Ride a Cockhorse

RAYMOND KENNEDY (1934–2008) was born and raised in western Massachusetts. In 1982, he joined the creative writing faculty at Columbia University, where he taught until his retirement in 2006. Kennedy's other novels include
My Father's Orchard; Goodnight, Jupiter; Columbine; The Flower of the Republic; Lulu Incognito; The Bitterest Age
; and
The Romance of Eleanor Gray
.

KATHERINE A. POWERS's column on books and writers ran for many years in
The Boston Globe
and now appears in
The Barnes & Noble Review
under the title “A Reading Life.” She is the editor of
Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life—The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963
, forthcoming in 2013.

RIDE A COCKHORSE

RAYMOND KENNEDY

Introduction by

KATHERINE A. POWERS

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Introduction

Ride a Cockhorse

Dedication

Epigraph

REVOLUTION AT MAPLE AND MAIN

   
ONE

   
TWO

   
THREE

   
FOUR

   
FIVE

   
SIX

   
SEVEN

   
EIGHT

THE TERROR SPREADS

   
NINE

   
TEN

   
ELEVEN

   
TWELVE

   
THIRTEEN

   
FOURTEEN

NIGHT OF DIRE RECKONINGS

   
FIFTEEN

   
SIXTEEN

   
SEVENTEEN

EXILE AND RETURN

   
EIGHTEEN

   
NINETEEN

   
TWENTY

   

Copyright and More Information

During the last decade or so of his life, Raymond Kennedy would occasionally and ceremoniously roll out of Brooklyn in his Lincoln Town Car and travel to western Massachusetts where I would see him now and again. He was drawn there by the countryside and the hill-and-valley towns of his youth, the region that provides the setting for all but one of his eight novels, including this one, his comic masterpiece. He told me that the most arresting memory of his childhood was seeing an enormous boat carried overland, progressing in state slowly and hugely past his house along Enfield Road near the Quabbin Reservoir. He was only five or six years old and stunned by its size and the surreality of its presence before him. It was, it turned out, a police boat bound for the recently completed reservoir whose supply of water for faraway Boston had submerged four little towns, including Enfield, the one toward which this road once traveled.

It is not likely that the breathtaking sight of this vessel on its way to preside over four drowned towns shaped Kennedy's vision of the world, but it is just like him to recall it and its imperious journey with so much satisfaction. In his novels he is the master, usually celebratory, of the brazen, the impertinent and majestically presumptuous. And, as it happens, he liked especially to confer these qualities on his fictional women, creating as fantastic a bevy of dominatrixes as the world of letters has ever seen. From
Flower of the Republic
comes Pansy Truax, lubricious, titanic brawler, and Mrs. French, elderly, steely seductress; from
Lulu Incognito
, Mrs. Gansevoort, devourer of innocence, the very “flesh-and-blood epitome of a great destructive principle loosed upon earth”; and from this book, its turbulent heroine, Mrs. Frances “Frankie” Fitzgibbons.

Ride a Cockhorse
, first published in 1991, is Kennedy's sixth novel. It is set in the autumn of 1987 in a small city in Massachusetts's Connecticut Valley where Mrs. Fitzgibbons, a widow and loan officer at a solid savings-and-loan bank, has gone mad, visited at the age of forty-five by sudden mania. Once kind, polite, and deferential, she is suddenly transformed into a powerhouse of ambition and a dynamo of sexual energy. She discovers in herself a “big thrilling voice,” astounding powers of eloquence, and radiant sexual magnetism; these she wields to persuade and persecute with unhinged abandon.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons is the managerial version of Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts; arbitrary and vindictive, she is never more truly her own megalomaniac self than when calling for somebody's head. Her three-week reign of terror over the Parish Bank can be seen as a grotesque expression of the spirit that seized America in the 1980s, that of the ruthless downsizers and predatory takeover artists who annihilated jobs, and of the cavalier bankers who destroyed hundreds of savings-and-loan institutions. This wondrous, horrifying woman, amoral and insanely overreaching, is—as she herself might put it—all business. She revels in its buccaneer spirit, firing people willy-nilly, cutting multimillion-dollar deals, swiveling back and forth in her chair, “tossing out clichés in a quietly boastful manner.” She is sexually aroused by financial waffle and flimflam, by the celebration of innovation and audacity. Her short reign encompasses the stock-market crash of October 1987, whose furious disarray relieves her twinges of fear and paranoia: “The reality of what was happening to certain big corporations out there was perversely reassuring. The telephone in her fist felt like a weapon, like a heavy black hammer, something solid and useful.”

If Mrs. Fitzgibbons's charade of being a banker is a satire on banking itself, especially as it broke loose from government regulation to ravage the land, her rise to power and demented, despotic rule can also be seen as a version of Hitler's. That element is certainly there, handily inserted throughout in Mrs. Fitzgibbons's denunciations and tirades, and as she gathers her select forces around her. Still,
Ride a Cockhorse
is the furthest thing from an allegory. It is surreal, certainly, but it is also firmly seated in its location, a small New England city very much like Holyoke, Massachusetts, the once-proud manufacturing town in which Kennedy spent a portion of his youth. He is fond of its people; they are his characters, and he describes their personalities, appearance, and little ways with wit and precision. And he rejoices in their speech: the novel is spangled with such venerable ornaments of American slang as “jamokes,” “galoots,” “welshers,” and “boogums.”

We can detect, amid the comedy and verbal pyrotechnics, the author's nostalgic regret that American cities have lost their dignity. The Parish Bank, after all, is located on what was once the city's business main street: now no longer the self-respecting thoroughfare of its hey-day but “revitalized” as an open-air mall. The atmosphere of a little burg's traditional amour propre pervades the novel, and, in fact, the floodgates of Mrs. Fitzgibbons's mania are opened by those stirring expressions of American civic pride: the high-school marching band and the triumphal, neoclassical architecture of banks of yore.

Kennedy's depictions of the bank's interior and of the marching band are exhilarating and, in the case of the latter, peerlessly so. The pages devoted to the rousing, uniformed splendor of the band as it comes swinging around the corner transmit to our own spirits a giddiness and buoyancy almost equal to that which infects the newly volatile Mrs. Fitzgibbons:

At the head of this magnificent assemblage is the “resplendent young drum major,” eighteen-year-old Terry Sugrue; it is he, this “vision of martial beauty,” who has unleashed the middle-aged widow's libido:

Mrs. Fitzgibbons's iron-fisted seduction of this young man is only the first of her conquests. At the bank, energized by madness, the formerly mild-mannered employee finds her unfettered spirit in towering accord with the building's interior, the “great marble-columned room, ... a magnificent, high-vaulted emporium, with its venerable dimensions, its twinkling dome, the long row of golden grilles of the tellers' windows—an almost celestial hall!” She usurps command through sheer willpower: it shimmers from her electrified presence and makes itself heard in vituperative riffs and wild fulminations, a heady verbal excess in which her creator clearly takes as much pleasure as she does.

She's got style. Bold, charismatic, and conquering, she moves up from a pitiful Honda to an enormous Buick commandeered from her hairdresser's boyfriend, Matthew, who enlists himself as her driver. With him at the wheel, the fabulous, frightening Mrs. Fitzgibbons travels big, her acolytes following behind in another car of despicable inconsequence: “The sight of the filthy compact following Matthew's gleaming, highly polished Buick down Dwight Street toward the business district was curious to the eye. It looked as though the Buick had snagged something under its wheels and was towing it to the city dump.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons's manic transformation into a juggernaut, ghoulishly funny as it is, is not entirely an antic affair; she is, in the first place, a genuine destroyer, gloating over the lives she ruins. Kennedy paints distressing pictures of those victims, their jobs annihilated by a force beyond reason or control. But then there is the case of Mrs. Fitzgibbons herself: she is tragically mentally ill. At times she glimpses this, feeling that she cannot quite control her thinking, at one juncture experiencing “the odd sensation that her brain had actually contracted; that the scope of her thinking was somehow attenuated, like water jetting from a nozzle.” It must all end badly—in a macabre sexual
Götterdämmerung
. But when it does, and when the sun has finally set on Mrs. Fitzgibbons's regime, the novel finishes on an unexpected note of pathos that is truly moving.

Ride a Cockhorse
is a brilliant, all-American oddity and its author, a one-man band. Somehow in these pages Kennedy has brought together surrealism, satire, and black comedy; affection, empathy, and nostalgia; astute characterization, inspired description, and astonishing linguistic brio. To quote Mrs. Fitzgibbons in a moment of sexual exultation: “This is the goods!”

—K
ATHERINE
A. P
OWERS

For Charles Drapeau

Looking back, Mrs. Fitzgibbons could not recall which of the major changes in her life had come about first, the discovery that she possessed a gift for persuasive speech, or the sudden quickening of her libido. While the latter development was the more memorable of the two, involving as it did the seduction of young Terry Sugrue, the high school drum major, it was Mrs. Fitzgibbons's newfound ability to work her will upon others through her skills with language which produced the most exciting effects. By early fall, some of her fellow workers at the Parish Bank, where Mrs. Fitzgibbons was employed as a home loan officer, could not have helped noticing her growing assertiveness on the job. She was ordinarily very reasonable and sweet-tempered, the soul of polite discretion. Almost overnight, she had become more strident, even to the point of badgering customers on the telephone and lifting her voice to a level that was considered inconsistent with the usual soft-spoken manner of a courteous banker. She could also be quite tart and provocative with those working around her, as on the afternoon when she lectured Connie McElligot, the woman at the next desk, for fifteen minutes on the subject of how the escalating interest rates of the 1980s portended an economic crisis of global proportions. Moreover, while speaking, Mrs. Fitzgibbons let fall certain locutions that revealed her true feelings toward the other woman, which were deprecative and of long standing, as she likened Connie McElligot's ignorance of such perils to that of any layman walking in from the street. “What would you know about the connection between interest rates at the Fed and the collapse of commodity prices in South America?” she said. “Nothing. Not word one.”