Quinn's Book

by William Kennedy

  Hillegond corrected Lyman, saying Dirck’s pursuits were in no wise low or mischievous, but of a high moral order such as others rarely reach. It is true, she said, that he is peculiar and ill-clad (and she eyed my own attire with disdain); but Dirck was also kindly, courageous, and brilliant, and she was proud of him.

  “Yes, of course,” said Lyman. “We are all proud of the boy. Proud, proud, proud. But his father would have loathed the publication of that ruinous book. Didn’t your son know that his father was a founder of The Society?”

  Dirck promptly stood and wrote his answer at the inkstand under the portrait of Petrus in his senescence, wrote with unerring speed of quill, after which I, with rounded vowels, read his words to all: “Of course I knew. Masked man who ordered my tongue cut, and also ordered against my murder, was giving obeisance to power of Father’s residual status in The Society.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” said Lyman, addressing his remarks to me. “But I’m suggesting you apologize on behalf of your father for what you wrote. If you do, I myself will resign publicly from The Society on grounds that this once splendid brotherhood’s high moral aim has fallen into low estate, corrupted by latter-day scoundrels.”

  Dirck exploded into a furious quilling of counterthrust, then stood beside me and said through the medium of my voice that he considered Lyman “great man, great friend of family and of father, but I will never retract one word, for book cost me eternal voice, and what recanting will return that? Neither apology nor resignation will change Society, an evil needing violent overthrow.” Then Dirck sat down in a swim of silent passion.

  Lyman stood and shook his fist at me, saying he could not resign “without history’s awareness that The Society was not always vile, and that all present members are not villainous men.”

  Dirck scratched out his reply and I read: “Well enough. Then you put Society in historical niche. Please reveal secret dogmas of yore that have led to crucifying of men and slitting of their gizzards to create pasture for rats. For I do not understand such moral evolution.”

  Lyman said that nothing he could say would reveal such progression, and that no matter what he said, “it would not clear the name of Petrus for having founded the local chapter of The Society. The words of Dirck Staats are required for that.”

  Dirck, dismissing this remark with a wave of his hand, wrote his conclusion: “Am not dead father’s keeper. Nor yours either.”

  The sociality of the evening deteriorated with that remark and before long we took to our beds. All that had passed weighed on my brain, but shining epiphanically through it all was the face of Maud. With her visit to Saratoga approaching within weeks, I knew a decision loomed: one that would also involve my bronze disk, which had been recurring in my dreams. On this burdened and sleepless night the disk’s face spoke to me in a pair of cryptic phrases: “Under the arches of love,” it said, and then “Under the banner of blood,” neither phrase holding intimate meaning for me. Only an intuition persisted that one day I might find the grand significance of this oracular object, as well as how it related to Joey Ryan and his slungshot, to the bumblebees in Maud’s script, to the bleeding wrist of Joshua the fugitive slave, and to the exploding soldier’s melancholy dust. The message emerging from my febrile imagination during these tumultuous days was a single word: “linkage”; and from the moment I was able to read that word I became a man compelled to fuse disparate elements of this life, however improbable the joining, this done in a quest to impose meaning on things whose very existence I could not always verify: a vision, for instance, of a young girl holding a human skull with a sweetly warbling red bird trapped inside, the bird visible through the skull’s eye sockets.

  In an earlier day I would have dismissed such a tableau as nightmare. But now I was propelled into an unknown whose dimensions grew ever wider and whose equal in spanning them I knew I was not. But even as I knew this I knew also I might never be their equal, and that remaining as I was, out of deference or timidity, would keep me ever distant from Maud. My life would then, I knew, fall into desuetude, like the lives of so many men of my father’s generation, men who moved through their days sustained only by fragments of failed dreams, and who grew either indolent in despair or bellicose in resentment at such a condition.

  And so, on a morning not long after the peaking of these pressures, I rode in silence with Will Canaday and Dirck to the Chronicle-Paddle, and when I saw the pair of them together in editorial conference beside the woodstove, I summoned the courage to present them with my decision, saying, “If you please, sirs, I think I must resign from this job and leave Albany.” They regarded me with silent surprise.

  “Leave for where?” Will asked.

  “For Saratoga, to the north.”

  “I know where Saratoga is. Have we treated you so poorly here?”

  “No, sir. I feel very happy here. Nobody is more grateful than I for what I’ve been given, but I have to meet someone.”

  “A relative?”

  “No,” I said, almost adding, “not yet.”

  Will sat down in the chair beside Dirck and stared at me with what I took to be incomprehension compounded. I believe he felt me bereft of common sense. “When does this departure take place?” he asked.

  “About two weeks,” I said.

  “You’ll stay in Saratoga? Live there?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “I really can’t say.”

  “Do you plan to look for another job?”

  “I was hoping,” I said, “that you would help me figure that out.”

  “Ah,” said Will. “So I’m to be an accessory to your flight.”

  “I would rather work here for the Chronicle than anywhere else in the world. But I have to help this person.”

  Dirck scribbled a note and handed it to me. It read: “Maud?” I nodded and handed the note to Will.

  “Then your journey is really a romantic quest,” said Will.

  “She asked me to meet her. She seems desperate,” I said.

  “Of course you’re fully equipped to solve all the random cares of desperate young women.”

  “Probably not any of them,” I said, “but I promised to try.”

  Will and Dirck then listened with mock solemnity while I spoke about Maud’s life with La Última and John the Brawn. But the more I talked the more I saw how ignorant I was of everything about Maud except her desire to be stolen by me. I did not say this. I said in summary that I couldn’t be sure when I’d return to Albany. At that moment I saw in Dirck’s face his realization that he was losing his voice yet again. I had become adept as his surrogate, but surely others could replace me; and I couldn’t say the same for Maud’s role in my affection, or mine in hers.

  Will raised the question of my disk and I said I’d leave it in his safe, but he said no. What if they burgled the safe? What if the place caught fire? What if he died? No. We needed proof of my ownership, and then safekeeping for the disk in a bank vault, in my name. As usual, Will was thorough.

  During subsequent days my departure was much discussed, especially by Hillegond, who couldn’t believe I was going off on my own. She stared me up and down and said, “If you are going to be an adventurer, you must stop looking like a crossing sweeper,” and she summoned a tailor to the mansion to measure me for wool and linen trousers, dress coats (the wool coat had a velvet collar), two silk damask waistcoats to match and contrast with the dress coats, and a long gray frock coat for cold weather. She personally took me to the city for dress shoes and shoeboots, six new shirts, six cravats, two pairs of braces, and an abundance of stockings and undergarments. All this was topped off with a tall black hat that I thought somewhat silly, but that Hillegond insisted was the true mark of a young gentleman.

  “I only wish Dirck had been like you,” she said to me.

  When we had done with clothing she took me to the stationer’s and fitted me out with a writer’s travel kit that included a
writing box, a portable lamp, candles and holder, two everpointed pencils, a dozen pen points with pen, ink, and inkwell, and a roll of writing paper.

  “Now you are a writer,” said Hillegond.

  “I think I will have to write something first,” I said.

  I came back to my room in the mansion, marveling at all my acquisitions. But one may be an acquisitor for only so long, and then the emptiness of it comes to the fore. And so I went down to the kitchen to see Matty and Capricorn, who had become my friends. I always wanted to hear their stories of Negro life in old Albany, and their tales of fugitive slaves, which sometimes were happy stories of escape, sometimes tragic with death and separation. I wanted to know what had happened to Joshua, and so I asked them how he was getting on after his ordeal and where he was. This won me a profound silence and brought our talk of slavery to an abrupt end.

  Two mornings before my leave-taking I was breakfasting in the dining room with Dirck when he placed a message alongside my plate as we finished our tea. I read:

  Daniel,

  Our society seems ever to be confessing its flaws to you, just as you seem to have been born to witness tragedy and to elevate people from trouble. I owe you my life. My banker is setting up an account in your name and will be here today to talk with you. You will now have an income for the next fifteen years of your life. By then you should be wealthy in your own right.

  Luck,

  Dirck

  When I realized what he had written and raised my head in grateful wonderment, Dirck was gone. As good fortune embraced me, baleful new shadows fell upon the Ryan family. The young Molly erupted with sores and boils over her entire body, a disease of no ostensible origin that was finally ascribed to the terrors that had taken seed in her upon her witnessing Toddy’s murder. Joey Ryan was set upon twice as he ventured little distances from the mansion, and one boy sought to pluck out his eyes. Hearing this, Margaret Ryan ran to Hillegond and fell prostrate on the parlor rug, cursing the enemies of Ireland, cursing America, cursing God and His mother, cursing the murderer of her husband and all his heirs and ancestors, cursing the curse that was on her and her children. She stopped cursing when Hillegond patted her head and cooed at her; then she sat up and swore she would leave Albany for a new place, swore it on the suffering body of Molly Ryan, on the threatened eyes of Joey Ryan, on the hate that lived in her own body and which was the blood, fire, and venom of her will to survive this hell of black devils.

  Lyman Fitzgibbon rescued the Ryans from family dementia by finding Margaret a charwoman’s job in a Syracuse orphan asylum, where her children could find haven away from Albany; and so one day they were gone from the mansion, yet frozen forever in my memory as paradigms of helpless, guiltless suffering. I sensed in the days after they left that a life such as theirs would probably not be my lot, that any troubles befalling me in later days would emanate more from my own willfulness or sapheadedness; that I was not destined to be a passive pawn of exterior forces. One exposes great hubris with such confession, but there was truth in my intuition.

  On the day I was to leave, Hillegond supervised the farewell breakfast, for which she baked bread from an old Dutch recipe. Laden with cheese, raisins, sugar, and walnuts, the bread, for Hillegond, was symbolic of plenty, her parting wish for me. Dirck kept his farewell as brief as he could, but his handshake was as strong as a bear’s trap as we separated.

  Will, who had already given me a letter recommending me as a gracious, trustworthy young soul of plentiful talent and potential, an effusion of praise I was sure no one would believe, came to pick up Dirck and report to us that Lyman had sent him a letter, to be printed in the Chronicle, publicly repudiating The Society and resigning from it.

  Will gave me his personal copy of Montaigne’s essays, telling me it contained enough wisdom for several young men like myself, and he urged me to read it constantly and in small doses. He also gave me some agates of advice. Sitting at the end of the dining-room table, where Hillegond and I were eating alone, holding his hat in one hand and his walking stick in the other, he delivered his message to me in words whose precise shape I cannot reconstruct, for I felt terrible leaving Will’s newspaper, which had become the home of my soul; and the thought of departure clouded my memory severely. Though I searched for those precise words all the rest of that day, my findings fell far short of Will’s impromptu eloquence. What he said, as best I could reconstitute it, was this:

  “Remember, Daniel. The only thing worth fighting for is what is real to the self. Move toward the verification of freedom, and avoid gratuitous absolutes.”

  I confess I did not know what he meant by the two final words, but which are exact, for I recorded them indelibly on my memory because of their strangeness. Will also added that I should be wary of marriage “before the age of comprehension,” which he placed at twenty-five. “No man younger than that has any idea what women are all about,” he said. “And while after twenty-five they have even less, they are somehow readier for the game.”

  His speech brought tears to Hillegond’s eyes, for it made my departure increasingly real to her: yet another adventure of the heart taking its leave. She gave me quite contrasting counsel as to matters of love.

  “I know you and Maud saw what happened on the night Magdalena came back from the dead,” she said. “I did not see you there, but John did, and he enjoyed the audience. I won’t apologize for what you saw, but I do say that life is never what you think. We seem to discover love in the most awkward places, and not always with the appropriate people. But Daniel, young dear of our hearts, love is better than wheat. Love is worth what it costs to find it, and I do know you’ve found it. I also know you know everything that I say before I say it. You are such a smart boy—smarter than Dirck was at your age, and he was smart as a Dutchman’s thirst. I shall miss you, Daniel Quinn, and I demand that you come back as soon as you can and make your home here. Bring Maud if you like, and if not her, then another. But you have made yourself valuable to the Staats family, and you shall never want again as long as we live. God bless your good sense and Godspeed on your new journey.”

  I had my train ticket in hand and was packed and ready for departure well before the appointed hour. Emmett Daugherty came to pick me up, and said we’d have to watch the Irish circus before I left, a comment that confused me. But he explained that today was the departure day as well for the new immigrants: homeless Irish who had come to Albany to find life, and finding none, were being ushered elsewhere—driven, really, from the city by authorities unable to cope with the mounting cases of Ship Fever the newcomers had brought with them. It was widely held that fever could not prosper in open spaces, and so the immigrants were being sent to the western plains, where they could build cabins, and forage in the outdoors for their lives, becoming as one with the wilderness, safely distant from the fetid city, where fever seeds wax strong.

  I embraced Matty and Capricorn in turn, vowing I would see them both again, then was smothered in my final enfolding by Hillegond and her abundant bosom, which made me weep with love for the woman to whose open arms I swore anew that I would filially return.

  I climbed onto the seat of Emmett’s open wagon as he threw my baggage aboard, and I turned my final gaze upon the mansion, its shrubbery, its turrets, its gables and conical towers, its sprawling porches and beautiful lawns of intense verdancy, its acres of bosky slopes, and that vast metabosky terrain I had always judged to be the Staatses’ primeval forest, and along which their road coursed toward the city. All this I surveyed with saddened eye, for I knew that this time I was truly leaving, perhaps never to return, despite my avowals, and sensing in my most anxious reaches that this was all slipping away forever, even before I had begun to command power over its lushness. This was no longer mine, and I was to be alone on the road, a waif in gentleman’s clothing, aimless and homeless, pointing myself in the vague direction of an even more vaguely defined duty to a stranger I barely knew but loved with unquestioning fervor.

>   I wept openly upon my separation both from the grandeur of this vision and from Hillegond’s chest full of heat. And then, as I accepted the unknowable emptiness of my future, Emmett clucked his horse into motion.

  And so goodbye.

  We saw signs of Emmett’s circus as we neared the railroad station: mobs of people being herded out of the city by constables and sheriff’s men on horseback. I sat beside Emmett in his wagon and we watched them pass.

  “Pay heed to these people and remember what you see,” he said to me, and I remember him as vividly as the rest, his great wavy mane of black hair crowning him with handsome abundance, his eyes as strong as nuggets of iron. And so in memory I heed him as much as I heeded that troubled throng. Here came a man with two children on his shoulders and three more in tow, a woman nursing slung babies at both naked breasts as she walked along. The day was chill, but some men walked bare-chested, galluses holding their trousers, their feet in rotting boots. A man with a bull terrier under his arm had grown neck whiskers like a dog collar, his face otherwise clean of hair. A boy in a small cart drawn by a jackass played on the pennywhistle a Gaelic air I remember my father whistling, and naughty women with chemises visible and skirts flying threw visions of hip and thigh at men and women both (one of them eyed me), taunting in the Irish tongue all who watched the parade from windows and doorways. One man wore no shoes, his feet wrapped in cloth. Another carried a short club, the Irishman’s gun, ready for impromptu battle. Men wore hobnail boots, hats of straw and felt, caps of leather and fur, tall hats, plug hats, sailor hats, vests. Women wore bonnets and shawls or nothing on their heads, sweaters, tattered coats, threadbare cloaks, long skirts. They carried brooms, and straw boxes, bags and valises tied with rope. Their stockings were rolled, their hair in buns or loose to the middle of their back like my mother’s, some of the loose-haired ones loose as well with affection to the men who pawed and patted them as they walked, those patters clad in tailcoats and knee britches with holes in the knees, men carrying pails and whiskey bottles and a small pig in a basket. One man pissed like a horse in the street, and an entire clustered family of six gripped one another’s hands in fearful dignity.