Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  Our parrot? Nicky said.

  Swoony, I said.

  She willed me her teacup, Nicky said.

  He never washed a day in his life, I said, imitating Swoony’s nonce phrases. The floor has a door.

  The floor does have a door, Nicky said.

  Right, I said. I’m sure it does.

  Want to see it?

  What?

  Nicky leads us into Swoony’s old ballroom, lifts up a tattered Persian rug and points downward.

  A brass-handled door set into the wooden floorboards. Locked.

  I wonder if we have an ax left in the house, I say.

  • • •

  Clean-shaven at last (Bronwyn takes her time with her ministrations), I sprawl with her on the dunes above the shore, a warm Atlantic breeze washing over us.

  We should ask them to come out and visit, she says.

  Who? I say.

  She digs me in the ribs. I’m serious, she says. Nicky at least.

  Anna Maria and Freddy have moved to one of the new “modern” apartments on Fifty-seventh Street. Omitted in Swoony’s will, Freddy has great hopes for a push into refining liquid petroleum, falling in with the Rockefeller cabal. Anna Maria involves herself with children’s education. She still keeps a cockatoo.

  Swoony’s safe contained six hundred thirty gold ingots, worth six million dollars, give or a take a few thousand, figured at the current market price of twenty-five dollars an ounce. The loot was secretly cached beneath the door in the floor, not by Freddy, not by Sonny, but by Grandfather himself, August, the first Delegate to strike it rich.

  Well, Bronwyn had said at the time of the discovery, at least it’s not silver. I’m sick of silver.

  We almost missed it. We could very well have given the house back to the bank with its hidden gold intact. If not for my brother knowing every nook and cranny of the house, the block, the island, the city and I’m sure, eventually, the world.

  Nicky himself might now in fact be wealthier than my parents, not from the gold, which passed to Bronwyn, but because he invested some of his childhood inheritance in Bessemer furnace technology, as well as an Irish sweepstakes winner, a horse named Fat Dancer. I know I don’t have to worry about my brother. He’ll be the first king of America someday.

  All right, I say, I’ll invite Nicky out in August.

  Our best man, Bronwyn says. The least we can do.

  Also that fellow Edna’s engaged to, I say.

  Viscount Boris, Bronwyn says. He’ll be entertaining. And I’d like to see Edna with her toes in the waves.

  Later still, we ride together along the shore. Two dappled grays, shaggy and unshod, beach horses. I realize all over again that the girl never truly feels herself unless she’s on horseback.

  The last of the Long Island sunlight drenches the whole scene, with a quality of clarity I recall from my childhood, the numberless waves marching all the way across the sea from Europe, bowing themselves to us, humbly displaying their whitecaps as they reach our shore.

  Shall I tell you a story? I ask her.

  I’ve never figured out a way to stop you, she says. We’re side by side on the grays, at a slow walk.

  When I was young, when this was still Grandfather’s estate—

  Freddy’s father, who died of grief over Sonny.

  The one who died of grief. I nod. We would assemble here every Fourth of July holiday, the whole family, and one of our traditions was to provide ourselves with a huge lobster boil. Each year we would do this, until when I was eight or nine—

  Hooo, she says, laughing, a nine-year-old Hugo.

  —one of my crazy old aunts, Luisa, went in for radical vegetarianism, the whole antivivisectionist movement, further and further every year until she went a little too far.

  She objected to the lobsters, Bronwyn guesses.

  Exactly, I say.

  Well, the poor bugs are boiled alive after all, she says.

  Aunt Luisa declared no more Independence Day lobster feasts.

  Independence for lobsters, Bronwyn says.

  And more than that, I say, she insisted on marshaling the children together, and we went into town and scooped up all the lobsters at the local fishmongers, bought them out—

  She was a crazy old wealthy aunt.

  —and with us hauling the two or three dozen lobsters she managed to buy, Aunt Lou would march us down to the beach, to the stream, right over there, where the rivulet would debouche into the ocean at low tide—

  Debouche, Bronwyn says, trying out the word.

  —and there, I say, we would release the lobsters into the wild, free them with a little ceremony. Aunt Luisa would make a speech, and the boys, my cousins and I, would collect the pegs from the claws, and my aunt lectured us that a creature caged is an affront to God.

  Amen, Bronwyn says.

  Only one year, one early morning, the morning after the Fourth, one of those times when we had released the lobsters the evening before, I and Cousin Willie and Tommy Bliss, I don’t remember who all, but a few of us were out at dawn to fish the surf.

  I have a feeling, Bronwyn says, this isn’t going to end well.

  Daylight was coming up, I say, and we crossed the little stream down there, where we had given the lobsters their glorious freedom. We found them all dead, torn apart by gulls.

  Liberty has its perils, Bronwyn says.

  We had been freeing them, year after year, and that stream is freshwater, not salt, so it made them a little sluggish, and easy prey for the gulls. We weren’t striking a blow for freedom after all. We’d just been feeding carrion birds that whole time.

  Your stories are always so sad, she says.

  I lean over and kiss her, tasting the salt and stray grains of sand on her lips, delicious.

  We spirit the grays into the surf. Then walk them again, side by side.

  She says, Do you think out of all the lobsters that you freed, dozens of them—

  Over the years, I say, probably more than a hundred.

  —don’t you think at least one of them might have made it out to saltwater? Maybe managed to fight off a seagull on the way?

  They do have pretty woesome hand claws, I say.

  It’d be an old lobster by this time.

  A wise old man of the sea, I say.

  Could be a female lobster, Bronwyn says.

  Could be, I say, laughing. A Comanche she-lobster!

  She’s out there right now, Bronwyn says, grown into some sort of monster, twenty or thirty pounds. Lobsters live a long time, don’t they?

  Yes, I say. Yes, I believe they do.

  Author’s Note

  Though this book may have its head in the clouds of fantasy it has its feet planted firmly in fact. Stories of feral children, private transcontinental train travel and a tigon in the Central Park Zoo all are grounded in historical research, as are details of confectionary Fifth Avenue mansions and outlandish French ballgowns. The Hunter’s Camp in Lansdowne Ravine was a real attraction at Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exposition. The law firm of William Howe and Abraham Hummel deserves a much more thorough airing than is offered here, and luckily two books treat the exploits of these interesting figures in depth: Scoundrels at Law by Cait N. Murphy, and an earlier study by Richard H. Rovere. Mark Twain chronicled the brawling atmosphere of silver-rush Virginia City in Roughing It. Fans of Alice James will be glad to read further in her diary, from which I drew some pithy Alice-isms.

  I would like to extend my thanks to Dr. David J. Jackowe for his help, and recommend his superb Atlas of Cross Sectional Anatomy and Radiological Imaging as the real-life model for Hugo Delegate’s anatomical drawings. Christy Pennoyer also merits special appreciation for lending me a crucial piece of the narrative puzzle. My wonderful editor, Paul Slovak, has always understood where I am coming from and helped me to get where I am going.

  Heartfelt gratitude to those who are always there for me: Peter Zimmerman, Andy Zimmerman, Suzanne Levine, Josefa Mulaire, Bill Tester,
Lisa Senauke, Gary Jacobson, Sandra Robishaw, John Bowman, Barbara Feinberg, Bethany Pray, John Donatich, Wendy Owen, Henry Dunow, Medith Phillips, Thomas Phillips. As always, Betty and Steve Zimmerman gave generously of their support and were avid first readers. Maud Reavill—a bit of a wild girl herself—supplied the enthusiasm, ideas and critiques that made Savage Girl a better book. And without Gil Reavill there would be no book at all.

  Finally, no writer could ever have a better ally than Betsy Lerner. It is to her that this book is dedicated, not only as a sage professional, but also as a long-time friend who has challenged me to live fully and write well.