Thrown into despair at the loss of his son, Jacobus brooded for three years, suffered an apoplectic fit in 1780 while chasing a family of brazen Irish squatters off his land, and died of splenetic outrage. Volckert immediately began proceedings to oust Moonlight of the Evening from the Staats mansion, which Jacobus had left to her alone in his will. But the will was flawed and easily tumbled, and Moonlight of the Evening spent her last year of life in the sepulchral Staats cabin, using her son’s sarcophagus as a dining table. Volckert had buried Jacobus with as much restraint as was seemly in the Dutch church, and while maneuvering to take over the land and house from Moonlight of the Evening, he also saw to it that the name of Jacobus became anathema in any society that coveted the presence and probity of Venerable Volckert. Within a month Jacobus’s name was only on the tongues of cads and vulgarians, and within a year in the most proper social groupings, Jacobus had faded into a shadow figure of doubtful legend, one who, like the silver-tailed shoat and seven-titted cow, may or may never have existed.
Volckert’s wife, Joanna, a woman of mindless piety, bore twin daughters, Trynitie and Femmitie, and they, raised in cloying righteousness, wed men of means from the outlands as soon as it was in their power to do so, and moved to New York and Boston, well out of probity’s clutch. Volckert’s wife also bore him a son, Petrus, who, as we have said, saw fit to wed and woo the bounteous and bawdy Hillegond in yet another reversal of the moral order in the Staats family, which, in matters of sensual predilection, exhibited all the stability of a Bach cadenza.
Petrus, inspired by the mercantile success of his great-grandfather Dolph, whose early investment in an overland stagecoach line had been passed on to Petrus as a legacy, proved to have economic genius in his makeup. He octupled the Staats fortune, becoming Albany’s richest man as the new century began. He also proved the most benevolent of all Staatses, and was loved by his contemporaries, who honored him by naming both a short street and a public water pump after him. He branched into hardware, joining the Yankee Lyman Fitzgibbon in an ironworks and foundry, and was also an investor in several canals (including the Erie), which his peers found quixotic, since canals offered stagecoach traffic its principal competition. But Petrus found such thinking benighted, was in time hailed as a pioneer of transport, and was buried beneath a tombstone bearing a carving of a canalboat.
Petrus died in 1835 at age seventy-two, a nobleman of the spirit and the purse, having built a marble mausoleum around the grave of his uncle Amos, the half-breed (who was only two years his elder), and having also transformed the Staats house into a Federal mansion of such vast dimension that travelers came to Albany expressly to see it. His wife, Hillegond, bore him a stillborn daughter and a son, Dirck, who was destined to play a most significant role in my life, and who, at the time of our arrival at the mansion, was in disgrace with his mother, who had turned Dirck’s two full-length portraits, painted when he was twelve and nineteen, to the wall. In the years after the death of Petrus, Hillegond had refused all offers of marriage, certain that her knowledge of men, despite her uncountable intimate encounters with them, was seriously bescrewed. Further, she grew certain from a recurring nightmare that should she ever consider a man as a second spouse, he would strangle her in her bed with a ligature. And so, when she imposed her bosom on Maud and me and welcomed us into her life, she was also keeping one wary but wavering eye clearly fixed on the most virile man to have crossed her doorstep in years, my master, John the Brawn.
How virile he, how wavering she, is the matter next at hand, for when I felt myself fully cooked by the fire in Hillegond’s kitchen I stood up and found myself (still wrapped in the blanket) face-to-face with Maud, who was dressed most curiously in clothes that had belonged to Hillegond when she was Maud’s size. The dress was drabness itself, but Maud was glad of the gift, and I was exuberant, both from the warmth the fire had kindled in my blood vessels and from being reunited with this magical child.
“What do we do now?” she asked me.
“I couldn’t say. Perhaps we should find the mistress.”
“She’s ever so frightful-looking, but I am fond of her,” said Maud.
Matty, the Negro woman, breezed by and waved us in the direction of the front end of the house, then went about her business in the kitchen. Maud and I stepped gingerly toward the main salon but were caught by the sight of Hillegond’s full-body profile standing just inside the door of the Dood Kamer, which gave off the foyer. Hillegond was rigid, both her hands gripping the insides of her thighs. We looked past her and saw my master attending to the corpse of Magdalena, which lay supine on the room’s catafalquish bed, to which one ascended by climbing two steps. John the Brawn, in shirtsleeves and trousers, was, with notable delicacy, raising the chemise of the dead woman from her knees to her thighs, having already raised and carefully folded her skirt above her waist.
“What is he doing?” Maud asked me in a whisper.
“I can’t be sure,” I said, though that was a canard. I knew very well what he was doing, as did Hillegond, who stood wide-eyed as John exposed Magdalena’s nether regions and then undid the cincture at his own waist.
“You mustn’t look at this,” I said to Maud, and I interposed myself between her and the brazen necrophile. But she shoved me aside rudely and barked in a whisper, “Get out of my way, you ninny, I’ve never seen anyone do this before,” which I came to know as Maud’s battle cry in her witnessing of this life. And so we squatted in the doorway, unnoticed by the principals in the vivid scene unfolding before us.
John the Brawn climbed aboard Magdalena Colón and began doing to her gelid blossom what I had heard him boast of doing to many dozens of other more warm-blooded specimens. The sight of his gyrations aroused Hillegond to such a degree that she began certain gyrations of her own, uttering soft, guttural noises I associate solely with rut, and which grew louder as her passion intensified. Magdalena looked vapidly toward us as John gave her the fullness of his weight, her one eye still open and staring, her hair fanned out in handsome peacock show on the pillow.
Hillegond’s moans came forth with such uncontrolled resonance that when John turned and discovered her pelvic frenzy he pushed himself away from the inert Magdalena and bobbed brazenly toward our hostess, who swooned into a bundle; whereupon my master did to her skirts precisely what he had done to Magdalena’s and, with what seemed to me magnified elevation (proving the truth of the adage: fresh comfort, fresh courage), crawled aboard the supine Hillegond and renewed his roostering. This taking of her infernal temperature restored Hillegond to consciousness and she threw her arms around John and yielded herself with a long crescendoing moan that concluded when our lady of the catafalque opened both her eyes and said aloud from the frigid beyond she had been inhabiting, “Why did you stop doing me?” raising her arms and stupefying us all, not least my master, who backed outward from Hillegond and, with undiminished extension, walked to the unfinished Magdalena, inspected her center (whose visibility she heightened at his approach), and then clambered once again aboard this abused flower, now resurrected from wilt by the sunny friction of joy. The spent Hillegond rose to one elbow and studied the sight as she might the resurrection of Lazarus, her sensual zealousness giving way to a vision of the miraculous. She covered herself and bore witness while my master, having quickly moved beyond amazement, resumed the thumping of his newly sanguinolent slut with vile laughter and swollen vigor, creating a triadic climax, not only in his own member and its hostel, but also in the bite wound of La Última’s face, which, as she bent herself upward to John in consummation, began to ooze the blood of her life, demonstrating that she was again at corpuscular flood in every vein and vessel of her being.