“You see what I mean,” said Hennessey. “They’re here and there, and sometimes they’re on the other fist.”
John smiled and picked himself up.
“If you get rid of those old bats you’re with,” said John, “I’ll buy you the best drink in this house.”
“You’re a drinkin’ man, are you?” said Hennessey.
“It runs in me family,” said John.
“What a coincidence,” said Hennessey. “It runs in me own as well.” He clapped a hand on John’s shoulder and the two men went off to the bar, leaving the ladies and the younger folk to fend for themselves in this argumentative world.
At the ball Quinn and Maud danced all dances that required no special skills, since Quinn had none. They danced what they knew until boredom ravaged their legs, and then they sat. At this point, and with ritual avuncularity, Obadiah asked Maud to pursue a schottische with him, and she accepted. As she danced with Obadiah, Maud realized she had never been alone with him in the months they had lived at his house. She looked at him and saw a skull being abandoned by its hair, revealing bony lumps that had the fascination of a mild deformity. Obadiah was a creature unlike most. Maud thought he would be much at home in an aquarium. He danced much worse than Quinn, and he told her she was a remarkable child, that few in this world had her gifts.
“Such people as you make the world spin on its axis,” he told her.
“You’re very nice to say that,” said Maud, “but I am not a child. I’m thirteen years and two months old.”
“Well, of course you are. But in a way—”
“Not in any way,” said Maud.
“Of course not.”
They danced in silence. Maud saw Magdalena dancing with Quinn and talking to him with her eyes closed, and jealousy rose up in her.
“There is a difference between a child and a woman,” said Maud. “I can’t say I’m a woman yet.”
“When do you become a woman?” Obadiah asked.
“When I make love to a man.”
“Have you chosen the man?”
“I may have.”
“I presume young Mr. Quinn is the lucky one.”
“He may be.”
“If he is not. .”
“If he is not I will find someone equally exciting.”
“Yes,” said Obadiah with a sigh. “Exciting. I’m not sure I was ever exciting.”
“What an unusual thing to say,” said Maud.
“What?”
“That you were never exciting. People don’t say that about themselves.”
“They do if they are me.”
Obadiah was a uniquely homely and boring rich man, but his abnegation thrilled Maud, gave her gooseflesh. She said to herself: I love Obadiah. I love what shall not be. I am never what I was. I am always new, always two. I am, and I am, and so I am.
After Maud accepted Obadiah’s invitation to dance, Quinn, obligated in the breach, asked Magdalena to dance. He found his feet not nearly so bored, and Magdalena floated in his arms. He told her as much and she told him he was a sweet boy. She apologized for John the Brawn’s throwing him off the canalboat like a sack of oats. Quinn’s newly assured self had already decided to relegate that event to useless memory, especially after watching John knock down the world champion, and so Quinn smiled and said of his canalside odyssey, “It was nothing. I just walked home and it was fine.”
The dimension of this lie convinced Quinn he had a future as a confidence man. He’d always felt bound for hell, convinced of it by his early confessors, and also by his great maiden aunt from Ireland who told him he was “a devil dog if I ever saw one,” when what he was doing — cutting his dead cousin’s hair with his father’s knife — was not devilishness but tidiness, for the boy’s hair was full of nits and cockleburs. And what way was that to bury anybody?
“You are becoming a reporter for the newspaper, I understand,” Magdalena said.
“I’m trying,” said Quinn.
“I, too, write,” said Magdalena.
“I thought you were just a dancer.”
“Dancers have souls with myriad planes,” she said. “Every step of the dance is like a line from a poem.”
“I didn’t think of that,” said Quinn.
“I write poetry that dances.”
Quinn nodded and danced on, fearing she would recite to him.
“Would you like to hear some of my poetry?” she asked.
“Oh, that would be fine indeed.”
Magdalena cleared her throat and prepared to recite and dance all at once.
“The moon followed me home,” she began, her grip on Quinn tightening.
“But a cloud covered it.
“And I made my escape.”
Quinn nodded and smiled. Magdalena needed no more.
“If a butterfly.
“Turned into a caterpillar,
“Where would be the loss?”
Quinn narrowed his smile, spinning with Magdalena as he did so, wondering how to respond.
“Those are quite short poems,” he finally said.
“I never write long poems,” said Magdalena. “My longest was about my trip to the bottom of the river.” She closed her eyes, straightened her neck.
“Four gleaming clamshells
“Danced for my pleasure.
“The mud fairies made me a shawl
“Of luminous eelgrass.
“I died of death
“Until the sword of the sailor
“Pierced my heart,
“And I ascended again
“Into the land of sorrow.”
“Someday I must write about your poetry so people will know you are more than a dancer,” Quinn said, shamed by his deception, pleased by his politesse. He wanted to be as honest with Magdalena as she was being with him. Perhaps he would write about her. She was a striking woman. He could even write of her body, of which he had had privileged sightings, in the Dood Kamer and under the garden arch.
“That would be very kind of you,” Magdalena said to him. “When are you going to kidnap Maud?”
“What’s that?”
“I know she’s asked you. Hasn’t she?”
“She told you?”
“She didn’t have to. She’s been asking men to kidnap her ever since she was eight years old.”
“No.”
“Everybody knows that about Maud.”
“I didn’t know it.”
“She doesn’t tell her kidnappers.”
“She’s been kidnapped before?”
“Never.”
“I don’t understand this.”
“She doesn’t want to be kidnapped. She only wants to talk about being kidnapped. That way she doesn’t have to make any decisions about the future. When things get difficult she invites someone to kidnap her.”
“That seems madcap.”
“Yes, doesn’t it?”
“Has Maud always been madcap?”
“As long as I’ve known her.”
“How long have you known her?”
“Since she was born.”
Maud Lucinda Fallon was born in 1837 of a twin and a tenant farmer, and distinguished herself at the age of two by reciting the Ave Maria in its entirety, in Latin. Her mother, Charlotte Mary Coan, and her father, Thomas (Thomsy) Fallon, both denied having instructed her, and both claimed utter ignorance of Latin.
Maud began a diary at age four and filled notebooks with poetic language her parents could understand only marginally. The source of her gift was made suspect by the parish priest in Athlone and her writing was not encouraged. When she was five her notebooks were sent to a schoolmaster for evaluation and Maud never saw them again.
Maud’s life lost what little formal structure it had when her father joined a tenant farmers’ rebellion and was arrested and shipped to an English prison. He escaped en route and found his way to Canada, from where he sent money back to Charlotte, a young woman of spirit, whose gift was for music and dance. Charlotte, in short order, took herself and her child to Dublin, resolving to wrench them both up from the depths into which Thomsy Fallon’s arrest had plunged them.