“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.
“But a cloud covered it.
“And I made my escape.”
Quinn nodded and smiled. Magdalena needed no more.
“If a butterfly.
“Turned into a caterpillar,
“Where would be the loss?”
Quinn narrowed his smile, spinning with Magdalena as he did so, wondering how to respond.
“Those are quite short poems,” he finally said.
“I never write long poems,” said Magdalena. “My longest was about my trip to the bottom of the river.” She closed her eyes, straightened her neck.
“Four gleaming clamshells
“Danced for my pleasure.
“The mud fairies made me a shawl
“Of luminous eelgrass.
“I died of death
“Until the sword of the sailor
“Pierced my heart,
“And I ascended again
“Into the land of sorrow.”
“Someday I must write about your poetry so people will know you are more than a dancer,” Quinn said, shamed by his deception, pleased by his politesse. He wanted to be as honest with Magdalena as she was being with him. Perhaps he would write about her. She was a striking woman. He could even write of her body, of which he had had privileged sightings, in the Dood Kamer and under the garden arch.
“That would be very kind of you,” Magdalena said to him. “When are you going to kidnap Maud?”
“What’s that?”
“I know she’s asked you. Hasn’t she?”
“She told you?”
“She didn’t have to. She’s been asking men to kidnap her ever since she was eight years old.”
“No.”
“Everybody knows that about Maud.”
“I didn’t know it.”
“She doesn’t tell her kidnappers.”
“She’s been kidnapped before?”
“Never.”
“I don’t understand this.”
“She doesn’t want to be kidnapped. She only wants to talk about being kidnapped. That way she doesn’t have to make any decisions about the future. When things get difficult she invites someone to kidnap her.”
“That seems madcap.”
“Yes, doesn’t it?”
“Has Maud always been madcap?”
“As long as I’ve known her.”
“How long have you known her?”
“Since she was born.”
Maud Lucinda
Fallon was born in 1837 of a twin and a tenant farmer, and distinguished herself at the age of two by reciting the Ave Maria in its entirety, in Latin. Her mother, Charlotte Mary Coan, and her father, Thomas (Thomsy) Fallon, both denied having instructed her, and both claimed utter ignorance of Latin.
Maud began a diary at age four and filled notebooks with poetic language her parents could understand only marginally. The source of her gift was made suspect by the parish priest in Athlone and her writing was not encouraged. When she was five her notebooks were sent to a schoolmaster for evaluation and Maud never saw them again.
Maud’s life lost what little formal structure it had when her father joined a tenant farmers’ rebellion and was arrested and shipped to an English prison. He escaped en route and found his way to Canada, from where he sent money back to Charlotte, a young woman of spirit, whose gift was for music and dance. Charlotte, in short order, took herself and her child to Dublin, resolving to wrench them both up from the depths into which Thomsy Fallon’s arrest had plunged them.
Charlotte joined a traveling theater company, became its principal dancer, the lover of two of its actors, and by the time the troupe reached England, she was its sensual public flower. From London she was whisked to Paris by a plutocrat in the July monarchy of Louis Philippe, changed her name to Lila Márquez to distinguish herself from the French, and was kept in circumstances proper to her burgeoning ambition.
Maud grew to be an encumbrance on her mother’s vie amoureuse, and so Charlotte-Lila sent the child to Spain to live with Maud’s aunt (and Charlotte’s twin), Magdalena Colón, that surname a gift from her most recent late husband. Like the intrepid general who refuses to die in battle but is thwarted in the charge by having his horses repeatedly shot from under him, Magdalena had bid farewell to three husbands at graveside and was on the brink of acquiring a fourth when Maud arrived in Spain and changed her life, generating in it the wise child’s mystery, and giving Magdalena new vistas beyond sensuality and security.
While Charlotte-Lila abandoned the Parisian plutocracy to pursue the devil amid the royal resplendency of Bavaria, Magdalena imposed tutors, dancing masters, and dolls on the five-year-old Maud, who became trilingual in a trice, and at six could also emulate her aunt Magdalena in the flamenco and the tarantela (which Magdalena had learned from a Zincali Gypsy queen).
In 1848, as revolution swept through Europe, Magdalena saw her fortunes fading in Spain and, upon the advice of a cosmopolitan lover, turned her attention to the United States of the New World, a nation only moderately cultured and given to irrational frenzies toward beautiful dancing females.
And so it came to pass in the summer of 1849 that Magdalena, known as La Última after the death of her third husband, arrived at New York with serving maid and Maud, now twelve, and began a theatrical tour that included a capsizing and sudden death in the icy river at Albany, a spiritual communion in Saratoga, a reluctant companionship with John McGee (a well-hung lout), an empty dalliance with Obadiah Griswold (a generous fool), and a dance in the arms of Daniel Quinn (a boy of compelling charm).
Maud, witness to this, adolescent savant-seer, child of the emotional wilderness, discovered one night in Obadiah’s mansion at Saratoga the presence of bloodstains on her bedsheet and fell instantly into raptures at their significance, judging them to be the geography of a long-awaited unknown. She sought counsel from Magdalena in coping with the flow.
“Well, Maudie, it’s about time,” said Magdalena. “Your body is several years late in catching up with your mind, but here you are, at last. Maybe now you’ll understand what your auntie is all about.”
Poor Quinn. Consider him. He saves a life, discovers love, finds it reciprocated, is obsessed and rightfully so, alters his life to yield to his obsession, finds worlds beyond worlds that he cannot understand, finds the object of his obsession to be madcap, takes her home, kisses her, all but swoons with confounded desire, goes to his rooming house, fails to sleep, rises, lights his writing lamp, plucks from his writing case his pointless pen, finds a point, imposes it upon the pen, unrolls his paper, uncaps his inkwell, poises his pen above the well with the intention of wetting the point and writing, refrains from dipping because his condition allows no clarity of thought, puts down the pen, paces up and down in his bedchamber, takes up his collection of Montaigne’s essays, opens it, and finds two passages underlined: “What causes do we not invent for the misfortunes that befall us? What will we not blame, rightly or wrongly, that we may have something to fight with?” and also this: “And we see that the soul in its passions is wont to cheat itself by setting up a false and fanciful object, even against its own belief, rather than not have something to act upon,” and piqued by this, turns back to the beginning of the essay, which is called “How the Soul Relieves Its Feelings on the Wrong Objects, When the Real Are Wanting,” reads it through, then resumes his pacing, considering the current state of love, of men and women, of his life past and future, wondering what will become of himself, a novice in all things, now that he is lost to love and probably about to set out in several wrong directions, linked as he is to a radical child, a deluded poetaster, and John McGee, a scurvy bastard, but who did knock down Hennessey with Quinn as a witness, and at that memory Quinn picks up his pen, dips it in his ink, and writes one sentence: “They call him John the Brawn and he doesn’t know enough to pull his head in when he shuts the window, but he knocked down the best fighter in the world,” and having written that, puts down his pen, smiles, walks up and down the bedchamber, and understands that he has just changed his life.
Quinn’s mood elevated once he discovered his control over the word. He envisioned a thrilling future for himself, sitting alone in hotel rooms, ruminating on epic events, then imposing his conclusions on paper for the world to read in the morning newspaper. He felt a surge of power and also vague intimations of wealth. He made plans to hire a carriage and take Maud to the High Rock, the Iodine, and the Empire Springs, whose multiple chlorides, bromides, sulphates, phosphates, and bicarbonates of magnesia, iron, soda, strontia, and lime had been vitalizing and restoring the health of multitudes since the age of the Indian, most notably the health of the “high livers,” whose love of good food, abundant drink, and nocturnal revels was a proven ravagement. Quinn did not consider himself a high liver, but he intuited that he might become one; and Maud, too, though of a different order. Quinn’s intuitions about Maud had all the fixity of a cloud in high winds.
Quinn’s plan was this: hire the open carriage, promenade through the city to the springs, stop at an appropriate place for tea, and, while the carriage waited, stroll with Maud through the first available park, lead her into a wooded grove, throw your arms about her, kiss her passionately with lip and tongue, declare your eternal love for her face, her form, her brain, her soul.
Upon Quinn’s invitation to an outing at the springs, Maud brooded on the uncertainties that had been keeping her wakeful during recent nights. Most disturbing was the dream that had arrived after her talk with the emaciated man. Walking by a lake she saw a living, pulsating, disembodied eye sitting on a large rock. The eye was her own and when she reached for it to put it back in its socket it slithered through her fingers into the sand. She cupped it in the palms of her hands and as she lowered it into the water to rinse it, the eye swiftly melted into corrupt slime.
Maud read this as an omen of confusion, especially in regard to Quinn. It was true that only he and she would do each other justice in this life. But what but a proper botch would they make of an adolescent marriage? It was a peasant dream, laughable. Furthermore, Maud was mutating: communicating with herself through the techniques of Mesmer, willing herself into states that were alien to her waking self. Become a loveless Japanese wife, she would tell herself. Become a sibyl in the Delphic mode. Become a child of slaves at the auction block. Become an actress who works with Shakespeare himself. She would allow herself to pass hours of waking and sleeping in these foreign moods, and come away from them only
reluctantly, and with written messages she could not reconcile. “The sadness of bumblebees and the longitude of pity exist only for lovers,” she wrote to herself. This poetic turn she found to be at odds with her pragmatic self, and pleasingly so. But her ability to communicate with the emaciated man was a disturbing extension of the condition, for it existed outside what she deemed the realm of the possible. She therefore disbelieved it, albeit hollowly: full of mocking echoes.
I must decide what to do about Quinn, Maud told herself, and so she fasted for the rest of the day, then set about making a dumb cake, as Magdalena’s Zincali Gypsy had taught her. She waited until Obadiah’s household was asleep and then in the kitchen she created her cake from eggs, salt, flour, and water in which she had lightly bathed her privities. She sat in silence with her back to the stove until it was time to take out the cake. She then revealed her breasts to the cake, covered herself, drew her initials with a knife on the top of the cake, and set it on the hearthstone in front of Obadiah’s drawing-room fireplace. She opened the front door of the house and left it ajar, sliced out a small piece of the cake for herself, and walked backward with it up the stairs to her room.
She put the piece of cake on her bedside stand, took off her dress, and unbuttoned her underclothing. She then ate the cake while standing, awaiting the spectral double of the man she would marry to enter the drawing room, carve his own initials on the cake downstairs, and perhaps then come up the stairs to pursue her with phantom hands. The loosening of her shift would allow her to free herself from such a grasp. He might get her underclothing, but not her. She would fall upon the bed at such an attempt, thus banishing him from the house.
The charm drugged her into sleep, and upon waking, and after inspecting the cake on the hearth at morning, she dressed herself and awaited the arrival of Quinn and his carriage.
Quinn walked through the village streets with Maud, envying the behavior of other strolling couples, all of whom seemed to be either in complacent love or in varied stages of flirtation. None seemed to exude the intensity of what he himself felt, and yet he could not touch Maud, not even her hand with his fingertips. Nor could he take hold of her arm to guide her; and so they walked as strangers along the grass-trimmed sidewalks, out of the area of stores, shops, hotels, and onto a street of stately homes and private gardens. At a wooded area past the last of the homes, Quinn stopped to regard the residue of a careless pic-nic: bits of bread, a strew of paper, a chicken bone, the core of an apple, a cork, a cigar butt, a woman’s handkerchief with a hole burned in it. An irrational sadness overtook Quinn.