“Then until it is the right time, we’ll talk about how I’m going to kidnap you.”
“I can’t be kidnapped now,” said Maud. “There are too many interesting things going on.”
“You mean like talking to spirits?”
“There are no spirits,” said Maud.
“Then who were you talking to?”
“I don’t know. I might have been talking to myself.”
“You mean you made it all up?”
“That’s a possibility.”
“How do you do thunder? How do you make a chandelier fall?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t do that.”
“Then how can you say it wasn’t a spirit if you aren’t sure you did it?”
“There are no spirits.”
“That well may be,” said Quinn, admiring how deftly he was getting back to the point, “but even so, I want to kiss you. I didn’t move to Saratoga to be rejected.”
“You’re absolutely right,” said Maud.
She stood up and took his hand, and they walked across the lawn in the early darkness. They saw Magdalena sitting under an arched pair of trellises at the entrance to the lower gardens, with John the Brawn and Obadiah Griswold both seated facing her. They could hear John say, “All he wants is a bit of a look. He’s been a proper gentleman, and very accommodating, if I might say so.”
“No,” said Magdalena. “I can’t be immodest.”
“You can be the bloody whore of Babylon when you put your mind to it,” said John. “Give him a look. Go on. Get it out.”
Maud and Quinn watched as Magdalena stood up and, by the light of the early moon, and swathed in the shadow of a great weeping beech tree, undid her buttons. Then, holding her dress open with both hands, she allowed the men to violate her with their gaze. As she undulated her body ever so slightly, John the Brawn leaned back in his chair to take in the view of his eminent domain. Obadiah, seeking a more proximate vista, leaned closer to the subject at hand. Magdalena swayed on. Obadiah’s right hand moved toward her vestibulum gaudiae. Magdalena backed away, closed her dress around her, and sat down.
“That’s enough of that,” said Quinn, and he grabbed Maud by the arm and moved away from the tableau, down the long, sloping lawn toward the lake.
“She’s such a fool,” said Maud.
“She seems to have a body that men desire.”
“Men desire any woman’s body if it’s naked.”
“Would you ever be naked like that?” Quinn asked.
“I can’t predict what I’d do. I’m not ready for that. But I am ready to kiss you.”
She stopped at the edge of the dark water and turned her face to Quinn’s. Obeying an inherited impulse, he put his arms around her waist, thrust his face toward hers, and placed his lips upon her lips. They kissed, just as they had in front of the dusty soldier’s coffin, with lips tight. Then, with the lips loosened somewhat, with tension rising, with everything new and the pressure of each kiss increased, with Quinn’s teeth and gums turning to sweet pain, they broke apart, came together again, tight, loose, looser; and then Maud’s lips parted and she eased the pressure totally, without breaking the kiss, and Quinn found his own lips growing fuller and softer and wetter. Then Maud’s mouth was open, and so he opened his own, and here came revelation. He tasted her tongue. This so undid him that he stopped to look out over Maud’s shoulder, out at the lights playing on the dark water, and to whisper into her ear, “This is a terrific kiss. This is the best kiss I ever had.”
“Keep quiet and open your mouth,” said Maud, and she pressed her lips again to his.
At this point Quinn fell in love with the secluded night.
Obadiah decided the only way to lay hands on the flesh of Magdalena was to dance with her. He could hold her hand, perhaps stroke her neck, or, given the proper gown, even stroke her shoulder. He could press himself against her bosom, feel the full whirling weight of her body as they moved about the dance floor. And so he arranged for them all to attend the weekly ball given by the Union Hotel.
A month had passed since the séance, and Maud’s fame as a spiritualist had spread, fueled at first by a report on her behavior written by Quinn for Calvin Potts’s newspaper and reprinted by Will Canaday. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune sent a reporter to talk to Maud and to the witnesses to her séance, and in time published a lengthy story on the “miracle at the spa.” A scout came to hire Maud for P. T. Barnum’s museum of freaks, but upon discovering Maud’s lack of belief in the very spirit with whom she had talked, the scout decided such skepticism was commercially useless.
Magdalena received offers to perform in many places, and she sensed a rebirth of both her passion and her talent for seduction. Wriggling into the shoulderless pink dress Obadiah had bought her for the ball, she counseled Maud on the display of a bodice. “Precisely three inches of cleavage is proper,” she said. “Two inches is denial, and four is basely vulgar.”
Magdalena insisted that Maud and John the Brawn attend the ball, and Maud chose Quinn as her escort. The five alighted from Obadiah’s splendid barouche and moved with sartorial elegance into the hotel’s vast lobby, where fashion ruled tyrannically and ostentation at its most fulsome was the crowd’s principal pleasure. John looked overdressed in cravat and tailcoat, Obadiah was original in black silk trousers and opera cloak, Maud virginal in white frock, and Quinn felt brand-new, wearing, for the first time, the gray dress suit Hillegond had bought him.
A group of men and women turned their full attention to our group upon a remark by one of the women. “There are those fraudulent spiritualists,” she said in stentorian whisper. “We saw them at the theater and nothing happened at all. They’re all charlatans.”
“How,” asked another woman, “are such low people tolerated here?”
“Ignore them,” said Obadiah to Maud and Magdalena. But John had already turned to address the insult.
“If I was you,” said John, “I’d keep that kind of talk to meself, ya old pissbats.”
A man whose brawn matched John’s, who wore a full beard and a dress suit, stepped in front of the women. “Hold your tongue, you pup,” he said to John.
“Hold me fist,” said John, and with the right jab Quinn had seen him deliver so often, the punch Quinn called The Flying Sledgehammer, John caught the whiskered man on, as they say, the button. The man fell like a wet sock, his legs betrayed by his devastated brain. On his back, the man found it difficult to believe such a thing had happened.
“No man knocks down Michael Hennessey,” he said.
“This man does,” said John the Brawn, “and if Michael Hennessey stands himself up from the carpet I’ll knock him down again.”
“He knocked Hennessey down,” said another man’s high-pitched voice from the crowd that suddenly surrounded the group.
“You knocked Hennessey down,” said the owner of the voice, a nattily dressed runt who grabbed John by the hand and shook it. “You put Hennessey on his back.”
“I see that I did,” said John.
“Do you know he’s the champion?”
“No.”
“Well, he is.”
“Champion of what?”
“Of the world entirely.”
“Is that a fact?” said John.
“It’s a positive fact,” said the runt.
Hennessey was up then, and smiling.
“You’ve a grand right hand there, bucko,” he said.
“I don’t deny it,” said John.
“There’s damn few right hands like that,” said Hennessey.
“There’s none at all that I know of,” said John.
“There’s one or two,” said Hennessey, extending his own right hand for a handshake. The two men shook hands and smiled at each other. Then Hennessey swung a left and caught John on, as they say, the button, and he went down like a wet sock.