Charlotte joined a traveling theater company, became its principal dancer, the lover of two of its actors, and by the time the troupe reached England, she was its sensual public flower. From London she was whisked to Paris by a plutocrat in the July monarchy of Louis Philippe, changed her name to Lila Márquez to distinguish herself from the French, and was kept in circumstances proper to her burgeoning ambition.
Maud grew to be an encumbrance on her mother’s vie amoureuse, and so Charlotte-Lila sent the child to Spain to live with Maud’s aunt (and Charlotte’s twin), Magdalena Colón, that surname a gift from her most recent late husband. Like the intrepid general who refuses to die in battle but is thwarted in the charge by having his horses repeatedly shot from under him, Magdalena had bid farewell to three husbands at graveside and was on the brink of acquiring a fourth when Maud arrived in Spain and changed her life, generating in it the wise child’s mystery, and giving Magdalena new vistas beyond sensuality and security.
While Charlotte-Lila abandoned the Parisian plutocracy to pursue the devil amid the royal resplendency of Bavaria, Magdalena imposed tutors, dancing masters, and dolls on the five-year-old Maud, who became trilingual in a trice, and at six could also emulate her aunt Magdalena in the flamenco and the tarantela (which Magdalena had learned from a Zincali Gypsy queen).
In 1848, as revolution swept through Europe, Magdalena saw her fortunes fading in Spain and, upon the advice of a cosmopolitan lover, turned her attention to the United States of the New World, a nation only moderately cultured and given to irrational frenzies toward beautiful dancing females.
And so it came to pass in the summer of 1849 that Magdalena, known as La Última after the death of her third husband, arrived at New York with serving maid and Maud, now twelve, and began a theatrical tour that included a capsizing and sudden death in the icy river at Albany, a spiritual communion in Saratoga, a reluctant companionship with John McGee (a well-hung lout), an empty dalliance with Obadiah Griswold (a generous fool), and a dance in the arms of Daniel Quinn (a boy of compelling charm).
Maud, witness to this, adolescent savant-seer, child of the emotional wilderness, discovered one night in Obadiah’s mansion at Saratoga the presence of bloodstains on her bedsheet and fell instantly into raptures at their significance, judging them to be the geography of a long-awaited unknown. She sought counsel from Magdalena in coping with the flow.
“Well, Maudie, it’s about time,” said Magdalena. “Your body is several years late in catching up with your mind, but here you are, at last. Maybe now you’ll understand what your auntie is all about.”
Poor Quinn. Consider him. He saves a life, discovers love, finds it reciprocated, is obsessed and rightfully so, alters his life to yield to his obsession, finds worlds beyond worlds that he cannot understand, finds the object of his obsession to be madcap, takes her home, kisses her, all but swoons with confounded desire, goes to his rooming house, fails to sleep, rises, lights his writing lamp, plucks from his writing case his pointless pen, finds a point, imposes it upon the pen, unrolls his paper, uncaps his inkwell, poises his pen above the well with the intention of wetting the point and writing, refrains from dipping because his condition allows no clarity of thought, puts down the pen, paces up and down in his bedchamber, takes up his collection of Montaigne’s essays, opens it, and finds two passages underlined: “What causes do we not invent for the misfortunes that befall us? What will we not blame, rightly or wrongly, that we may have something to fight with?” and also this: “And we see that the soul in its passions is wont to cheat itself by setting up a false and fanciful object, even against its own belief, rather than not have something to act upon,” and piqued by this, turns back to the beginning of the essay, which is called “How the Soul Relieves Its Feelings on the Wrong Objects, When the Real Are Wanting,” reads it through, then resumes his pacing, considering the current state of love, of men and women, of his life past and future, wondering what will become of himself, a novice in all things, now that he is lost to love and probably about to set out in several wrong directions, linked as he is to a radical child, a deluded poetaster, and John McGee, a scurvy bastard, but who did knock down Hennessey with Quinn as a witness, and at that memory Quinn picks up his pen, dips it in his ink, and writes one sentence: “They call him John the Brawn and he doesn’t know enough to pull his head in when he shuts the window, but he knocked down the best fighter in the world,” and having written that, puts down his pen, smiles, walks up and down the bedchamber, and understands that he has just changed his life.
Quinn’s mood elevated once he discovered his control over the word. He envisioned a thrilling future for himself, sitting alone in hotel rooms, ruminating on epic events, then imposing his conclusions on paper for the world to read in the morning newspaper. He felt a surge of power and also vague intimations of wealth. He made plans to hire a carriage and take Maud to the High Rock, the Iodine, and the Empire Springs, whose multiple chlorides, bromides, sulphates, phosphates, and bicarbonates of magnesia, iron, soda, strontia, and lime had been vitalizing and restoring the health of multitudes since the age of the Indian, most notably the health of the “high livers,” whose love of good food, abundant drink, and nocturnal revels was a proven ravagement. Quinn did not consider himself a high liver, but he intuited that he might become one; and Maud, too, though of a different order. Quinn’s intuitions about Maud had all the fixity of a cloud in high winds.
Quinn’s plan was this: hire the open carriage, promenade through the city to the springs, stop at an appropriate place for tea, and, while the carriage waited, stroll with Maud through the first available park, lead her into a wooded grove, throw your arms about her, kiss her passionately with lip and tongue, declare your eternal love for her face, her form, her brain, her soul.
Upon Quinn’s invitation to an outing at the springs, Maud brooded on the uncertainties that had been keeping her wakeful during recent nights. Most disturbing was the dream that had arrived after her talk with the emaciated man. Walking by a lake she saw a living, pulsating, disembodied eye sitting on a large rock. The eye was her own and when she reached for it to put it back in its socket it slithered through her fingers into the sand. She cupped it in the palms of her hands and as she lowered it into the water to rinse it, the eye swiftly melted into corrupt slime.
Maud read this as an omen of confusion, especially in regard to Quinn. It was true that only he and she would do each other justice in this life. But what but a proper botch would they make of an adolescent marriage? It was a peasant dream, laughable. Furthermore, Maud was mutating: communicating with herself through the techniques of Mesmer, willing herself into states that were alien to her waking self. Become a loveless Japanese wife, she would tell herself. Become a sibyl in the Delphic mode. Become a child of slaves at the auction block. Become an actress who works with Shakespeare himself. She would allow herself to pass hours of waking and sleeping in these foreign moods, and come away from them only reluctantly, and with written messages she could not reconcile. “The sadness of bumblebees and the longitude of pity exist only for lovers,” she wrote to herself. This poetic turn she found to be at odds with her pragmatic self, and pleasingly so. But her ability to communicate with the emaciated man was a disturbing extension of the condition, for it existed outside what she deemed the realm of the possible. She therefore disbelieved it, albeit hollowly: full of mocking echoes.