Quinn's Book

by William Kennedy

“I think we should change partners,” Maud said, and she broke from me and went to Gordon. “I would like to dance with Phoebe,” she said.

  “With Phoebe?” said Gordon, stunned.

  “With Phoebe,” said Maud, and she grasped a reluctant Phoebe in a waltzing position and moved her forcefully away from Gordon, all of us suddenly turned into spectators. But dancing was not Maud’s intention, as she proved by spinning Phoebe around and ripping her dress down the back. Phoebe tried to turn and strike Maud but Maud was far stronger and quite ready for the countering. She then flung Phoebe onto the floor, face down, and sat on her back. Gordon and another man started to intervene but John stopped them.

  “Let them be,” said John. “History needs elbow room tonight.”

  Maud continued ripping Phoebe’s dress, and then her petticoat and fluffy netherings, Phoebe squirming and screaming to the death, of course, howling for help. I thought Maud must have lost her reason, and yet her method exuded such control that a purpose was obvious.

  “For heaven’s sake, what are you doing, Maudie?” Magdalena asked, hovering over the struggling women.

  “This is Phoebe Strong, Auntie, Gordon’s first cousin.”

  “I know it’s Phoebe,” said Magdalena. “Of course I know Phoebe. What are you doing to her?”

  “I’m ripping her clothing.”

  “Yes, but whatever for?”

  “She’s the hateful bitch who planned the mockery of you and me this afternoon.”

  “Phoebe did that? Did you do that, Phoebe?”

  “I did and I’m glad I did,” said Phoebe between screams.

  By this time Maud had ripped the full length of every garment Phoebe was wearing and as the circle around us grew dense with interrupted dancers Maud fully uncovered the screeching Phoebe’s buttocks for all to see.

  “I thought of asking her to apologize,” said Maud, “but this seemed a superior solution. Do you agree, Auntie?”

  “Oh, quite,” said Magdalena. “Quite indeed. But you know that is a most unpleasant sight. All full of pimples and dimples. Oh, do cover them.”

  At the roar of laughter Maud stood up, and the humbled Phoebe, screaming and crying, clutched her rags about her and ran off toward the mansion. The orchestra took up the music again and the beautiful dreamers of Saratoga resumed their dancing under the stars.

  As the evening moved on, four whores who had been the recipients of Magdalena’s charities (she supported cyprians, waifs, and actresses) turned up, crying helplessly as they bent to say farewell to their benefactress. Their spirits improved when they saw how well she looked, and after several beers they were all in chorus singing “Father’s a Drunkard and Mother Is Dead,” which took the evening into a new phase.

  The crowd was thinning and the light dimming. Many couples moved through various stages of romance by the shore of the lake, or in the shadowed woods, or in the sanctuary of Obadiah’s shrub gardens. Gordon could not stop apologizing for his cousin’s behavior, he assuming the guilt himself. But Maud wanted to hear no more of it and she left him to dance with me.

  “I think it’s getting time now to kidnap you,” I said.

  “A perfect ending to a perfect day,” said Maud.

  “I would like to sit under that arch,” I said, pointing to the trellis where we had watched Magdalena reveal herself to Obadiah at John’s urging. We sat on the benches where they’d sat, the roses on the trellises around us all colored a vivid blue by the dark light of the night sky and the dancing flames of a thousand lamps and candles. And then, for the first time since our rendezvous at Hillegond’s house, I kissed Maud. I had felt estranged from her after our meeting on the hotel piazza at morning, but I reclaimed our intimacy with the kiss, my brimming passion organizing my mind in a most salutary way. What flooded back to me was not just every memory, every loving response I’d had to her, but the opening also of an entire emotional landscape that I truly knew must exist somewhere but had never been able to find: the discovery of a new place in which to live. It vanished as quickly as it appeared, a trompe l’oeil of the imagination, but I knew as long as I had Maud with me I could reconstitute it. I took her by the hand just as Gordon arrived.

  “You’re monopolizing Maud,” he said to me.

  “I was about to take her somewhere and make love to her,” I said.

  “You had better quit that sort of talk, fellow.”

  “It’s more than talk, Gordon.”

  “I’m going to marry this woman,” he said.

  “I’ve loved her for fifteen years,” I said. “Do you think now that I’ve found her I’ll just walk away from her?”

  “Maud,” he said, “I want you out of this situation.”

  “She has a will of her own, Gordon. Why do you suppose she’s with me?”

  “You’re an arrogant bastard,” he said.

  “And you’re an insufferable prig,” I said.

  I stood up and he rose to come at me, but I merely pushed and he went backward onto the bench. He stayed sitting.

  “I’ll have satisfaction for this,” he said.

  “You will,” I said.

  “Oh, no,” said Maud. “Never.”

  I took her hand and pulled her away and across the lawn, seeing Magdalena in the cradle of John’s arms, he walking down toward the shore. We stopped and watched and saw her bearers following with her chaise longue, which they placed at the water’s edge along with two large candelabra. John put Magdalena on the chaise in a position that allowed her to look out over the great expanse of water, then sat down on the grass beside her.

  A storm was developing on the lake, and in an hour the wind would rise and extinguish most of the candles and the party would end. Tomorrow would be a day of fast and humiliation, called for by the President to rekindle the nation’s attention to ending the war. Quinn would contemplate a duel with Gordon and remember Joshua’s duel with life and his conclusion about it: “If you lose it’s fate,” Joshua said. “If you win it’s a trick.” Quinn would dwell on this and perceive that he himself had changed, that he was forever isolated into the minority, a paddynigger and an obsessive fool whose disgust was greater than its object, who was trying to justify in this world what was justifiable only in another cosmic sphere. There were no explanations that satisfied Quinn, only a growing awareness of dark omissions in his life and a resolute will to struggle with the power the past seemed to have over him: power to imprison him in dead agonies and divine riddles. He would wake dreaming of his disk and its faces, a savage dream of a new order: faces as old as the dead Celts, forces in the shape of a severed hand and a severed tongue that would bring Quinn great power over life.

  “You will go to war,” the Mexican dwarf had told him on the veranda. “You will live a long life, raise sons, and have a happy death.” Quinn believed none of it, believed it all.

  Maud did not want to go to her room, or to the hotel, but led the way to an upper floor of the mansion on the side that gave a full view of the lawn and the lake. She tried one door and they were greeted with a privileged vision: Obadiah on his knees, holding aloft the skirt of Adelaide, a parlormaid, and licking the back of her right knee. They moved on and found a room and locked themselves in, and then kissed at such a pitch of passion that Quinn thought his chest would explode, so acutely aware was he that at last he had stolen Maud.

  “Slow,” he said, and he loosened the dark ribbon that held Maud’s dress at the bodice. She removed the ribbon from the dress and tied it around her neck as a choker, and he took her dress from her, then the rest of her garments, and she did the same for him. The ribbon was long and uneven and fell the length of her torso to obscure part of her private hair. Quinn’s eyes studied her with a wondrous lust and a love that was as limitless as the universe. Maud rolled backward onto the simple iron bed, her legs rising, the ribbon falling naturally between her open thighs, leaving her gift mostly secret. Quinn moved between her legs and gently lifted the ribbon to one side. And then Maud and Quinn were a
t last ready for love.