Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  St. Alban’s Recuperative Home, in Wellesley, an asylum for those beset by nerves and exhaustion. I had retreated there almost exactly a year ago. My doctor-torturers induced seizures, fed me copious amounts of butter, put me in cold baths for hours, afterward covering my body with wet canvas. Strict silence enforced at all times.

  None of it helped. My instability of mind had persisted.

  Professor James suggested that he should take charge of my pistol, the one that Colm Cullen had given me. “Someday when you tell me you don’t see the need of it anymore, I will give it back to you.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

  “Your keeping a pistol is what does not make sense. Guns are like thermometers, only instead of measuring body temperature they measure our fear.”

  I gave him the weapon. He slipped it into a desk drawer. It was easier to give up the pistol, knowing I had a trusty sliding knife in my breast pocket.

  “Shall we walk out?” said Professor James. “Alice will be anxious for us, and I thought you might want to reacquaint yourself with your school, which has dearly missed your presence.”

  We exited the little room into the residence’s entry hall. The professor’s mother, Mary James, peered from behind her full-bearded husband. “Very pleased,” she said. “No tea, then?”

  “No, Mother,” said Alice. “We must go if we want to catch the last of the light.”

  “Very nice to meet you,” I said, and once again the elder Mr. James gripped my hand.

  We crossed the street to the campus, and I was immediately flooded with memories of my Harvard days, of plunging myself into studies so completely that everything else in the world—most of all my small fears and worries—melted away. I rarely socialized when I was at school. Unlike in New York, where there was always temptation, a group of raging young fashionables ready to invade a restaurant or a club or take a rollicking dive into the Tenderloin.

  We turned in among all the old familiar red bricks, the Yard greening up with the season. The warm weather pricked at my mood.

  Alice said, “The ancient superstition as to spring and youth being the most joyous periods is pretty well exploded, don’t you think?” She took William’s hand. “The one is the most depressing moment of the year, so is the other the most difficult of life.”

  “I suppose,” I said, “but my own difficulties are . . .”

  “Overwhelming?” asked James. “You know, you can speak before my sister with perfect confidence. Crises and debilitating anxieties have long been my bosom companions. Alice, too—do you mind my saying, Alice?—has struggled often with the idea of self-death. Haven’t you, dearest dear?”

  “What to do about it is the question,” said Alice. “My best answer: clothe oneself in neutral tints, walk by still waters and possess one’s soul in silence.”

  Well. Another prescription.

  “That is precisely what I have thought,” said James.

  “Nonetheless I have found that of all the arts,” said Alice, “living is the most exquisite and rewarding.”

  “Again, what I was thinking,” said James.

  “And your sister, Bronwyn?” Alice asked me. “I was very much impressed to meet her in New York. Such an interesting, intelligent, fierce presence.”

  We rounded the corner past Massachusetts Hall. And Harvard Hall, where I had so often labored late into the night, immersed in my studies, never imagining the troubles in my future.

  “Let me tell you a beautiful, touching tale,” said Alice.

  “Here we go,” said James. “Now, listen.”

  “An old couple near Boston who had lived together for half a century became destitute and had to sell all their things, and had nothing before them but the dreaded poorhouse, where they would have meat and drink, to be sure, but where they would be separated. They could handle all but that, so one day they went out together and never came back, and their old bodies were found tied together in the river. How perfect a death!”

  “Alice is having a good day,” James said mildly. We silently parsed her tale.

  A loose-limbed fellow with big teeth and shaggy brown hair ambled toward us across the Yard.

  “Oh, not that fool Roosevelt,” I muttered. I took James’s elbow, he took Alice’s, and we guided ourselves in the opposite direction.

  “The newspapers came to attack your sister like wolves,” James said.

  “It makes me glad to be of such small moment in the world,” said Alice.

  Professor James said, “Tennessee wrote us that Bronwyn had moved in at their town house.”

  I searched his words for irony or disapproval. How could I explain?

  “She was so beautiful at her debut, so perfect.” I said. “Everyone loved her. And then it all fell apart.”

  We stood in the middle of the Yard, in front of Mass Hall, and the shadows tumbled stone blue all around us. A ripple of coolness passed through the air. Alice pulled her shawl close.

  I said, “A shooting, a stabbing, a boy’s body and all the flood of stories—it’s no wonder she went away.” I wiped my eyes. “She went to the Woodhulls, yes.”

  “Is she unhappy?” asked Alice.

  “The odd thing is, I don’t think so. I don’t know. When she left us, it looked as though she were embarking on a grand adventure.”

  “She’ll have an adventure, certainly, with those women,” said Alice as we resumed walking back toward Quincy Street.

  “And my heart is so sick,” said I. “I wanted to protect her. To care for her. But those things are impossible.”

  “What will you do?” asked Alice.

  “What is there to do?” I said. I suddenly remembered Bev’s absurd words of advice: All you’ve got to do is shave your beard. But where would that get me?

  “There is only one thing for it,” said Alice.

  “Tell me,” I begged. For some reason my heart felt totally open to the tiny woman with the sad eyes, my professor’s invalid sister.

  “You have got to fall in love,” she said.

  “Funny,” said William James, “I was just thinking that.”

  • • •

  I did not resort to St. Alban’s sanatorium. I took the night train home from Boston and walked out of the Grand Central Depot into a brand-new springtime morning.

  Manhattan in May. I wondered, for an uncharacteristically euphoric moment, whether there could be any more exciting place on earth. I had to remind myself I was miserable. The mildness of the air tempered the usual street cacophony. Calm self-satisfaction showed on all the handsome passing faces. The lions in the jungle were happy.

  Half a block toward Fifth, I entered a storefront barbershop and had the man render me clean-shaven. The strop of the straight razor, the hot towel, the blade at my throat. And I was a newborn babe.

  As I walked north, a hot, soft pretzel materialized in my hand. Eventually the green of the park rose up into view like the opening of a picture book. We Delegates could pull through this financial nightmare, I thought bravely. Plus, Bronwyn was in the world, she was somewhere in this city, drinking coffee and wearing Turkish slippers (though not bloomers, I hoped) and smiling her Bronwyn smile.

  I had been told to fall in love. It wasn’t hard. I discovered myself already there.

  Swoony’s manservant, Mike, shut the door behind me, and I dropped my bag onto the floor and sighed. A deep and dark stairhall, taste that hadn’t changed in years.

  “Hugo, dear,” I heard Swoony call. “In here, darling!”

  Swoony’s downstairs parlor was the usual place to find her now. I walked in the door talking. “That coastal to Boston is really fast, Grandmo—”

  Bronwyn sat on the divan beside my grandmother. Clad in a dress of tangerine silk that fell in a pool around her feet. Her lustrous, wavy hair she wore loose around her shoulders. She had changed her appearance, though. I realized that she had cut her hair in a fringe across her brow, the new style called “bangs” that all the girls would n
ow describe as “charming.”

  She rested her hazel eyes on me, a luminous gaze that worked to stop me in my tracks every time.

  “Oh,” I said. For some reason I began to back out, as if I had blundered into a private place.

  “Hugo, stay, stay, of course,” said Swoony. “We have a guest.” She toasted me with her teacup.

  I hadn’t noticed, being overwhelmed by the mere fact of Bronwyn, but there was another woman present.

  Seated across from the divan, in the soft velvet chair that we called “the comfortable one,” the elderly lady wore black from head to toe, shabby black, offset by a bright white handkerchief in her lap. At first I thought that Swoony in her unpredictable way had invited a potential housekeeper in for an interview and was now feeding her tea. The woman’s hair, too, was black, a deep, wavy black, pulled up and pinned in back.

  Bronwyn’s black hair.

  “Hugo,” said Bronwyn. It was the first I had heard her voice in a month. “This is my mother, Mallt Bowen.”

  I stood there. Her mother now. So. She didn’t spring from a god’s forehead after all.

  “I’m grateful to make your acquaintance,” said Mallt. Her voice faint, with a Gaelic lilt.

  As in a dream, I stepped over and bowed to Bronwyn’s mother. Her real mother. Even if I hadn’t been introduced, it would quickly have become obvious. I looked into her face and saw Bronwyn’s brow, Bronwyn’s nose, Bronwyn’s mouth.

  “Excuse me,” she said, and spit bloody sputum into the handkerchief.

  “How did . . . ?” I said—to the mother or the daughter or Swoony, whoever knew—asking how this impossible reunion had come to pass.

  “Freddy found her,” Bronwyn said.

  “We missed our daughter,” said Bronwyn’s mother. “We missed her ever so much. We knew she was taken by those terrible savages. We thought she’d been kilt for sure.”

  Swoony petted Bronwyn’s hair. “That’s our Virginia,” she said.

  Looking momentarily puzzled, Mallt said, “We heard all the mining jobs was down in Argentina, so we went there.”

  “But how did you hear about Bronwyn?”

  “A man come looking for us,” she said. “A man your father sent. And Bronwyn kept her name, you see. Didn’t you, darling?”

  “Virginia,” purred Swoony.

  “I lost Hugh Brace along the way, Bronwyn’s stepfather. He had the consumption. But I made it here, I did.”

  “Yes, you did, Mother,” said Bronwyn.

  “And there’s only one Delegate family in town,” said Mallt. “You was easy to find.”

  “Virginia Delegate,” said Swoony, sipping.

  “I don’t like those folks that crowd the streets here,” Mallt said. “Ugly people, ugly.”

  “It’s all right,” said Bronwyn.

  A coughing spasm racked her mother, the daughter moved to position the old lady more comfortably in the chair, and Mallt Bowen lapsed into a closed-eye meditation.

  My emotions piled up like storm clouds. I cannot let anything unsteady me, I told myself. I crossed to the window.

  “And Bronwyn,” I said, finally facing her. “You’ve returned.”

  “I missed Nicky,” she said. She joined me at the window.

  “Really,” I said.

  “Those women are false,” she said. “Woodhull and Claflin. I couldn’t trust them after all. Then Freddy sent for me, and I heard I might have a living mother. So here I am.”

  Her eyes held me. “You’ve shaved.”

  I trembled inwardly, standing so close. The scent of oranges. “You know, you have a small macula,” I said.

  Bronwyn stiffened. “A what?”

  “A speck,” I said. What was I saying? Babbling on. “Just a little black bar on the rim of the iris. In your left eye. I’ve noticed it before.”

  She appeared alarmed. My face felt hot.

  “It’s nothing,” I said quickly. “I’m sorry I mentioned it.”

  Bronwyn turned away, flustered, and went to Mallt, then knelt and laid her head in the woman’s lap. “I’ll never leave you,” she murmured. But she still looked strangely back at me.

  I didn’t know whether to put my arms around the two of them or warn the mother that she had a killer for a daughter.

  “What should we do now?” I asked.

  “Drink tea,” said Swoony.

  26

  I wish I could tell you that it was all sunshine and roses from there on in. Nicky returned from exile at Cousin Willie’s. We were a family again, he and Bronwyn and Freddy and Anna Maria and I. But we were like a vase cracked and put back together without glue. One touch could make us fall apart again.

  How I read it: Bronwyn had left us in order to be free, and she returned because she was willing to sacrifice that freedom to be with her mother. She knew we would take Mallt in.

  Toward me she appeared skittish. When I entered a room, she often as not left it. During the day she stayed by her mother’s side, making sure she was comfortable, helping the nurse whom Swoony had hired. We came slowly to grasp how completely illness had taken over the woman.

  We could thank Freddy for Mallt Bowen, and for the few details that she summoned forth regarding Bronwyn’s early life. It took a while, but Freddy’s hired detectives finally tracked down the story of a child taken by wild Indians, a couple bereft, their subsequent travel to South America. Found, too late, the stepfather dead, the mother dying.

  Bronwyn had been born in the Port of Philadelphia on July 19, 1857, on the first day of Dan and Mallt Bowen’s arrival in the United States from Wales. The family relocated to the coalfields of northeastern Pennsylvania, then, with the Civil War raging, to the mining towns of Colorado. In an unheralded Comanche raid, she was taken, aged four, in late spring 1862.

  So her real name was Bronwyn Bowen. Her real age, eighteen.

  Bronwyn might have acted the dutiful daughter during the day, but in the evening she continued to leave the house. Not covertly, dressed as a boy, as she used to, but openly, brazenly.

  The ostensible reason, she said, was her charity work with women of the night. She had recruited Edna Croker into the task. Recovering after the Fifth Avenue Hotel tragedy, Edna felt well enough to engage in the pursuit, especially since it meant spending time with her beloved Bronwyn. Several times Colm went with them as a bodyguard, if their target neighborhood was particularly low.

  “They pass out bundles,” Colm said when I asked after Bronwyn’s nighttime activities. “She’s keen to get them fallen ladies engaged as seamstresses. They have a doctor with them, and some nurses.”

  “And afterward?” I asked. “She goes out?”

  “Afterward she comes home,” Colm said. “At least she did when I was along.”

  I didn’t entirely trust his account. He appeared to have become a complete Bronwyn partisan. I was surrounded by them. I was also stung she hadn’t invited me to accompany her on her missions of mercy.

  Love is a coin played often for its obverse, jealousy. My lovesick neediness appeared not to impress Bronwyn. She continued to avoid me and, when we spent time together, to act distracted and remote.

  I swear that I did not actively spy on her. Knowing at least that much, that a sure way to kill love is to worry it.

  Why did I follow her that particular night? All that day and the day before, there had been a flurry of activity on her part for which I could not fully account—hurried meetings in the stairhall with Edna Croker, notes sent by messenger, notes received. Something was clearly up.

  “The last two missives were to the Showalter place,” Mike the butler told me when I buttonholed him.

  “Showalter? That can’t be,” I said.

  “Before that, two from Croker, then two more to Croker,” Mike said.

  Colm told me he had no idea what was happening, if indeed something was. “Young ladies,” he said, as if that explained it all.

  Which it very well could have. But my feelings for Bronwyn were not to be d
enied. I could not simply settle into an evening of anatomical drawing and forget about her.

  A thunderstorm hammered in from the west, bringing hail that afternoon and a drenching rain afterward.

  “I hope you have the good sense of staying in tonight,” Anna Maria said to Bronwyn at dinner.

  “I’m going to Edna Croker’s,” Bronwyn said. “Her family is having an evening at home.”

  “I suppose that’s all right,” Nicky said, assuming the pompous air of a social secretary. “Although I might wish for a more exalted company. The Crokers remain not quite comme il faut.”

  “Don’t be precocious, dear,” Anna Maria said.

  “They are the only family that will accept me as a guest,” Bronwyn said.

  “A recital?” I asked.

  “You shan’t come,” she said to me, a tad abruptly, I thought. Softening, she said, “You’d be extremely bored. Bel canto, not to your taste.”

  You are lying, the green-eyed monster within me said.

  “Take the barouche,” Freddy said, forgetting we had already sold it.

  “She’s picking me up in her coach,” Bronwyn said.

  Stormy as it was that night, I made it my business to be waiting in the darkness of Sixty-third Street as the Croker coach pulled up in front of Swoony’s. Mike helped in a heavily veiled Bronwyn. Edna herself, whom I glimpsed as the coachman passed down Fifth, appeared veiled also. I followed them downtown.

  The pelting rain transformed the graveled avenue into slop. My suspicions rose to new heights when the coach stopped at Forty-second and Fifth for a new passenger, a woman who left a second carriage parked alongside the reservoir and quickly climbed inside the coach with Edna and Bronwyn. In the rain, that it was indeed a female was all I could see, since furthermore her face remained totally obscured by veils, scarves and wraps.

  The coach abruptly swung back north, turning in the middle of the thoroughfare. I had to pull my mount smartly around to prevent myself from being seen. I needn’t have bothered, for in the next moment the Croker coach pulled to the curb. The trio of occupants got out and, shielding their heads from the downpour, transferred to a hansom cab.