Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  Swoony had lately become afflicted with the same sort of insomnia that often struck the elderly (she was seventy-seven), common when the footsteps coming for us all begin to sound louder and nearer. The previous winter we often found her trailing through the drawing room, the dining room, the library and the parlor, at all hours of the day and night.

  Her thoughts were increasingly unmoored also. She soothed her afflictions with continual sips of Napoleon brandy, which she took out of a teacup that never left her side. Either the brandy was pickling her or age was.

  “Swoony,” we all said, lifting our glasses to her, while she lifted her teacup to us.

  Winston supervised the serving. Rising above the opposite side of the table from where I sat, a whole wall of gilt picture frames displayed my father’s collection of Meissoniers and the minor painters français. Nymphs cavorted in moonbeams that passed through puffs of pastel cloud.

  “Winston,” said Swoony, beckoning him. “Might we have the lobster salad?”

  The butler appeared perplexed. A serving of the lobster salad already sat on my grandmother’s plate, as did portions of the aspic and boiled broccoli, the stuffed apples and the superior biscuit. Everything was laid out on our gold-edged holiday china, which we used only a few times a year.

  “Ma’am,” Winston said, picking up the lobster dish nested in ice and holding it forward for Swoony.

  “I didn’t mean . . .” said Swoony, momentarily confused. “Oh, I meant the pressed beef.”

  Stewed peaches, ginger cake, pound cake, ribbon cake, figs, walnuts in the shell. The more that came on, the less I felt like eating.

  “Where is the girl?” Swoony demanded loudly. “Virginia, the one in the pretty white dress and the hair ribbons. I like her. Where is she? Unkind of her not to attend.”

  “She’s a shut-in,” Nicky said. “Mrs. Kate says it’s female trouble.”

  “Don’t be ill-mannered, dear,” Anna Maria said, a mild rebuke, I thought, for the insolence of the remark.

  We retired to the drawing room. Anna Maria took to the upright.

  “Tahktoo?” said my mother. “‘Here We Go A-Courting’?”

  The berdache pulled himself up beside the piano and linked his hands in front of his chest. In a high, quavery voice, he began to sing the white man’s song.

  I gazed moodily out onto Fifth Avenue.

  “Colm,” I said, calling him over. I gestured out the window. “That’s him, isn’t it?”

  The Stone-Thrower. Slouching along the Central Park wall, swaying drunkenly, staring up at The Citadel.

  “I’ll send him on his way,” Colm said. “Or perhaps it’s time to bring in the police.”

  I felt an inexplicable connection with the poor soul. “We should invite him in for our Thanksgiving,” I said, but made no move to do so.

  • • •

  Later in the afternoon, Colm and I took a horse trolley down to the police headquarters on Mulberry Street, in a neighborhood of gun shops and cop saloons, normally haunted by newspaper reporters but quiet that day, with an air of sleepy holiday indolence.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” I said, hesitating at the police building’s forbidding gray stone porte cochere. “You go ahead and make your Thanksgiving visits,” I told Colm. “I think I’ll go on to Delmonico’s.”

  “Are you sure? Do you mark him?”

  Colm gestured down the thoroughfare. Sure enough, our shadow the Stone-Thrower had somehow made his way downtown with us and cowered in an across-the-street doorway like a thief.

  “One word from me and he’ll wish he were back in Virginia slaving in the mines,” Colm said. He had many friends on the police force, and I didn’t doubt his word.

  I told him no, I’d prefer the man not be bothered, bade Colm good-bye and headed off down Mulberry in the direction of Delmonico’s. After half a block, though, and with Colm out of sight on his way uptown, I doubled back and entered the police building.

  In the lobby the same sleepy air obtained as on the street outside. No one paid me any mind. An officer in a double-breasted blue uniform with copper buttons sat guarding the entrance into the bowels of the place.

  “Officer,” I said.

  “Young gentleman,” he said, not looking up from his perusal of the Herald.

  “Hugo Delegate, sir.” With sublime uninterest he looked up at me, then back down at his newspaper.

  “I’d like to make an inquiry,” I said. I felt oddly timid.

  Sufficiently certain that I wasn’t going away, he folded the Herald and looked up at me.

  “Misdemeanor intake? Males, give me a name, the women are at Blackwell’s. Is it a female you’re after?”

  “No, it’s nothing like that.”

  “Felony?” he asked.

  “I’m wondering about murders.”

  “I wonder about them, too,” he said. “All the time.”

  “In the past few weeks, or months, have there been any odd murders?”

  He stared at me. “What was your name again?” I repeated it for him.

  “Yes, Mr. Hugo Delegate,” he said slowly. “Yes, there has been a wealth of violence done upon the fair denizens of this metropolis, quite a few killings, in fact, as any student of human behavior might expect but which some of us more removed from the harsh realities of life would be surprised to hear.”

  A philosopher in blue serge. “Yes, well . . .” I said, faltering.

  “Yes, well,” he said. “Any murder in particular?”

  “I’m thinking more in the line of gruesome crimes, with perhaps mutilation involved in the commission.”

  “Mutilation,” he said.

  “Mutilation.” I nodded.

  He fished out his newspaper and slapped it with the back of his hand. “What you want, young Delegate, is what the gentlemen of the press have. Garrotings, knifings, strangulations, assault by brass knuckles, random manslaughters, dear mothers placing their dear babies into the oven.”

  He shook his head and sighed sadly. “It’s enough to make you question the good intentions of your fellow human beings, ain’t it? I would give you my personal copy of this esteemed publication”—referring to the Herald—“but I haven’t finished with its illuminating contents, and also, you might do better, for the lurid narratives you seek, by reading the Police Gazette.”

  Apart from sarcasm I understood that I could expect nothing more from that quarter. Leaving the police building, I crossed the street to where the Stone-Thrower sat, insensible with drink, on the brick steps of a shabby residence.

  “You there,” I said, and watched his consciousness struggle to return to him. “Would you like to accompany me?”

  “Accompany?” A four-syllable word, too much for him. He blinked up at me. The odor of alcohol and sweat rose from his clothes.

  “Will you come with me?” I asked again.

  “She’s . . . she’s . . . she’s . . .” he managed.

  “Yes, yes, she is,” I said. “But right now I am asking you whether you wish to come along with me on an errand I must run.”

  “You won’t hurt me?” he asked.

  “Certainly not,” I said, helping him to his feet.

  “Where are you taking me?” he asked. “I fear you’ll do me harm.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “Whatever I do to you, I’ll never approach the damage you habitually inflict upon yourself, now, will I?”

  I guided him gently toward a hansom cab, and he came along willingly enough, but since he seemed uncertain of where he was, he might not have had that clear a grasp on where he was headed.

  “Bellevue Hospital,” I called to the driver. To the Stone-Thrower I added, loading him into the carriage, “I propose a visit to the city morgue.”

  • • •

  Such facts as I extracted during our journey uptown to the Kips Bay neighborhood: The Stone-Thrower’s given name was Karl Kleinschmidt, he was thirty-four, had made a small strike in the Washoe, sold out, and used the proceeds to fi
nance his way across the country to haunt the Delegate doorstep. To what end I could surmise, but the subject felt like a sore one just at that juncture.

  The magnet of Savage Girl. I imagined her drawing men to her, one after another from all over the country, admirers who had seen her just once, maybe, or those she had driven into folly. They couldn’t forget her, so they performed their lunatic pilgrimages to her side. She had smiled at them. Or she hadn’t. It didn’t seem to matter. They came anyway.

  There calls a small voice from deep inside every man, when facing the woman he loves, instructing him to fall flat on his face before his beloved and plead for mercy. As a romantic strategy, this approach seldom proves successful. But such was Kleinschmidt’s choice.

  Sadly enough, I felt some allegiance with him, which caused me to take him under my wing rather than beat him senseless, as men usually did whenever they encountered him.

  “Did you just break wind?” I asked, the closeness of the carriage exacerbating the man’s stench.

  “No,” he said.

  “Do you always smell this way?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he muttered, a thoroughly despondent individual. He kept repeating phrases. But one piece of babble among his many stood out.

  “She beds them and then she kills them,” muttered the drunken Kleinschmidt. “She beds them and then she kills them.”

  “She does, does she?” I said, trying to remain unrattled. “But I suppose that’s better than the other way around, isn’t it, my man? Kill them and then bed them? That wouldn’t do at all.”

  Eventually his babbling passed to weeping.

  When we made it to the morgue, I was glad to have an ally with me, even as hopeless a one as Kleinschmidt. We presented ourselves at the hospital’s main pavilion and, with a small bribe, gained entry into the restricted area. To a tiled, well-windowed first-floor room, its dozen tables populated with cadavers of the unidentified dead.

  The chemical reek of the place stung my sinuses, reminding me of dissections in days past. A stab of missing Harvard hit me. So simple, that life. Labs! Classes! Examinations!

  Beneath the morgue’s formaldehyde smell, a honeyed stink of death. Along the walls, immense blocks of river ice cooled the room to the point where I could see my breath.

  “A moral visit?” asked the attendant, a gaunt man in a rubber apron.

  “What?”

  The attendant gestured to Kleinschmidt. “Him. Put the fear of the Lord into him, will you?”

  I still didn’t understand.

  He shouted into the Stone-Thrower’s face. “This is where you’ll be if you keep on your degenerate ways!”

  Kleinschmidt buried his face into the breast of my waistcoat, an extremely disagreeable development. I extricated myself as quickly as I could. The poor man gazed about at the surroundings as though he had entered a nightmare.

  Perhaps, I thought, the visit could do him some good after all.

  Small grave lights hung from the ceiling, illuminating the bodies. They lay carelessly shrouded, some half uncovered, men and women both, oaken blocks propping up their heads. Pale, pale, the faces of the dead.

  “I wonder,” I said in a low voice to the attendant, “if any of your charges might exhibit signs of peculiar violence. Pudenda abscissa sunt.”

  This was an occasion for some delicacy. In the case of the Palmer House waiter, the genitals had been taken off and carried away. And with Peter Fince in Nevada, mutilation had also been mentioned.

  The morgue doctor’s Latin training might have been deficient, since I had to ask the question in the mother tongue. “The private parts cut off,” I muttered.

  The man gave me a frowning look. “Are you with the newspapers?” he said, low-voiced.

  I shook my head.

  “Then how do you know?”

  “Just show me the corpus.”

  We were both whispering, a common practice with which I had become familiar in my anatomy studies, where loud voices and exuberance were considered anathema in the presence of the dead.

  While Kleinschmidt stood gaping, I followed the attendant to the rear of the morgue. There a rickety wooden-framed structure supported yet more cadavers, a dozen or so stored in some sort of monstrous pigeonhole arrangement.

  Pulling out a wooden body board from one of the cubbies, the attendant unsheeted the deceased.

  “Police was here and gave up on him, seeing how he were just a Gypsy,” he said. His voice took on a conspiratorial undertone. “The missing part was never found.”

  I had seen the man only a single time, in the dead dark of the Central Park wilderness, with just a campfire illuminating the scene. Yet I was certain that the well-mustachioed corpse, displaying deep incisions across its torso, the femoral artery expertly severed between the adductor and the sartorius, the disfigured pelvic saddle a mass of clotted blood, was Bronwyn’s dancing partner of a few nights before.

  “Would you like to tell me what’s going on?” said a familiar voice as I stood contemplating the dead man.

  Colm Cullen. I felt guilty, as though I had been caught out at something, which of course I had.

  “What might we be doing here, Hugo?” he asked. He had not gone on his holiday visits after all but trailed me to see what I was up to.

  “The Stone-Thrower . . .” I managed to say.

  Colm poked his thumb toward the door behind him. “He just tore out of here, white as a ghost. But that’s not what this is about, is it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s about her, ain’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, I won’t tell you how you should run your life,” he said. “But if you let me in on it, maybe I could help. That’s what you’re paying me for, ain’t it? To keep you out of jams?”

  So I laid it out to him, the two of us standing together in the chilly morgue room. The killing I had stumbled into at Palmer House in Chicago. The headless body in the Washoe. Finally the present one, the Gypsy dancer.

  Gesturing at the corpse on the slab, I said, “I saw her with this man in the park just a few nights ago. Dancing like a bar girl.”

  Colm gazed down at the dead man. “You sure it was him?”

  “Well, no,” I said. “But don’t you see? They’re all being done to in the same way!”

  Colm shook his head, unconvinced. “You’re telling me you think the wee girl is capable of something like this? What does she weigh? She’d blow away in a strong wind!”

  “I know, I know,” I said. “I think it’s crazy, too.” I omitted my other crazy thought, that I myself might be capable of such crimes. But Colm seemed to speak on it.

  “Listen, I knew of a man back on Dudley Square, when I was growing up in Boston,” Colm said. “He was the jealous type, liked to keep his girlfriends shut up in a room, and only he had the key. He was attracted to a wild girl, really lively, out in the dance halls every night, everybody loving her.”

  Scratch an Irishman and he’ll bleed a story.

  “I used to . . . well, I mean, he used to dream up misdeeds this wild girl was doing, imagining all sorts of dark adventures just because she was fun-loving. A man’s thoughts can run away with him. Do you see what I’m telling you?”

  I did see. Colm Cullen, the workingman’s version of a psychologist. I wondered what Professor James would make of him.

  “Bronwyn ain’t Delia Showalter,” Colm said. “She ain’t your fragile society girl. She might like her men. But that don’t mean she’s done deeds would make the devil blush.”

  It was all in my head, he was saying. My fantasies sprang from my own fears. Men normally like their women firmly under control. Savage Girl was simply too free-spirited for me, and that led me into dark suspicions.

  “Now, for the sake of our peace of mind, let’s go get a damned drink,” Colm said. “This place is giving me the piss shivers.”

  • • •

  All that Thanksgiving holiday, Bronwyn remained shut up
in her bedchamber.

  Mrs. Herbert kept the keys to every room in The Citadel on a chatelaine she wore at her waist, barrel keys for the silver cabinets, flat keys for the linen trunks, most of the room keys skinny iron skeletons. The head housekeeper was, as Freddy said, the rock upon which we built our home.

  We had a small disagreement that evening, when I suggested that Mrs. Herbert accompany me to gain access to Bronwyn’s quarters.

  Freddy and Anna Maria had left the house on their Thanksgiving evening calls. Winston, too, seemed to be unavailable. Lacking appeal to superior powers, the formidable Mrs. Herbert had no recourse but to accede to my wishes.

  “I’m worried about my dear sister,” I told her. “We will only check to see if she is well.”

  “We’re all worried, Mr. Hugo, but she insists on privacy,” Mrs. Herbert said. “The Chinese maid goes in with dinner trays.”

  “I’m sure Miss Bronwyn is fine. But I’d like to speak to her directly.”

  Unlocking and opening the door, we came upon Bronwyn at a small writing desk on the far side of her bedroom. She was perfectly presentable, dressed in a pleated frock, the overskirt pulled up to a deep bow at her back. I noticed on the desk the torn-in-half Bible, propped open.

  Mrs. Herbert waited at the open door as I ventured into the maiden’s bedroom. “I’m sorry,” I stammered, suddenly abashed. “Dear sister, you have been so secluded lately, I thought to make a visit to see if there was anything I could do.”

  “I want to be alone,” she said.

  “Yes, yes, surely,” I said. “But too much aloneness can be mentally unhealthy, isn’t that so?”

  She appeared paler than when I left her last, when the upstairs maid turned me out of her room the morning after her escapade with the man now lying dead in the morgue.

  “I wonder if it would be better to not only get out of this room but perhaps out of the house,” I said. “I’d like to invite you to an evening on the town sometime, say, this Saturday, when we can sightsee the Young Patriarchs’ Ball down at the Academy of Music.”

  She remained silent. In the doorway Mrs. Herbert coughed into her hand. “It might be amusing for you to see all the howling swells,” I said. “Of course, we ourselves shall have to wear proper evening dress.”