I dutifully moved the eyelid down over the eye, feeling the flesh soft, pliable, and without warmth, but not yet chilled, somewhat like the loose skin of a chicken dead thirty minutes.
“What can the dead see?” I asked Maud when I’d done her bidding.
“If you look in their eyes you see your fate. And one must never know one’s fate if one is to keep sane.”
“I wouldn’t mind seeing my fate,” I said, “for then I’d know how to avoid it.”
“You can’t avoid your fate, you goose. That’s why they call it your fate.”
I let her have the argument, for I noted that Magdalena’s eye was quavering, and I grew fearful. Slowly that same eyelid slid open, back to the point from which I had closed it, and the eye again fixed upon Maud and me. I leaned forward for a look but Maud tugged me back with her urgent bulldog grip. I broke her hold and looked squarely into La Última’s eye by the light of the brilliant half-moon, at first seeing the conventional human orb: the maroon iris, the deep-brown pupil, the soft white transparency of the conjunctival membrane striped with the faintest of frigid purple rivers and tributaries. And then in the center of the suddenly luminous pupil I saw a procession of solemn pilgrims moving through a coppice: night it was, but snowing, and as fully bright as this true night that surrounded us. And there was Maud, her hand held by an old woman. There, too, moved John the Brawn, ahead of a figure wrapped in furs. I myself trudged forward alongside a black dog and I sensed that this was the funeral procession of Magdalena, made visible for us by her own dead eye. Her body, however, was not in portage, nor was it anywhere to be seen.
I intended to say nothing of this to Maud, having no wish to confirm the superiority of her mystical knowledge to my own. But she knew from my steady gaze into that dead eye that I had indeed seen something queer, and so at her earnest tugging of my sleeve I reported the scene to her, was narrating the cortege’s route, when the vision abruptly changed to an even darker night, with a ragtag troop of men swarming down a city street and smashing the windows of a newspaper office with stones and clubs. It changed a second time and a young man, his face familiar but to which I could attach no name, emerged from the same building in bright daylight, talking soundlessly but volubly to two men who held him by the arms as they walked. Suddenly he was thrown into a carriage, which swiftly wheeled off behind a matched pair.
I had no time to speak of this to Maud, for John the Brawn opened our own carriage door with a bravissimo shout: “Out and down with you both. We are welcome guests of the mistress of this grand place.” And when he hauled both of us out, he lifted the trunk off the luggage rack, plucked Magdalena out of the cab, and threw her over his shoulder like a sack of barley. Then, with a dismissing wave to the carriage driver in lieu of a gratuity, he led us up the gravel pathway to the house, dragging the trunk. Maud held me back a few paces and whispered to me in a desperate tone of voice, saying I must always remember she was never going to marry anyone, was never going to grow up to be like her hated mother, or even like her saintly whore of an aunt, and that I must promise to steal her away from this house if it should come to pass that the Staats woman, or some other hateful adult, should try to take charge of her life.
“It’s you who have first right to my life,” she told me, “for it was you who kept me from sliding to the bottom of the river. Will you promise me — promise on your heart’s blood — that you’ll steal me, whatever the cost?”
Her vehemence took me over, and I swiftly and foolishly promised: I will steal you, if need be, no matter what the cost, no matter how long it takes.
“Now kiss me,” she said, and I kissed her on the cheek, the first female flesh other than my mother’s and sister’s to ever brush my lips. I also tasted a wisp of her hair and found the whole sensation surprisingly exciting to my mouth and lower intestines.
“Hurry along,” John said to us, and we mounted the steps of the canopied porch to see him with Magdalena slung over his shoulder, standing now beside a strapping woman whose stature seemed not to pair with the wrinkles of her skin: as if she had not shrunk with age but had grown muscular. Her cheeks were rosy coins of paint and from her naked ears dangled earrings that looked very like church bells. She was still formidably handsome despite the wrinkles and the grotesque nature of her adornments, and as we stepped into the first warmth any of us had known in what seemed like an age of icy blasts, she squatted to greet us. This hothouse crone — Hillegond Staats was her name — embraced both Maud and me together with those powerful arms, pulled us to her wrinkled, half-draped, and formidable bosom, which smelled of corn powder and myrrh, and wept rhinoceros tears of gratitude that an adventure of the heart was entering into her life. She said as much in words I cannot precisely recall, for the degree of their welcomeness crowds out their sound and shape in my memory. This giant creature, Hillegond, had us in her power, which was very old power and reeked of money and leisure and exploitation and looked for its deeper meaning in the eyes of madmen, dead whores, and children of the wild river.
“Come in, come in, my frozen dears,” the great crone said to us. John the Brawn shoved the door closed behind us and we stood in that grand entrance hall, dwarfed by the unknown, which billowed crazily through that mansion like the lovely heat that was already warming our souls.
WHEN HILLEGOND CEASED to squeeze the frigidity and the breath out of Maud and me, she shooed us into the care of a black man named Capricorn and a black woman named Matty, both of them slaves in their youth. Capricorn wrapped me in a blanket, took me to the kitchen, sat me in front of the huge gray brick kitchen fireplace, and fed me Dutch soup with apples, potatoes, carrots, and the livers of certain undesignated creatures, unarguably the most important meal of my life, while Matty took Maud elsewhere for a change into dry clothing. Capricorn, who as a freed slave thirty years earlier had been a man of social eminence among Negroes, was kindly toward me without undue deference. Meanwhile, Hillegond, my master, and the residual elements of Magdalena found themselves together in the Dood Kamer, or dead chamber, the room set aside in substantial homes of the old Dutch to accommodate death.
Hillegond’s house was indeed old Dutch, and substantial. She was born Hillegond Roseboom, daughter of an Albany tavern-keeper of bibulous repute; and it is known that she said farewell to maidenhood at age sixteen (some insist she voyaged out years earlier) by marrying Petrus Staats, son of Volckert Staats, grandson of Jacobus Staats, great-grandson of Dolph Staats, great-great-grandson of Johannes Staats, great-great-great-grandson of Wouter Staats — all of these descended from a pre-Christian or perhaps even a primal Staatsman, though the voluminous family records (initiated by Volckert, preserved by Petrus) trace the family only to the sixteenth century about the time Holland was declaring itself independent of Spaniards and preparing to shape the New World in the image of Dutch coin.
The first to reach the New World was Wouter Staats, who gained renown as a trader by perfecting counterfeit wampum (polished mussel shells with a hole in the center, strung on a string). Wouter arrived with his wife at Fort Orange, the early name of Albany, in 1638, and in 1642 fathered Johannes, the first born-American Staats, a noble-headed youth who grew up to serve in the militia as an Indian fighter, gaining knowledge of the wilderness and its inhabitants to such a degree that upon leaving the military he entered the fur trade (beaver pelts) and earned the wealth that began the family fortune.
Johannes was everywhere praised for his honesty but suffered the taint of a curious wife, Wilhelma, who worked as a produce trader during Johannes’s long absences in quest of furs, and incorrigibly sold her customers sported oats and blue wheat. Johannes retired Wilhelma when his wealth permitted, and through his charities erased her stain from the family reputation. He also became a zealot of religious liberty, championed the right of Lutherans, Huguenots, and Jews to worship in Albany, and, upon the appearance of Newton’s comet, arranged the day of prayer and fasting that was credited with persuading the Deity to banish the dread missile from Albany’s skies.