Quinn's Book

by William Kennedy

  In the Five Points and other like slums of the metropolis there was all but solid opposition to the war and to the race of people whose plight had brought it about. Also in the Five Points, Quinn found that the Copperhead politicians, great friends all of John McGee, were viewed as heroic figures. Denizens of the Five, “outscourings of humanity, the dregs of Europe” commonly called, abided in harmonious squalor with the city’s criminal element, and numbered, in all, perhaps eighty thousand in a city of eight hundred thousand, a statistic with wicked potential.

  Given the normal antisocial elements of such a group, its antipathy to the war and to the government waging it, given its natural thirst for vengeance, the balance of social madness, in retrospect, can be viewed as easily tippable with the imposition of a hateful law. Such was the conscription law, drafting men for the first time (volunteers and bounty seekers had heretofore sustained the army’s needs), but exempting from service anyone able to pay the government three hundred dollars. We need not elaborate on the crystalline injustice of this to the poor man in general, and in particular to the poor Irishman (a quarter of the entire city was Irish), mired in generational denial and humiliation as he was, and for whom free Negroes meant a swarm of competitors for the already insufficient jobs at the bottom of the world.

  And so in the heat of a midsummer weekend in July 1863, while Lee was licking his wounds from Gettysburg, the first polymorphic mob, estimated at ten thousand, drank itself into a frenzy in the greengroceries, the dance halls, and the dives of its choice, then took to the streets with baleful intent: Burn the draft office, burn the Tribune, that abolitionist rag, and pillage and destroy all that is not of us.

  John and I found that mob as we turned the corner onto Ninth Avenue. The screaming that greeted us was horrendous, a battle already engaged between fifty policemen and the uncountable rioters who, in this moment, were led by a gigantic bare-chested, one-armed man, and at his side a young man I’d seen haranguing a crowd at the Five Points two days earlier. I remembered him at that time screaming anti-Negro invective at a crowd, urging rebellion, riot, revolution, no draft, and concluding with huzzahs for Jefferson Davis.

  This younger man now fought like a pit bull, felling policemen with his club and with the force of his rage; and beside him the giant flailed outward with his enormous bludgeon, an extension of his Herculean right arm, cracking heads and backs with a vehemence, his own head and body remarkably invulnerable to clubbings by police truncheons.

  The mob moved relentlessly forward, the police valiant but unequal, routed and forced to flee for their lives as we watched. I do not know how they found Joshua’s house. Perhaps they saw a Negro face in a window, or perhaps a neighbor was aware that Joshua had been there in recent days. But they singled out the house, beat open its doors, and swarmed inside.

  “If he’s still in there, he’s dead,” said John.

  The howling of the mob grew fiercer, more shrill, a wordless yawp of animal frenzy, the mob hearts all linked now in a single feral pulsebeat as they sensed a quarry and a kill. And then, from a second-story window in the house, a man screamed in triumph words I could not understand, but the mob could, and it responded with a roar. The man gave a signal and the mob obeyed. It moved backward into the street and was rewarded with a Negro (not Joshua) being pitched headfirst out the window, whereupon the mob closed in over him and I saw no more of what was done.

  Joshua they brought out the door, his head bloodied but he still able to walk, and at the sight of him John broke into a run and pushed his way toward the center yelling, “Don’t kill him!” only to be met by the one-armed giant and his cudgel and dealt such a blow as would have killed two normal men. John fell unconscious, bloodied, dead I thought, and death might have been his lot had not the mob’s focus been on the preferred quarry: Joshua. The swarm turned its attention from the dissenter, and I pulled John off the street and toward the basement of the nearest house, found it doorless, black, and empty. I propped John in a corner, and as best I could, tried stanching the flow of his blood. He was breathing, but I dared not move him toward help now, for the sight of that bloody head was too likely to whet the mob’s appetite for another kill. And so I was fated to guard the wounded John and watch from my darkness as the mob took its pleasure with Joshua. Here is what they did to him:

  They beat him with their cudgels

  And they stabbed him with their knives

  and he did not die

  They dropped stones onto his chest

  They dropped stones onto his head

  and he did not die

  They poked holes in him with sticks

  They roped his legs and dragged him

  and he did not die

  They gave him to the harpies

  And they opened up his flesh

  and he did not die

  Then the harpies oiled his wounds

  And they lit him with a match

  and he did not die

  Then they hanged him from a lamppost

  Lit a fire underneath him

  and he died

  The mob moved on, and so I was able to get help from a family on the block to carry John to a bed; and a woman bandaged his head. Two samaritans cut down Joshua but a fragment of the mob came back and found him on the ground and hanged him a second time. When quiet came upon the street I shinnied up the lamppost and cut him down again. His left hand had been severed. I could not find it. I dragged him into my cellar and left him, then explored the neighborhood until I found a peddler with a pushcart. I rented him for two dollars, but when I told him my purpose he reneged. I threatened him and he went with me. When we got to the cellar, Joshua was gone.

  WHEN MAGDALENA COLÓN DECIDED she was about to die for the second time, she announced from her bed that the only way she could die properly was lying by the water under a tree. Her intuition about death came at home at midafternoon, two hours after she collapsed in the gallery in my arms. She summoned Obadiah, Maud, her doctor, and her servants to her bedroom and insisted that someone find John McGee and bring him to her to reorganize the evening. Instead of a birthday party to celebrate her being alive for fifty-five years, what she now wanted was a wake to acknowledge her passing over into lovely death, but held while she was still alive and able to enjoy both sides of existence at the same time.

  “You can’t have a wake if you’re not dead,” said Obadiah by her bedside.

  “I won’t even let you come to the wake if you don’t mind your mouth,” said Magdalena.

  The doctor had diagnosed her condition as palpitation, arrhythmia, and syncope, and ordered her to sip brandy, lie with her head below the level of her ankles, with her clothing loosened at neck and waist, with smelling salts on hand for revival in the event of further fainting, a coffee enema if necessary, and with the utmost ventilation to her room.

  Maud entered into a weeping rage at Magdalena’s plight, but Magdalena delighted in the attention, ordered her maid to find her a loose-fitting blouse, strip her of all undergarments, daub her face with powder, etch with pale crimson the lines of her lips and the hollows of her cheeks, brush her hair forty strokes, impose upon her throat the pendant emerald Obadiah gave her for her fiftieth birthday, heighten her eyebrows and eyelashes with charcoal, push her feet into her silver slippers, and find a pair of strong men to carry her out onto the lawn beneath a tree, where she might freely breathe her anticipated last. She then sent for me to ask my advice in publicizing her wake, since she wanted all her friends and enemies to come. I suggested a handbill.

  “Fine,” said Magdalena, “and I also want you to write something about me and how I changed the world.”

  “How did you change the world?” I asked.

  “I have no idea. That’s why I want you to write it.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said.

  “Splendid. And you can read it tonight at the wake instead of some poopy old prayer.”

  I was alone at this point in the day, John off in places unkno
wn, and Oba, as people called him, having donned his at-home costume of dressing gown and thigh-length kid boots, puttering around the servants’ quarters. Maud closeted herself in her private reverie, emerging only to check on Magdalena’s condition, which was improving. When she collapsed in my arms her face was ashen, but by now she had become sanguine and relaxed and was moving toward death with all her summonable beauty.

  I took myself to the library, where Oba’s butler brought me Magdalena’s half-dozen scrapbooks, thick with newspaper cuttings in Spanish and English. I browsed through them and saw an outline of her life, the topography of a notorious career, the mockery of her first death, and on forward into the social notices of her life with Obadiah. What she wanted me to write, I supposed, was an obituary that would heap glory upon her achievements as performer, as mystic, as hostess; but the very thought of that bored me. If I was to do justice to the woman, I needed to move beyond the barricade of empty facts into some grander sphere—charting, for instance, what I myself found significant: her ability to survive as a solitary woman in a hostile world; her love affair with death; and, most important of all (to me), her nurturing of the incredible Maud, and then imposing that hallowed creature on my life.

  The decision I had made so long ago, to live my life according to the word, reached its apogee in the war and then descended into the bathetic dumps of faceless slaughter. Yet in writing about what was worst in this world an unconscionable pang of pleasure dogged my every line. Mine was clearly a life fulfilled by language, and I was coming to see that through that, and only that, could I perhaps in some unknown way gild the eccentric life of Magdalena, or the tragedy of Joshua, or my own thrumming symphony of mysteries. By devising a set of images that did not rot on me overnight, I might confront what was worth confronting, with no expectation of solving the mysteries, but content merely to stare at them until they became as beautiful and valuable as Magdalena had always been, and as Maud now was.

  It was in this elated frame of mind that I picked up a pen and set down a handful of words that I hoped would begin the recovery not only of what had been lost but also of what I did not know had been lost, yet surely must have been. I was persuading myself that if I used the words well, the harmony that lurked beneath all contraries and cacophonies must be revealed. This was an act of faith, not reason.

  And so, rather than writing Magdalena’s obituary, I began to write her story, taking the facts not from her cuttings but from my imagination, where, like a jungle flower, she had long since taken root.

  I, Daniel Quinn, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinns (of this I was hopeful), would, with the courage false or real that comes with an acute onset of hubris, create a world before which I could kneel with awe and reverence as I waited to be carried off into flights of tragic laughter.

  I did not write Magdalena’s obituary but I did compose the notice of her death and carried it to town to have it printed as a handbill for distribution throughout the city. It read:

  NOTICE OF PROXIMATE DEATH

  The social leader and former international theater star Magdalena Colón Griswold, with all sincerity and affection, invites the visiting and resident citizenry of Saratoga to a viewing of her last remains, so to speak, this evening at her home, Griswold Gardens, on the eastern shore of Saratoga Lake. Her passing will take place on the Griswold lawn, and so, to facilitate the viewing, it is suggested that visitors carry with them either candle or lamp. Dinner and libations will be served, and dancing on the lawn will begin sharply at eight o’clock.

  Magdalena had not anticipated anything more than a solemn parade of mourners filing past her, uttering condolences, shaking her mortal paw. But when John McGee arrived he put an end to such thinking.

  “We’re having a party,” he said. “You can’t spoil everybody’s evening just because you’ve decided to die.” And so the final sentence was added to the handbill’s invitation.

  The guests began to arrive by seven. Those invited to the birthday were received in the mansion; those invited to the wake were directed to the lawn. John, when present at the mansion, clearly became the man of the house, Obadiah no more than a potty little wisp in the cosmos. John took up the welcoming position at the front gate, just as he had at the track, but now he turned away no one, including known thieves.

  “Just stay outside the house,” he told the thieves he recognized, “or I’ll eat your gizzard for lunch.”

  Champagne, Bordeaux wines, squab, and lobster were served to the birthday guests; beer, oyster stew, and crackers to the mourners on the lawn. John had ordered a stage built at the edge of the reflecting pool and at seven sharp Adolph Bernstein’s orchestra from the United States Hotel began the music of the evening with a Chopin medley. John also asked Jim Fisk to bring his German band to the party, Fisk said he would, and did, and so music was continuous for Magdalena’s presumably farewell performance. Milo, the Master of Magic from Albany, performed hat and animal tricks at an intermission, and when the music resumed Milo waltzed with a dancing bear, who was actually Cornelius Gómez, an idiot-savant Mexican dwarf, who told fortunes for a quarter afterward on the veranda.

  Magdalena watched it all from her vantage point at the cusp of the lawn’s principal slope, Maud beside her dotingly, responding to all her whims, which grew fewer as the line of strangers who came to wish her a pleasant passing grew longer.

  “What a lovely idea inviting people to your wake . . . Are you dead yet, Magdalena? . . . When do you die? . . . Will we see it happen? . . . Have a good time in heaven, Magdalena . . . We’ll miss you . . . Will there be a party for the funeral, too?”

  “You’re all such dears to come,” said Magdalena. “I hope we don’t run out of food. Maud, will we run out of food?”

  “No, Auntie.”

  “That’s nice, dear. Keep them moving.”

  No one mentioned the mockery of the afternoon to Magdalena, this warning passed on to all in line by order of John McGee, who said that if anyone talked of the thing to Magdalena he would break both their legs. Of the mockery, John discovered through informers that the two Negroes were both transient stable hands who had no knowledge of what they were doing and earned three dollars apiece for what they thought was entertainment for the crowd.

  Gordon Fitzgibbon grew so pensive and melancholy over the mockery that Maud could not bear his presence and sent him away to elevate her own spirits. She told Gordon to cure himself of gloom and come back to the party in jubilation or else she would have nothing to do with him for the entire evening. Gordon went off and drank gin at the United States bar and returned at sunset with a rakish angle to his tall hat and a crooked smile on his face, the first time Quinn ever noted anything likable in the man.

  Gordon arrived on the arm of his cousin Phoebe Strong, whose horse had also suffered humiliation during the afternoon, finishing a ridiculous number of lengths behind the winner. What Gordon did not know, nor did Quinn, was that Phoebe had been the architect and executrix of the mockery, and of the letter penned by Purity Knickerbocker—these facts unearthed by John McGee and his Hawkshaw network of social spies. John told only Maud of his discovery, and so Phoebe arrived at the wake with the serenity of a criminal who has committed the perfect crime.

  Humanity arrived in great droves to mourn for Magdalena and grieve in its free beer. The lawn was asprawl with a vast multitude, the night a wash of flickering brilliance from a thousand lamps, lighting up the lawn more brightly than a full moon. John took it upon himself to summon a Presbyterian cleric, who was part of Magdalena’s social set, to utter a prayer on behalf of the imminent decedent’s soul, but the uniqueness of the occasion thwarted the man and instead he uttered a homily on the therapeutic quality of night breezes. Magdalena lost patience and shooed him away.

  “Daniel,” she said, “you say a prayer for me.”

  “No,” I said, “I can’t do that sort of thing anymore. But I shall write about you as one of the great philanthropists in the entire histo
ry of sensuality.”

  “He’s so brilliant,” said Magdalena. And then she pulled me to her and kissed me on the lips.

  “I envy Maud,” she whispered.

  “You are the queen of the night,” I told her, and she feigned a swoon.

  The mourners’ line undulated across the entire lawn, and at the level area atop the slope the dancing began.

  “I should like to dance,” said Magdalena. “It may help me die. I should like to dance with John McGee.”

  “And so you shall,” I said, and we organized the bearers, who carried Magdalena and her chaise longue across the lawn to the dancing area. I summoned John and told him he was wanted. He had never stopped being Magdalena’s lover, even after her marriage to Obadiah—their assignations, whenever John was in range, being an open secret, and always conducted on Wednesday afternoons, Magdalena’s preferred day of the week ever since a young lover told her Wednesday had been named for the god of poetic frenzy.

  And so we danced: Magdalena and John, Gordon and Phoebe, Maud and I, and several hundred others, all waltzing to the music of “Beautiful Dreamer,” so very popular at this moment. Seeing her dance I did not believe Magdalena would die. She looked irrepressibly radiant. How could such a vivid creature cease to be?