Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  Sopping up the last bit of gravy with the last bit of corn bread, Howe says, When I am presented with a case, I never ask, What are the charges? I always ask, Who is the judge? Sitting on the bench this morning will be Bowman Harkington, a Democrat. He is a man whom the newspapers will characterize as one ill disposed to look kindly upon a wealthy scion such as yourself.

  Formerly wealthy, I say.

  Howe looks pained. It is the wrong thing to bring up, inadvertently reminding him that my father’s long purse had recently been rendered considerably shorter. He whispers to one of the lackeys, who runs out of the room as if on fire. Off to loot what remains of the Delegate bank accounts, no doubt.

  There are certain aspects of Harkington’s background, Howe says, that make him preferable to us as the presiding judge over your arraignment, and especially over the hearing for bail. He is a man with whom we have worked in the past and will work again this morning.

  Bribable, in other words.

  Hummel nods and coughs into his hand. While in the courtroom, Howe continues, you will not speak. You will stand up and sit down as commanded. You are a mere poor player on the stage, but you do neither strut nor fret. You may not understand the proceedings. That doesn’t matter.

  I recall the last I saw of Bronwyn, the Friday night of Bev’s death, three days ago now. I am still determined to save her. At present she could be anywhere in Manhattan. Or riding the transcontinental back to Virginia City. I hope, at least, that she remains safe.

  I’m not at all innocent, I say.

  Which one of us is? Howe says. You labor under a common misperception of the law. The law does not find you innocent, it merely judges you not guilty. And though you may not believe in your own innocence, in the unlikely event this case comes to trial, you will be proved not guilty. But first we will bail you out from this jail.

  Two hours later I am led by a bailiff through the mazelike Tombs and into a courtroom on a lower floor. William Howe’s grand prediction of a controlled and tidy judicial process goes off the rails almost at once.

  • • •

  Nothing demonstrates the awesome power of the firm of Howe & Hummel like the emptiness of Courtroom Four. By some method devious or masterful, they have been able to head off the press from covering the next installment of the Humiliations of the Delegates.

  The empty chamber hosts only a few warm bodies. Apart from myself, there are two clerks, a bailiff, a tipstaff, my two lawyers and Judge Harkington, a man who appears to me to be comically unlike a jurist. With hair sprouting in all directions, he seems a hobbledehoy character out of Shakespeare, swallowed by his robes.

  I am about to say, Where did they exhume him? when the words die in my mouth, as a second bailiff leads another defendant into court.

  Bronwyn. In shackles. I had no idea she had been taken.

  Her presence momentarily stuns me. Then, leaping to my feet like a stage actor, I call out, We’re betrayed! Unthinking, I react, moving to strike the person nearest at hand, Bill Howe. The bailiff behind me wrestles me back into my chair.

  Bronwyn is led across the room to take her place at a defendant’s table a few feet away, wearing her now-somewhat-tatty brown dress, blood smears visible upon it, her black hair uncombed but that immensely frustrating unruffled expression on her face.

  No more the lady, no more the fresh-faced debutante of the last few months.

  The return of Savage Girl.

  I readily grasp what her presence means, the depth of the lies Howe and Hummel have told me. They let me sit there talking for forty-eight hours straight, spilling all our secrets, but never once in that entire time did they divulge that the law had her in cuffs, too.

  At the women’s prison on Blackwell’s Island, I find out later.

  I realize instantly that while I am going to be freed on bond, Bronwyn is to be made a scapegoat.

  Freddy. It is my father’s doing. The transatlantic telegraph cables must have been buzzing the whole weekend.

  Let the girl swing, but save my son.

  I still have my suspicions about Bronwyn’s activities. But when I see her standing there surrounded by burly jailers, alone and cast out, my fears melt away.

  Though all men will set themselves against you, I take your side.

  Your Honor, I call out, I wish to discharge these gentlemen and act as my own counsel.

  Sit there and be silent, Mr. Delegate, Harkington says.

  I insist, I say. My plea is guilty.

  Silence! the hairy little judge cries. Shall I have you removed?

  Excellence, Bill Howe says, rumbling to his feet, you see a defendant come before you unsettled in mind.

  I cast a desperate look over at Bronwyn, who raises her shackled hands and puts a finger to her lips. Something I had not realized before, for all my reading in Spenser and Sir Walter Scott: Distress is exactly what renders the damsel-in-distress beautiful.

  With Bronwyn’s presence I understand even less how it is that Howe and Hummel have managed to keep a lid on the proceedings. The Wild Child of the Washoe appearing in court on a murder charge? Fresh meat for the jackals of the fourth estate.

  I refuse to be silenced. I call out, Why is she shackled and I am not? Why am I represented and she is not?

  Remove the defendant, remove the defendant, Harkington says. Straggly white hairs shoot out of his ears like flames.

  Your Honor, Your Honor, Bill Howe says.

  Hummel leans over, seizes my neck and twists me back into my seat. One more outburst, he hisses, and all your tawdry little secrets will be spilled.

  This will take but a moment, Your Honor, Howe says to the judge, your forbearance, please. Harkington sinks back into his robes, momentarily placated.

  Plea? Harkington says.

  Not guilty, Howe says.

  Bail?

  A ten-thousand-dollar surety upon the Fifth Avenue mansion of his grandmawmaw, Howe says.

  Mr. Newark?

  A man rises to speak, a person so colorless I had not noticed him before. The prosecutor.

  The state accepts the terms of bail, he says.

  Stand, Mr. Delegate, Harkington says.

  Howe hauls me to my feet. You may discharge your counsel, as you wish, the judge says. In which case the bond arrangement proposed by Mr. Howe and Mr. Hummel and accepted by the state prosecutor will be voided and you will be thrown into the lowest cell of this prison that I can find for you.

  May I speak to my codefendant? I ask.

  No, you may not, Judge Harkington says.

  I lean toward Bronwyn. If I’m out, I can get you out, I say. If they keep me in, I won’t be able to do anything.

  Bronwyn gazes back at me, her face a mask.

  Harkington erupts, banging his gavel, slapping me with a hundred-dollar contempt-of-court fine.

  I’m wrenched back facing forward by the bailiff.

  What about her? I say.

  As if my words have unleashed the Furies, the courtroom explodes. Dozens upon dozens of reporters, news hacks and magazine writers invade the place at once, shouting, feverish, jockeying for seats. I have never seen a single room so transformed so quickly.

  Wild Child, they call. Savage Girl!

  Harkington’s last few words are lost amid the general disorder. The bailiff leads Bronwyn away, the frantic journalists leaping at her like a pack of pink-skinned dogs. Deprived of their primary prey, they turn on me.

  • • •

  The Point is quiet on a Monday forenoon, though various bottles lie scattered across the sidewalk, dead soldiers left over from the campaigns of the weekend. Leaving the Tombs proved less difficult than losing the trailing newsmen. Bailed out of the prison, I only barely extract myself from their clutches through means of sequential hansom cabs, by the end of which subterfuge I am out of ready coin.

  I proceed to the Tenderloin nightclub, where I suspect that Tu-Li and the berdache are holed up.

  Penniless, hounded and betrayed, feeling bitter and we
ary, such is my present status. I am cored out. If someone would bother to ask, What are you feeling? I would say, I feel hollow. But no one bothers to ask. Neither do other questions plaguing my mind receive much in the way of answers.

  Why did Howe and Hummel conceal Bronwyn’s arrest from me? For the entire time of my weekend interrogation, she was lodged in a cell on Blackwell’s Island. Yet they failed to mention this salient fact.

  They have shown their true colors. They represent not my interests but Freddy’s. I can look for no more help from that quarter. It was only my own naïveté that made me trust them in the first place.

  And Freddy and Anna Maria? They, too, have proved themselves unworthy. They fled the country, abandoning their children in need. Then they callously directed their minions to allow Bronwyn to rot in jail.

  Was this really all my father’s doing? Did my mother actively aid and abet or merely stand by? Either way I judge her culpable. Why would she turn on the former object of her maternal affection?

  Save the son, sacrifice the daughter. Adults, I have noticed, often behave like cowards.

  Then again, Howe and Hummel did manage to roll away the stone from the Tombs. I have risen again. Not many men emerge clean from the Halls of Justice. To that degree my lawyers have served my ends, since I believe that only in freedom can I work to understand the series of killings that have followed me and Bronwyn step for step, like trailing hellhounds.

  But that thought only leads to another. Why have I thrown my lot in with Bronwyn? Everything indicates she actually belongs in jail. She is some sort of madwoman. I still feel the weight of her attack that night in the ravine. I still blame her for the death of Colm. If she is a murderer, why would I want to free her?

  Yet upon gaining liberty I go directly from the Tombs to The Point, seeking out her two truest partisans.

  I think about my conclusion early on that Bronwyn is never a prisoner and always is where she is only by choice. Could she have allowed herself to be captured and prosecuted for Bev’s murder out of some perverse strategy that is beyond my comprehension? Is she playing some high-level game?

  Yes, I am penniless, hounded and betrayed, searching for allies among two former friends who now ostracize me. I climb the purple-painted stairs of the Tenderloin brownstone and push open the door of The Point.

  In the harsh reality of morning, saloons and dance halls so gay just hours before display themselves shorn of ersatz nocturnal glamour, cold, bled out, a faint odor of excess left hanging over their interiors.

  Thus it is with The Point. Its lurid paintings and exotic furnishings by the light of day appear merely silly. The tonsured apothecary behind the bar, tending to his bottles and potions, is stripped of his nighttime authority.

  We’re closed, the barkeep says, not turning around. He adds mysteriously, Deliveries go through the hole.

  I’m trying to find Tahktoo, I say.

  He does look at me then, and I see the light of recognition in his eyes. Young Mr. Delegate, he says. This is a clear violation of the sacred anonymity of the Tenderloin, but I let it pass.

  Tahktoo? I say. Do you know where he is?

  The Zuni Queen of the Night resides in an apartment upstairs, he says. But she doesn’t want to see you. And like I say, we’re closed.

  Normally I would extract a bill from my pocket, wave it under the good man’s nose and obtain entry. But I have no bill to wave.

  Please, I say. I am penniless, the news hacks hound me, I am betrayed by my lawyers. I need to speak with my friend.

  Ho! he says. Speaking only for myself, it is good to see a high-and-mighty Delegate brought low. Say that word again.

  Which?

  That first word.

  Please, I say, wondering what I have done to make this man hate me.

  Please, what?

  Please, sir.

  He stomps his foot heavily behind the bar. A creature emerges, popping up from the basement below, some sort of subterranean midget employee. One of Swoony’s nonce phrases occurs to me: The floor has a door. The barkeep whispers to the midget, who looks over at me and scampers up the flight of stairs at the rear of the establishment.

  I wait.

  How do you like it? the barkeep asks.

  What?

  Disgrace.

  Bitter as salt, I say.

  Welcome to our world, he says.

  The midget—through bleary eyes I realize it is merely an extremely dirty young boy—appears at the top of the stairs, beckons and leads me up four flights to the garret. At the top of a steep, narrow staircase stand the berdache and Tu-Li.

  Wait, Tahktoo calls down to me.

  We only want to see you if you have given up your wrongheaded ideas, Tu-Li says.

  Is she guiltless? the berdache asks.

  Colm Cullen is dead, I say.

  Do you believe her guiltless? Tahktoo repeats, insistent.

  Just this morning, I say, not two hours ago, I saw the blood of Beverly Willets on her dress.

  They do not respond, staring down at me like the gods from Olympus. Tu-Li makes a motion with her hand, and the midget boy pulls on my sleeve, trying to lead me away.

  All right, I say.

  Say it, Tahktoo says.

  She is innocent, I say, suddenly realizing that I actually accept it as true, despite the night in the ravine, despite what my own eyes have seen, despite all the evidence to the contrary. I am as though a believer, witnessing the blood flow from the relic, the tears on the cheeks of the statue.

  Come up, you fool, Tahktoo says, and Tu-Li laughs.

  As I start to climb the steep little stairway, my head goes dizzy and I fall backward onto the midget child. Although I almost immediately recover my senses, Tu-Li and the berdache put me to bed on a pallet in their tiny garret chambers, where I sleep like the dead for six hours.

  • • •

  Someone plays a tinkly piano downstairs when I wake in the garret of The Point, a strange bouncy tune of a type I have never heard before. I am alone. The room is thick with afternoon heat. The scent of opium seems to emanate directly from the walls.

  The faint click-click of gambling tiles. I find Tu-Li and the berdache right outside my door, in a cramped sitting room, a made-over stair landing, really, that barely affords them space to play their game.

  How do you feel? Tu-Li asks.

  Rocky, I say.

  Come and sit, Tahktoo says. We’ll speak of things that matter.

  Everything I know is wrong, they tell me. We talk over strong coffee, and I come to understand how my suspicions of Bronwyn are viewed by the two of them as a deep betrayal that renders me unfit for association.

  It was either Bronwyn or the Delegates, Tu-Li says. We made our choice.

  The blood I saw on Bronwyn’s dress, they say, could have gotten there when she grappled with Bev’s real killer. Which real killer? They neglect to say. But I suddenly recall that I also had bloodstains on my clothes that night.

  If Tu-Li and the berdache saw the girl standing with red-smeared hand claws over a dead body, they would still believe her innocent. Such is their unconditional love for their darling.

  I do my best to convince them of my allegiance to Bronwyn. I feel as though I am being accepted into some obscure religious sect.

  We air it out, all of it, analyzing every event starting at the Comstock and through to the Philadelphia fair, always with the proviso that Savage Girl is somehow, in some invisible, unimaginable way, wholly blameless.

  It is difficult to do. Logic suffers. I feel myself being bent into a pretzel. I go along, but I still harbor doubts.

  She acts uncomfortable around me, I say.

  You did something to her, Tu-Li says. You know how she has only a few memories from childhood?

  Before the Comanches, the berdache says.

  Yes? I say.

  Well, you walked into one of them, Tu-Li says. She remembers, back when she was three or four, her mother talking about a little fleck she has in
her left eye. Her mama says to her, “The first man who notices that spot, him you shall marry.”

  I can’t quite believe it. But thinking back, I can precisely date the start of her increased skittishness around me, the time when I, blabbering like an idiot, mentioned the maculation in her eye.

  This is a revelation.

  So it’s fate. We are meant for each other.

  Tu-Li says, We can’t believe after all this time that we know her better than you do.

  But she loves no one except herself, I say.

  The berdache erupts with a deep, snorting guffaw, and Tu-Li and I both look at him.

  You know very well the one she loves, he says.

  Bad luck to tell it out loud, Tu-Li says quickly.

  Who understands both sides of the human heart better than me? the berdache says.

  I don’t wholly grasp what they’re talking about until much later. It’s like I won’t let myself know. But something makes the blood run to my face.

  As upset as the two of them are that I could ever have suspected their dear Bronwyn capable of violence, we are still able to make a deal. We begin to scheme and plot. We are three now.

  Three against the world, I say.

  Four, the berdache says.

  Nicky is out of commission, I say. A prisoner of war. In England.

  Then it will have to be three, says Tahktoo.

  • • •

  Briefly I consider hiding out with Tu-Li and the berdache at The Point but decide I’ll just have to brave the press gauntlet at Swoony’s.

  So I head home.

  Tu-Li has refreshed my pockets with a little cash, but I choose to walk, even though I still feel the old wound in my foot from the night of the debut. The pain I find pleasurable. It is a fine spring evening.

  North and east, a crinkum-crankum route out of the Tenderloin, then passing by the Showalter brownstone, dropping a card to pay my respects. Up Fifth Avenue to the northern edge of town, a half-rural realm where only a few lonely outposts exist. Madam Restell’s mansion, mired in shadow.

  In the Fifties, as I approach the park, I pick up a ragtag gang of street children, who somehow recognize me.

  Delegate-smell-a-rat! they shout. One of them has a kid goat on a dirty string tether. Such is my escort home.