see.”
The Zinn family was scattered, John Quincy explained, with an air of uncharacteristic sadness: perhaps it had even died out, and he was the last of his line. Certainly both his parents wer
e dead—and his only brother, a sailor on one of Commodore Perry’s great men-of-war, had died of a mysterious fever off Smyrna, and was buried at sea.
The farm above Christiana?—ah, long ago sold for taxes! It had never been very productive in any case, and young John Quincy had not greatly desired to take it over.
The first Zinn in the region, John Quincy’s grandfather, was one Rudolph Zinn, an Austrian immigrant, who had, as a consequence of a severe wound suffered during an attack led by General Benjamin Lincoln against the British, remained in the Valley, evidently nursed back to health by a Quaker farm family. The young soldier had then married into the family, and taken up farming. A romantic outcome, Miss Kiddemaster judged, to a possibly tragic tale.
“I think not romantic, Miss Kiddemaster,” John Quincy Zinn said slowly, stroking his beard, “but, rather, necessary. For all events occur as they must, in a universe of fluidly interlocking parts.”
“I see,” said Prudence, staring and blushing; tho’ in fact she did not.
Alas, John Quincy Zinn’s vague history of his background was untrue!—and one can only gauge the depth of his feeling for Prudence Kiddemaster, and his anxiety lest he disappoint his Philadelphia patrons, by our knowledge of how he abominated falsehood. And it may be, too, that the young man’s immersion in books, and his frequently obsessive speculation upon the “nature of the Universe,” had blurred his memory of particulars, especially as they touched upon Evil. (For, as we have seen, Mr. Zinn was passionately resistant to the very concept of Evil, judging that it could have no place in God’s benign machinery.)
There had been, indeed, a Rudolph Zinn, a private in General Lincoln’s infantry, and he was John Quincy Zinn’s grandfather; but the “Zinn” connection was less legal than one might like—meaning by this that illegitimacy figured in John Quincy’s background. Zinn was the young soldier’s name, but Zinn, alas, never became the official name of the seventeen-year-old girl who bore his child, and fled away with it, upon the occasion of Zinn’s execution in the spring of 1786. (For Zinn was executed, along with eleven other mutineers, on a parade ground in Morristown, New Jersey—an ignominious death, and yet one befitting a rebel, especially during such perilous times.)
It is not known, and surely the loss is not a significant one, what the surname was of the young woman who was John Quincy Zinn’s paternal grandmother: enough for us to record that Zinn was the name she appropriated, as she appropriated from somewhere a plain, very thin gold wedding band, thereby deeming herself “wed,” and the equal of any married woman she passed on the street! Her lover having been shot by a firing squad, she took her abrupt leave of Morristown and went to live with relatives in the village of Shaheen Falls, New York, where her illegitimate son, though unbaptized in any church, was known by the proud name of John Jay Zinn—this name being an indication more of the young mother’s impetuous optimism, or of her simple ignorance, than her patriotic regard for the illustrious John Jay: for Mr. Jay, like George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Knox, and, indeed, General Benjamin Lincoln himself (who had, after all, ordered the mutineer Zinn’s summary execution), and many another gentleman of the great Federalist party, was surely no friend of such desperadoes, vagabonds, and shiftless laborers from foreign shores, as she and her family no doubt were; and would have had little patience with her complaints, or with the ceaseless mob demands of her ilk. (And to think that the traitorous Daniel Shays and his rebels were yet to come, in the following year! Indeed, it is a wonder that the young nation did not expire in those early years, as George Washington so feared, beset on every side by rabble-rousers and self-styled “Republicans.”)
Rudolph Zinn and his fellow mutineers were partly justified in their discontent, certainly, for they were in the unfortunate position, as soldiers in the Continental Army, of receiving their 22¢ daily salary in Continental currency, first issued in 1775, but, as the war continued, depreciating in its value some forty times—well-nigh worthless, in fact, by 1786, when various isolated mutinies flared up, and soldiers refused to accept payment in such currency, and in some cases (in Zinn’s case, it may be inferred) incited others against accepting it. Discontent of this sort, coupled with the hardships of long winters and insufficient supplies, and rumors of Federalist money-making speculations, are perhaps comprehensible; but surely cannot excuse traitorous uprisings within the Continental Army, at a time when unity was so very necessary. So young Zinn was shot down, with eleven comrades, and buried in a pauper’s grave, no doubt a mass grave, somewhere in Morristown, New Jersey: and one can hardly fault John Quincy, for choosing not to dwell upon his grandfather’s fate. How much kinder, how much more idealistic, to imagine him as a soldier wounded in the service of his young country, and nursed back to health by a Quaker family in southeastern Pennsylvania!
Thus the grandfather, dead at the age of twenty-nine; and the father, tho’ living to his fifties, doomed to suffer a particularly horrific death, an execution, too, of sorts—tarred and feathered and hanged, and set ablaze, by a drunken lynch mob, in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, in southern Pennsylvania.
For the father, John Jay Zinn, was not, as John Quincy suggested, a farmer; but instead a pedlar—one of that problematic itinerant tribe commonly known as Yankee pedlars, about whom so many tales have circulated, by no means of a generally flavorsome nature.
JOHN JAY ZINN, the infamous pedlar: whose trade took him as far north as Bangor, Maine, and as far south as Raleigh, North Carolina. But it was only villages he dared visit—only isolated country settlements, or farms, or shanties up in the hills, stuck on the edge of nowhere.
On foot, or riding a swaybacked mare acquired in trade, or leading a donkey laden with goods. Alone, or with his son. Or with his mulatto mistress from Carolina; or was it Baltimore; or had she been found on a New York street . . . ? Carrying his heavy leather backpack, in the cold slanting rain, in the spring mud, through Maine and New Hampshire and Massachusetts, carrying a staff, limping badly, through Connecticut, his whiskers sprouting gunmetal-gray, That damned Yankee crook, through Rhode Island leading a sickly mule, head bowed against the sun, eyes narrowed in a permanent crafty squint, New York and Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Maryland, so many wives for so ugly a man, tall, gangling, sallow-faced, his expression carved out of hickory, his black eyes so sharp they could pick up the gleam of a coin at one hundred yards—in the dark; Shaheen behind him, and the Catskills, and the wintry Poconos, and the Delaware village where a man stabbed him high in the chest for cheating at cards, and no one intervened, You won’t dare show your ugly face here again, bawling his trade, through marshlands where mosquitoes wouldn’t touch him because his blood tasted of brass, along logging roads where screech owls hid from him, else he’d cheat them of their cash, Virginia and Carolina, Cape Hatteras where he had a woman, the outskirts of Lynchburg where he sold his services as a water diviner and walked off with $200 cash in his deep secret pockets, Look at that blood!—is that real blood of his?—but the well dried up the next morning, being only a witch-well, and nothing real.
John Jay Zinn, the pedlar. Tho’ he went by other names. Alone, or with a fat wall-eyed slackly grinning girl staggering beneath a backpack filled with kitchen utensils and home remedies and outlaw (untaxed) rum, or with the little boy who must have been his son: blond and sunburnt and husky for his age, but crafty-silent. Marshlands, farmland, lanes oozing in black mud, where vultures rose slowly from the carcasses of horses fallen by the roadside, Prince George County, Blackstone, Hungry Mother Mountain, East Stone Gap, Manassas, a black preacher’s coat flapping about his knees, loose in the sleeves so that his bony wrists showed, He won’t dare come back here again, he knows what will happen to him, hawking false teeth for both male & female, young & old, wax-cleaners for ears, his trousers baggy in the seat and knees as if belonging to another, larger man, solitary, singing and laughing to himself, counting his money in the dark, long-fingered, selling Bibles and wire-framed eyeglasses, the rattlers woul
dn’t come near for fear he’d cheat them of their rattles, the blue racer snakes flew away in the trees, a tall white bell-shaped hat stuck on his head, dented in the crown, heavy with gold coins sewn up inside, the dripping pine forests of Carolina, the red-clay foothills of Virginia, no flicker of expression in his nut-brown face, no alarm, no apprehension, no fear, no terror, never a smile except that wide lipless crafty grin, Ma’am, may I show you, Mister, may I demonstrate to you, the wooden face, the glass eyes, What was his name, Zinn?—or was that the other one? Alone and on foot and pretending to be penniless. A hacking cough. Phlegm laced with blood in the palm of his hand, leaking through the fingers. Alone or with an Indian woman. Or with his son. The damned Yankee crook—how did he get away so fast?—disappearing around the bend in the road, evaporating like mist, half the village’s gold coins in his pockets and the other half in the crown of his hat. Yankee!
John Jay Zinn, the pedlar from Maine. Or was it New York. Zinn who spread typhoid one wet spring, along the shore of Delaware Bay. Zinn who had left a wife behind in Shaheen Falls. And another wife in Front Royal, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He was six feet ten inches tall—a loose-limbed gangling giant. Walked hunched forward, using his staff as if he hated the ground and wanted to cause it pain. One winter, dressed in beaver skins, short and plumped-out, ruddy cheeks, spectacles with plain glass in them, to hide his squinting winking mocking eyes; the next winter, skinny again, in knee-high leather boots stiff with mud, the old broadcloth preacher’s coat that wouldn’t have been warm enough for a normal man, the old soiled white hat dented in the crown: Is that Zinn again?—or that other Yankee crook? Alone and coughing into his hand. Alone and bawling songs, drunk, at the tavern on the creek in Fayette. He was a spy for Jackson in the Carolinas, a spy for Calhoun in New England, he had the power to arrest anyone fool enough to buy his untaxed rum, he sold Dr. Bolton’s Purgative Pills in the little green box with the legend on the side Caution: Not To Be Used By Females in the Pregnant State As Miscarriage Might Occur, the villagers flocked to him, attracted by a magnet in the crown of his hat which drew their gold and silver coins and even the fillings in their teeth. Quadrants for sale, seashells from the depths of the ocean that foretold the future if you pressed your ear up close enough, wigs for all sizes of heads made from human hair stiff as horsehair, Professor Dobson’s Portuguese Laudanum, a secret oily potion “for men only,” firecrackers and sparklers and gunpowder, even the laziest woodchucks and possums could not resist, the white-tailed buck traded his antlers, the squirrel traded his bushy plume of a tail, Is that boy of his touched in the head?—what a pity, the Maryland flatlands, the New Jersey pine barrens, December days when the sun never rose and the sky was a black lurid soup. Damn Yankee spy.