Savage Girl (14 page)

Sad figures, the little advocate party. Formerly the center of all the world’s attention, now discarded amid the galloping rush toward the American future. The women and their handlers appeared dazed to be present at the Willets farm at all, unsure how they had wound up there. In Albany on a lecture tour, then suddenly transported to Versailles-in-the-Berkshires.

Soon enough, we were made so merry by the champagne that all uncertainty ceased. The host’s suggestion that the women reprise their “performances” at the Nashville slave barn failed to give rise to violence, as I believe Bev, ever the provocateur, may have intended.

I envied him as a mind unmolested by doubt. He posed a danger to me, though. A profoundly bored individual, and thus one finely tuned to the possibilities of scandal as a form of entertainment, Bev Willets played no favorites in choosing targets for gossip.

The inclusion of Bronwyn within the family circle exposed us, rendering the Delegate name vulnerable. Adopting the berdache was one thing. But attempting to pass off a girl with a questionable past (and a combustible present) as fit to be introduced into society was quite another.

Fraught, the whole idea. I resolved to renew my efforts to talk Freddy out of it.

Bev avowed he wanted to be informed of “every trivial detail” of my transcontinental adventure. His attention then instantly wandered as I launched into the story. Just as well, since I had determined that I would withhold from him large portions of the family’s recent experience.

Bronwyn I would keep as my secret.

11

The next morning, the quondam abolitionists and their two charming dolls had already departed when I awoke.

Bev was nowhere in evidence either but had somehow found a way to indulge in another bit of provocation. As I sat taking my tea in La Ferme’s Temple of Love, an octagonal belvedere with a neighboring grotto, visitors arrived. Delia Showalter, her two cousins and her aunt rode up the driveway in a four-in-hand.

Their visit engineered by Bev, no doubt, as part of his endless campaign of mischief against me. He knew of my ambivalent feelings toward Delia, my intended, the erstwhile love of my life, and he wanted to see if he could sow trouble by throwing us together again after our long separation.

“I have chivvied you out, haven’t I?” Delia said, looking prettily fashionable in a vermilion riding jacket.

I am not sure if I wanted to see anyone more than I did Delia at that moment, or anyone less. We had left a good deal hanging fire when I departed Manhattan two months before.

“You’re looking well for someone who has just conquered the continent,” she said lightly.

Her relatives, well trained, moved off to examine the Temple of Love, leaving us to stroll alone.

“Bev?” she asked.

“Off on a hunt, I think. Did he tell you I was here?”

“He telegrammed us to stop on our way to The Ditches.”

The Ditches. Our family place near Lenox, just across the Massachusetts state line, five miles to the east. A fantastic mansion, the
Delegate answer to La Ferme, to Newport, to Saratoga, and to every other rusticating venue where our set congregated.

Standing there in the fresh rural morning, Delia managed to exhibit the pale delicacy of a closed Manhattan drawing room, a translucency of skin tone that represented the height of fashion, and which in the past had thoroughly beguiled me.

She came to me forever breathless. I succumbed to her perfumed, feathery presence. Put a milkmaid’s bonnet on her, pose her in the courtyard of La Ferme, and the ancien régime effect would be complete. Marie Antoinette come back to life.

“Are we friends?” she said as we walked along the shore of the little lake, its waters covered with lily pads and stocked with kissing carp.

“Seeing you again,” I said, “I feel nothing if not affection.”

She smiled a smile that lit the world. “Oh, I hoped so,” she said. “I so hoped that what they say about absence and its effect upon the heart was true.”

When I didn’t respond, she added, “About its growing fonder.”

“Yes,” I said, attempting to keep the shade of exasperation out of my voice. Had she a need to spell everything out?

“Yes?”

To place into words such ephemeral feelings as our reunion had reawakened seemed to me a recipe for ruining their frail charms.

“You must have had all sorts of adventures with the wild women of the western territories,” Delia teased.

I shifted instead to a description of my descent into the underworld via the Elephant, feeling myself closed within the steamy fist of the Brilliant Mine, the blue muck, a rataplan of black powder and nitro charges exploding in the caverns and galleries. The veins of silver ore embedded in the walls, hot to the touch.

“We brought someone back,” I told her.

“Yes? One of your father’s souvenirs?”

“One of my own,” I said. “Colm Cullen, he’s to be my hand when I return to school.”

“Good,” she said, trilling a laugh. “You need a minder.”

Delia took my arm, and we walked on, and I felt myself drop
with a thud onto the track I had so recently jumped when I left for the West.

Delia Showalter had been marked for me (and I for her) when our families both had summerhouses amid the green enchanted woods of Staten Island. We played together, I was told, as toddlers on New Dorp Beach. At dancing schools, lemonade socials, skating parties throughout my youth, there was always Delia.

I developed a secret intoxication at the prospect of having her. Here was a prize being given up to me, obtained not through any effort on my part but as a birthright, a sacrifice offered simply because I was who I was. I could not adequately describe the level of flattery that such an arrangement entailed. It put me into a high state of arousal and smugness both.

“Won’t you ride over with us?” Delia asked. “We have room in the landau.”

Anna Maria had scheduled some sort of midsummer extravaganza at The Ditches for the remainder of the week, games, outings, a ball.

“I don’t know,” I said. I had a sudden urge not to attend at all.

Delia gave a short laugh. “Well, you are coming,” she said, as though detecting my thought. “Being as it is your own family’s affair.”

“Bev and I will be over this afternoon,” I said. “He has a new Kentucky racing mare he keeps going on about.”

The man himself approached us across the lawn. “The brilliant young couple,” Bev called out. “Wedded together like a button on a sleeve.”

•   •   •

The Delegate country seat, a wood-and-stone Moroccan-flavored monstrosity, had been built near the end of his life by my grandfather and named The Ditches after a local Mahican village ruin.

Not a man given to half measures, Grandfather designed and constructed what was then (and for all we knew still was) the largest private home in America. A hundred rooms, an acre on each of its four floors, a two-thousand-square-foot ballroom. The place loomed over a crystal lake called Stockbridge Bowl.

After all that, it pleased August, in one of those ironic formulations that enliven the humors of the rich, to term the place “a cottage.” Also after all that, he fell dead of a heart attack before he could take up residence.

The Ditches began as an experiment, part scientific, part emotional. Was it physically possible to build and maintain a structure of such vastness? To erect a private home large enough that a circus might come and set up within? And would such a home erase the stain caused by Sonny’s death?

Where August Delegate went, fashion followed. Suddenly all of smart New York wanted a place in the mountains, and enormous cottages started to dot the Berkshire landscape: Fair Meadows, The Elms, Wyndhurst, Shadowlawn.

The Ditches dwarfed them all. “Why stint?” My grandfather’s motto.

Viewed from the lake below, The Ditches resembled an unearthly, heavy-masted pirate ship approaching on the horizon. Among its hundred rooms, a billiards salon, a golf lodge, a walk-in humidor. Two chapels—we had some rogue Catholics in the family. In the private wing, a locked art gallery displayed scandalous French nudes.

When August needed properly weathered timbers, he secured them by salvaging a sunken French warship off the coast of Brittany, dismantling it and importing his choice of wooden beams to the work site. Dried out, the age-old timbers provided the antiquated look my grandfather thought delightful. The study where they were installed smelled faintly of the sea.

Alas, none of it brought back his much-loved son. Gloom hung over The Ditches like the fog on Stockbridge Bowl.

Bev and I rode the five miles from his family’s place to mine at the height of the noonday sun. Anna Maria’s midsummer festivities were to begin later that afternoon. The green fan of trees shaded us as we passed beneath, and the many cascades coming off the hills to the north cooled our progress also.

The racing mare, which Bev had named Tullia after the last queen of Rome, proved a magnificent animal, often executing excited little
caracoles along the trail, flanks quivering as though she were only barely contained. In sprints Tullia went off faster than any other mount I had ever witnessed.

Bev had provided me with a black gelding, insisting on sending my pathetic rented chestnut back to exile in Albany.

“You’re having a full thirty-piece orchestra,” Bev said. “Vince Lopeman’s boys, up from the Fifth Avenue Hotel.”

He often did that, informed me of details about my family of which I had no awareness myself. How did he know which musicians were to play?

“And she has invited the Circle.” She being my mother. I could soon expect to see the twenty or thirty cousins, friends and schoolmates with whom we habitually associated.

There have been periods of my life when I never wanted to go anywhere with my family, never wanted anything to do with them; I just wanted to see my friends. Two months previous I had tried to wriggle out of the trip to Virginia City.

But now the prospect of meeting the Circle again left me feeling deeply ambivalent.

Bev and I broke out of the woodland and trotted alongside the shore of the Bowl, its blue surface showing off primrose glints of the sun. Sugary, unthreatening clouds massed in the sky.

Far off, in the fields that ran down to the lake from The Ditches, we saw a boy on one of Freddy’s Cayuse ponies. At first I thought it might be my brother, Nicky. But the figure rode so well seated that I decided it had to be a groom.

Freddy had become enamored of the Comanches a few years back, during his first tour of the West, and he purchased a remuda of the tribe’s distinctive, tough little mounts and had them brought back east, paddocking a dozen at the Berkshire house.

Everyone hated them. They were small, no more than fourteen hands, but they bit and kicked with a malevolence unmatched in horsedom. They smashed down fences like schoolboys and attempted to mount the ruck of our herd, once managing to foul a valuable broodmare.

The ponies would have been all right if they performed. But few of us could handle them. On top of it all, they looked scruffy, with shaggy three-inch coats, high withers and odd, sloping pasterns.

Left alone, they went wild.

But here was one, a pinto, ridden with blazing speed and astonishing grace, tearing along the open meadow parallel to the shore.

“What is that?” Bev asked, turning his mare to intercept the pony.

Seeing us, though, the rider altered his course, breaking toward the sparse, parklike forest above the lake.

Bev took up the challenge. We threw ourselves up the hill and into the woods. He let the mare have her head, and she crashed through the undergrowth like a banshee, thundering among the sunlit glades, getting after the pony. We galloped into a grove of beech, ducking under low boughs and dashing past tree trunks at great peril to life and limb.

The little pony was fast, and also much quicker on turns and maneuvers. It dodged effortlessly through the forest. We’d approach—or Bev would approach, since I lagged behind—and the pinto seemed to tease him, then veer suddenly away.

“If only . . . get him . . . on the stretch!” Bev shouted, huffing with effort.

He got his wish. The pony plunged abruptly downhill and emerged onto the shoreline of the lake, Bev and the mare galloping furiously in pursuit.

With a sickening jolt, I recognized the rider. The cross-dressing berdache had gotten to Bronwyn. She had taken to wearing boy’s clothes, her hair tucked up under a cap.

I only hoped Bev didn’t notice anything untoward.

We pounded on but couldn’t seem to gain on the little pinto. A furlong, then another. Along the beach, sending up ricochets of stones and sand. The Ditches appeared above us on the hill.

The pinto pulled away.

As a last insult, Bronwyn lifted herself up and sat backward on the little horse, facing us, taunting and beckoning with no diminishment of speed, until she disappeared into the woods along the shore to the north.

Bev finally halted, his vaunted Kentucky mare flecked white, stomping at the pebbled shore and taking in great wheezing gulps of air.

“What . . . the dickens . . . ? Who was that kid?”

I didn’t want to tell him. Here were all my fears and embarrassments come true.

“Whatever that was . . .” he said, still breathing as hard as his horse, “I want some.”

We led our thoroughly blown mounts uphill through the meadows toward The Ditches, the pseudo-Moroccan hulk on the ridgeline. Human figures rendered small by distance wandered about the lawns and terraces. I dreaded encountering them.

Bev couldn’t stop talking about what had just happened. He hated being beaten and kept badgering me about who had done so.

I nursed the fervent hope that Bronwyn would keep riding, into the Berkshire forests, over the mountains, out of my life. But I also experienced, so deep down it remained unconfessed, a glimmer of admiration.