“Gordon covered them both so they wouldn’t haunt him,” said Maud, “but I had him uncover Hillegond. I couldn’t stand her being completely gone.”
“You did well,” said Quinn. “And where is the master of the house today?”
“At the foundry,” said Maud.
“I thought you were down south dodging musket balls,” Moran said to Quinn.
Quinn regarded Moran’s large, flashing, and breakable teeth, then put his sack on the table in front of his chair.
“I gave that up,” said Quinn.
“You’re right to come back here,” said Moran. “I love this place.”
“We all love this place and we love one another, don’t we, Joseph?” said Maud.
“Love lasts forever,” said Moran, staring at the portrait. “I loved Hilly.”
“Who didn’t love Hilly?” said Quinn.
“The fiend who murdered her,” said Maud.
“Ah now, that’s a truth,” said Moran. “Bad enough to kill one woman. An act of passion, perhaps. But to turn on Matty.”
“Murderers have their logic,” said Maud.
“Who is the killer?” asked Quinn.
“Ah,” said Will Canaday. “There’s a question.”
“Finnerty,” said Moran. “Ambrose Finnerty.”
“Joseph brought him to Albany,” said Maud.
“I saw him in Boston,” said Moran. “I never heard a more stirring orator.”
“He’s in the penitentiary,” said Will. “He claims innocence and says he’s an ex-priest, but nobody can find the truth of that yet. He traveled with a woman and babe, his wife and child, oh yes. But she’s a known cyprian who says she’s a nun and that Finnerty, her confessor, plugged her up with child in the convent. She loved him all the same, and he her, and they knew the world was good and the church wasn’t. So they went into theater with their peculiar love of God, and their hatred of all true priests and Catholics. And may the rightful Jesus and all his saints stand strong between us and the likes of such faith.”
“The Catholics have a lot to answer for,” said Moran.
“As do the heathens and Hottentots,” said Will.
“Finnerty could sing, too,” said Moran.
“Bawdy songs about religion,” said Maud.
“He kissed and fondled his wife onstage,” said Will. “In their nun’s and priest’s costumes.”
“It was very effective,” said Moran. “We filled the house twice a night for three weeks at thirty-five cents a ticket. Think of it.”
“Hillegond was in bed,” said Maud, “reading Gordon’s play about Dido. Joseph was going to produce that at his theater, too, with some help from Hillegond, weren’t you, Joseph?”
“I had hopes,” said Moran.
“She was wearing her rose-colored nightdress,” said Maud, “and her worsted stockings, too, because there was a chill in the air. And her silver earrings. She would never be caught without her earrings, even in sleep. It was near midnight when she looked up from her book and heard the step outside her door.”
“How do you know she looked up from her book?” Quinn asked.
“I have my ways.”
Quinn nodded and opened his satchel. He took out his bronze disk with the angry face. Was it a fat man with a round tongue? Was it a walrus? Was it a bespectacled woman screaming? Quinn put the disk on the table in front of him.
“What is that?” Moran asked him.
“It’s a thing of a kind. A round sort of thing,” said Quinn.
“I can see that.”
“Quinn puts tubers on it,” said Will.
“Hillegond,” said Maud, “had come to the part of the play where Dido pleads with Aeneas to stay in Carthage with her, but he says he cannot. I’m so sick of self-sacrificing women, immolated by love.”
“How do you know where she was in the play?” Moran asked.
“There are things one knows,” said Maud.
She stood up from the pianoforte bench, walked across the room with regal poise, and sat in a cushioned chair that gave her a vision of both Hillegond’s portrait and her own listeners. Quinn rotated his disk so that its face had proper perspective on Maud. He did not know why he did this but he did it. Why should I have to know why I do what I do? he said to himself.
“Finnerty was intriguing to Hillegond,” said Will from his own plush bench. “She invited him to dinner one night to hear his full story and he admits they had a dalliance.”
“More than a dalliance, I’d say,” said Moran.
“They found her jade ring in Finnerty’s rooms,” said Will. “That’s what did him in.”
“He said she gave it to him,” said Moran. “But there’s no proof. His wife said he was with her that night, but that’s a wife talking.”
“Hillegond took fright at the footstep,” said Maud, “for it was heavier than it should have been. But when the door opened and she saw him she gave him a smile. ‘Ah love,’ she said to him. ‘Look at you, sneakin’ around like a nighthawk.’ ” “You even know the words she used,” said Moran.
“It’s quite remarkable what I know,” said Maud.
“You used to do that sort of thing all the time,” said Moran.
“She made her living at it,” said Quinn.
“She moved sideways on the bed to let him sit beside her,” said Maud. “He kissed her gently on the forehead, then on the lips—not a real kiss, which she expected—and then he took off her spectacles and kissed her on the eyes. When he had closed both her eyes with his kisses he put the garrote around her neck and tightened it. She flailed but she wasn’t strong. She was big, but age had drained her and she soon stopped her struggle. He continued twisting the garrote and pulled her off the bed with it. Her feet knocked over the ewer pitcher with the tulips on it.”
“A pair of owls are roosting in Hillegond’s room,” said Will.
“I would like to see that,” said Quinn.
“They’d be asleep now,” said Moran. “Owls sleep in the daytime.”
“Even so,” said Quinn.
“I see no reason not to see them, even if they’re asleep,” said Maud, who stood up from her bench and led the way out of the music room. Quinn put his disk into his sack.
“Are you coming, Joseph?” Maud asked at the foot of the stairs.
“What is the point of looking at owls?”
“Indeed there is none,” said Will.
“But they must be a sight to see,” said Quinn.
“They’re quite beautiful,” said Maud.
“I have no objection,” said Moran.
And so up the great staircase they went to Hillegond’s room, whose six windows offered a view of the river and the sunrise, and where the pair of owls were asleep on the valance above the glass doors to Hillegond’s balcony. The room was a vista of peace and order. Murder was nowhere to be seen, though the aroma of villainy hung in a vapor alongside the lushly canopied bed, and all four visitors to the room walked ’round it.
They stood by the glass doors and stared up at the sleeping owls, which were two feet tall, one a bit taller, being female. The birds were both solidly pale gray, great soft puffs of matching and matchless beauty, both feathered to their talons and sleeping side by side, facing into the room with closed eyes.
“They’ll die in here,” Quinn said.
“They go out to eat,” said Maud. “The servants open the doors for them at dusk and again at dawn. They know no one lives in this room anymore, and we all welcome their presence.”
“An owl can turn its head completely around and look backward,” said Moran. “I once made a study of birds.”
“The room isn’t quite like it was,” said Maud. “The Delft vase and the double-globed lamp with the lilacs were both broken when Matty came in and fought for Hillegond’s life.”
“I thought they found Matty on the stairs,” said Quinn.
“The struggle carried out of the room. Matty fought fiercely. She was a strong woman and she
loved Hilly.”
“She heard the fighting going on?” asked Quinn.
“She only heard the pitcher fall and break,” said Maud.
“You know it all, don’t you?” said Moran.
“Yes,” said Maud. “I also know it wasn’t Finnerty.”
“You can hold these owls when they’re asleep, and they won’t wake up,” said Moran. He carried Hillegond’s baroque silver dresser bench to the glass doors and stood on it. He reached up and grasped the sleeping female owl with both hands and stepped down from the bench. The owl slept on.
“That’s quite a trick, Joseph,” said Will.
“Not a trick at all if you know anything about owls,” said Moran.
Maud opened the double doors to the balcony and the breeze of summer afternoon came rushing into the room. Quinn studied the behavior of the owl held by Moran and observed that owl sleep is comparable to coma, a step away from death. He studied the behavior of Moran and marveled at the man’s concentration on the bird: eyes as hard as iron spikes. Quinn felt his old resentment at Moran’s ability to differentiate himself from the normal run of men.
“Joseph and I became lovers during my time here as Mazeppa,” said Maud. “Everybody knew, didn’t they, Will?”
“Joseph tends to boast about his conquests,” said Will.
“He was very attentive in those months,” said Maud, “but I don’t think I made him happy. As soon as I left the city he began to court Hillegond.”
“Assiduously,” said Will. “It was peculiar.”
“Which of your six was he?” Quinn asked.
“Number three,” said Maud, “and the only one in theater.”
“Joseph wanted to marry Hillegond,” said Will, “and she considered it for a time. But finally she wouldn’t have him.”
“We remained great friends,” said Moran. “May we change the subject?”
“He loved this mansion,” said Maud, “and all that went with it. And all that went with Hillegond.”
“Then he saw he couldn’t have it,” said Will.
“Hillegond came to think it was ridiculous, the idea of them marrying,” said Maud.
“It was not ridiculous,” said Moran. “Profound aspirations must not be mocked.”
“How lofty of you, Joseph,” Maud said.
“I admit error.”
“The news will thrill Hillegond in her grave.”
“It’s a great pity,” said Moran, “all this plangency so close to the heart.”
“Closer to the throat,” said Maud.
Quinn pondered these remarks and concluded that for some men a fatal error is the logical conclusion of life, and may not really be an error at all but the inevitable finale to an evolutionary evil. He watched as Moran the covetous sat on the bench, holding the owl aloft above his lap. Suddenly the bird was awake and staring, and Moran instantly released her upward. Perversely, she settled downward and sank her talons through his trousers and into the tops of his thighs. He screamed pitifully as he fell backward, and at the sound of flowing blood the male owl’s eyes snapped open. Soundlessly he flew down from the valance and, in an act of providential justice, drove his talons into Moran’s face and neck.
HORSELESS NOW, I, Daniel Quinn, that relentless shedder of history, stepped aboard the horsecar, the first of three conveyances that would take me to Saratoga Springs and Maud and the others who had gone before me, and I sat beside a Negro man in whose face I read the anguish of uncertainty, an affliction I understand but not in Negro terms. The man was bound for a distant place, his bundles and baggage revealing this fact, and I began to think of Joshua. I then tried to put Joshua out of my mind and opened the satchel containing my disk. I studied the disk rather than people who would take me where I did not want to go again. I discovered the disk looked Arabic with all that cursiveness in its design. Were the Celts really Arabs? Perhaps they were Jews: the lost tribe of Tipperary. The lost tribe of Ethiopia, some say. Go away, Joshua. I will remember you when I am stronger. I concentrated on my disk and it changed: convexity into concavity—a fat tongue into a hollow mouth; and in this willful ambiguity by the Celtic artist I read the wisdom of multiple meanings. Avoid gratuitous absolutes, warned Will Canaday. Yes, agrees Quinn, for they can lead to violence.
How had Maud known about the violence to Hillegond? Well, she knew. Psychometry is the most probable. How did she make the chandelier fall? Psychomagnetic pulsation, most likely. Quinn has neither of these gifts. Quinn is a psychic idiot. Quinn experiences everything and concludes nothing. Tabula rasa ad infinitum. Still, when the owl tore out Moran’s throat there was a purgation of sorts. Quinn perceived that he himself had wanted the mansion as much as Moran did, but so hopelessly that he did not even know that he wanted it. What good is your brain, Quinn, if you can’t even read your own notes? Yet, once free of secret covetousness, Quinn moved outward: another leaving off of false roles, false needs. In beginnings there is all for Quinn, a creature of onset. Will Quinn ever become a creature of finalities?
For this newest onset I was, as usual, unprepared except financially. I’d used less than a thousand dollars of what Dirck had given me over the past fifteen years and had allowed the rest to mount up in Lyman Fitzgibbon’s bank; and so for a reporter I was a modestly wealthy man, without need of work for hire.
Freed from the history and the penury of war, at least for the moment, Quinn was about to embark on a life of thought, or so he thought. And there he went, west on the train to Schenectady and north on another to Saratoga, crowding his brain with unanswerable questions and banishing unwanted memories that would not stay banished, especially since he was about to enter the gilded and velvet parlors of John McGee, the gambler who could fight, and would, and did, and whose life is not separable from Joshua’s anymore.
John never gambled when I first knew him, preferring to store up his savings for drink. But we find new targets for our vices as we move, and when he knocked down Hennessey, the champion of the world entirely, John’s life entered an upward spiral that took him into bare-knuckle battles in Watervliet, Troy, the Boston Corner, White Plains, Toronto, and home again to Albany I wrote John’s ongoing story for the Albany Chronicle until the Toronto bout, Will Canaday then deciding not to finance expeditions quite so distant. I grew audacious enough to tell Will he was erring in news judgment, for John McGee and his fists had excited the people of Albany and environs like no sportsman in modern memory.
“Sportsman? Nonsense,” said Will. “The man is loutish. No good can come of celebrating such brutes.”
It is true that John’s brawling was legendary by this time, his right hand a dangerous weapon. He knocked over one after the other in his early battles and in between times decided to open a saloon in Albany to stabilize his income. He set it up in the Lumber District, an Irish entrenchment along the canal, and called the place Blue Heaven. Over the bar he hung a sign that read: “All the fighting done in this place I do . . . [signed] . . . John McGee.”
A brute of a kind John was. Nevertheless, he was a presence to be understood, as even Will Canaday perceived when John fought at Toronto. In that fight, ballyhooed as Englishman against Irishman, John knocked down, and out, in the twenty-eighth round, a British navvy who was Canada’s pride. John escaped an angry crowd, bent on stomping his arrogance into the turf, only with the help of the fists, power, and guile of the man who had been his sparring mate, and whose talent for escaping hostile pursuants was also legendary. I speak of Joshua.
And so it thereafter came to pass that John the Brawn was, at the age of thirty years, polarized as the heroic Irish champion of the United States, and matched against Arthur (Yankee) Barker, the pride of native Americans. The fight took place on a summer afternoon in 1854 at the Bull’s Head Tavern on the Troy road out of Albany, a hostel for wayward predilections of all manner and scope, where, as they say, cocks, dogs, rats, badgers, women, and niggers were baited in blood, and where Butter McCall, panjandrum of life at the Bull’s Head, hel
d the purse of ten thousand dollars, five from each combatant, and employed a line of battlers of his own to keep excitable partisans in the crowd from joining the fight, and whose wife, Sugar, kept the scrapbook in which one might, even today, read an account of the historic fight taken from the Albany Telescope, a sporting newspaper, and written by none other than Butter himself, an impresario first, perhaps, but also a bare-knuckle bard, a fistic philosopher, a poet of the poke.
Wasn’t it a grand day [Butter wrote], when we all twenty thousand of us gathered in the Bull’s Head pasture to witness the greatest fight boxiana has ever known? It was a regular apocalypse of steam and stew, blood and brew that twinned John (the Brawn) McGee, also known as John of the Skiff and John of the Water (from his days on the river), and Arthur (Yankee) Barker, also known as the Pet of Poughkeepsie and The True American—twinned and twined the pair in mortalizing conflict over who was to be bare-knuckle champion of this godly land.
John came to the pasture like Zeus on a wheel, tossed his hat with the Kelly-green plume into the ring, and then bounded in after it like a deer diving into the lakes of Killarney. His second bounced in after him, Mick the Rat, a stout Ethiopian who, they say, all but broke the nozzle of the God of Water in a sparring meet. The Mick tied the Water’s colors to the post as the Yank trundled in, no hat on this one, just the flag itself, Old Glory over his shoulders.
Peeling commenced and the seconds took their stations while the flag was wrapped around the Patriot’s stake. Referees and umpires were appointed, the titans shook hands, and yo-ho-ho, off they went. The odds were even at first salvo, but the grand bank of Erin was offering three-to-two on the Water.
ROUND ONE
Both stood up well but the Pet in decidedly the handsomest position. Hi-ho with the left, he cocks the Skiffman amidships and crosses fast with a right to his knowledge box, but oh, now, didn’t he get one back full in the domino case and down.
ROUND TWO
The Pet didn’t like it a bit. He charged with his right brigade and hooked his man over the listener, which the Brawn threw off like a cat’s sneeze and countered with a tremendous smasher to the Patriot’s frontispiece, reducing him to his honkies. Said Mick the Rat from the corner, “Dat flag am comin’ unfurled.”