He turned onto Van Woert Street to see the burned-out house. The once-Irish street was now mostly black. Two walls had partially collapsed into rubble and spilled into the street, which was wet and blocked by traffic cones. The ruin was three houses away from where George Quinn had been raised by the Galvins, cousins from Clonmel, after his parents died in the ’95 train wreck. The Galvin house was a three-storied twin of the burned house, the Galvins long gone from Van Woert.
Quinn had met them as a child, making the rounds with George as he collected or delivered numbers money; but George fell out with them in the late ’30s over an unpaid gambling debt. Quinn last visited the house in 1945 when he was a high school senior and went to pick up belongings George had left there in a steamer trunk thirty years earlier.
Quinn called Ben Galvin, who worked in the paint gang at the West Albany railroad shops, and was the only cousin left on Van Woert Street. Ben found the trunk in the attic, where George thought it might be, and there it sat in Ben’s parlor, open and empty.
“What’s he want with the trunk?” Ben asked Quinn.
“He doesn’t want the trunk. He wants the trophies he won in dancing contests, six of them. We talked about them last night. He said his patent leather dancing shoes and a tuxedo were also here.”
“None of them things were in it,” said Ben. “Only this stuff,” and he pointed to two books lying on top of a packet wrapped in brown paper and tied with cord, and a thick scrapbook jammed with folded newspapers. “Paper is all it is. Paper. That’s the lot.”
Quinn untied the cord and opened the packet: a manuscript written in ink on linen rag paper. He read the first line. “I, Daniel Quinn, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinns. . ” The scrapbook was fat with newspaper clippings about Civil War battles, about Fenian troops on horseback moving from Albany toward Canada in 1866, about Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn. The cloth bindings of both books had been slit and hung loose when Quinn picked them up: The Personal Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, 1888, and Going to See the Hero by Daniel Quinn, 1872. Ben bent over to watch Quinn’s hands closely as he handled the books.
“You knew about these?”
“Pop thought there were books here but he didn’t remember what they were. My grandfather was a writer. This is his,” and he held up the Hero book.
“Can’t be worth much,” Ben said. “Sixty, seventy years old.”
The dance trophies couldn’t have been worth much either and were probably pawned long ago, along with the tux and shoes. Quinn smoothed the cloth binding of the Hero’s spine. He could glue it.
“I heard of this book but I never knew we might have it,” he said.
Quinn guessed Ben had cut the bindings, searching for hidden money. And he thinks it may still be in there someplace and that I know how to get at it.
“So that’s it?” Quinn said.
“I should charge him rent for keepin’ it here thirty years.”
“How much rent would that be?”
“I’m not that kind of guy,” Ben said.
Quinn, behind the wheel, stared at the Galvin house, measuring the odyssey that the Hero book had set in motion: a career in news and fiction that would deliver him into the Hemingway orbit, which would lead to the perpetual revolution and Renata, Max, Fidel, Tremont, Matt, others, and ultimately, now, back to George Quinn and the Galvin house. Next stop: the hospital burn unit, and the two latest casualties of this perpetual revolution.
“George,” said Renata after Quinn’s departure and her call to Ursula, “take off your hat. We’re not going out anymore. It’s a handsome hat. Very stylish.”
“I had a hat when I came in.”
He set his hat on top of the bridge lamp. Renata lifted it off and hung it on the coatrack. They sat on opposite ends of the sofa.
“I loved what you said to Daniel when he asked you about Peg. You said, ‘Don’t you love your girl, for chrissake?’”
“I said that?”
“You did. It was a wonderful answer.”
“All compliments gratefully accepted.”
“I’ll bet you had a lot of girls in the old days.”
“There were a few in the shirt factory.”
“You said Daniel was your only child. You said he was the only one who came to you.”
“Daniel. Is he the one who owns this place?”
“That’s the one.”
“He’s a very nice fella. He could lick his weight in gold.”
“You said he was your doll.”
George considered that.
“My doll.” He paused. “The boy.”
“Daniel Quinn. Your son.”
“He was a wonder, smart as a cracker. Shot a hole in one when he was twelve with the driver I gave him.”
“He’s my husband.”
“Is that so? I didn’t know. He’ll be a good husband.”
“Yes, he will. But we haven’t had any children. We’ve had no dolls of our own.”
“Children come when they want to.”
“Daniel wants to be a father, but we haven’t been able to make that happen.”
“If at first you don’t give up.”
“Yes. That’s good advice. We tried again tonight. I did.”
But Renata knows she doesn’t have to be a mother of anybody. She was ordained to be a wife, or a lover, and the life she leads is opportune. She goes with what she intuits. She had a chaperone until she was nineteen and three lovers before twenty.
“I do have a niece who is like a daughter. My sister’s child, Gloria. You know Gloria.”
“Gloria?”
“The lovely young blond girl who lives here. You see her every day.”
“Yes. I think I’ve met her.”
“She’s in the hospital. She was in a fire on Van Woert Street.”
Renata’s girl is now scarred because she has Renata in her. The two are alike, out of Margarita, born to ride the wave of willful and passionate change, that wave that was about to separate her and Quinn. But now it throws them together on the shore with Gloria and they will enfold her, and she will be reborn to them in the oddest way. If she doesn’t die.
“I used to live on Van Woert Street,” George said. “I lived there with my cousins after my parents died.”
“I know you did. That’s why I mentioned it.”
“I remember the Fitzgeralds had a fire several doors down from us. The firemen saved the cellar.”
“Gloria was seriously burned tonight. So was Roy.”
“Roy who?”
“Roy Mason. The son of Cody Mason. Cody played the piano tonight.”
“Cody Mason’s a good fella.”
“So is Roy. The fire was deliberately set in Roy’s house. Somebody wanted to hurt him. Or kill him. They didn’t kill him but the fire killed a man upstairs.”
“Who would do a thing like that?”
“People who fear Roy because he’s angry about what happens to black people. He talks about it publicly, gives people a voice.”
“Black people have problems,” George said. “They try to do their stuff and those fossie-fossies pick them right up and take them around.”
“Fossie-fossies,” Renata said. “You mean forces? Bosses? Falsies? Fossils? What does that mean?”
“Fossie fossils, that’s it, the boys with the money,” George said. “People who don’t have any money don’t have any luck. They hit the number once in a while but it’s stacked against them. Sometimes they don’t even collect when they do get a hit. The boys refuse to pay them off. They’ve got to change their luck. When you’re lucky you can strike oil in the attic.”