Savage Girl (30 page)

Embarrassed now, Freddy sat down.

“I got him!” Nicky crowed, dashing back to his seat. “I nailed Freddy, Bronnie!”

“Tea?” said Anna Maria.

“I won’t,” said Bronwyn. “Or rather I can’t. I’m leaving.”

Anna Maria gave a sideways glance toward Freddy. “I thought we said going out wasn’t such a good idea just now,” she said. “Freddy?”

“What?”

“I won’t be back,” Bronwyn said.

“It’s just, everything is at sixes and sevens, with the newspapers,” Anna Maria said. “You know that.”

“Wait,” I said to Bronwyn. “What do you mean? What are you talking about? ‘Won’t be back’?”

“April Fools’!” said Nicky.

No. It was something else. A sick, panicked feeling crept over me.

“I guess, if you are careful and just go for the afternoon, perhaps wear a veil, it may be all right,” Anna Maria said. “What do you think, Father?”

“No,” said Bronwyn. “It’s not that.”

“April Fools’?” asked my father.

I noticed that Bronwyn’s dress was looped up to knee height and she wore what looked like Turkish slippers, as well as some sort of outlandish lacy trousers above her white stockings. Exactly like underwear, I thought, except that she was on her way out into decidedly public New York City.

Bloomers. Or, rather, to render it as it occurred in my mind,
Bloomers!

“I can’t bring this trouble down on you anymore,” Bronwyn said. “It isn’t fair.”

“Oh, dear, none of us feels that way,” Anna Maria said. “It’s not your fault. It’s those wretched journalists.”

“This is just something I’ve decided I have to do,” Bronwyn said.

“It’s all too banal, Bronnie,” Nicky said, employing his new favorite word. “Too, too banal.”

“But I don’t understand,” Anna Maria said. “You’re going?”

“She’s going, Mother,” I said. “Didn’t you hear her? She’s moving out.”

“But where will she . . . Where will you live?” a bewildered Anna Maria said. “This is your home.”

Nicky went back under the table.

It had begun to rain, a sparkling, sunlit downpour, the kind that required boots and a voluminous umbrella.

“You’ll get wet . . . Your slippers . . .” Anna Maria had tears forming in her eyes, we could all see them. Bronwyn stepped up to her and laid her hand against my mother’s cheek.

“Well, it may be for the best,” said Freddy gloomily, rising to his feet again.

“Oh, Friedrich!” Anna Maria said, blubbering now, clutching Bronwyn’s hand and pressing it to her lips.

Freddy said, “This episode, this thing that has taken us all over, it must come to an end.”

“But where will you go?” Anna Maria repeated.

“I’ll be perfectly all right,” Bronwyn soothed.

“Answer her!” I cried.

“I know two ladies who want to take me in. Very elegant, very civilized ladies.”

“Who?” I demanded. “Who is bringing you away from us?”

“You know very well, Hugo,” said Bronwyn. “Since you and Colm saw me with them last night.”

Anna Maria: “What? What? What is going on?”

“Victoria Woodhull,” I said.

“Oh, my Lord,” said Anna Maria, seeing fresh disaster looming.

“Running for president when she can’t even vote,” Freddy sneered. “That makes a lot of sense.”

“Don’t forget her charming radical sister,” I said. “The one who advocates legalized prostitution.”

“Hugo!” wailed Anna Maria.

“April Fools’, April Fools’,” Nicky said weakly. Bronwyn dragged him out from under the table and hugged him.

“Tami,”
she whispered to him. Comanche for “younger brother.”

“Patsi,”
he said back to her. Older sister. Then he dove back under the table so the rest of us couldn’t read his distress. He began kicking methodically at the table leg.

“It’s better for you all if I go,” Bronwyn said. Approaching Freddy, who tried to turn away, she seized his arm and kissed his cheek.

“I’ll always remember what you did for me,” she whispered to him. His eyes brimmed with emotion.

Bronwyn walked out of the dining room and down the stairs that led to the front door, her train flowing over each step like a waterfall. Anna Maria and I pursued her, my mother holding the girl’s hand and promising her that things would change if only she were to reconsider.

In the stairhall, Bronwyn kissed my mother. I pitied Anna Maria. She had opened her heart to the girl and had gotten so little in return. Now this. A second daughter was deserting her just as the first one had.

Nicky came plunging down the stairs after Bronwyn. She ruffled his hair.

“Tell Tahktoo and Tu-Li that I will see them soon,” she said.

She reached out her hand to me. But I kept my mine at my side, saying only, “You have no bags.”

“I have everything I need,” she said.

24

And then, disaster.

It rolled up on us slowly. Or at least it did on me. Freddy and Anna Maria knew all along what was happening, like a giant wave they saw far out in the ocean, coming closer, rising, rising, until it towered over them and they realized it was going to crash.

There could have been signs that I didn’t notice, mired as I was in a brown study, my thoughts poisonous and morose. I embarked upon a project to draw a complete human musculature, after Vesalius.

At one time in the not-too-remote past, Andreas Vesalius had been my god. He was the founding genius of anatomical art. A sixteenth-century Flemish physician based in Brussels, he published in 1543
De humani corporis fabrica
(
On the Fabric of the Human Body
). The book exploded like a thunderclap in the storm of ideas that was the Northern Renaissance.

Vesalius did the dissections, but no one was precisely sure who drew the brilliant, shattering, diabolical illustrations. Most definitely a student in the studio of Titian, probably a Dutch painter and draftsman named Jan Stephan van Calcar. Here in these superb anatomical drawings was the human being demystified, man as meat, man as animal.

Vesalius gave us human muscles, bones, organs. He did not manage to picture the human soul. He peered into the heart of man and found . . . muck. Blood, sinew, tissue.

It is possible the heresy of humanism was born with the publication of
De humani corporis.
Certainly the drawings furthered the radical idea that man was the proper study of man—not God, not theology, not the divine.
Sanguino ergo sum.
I bleed, therefore I am.

Freddy had given me an eighteenth-century copy of the Vesalius when I was fourteen, and I don’t think I ever recovered. In those early days of April, with Bronwyn abandoning us, I returned to Vesalius as to an old friend.

At first, sitting at my drafting table, I thought the rising ruckus outside The Citadel was more Wild Child of the Washoe nonsense. The crowds seemed larger, more vocal, angrier. But I was locked in my study trying to get a rectus abdominis right, and locked also in the misery of my own mind. I tried to ignore what I considered petty distractions.

Until the crowd started to toss bricks at our windows. By the fourth of April, things came to a head. I ventured out of my study to find the house in an uproar.

“What on earth is going on?” I asked Randall, who merely ran past me down the hall without bothering to answer.

I proceeded downstairs and encountered a struggling crew of servants trying to board up a smashed window in the front parlor. Venturing to the entrance hall, I surveyed the crowd in the street outside.

A moblike clot of laborers, with a scattering of gentlemen among them, completely blocked Fifth Avenue. Mounted police officers forced the mob to the sidewalks, but the rabble reasserted its blockade as soon as the horses passed. A man in a slouch hat roused the crowd, screaming that my father was a crook. Another man ran, pursued by a cop with a cudgel.

What new nastiness could this be? Whereas the Wild Child crowds ran on vicarious urges, the current mob seemed downright threatening. A bolt of fear ran through me, and I withdrew from the front hall and went looking for Freddy for an explanation.

I found him, Anna Maria, Tu-Li and the berdache assembled in the aviary, along with a small clutch of servants. It was as far as we could get from the madness at the front of the house.

“Hugo, old man,” Freddy said. “I’m glad we could pry you out from your anatomical studies.”

“That riot in the street isn’t about Bronwyn,” I said.

“I’m afraid not,” Freddy said.

“Sit down, dear,” Anna Maria said.

“What’s going on?”

“Well, you’ve been rather holed up the last few days,” Freddy said. “There’ve been developments.”

“Developments about what?” I asked. “Is Bronwyn all right?”

“We know you’ve been upset,” Anna Maria said. “We’ve all been heartbroken.”

“This isn’t about your sister,” Freddy said. “At least not directly.”

“For pity’s sake!” I said.

One of the servants, a houseboy named Georgie, addressed Freddy—an unlikely occurrence that indicated incipient chaos in the household. “You sent young Master Nicholas away, sir,” he said.

Then Annie, the kitchen girl, said to Anna Maria: “We’re afraid for ourselves, madam.” The mood in the room veered toward open rebellion.

“Please, let Master Friedrich speak,” Winston said.

“No one needs panic,” Freddy said, raising his voice in a bid to gain control. “We are perfectly safe. We did send Nicholas away to his cousin’s, merely as a precaution. I have contracted with a force of Pinkertons, who should be here shortly to clear the loiterers from in front of our door.”

“But why are they out there?” I was practically shouting. “I have to know—has something happened to Bronwyn?”

“She is all right, for all we know,” Anna Maria said. “Tu-Li has seen her.”

“She prospers,” Tu-Li said, a comment, in the present heightened circumstances, that seemed oddly out of place. She prospers?

“I am sorry to say I have not been completely forthcoming with you,” Freddy said. “I thought I could remedy the situation and all would be well. But lately it has deteriorated past remedying.”

He laid out the whole sick story then, a tangled tale of financial sleight of hand and attempted monopoly that I had to believe few in the room could fully understand.

Events had gone on right under my nose that had ruined us.

During our trip to the Comstock the previous summer, when I
thought Freddy was consolidating the family’s mining interests, he was in reality engaged in a highly risky conspiracy to game the world silver market.

Working in alliance with Michael Hart-Bentley, Oliver Stringfist, Stanley Beales and Dixon Kelly, the same moguls with whom I had shared breakfast in Virginia City, Freddy had concocted a scheme that worked like this: His combine sought to buy up as much silver and as many silver contracts as it could. Some of these were newfangled financial instruments called “forward contracts,” meaning they bought the right to buy silver in the future at a prescribed price.

It was all done at a very high level, with the collusion of the Chicago Board of Trade. Normally such forward contracts dealt in grains—wheat, corn, barley, rye and oats—seeking to smooth out volatility in the markets. Freddy’s group sought to do the same with silver and come out ahead in so doing.

They made an audacious attempt, in other words, to corner the market and develop a monopoly on the supply of the precious metal throughout the world. By withholding their stockpile, they would drive up the price, enriching themselves to an impossible degree.

Incredible as it might seem, the insane maneuver very nearly worked. By the winter of 1875–76, the Stringfist-Delegate cabal had managed to gain control of an astonishing sixty percent of the world’s liquid reserves of silver, some 500 million dollars’ worth. All the fat moguls had to do then was sit on their pile and gloat, watching prices spiral up, the market firmly squeezed between the jaws of supply and demand.

Freddy didn’t bother to lay this all out during that talk in the aviary. He merely sketched the broad outlines. Later on, digging into the details myself, I learned the outlandish scope of the plan. And I realized that I had never really understood my father.

As much as Freddy gloried in his status as a dilettante, a dabbler in a green satin vest, inwardly he seethed. He was seen as the man without a job, who didn’t have to work, who collected butterflies and birds of prey and odd, comical people. His brother, Sonny, was the serious Delegate, the successful one, the famous one.

How my father must have grown sick of that endless refrain. In death, Sonny’s reputation grew ever more resplendent.

The silver fandango, I realized, was Freddy’s attempt to assert his own primacy. In a single stroke, he would double the family fortune and be hailed as a financial genius who ranked alongside his famous brother.

Instead he lost it all.

Halfway around the globe, an unforeseen event occurred, a historical happenstance that even Oliver Stringfist could not control.

It was actually more a chain of events. The French had been beaten badly in the Franco-Prussian War. The victors forced the vanquished to pay an indemnity. France transferred to Germany a huge portion of its national gold reserves, which had been piling up in French coffers since the time of Louis XIV. Otto von Bismarck, the German minister, in receipt of all this incredible wealth, decided his country would much rather use French gold to mint its ubiquitous thaler coins, rather than American silver.

Suddenly, in early spring 1876, Friedrich Delegate and company saw silver prices heading downward, rather than upward as they had planned. The end came surprisingly quick. Their bet went sour. Forced to make good on their forward contracts at set prices that now lost them millions, each of the five men involved went bankrupt. They witnessed their personal fortunes sucked away by the voracious demands of the market.

Freddy turned aside that day in the aviary, away from the crowd of servants, putting his forehead against mine, hugging me with forlorn desperation.

“I wish I could tell you that I gave all your money to the poor,” he said.

“How much?” I asked, a strangled whisper. “How much did you lose?”

I never actually heard him say it, but it didn’t matter, because the word would be out on the street soon enough.

A number: 60 million.

Sixty million dollars, the whole Delegate family fortune, vanished, like one of those streams out west that don’t end in the ocean but wind
up just draining into the sand of the desert. Swoony’s fortune remained relatively intact, but it was just a matter of time until that, too, would be fed into the maw of the banks.

The swindle’s failure led to a widespread financial collapse, which led to a panic, which led to an even more widespread financial collapse. The men in the street outside The Citadel had been put out of work by the greedy folly of Freddy and his friends.

My father turned back to the household servants. “I’m afraid we shall have to let some of you go,” he said. “And for the others, it might be newly difficult for us to appear in public for the next few days.”

The threat of retributive violence loomed. If the promised Pinkertons did not arrive, the situation might become dire. He was sorry, he said, to put us all into an unpleasant fix. Better days would come.

The deflated servants shuffled out, more stunned than angry. We heard them burst into dismayed chatter as soon as they were out of sight.

“So we’re poor,” I said when they had left.

“No, no, not poor,” Anna Maria said.

“We are no longer rich,” my father said simply.

A sequential catastrophe descended upon us during the month of April, a stunning succession of blows that sent us all reeling. I would think, Well, now, that’s the worst of it, only to wake the next day and find new torment in store.

The Ditches, mortgaged, foreclosed, sold to a Vanderbilt scion. Our Fifth Avenue residence, mortgaged, foreclosed, to be sold or rented out by the bank. We would be able to find refuge right next door at Swoony’s, but still, the displacement rankled.

The poison at the tip of the barb was Bronwyn. I could not help but think of her as the evil angel of our misfortune, at that very moment rejoicing somewhere in the completeness of our disaster. She had spurned us and now stood with her loathsome new friends, glorying in the Delegate decline and fall.

Yes, she prospered, as Tu-Li had said. Despite my self-imposed hermitage, I read the popular press, obsessively tracking down every tidbit of information on my dear departed sister.

Her scandal and Freddy’s own rolled themselves up into a single ball of dung, smeared across the pages of every newspaper in town. The Wild Mogul of the Washoe joined the Wild Child as a figure of universal derision.

I witnessed Bronwyn leveraging her infamy to higher and higher levels of celebrity. Competing stories cropped up in competing papers. She would appear on the stage, it was announced. No, she would not. Queen Victoria wished to meet her. The queen did not wish it, being unamused. She walked the streets of the Tenderloin, offering her favors. She walked the streets, but with Tennessee Claflin and her people, extending charity to fallen women.