Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  It is possible the heresy of humanism was born with the publication of De humani corporis. Certainly the drawings furthered the radical idea that man was the proper study of man—not God, not theology, not the divine. Sanguino ergo sum. I bleed, therefore I am.

  Freddy had given me an eighteenth-century copy of the Vesalius when I was fourteen, and I don’t think I ever recovered. In those early days of April, with Bronwyn abandoning us, I returned to Vesalius as to an old friend.

  At first, sitting at my drafting table, I thought the rising ruckus outside The Citadel was more Wild Child of the Washoe nonsense. The crowds seemed larger, more vocal, angrier. But I was locked in my study trying to get a rectus abdominis right, and locked also in the misery of my own mind. I tried to ignore what I considered petty distractions.

  Until the crowd started to toss bricks at our windows. By the fourth of April, things came to a head. I ventured out of my study to find the house in an uproar.

  “What on earth is going on?” I asked Randall, who merely ran past me down the hall without bothering to answer.

  I proceeded downstairs and encountered a struggling crew of servants trying to board up a smashed window in the front parlor. Venturing to the entrance hall, I surveyed the crowd in the street outside.

  A moblike clot of laborers, with a scattering of gentlemen among them, completely blocked Fifth Avenue. Mounted police officers forced the mob to the sidewalks, but the rabble reasserted its blockade as soon as the horses passed. A man in a slouch hat roused the crowd, screaming that my father was a crook. Another man ran, pursued by a cop with a cudgel.

  What new nastiness could this be? Whereas the Wild Child crowds ran on vicarious urges, the current mob seemed downright threatening. A bolt of fear ran through me, and I withdrew from the front hall and went looking for Freddy for an explanation.

  I found him, Anna Maria, Tu-Li and the berdache assembled in the aviary, along with a small clutch of servants. It was as far as we could get from the madness at the front of the house.

  “Hugo, old man,” Freddy said. “I’m glad we could pry you out from your anatomical studies.”

  “That riot in the street isn’t about Bronwyn,” I said.

  “I’m afraid not,” Freddy said.

  “Sit down, dear,” Anna Maria said.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Well, you’ve been rather holed up the last few days,” Freddy said. “There’ve been developments.”

  “Developments about what?” I asked. “Is Bronwyn all right?”

  “We know you’ve been upset,” Anna Maria said. “We’ve all been heartbroken.”

  “This isn’t about your sister,” Freddy said. “At least not directly.”

  “For pity’s sake!” I said.

  One of the servants, a houseboy named Georgie, addressed Freddy—an unlikely occurrence that indicated incipient chaos in the household. “You sent young Master Nicholas away, sir,” he said.

  Then Annie, the kitchen girl, said to Anna Maria: “We’re afraid for ourselves, madam.” The mood in the room veered toward open rebellion.

  “Please, let Master Friedrich speak,” Winston said.

  “No one needs panic,” Freddy said, raising his voice in a bid to gain control. “We are perfectly safe. We did send Nicholas away to his cousin’s, merely as a precaution. I have contracted with a force of Pinkertons, who should be here shortly to clear the loiterers from in front of our door.”

  “But why are they out there?” I was practically shouting. “I have to know—has something happened to Bronwyn?”

  “She is all right, for all we know,” Anna Maria said. “Tu-Li has seen her.”

  “She prospers,” Tu-Li said, a comment, in the present heightened circumstances, that seemed oddly out of place. She prospers?

  “I am sorry to say I have not been completely forthcoming with you,” Freddy said. “I thought I could remedy the situation and all would be well. But lately it has deteriorated past remedying.”

  He laid out the whole sick story then, a tangled tale of financial sleight of hand and attempted monopoly that I had to believe few in the room could fully understand.

  Events had gone on right under my nose that had ruined us.

  During our trip to the Comstock the previous summer, when I thought Freddy was consolidating the family’s mining interests, he was in reality engaged in a highly risky conspiracy to game the world silver market.

  Working in alliance with Michael Hart-Bentley, Oliver Stringfist, Stanley Beales and Dixon Kelly, the same moguls with whom I had shared breakfast in Virginia City, Freddy had concocted a scheme that worked like this: His combine sought to buy up as much silver and as many silver contracts as it could. Some of these were newfangled financial instruments called “forward contracts,” meaning they bought the right to buy silver in the future at a prescribed price.

  It was all done at a very high level, with the collusion of the Chicago Board of Trade. Normally such forward contracts dealt in grains—wheat, corn, barley, rye and oats—seeking to smooth out volatility in the markets. Freddy’s group sought to do the same with silver and come out ahead in so doing.

  They made an audacious attempt, in other words, to corner the market and develop a monopoly on the supply of the precious metal throughout the world. By withholding their stockpile, they would drive up the price, enriching themselves to an impossible degree.

  Incredible as it might seem, the insane maneuver very nearly worked. By the winter of 1875–76, the Stringfist-Delegate cabal had managed to gain control of an astonishing sixty percent of the world’s liquid reserves of silver, some 500 million dollars’ worth. All the fat moguls had to do then was sit on their pile and gloat, watching prices spiral up, the market firmly squeezed between the jaws of supply and demand.

  Freddy didn’t bother to lay this all out during that talk in the aviary. He merely sketched the broad outlines. Later on, digging into the details myself, I learned the outlandish scope of the plan. And I realized that I had never really understood my father.

  As much as Freddy gloried in his status as a dilettante, a dabbler in a green satin vest, inwardly he seethed. He was seen as the man without a job, who didn’t have to work, who collected butterflies and birds of prey and odd, comical people. His brother, Sonny, was the serious Delegate, the successful one, the famous one.

  How my father must have grown sick of that endless refrain. In death, Sonny’s reputation grew ever more resplendent.

  The silver fandango, I realized, was Freddy’s attempt to assert his own primacy. In a single stroke, he would double the family fortune and be hailed as a financial genius who ranked alongside his famous brother.

  Instead he lost it all.

  Halfway around the globe, an unforeseen event occurred, a historical happenstance that even Oliver Stringfist could not control.

  It was actually more a chain of events. The French had been beaten badly in the Franco-Prussian War. The victors forced the vanquished to pay an indemnity. France transferred to Germany a huge portion of its national gold reserves, which had been piling up in French coffers since the time of Louis XIV. Otto von Bismarck, the German minister, in receipt of all this incredible wealth, decided his country would much rather use French gold to mint its ubiquitous thaler coins, rather than American silver.

  Suddenly, in early spring 1876, Friedrich Delegate and company saw silver prices heading downward, rather than upward as they had planned. The end came surprisingly quick. Their bet went sour. Forced to make good on their forward contracts at set prices that now lost them millions, each of the five men involved went bankrupt. They witnessed their personal fortunes sucked away by the voracious demands of the market.

  Freddy turned aside that day in the aviary, away from the crowd of servants, putting his forehead against mine, hugging me with forlorn desperation.

  “I wish I could tell you that I gave all your money to the poor,” he said.

  “How much?” I asked, a str
angled whisper. “How much did you lose?”

  I never actually heard him say it, but it didn’t matter, because the word would be out on the street soon enough.

  A number: 60 million.

  Sixty million dollars, the whole Delegate family fortune, vanished, like one of those streams out west that don’t end in the ocean but wind up just draining into the sand of the desert. Swoony’s fortune remained relatively intact, but it was just a matter of time until that, too, would be fed into the maw of the banks.

  The swindle’s failure led to a widespread financial collapse, which led to a panic, which led to an even more widespread financial collapse. The men in the street outside The Citadel had been put out of work by the greedy folly of Freddy and his friends.

  My father turned back to the household servants. “I’m afraid we shall have to let some of you go,” he said. “And for the others, it might be newly difficult for us to appear in public for the next few days.”

  The threat of retributive violence loomed. If the promised Pinkertons did not arrive, the situation might become dire. He was sorry, he said, to put us all into an unpleasant fix. Better days would come.

  The deflated servants shuffled out, more stunned than angry. We heard them burst into dismayed chatter as soon as they were out of sight.

  “So we’re poor,” I said when they had left.

  “No, no, not poor,” Anna Maria said.

  “We are no longer rich,” my father said simply.

  A sequential catastrophe descended upon us during the month of April, a stunning succession of blows that sent us all reeling. I would think, Well, now, that’s the worst of it, only to wake the next day and find new torment in store.

  The Ditches, mortgaged, foreclosed, sold to a Vanderbilt scion. Our Fifth Avenue residence, mortgaged, foreclosed, to be sold or rented out by the bank. We would be able to find refuge right next door at Swoony’s, but still, the displacement rankled.

  The poison at the tip of the barb was Bronwyn. I could not help but think of her as the evil angel of our misfortune, at that very moment rejoicing somewhere in the completeness of our disaster. She had spurned us and now stood with her loathsome new friends, glorying in the Delegate decline and fall.

  Yes, she prospered, as Tu-Li had said. Despite my self-imposed hermitage, I read the popular press, obsessively tracking down every tidbit of information on my dear departed sister.

  Her scandal and Freddy’s own rolled themselves up into a single ball of dung, smeared across the pages of every newspaper in town. The Wild Mogul of the Washoe joined the Wild Child as a figure of universal derision.

  I witnessed Bronwyn leveraging her infamy to higher and higher levels of celebrity. Competing stories cropped up in competing papers. She would appear on the stage, it was announced. No, she would not. Queen Victoria wished to meet her. The queen did not wish it, being unamused. She walked the streets of the Tenderloin, offering her favors. She walked the streets, but with Tennessee Claflin and her people, extending charity to fallen women.

  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 somet
hing. 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.