Savage Girl (31 page)

Later the night of Freddy’s confession, I found a small group of our not-yet-let-go male servants gathered in the back courtyard, near the stables. Several of them, Cheevil and the Laughton brothers, gave me black looks and stalked aggressively away as I approached. But Paul the doorman remained, a half-empty whiskey bottle in his hand, a surly, deal-with-me-if-you-dare expression on his face.

I said not a word at first, just stood there in the horse-smelling dark, and eventually Paul said, “I guess you’s just as worse off as us,” and passed me the bottle. We proceeded to descend together into a blotted-out sea of alcoholic oblivion. When we tossed his empty bottle on the manure heap, I ventured back into the house and got another.

There can be a grim joy in drinking alongside a serious drunk. It is a mutual test of wills, a comparison of two men’s concept of the color black. At first we nursed our parallel angers, imbibing in seething, silent rage. Later our twin furies appeared to merge.

People often misinterpreted my silence as an invitation to speak. Paul began to mutter, a stream of words so filthy that I marveled as each one came out of his mouth. I only gradually became aware of whom he talked about.

“Like attracts like. The fallen moves among the fallen. Why do you think she works with hoors? Because she’s one of them! I don’t have to know it. The whole town is talking about it. She mixes with light women—she’s one of the lightest.”

He was speaking of Bronwyn, speaking as no servant should ever
speak of one of the family, nor one human being of another. I should have stopped him right there but found a stinging comfort in hearing my darkest thoughts pronounced out loud.

“Every night a different man. She don’t
welcome
advances, she
makes
advances. You seen her walk. Right there, that’s an invitation. She’s got a come-on smile, don’t she?”

“Yes,” I said, only it came out “Yush.” Self-pitying, I considered that Bronwyn never smiled at me.

“You need to bring her to heel, young master. It ain’t proper, the way she lords it over us. You look in the Bible, a woman is a tool of man. Oh, she’s a girl that can gull you. She’s gulled all the family, I know that. Pretty Bronwyn, dear Bronwyn—what a laugh. You ain’t to blame. The whole world got taken in. But here’s the thing: She’s poison.”

That rang a bell. “What did you say?”

“I said, she’s poison. P-o-s-e-n—I don’t know how you spell it, but you know what I mean.”

Paranoia flooded in. I grasped Paul’s lapels drunkenly. “She used to say that. She herself said she was poison. Did she put you up to this? She wants you to warn me off her?”

“What? I’m just trying to tell you. Don’t you see? She hoodwinked all of us. Everything she wanted has come to pass. She didn’t like the dog Hickory, Hickory is gone. All girls’d love a rich wardrobe, she’s sitting on silk. She wanted to come out grand, she’s come out grand. She controls your parents and young Master Nicholas. She’s evil, I tell you.”

He muttered and cursed all the way through the second bottle.

The next morning at breakfast—or, really, the next hungover noon at tea—I encountered a harried-looking Anna Maria.

“We have to fire Paul,” I said.

“Oh, you poor dear,” Anna Maria said. “We have to fire them all.”

•   •   •

Now everything went dark. With Bronwyn gone amid the roiling uncertainty about our family future, I withdrew into my room, alternately lying paralyzed in bed or obsessively cataloging and
recataloging my anatomical specimens. I was like a moth with no flame, my life an emotional wilderness, a desert, really, the type of psychic landscape one crosses slowly and painfully.

It didn’t help that I was abandoned, just at that moment, by two friends and allies, Tu-Li and the berdache. Our estrangement might have been partially my doing, but still it stung. I went to them in the midst of our family uproar and carefully enumerated my suspicions that Bronwyn might in some way be connected to nefarious crimes.

“Too many circumstances have come together for me to think the girl is entirely innocent,” I said, trying to be mild and less sensationalistic at least than the newspapers.

We were in their drawing room in the South Wing. In preparation for our move out of The Citadel, the space had been almost stripped clean of furnishings. But I got the impression that as long as the two of them had their gambling tiles, it wouldn’t matter what else was taken from them.

“You now believe Bronwyn is a criminal?” Tahktoo asked. Not incredulous, really, more stony-faced. “I’ve seen you oftentimes stupid, Hugo, but never mean.”

“You hate her, like the rest of them do?” Tu-Li asked, gesturing outside the window, to Fifth Avenue, New York, the world. “She who is only faultless?”

I could tell this wasn’t going to be easy. I was saying Bronwyn might be crazy, and clearly they were thinking that
I
was. Was I being so unreasonable? Bodies were piling up as if on a battleground. Someone had to do something. I tried to convince them.

“Young master,” Tu-Li finally said, “you are wrong, and wrong in such a way that until you leave this folly behind, it is going to be difficult for me to look at you again.”

“Or remain in the same room with you,” the berdache said.

And with that they both rose solemnly from their game, leaving the ivory tiles scattered on the floor, and walked out.

“Wait,” I said, trailing them into the hall.

But they wouldn’t wait, and when I caught up to them, they looked at me without seeing, two faces each closed like a door.

They left The Citadel that day, never to return. Anna Maria was inconsolable. First Bronwyn, now Tu-Li and the berdache. All her pets. The South Wing stood in rebellion against the North Wing, and the divided house could not stand.

The betrayal was so complete, so bitter, that I cast about for additional explanations. It could not be wholly my fault. Bronwyn, Tu-Li and the berdache had left because the scandal burned too hot. Or because the family had lost its wealth. Maybe they knew something they didn’t want to tell. They were the petty ones, not me.

By the third week in April, our move from the residence began in earnest. Whenever I emerged from my room, I would encounter strange groups of men in shirtsleeves and arm garters, watched over by the still-faithful Winston. They carted away pieces of furniture, examined the premises, measured the rooms with tape measures.

Creditors. Our collapse was complete.

We opened the communicating hallway between our house and Swoony’s to the north, transferring our much-diminished possessions in a sad parade.

Swoony’s place was the twin of ours, with the exception that the furnishings in our house had been sparkling new and in use while hers were covered with canvas sheets. She lived in just two rooms on the first floor. Perversely, I could relate to the surroundings, everything masked and thwarted and old.

One of my last acts before we shut the hallway and departed The Citadel forever was to venture into Bronwyn’s old quarters in the South Wing. Here, alone among all the rooms of the house, nothing much had been disturbed. Anna Maria couldn’t bear to pack away Bronwyn’s things. She still hoped for her pet to come back.

I lay down on her bed. One or another of the now-dismissed servants had kept the furnishings dusted and neatened, and it resembled a place whose occupant had just stepped out, shortly to return. The room still smelled of her. Like beach sand, oranges, mown hay.

She had left everything behind. The million-dollar wardrobe hung in the dressing room we had created for her. The special bathtub Anna Maria had commissioned remained, empty and dry. A book—a
translation of
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
—lay cracked open on the bedside table.

Bronwyn’s casual rejection of the things we had given her shocked me, demonstrating a lack of normal human sentiment that brought to mind a snake sloughing off its skin. I thought of a favorite phrase of Professor James: “the unbribed soul.”

We had tried to buy her, but she would not be bought.

I reached beneath the armoire, hoping somehow that she might have left her totem items: her pathetic books, childhood doll, lethal razor claws. The battered little canvas bag was gone. She took only what she came with and left behind destruction in her wake.

Fury rose in me, a white-hot anger that felt almost pleasurable, because it had been weeks since my inner life had become dulled and pinched off. And as I could not bring myself to hate Bronwyn herself, I focused upon Bev Willets. He was the one. He had poisoned her mind against us, encouraged her rebellion, seduced her emotions.

He had taken up with Delia Showalter. Now he would do the same with Bronwyn.

Why? Why did Bev Willets do anything? Because he could. Out of some Iago-like motiveless malignity. Because, even as a young child, he liked to break things.

My new quarters in Grandmother’s house I left undusted and closed, the canvas covering still on the bed. I slept in a chair. I didn’t bother to unpack my belongings. I simply brooded, allowing my anger, distress and petulance to mature until they wholly took me over.

I pawed through a lifetime of Bev’s perceived slights, picking at each scab until it bled afresh. Beverly the scoundrel, Beverly the mean, Beverly who had presided over one of my signal childhood humiliations, a depantsing in the bathroom of Collegiate School.

The age-old riddle: You walk in upon your love in the embrace of another. You react with mindless rage and happen to have a pistol in your hand. But which one do you shoot?

Your mate? The interloper? Both? What satisfies your sense of hurt, your wounded honor? Your choice reveals an essential aspect of your character. Who are you, Leontes or Othello?

Women, I am told, tend toward killing the rival, while men usually shoot their betraying spouse. It is not a hard-and-fast rule. Some years ago, you will recall, Congressman Dan Sickles killed his wife’s lover, Key.

I’ve always found it a trick question. My forlorn response to the riddle, which I would never publicly admit to, my answer, my secret, hidden, unconfessed answer: I would shoot myself.

There exists a very deep level of the human mind where homicide and suicide are one and the same thing.

I finally bearded Bev Willets at his club, the Union. Not wishing to relive the indignity of the recent evening when I burst in on him at his town house, I planned an ambush. I contrived to enter the hushed, thickly carpeted and tobacco-flavored precincts of Manhattan’s most exclusive gentlemen’s establishment, sneaking in like an impostor. A big leather armchair in the parlor off the billiards room provided a useful blind in which to conceal myself.

I knew he would come. I simply waited. And, stupidly, I must have dozed, since I woke to Bev shaking me roughly.

“Delegate, old dog!” he said jauntily. “If you’re looking for her, you won’t find her here. We don’t allow women in the Union, though I see they’ve made an exception for you.”

“Be quiet and listen to what I have to say,” I told him.

I noticed that even though he affected a casual indifference, Bev’s eyes roamed to my hands and belt, checking for weapons.

“Come to give me what for?”

“I’ve come to tell you what an odious swine you are,” I said.

“In that case let me call for brandy,” he said. He motioned over a waiter.

“Shut up!” I shouted. In my frustration I failed to notice that we had drawn an audience. In the billiards room next door, the balls had stopped clacking. A half dozen young Union Club swells gathered in the doorway, amused expressions on their dull faces.

I tried and failed to lower my voice. “You forget that I know you,” I said to Bev. “I know your vile ways with women, how you use them and then throw them away as if they were garbage.”

The random “I say!” and “That’s rich!” emanated from our audience. I put my face close to Bev’s. He affected an unruffled air. “This time you’ve gone too far,” I hissed. “I won’t have it.”

“Have you spoken to Bronwyn about this? Because even though
you
won’t have it, I’m afraid
she
will.”

Rude whistles from the billiard boys.

I almost struck Bev then but held my hand. “You’ve disturbed my sister’s mind to the point she is not thinking clearly.”

“Your sister! You really are mad, do you know that? You’ve lived with her, given her the immense benefit of your acquaintance, yet you don’t know a thing about her. Do you know she prefers coffee to your stupid weak Delegate tea? That she has trouble with the kind of pink-skinned dogs your family persists in keeping? That the color you see on her lips is not rouge but strawberry juice?”

“Shut up!” I shouted again.

“If you’re so in love with her, you should really shave off that ridiculous beard of yours. She doesn’t like fuzzy bears. How could you not know that? How could you not know anything about her? Are you so lost in yourself not to realize what you have right in front of you?”

“Sir?” The waiter, upset that our disagreement had disturbed the tomblike stillness of the late-afternoon sitting room, had summoned help, two burly club doormen.

“All right, Delegate,” Bev said. “This evening, nine o’clock upstairs under the eaves at my place, come ready to fight.”

He turned to the doormen. “Could you escort Mr. Delegate to the door and see to it he’s not allowed to return?” Applause from the billiards room as I left.

Escorted roughly out into the streets of Manhattan, I charged around, down to Washington Square, back up Fifth, finally settling in at the Madison Square Delmonico’s. A despised member of the notorious Delegate clan now, I was cut repeatedly by acquaintances and waiters alike, but I didn’t care. I ordered a steak and, when it finally came, examined it for kitchen spittle before tearing into the beef like an animal.

Replaying every thrust and parry of my verbal clash with Bev.

“Under the eaves.” The Willets mansion came equipped with all the fashionable touches, including a top-floor racquets court illuminated by skylights. A pretty space, the site of many previous competitions as well as incidental parties and random debaucheries.