Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  A backhanded reference to her going out in boy’s garb.

  “As you wish,” she said. “But I’d like you to leave me to myself now.”

  “Saturday evening, then,” I said, bowing backward out the door like a courtier.

  Mrs. Herbert closed Bronwyn in her room once again. “Very good, young master,” she said to me. “Very, very good. You’ve always been a kind boy. It will be a blessing for her to go out and about a bit.”

  Behind us we heard Bronwyn’s door lock being turned.

  That Saturday, the night of the Young Patriarchs’ Ball, represented the traditional start of the Christmas social season. I was of course expected at the occasion myself but begged off, pleading illness. This was an untruth, though I was still feeling punky on account of the crushed-in noggin I’d received during the incident in the park.

  Delia Showalter, with whom I was to attend, communicated her irritation by attending the ball instead with Bev Willets.

  We finally had it out, she and I, Delia accusing me of shunning her and I protesting all sorts of maladies, among them one with which I thought she could not argue, tuberculosis of the bone.

  The truth lay elsewhere. I was bored with her.

  When Bronwyn descended the front staircase from the third floor to the second that evening, I had a thought that while she was not quite a woman, she was definitely no longer a girl. I recalled the body lying in the morgue. Perhaps killing a man matures a person.

  Tu-Li stood behind her, watching her navigate the stairs. The Chinese maid had performed her part admirably. She’d ornamented Bronwyn’s plain pleated dress with shawls and scarves and added accoutrements of gloves and jewels and other flourishes. Bronwyn wore no bonnet but had her black hair arranged in a chignon to which tiny blue flowers were affixed. The upsweep exaggerated the pale slenderness of her neck.

  “Are you ready, sister?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  A ride in a carriage was not a new experience for Bronwyn, but she seldom had gone out at night (except, of course, on her own). Now she wrapped herself in her mohair mantle and gazed out the window as we proceeded down Fifth. Our footman Randall drove. The smoky glow of the gas lamps, the cold black of late-hour Manhattan in autumn.

  The Young Patriarchs’ Ball at the Academy of Music started fashionably late. Guests arrived no earlier than ten o’clock, collected themselves, primped and chatted and took refreshments before the band struck up at midnight and they started in on the quadrille. They might well dance until dawn.

  It was now eleven. We turned the corner of Fourteenth Street and proceeded crosstown past Union Square to the Rialto. I called for Randall to halt. Our brougham lined up among dozens of carriages on Irving Place and along Fourteenth. Chaises, landaus, whiskeys, even a fly or two—all of them disgorging the grandees of the city.

  The zoom, in full force.

  I reached across Bronwyn and slid open the window so that she might see.

  Initially the splendid nature of the spectacle did not assert itself. Splatters of horse manure marked the thoroughfare, but the academy rolled out an elaborate purple carpet at the curb so that milady’s train should not drag in the muck. Gaslight set the whole street ablaze. But the scene was too jumbled, too chaotic to be impressive.

  Then something happened. Edwige D’Hauteville disembarked from a carriage ahead of her escort, DeLancey Kane. The lady looked a picture. A silver ball gown, a negligently bared shoulder as her stole slipped, and she stood poised, as if displaying herself to the crowd of gawkers held back from the entrance by big police.

  “Oh!” Bronwyn exclaimed. I reached into my suit pocket and handed her some tiny mother-of-pearl opera glasses.

  The D’Hauteville girl was damnedly handsome. But something more, she was caught there at the entrance to the ball as if frozen in a carte de visite or a tableau vivant, an emblem of something, the Evanescence of Beauty. A line from one of de Vere’s sonnets applied: “Sad is our youth, for it is ever going . . .”

  “Do you know that girl?” she said, holding the glasses to her eyes.

  “I believe I know pretty much everyone going in,” I said, not as a boast but merely to assert my fluency. “They are my friends.”

  It was the Age of Silver, silver was the color of the day, of accents and fabrics and jewelry settings.

  “Over there is Elizabeth Rink, the older sister of a friend of mine,” I said, indicating a young woman in a dress of white tulle (probably Worth) embroidered in silver, with pansies brocaded over the train.

  Of another new arrival, I said, “I met Irene Davidovich, who is a marquesa, through my mother.” The tall brunette made her way from her carriage to the doors of the academy in the finest satin, carrying a small bouquet of sweetheart roses circled round by, yes, a ribbon of silver.

  “But her . . .” Bronwyn said as D’Hauteville entered the academy with DeLancey Kane.

  I laid my hand on my sister’s arm. “You could be that lady, Bronwyn. Come spring, if you apply yourself assiduously to your studies, if you learn to dance and speak and carry yourself, you could be her. You could be the one!”

  She looked at me. “‘Assiduously,’” she repeated. “You always use such big words, and I never know what you are talking about.”

  I laughed. “You will.”

  I wanted to tell her that to become fully human she needed more than vocabulary and dance steps and proper comportment, that one must look to the heart and the head, if not the soul. But on such basis her character appeared an unfathomable mystery to me.

  She gazed out at the flamboyant parade around the entrance. “That blond woman has a bird in her hair.”

  “It’s fake,” I said. “Shall we go inside?”

  “Us?” she said. I had never seen her react with timidity before.

  “Let’s go,” I said, smiling. “I know a secret way into the lion’s lair.”

  I handed her down from the brougham. She lifted her hem up from the dirt of the street and took my arm. We threaded our way through the crowd of spectators. We were dressed for the evening but not for the ball, and the gawkers dismissed us as unworthy of their attention.

  Freddy told me it was a fairly new phenomenon, within his lifetime, this passion on the part of the mob to spectate on the affairs of the wealthy. The newspapers reported breathlessly about the “uppertens,” as they referred to the wealthiest ten percent of the population. Caroline Hood, the reigning queen of society, told us she kept away from the windows of her mansion at Thirty-eighth and Fifth, in order to avoid the prying eyes of the public.

  I guided Bronwyn around the block, up Third Avenue to Fifteenth, down the street to the rear of the hall.

  “Now, don’t ask where we are going,” I said. “You are in perfectly good hands.”

  At the back of the enormous Academy of Music structure, a door stood partially open, yellow light spilling out to the street. A stagehand loitered outside, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

  “We’ll just be a minute,” I said, slipping one of the new silver twenty-cent pieces into his palm.

  Up one back staircase, then the next, then the next, all of them dirty and untended but with Bronwyn never uttering a complaint. We finally reached the door I was seeking.

  It opened onto the manager’s box, far up the side of the theater, one level above the parterres, so high the blaze of the orblike chandelier struck us blind at first. We overlooked the nobby assembly down below, swirls of satin, men in stark and shining black, decorative arrangements of flowers so towering that you could smell their perfume even from our elevation.

  Also in the air, a sensual electricity, from the touch of the men and women as they moved about the room together. But that might have been my imagining.

  Bronwyn stared downward, cheeks flushed, eyes shining, clearly enthralled.

  “They own the world,” I murmured, putting my lips close to her ear. “The ones down there. It is not so much their wealth, though there is that. It
is entrée. The ability to go wherever one wants.”

  I thought that would appeal to her, but it was not enough. “Another thing: These people are bulletproof. If you join their ranks, whatever trouble you encounter, whatever threat you face, you can get out from under it merely by being one of their number.”

  She drew her gaze from the dance floor and looked at me, her hazel eyes searching mine. How pretty she was, I thought, how honest.

  “Are you in trouble, Bronwyn?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t try to help,” she said.

  “But I want to. Whyever shouldn’t I?”

  “Because I’m poison,” she said.

  “What? What do you mean?” She looked away, and I let it drop. I decided I didn’t after all really want to know what she meant by that.

  “One last thought, very important,” I said. “You cannot take society seriously. You must, must, must treat this all as a game. Otherwise you are lost. You can have it as long as you don’t want it.”

  “A beautiful game,” she murmured, looking down again at the elegant couples. Strains of music filtered up to us. The cotillion was about to begin.

  “A bird in my hair?” Bronwyn asked.

  “It doesn’t have to be with a bird,” I said.

  Outside on the street, I realized I had made a blunder. Instead of directing Randall to bring the carriage around to the back of the hall, I had left him parked in front, at the entrance. Returning to the brougham, we encountered the two people I had no wish at all to see.

  Beverly Willets and Delia Showalter.

  They spied us just as we slipped into the carriage.

  “Delegate!” Willets roared out, alerting the whole crowd to my presence. Delia looked stricken. I waved uncertainly.

  “Go, go, go!” I called to Randall, wanting him to get us out of there before I was forced to engage in what would have been an awkward conversation.

  16

  I wanted Bronwyn to come into my world, the real world, the precisely cut diamond of Manhattan society, and I now believed she wanted it, too. We recognized a shared goal. The alchemy of that evening spent spying upon the Patriarchs’ Ball rendered our relationship much clearer.

  Later that night, into the early morning, as if in reward for our newfound intimacy, we sat before a dying fire in Freddy’s library and Bronwyn told me her story.

  Her words, while she traced her background from childhood to the present day, served to bind us as close together as any brother and sister ever could be. To say that the facts of her life newly altered my feelings for her would be misleading, since those feelings had been in constant transformation since the day I first set eyes on her in Dr. Scott’s barn.

  We did not finish talking until the dawn came up, imbuing the leafless winter dogwoods in the park with a ghostly materialism. The recounting had a good effect. In the weeks that followed her confession, Bronwyn applied herself to her studies with such focus and enthusiasm that everyone remarked upon it, from Freddy to the tutors to the household staff.

  Bronwyn was, in a word, tireless.

  “You’ve worked a miracle, dear boy,” my father said, giving me all the credit.

  Freddy and Anna Maria set the last day of February as the date for her debut, and all our efforts were geared toward that. Bronwyn had progressed to the degree that by New Year’s week we felt she was ready to take her first tentative step into society.

  Dancing school.

  Specifically, Madame Eugénie’s Académie de Danse, attendance at which was de rigueur in our circle—

  • • •

  Wait, wait, Bill Howe interrupts me again. You’re jumping ahead.

  Yes?

  Well, you can’t do that, he says.

  Do what?

  Tell it that way. Mention that the girl has told you her story and then slide over it as an inconsequential detail.

  Bronwyn’s story is well known by now, isn’t it?

  Howe splutters. But . . . but . . . but—there are so many different versions, from the newspapers, the authorities, even the clergy, it is imperative we hear the account she relayed to you. With utter completeness, if you will, Mr. Hugo, with utter completeness.

  Might that not derail the momentum of the narrative, I say, by entering us into a previous chronological period? Doesn’t Aristotle preach a strict unity of time?

  Bugger Aristotle, Howe says.

  From what I’ve heard of the great man, I say, he might enjoy that.

  Howe says, Go back, if you please. Leave nothing out. That evening after your visit to the Patriarchs’ Ball. What she told you.

  Bronwyn’s Story

  My life comes out of a cloud of not knowing. The truth is, I don’t have a birthday, I don’t know how old I am. Sixteen or seventeen or eighteen. Which means I was born sometime before 1860.

  I don’t remember my papa. I remember Mama better. My father had a beard, a black beard. He used to come into where we were, in whatever camp it was, all dirty from work. He did mining.

  I think we came from Wales. That’s what occurred to me during my geography lessons with Freddy. Mama talking about Wales. Or maybe Cornwall, since either Cornwall or Wales is where the mine workers in America always come from. But I think I remember her telling me about our village in Wales. Her mother and father. They were coal miners.

  This is hard for me, since all I have is pieces. A baby cradle in front of the fire. Mama could never nurse, she had no milk. The baby cried. My mother’s hands smelled clean from the washtub. My father’s smooth, dark hair and his eyes that were serious so much of the time. Once I was able to look into mirrors, I came to believe that I had his eyes.

  I’m not sure about any of it. We lived first back east, and I don’t remember how we got west. There was a lot of walking, but it could have been anywhere. Both my parents pushed wheelbarrows full of our things, and at night we’d turn the barrows on their sides and put our canvas over them and that was where we slept. Glynn, the baby, died.

  We were in Colorado. After all the flat country, seeing the mountains for the first time was one of my clearest early memories. Standing there staring at them. I can close my eyes right now and see them still. The peaks with snow on them made me feel tiny.

  We were very poor, but everyone was poor, so it didn’t matter. We’d go to a camp, stay for a while, then move on. I don’t remember the names of the camps. Leadville, I think. They were sad places.

  I learned to read from the family Bible, sounding out sentences to Mama as she did her work. I could write my name. I was always smart, always ahead. My mother gave me instruction, as much as she had time for. She handed me a stick to write with in the dust. The letters came easily for me.

  In Colorado they hung my father and three other men for stealing gold they dug but that wasn’t theirs. They made the whole camp watch the hanging. Mama covered my eyes, but I looked.

  We went south along the mountains. Somebody called them the Blood of Christ Mountains. And there we found paradise. Like in Genesis: “And a river went out of Eden to water the garden.” Everything was beautiful and sunny and fresh.

  Mr. Hugh Brace, my next papa, took care of us. He was a hunter, and there was always lots of game and fish in the streams. We even had a cabin. I sang a hymn to the camp. I can see the close, dark walls we lived within. I remember the window and how the sun came in and made a patch on the dirt floor, and how glad we were for the sunlight. For a miner, light is precious.

  Then Mr. Brace said we all had to go. I couldn’t understand why we had to leave, but we went south again. Along the mountains. Every sunset was like fire. And that was when I was taken by the Numunuh. I must have been about four or five. They rode down on the train of wagons we were with, and first they drove off the stock. I didn’t know what was happening, but everyone was crying, so I cried, too. Darkness and a storm of horse hooves.

  Rough hands yanked the back of my pinafore, throwing me across the pony behind the rider. This was Tabekwine, Sun-Eag
le, my next father. I cried, and he cracked me across the cheek, so I didn’t cry anymore, not out loud anyway.

  We rode for days and nights, changing off ponies. I slept tied to the mane. I was thirsty, hungry. He gave me some chopped-up corn from a little pouch and a piece of greasy dried meat.

  After a while I ached so and was exhausted and sunstruck. I wanted nothing apart from getting down off the pony.

  Until that day I had never been on a horse before. After that I was rarely off one. I cried every day for the next month. A woman took care of me sometimes, Nautda. I called her “Old Mother.” Her children, Cos and Ogin.

  My white skin made me strange, but I soon burned brown. No one harmed me, no one beat me, I was free. They let me keep a doll, the only thing I had from my old life. I made deerskin clothes for it, learning to sew with sinew.

  It is difficult to believe, I am sure, the way you live here in New York City, that my life among the Numunuh was anything but a hardship. It wasn’t. After a time I began to be happy. The children were let go. We could do anything. We raced ponies in the arroyos. We all had our own bows. I could put an arrow into a knothole better than any of my brothers. They called me Naivi, which just means “girl.” They loved me.

  Let’s say you are like the wizard Merlin in the books Nicky reads to me and had magic and could say to me, “I will fly you back to life among the Numunuh.” You would think that I wouldn’t go, that of course this life now in New York City is better. The one in the lodges, where everything smelled like smoke, where I was wild, that is a poor life, you would say.

  But for me, in my heart, it’s different. I might go or I might not, but it would be a hard choice. I am a Numunuh girl. Those years made me who I am. They made me free.

  We never called ourselves Comanche. That was the name others gave us, the Mexicans, I think. It means “Those Who Want to Fight Us All the Time.” Given all the horses we stole and the wars we fought, I can’t blame anyone for naming us that. We were Lords of the World.

  After I had spent two summers with them, Sun-Eagle and Naudta took me as their own daughter. I might have been seven. They led me into a lodge, and an elder lifted me up in the smoke of the fire four times, saying, “Her name is Hutsu.” It meant “bird,” and after that I was really a part of the clan.