Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  A different sort of welcoming committee camps out in front of Swoony’s. With torches. I am buffeted and blocked on my way into the place, fearing for my life and saved only by Mike the butler, who opens the front door to pull me inside. He must shove newspapermen aside to reclose it.

  Mr. Hugo, the man says, as if I have just stepped in from a walk around the park. You will find Mrs. Delegate and Mrs. Bowen in the downstairs sitting room.

  I want to say, Where else would they be? But don’t.

  I enter to Swoony and Mallt. Friedrich! Swoony calls out cheerily. Bronwyn’s mother has sunk deeper into herself even in the space of the three days I have been gone. Her white handkerchief has turned a rust red.

  I neglect to tell the two crones of my weekend adventures. A mutilation murder, a trip to the Tombs, a court appearance, bail. Why bother them with that? They have their own mortality in mind.

  Instead I join Swoony for a cup, or two, of brandy. The scene resolves itself into an unreal domestic tableau. Rags makes herself a hassock beneath my feet. From the walls glower the succession of Delegate ancestors, gilt-framed chiaroscuro portraits that follow Swoony to Newport or New York City, wherever she happens to reside. I cannot imagine that any of the august personages who have stared sternly down at me since I was a child ever found themselves in worse straits than I do now.

  Virginia is here, Swoony says.

  Ah, I say.

  I don’t say, She is in jail on Blackwell’s. I don’t say, She is imprisoned because of the fecklessness of your blackguard son, my coward father, Freddy. I don’t say, Your addled mind mistakes even her proper name.

  Virginia has been taking care of us, hasn’t she, Anna Maria? says Swoony.

  Mallt doesn’t respond. Evidently she can’t handle even the simplest question. Her red-lidded eyes no longer burn, only smolder. I wonder if she has in fact expired.

  Grandmother prattles on. She comes at night, Swoony says. You know I have trouble sleeping. The floor has a door.

  Yes, I think. Yes, it does. Whenever you believe you have reached bottom, the floor has a door that will drop you lower.

  I think I will go up, I say. Good night, Grandmother. Good night, Mrs. Bowen.

  Tell Virginia to come down and talk to us, Swoony says.

  Good night, says Bronwyn’s mother, a whisper from the grave. I head to my room with the sound of her cough trailing me.

  I make my way up the darkened stairs to the second floor, thinking to take out my sketchbook, my usual refuge in times of trouble. I pace along the gloomy corridor, and see . . . something.

  In the skein of dark that hangs over the hallway, I catch a quick glimpse of a disappearing figure. A girl with long dark hair. But Bronwyn can’t be here.

  I blink back my fatigue and enter my room. Swoony’s fantasies have invaded my mind. Attempting to draw, I doze over my sketchbook. But Bronwyn pries herself into my dreams, too, a bare-breasted Amazon who walks alongside a tigon.

  31

  The next morning, Tuesday, I venture to the front door, Mike beside me wielding a cosh.

  Ready? I say. He nods. I step out onto the front stoop.

  This early the newsman scrum has thinned. A preacher stands across the avenue, Bible open, ranting volubly. He somehow resembles a sober version of the Stone-Thrower. Then I realize it is the Stone- Thrower, Kleinschmidt, who has evidently found his true calling.

  I think about crossing the street to greet the man, perhaps to suggest a text for a homily, something about not casting the first stone. But instead I motion over one of the newsmen, a tall, skinny, bespectacled fellow by the name of Wick Zinder. A leading light of James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald, he reports on the “serious” scandals, meaning the ones involving a lot of money.

  It turns out I didn’t need to summon him—he was heading my way on his own, along with several straggling reporters.

  Can you give me a few words? Wick Zinder says. Like a lot of tall guys, he slouches.

  Sure, I say. Come along inside.

  Really?

  Just you, I say. Come up, you fool, and make it fast.

  The journalists begin to crowd in front of the door. Mike the butler brandishes his blackjack.

  My photographer? Zinder says.

  The two of them squeeze in, Zinder’s unintroduced confederate hauling an immense wooden box camera. Mike beats back the rest of the rabble and slams shut the door.

  I ask the two newsmen into the parlor. It has the smell of a sickroom. The nurse is there with Mrs. Bowen and Swoony, still in her pre-first-teacup funk.

  This is my grandmother, Mrs. August Delegate, I say. This is Bronwyn’s mother, Mrs. Dan Bowen.

  Zinder has the stunned look of someone who cannot believe his good luck. He already brandishes his little palm-size notebook and is inhaling the room, scribbling furiously.

  Have a seat, I say.

  What . . . what . . . what . . . ? Wick Zinder stutters. I have a feeling he’s not a man often at a loss for words.

  Why me? he finally manages.

  I like your work, I say. The man inflates like a swamp bullfrog, and—I can’t believe it—he actually writes this down.

  I feel as though the true story is not getting out to the public, I say. And I have an announcement.

  His man sets up the camera in front of Mrs. Bowen. No need to caution her to sit still for the exposure. Mike the butler enters with tea and, to the delight of his mistress, teacups.

  Your announcement? Wick Zinder says, prompting me.

  Bronwyn Bowen will once again become Bronwyn Delegate, I say. We will be married as soon as she is released from Blackwell’s. Truth be told, we are already married in our souls. The ceremony will just be a formality.

  Mrs. Bowen jerks awake, ruining the exposure.

  I give Zinder a good half hour, the pages of his notebook flipping like leaves in the wind. I tell him “everything.” What my family thinks of the match. Our deep feelings for each other. I am she and she is I. How our marriage is step one in the rehabilitation of the Wild Child of the Washoe. That the murder charges against her will be resolved. A starry fabrication about our first kiss.

  She is mine forever, I say. We will marry, even if the ceremony has to happen in the Tombs.

  I lay it on thick.

  What I don’t say, because Tu-Li and the berdache would have excommunicated me if I had, is that somewhere deep inside I still suspect that Bronwyn is a killer. If not her, who?

  That afternoon a Herald special edition, headlined DELEGATE SPEAKS. On page three a nice engraving of Bronwyn’s mother, taken from the photograph, and one of Swoony and myself, posed in front of an oil portrait of my great-grandfather Stephen.

  • • •

  That night strange sounds in the household, the patter of footsteps upstairs.

  I am occupied in the front parlor, assisting Mallt Bowen in her efforts to shuffle off the mortal coil. She finally does so at the stroke of midnight, in the presence of Swoony, the nurse and a minister from Grace Church. Her portrait in the Herald that day acts as her last and only one, the process of taking it probably helping her death along.

  The next morning, the undertaker lays the old woman out, the shroud-draped dining-room table serving for a bier. An exclusive set of mourners, my grandmother’s last few household servants, pass in bereavement. Swoony, under the mistaken belief that her daughter-in-law, Anna Maria, has died, spends the day in a haze of tears and brandy.

  I make sure the press knows about the burial service, scheduled for Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. For the rest of the day, I immerse myself in furious consultations with Tu-Li and the berdache. We send a black dress of mourning over to Blackwell’s Island prison. Tu-Li stands in for Bronwyn during the fitting at Richardson’s, since the two of them happen to be of the same stature.

  On credit we purchase an identical gown for Tu-Li and, to prevent sulking, one for the berdache, too. All in silk crepe, full widow’s weeds, plain collar, nine-inch weep
ers cuffs made of white lawn, a bombazine mantle, a cloak of Henrietta cloth, the bonnet’s veil made of gummed, tightly wound silk threads. Supple kidskin gloves and a cambric handkerchief.

  I am conscious, during the process, of making fashion choices that would have done Bev Willets proud.

  Tu-Li and the berdache have returned to live with us. By evening Swoony has cheered up, working her teacup and playing the Chinese tile game with them. She has welcomed the two into her home primarily as gambling partners. The old woman has curious gaps in her senility. She can’t remember the day of the week but is still a demon at cards and tiles.

  By messenger boy from Blackwell’s Island (I recognize the dirty midget child of The Point), we confirm our expectation. Bronwyn is to be allowed to attend her mother’s burial in the custody of a special contingent of matrons and guards. I think of the girl’s cold heart. Does she mourn her mother’s passing? Is she weeping, alone in her cell?

  Helped along by a thin slice of Tu-Li’s opium, I pass out at midnight, troubled only briefly by swirling images of Bronwyn, jaguars, veins of gleaming silver deep within their beds of blue muck. The late Mallt Bowen appears to me also, floating in midair, then slowly crumbling into ash.

  At ten o’clock the next morning, Thursday, the hearse, drawn by two immense plumed Belgians, pulls up in front of Swoony’s. At the same moment, a cable arrives from Nova Scotia. Freddy, Anna Maria and Nicky, a day out from New York. I’m not sure what reception I will give, at least to my parents, when they arrive. At any rate they will miss the funeral.

  We make a motley company, Swoony, Tu-Li, the berdache and myself in one black carriage, following along after the hearse, with about fifty newsmen, gawkers and fire-and-brimstone preachers tagging behind. The procession swells in number on the long trip downtown, some of the late-joining mourners treating the event more in the way of a festival. Through a teeming neighborhood of gasworks, tenements, rendering yards, warehouses, the city’s viscera, to the Brooklyn ferry.

  Green-Wood Cemetery, behind only Niagara Falls, is the greatest tourist destination in all of America. People come for carriage rides, for picnics, to view the statuary. Memento mori falls far down on the list as a reason to visit. Please do not refer to Green-Wood as a graveyard, say the docents. It is a Realm of Rest.

  On this day, an overcast afternoon by the time we finally get there, all the spectators are eager to have a look at the Wild Child of the Washoe, fully five times famous (for her million-dollar wardrobe, her spectacular debut, her shooting, her bizarre background in the Comstock, her arrest for murder).

  The cemetery grounds host a huge, craning crowd of avid spectators. Green-Wood visitors wholly ignorant of the event get swept up in the throng. The gentlemen of the press are relentless, the constabulary overwhelmed. It is perfect chaos.

  I see Bronwyn arrive on the wrong side of the open grave, out of position, a matron and two guards escorting her. She takes her place, standing in her dull black dress by her mother’s coffin, a weeping veil of crepe covering her face. She could have been anybody. The push and jostle of the mob force the graveside mourners to align and realign themselves constantly.

  A shout rises: Take off your veil! Other voices agree: Remove the veil!

  The Grace Church pastor calls out for dignity, in vain. Repeatedly bumped, he almost stumbles into the grave.

  Ashes to ashes, yes, yes, let’s hurry this along before we have a riot on our hands. The Gospel reading, Matthew 11: “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

  Not by choice but by process of elimination, neither Bronwyn nor Swoony being up for it, I present the eulogy. I want to celebrate Mallt Bowen’s life, I say, tracing her journey from Wales, to Pennsylvania, to the Comstock, to South America, always on the trail of “the color,” as gold is named among its acolytes. I cite her love for her late husband, Dan, for her second husband, Hugh Brace, and for her children, only one of whom survives.

  The hymn is taken up by the whole gathering, now over a thousand strong, the voices floating out over the spring-green hills of Brooklyn’s city of the dead:

  A mighty fortress is our God,

  A bulwark never failing;

  Our helper he, amid the flood

  Of mortal ills prevailing.

  Benediction, and out.

  Oh, dear, oh, dear, moans Swoony, breaking her tear-streaked silence. Poor Anna Maria.

  I get my grandmother away before the crush and before the minor riot that does in fact ensue. Those assembled, newsmen and onlookers alike, verge on panic.

  At graveside, bedlam. The police are unprepared.

  Two ladies in mourning pass each other, come together, fall apart.

  A trample of spectators.

  Afterward it is unclear exactly when the switch was made. The news ripples through the crowd, causing a second riot.

  The Wild Child of the Washoe has been misplaced.

  In her stead, wearing a dress so similar as to be easily mistaken, the prison matrons have erroneously taken charge of a Chinese woman named Tu-Li, also known as, in the popular press of the day, the Dragon Lady.

  Bronwyn Bowen, Bronwyn Delegate—whatever is her name, she is nowhere to be found.

  She is free and abroad in this city.

  • • •

  The police visit Swoony and me several times that evening. Officers root through the whole house, looking for Bronwyn, several uniformed goons led by a head goon, a detective who cannot detect.

  The floor has a door, Swoony informs them.

  What does she mean by that? Detective Billy Brevoort asks me. I need my men to examine this door she’s always talking about.

  It’s nothing, I say. The family motto. Solum fores constegit. The floor has a door. It has been my experience that a bit of Latin satisfies even the most vigilant curiosity.

  The mustachioed copper does indeed back off, although later I see him peering at the floorboards and lifting the corner of a rug or two.

  After the police leave, it is just my grandmother, her teacup and me, alone together in the parlor with the evening shadows swelling.

  I wonder about the next day, when my parents and brother are expected to arrive back from their aborted European sojourn. To Swoony’s surprise, Anna Maria will walk into her mother-in-law’s house resurrected in the flesh. I think about gently preparing the way but have no faith that Swoony will remember today’s burial, who Anna Maria is or that Mallt has left the scene.

  Everything is for Virginia, she says out of nowhere.

  All right, I say.

  I wonder where Savage Girl might be, right at the moment. The plan was for her to be smuggled into The Point by the berdache and stashed in his garret quarters. The place is accustomed to keeping secrets.

  But with Bronwyn you never know. Man makes plans and Bronwyn laughs. She could be on the moon.

  Not for the first time, I wish Nicky were around. My brother always knows where the girl is, even if she’s not at home, in fact even during that period when she had moved out. It’s as if he has some sort of network of adolescent irregulars keeping track of all movements of interest occurring anywhere within the shores of Manhattan Island. He always knows when the circus is in town.

  Hey, sprat, where’s your sister? I would say on some random afternoon.

  She’s with Edna Croker at the police stables on the other side of the park, he would say. Or with Anna Maria, at a dress shop. Wherever she might be, he knows it.

  His certainty, if not his grasp of the truth, is uncanny.

  Restlessness seizes me. I’m newly conscious of the vise that has been pressing in on my brain for a long time now, love and hope on one side, suspicion and dread on the other.

  If ever you lose me, find me here. What she said that day in the Dene, the little valley in the Central Park she loves so much.

  Impulsively, leaving Swoony to be put to bed by the nurse, I head upstairs to ready myself for a quick excursion into the park. I
have to plan carefully. There remains a dogged coterie of newsmen keeping vigil outside Swoony’s house even now, lying in wait all night, determined to be first with the story, whatever the story might be.

  If I choose simply to walk out the front door, enter the park and head for the Dene, a few of these press sentries will inevitably follow me. In the unlikely event that Bronwyn is there, I will have led them right to her. They will slaughter us.

  In The Citadel I could slip out through the stables at the back. Or do as Bronwyn had, scale the back wall of the South Wing. But because I am at Swoony’s, I will have to risk a frontal assault, dashing out the Fifth Avenue entrance and hopping into a series of hansom cabs. Shake them off my tail and enter the park by another approach.

  I dress in blackest black for the occasion. Then I flop down on my bed and decide it’s all for naught. She won’t be in the Dene, and I don’t necessarily want to meet her there. Not in the dark. It might be not wonderful Bronwyn I encounter but terrifying Savage Girl.

  Then, lying there in darkness, listening for the clock chime, I am troubled by the same sort of random sounds I have heard upstairs recently, ratlike scurries, footfalls, a whispery sweeping.

  If she wishes, Bronwyn is certainly capable of entering Swoony’s house surreptitiously. But I doubt if she would risk a visit. Unless she were compelled by urges too strong to be resisted.

  They are hunting her down even now. She needs an enclave, a sanctum, a refuge. I suddenly am certain she has come. I venture out into the darkened hallway.

  Light footsteps indeed.

  Bronwyn?

  What happens next is hard for me to feature. I see a white ghost pass through a locked door. Impossible. Groping my way, I arrive at the wall where the ghost vanished—the closed-off passage that leads from Swoony’s residence into The Citadel.

  I search by touch in the dark and find that the portal is open a crack. I swing it wide, and it gives way soundlessly.

  Everything becomes clear to me then—the late-night sounds, the visits of “Virginia” to Swoony and Mallt, my own visions of a spectral girl in the upstairs hall. Bronwyn has taken up residence next door in The Citadel. Blackwell’s is a sieve. She must come and go from the prison like an escape artist.