Magdalena, undaunted, repeated her tale to a Rochester audience. By then the word of her bizarre story, and not her sensuality, sold out the house. Hearing the laughter and hooting that met her remarks about resurrection, Magdalena swirled in frenzied pirouettes across the stage and fled into the wings. Witnessing this, hearing the hoots, Maud walked onstage and faced the hostile audience, whose derision subsided at her advent.
“Only fools and martyrs laugh at death,” she said to them. “Which are you?”
She then asked the orchestra leader to play the music for the Spider Dance, and in learned emulation of her aunt she whirled about in recklessly flying skirts, her wild abandon silencing all hooters, and at length provoking them into cheers and long applause as the curtain fell. She took no curtain call. Backstage the wounded Magdalena embraced her, saying, “What a wonderful child you are.”
“I’m not a child any longer, Auntie. No child could dance as I just have.”
“Whatever you are, Maudie mine, I love you.”
“You needn’t go on about that. Go out there now and sing your songs or the theater manager will deny us our money.”
Thus began the stage career of Maud Fallon.
La Última, in subsequent days, experienced a falling off, an attack of despair that prevented her from venturing on to Buffalo. She stopped eating and faded languidly into a vale of melancholy.
“I have lost the voluptuary in me,” she kept saying. “My life is a bore, and in boredom I shall surely die.”
She did not say this to John McGee, especially when he was providing her with the only kindness he fully understood: the thrust of his pelvic appendage. She received his thrust with artificial passion, but such politeness also bored her, and so she eventually accepted John’s largess in immobilized silence.
“You had more life when you were dead,” John told her.
She arose one day from her passionless bed to perform the usual ablution, and the coolness of the water between her legs seemed to renew her spirit. The idea of the healing power of water, so capable of assuaging even the agony of death, preempted all her thought.
“I must have a lake,” she said to John.
“A lake, is it?”
“I must lie in a lake and recover my passion,” she said.
“By the Jesus, I’m all for that,” said John.
And so Saratoga Springs, famed for its lake and its healing spas, famed also as a place where voluptuaries were as commonplace as clover, became the destination of Magdalena, of John the Brawn, and of that chrysalid creature of the future, Maud Fallon.
Upon arriving in Saratoga, Daniel Quinn bought a newspaper and read of the cancellation of Magdalena Colón’s performance that night at the Union Theater. The brief story referred to unexplained noises in the theater during an earlier performance. Quinn went to the theater and found it closed. He went to the print shop where the newspaper was printed and confronted its publisher, Calvin Potts, a small man with a white pigtail, who was wearing an apron stained with a generation’s worth of ink. Potts was working at a type cabinet, a stick of type in his hand, when Quinn introduced himself and handed him the letter Will Canaday had written on his behalf.
“A man of substance, Will Canaday,” Potts said. “You must be worth a scrap of something if he thinks well of you. Did you ever set type for him?”
“Setting type isn’t what I want to do,” said Quinn, and he groped for the word that would define his goal. Editor? Not likely. Writer? Too ambitious. “I think just now I ought to learn how to be a paragraphist,” he said.
“You’d best learn to set those paragraphs in type if you want to earn a living, boy. Words are flimsy things. Type is solid and real.”
“I can see that,” said Quinn. “But paragraphs are also real in their way. I’ve seen how they can change things.”
“Ah, so you’re out to change things.”
“No, sir. I just want to write paragraphs and see what happens. I thought I might write one or two for you about Magdalena Colón, the dancer. I know her quite well and I saw this story about her in your newspaper.”
“Did you read that about those noises? Folks think spirits made them.”
“Yes. Magdalena is quite good with the spirits.”
“You talk to spirits too, do you?”
“No, sir. I talk only to living people.”
“A blessing if you want to be a reporter.”
“I don’t know where to find Magdalena, though.”
“She’s out at Griswold’s place, but I don’t know as they’ll let you in out there.”
“I’m expected,” said Quinn.
“You certainly do come equipped,” said Potts, and he told Quinn how to find Griswold’s. “I’ll look at your paragraphs, if you write any,” he added, “but hold down that spirit nonsense. People want real stuff, not all that folderol about spooks.”
Quinn nodded as he went out, not quite agreeing.
Calvin Potts gave Quinn directions to the home of Obadiah Griswold, the carriage and sleigh manufacturer at whose home on the shore of Saratoga Lake Magdalena Colón and her entourage were guests. Obadiah had become smitten with Magdalena after seeing her dance in New York, and offered her the run of his mansion, his stables, his vast acreage, and his lake whenever she cared to visit. In her melancholy period at Rochester she remembered Obadiah and wrote him, accepting his invitation.
Obadiah welcomed his guests with one proviso: that Magdalena alone occupy the room next to his own. He kept her constantly in his sight during the first days of her visit, catering to her every whim. Magdalena accepted him as an oddity, a foppish middle-aged widower who frequently wore an ankle-length robe to hide his bowlegs, a descendant of English Puritans who had long ago rejected all Puritanical inheritances. Anticipating Magdalena’s early capitulation to his desire, Obadiah took her on a tour of his secret thirdf-loor room that housed his erotic sculpture, paintings, etchings, and pornographic books dating to the dawn of printing. Magdalena relapsed into melancholy at the sight of so many erect phalluses and lubricious vaginas, and she retreated to her room, insisting that only Maud and John the Brawn attend her bedside.
Obadiah took up a vigil outside Magdalena’s door and left it only to eat, sleep, and perform bodily functions, a gesture of concern that so bored Magdalena that she sent John theater-ward to book her a performance as soon as possible as a means of escape. John returned, accomplished, but warned her the theater manager would brook none of her humbuggery.
“Just keep mum on what you found at the bottom of the river,” John told her, “or he’ll throw us all out in the alley.”
And so Magdalena performed as she had prior to her death: a blithe entrance to the orchestral melody, several pirouettes of restrained torsion, then a medley of French and Spanish songs. She followed with her interpretation of a Viennese waltz, andante, and concluded with the Spanish tarantela, her spectacular Spider Dance, allegro—oh yes, quite. Hisses, hoots, wild applause, and huzzahs, the miscellaneous wages of Terpsichore, followed her performance.
On the next night Magdalena had barely begun her Spider Dance when a thunderclap shook the theater, vibrating orchestra seats, rocking the boxes, loosening plaster dust from the ceiling, and spilling oil from the burning wall sconces into running pools of fire onstage. Maud, standing in the wings, swiftly smothered them all with a piece of canvas.
Magdalena was convinced an earthquake was in process, but then calm returned, audience panic and screaming subsided, and except for a few who fled at the threat of fire, people returned to their seats. Magdalena signaled the orchestra to resume, and she began her dance anew. At her initial steps another noise erupted, smaller of force, but formidable even so; and then another, and another. Magdalena stood frozen, and the orchestra trailed off. The booming from above, fixed in no single area, seemed to be a storm floating free inside the theater. The concussions came yet again, four this time, and rhythmic; then three more, and rhythmic. Such noises were man-made, were they not? Earth had never quaked in regularized tempo, had it?