Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  More and more strange. I couldn’t imagine what it was all about, but I didn’t like the feel of it. Back up Fifth Avenue, a block past the rising scaffolds of the Catholic cathedral a-building, to arrive at an elegant, four-story chocolate-stucco mansion at the northeast corner of Fifty-second Street.

  The place’s somewhat forbidding aspect stemmed from the dearth of gaslight around it. Oddly, that specific stretch of Fifth lacked streetlamps. Most houses at least illuminated their own doorways and grounds, out of a sense of display or for simple safety. Not so this one, which stood well shrouded by the night, to be only occasionally lit by fissures of lightning.

  The three women left the cab, did not approach the front door of the house but instead proceeded along a dark walkway to the side until they were swallowed by the gloom.

  The caper began to feel dangerous to me. Whatever they were up to, it did not involve a stay-at-home vocal recital under the watchful gazes of Mr. and Mrs. Croker.

  Thoroughly drenched, acting entirely on impulse, I hitched my mount across Fifth Avenue and plunged down the little walkway myself, wishing at least to establish into what door my quarry had disappeared. But when I rounded the back corner of the mansion, I blundered directly into them in the dark.

  I make a poor footpad, but in my defense the three of them were dressed head to toe in black, the entrance they stood before was unlit, plus the rain obscured all.

  Edna Croker emitted a little gasping shriek as I collided with her.

  “Hugo,” I heard Bronwyn hiss. Two things happened. The anonymous woman with them collapsed into a faint, and the door in front of which we stood cracked open, allowing a thin gleam of yellow light to emerge.

  By that illumination I saw that the third veiled woman, slumped lifelessly now in Edna Croker’s arms, was Delia Showalter.

  I felt weak in the knees myself.

  “Don’t you go down, too, damn you,” Bronwyn said, seizing my arm.

  “What’s happening here?” I asked. I meant it as a demand, but it came out more resembling a yelp.

  “Bronwyn Bowen,” Bronwyn announced to the maidservant who had opened the door. The servant nodded but then reclosed the door sharply.

  “Bronwyn,” I said.

  “Oh, my God,” Delia moaned, coming back to life. “Oh, my precious God.” She turned her face to the corner of the doorway.

  “Why’d you have to come?” Bronwyn asked, her voice fierce.

  “Now that he’s here, we need him,” Edna whispered to her. “We need a man.”

  Bronwyn shook her head, dismissive. “He won’t be able to take it.”

  The maidservant opened the door again, beckoning us in.

  “I have to know what’s going on,” I said.

  Bronwyn hesitated, then put her face into mine. “We’re in trouble. You make a scene, you do anything except keep your mouth shut and look pretty, I’ll slice open your guts and feed them to Rags.”

  The imperative in her words impressed me—authoritarian yes, but with a desperate pleading mixed in, too. Such was her sway over me that I could not, at that moment, do anything except exactly as Bronwyn commanded. I meekly followed them into the dark-lit mansion for I knew not what purpose.

  A parlor or waiting room of sorts, replicating the gloom outside by utilizing only a single candelabrum for its uncertain glow. The hearth unlit. Flowered carpets, velvet curtains, engravings of Dutch masterworks hung on the wall beside the ormolu mantel clock. An air of restrained opulence. It did not feel to me like a brothel, but there was something mercantile about it, not a private home. A smell of carbolic in the air.

  The maidservant had disappeared, and when she returned I caught a quick glimpse of the interior: two women walking side by side in loose kimono-style white robes. From somewhere deep within the house, the squall of an infant.

  “Madam Restell will soon be with you,” said the maidservant.

  With those words the scales fell from my eyes and I felt the world crashing down upon me.

  • • •

  Everyone knew Madam Restell. She had become wealthy even before the war, but after that time her fortune, one of the first big mail-order fortunes ever, rivaled those of some of the wealthiest men in Manhattan. She didn’t earn respect for it, though, but hatred.

  Madam Restell helped women to adopt out babies, and she helped women avoid having babies, too. People commonly jeered and spit at her elegant carriage as it conveyed her openly about the town.

  I felt it impossible to recover my equilibrium. Madam Restell! “The Most Evil Woman in New York!” A living, breathing, walking scandal, a tempting target for every preacher and Puritan, subject of tirade after tirade in the press.

  Naturally, I did not track the exact movements of such an odious personality, but the last I heard, she operated out of an unassuming yellow clapboard house in Greenwich Village. Now here she was on Fifth Avenue, having come up in the world.

  Madam Restell, who advertised as a female physician in the Herald, promoting herself as a dispenser of pills and nostrums:

  Madam Restell’s experience and knowledge in the treatment of cases of female irregularity, is such as to require but a few days to effect a perfect cure.

  Madam Restell, abortionist.

  I flung myself into one of the upholstered chairs in the waiting room. A boiling wrath erupted inside me and I leaped back to my feet. Somehow I directed my anger not against Bronwyn, the guilty party, but against Delia.

  “How could you bring her here?” I snarled, seizing Delia by the arm, wrenching her hand from her weeping eyes.

  Delia shrank away as if in horror. “Please, please, please, we must leave!” she cried.

  Bronwyn moved in between us.

  “No, no, this is not right,” I said. I grabbed Bronwyn and looked her square in the face. “You must have the child!”

  She took a single step back.

  I spoke quickly to her, a flurry of pleading. “I don’t care who knows, we will accept it into our family, your lying-in, everything will be taken care of, but not this! Not this! Please, Bronwyn. Keep the child!”

  Competing angers battled for my attention. Anger toward the man who had spoiled my love. Bev? One of the Bliss brothers? The Gypsy dancer? The candidates were many. Anger toward Delia and Edna, conspirators who had brought Bronwyn to this awful house of shame.

  And then the woman herself entered to us, Madam Restell, in a rich black silk gown, lace mantilla trimmed in fur, white satin bonnet. The very luxury of her costume enraged me. It seemed the height of indignity that this woman, who I featured at that moment should be flung into the pits of hell, instead walked the earth in finery.

  “Miss Bowen,” she said in a calm voice, moving forward to take Bronwyn’s hand. “This must be too, too sad for you and your”—looking at us, choosing her words—“friends.”

  Wanting to pound her to the floor, I remained paralyzed in her presence.

  “All will be well,” Restell said. “I have stood in this room with countless weeping females and seen those same young ladies but a short month later, all gay and laughing in carriages on the concourses of the Central Park.”

  “We should go!” Delia cried out.

  “Now is not the time to lose your nerve,” Restell said, still addressing Bronwyn. She turned to me. “And this? Is this the man responsible?”

  The strangeness of the surroundings, the appalling circumstance I found myself fallen into, most of all Bronwyn’s degraded status served to rob me entirely of words. I could not answer Madam Restell. I would have known my lines, if I could have but said them, drawing myself up like the hero in a melodrama. “Me, madam? I am not her betrayer! But I shall be her avenger!”

  “Yes, yes,” Restell said, as if responding to my unspoken sentiment. “It is always the same. The men are always right, but it is the women who are wronged.”

  Edna wept, too, now, the whole waiting room awash in emotion. Clucking, Madam Restell said, “Who comes with her to the
examination?”

  She glanced at me. “Not you. You look as if you like to faint. You had better sit down.”

  “No!” I shouted, and took Bronwyn protectively in my arms.

  Restell shrugged. “Then her,” she said, indicating Edna. With that the abortionist gathered up Delia Showalter and, Edna Croker following, conducted her into the examination room.

  I had been well pummeled by blows the whole evening, serial realizations that led me into ever darker regions of my mind, but now I formed a new understanding that staggered me all over again.

  It was not in fact Bronwyn who was here for Madam Restell. It was Delia Showalter.

  “Tell me something, Hugo,” Bronwyn said as we were left alone. “Have you been a fool your whole life?”

  I sank back into a chair, all clear thought thwarted by emotion.

  “We’re lucky the poor girl didn’t die of shame simply from your presence,” Bronwyn said.

  Bile rose in my throat, and I felt sick to my stomach. Bronwyn kicked a spittoon over from a corner and positioned it in front of me.

  “You could actually help, you know,” she said. “Instead of being a drag on the whole enterprise.”

  “The enterprise!” I wailed.

  “She needs a strong arm to lean on,” Bronwyn said. “Let’s leave judgments and upsets and anger behind for now, all right? Let’s just get through this night.”

  I looked up at her. I am sure my face was a mask of distress. I could not understand her expression. It appeared cold to me. Savage. Yes, yes, all very well to say, leave judgments behind. But here she was, judging me!

  “I am sorry we ever brought you here from Virginia City,” I whispered.

  “You didn’t bring me,” she said. “I came.”

  Bronwyn told me to do nothing but sit upon the small chair in the waiting room, exactly where I was, not to move until I was called upon. Then she went into the examination room.

  “Don’t stir from this place,” she said as she left. “But be ready.”

  How could I not? The weeping in the next room, the doom-laden striking of the ormolu clock, the certain crime in which I had become involved worked on my mind incessantly.

  Time passed, the weeping died, then was replaced by wretched, impossible, horrible shrieks of pain, choked and pitiable.

  “Mama, oh, Mama, Mama!” Delia cried. I could not just sit there helplessly! But I did.

  Four A.M. The deserted hour.

  Bronwyn burst through the door. “Hugo, come quickly,” she said.

  What I encountered in Madam Restell’s examination room will stay with me for the rest of my life.

  Restell, in a gore-streaked surgeon’s apron. Delia only semiconscious, her legs splayed under a stained sheet and flopping pathetically whenever they were repositioned. Edna Croker standing alongside the abortionist, her eyeglasses splattered with flecks of blood.

  From some dim recess, I summoned up the memory that Edna volunteered as a nurse, and she seemed to be steady and stoic, holding up better than even the grim, worried Restell. I feared for Edna, though, thinking that another trip to the rest home might be in store for her.

  Bronwyn stood at the head of the table, holding tight to one of Delia’s bloodless hands, whispering desperate soothings into the girl’s unhearing ear.

  “She’s bleeding out,” Restell said to me. “You’re a medical student, they tell me. Can you do anything?”

  Four A.M. The desperate hour.

  Yes, I tried. Edna and I tried. I attempted to locate and stanch the bleeding at its source, but it kept coming, not pulsing, not arterial at least, but venous, a slow draining-away of life. Finally, after I packed her wounded uterus with a tamponade of gauze, she stabilized.

  At dawn, as the light rose . . . well, you really couldn’t call it a rally, but Delia came around sufficiently to be able to talk.

  “I want to go home,” she whispered. “I want my mama.”

  “You can’t be moved, darling,” Bronwyn said.

  Madam Restell was frantic not to have the dying girl there. “A litter, a closed coach,” she said. “We have done it often before.”

  “No, no,” said Delia. “I can walk.”

  We did get the poor patient to her family’s Twenty-eighth Street brownstone, Edna acting as friend and nurse, smoothing the way for Delia, holding her up for the few steps from hired coach to home.

  Halting briefly at the Showalter back door—the servants’ entrance, I noticed, less public that way—the sick, ruined girl turned and gave a wave and an ashen, uncertain smile, then disappeared inside.

  • • •

  Dawn after a big rain. The city washed fresh and clean. Ice and coal wagons on the street. The sidewalks just starting to become peopled. Bronwyn and I proceeded by hansom cab from Twenty-eighth north up Fifth toward Swoony’s. I tied my mount on behind. Inside the cab we were largely silent.

  Hugely silent. The kind of silent filled with empty words. I had a lot to say to her, but none of it mattered.

  Instead, after a few blocks, when we reached Thirty-fourth Street or so, she began to talk. “Nothing in her life prepared her for any of this,” Bronwyn said.

  Delia.

  “Her mother counseled her, but only delicately. The needs of her future husband. Her mother said to open her heart to her spouse, don’t smother him, physicality is not wrong, nor is it paramount. Delia hoped fervently that she would make a good wife. But she was a girl sent out into the world without defenses.”

  “Please,” I said. “I’m not sure I can bear it.”

  A blow, another blow, then one more.

  “Beverly Willets wrestled her down in a closed carriage on a cold night last February. He parked on an empty street at the far western edge of town, by the docks. He held her hard by the neck, squashing her windpipe while unbuttoning his trousers. She had no way of responding, it was so far out of her ken. She was strong, you just saw in there how strong she is, but she wasn’t raised to fight. And the man she thought was her friend simply outmuscled her.”

  Stupid fool. All I could think. Not about Bev—there were harsher judgments reserved for him—but about myself. I had been foolish in regard to Delia. Not realizing that by jettisoning her I had made her vulnerable to any predator who happened by.

  “Afterward she straightened herself and he walked her into her family’s home, the perfect gentleman.”

  “I want to kill the man,” I said.

  “I have, too, ever since I finally heard the whole confessed truth from Delia,” Bronwyn said. “But of course the coward has fled town.”

  “How did you get involved?” I asked. “Surely there were others who could have helped her.”

  “Who? Do you really think this is rare, Hugo? A girl spoiled? Come along with me and the Crushed Daisy Alliance some night, see how common it is. What’s rare is people willing to help instead of condemn.”

  “Crushed Daisy? Could you possibly have come up with a more ridiculous name?” I said.

  “You’re avoiding the issue,” she said.

  “It was you who knew Madam Restell,” I said. “You who arranged it. Victoria Woodhull taught you all this.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I kept your holy Delegate name out of it.”

  She saw that the shot hit home and laid her hand on my arm. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You were fine in there at the end. Really fine. I felt as though it was a privilege to know you. You saved her life.”

  I sobbed silently. “She doesn’t have a life,” I said. “Not anymore.”

  “Sure she does,” Bronwyn said. “Look, Hugo darling, the strong savage the weak. Men brutalize women. What did Restell say? The men are always right, but the women are always wronged. What can you or I do against any of it? This was nothing. This was only doing what had to be done. She will survive.”

  “I feel like an outlaw,” I said.

  “Me, too,” Bronwyn said. “I think it might be safer for us right now if we did what o
utlaws tend to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Leave town.”

  Not right away, she said. That might arouse suspicion. The Showalters would be as anxious as we were to conceal the truth of what had happened. But given the awareness that Bronwyn had of being stalked continually by the press, it might be better simply to leave the field of battle for a while.

  “An expedition,” she said. “We’ll take Nicky to the fair.”

  I stared at her. After the abattoir of emotion we had just been through, to be able to pronounce that word, “fair.” To be able even to think of it. Bronwyn’s heart was truly ice. There was indeed a massive world’s fair in Philadelphia just then. But how could she suggest a visit?

  Against gallows humor nothing measures up so much as a physician’s dark brand of sardonic observation. I have witnessed words spoken in an operating theater, the patient lying etherized on the table, that would have carried the poor soul off just to hear. A method of coping, no doubt, but an extreme one.

  Around Harvard Medical School the previous term, a doctor’s satirical witticism got repeated over and over, passing from student to student as a sort of common reference that demonstrated the cool-hearted knowingness of the teller.

  “The operation was entirely successful, but the patient succumbed.”

  Ah, yes, boys, very funny, that. With Delia Showalter the sentiment came brutally true. We were, in fact, successful in ending her pregnancy. We got her home. Pale to ghostly, complaining of terrible pain, she spoke, walked on her own, even appeared at dinner once, all the time bleeding, seeping into her menstrual rag.

  Two nights later, at the hour of sleep, the blank hour, four A.M., the patient succumbed, her heart struck by a clot and stopped like a broken clock.

  27

  Sandobar, poor Sandobar. It would be the last journey we would make in our magical machine.

  I thought of Vesalius’s drawings in which the skin and skeleton and arterial systems are all stripped away, leaving only the nervous system. That was what was left of Sandobar, that was what was left of me.

  The train at least had her still-twitching torso: the parlor car, sleeping compartments for my parents and for Bronwyn, a separate car containing a shared compartment for Colm, Nicky and me. The stoves were cold, though, and the boiler heating system disconnected.