“I worry she’ll be harmed by this business, whatever it is,” said Gordon.
“Is she joining us here?” Quinn asked.
“She and Obadiah will meet us at the track,” said Gordon.
“Has she kept her looks?” Quinn asked.
“And her figure,” said Maud.
“Splendid. She’s one of our national physical treasures.”
“I agree,” said Gordon.
“You do?” said Quinn. “I wouldn’t have expected that of you.”
“I don’t know why not. I’m fond of the whole family.”
“As am I,” said Quinn, and he leaned over and kissed Maud on the mouth.
“That’s a bit familiar, I’d say,” said Gordon.
“With reason,” said Quinn. “I’m deeply and forever beyond familiar, and beyond that, I’m irrevocably in love with Maud, and I intend to kidnap her.”
Gordon broke into laughter and his tall hat fell off.
“How wonderful,” he said. “You speak as well as you write. Wasn’t that wonderful, Maud?”
“It was wonderful,” said Maud.
“Of course you know I mean it,” said Quinn.
“Of course you do,” said Maud.
“Did Maud ever ask you to kidnap her?” Quinn asked.
“Not that I can remember,” said Gordon.
“Good. She asked me, but I was never quite equal to it, and she was a vacillating kidnappee. But now I’ve decided to carry her off into the night, out of bondage to money, power, and fame, and do arousing things to her soul. Would you like that, Maud?”
“I don’t think you should answer that question,” said Gordon.
“I have no intention of answering it,” said Maud.
“I think it’s rather insulting,” said Gordon.
“Love is never an insult,” said Maud. “Let it pass.”
“I’m not sure I like your attitude,” said Gordon.
“Oh, you like it, you like it,” said Maud.
“I’m not sure I do.”
“Are we going to the track or not?” said Quinn.
“We’re going,” said Maud.
“Having professed love for you, am I still welcome or should I engage my own carriage?”
“Oh, Daniel, don’t be twice a boor,” said Maud.
Our triumvirate at this point descends the porch stairs and, settling into Gordon’s handsome landau drawn by a pair of matched grays, recedes now, necessarily, into the moving mosaic that Saratoga has become at this hour. The landau moves into a line half a mile long, extending from the front of the hotel on Broadway out past the elms on Union Avenue and onto the grounds of the new Saratoga track. The carriages are a study in aspiration, achievement, failed dreams, industrial art, social excess, tastemaking, advance and retrograde design, cherished fantasy, inept pretension, and more. They are the American motley and they carry the motley-minded denizens of a nation at war and at play. Quinn, aware the Union Army uses up five hundred horses each day of the war, is uncomfortably gleeful to be a part of this many-horsed motley. In his woeful solitude he embraces the crowd, famished for significance that has not been sanctified by blood. Before the day and the night are over, Quinn will observe, speak with, or become friend of, among others en route to the track:
Price McGrady, John’s gambling partner in New York City, a faro dealer of such renown that John pays him forty-five hundred dollars per month plus fifteen percent of the house winnings at all faro tables, and who is now in a fringe-topped surrey alongside his lady for today, ready for his horse, Tipperary Birdcatcher, to win the principal race of the day, or, failing that, ready for it to lose, either outcome an exercise in ecstasy;
The Wilmot Bayards of Fifth Avenue, he a horseman and yachtsman, investor in the racetrack with John McGee, and owner of Barrister, a horse that will run in the feature race, Bayard today among the most effulgent presences in the parade, riding in a barouche made in France, drawn by eight horses, and monitored by a pair of outriders who are wearing the silks of the Bayard Stable, gold and green, the colors of money;
Lord Cecil Glastonbury of Ottawa, the iron magnate (and sympathizer with the Confederacy), in a wine-colored four-passenger brougham, he the owner of Royal Traveler, the horse favored in today’s feature race;
Jim Fisk, the stock speculator and financial brigand, in a six-passenger closed coach, the largest vehicle in the line apart from certain omnibuses owned by the hotels, in which the brigand carries five cuddlesome women, all six drawn by six horses that follow behind the German marching band Fisk has hired to travel with him for the week;
Colonel Wally Standish of the 104th Regulars, who rides alone in his two-wheeled cabriolet, proving that the wound he earned in the Second Manassas campaign may have left him with a malfunctional left arm, but that his right is still powerful enough to control his spirited sorrel mare;
Magdalena Colón and Obadiah Griswold, he the carriage maker and principal partner of John McGee in establishing the racetrack, and for whom the feature race of the day, the Griswold Stakes, has been named — this notable pair riding in Magdalena’s demi-landau with its leather top folded down, she holding the reins of what is known to be the most expensive two-passenger vehicle in Saratoga: Obadiah’s masterpiece, gilded rococo in decor, doors of polished ebony, with Magdalena’s initials inlaid in white Italian marble on each door; she and Obadiah both eminently visible to all whom they now pass, he entirely in white including white cane and white straw boater, she in a summer dress of gray foulard silk with blue velvet buttons, the dress created in the postillon body design with tripartite tail, the new fashion favored by young women with slender figures; and rising from the right side of her straw bonnet the feathered plume of changeable color — gray today — that plume her vaunted symbol of resurrection ever since her time at the bottom of the wild river and which has made her the most instantly recognizable woman in Saratoga, in or out of season.
Along with these, in assorted buggies, phaetons, chaises, coupes, and chariots, come bankers, soldiers, politicians, Kansas farmers and Boston lawyers, litterateurs from Philadelphia and actors from Albany, reprobates with dyed locks and widows so tightly laced that breathing does not come easy, young women with tapering arms and pouting lips, full of anxiety over the adequacy of their botteries and chausseries, gouty sinners and flirtatious deacons, portly women with matching daughters who are starting their day, as usual, full of high hope that they will today meet the significant stranger with whom the hymeneal sacrifice may at last be offered up — these and five thousand more of their uncategorizable kind all move forward at inch-pace progress into the brightest of bright noondays beneath the sunswept heavenly promise of life at Saratoga.
A quarter of a mile from the track the carriage line intersected with a moving crowd of Negroes singing a song to the music of their own marching musicians, the singing spirited and full, the music rousing, the crowd en route to a celebration (to be marked by song, speeches, and prayer, I would discover in tomorrow’s newspaper) of the emancipation of slaves in the rebellious states of the American union, as well as a commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. The marchers were singing this:
No more peck of corn for me, no more, no more;
No more peck of corn for me, many t’ousand go.
No more driver’s lash for me, no more, no more,
No more driver’s lash for me, many t’ousand go.
I observed that the faces of all the marching Negro men brought back, as always, the face of Joshua and his myriad masks of power.