Savage Girl (15 page)

•   •   •

I needn’t have worried. As nervous as I was about the unsuitability of Bronwyn to society, my parents were more so. They carefully segregated the family from the Circle, leaving me and my friends to drawing rooms, garden terraces or beaches of our own.

That afternoon the inevitable archery competition among the young ladies. The sport held attraction by allowing for athleticism without exertion.

“Take a wager, you bounder,” Bev said to my cousin Willie. Since the latter was enamored of Camilla Tracy, and Camilla did not know an arrow’s blade from its shaft, Bev saw a mark.

“I’ve been burned before,” Willie said, refusing the bet.

Chattering and laughing, the troupe of girls trailed lazily over the terraced lawn, quivers scattered on the ground. Each archer, all twelve or so of them, wore a shade of white—cream, frost or eggshell—each one dripped with lace, and each had styled her hair in some kind of
complicated braided effect. They wore leather bracers on their arms and brandished regulation-size longbows, shoulder height.

Delia, the sun in her eyes, appeared in a high-necked white dress with an outlandishly pert bustle.

“The Amazons, you know, sliced off their breasts to make it easier to draw a bow,” Bev said.

“You’re irredeemable,” Delia said.

“He’s made the same remark at every archery match he’s ever been to,” said Chippy Wilson.

“And no one ever takes me up on it,” Bev said. “You’d think in the spirit of competition, something could be done.”

Harriet Smith-Croft sent a first arrow to the straw-filled target with a solid
thwock.

“Who was it beat you two so roundly at the race along the shore?” asked Delia. “That pony didn’t look healthy enough to stand, much less gallop.”

The
thwocks
began to come in bunches, punctuating the conversation.

Archery represented only one element in the required armamentarium of every marriageable young woman. Piano. Watercolors. French. Perfect crewelwork. The quadrille, the waltz, the two-step. And
thwock
ing a straw-stuffed pasteboard target with a an arrow made of white cedar.

“Hugo refuses to divulge who the demon rider was,” Chippy said.

“Twenty on my lady’s next shot to hit the bull’s-eye,” I said to Bev.

“All right,” he said.

Delia bent her head coquettishly, nocked her arrow and let it fly. Dead center at twenty yards.

“You dog,” Bev said. “As if you need the filthy money.”

Above us, on a walled terrace faced with Moorish stucco, the family played at its own little archery contest. With a shock I recognized Bronwyn among them.

She appeared swallowed up in her lace, her hem dragging and her sleeves too long. Wisps of her hair fell along the sides of her face. If she saw me there down below her, she didn’t show it. She had a short bow in her hands and unleashed an arrow.

Huzzahs from the family terrace.

With a creeping sense of dread, I saw Bronwyn draw her bow again, shoot again, draw applause again. Her makeshift target, the U-shaped handle grip of a shovel dug into the earth at thirty yards. Her arrow passed cleanly through and embedded itself in the turf beyond. More huzzahs.

I realized that James and David Bliss had drifted out from the Circle’s orbit, scaled the stone steps to the upper terrace and joined the family group. Davey made himself responsible for moving back the target, taking it up, pacing off ten yards, digging the shovel in again farther from where Bronwyn stood.

Well, yes, I thought. Horsemanship and archery. Comanche virtues. Of course. But have the damned Savage Girl face off with Delia Showalter at the cotillion and we’d see whose claws were longer.

From forty yards Bronwyn put another arrow through the palm-size space of the shovel handle. Louder applause now.

The Circle girls continued to
thwock
tirelessly away.

As I had in Chicago, I witnessed again the surprising attraction Bronwyn held for men. Chippy Wilson clambered up the terrace wall to join James Bliss beside her. James reached over to furnish her with an arrow as his brother moved back the target shovel ten yards.

“Who might that be?” Bev said, low-voiced, at my shoulder.

I had been prepared for this. Somewhat. Anna Maria and Freddy and I had talked it over.

“We decided we would introduce our dear young Bronwyn as a cousin,” Anna Maria had said. “From the West.”

“Not a lie, really,” Freddy said. “In the sense that humankind is one big family and all men are cousins.”

But the word “cousin” stuck in my throat. “Does the creature have a name?” Jones Abercrombie asked.

“More to the point,” Bev asked, “is she out?” As in presented to society.

“For Chrissakes,” I said. “She’s just a child.”

Up top, Bronwyn put her shot on target once again. Astonished laughter and cheers.

Delia approached the distracted members of her once attentive audience. “What’s going on up there?” she asked.

•   •   •

Anna Maria had been organizing balls all my life, ginning up extravagant dances at the merest hint of opportunity. The Christmas Ball. The St. Valentine’s Ball. The War Victory Ball. The Ball of Antiquity, a fancy-dress masquerade with a requirement of togas for the men and chitons for the ladies. The Any Old Occasion Will Do Ball.

She danced well herself, of course, and always hired the best orchestras. I can see her even now, train looped up to her wrist, smiling with genuine pleasure. As opposed to some other ladies, who maintained thin-lipped paralysis even as they waltzed. Dancing brought out the young girl in her.

As a youth I attended Madame Eugénie’s dance academy, the only socially acceptable school in Manhattan for such purposes, running through the steps alongside Bev and Harriet and James and David and Camilla. But I actually learned to dance from Anna Maria. All except for the still-somewhat-scandalous waltz, of course. For that I was on my own.

At the Midsummer Night’s Ball, Anna Maria lit the ballroom at The Ditches with low candles on the tables and placed sprays of wild roses and carnations and lilies of the valley in bowls on every side.

As a novelty the immense twenty-foot door panels at either end of the room were opened to the night, with a few of our boys posted at each with feather fans, Moroccan style, to bat away the insects. The breeze off the Bowl swept up the hill, cool and lake-scented.

The strains of the orchestra came up. Delia Showalter looked more beautiful than I had ever known her to be. My mind emptied of all other women but her.

I had made Freddy promise to exile anyone underage to the hinterlands of the second floor and to keep the adults well in the background. Unspoken but understood, the idea that Tu-Li and the berdache would occupy themselves elsewhere as well.

“Nicky will just have to stay away,” I said. My annoying brother.

“Haven’t you noticed?” Anna Maria asked. “Nicky is entirely besotted with Bronwyn. Follows her around like a puppy. I think he’s almost as impressed with her as he is with Tahktoo.”

I
had
noticed, actually. I had seen him toting the girl’s hairbrush for her as though he were a royal page, trotting along behind Bronwyn, looking on while Tu-Li arranged her coiffure in the upstairs boudoir.

Savage Girl had once again descended into mutism, her verbal forays limited to occasional, unexpected phrases directed at a few select personages. She never spoke to me, for example. She barely looked at me. She ignored me.

At our midsummer ball, the gentlemen wore white tie. The ladies skimmed the floor atop their crinoline clouds, all milk-white skin and dimpled wrists, their gleaming hair pulled back to fall in fat tendrils down the napes of their necks.

Perhaps I had been reading medical journals too avidly, but the sight of the women’s impossibly slim waists was slightly marred for me by a recent article on the “calculable harm” that overtight bone corsets wrought upon the internal organs. I felt as though I could circle my hands around Delia’s midsection and have my fingers meet.

Harriet Smith-Croft, on Bev’s arm, wore rose taffeta with chantilly flouncing, while Caroline Howland, with Jones Abercrombie, was in black net over white gauze. Delia, with me, looked exquisite, a lily in her dark-blond hair, her apple-green dress exposing her shoulders, the powder-pale expanse of flesh accentuated by a choker of her mother’s diamonds.

“Will you do me the honor?” I asked Delia as the first waltz began. We both smiled at the formality. We had danced with each other our whole lives.

I saw Anna Maria sitting at one of the small tables to the side of the orchestra, glowing beneath her tiara, making sure that everything was going well before taking to the floor herself. She waved her fingers at me and smiled.

Later on, far past midnight, I left the ball to pad down the endless carpeted hallways of the first floor, past the condemning portraits of Sonny and Grandfather (
What are you doing with your life?
), the sound
of violins dying behind me. On either side of me stretched drawing rooms.

I had once commented to Freddy that The Ditches was one big drawing room. We had a series of interconnected ones on the ground floor, several more on the second level. They ran to themes: Alhambric style, Pompeian style, the Raj, a Roman one featuring bronze statuettes designated
Seedtime
and
Harvest.
Eight in all downstairs, too many for any reasonable utility.

“But more opportunity for assignations,” said Freddy, arching his brow significantly.

That early morning, with the dancing still going on in the ballroom, I proceeded alone along the downstairs hall. Passing the seventh drawing room of the eight, I heard a crash. Then giggles, then shushing. I leaned through the open door and saw only dim shapes. Then, as my eyes adjusted, I could see my little brother, Nicky, brushing off his dark suit. He didn’t notice me.

Next to him stood Bronwyn, appearing only as a small, narrow-framed girl, a little taller than Nick was, her thick black locks set off by the sky blue of her demure muslin gown. I could see the points of her white slippers peep out beneath her white silk slip.

The moon came in the window and cast a light on them. Nicky said, “Now, try again.” She put her white-gloved hand on his shoulder, he put his hand on her waist, and they began their own cotillion there in the dark.

•   •   •

It was around this time the third murder was committed, although I did not discover it nor link it with the others until long afterward. One of our grooms, Graham Barton, disappeared from The Ditches without explanation. We thought, for various reasons indicated by his recent behavior, that he had simply left our employ. He had no family and had been talking a lot of late about the gold fields of the West.

Barton was a good man, a strong, strapping laborer of twenty with a great muscular build. He helped Bronwyn with Freddy’s Comanche ponies. I had stumbled upon the two of them grooming the beasts one
early morning, Bronwyn smiling gaily as she wielded the curry brush. Bronwyn, who never smiled at me.

I suddenly discovered myself upbraiding the fellow for his familiarity. Such strange impulses seized me at times. The girl, wordless as usual, flashed her eyes at me and stalked away.

Later, months later, that following winter, when Graham Barton’s body was discovered by a local hunter in the muck of a little pond near the Bowl, animal predation had done its work. The mutilated corpus remained unidentified, unmourned and uninvestigated, buried in a potter’s grave until Freddy and Anna Maria had it retrieved, a half year after the poor man’s demise.

12

Even with the midsummer gala over and the celebrants gone, being at The Ditches wore on my frayed nerves. During the remaining days of summer, there would be more dances, more calls from neighbors, more staying-over guests fleeing the New York heat. More opportunities, in other words, for Bronwyn to misbehave and for what I had come to see as a reckless experiment on the part of my parents to end in disaster.

The year before this, I had refused for health reasons the annual invitation by the Bliss brothers and their friends for an Adirondack wilderness sojourn. They took one every August, a time, Davey Bliss said, “to go stark raving wild.” We would depart the circus of civilization. Penetrate the northland wilderness by canoe. Live on the fish we caught, the game we shot, the blueberries we harvested.

I wasn’t quite sure I was up for it this year either, but I surely did not want to sit around The Ditches. Since the ball, Bev Willets had given every indication of becoming a pestering presence. He was like an animal who scented blood. Who was this new ward of my parents? What was her background? Could I do him the favor of tracing her Delegate cousinage?

Delia also seemed rather too much interested in the mysterious newcomer to the family circle.

So I went north with Jimmy and Davey Bliss.

Our entry into the Adirondacks, a first toe-dip into the wild before the full-on plunge, occurred at Paul Smith’s Camp, the celebrated lodge on St. Regis Lake. An Erie Canal boatman, Smith had settled in the region a decade before with a rough-and-tumble bunkhouse,
leasing canoes to athletic millionaires and their sons. Now he was a rich man, with thousands of acres to his name. You could drink whiskey and consume broiled foie gras in his lodge’s main dining room while gazing out upon the soaring conifers and believe yourself a changed man.

Smith’s was as far as many rugged outdoorsmen got. We planned to go farther. Outfitted with three canoes, five of us—the Bliss brothers, Bev’s cousin Trip Willets, myself and an Algonquin guide named Johnnie Fishhawk—embarked on the first of August, a Sabbath Sunday, determined to leave all civilized constraints behind and worship at the true altar of nature.

I felt my gloom lift and my neurasthenia lessen as soon as we departed Smith’s. Previous to this I had sometimes considered the wilderness to be too much of a physical challenge for me. But the paddle felt right in my hands, and digging it into the blue waters of the lake made my musculature come alive.

We camped that night on a deserted shoreline island. Johnnie Fishhawk made what he called a “white man’s fire,” a huge bonfire blaze. I felt shy at first but eventually joined the others in swimming au naturel. I ate with a relish I hadn’t experienced since childhood.

Around the fire that night, Jimmy Bliss quoted Thoreau: “How near to good is what is wild!”

Davey said, “Does that mean ‘near to good,’ as in not quite good, and flawed?”

Trip Willets: “Or does it mean ‘near to good,’ as in sitting at the right hand of God in heaven?”

Thus our meandering and quite fatuous philosophical dialogues. Crude or not, everything, including conversation, felt truer in the outdoors. In camp we spent more time out of our clothes than in them, slathering our bodies with mud, as the beasts do, whenever the flies bothered us.

I had not a thought of The Ditches, I had not a thought of Manhattan, I had not a thought of Harvard, no thought of her nor anyone else.

Two weeks out I took a canoe, some flour, a little bacon grease and a packet of salt and pushed alone up Stony Creek and Raquette River
to the falls. Fishing, paddling, camping, huddling in the lee of trees as magnificent storms blew through the mountains. I didn’t hunt, not wanting the percussion of gunfire to desecrate the silence. I lived an animal existence.

I don’t know why this kind of life appealed to me at precisely this time, when it only intermittently had before, but getting away from my family, at least, suited me well. Over the thundering cascade, at night, the aurora spangled the sky with ghostly green hallucinations and wolves called to each other far off in the cedar cathedrals of the forest.

No fear, my lupine brothers engendered in me no fear. Why should they, since with my bronzed body, my mud-slathered hide, the hawk feathers woven into my hair, I was at one with them? Besides, I had my rifle and my campfire.

I recalled Freddy’s full-throated lupine yowl at Dr. Scott’s and attempted to replicate it. I must have done a poor job, since the pack refused to answer me back.

•   •   •

Then, in September, Harvard.

It should have been a jolting reentry into civilization, but it proved not to be. I stopped off at The Ditches on my way to Boston, wandering the immense home’s servantless halls like a revenant. Nothing renders a mansion more ridiculous than emptiness. The family had closed the Berkshire cottage for the season, decamping for the far northern climes of Canada, to our chalet at La Malbaie along the St. Lawrence. Bronwyn went with them.

With the legal cloud over him successfully dispersed, Colm Cullen met me in Boston, taking great delight in squiring me around his youthful stomping grounds. We set ourselves up in Cambridge, renting a floor of rooms at Mrs. Morgan’s on Brattle Street. I took to punch and billiards at the Porcellian Club and generally slipped back into dear old homely Harvard as into a well-worn suit of clothes. A simple student once more.

Or so it seemed to me. My school chums kept remarking how
changed I was. “Why, Delegate, you’ve come quite near to health,” the Roosevelt boy exclaimed to me, Teddy, a face full of grinning teeth.

“The Adirondacks,” I said.

He brayed out a laugh. “Keep it up, old man! Up!”

A backlog of Anna Maria’s chatty letters waited for me, some from Canada, some from the city. Hickory, our bull terrier, exiled to the country on account of trouble between the purebred beast and Bronwyn. Bronwyn herself, taken up by a trio of ministers from Grace Church on lower Broadway.

“They are very excited by the tattered Bible she possesses,” Anna Maria wrote. “It lacks the New Testament, so Pastor Webb, in particular, pronounces her to be in a state of prelapsarian innocence, ripe for the redeeming power of the Word. There’s good news, he tells her, and she repeats the Gospels after him.”

While at school I more and more avoided my friends to spend time with Colm. We practiced the art of knife throwing together, using a stump in Mrs. Morgan’s yard. He acted as my guide and protector on late-evening jaunts to the brothels and jilt joints of Ann Street, also known as “the Black Sea,” Boston’s harborside district and the one perhaps the farthest, in all senses, from Harvard Yard.

Not that we did not, often enough, encounter university students in the streets of the Black Sea who had traveled just as far as we had. But if I ever tried out academic discourse on my Irish friend, he would shake his head.

“I’ll leave such matters to you, young master,” Colm would say. “I ain’t one for the impracticalities.”

Acting nearer to that intellectual role, my mentor in the field of anatomy at Harvard, Dr. James. I would say that William James was the man I most admired outside of my father, though my admiration for Freddy waxed and waned with the moon, depending on his latest antics.

“I’ve noticed a marked distraction in your focus lately,” Dr. James said to me one afternoon we spent at the dissection table.

He was perhaps more observant than my peers. They all thought I was the picture of health.

After returning from the wilderness, settling in for a term at school, I had slowly come to detect an increasing inner restlessness. I couldn’t quite put my finger on the reason, but something felt amiss. An impatience with my studies. Not anatomy, no, but others, natural history, rhetoric. Then I noticed, sitting over my books, that my hands had begun to shake.

At the medical-school lab on Grove Street, Professor James and I worked on an unusual specimen delivered to him by Boston City Hospital, a teratoma taken from the uterus of a charity patient.

“Is anything off the beam with you?” he asked.

“No, no, I am perfectly happy,” I said. “Well, no one is perfectly happy, but I am near to it.”

He emitted a
hmmn
and went at the tumor with a set of dental picks. A teratoma is an odd little thing, one of the ghastliest growths known to man, a blood-infused ball the size of a child’s fist, made up entirely of teeth and hair.

The two of us each wore a pair of ocular devices, inventions of mine that Dr. James commended very highly and adopted at once, high-power magnifying lenses set into eyeglass frames and designed to be worn for dissection and surgery.

In fact, James tended to praise me often, perhaps too much for my equilibrium, since I admired the man so fervently. He liked my anatomical drawings.

“These are very good,” he said when I presented some of the sketches I had done on the train ride across the continent. “Would you like me to speak to a publisher about them?”

Concentrating on the clot in front of us, we teased out its layers, peeling them back like the leaves of some rank, diminutive cabbage, flaying the epithelial tissues one after another. By an effort of will, I steadied my hands. It was fine work, but gross in the fastidious sense of the word, since the thing smelled foul enough to strip paint.

“Hair and teeth,” James murmured. “The human irreducibles, sex and death.”

I tried to understand what he meant. Hair, the alluring, and teeth, the slashing bloodletters.

“Except by fire, human hair is nearly indestructible,” he said. Except by fire. Meaning: anger. The only force capable of destroying love.

“So love wins out,” I said, speaking broadly. “Over violence, I mean.”

“Oh, teeth, teeth last forever, too,” he said. “Who has not felt the urge to tear and rip and maim? Do you know your Hindoo deities? Shiva, the Destroyer?”

I quoted a tidbit of Emerson: “If the red slayer think he slays, / Or if the slain think he is slain, / They know not well the subtle ways / I keep, and pass, and turn again.”

He raised his head and beamed a smile at me, his eyes swimming behind the lenses.

I first encountered Professor James two years before, when he acted as my instructor in physiology. I took to him at once, and he, I thought, to me. I saw in him a like-minded figure, an intellectual, but one who felt emotions perhaps too deeply.

This year he had invited me to participate in a small, informal practical-anatomy curriculum, a course that often consisted of just the two of us, wearing our eyeglasses, cutting and prying, picking and exposing. Close work. The mere sounds made by a dissection—gelatinous, mucky, moist—have been known to send some people into a faint.

James kept a middle part to his hair and wore a pointed, well-clipped beard that made him look rather more Bohemian than less. His necktie, a striped creation that he let droop beyond his collar, would have elicited a laugh from Bev Willets, but though I didn’t take up the style myself, it looked rather dashing on him. His face retained its youth (he was thirty-three that year) and normally wore a kind, soft expression.

“I wonder, Dr. James,” I said after passing a silent moment working at the mass, “if the study of a wild child has any benefit for the furtherance of science.”

“A wild child? You mean feral, one supposedly raised by animals?”

“Such as the Wild Girl of Songi or Victor of Aveyron,” I said.

“Mostly hoaxes, I would have thought, though I haven’t made any concerted study of them myself.”

“But if we could posit the existence of such a creature, verifiable and genuine, would not the field of natural science be the better for a thorough investigation?”

“Certainly,” he said. “However, these figures are almost always ruses, sideshow-carnival types of things, tricked up to inflame the popular imagination.”

He stopped, propping his examination glasses on his forehead, making himself resemble some four-eyed beast. “I was assuming your query to be hypothetical, but perhaps not.”

I was silent, bending to the work.

“Male or female?”

Again I refrained from answering, embarrassed that I had opened the subject with him.