Savage Girl (12 page)

“No, you’re right, they might not,” said Freddy, shaking his head in what looked to me like pretend sadness. “The sentinels of propriety are known to be strict.”

“That makes the whole exercise pointless, doesn’t it? Your little game will be up as soon as the town learns what she was. A girl in a coochie show. In fact, they may run us out of town, too.”

“Unless . . .”

“Unless?” Once again I had underestimated my father. “Unless they don’t learn of her past,” I said. “What will you do? Lie?”

“Oh, I don’t think that will be necessary,” he said. “Given the gullibility of our species, dishonesty is often superfluous.”

“What then?”

“There is a difference between lying and not telling. I don’t see what business it is of Caroline Hood and the Tremont aunts and all those crinoline pillars of the community.”

“Oh ho, they will make it their business, you can count on that. And what about the girl herself? Have you asked whether she wishes to be displayed as a showpiece?”

“You know the incredible thing about Dr. Scott’s production?” Freddy said. “She enjoyed it. Her performance was entirely deliberate.”

“In order to go along with your plan, she must deny who she is,” I said. “Who she has been.”

“She might be in a hurry to forget it,” Freddy said. “People enjoy transformation almost as much as a butterfly does.”

“You’re wrong about that,” I said, probably a little too sharply for Freddy’s taste. “Most people resist transformation as though it were the plague. What people enjoy most is being rooted in their own muck.”

Freddy shrugged. “Professor Dr. Calef Scott’s miserable theatrical on the one hand, the world of Manhattan’s fashionables on the other. Which would you choose?”

“You don’t detect any similarities between the two?” I asked.

Freddy put on his stentorian Dr. Scott voice. “See the Savage Girl! Raised from the Comstock gutter and transformed into . . . a Right Proper New York Lady!” He laughed at himself.

“She doesn’t know the rules, nor the stakes,” I said. “It’s unfair.”

“The choice will be hers to make, of course, at every step of the way, but I don’t foresee any difficulty,” he said. “I’ve noticed that the attractions of society often prove irresistible to human vanity.”

He rose and halted next to my chair, looking down at me. “You’ll play along, won’t you?”

I should have stood up to him. I should have taken Bronwyn’s hand and fled, released her somewhere into the wilderness, like some wounded beast we had nursed back to health.

I did none of that. I sighed. And, to my everlasting sorrow, nodded.

As he knew I would.

“But, Freddy?” I said. “The sooner the better. She should debut this season.”

“Really? I think not. I was going to hand her off to Cousin Karl for a year of finishing in Europe.”

In New York City, wealthy, well-connected girls aged eighteen customarily had their social debuts in late winter. The elaborate process—lessons, calls, final culminating debutante cotillions—served to indicate to the wider world that the young lovelies were henceforth marriageable material. They could now “come out,” literally, from the cloistered haven of their parents’ homes.

“It has to be this coming season, January, February,” I insisted, shivering as I thought of the scene on the sixth floor of the Palmer House. “Think of her as a bomb about to go off. The longer you try to keep it in hand, the more likely it will blow up in your face.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” he said.

“You know I am,” I said. If it were done, Macbeth says, better it were done quickly. The cardinal rule for all risky enterprises.

“Can we possibly have her ready in time?” Freddy asked.

“Anna Maria will help,” I said. “Keep her off the raw meat and all that.”

“And you?”

“Yes,” I said, sighing once more. “I already indicated I would.”

He smiled wanly and nodded. “I’m glad we had this frank exchange,” he said, and left the car.

Freddy’s sarcasm had a warm, blunt edge. He really was genuinely glad to talk to his son, but I feared he had no intention of listening to a word I said.

I wondered where Anna Maria stood on this decision. Watching her with Bronwyn would melt even the stoutest heart. It had always been my mother’s dream to bring a girl out into New York society. I had seen her assist other debutantes in the process—cousins, daughters of friends—but thinking about it now, I realized that only her own daughter could truly satisfy her yearning. Of course she would side with Freddy on his quest.

Sandobar rumbled past the ominous stone prison on the Hudson River shore and ran alongside the Tappan Zee. I could see, miles to the south, the blocky outline of city buildings.

Manhattan.

A web of friendship and society waited there, ready to trap me once again.

Bev and Chippy and James and David Bliss. Jones Abercrombie. Cousin Willie. Delmonico’s. The Maison Dorée. Harriet, Caroline and Camilla. All friends, and all in bitter competition. The Circle, we called ourselves, pompous even as green youths.

And Delia Showalter. Of course. Delia. Did I inwardly groan at the thought of her, or was that the feel of my heart leaping? The pale maiden, playing her role as the love of my life. What should I do about Delia?

I had been away only two months, but it felt like much longer. Had
I changed? Was I different now? What would my friends in the Circle think of me?

Another thought, which nearly unmanned me it was so disheartening. What would they think of her? Would they treat our recently plucked wildflower delicately, appreciating her fierce beauty?

No, I knew the sad truth. Asking such people to be kind only brought out the long knives that much sooner. They were the social equivalent of Chicago stockyard butchers, efficient at evisceration.

For the whole last leg of the trip to New York, I encountered Bronwyn only once, when she emerged briefly as we flew down the Hudson past the little river towns. I stood in the last car on the shooting deck, sunk in my thoughts. The Palisades, the grandest little chain of cliffs in the world, made me feel ill, I was so homesick for them.

Bronwyn came out onto the deck. I tried to read her face. A summery, end-of-June morning, just before midday, the river a lazy blue dragon asleep beside the tracks. The pink-faced escarpment, opposite, lit by white-yellow sunshine.

“Pretty,” I said.

She took it all in for a long minute.

“Yes,” she replied softly.

An actual word. Had she really said it, or did it float by on the wind?

She turned and went back inside. I didn’t see her again until we were in the Grand Central Depot.

Southward, whistle howling, Sandobar rocketing and rolling, Bob Cratchit pouring it on, toward the island, toward the harbor, toward the sea. Whizzing directly alongside the wisteria-covered cottage where Washington Irving wrote, hating the new railroad when it went in back in the 1850s.

Thundering across the little stream at Spuyten Duyvil, onto the sacred ground of Manhattan, through the slot in the hills of Harlem, down the sooty trough of Park Avenue, down, down, down, into the quick-beating heart of New York City.

Home.

And there all our difficulties began.

Madame Eugénie’s Académie de Danse

10

After I talk myself hoarse, after I pursue memory to exhaustion, and after I witness Bill Howe take a voluminous lunch to match his voluminous breakfast, I finally sleep.

For three hours. It is late Saturday afternoon when I wake. I cross to the window. The pane is hot to the touch. The air in the street outside the Tombs has been struck still by the late-spring sun. Manic insects rub their legs together to produce their maddening frequencies of sound, which I can hear even inside the prison.

Blisteringly hot outside, in the prison director’s office it is cool, almost cold.

At first I believe this is the effect of the marmoreal surroundings, but slowly, as my head clears, I realize that the source of the chill in the room is Abraham Hummel himself. Like Beelzebub, he brings his own winter with him wherever he goes.

His partner, Howe, is nowhere to be seen.

Waking to the realization that someone is watching you is always disconcerting, and having the onlooker be Abe Hummel makes it doubly so.

He stares me down. I can’t pretend to go back to sleep, so I sit and face him.

You have left something out, Hummel says. Haven’t you?

His first words to me during this, our latest encounter.

I suppose I must confess that Hummel and I have had dealings before. The reason Bill Howe took him on as a partner, the reason the pinched little man made himself indispensable to the already hugely successful barrister, was by means of a simple subterfuge Hummel invented and perfected.

He raised extortion to an art.

A wayward woman comes to the office of William Howe. Mr. Hummel, then a lowly stenographic clerk, takes down her story. She has been betrayed, says the woman, by a man of high standing. She mentions a name that could shake the halls of industry, the back rooms of business and the salons of society. The child aborning in her womb, she avows, is his.

Hummel is on the case. Not in the courts, no, he works in too fine a métier for that. He merely reaches out to the accused, whispers the name of his female client, promises discretion if . . .

The word “scandal” is never mentioned, only implied. Let the gentleman in question imagine the consequences for himself. Fathering a bastard with a light woman? How would his wife react, for example? His minister?

Blackmail by any other name would smell as foul.

The payoff is split, eighty-twenty, between the firm and the complainant, very much in favor of the former. Word gets around, and soon waywards are knocking down the doors of the offices of William Howe. And when the stream dries up, as it does occasionally (much to the disgrace of the city’s goatish and licentious, who have fallen shockingly down on the job), why, Mr. Hummel is quite capable of hiring the seduction out. He puts a girl onto a likely target and reaps the results.

Bill Howe is sometimes frightened by his dried prune of a clerk, but never that frightened, and never for that long. He cannot deny the tides of money that are washing up on his shore. The firm of William Howe, Esquire, becomes the partnership of Howe & Hummel.

Alas, I played a small part in the matchmaking for that infernal marriage. Because yes, disapproving reader, I became ensnared in Abe Hummel’s net along with the rest of
tout le monde.
While my mademoiselle was not in a family way, she did have evidence of our entanglement in the form of letters. So a few coins in Hummel’s tide of gold came from my pockets. Or, actually, from Freddy’s.

It is thus not without a measure of trepidation that I wake to find myself alone with Abe Hummel this hot-and-cold afternoon, and that
I find him speaking to me, since the last time we exchanged pleasantries the family coffers were poorer by a few thousand.

You have left something out, Hummel says. Haven’t you?

I don’t respond, but I do think, Well, yes. The lies one tells always pale in comparison to the truths one withholds.

I have left something out. To what miserable little detail could he be referring? I rack my brains. I already feel like a prisoner in the dock.

Do you have anything to say for yourself, wretch?

Yes! No! I don’t know!

Hummel says, You crept into her room, didn’t you?

At first I think he is accusing me of . . . But no.

One of those days, he says, when she was asleep curled up on the parlor-car divan, or perhaps one night when she was dashing about on top of the train. You went into her sleeping compartment while she was not there.

Hummel is the devil. He can peer through your soul like a pane of glass.

Yes, I say.

What did you find? he asks. Like a lawyer practiced in courtroom strategy, he poses only those questions to which he already knows the answer.

I found things that explained why she left us so soon after we freed her, I tell him. Why she had to vanish from the street in front of the International Hotel. Why she was gone for days before she came back to join us on Sandobar.

She needed to fetch something vital to her, didn’t she?

She went out to collect her paltry belongings, yes, I say.

I confess the whole to story to Hummel, that I never planned to trespass, that one night as I headed down the passageway in
Nighthawk,
the personal servants’ car, passing by her sleeping compartment’s door, I experienced a sudden urge to turn the handle, to see if it was locked.

Inside, the smell of a lair, not unpleasant. A small, dark room, six by twelve, originally intended for a parlormaid. Bronwyn had taken all the linens from the cot and made herself a nest on the floor. No
perfumes and potions bedside, but nevertheless a scent of oranges. No girlie things, no personal items at all.

Except . . . Kneeling down to investigate the swirl of sheets in which she slept, I spotted a dirty canvas bag shoved beneath her pallet.

Outside in the corridor, voices. Tu-Li, bringing Savage Girl back to her room. I am discovered!

But no, the voices continued forward.

Inside the bag, five items.

Her hand mirror. Two books, not whole but torn in half at the spine. The Holy Bible, minus the New Testament, Revelation and part of the Pentateuch. What looks like Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair,
torn in half also, so that it is missing the first few and last hundred pages or so. Both half books are filthy and covered in grime.

And a rag doll. Dirty also, threadbare from heavy use. Pathetic, like the single toy of an impoverished child.

And? Hummel asks. One other thing was in that bag, wasn’t it?

I nod. A set of the hand claws she used in Dr. Scott’s show.

I thought as much, Hummel says.

William Howe sweeps into the room, trailed by his retinue of clerks and secretaries. He has bathed and changed his toilet from green trousers to scarlet, from a blue vest to green, and from a rose shirt to a yellow one.

For all I know, Hummel, too, might have changed while I slept, his black trousers and black waistcoat replaced by a black waistcoat and black trousers.

Howe glows with a robust pink freshness. He sits down and rubs his hands.

Never fear, he says, I have ordered up a tub brought in for you, young Hugo. Hot water and soap. We shall get you feeling like a new man again. Until that time, to business.

He confers in whispers with Hummel. Their firm’s motto,
Fides apud fures.
Honor among thieves.

Howe motions to a clerk. By transatlantic cable, he announces, the wonder of the age, a telegram from your parents.

Freddy and Anna Maria are in London.

Waving the telegram, Howe says, They board Her Majesty’s mail packet
Alhambra
by exclusive arrangement with the Court of St. James’s and should be here within a week.

Patting my knee, he says, By which time we shall have you bailed, adjudicated, freed from the onus of these terrible crimes and able to meet Friedrich-August-Heinrich and Anna Maria (Howe rolls every
r
) with a clear conscience at the West Side docks.

He gives the telegram back to his clerk without actually letting me see it. To prevent distraction from the task at hand.

Now, he says, pray continue. What did I miss?

He was just telling me about his discovery of the murder weapon, Hummel says.

Howe blinks at him. A nasty business, he says. Shall I clear the room?

I’d much rather begin where I left off, I say.

Yes, yes, Howe says, arrival in New York, further machinations of this terrible starveling waif. Go on.

•   •   •

I feel as though I have gotten ahead of myself somewhat. All stories are about family, even those that pretend not to be. So I should tell you about mine.

The first rule with men: Put no faith in their words. Their words are only the wrapping of the gift, which must be torn away to reveal the truth. Look instead to their unspoken selves, secrets they believe they dissemble but which are in reality displayed for all to see.

The men in my family. Freddy’s father you no doubt know, the fabulous August Delegate. And August’s first son, also called August, or Sonny in the family, dead at the Christlike age of thirty-three, carried off by a sudden fever in the gold fields of West Africa, or who knows really how Sonny Delegate died? It is a mystery of the age.

Having accomplished more in his score-and-thirteen than most men do in their biblical allotment of three score and ten, Sonny existed as the world’s marvel, a whirlwind, a genius. The Son King, they called him. For a shining moment, he walked the earth as the
wealthiest creature on it. His true accomplishment was to make enormous amounts of money for all those around him, and this worked to make him famous and well loved.

Upon Sonny’s death my grandfather was left with his other son, poor second-best Friedrich. An outcome so unsettling that Grandfather soon died of it himself. The African fever that took off Sonny, they said, reached out across the ocean for a collateral victim.

Yes, August Senior was left with Friedrich, and then Grandfather died and Friedrich was left with a fortune so high and tall that you could not scale its golden pile if you climbed for a whole sunlit Sunday.

Freddy was also left with me. As my father disappointed his father, so my father was disappointed in me. And none of us could help any of it. What a bottomless swamp a family is.

The Delegates’ mining interests in Virginia City, first developed through Sonny’s Midas touch, filled the coffers of the Boston and New York banks during the War of the Rebellion. This allowed the bankers to have money to lend to the Union cause. Thus it might be said the Delegate family helped win the war. They also serve who only stand and finance.

Because everyone knows we didn’t have much else to do with the actual fighting. I was twelve when the war ended, and in that same week Lincoln was assassinated. My poor little sister, Virginia, had died of scarlet fever as Sumter’s cannons boomed. My brother, Nicholas, came into the world in the war’s second year.

The truth is that while the hostilities walloped the slaver states that were in revolt, across the North the industrial miracle was such that life churned on seamlessly. The mills ran twenty-four hours a day. Dry goods and groceries were never in short supply. Buildings were erected, rails laid, streets paved.

Only by the roll calls of the dead printed in the newspapers (which I followed religiously) could you tell we were involved in the hostilities at all.

And yet despite the war’s remoteness, I passed a childhood awash in blood, my night dreams colored so precisely that they differentiated
between limbs blown off in battle (tattered, stringy) and those removed by a surgeon’s saw (pinched, right-angled).

I had never before witnessed a man killed, not until Butler Fince shot Hank Monk right in front of me in the club dining room of Virginia’s International Hotel. But I had seen many deaths, gruesome and bloody, in my nightmares.

The streets outside the windows of my father’s library (we lived on Thirty-first and Fifth then) might be thick with richly painted carriages, the walkways peopled by pink-faced men in gleaming top hats. But as I followed the progress of the fighting, through Shiloh, the Peninsula Campaign, Second Manassas, Antietam, Stones River, I noticed a shift in the view. Brass bands, oratory, nationalistic fervor, but also the returning wounded.