Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  They had set up a huge gilt-framed mirror and posed Bronwyn in front of it. My newfound sister stared blankly at her reflection. She wore a modest, lace-collared gray gown, her copious hair controlled in French braids.

  “Now,” said Mrs. Stebbins, directing her movements. “Drop forearm from elbow as if dead.”

  Bronwyn allowed her arm to fall limp, then stuck out her tongue and went cross-eyed. Her imitation of death, I supposed.

  “Shake it,” said the teacher. “Vital force arrested at elbow.”

  The world waited breathlessly as Mrs. Stebbins was in the process of writing a book. Her inspiration, a performer at the Paris Opéra-Comique named François Delsarte, whose method linked voice, breath and movement as expressive agents of human impulses.

  The Delsarte Technique was all the rage.

  “These are essential decomposing exercises,” Mrs. Stebbins explained to my mother.

  I thought the whole business complete bunkum. But Anna Maria loved to help with lessons; it was her favorite thing. She felt that it brought her closer to her daughter. Afterward they’d curl up together in front of an open hearth and my mother would read to Bronwyn for hours. All the fairy tales and children’s stories Anna Maria had missed reading to her lost Virginia.

  “Don’t hunch, don’t slouch,” barked Mrs. Stebbins at her pupil. “It is rude and ill befits a lady. Also, slumping affects the voice.” She reached out and physically pulled Bronwyn’s shoulders back.

  “Not so extreme,” said Anna Maria. “She appears animalistic.”

  “He looks at me!” Bronwyn cried. Meaning that I was making her self-conscious.

  Mrs. Stebbins told her to never mind.

  Bronwyn sat down hard on a straight-backed chair and glared angrily across the room, once more reverting to a farouche child.

  “She balks at her lessons and is headstrong in the extreme,” Freddy told me over his after-dinner cigar that evening. “She will be proceeding along fine, making good progress, then suddenly regresses horribly. Anna Maria, really, is the only one who can do anything with her.”

  “I rather found her very much changed,” I said. “I noticed it on my return home anyway. She speaks now, for pity’s sake! What was I, fifteen weeks away? You are like a parent who sees his offspring every day and thus doesn’t realize its incremental development, whereas a relative who comes only once or twice a year remarks upon how the child has grown.”

  “Well, yes, surely she has changed,” Freddy said. “But when you start at zero, coming up to one or two is no large accomplishment. To be able to introduce her into society, we need her at a ten.”

  I suggested that the whole approach might be wrong. That before she could progress, Bronwyn had first to understand why she needed to learn. “You teach her table manners when perhaps she needs philosophy.”

  He snorted. “You haven’t worked with her.”

  “I will if you want me to,” I said.

  He looked at me keenly. “Honestly, I have been contemplating aborting the whole venture.”

  “Shipping her back to Dr. Scott,” I said.

  “Well, no, that wouldn’t do. Anna Maria would never have it. But, you see, that’s part of the problem. What would do? How does one dispose of a half-finished human?”

  “Your compassion leaks through your intent,” I said, but I don’t think he detected my sarcasm.

  “She reads, you know.”

  I was shocked. “She does not.”

  “Yes, she does. Whether we have taught her or if she had some dimly remembered learning in her childhood, we don’t know. But if sufficiently coaxed, she can understand a simple text well enough. More and more every day.”

  “That is great news, isn’t it?”

  “At times she demonstrates a voracious intelligence,” Freddy said. “Quite remarkable. Except, notably, in the moral sphere, where she is an imbecile. And there’s something else, too. I can’t deny she has a quality of self that is very attractive to people. She has charmed the household staff. Winston is taken with her. They slip her delicacies when she is confined to her room.”

  “Do you confine her often?”

  “When the occasion warrants, more often lately than before. I don’t know what can be troubling her. We give her a place at our table, dress her sumptuously, she has every luxury. We spend a fortune on her toilette. Her willfulness smacks of ingratitude.”

  “You are asking a great deal of the girl, Freddy, attempting to cram years of education into just a few months. Professor James refers to the process as ‘socialization.’ It’s very complex. She’s not some trick pony.”

  “You said you would help, Hugo. Will you see what you can do with her? Perhaps a guiding hand, one nearer to her own age, a dear sibling, patient and understanding . . .”

  “Don’t lay it on too thick,” I said.

  “Anna Maria and I have been invited on a weekend away to Edward Livingston’s country place. This is an example of a social affair to which we cannot possibly take Bronwyn in her present state. We have been terribly constrained in all our engagements, in fact, oftentimes having to leave her behind with Nicholas and Mrs. Herbert, the poor girl a virtual prisoner.”

  Mrs. Herbert acted as our head housekeeper and was a capable no-nonsense woman. Nicky had his nurse also, but somehow I did not feel them a match for Bronwyn.

  “Take her into the park,” Freddy said. “Take her on the ferry, read to her—that always soothes her—but take her in hand, will you? See what you can do, because I tell you right now, I am at my wit’s end with her.”

  I had seen it before, one of my father’s projects somehow not playing out precisely the way he expected it to, how he could jettison an obsession and move on as if it were only a passing whim. His collection of exotic lepidopterans left unfinished, half the specimens unpinned. He embarked upon a campaign against mediums who claimed they could communicate with the dead, dropping it abruptly. He began and then abandoned an assemblage of Bibles that had stopped bullets during the War of the Rebellion.

  Bronwyn would be discarded, too, relegated to the status of an urchin-in-residence or perhaps kept chained in the attic like Edward Rochester’s mad wife.

  Thus it was a few days after my talk with Freddy, equipping myself with a bullwhip, a cattle goad, a pair of ready manacles and a flask of whiskey (only the last being the truth), I hied myself forth with Nicky and Bronwyn for an afternoon constitutional in the Central Park.

  When we left the house, Bronwyn in a demure funnel bonnet with a satin bow, we all but bumped into a forlorn little group standing just outside the door, gaping upward at our windows. Two women, a man and two children, huddled together, looking at us as though we had stepped out of a dream.

  “Coming through, coming through!” announced Nicky, holding out his arm as though to move them aside.

  “A moment,” I said. It was not a surprise to find them there. For as long as we had been at the Citadel, we had seen a steady stream of gawkers and curiosity seekers, some of whom trekked the eighty blocks from the East Side docks to see the house. Freddy employed Paul the doorman primarily to hustle such onlookers away.

  As I fumbled past our admirers, Bronwyn paused and removed from the pocket of her cloak a little velvet purse. She untied its ribbon and with pretty, delicate movements, proceeding from one to the other, beginning with the children, deposited a coin into the hand of each. When she got to the father, finding her purse exhausted, she reached into her pocket again, this time pulling out a white handkerchief, which she solemnly conveyed to the man.

  The gape-mouthed grouping parted for us then, and we moved across the avenue into the park.

  Evidently my brother and my new sister had ventured into Olmsted and Vaux’s American masterpiece many times before. The two of them walked confidently forward as we entered the commons at East Sixtieth, via Scholars’ Gate, its name marked prominently on a stone plinth beside the portal.

  “Do you know the role of the scholar in so
ciety, Bronwyn?” I asked, thinking to begin my lessons slantwise. In reply she scampered off with Nicky up Wien Walk, in a race toward the not-yet-frozen skating pond, leaving me trailing behind.

  I soon realized that if I thought of taking them to the park, they in fact were taking me. The two of them treated the whole sprawling expanse as their backyard. Riding the bridle trails together almost every day. Bronwyn showing herself to be nowhere as much at home as on a horse.

  We headed west, deeper into the park, skirting the Zoo and stopping at the Dairy for some fresh milk. I attempted to use the occasion for a discourse on the Dairy building itself, and Calvert Vaux’s excellent grasp of Victorian Gothic architecture, but Bronwyn and Nicky were too busy comparing milk mustaches.

  “Nicky wants the Carousel,” Bronwyn said.

  “I do not,” Nicky said. “I’m too old for that business.”

  He turned out to be an eager child after all, however, since when we approached the amusement, he dutifully took his place in the line, leaving me alone with Bronwyn.

  Gesturing to a black-streaked rock outcropping nearby, I was about to launch into a précis on the geology of Manhattan schist and gneiss, planning to crown my talk with a superb pun (“One is schist as gneiss as the other”). But Bronwyn abruptly took my hand and led me to the rear of the merry-go-round, where a dirt ramp descended toward an understory.

  “I don’t think the public is allowed here,” I said. She dragged me down along the incline anyway.

  The Carousel had a lower level. At the terminus of the ramp, a pair of weathered wooden doors hung half off their hinges. She dropped my hand, slipped one of hers into the gap between the panels and sprang the latch.

  “You are going to get us into trouble.”

  She didn’t listen but stepped forward into the darkened interior. Above, the calliope gave off its manic music and the painted wooden horsies went round and round. I felt the scene turning bizarre. Not knowing what else to do, I followed her through the barely cracked door.

  Inside, one of the more curious displays in all of New York. In the musty basement, two ancient, swaybacked mules plodded around a circular dirt track, hitched to the center pole of the Carousel, their pathetic straining providing the power that turned the ride. I recollected the Toad, turning the tub at Dr. Scott’s sideshow. The beasts performed their labors all out of sight of the merrymakers only a few feet above them.

  No groom or boy watched over the mules. A bell rang, they halted. Two bells rang, they trudged forward again.

  “Blind,” Bronwyn said, approaching them during one of their respites.

  The strangeness of the tableau trumped my thoughts of trespass, and I followed her onto the track. She fished into her frock and brought out a folded paper, which when opened proved to contain sugar. The first mule strained at its harness to get at the treat, lapping it eagerly with a hideous red-gray mop of a tongue.

  The bell sounded twice, the mules lurched forward, forcing the Carousel upstairs to revolve. We walked alongside them.

  “This one is Archie, and that one is Maud,” Bronwyn told me.

  The scene really did have a wonderful incongruity to it. I could hear the squeals of the children above us, my brother being one of them, though probably not among those so undignified to cry out.

  The multicolored fantasia of the Carousel, its public face up top, contrasted sharply with the sad spectacle in the pit. The children, whirling about without care, while here underneath was the truth of things.

  Archie and Maud had consumed their sugar and were chomping on the paper envelope. Nicky stuck his head through the door.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “It’s almost time.”

  Time for what? I wanted to ask, but felt myself borne along by their enthusiasm and by something else as well, their grasp of the secrets of a place that I had lived directly across Fifth Avenue from for years now but did not really know.

  • • •

  Shrieking with laughter, we raced goat carts on the Mall, scattering pedestrians left and right. I had a sense of triumph when I won one of the heats, although then I recalled that Bronwyn had counseled me as to which particular goat to choose, and I realized that she was the true author of my victory.

  Its being a bright and warm autumn weekend, the park was thronged with visitors. On the graveled concourses that cut through the copses and green lawns, carriages passed by of every stripe: landaus, hansom cabs and open Victorias, the last predominating with the fashionables, the better to see and be seen.

  “Bronnie, come on!” Nicky said, tugging the girl through the traffic on Center Drive. “It’s time!”

  I went along with them, not knowing or caring much what it was time for, willing to pass the day innocently with my two siblings, one blood, one adopted. We dodged across East Drive, avoiding the flying carriages, and approached the Zoo from the rear. Atop a small rise, we could look down into its enclosures and cages, seeing them ringed with spectators, some of whom aped and tormented the animals displayed.

  As we passed down the slope, a thick blackthorn planting confronted us, backed by a dense hedgerow that skirted the Zoo along its rear boundary.

  By this time I understood that Bronwyn and my brother disdained natural entrances to any of the park’s attractions. They would rather improvise. We plunged directly forward into the thicket, following a faint track that had us bending and ducking all the way.

  Emerging from the blackthorns, we hit the hedgerow, which I realized had a sturdy lath fence behind it. I considered ourselves stymied, but, taking up a secret path, Bronwyn and Nicky moved forward. I was about to suggest that this was altogether too much when the two of them stepped into an invisible break in the hedge and vanished.

  Struggling to keep up, raked by blackthorn spines, after much difficulty I arrived at the lath fence to discover that it, too, had a gap. Nicky’s hand reached back, grabbed the worsted of my suit and forced me to bend down toward him.

  Slipping through, I arrived to where Bronwyn and my brother crouched, a narrow, trash-strewn alleyway behind the lineup of the Zoo’s cages. The air had a heavy moschate stink, underlaid with a vinegary smell of piss. The alleyway angled and dead-ended there. A sign on a nearby brick building read RUBBISH, and groundskeeper implements leaned up against the wall.

  “What are we doing?” I asked, but Nicky and Bronwyn both shushed me. I could hear the gabbing of zoo spectators just a few feet away, but we were invisible to them. We knelt beside a low concrete wall with bars embedded in it: the cage of some large creature.

  A roar sounded from right near to us, a roar that would melt steel.

  “We have to leave,” I hissed. They merely waved their hands at me.

  Another immense roar, a clang, and a lion came stepping through a small portal from its outside run. The cage beside which we crouched was the animal’s interior den. The door banged shut behind the beast, the crowd booed, and we were alone with a jungle cat, within arm’s reach, separated from us only by a low concrete wall and a few flimsy iron bars.

  Near enough to feel the animal’s body heat, I tried to back away but was constrained by the small space.

  It was a lion, yes, with tensile flanks and giant paws and a flowing mane, but it was something else, too. A tiger. The huge haunches that rested a mere foot from my nose were streaked with dark tiger stripes, parallel bands running over the buff pelt of a lion.

  “A tigon,” Nicky whispered. “His name is Charlemagne, but everyone calls him Charlie. Tigons are much rarer than ligers.”

  “Tiger father, lioness mother,” Bronwyn explained, “instead of lion father and—”

  I clapped my hand over her mouth. Shut up! I wanted to shout at them. Just shut up! I had a terror of the creature’s noticing us, although we were so near he no doubt already had. In such proximity the iron bars seemed to have diminished in size until they appeared as mere wires, easily broken through.

  “Presented to the Zoo nine months ago by a maharaja in Indi
a,” Nicky said, adding, for emphasis, “deepest, darkest India.”

  “They feed him every afternoon, then put him in here to sleep,” Bronwyn said.

  The tigon’s amber eyes with their gulf-black pupils came up to rest upon us or rather, as I felt it, upon me. He stopped, gave a hollow sigh and sank to the floor. A low rumbling rose up out of his chest, sounding like faraway thunder.

  “Bronwyn,” I whispered.

  “No,” she said softly. “Wait.”

  The tigon flopped its enormous body toward us, rolling slowly over, taking its time. Still keeping its gaze fixed on me.

  Bronwyn reached her hand into the cage. More specifically, she wrapped her fingers around one of the bars at about the height of the tigon’s gigantic moon face. She let it remain there, and we all crouched, poised on the cusp of something great or awful, waiting.

  The tigon gave a yawn that allowed us a good look at a pair of incisors the size of cavalry sabers. Well within reach of Bronwyn’s arm.

  Wait now, I thought. Wait. I seemed unable to unfreeze myself. How had I allowed things to go this far?

  The creature raised his eyes to Bronwyn’s. Gently but firmly, like to like, species to species, he rubbed his plush muzzle against the knuckles of her hand.

  “Charlie,” she murmured, over his purrlike rumble, which in the small space sounded enormous. She reached out to pet him then, a sensuous, rhythmic rubbing that the animal gratefully allowed.

  “What are you kids doing here?” came a piercing voice, and I turned to see a stocky, bearded man in a blue uniform approaching us down the alleyway. “This area is forbidden!”

  I stood up awkwardly, eliciting a worried growl from Charlie, and ducked my head submissively before the zookeeper’s authority. But when I turned to collect Bronwyn and Nicky, they had somehow disappeared, leaving me to my stammering explanations as I was escorted from the Zoo grounds and instructed never to return.

  • • •

  “I’m afraid there is a detective in to see you, Mr. Hugo,” Winston said, a mournful, disapproving look barely concealed on his face.