Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  Up in my suite, I examined my face in the room’s massive, gilt-edged mirror. My nose appeared elongated, bulbous. I looked like a sad clown. My head felt full of sand.

  Still shaken, still breathing hard, I poured myself another shot of whiskey, wishing I had my pen and ink, left behind in Sandobar. Anything to distract my reeling thoughts. Instead I sat down with the Chicago Tribune, wanting diversion, wanting normalcy above all.

  I sat there, half reading, half musing, not wholly comprehending the printed words swimming before my eyes.

  A commotion outside, rushing footsteps, and a muffled, horrified kind of shout. I opened my door and peered into the corridor, hoping desperately not to see the phantasms that had so recently afflicted me.

  On the seventh floor, nothing. I took the stairway down a floor to the sixth. Four people stood in the middle of the corridor, speaking in hurried whispers, leaning into the open door of one of the guest chambers. Only too aware of my distracted thoughts, I proceeded toward them. But they ignored me, so intent were they on their activity.

  Two males and two females in hotel livery, houseboys, maids. They gathered around a human form that lay twisted in the doorway, feet splayed out into the hall.

  “I’m a doctor,” I said. Not strictly true, but they stepped aside for me.

  Crouching, the first thing I saw was blood, a lot of blood, staining the man’s left leg. Cutting open the slice in his trousers with my knife, I found his adductors slashed at the artery.

  Arteria femoralis. The femoral artery. One of the body’s major vulnerabilities. Breach it and use your waning minutes to say your prayers.

  The victim’s torso also demonstrated signs of violence. Stripes across his chest, slicing through his shirt and vest as though it had been raked by a powerful and vicious knife attack.

  The groin area had been totally destroyed.

  I bent my ear to the man’s mangled chest. No pulse, no hope. I judged him fifteen minutes gone, at least.

  There was nothing I could do.

  The wrestler-waiter lay dead, his sandy hair, formerly so carefully parted in the middle, now completely unkempt.

  • • •

  Something happened after Chicago, some sort of divide. In order to make a line connection, we left the Palmer House before daybreak, allowing me to avoid any immediate repercussions from the murder of the waiter. Though Chicago officialdom did not manage to question me, I was still rattled by the event.

  What had happened? The terror of the sixth floor dissipated like wisps of a passing nightmare. I cleansed myself of the dead man’s blood and wiped down my knife. Bundling up my room towels and stained clothes, I discarded them in a street-side trash bin as we took a carriage to the railhead.

  And I told no one. Not Freddy, not Anna Maria, not Colm, keeping secret my involuntary excursion into a violent mental twilight.

  Shut away also was a tiny, niggling, shivery suspicion. Did Savage Girl have a heavy-bladed hand in the death of the waiter? Was that the truth of it? No, no, the possibility was too absurd, too dark, too dangerous for me even to think on it.

  What I saw were morbid fantasies, nothing more. My mind that night had been “disguised by drink,” a phrase my grandfather used.

  Sandobar traveled east, through the farms and small towns of the more settled part of the country.

  But as I said, a divide. Bronwyn was no longer with us. She took to her sleeping compartment in the sixth car, did not come out, ate her meals there (I imagined Cookie tossing in a piece of raw meat, then running away).

  Anna Maria, the berdache and Tu-Li visited the girl briefly, but no one else—no men, not Freddy nor myself. My mother informed us it was a “female situation” and warned us to stay away.

  Despite the violence in the Palmer House, I was careful to act normal and not display any inner turmoil around the family. None of them even knew of what had occurred in Chicago. I was unsure if I myself knew.

  During this fallow period of her isolation, I was often in the parlor car, waiting for Savage Girl to appear. She never did.

  As we drew closer to New York, like Bronwyn, I, too, became more and more withdrawn. The Palmer House nightmare, which I thought safely repressed, cropped up at unlikely intervals. Nothing had happened, I convinced myself. I had simply blundered into the aftermath of a crime.

  What is your connection? Only that of the observer and observed. The witness is not, after all, a participant.

  “You shouldn’t moon about so much, dear boy,” Freddy said to me, coming into the parlor car one morning. “You make it obvious how much you miss your playmate.”

  “It won’t work,” I said.

  “What won’t?”

  “You and Anna Maria plan to groom and school her, in view of making her over into a polite young lady. Then you will introduce her into society as a test of your theories.”

  “We haven’t exactly made a secret of it,” Freddy said.

  “They will never accept her,” I said. “Because of her past.” I spoke from firsthand knowledge of the snake-pit social world of Manhattan, where pedigree was all.

  “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 thin
k 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.

  Part Two

  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 F
reddy’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.