Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  I lay down on her bed. One or another of the now-dismissed servants had kept the furnishings dusted and neatened, and it resembled a place whose occupant had just stepped out, shortly to return. The room still smelled of her. Like beach sand, oranges, mown hay.

  She had left everything behind. The million-dollar wardrobe hung in the dressing room we had created for her. The special bathtub Anna Maria had commissioned remained, empty and dry. A book—a translation of The Letters of Abelard and Heloise—lay cracked open on the bedside table.

  Bronwyn’s casual rejection of the things we had given her shocked me, demonstrating a lack of normal human sentiment that brought to mind a snake sloughing off its skin. I thought of a favorite phrase of Professor James: “the unbribed soul.”

  We had tried to buy her, but she would not be bought.

  I reached beneath the armoire, hoping somehow that she might have left her totem items: her pathetic books, childhood doll, lethal razor claws. The battered little canvas bag was gone. She took only what she came with and left behind destruction in her wake.

  Fury rose in me, a white-hot anger that felt almost pleasurable, because it had been weeks since my inner life had become dulled and pinched off. And as I could not bring myself to hate Bronwyn herself, I focused upon Bev Willets. He was the one. He had poisoned her mind against us, encouraged her rebellion, seduced her emotions.

  He had taken up with Delia Showalter. Now he would do the same with Bronwyn.

  Why? Why did Bev Willets do anything? Because he could. Out of some Iago-like motiveless malignity. Because, even as a young child, he liked to break things.

  My new quarters in Grandmother’s house I left undusted and closed, the canvas covering still on the bed. I slept in a chair. I didn’t bother to unpack my belongings. I simply brooded, allowing my anger, distress and petulance to mature until they wholly took me over.

  I pawed through a lifetime of Bev’s perceived slights, picking at each scab until it bled afresh. Beverly the scoundrel, Beverly the mean, Beverly who had presided over one of my signal childhood humiliations, a depantsing in the bathroom of Collegiate School.

  The age-old riddle: You walk in upon your love in the embrace of another. You react with mindless rage and happen to have a pistol in your hand. But which one do you shoot?

  Your mate? The interloper? Both? What satisfies your sense of hurt, your wounded honor? Your choice reveals an essential aspect of your character. Who are you, Leontes or Othello?

  Women, I am told, tend toward killing the rival, while men usually shoot their betraying spouse. It is not a hard-and-fast rule. Some years ago, you will recall, Congressman Dan Sickles killed his wife’s lover, Key.

  I’ve always found it a trick question. My forlorn response to the riddle, which I would never publicly admit to, my answer, my secret, hidden, unconfessed answer: I would shoot myself.

  There exists a very deep level of the human mind where homicide and suicide are one and the same thing.

  I finally bearded Bev Willets at his club, the Union. Not wishing to relive the indignity of the recent evening when I burst in on him at his town house, I planned an ambush. I contrived to enter the hushed, thickly carpeted and tobacco-flavored precincts of Manhattan’s most exclusive gentlemen’s establishment, sneaking in like an impostor. A big leather armchair in the parlor off the billiards room provided a useful blind in which to conceal myself.

  I knew he would come. I simply waited. And, stupidly, I must have dozed, since I woke to Bev shaking me roughly.

  “Delegate, old dog!” he said jauntily. “If you’re looking for her, you won’t find her here. We don’t allow women in the Union, though I see they’ve made an exception for you.”

  “Be quiet and listen to what I have to say,” I told him.

  I noticed that even though he affected a casual indifference, Bev’s eyes roamed to my hands and belt, checking for weapons.

  “Come to give me what for?”

  “I’ve come to tell you what an odious swine you are,” I said.

  “In that case let me call for brandy,” he said. He motioned over a waiter.

  “Shut up!” I shouted. In my frustration I failed to notice that we had drawn an audience. In the billiards room next door, the balls had stopped clacking. A half dozen young Union Club swells gathered in the doorway, amused expressions on their dull faces.

  I tried and failed to lower my voice. “You forget that I know you,” I said to Bev. “I know your vile ways with women, how you use them and then throw them away as if they were garbage.”

  The random “I say!” and “That’s rich!” emanated from our audience. I put my face close to Bev’s. He affected an unruffled air. “This time you’ve gone too far,” I hissed. “I won’t have it.”

  “Have you spoken to Bronwyn about this? Because even though you won’t have it, I’m afraid she will.”

  Rude whistles from the billiard boys.

  I almost struck Bev then but held my hand. “You’ve disturbed my sister’s mind to the point she is not thinking clearly.”

  “Your sister! You really are mad, do you know that? You’ve lived with her, given her the immense benefit of your acquaintance, yet you don’t know a thing about her. Do you know she prefers coffee to your stupid weak Delegate tea? That she has trouble with the kind of pink-skinned dogs your family persists in keeping? That the color you see on her lips is not rouge but strawberry juice?”

  “Shut up!” I shouted again.

  “If you’re so in love with her, you should really shave off that ridiculous beard of yours. She doesn’t like fuzzy bears. How could you not know that? How could you not know anything about her? Are you so lost in yourself not to realize what you have right in front of you?”

  “Sir?” The waiter, upset that our disagreement had disturbed the tomblike stillness of the late-afternoon sitting room, had summoned help, two burly club doormen.

  “All right, Delegate,” Bev said. “This evening, nine o’clock upstairs under the eaves at my place, come ready to fight.”

  He turned to the doormen. “Could you escort Mr. Delegate to the door and see to it he’s not allowed to return?” Applause from the billiards room as I left.

  Escorted roughly out into the streets of Manhattan, I charged around, down to Washington Square, back up Fifth, finally settling in at the Madison Square Delmonico’s. A despised member of the notorious Delegate clan now, I was cut repeatedly by acquaintances and waiters alike, but I didn’t care. I ordered a steak and, when it finally came, examined it for kitchen spittle before tearing into the beef like an animal.

  Replaying every thrust and parry of my verbal clash with Bev.

  “Under the eaves.” The Willets mansion came equipped with all the fashionable touches, including a top-floor racquets court illuminated by skylights. A pretty space, the site of many previous competitions as well as incidental parties and random debaucheries.

  At ten after nine, I arrived at the town house and was charitably welcomed by Margolis the butler. Marching up the stairs to the garret at the top of the house, I experienced the hollow-stomached, weak-groined sensation I always got before a boxing match. Margolis waited below as I climbed the rickety fourth-floor stairway to the court.

  “Best of luck, sir,” he said.

  “We who are about to die salute you,” I called back.

  Stepping into the gymnasium, I experienced fresh humiliation. Spectators. A few of the billiard-room boys, the Bliss brothers, Jones Abercrombie.

  And Bronwyn. She stood to one side with Victoria Woodhull, Tennessee Claflin and a small clutch of other women. Just to distract me, wearing bloomers again.

  I would not be spared, it seemed, any possible opportunity for shame.

  “Delegate! Finally!” Bev called out with false heartiness. “We thought you might back out.”

  “Let’s get to it,” I said, ignoring the audience, which had gathered at the far end of the space. There for amusement and entertainment. I thought b
ack to when Bev and I performed our mock-combat dance during the German at the debut.

  “Oh, I like the fights,” I heard Bronwyn chatter. “My old mother told me women always enjoy watching the fights because they like to see some man get what’s coming to him.”

  Laughter from the assembly. They loved her.

  The overheated racquets court made my head swim. Bev always kept the whole town house blazing, as if to declare himself separate from those faceless poor who could not afford coal. Even before the contest, sweat had broken out on my skin. I’m afraid I appeared nervous.

  When Bev stripped off his shirt, I realized I had underestimated him woefully. Lately he had taken up the gymnasium training craze, employing a medicine ball and Indian clubs. His gym master had him running around a wooden track like a dog.

  Next to him my physical shortcomings were thrown into high relief. In the court’s mirror, I appeared hollow-chested, spindly. I had violet shadows beneath my eyes. My beard was in disarray, as though a porcupine had assaulted my face and then stuck itself there.

  Bev and I had fought many times throughout our childhood. He always eventually gained the advantage. The rule is that a boxer will beat a brawler every time, but with us such distinctions went out the window, our antipathy for each other quickly taking over, making us flail.

  We had done so before in this very same space. Some of the dark stains on the hardwood floor were no doubt the old unscrubbed outlines from blood spilled in childhood, which as everyone knows is ineradicable.

  We both oiled. No signal, no bell, simply a “Yup” from Bev and we went at it, larruping each other mightily. For a good five minutes after we started, the only sound was the solid whack and slap of our blows.

  Some fights are determined not by skill but by which combatant is angrier. I believed I was gaining the upper hand. Bev was punishing me, though. I could feel my brain caroming around inside my skull like a cue ball. My bum foot was a handicap.

  Then we both swung wild punches and, with simultaneous lucky shots, knocked each other out.

  The last sensation for me, before a woozy spiral into unconsciousness, was Bronwyn’s chiming laughter and her saying, “Excellent, gents, very well done.”

  25

  At seven o’clock on May Day morning, slipping past the few hardy souls who still hung in ambush about our block, not waiting for Swoony’s dry-toast-and-weak-tea breakfast, I shook off the gawkers and took a hansom cab down to the East River docks, to board Saxon, of the Sprague Line, the last steam coastal headed for Boston that would arrive in daylight.

  When I reached the dock and was waiting to board, my skin suddenly bristled, as the skin of a mouse must crawl when it’s around a cat. I felt somehow observed, stalked. I darted a glance over both shoulders, quickly, in order not to attract attention to myself. Nothing.

  All the murders, all the bloody gashes, all the obliterated organs. The thought had preoccupied me for the past few weeks, that I had been present at every crime scene. Matthew Donleavy, the waiter at Palmer House in Chicago. Our groom from The Ditches, Graham Barton, his body only recently identified. The nameless Gypsy dancer. Percy Roehm, the young heir at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Pollard, the Human Polar Bear at Coney Island. Even Fince’s brother, Peter—well, I had been in the general vicinity of Virginia City when it happened.

  By some lights, by some narrowly suspicious lights—by a policeman’s lights, in other words—I could have done them all.

  That the police had not caught up with me yet was tribute only to the gross incompetence of the law. But that didn’t make me feel much better. I often thought the day would arrive when some eager detective would come knocking at my door.

  Or the Savage Girl would. Because the only other person I could think of who was at each and every crime scene was Bronwyn. She might suspect that I knew too much, that I understood there was some kind of a link between her and these horrible murders. Plus, she had a sharp instrument in her possession that she could employ against anyone, including me.

  Whenever I saw a young, shapely woman from behind, approaching her so that I could not glimpse her face, seeing only thick black hair pinned up under her hat, I would always think of Bronwyn, the savagery in her waiting only to come out, seeking the opportunity to claim her next victim.

  On the dock one such woman triggered in me staccato thoughts of fear and flight. I looked again. Not her. I am mad. I am mad. What Fince shouted before Tu-Li finished him, the words now ringing in my brain.

  I occupied my time on the way up by reading Professor James’s lecture notes on paranoia. I planned to throw myself on his mercy as a patient, though the only sure cure for what I had would be for me somehow to turn back the clock.

  The coastal went along at a fast clip, breasting the shallow gray waves, past Long Island, Connecticut, Nantucket, Cape Cod. The speed of the boat helped me forget my fears, at least for now. By the time I arrived in Cambridge, it was four o’clock in the afternoon. I had gotten over the feeling of being tracked, but I still felt poorly, agitated to the degree that I noticed my hands trembled more than usual.

  The James house on Quincy Street had generous proportions, a gracious yard behind a glossy black gate, with banks of late-blooming forsythia all around the verge. I climbed the steps and rang the bell, wondering if escaping my troubles by falling upon the hospitality of my professor was the best idea.

  Alice James, attired in spider-gray velvet, came up promptly behind the houseboy.

  “Hugo, we were so glad of your telegram. Come in.”

  “Ho!” sounded a deep voice behind her. Not Professor James but an older man who resembled him, his father, Henry James Sr. “I have heard about you, young man.” He shook my hand with vigor.

  “Have you?” I offered.

  “I know that you provided William with an excellent pupil in Cambridge and with excellent fare in Manhattan.”

  I had heard something of the senior James, too, that he had gypsied his family around Europe and America while the children were growing up, settling in no place for more than a year or two, parking them in experimental schools and with private tutors and somehow giving them a marvelous education in the middle of all the upheaval.

  William told me that he had already toured Europe five times and that he was fluent in five languages. His brother, Henry James, relocated permanently to London, was well on the way toward becoming a serious writer. Within the family, though, the two geniuses were merely “Willy” and “Harry.”

  The interior of the house was light and warm, the atrium entry hall toasting under the early-May sun streaming in through a greenhouse-style roof. I remembered something James once said to me when we worked in the science laboratory, our papers spread out in front of us, a beautiful snowfall pressing up against the bank of windows. “The light is shrieking away outside.”

  It has been my observation that when you are feeling bad, no environment, no matter how pleasant, can lift the pall. I suspected that these two people, Alice and her father, could not help but notice the corners of my mouth sagging, that they feared I might break into tears at any moment.

  “Let our man take your overcoat,” said Mr. James Sr.

  “Hugo.” Professor James had joined us. “Glad to see you. A delightful break from reading examination papers.” All around the entrance hall towered a series of palms in square containers on a glossy parquet floor. Three collegial armchairs stood clustered in a corner, with a shawl thrown over the back of one. It was easy to imagine Alice sitting there alone, awaiting company. Me.

  “Mary!” shouted William’s father in the direction of the stairs. “We have a guest!”

  “She needn’t come down,” said Alice of her mother. “We’ve planned a walk anyway.”

  “No, please,” I said. “I’ve just come to consult with Dr. James.”

  With that I physically pulled my professor into the little receiving room to the right of the front door.

  “Delegate?” he said, baffled at m
y abrupt treatment of his family. “I thought we might take a stroll around the Yard.”

  I shut the door. “You have to help me,” I said. “I believe I am going mad.”

  For fifteen minutes I spewed forth a steady stream of anguish. James was fast becoming America’s premier authority on psychology and the human mind. I grabbed at him like a drowning man.

  “Can there be such a thing as a dissociative state, a trance a person goes into and afterward he has no awareness of what he has done?”

  Certainly, Professor James said. He had seen it occur.

  “Can there be two selves in one body?” I asked. “And one goes out and does things, horrible things, and then wakes up to become the other, without memory?”

  I ran through it then, the fact that wherever I went, murder seemed to follow. I could not be certain what I had done, but with the memory gaps, the uncanny coincidences, the serial procession of dead bodies, I was beset by doubts.

  “It all seems bizarre,” I said. “I know that I’ve been gripped with horrible rages lately. I feel like my head has been in a vise. Could it be paresis?”

  “But isn’t it a common characteristic of paresis not to recognize the symptoms of paresis?” James responded.

  He questioned me. About the concussion I suffered after the Gypsy killing in the park, whether the memory gaps had been more serious since that time. Did I link the incidents mentally with any other person? My mother or father?

  I had left Bronwyn out of the whole story.

  He listened. Bless him, he listened. When I finished, he offered no palliatives, but I somehow felt relieved. We fell into a long silence.

  “Well, Hugo,” James finally said. “I am truly sorry. Of course, we couldn’t help but hear about your tribulations at home.”

  “It’s not good,” I said, choking up slightly.

  “I would suggest you remove yourself from the fray a bit. You’ve been up at St. Alban’s before, I recall?”