The Savage Kind

by John Copenhaver

  To Jeff, for his love, patience, and inspiration

  Strait at these words, with big resentment fill’d,

  Furious her look, she flew, and seiz’d her child;

  Like a fell tigress of the savage kind,

  That drags the tender suckling of the hind

  Thro’ India’s gloomy groves, where Ganges laves

  The shady scene, and rouls his streamy waves.

  —Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book VI

  PROLOGUE

  If I tell you the truth about Judy and Philippa, I’m going to lie. Not because I want to, but because to tell the story right, I have to. As girls, they were avid documentarians, each armed with journals and buckets of pens, convinced that future generations would pore over their words. Everything they did was a performance. Everything they wrote assumed an audience. After all, autobiographers are self-serving, aggrandizing. Memoirists embellish. It’s unavoidable. To write down your memories is an act of invention, to arrange them in the best, most compelling order, a bold gesture. Some of the diary entries that follow are verbatim, lifted directly from the source, but others are enhanced and reshaped. I reserve my right to shade in the empty spaces, to color between the lines, to lie.

  You may balk, dear reader, but I don’t care. I need to get this right.

  I could take different approaches. I could contrast the teenage girls: the black hat and the white, the harpy and the angel, the cunning vamp and the doe-eyed boob. Or I could draw them together, a single unit: Lucy and Ethel, Antony and Cleopatra, Gertrude and Alice, Watson and Holmes, or even, I dare say, Leopold and Loeb. But neither of those angles would work. The complicated facts are inescapable. These girls are both separate and together, both unified and distinct. They solved mysteries together and, yes, they killed together, but many times, they followed their own paths and even crossed one another. Things are never that simple, never that black or white, that good or evil, or that true or false. I’m not writing this to assign blame, or to ask forgiveness, or to tie it up in a bow for posterity. It’s not that kind of book. After all, an act of violence committed by one may have originated in the heart of the other. That’s to say, this is a story about sisters, and like many of those dusty and gruesome stories from ancient literature, here sisterhood is sealed with blood.

  I should know. I was one of them.

  It’s 1963 now, and I’m thirty-one. A few months ago, Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy brought us to the brink of apocalypse. There’s nothing like flirting with nuclear war to churn up mortal thoughts, to urge you to comb over the past and reconnect with old friends. With that in mind, I hope these pages reach my partner in crime, my only true friend, and nudge her out of hiding. I hope she reads this and knows that I understand her, that I love her, and that more than anything, I want to see her again. It’s time.

  By now, I’m sure you’re wondering who I am: Which girl? Which woman? I should say. The harpy or the angel? Leopold or Loeb? Whose story is this?

  Well, I’m not telling. Not yet. I hear you cry: “Don’t be so manipulative!” But this story is all about manipulations, so why, dear reader, should I spare you? Sink into it, and don’t worry: You’ll know everything before it’s over. I promise.

  CHAPTER ONE

  PHILIPPA, SEPTEMBER 8, 1948

  No letter for weeks. Maybe they’re distracted by the beginning of the school year, or they’ve moved on, or they’re just lazy. If they bothered to write, what would they have asked? “Hey, chum, how’s your new school?” Awful, I’d answer—my pen tightly lodged between my fingers, my tongue cocked between my teeth—the kids at Eastern High are impenetrable. They wear blank frowns or phony smiles and drift by like they’re on conveyor belts, their eyes looking past you. “And what about Washington, DC? Is it a total lark?” No, I’d say, it’s revolting. From the swampy air to the oily bus exhaust to the meaty stench of Eastern Market, it’s like being smothered by a big sweaty palm. “But that must be the worst of it, right?” No, erstwhile friends, the worst is our house: It’s a cookie-cutter copy of the other ancient row houses on the block. My window overlooks a clothesline-tangled alley and a couple grimy carriage houses, the habitat of feral cats, their nightmarish caterwauls echoing through the night.

  I miss our ramshackle, gingerbread Victorian in Pacific Heights. I loved stretching out in the window seat of my bedroom and writing in this and reading the Brontës, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, or anything that blended the supernatural with distraught young women in peril. “So thrilling!” I’d think to myself. “If only I could stumble into drama like Emily St. Aubert or Jane Eyre do.” I would pause occasionally and take in the sweep of the Golden Gate Bridge or watch as the fog swallowed the hills across the Bay.

  That’s why I waited so long to unpack. I was hoping that we’d have a reversal of fortune, that Dad would say, “Hey Phil, I hope you didn’t get too attached to DC. They’re assigning me back to the Presidio.” But Bonnie, ever the fairy stepmother, made it her project to gently—and persistently—nudge me to unpack. With only a week until the beginning of school, I finally dove in, ripping boxes open and flinging stuff everywhere. When I stopped to catch my breath, the spectacle of it was crushing. I slouched against my bed and bawled.

  Weeks later, it’s nearly complete. The dusty lilac walls and silky window treatments are beginning to feel familiar. My new cream-colored bedspread looks smart and womanish on my bed. I plan to paint over the fussy primrose stenciling on my vanity and its matching chest of drawers. Maybe I’ll choose a serious and sophisticated color, like aubergine.

  In another gesture of excruciating thoughtfulness, my stepmother unwrapped and displayed on my dresser the framed eight-by-ten of my mother at her wedding reception. Just when I settle into resenting Bonnie, she does something like that; it’s always a perpetual game of chess between us. In the photo, my mother’s wearing an unconventional outfit for the time—a tailored suit of creamy linen, a white blouse ruffled to her chin, and a wide-brimmed hat, falling over her right eye at a jaunty angle. Her nose is tilted up, her smile furtive, and her visible eye is amused as if she and the cameraman—Dad perhaps—just shared an inside joke. In her white-gloved hands, she’s clutching a spray of white roses and baby’s breath. I would give anything to have known her, even for a few years. That emptiness never goes away, that ache. She’ll always be a thirty-year-old newlywed, preserved like a prehistoric insect in amber.

  I tacked my old life on the corkboard beside my bed: movie stubs, theater playbills, photos of my friends, a tenth-grade class photo (the class of 1949 in stiff blue blazers and dour expressions), a letter from Aunt Sophie in her sprawling script, valentines dashed off by silly boys, a smashed and withered corsage from the spring dance, magazine clippings of my favorite stars—Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Joseph Cotten, Merle Oberon—a postcard of Coit Tower against a faux blue sky.

  There it was, a little girl’s life—where I’d been and who I’d been. Nostalgia wanted to well up and burst through, but a bewildering question kept it at bay, a question I continued to repeat:

  Who will I be now?

  Who will I be now?

  PHILIPPA, SEPTEMBER 9, 1948

  Today I met someone remarkable.

  I was staring at my mountain of spaghetti at lunch when an elbow jabbed me. A gossipy girl—Betty, Barb, Bess? Something with a B—pointed across the cafeteria and whispered, “Judy Peabody, the one with the bangs. She drops bricks on cats. Kills them for fun.” This girl, Judy, held herself erect and gripped her tray like a battering ram. Her jet-black bob sliced across her forehead and fell in sharp angles over her high cheekbones. Over her long black sweater hung a double loop of faux pearls, like a flapper’s from an old silent movie. The other kids scattered as she
strode to an empty table and sat. She arranged a napkin in her lap, pulled her sleeves back, and tucked her pearls into her sweater. Her every movement felt choreographed, and I wanted to know more: Who was she? And why the dated outfit? And what exactly did she do to cats?

  Before she ate, she scanned the room. When she looked in our direction, most of my tablemates, the Metro Baptist Bible School contingent (commonly known as the MBBS girls), burst into an explosion of gasps and side-jabs, as if spotted by a vicious predator in the wild. A few of the older, more skeptical girls huffed, rolled their eyes, and adjusted their Peter Pan collars.

  I sat perfectly still.

  During the first weeks of school, the MBBS girls threw their arms around me, all good cheer and high-toned cooing, but their embraces felt fake—or unsure, like they were pinching my flesh, seeing if I was one of them, the real thing, whatever that was. But I was testing them too, and they were failing. They gossiped and backstabbed and babbled endlessly about boys. None of them read books or even newspapers, just Seventeen, Ladies’ Home Journal, and of course, the Bible. Their minds were nets, only catching the fluttery and flimsy bits of life.

  On the surface, Judy and I are totally different. I have big, messy strawberry blond hair that I trap in a ponytail. I dress in pastel sweater sets, bobby socks, and own pairs of saddle oxfords in various color combinations: black and cream, cream and taupe, taupe and chocolate. It’s all a disguise, of course. I want to blend in, a strategy I’ve learned from moving around as a Navy brat. The blue-haired crone who taught me history my sophomore year told my father that I was “such a sweet and accommodating young lady.” It’s true. I always check my first impulse and edit it out. Adults do it, so I do it, too. But it wears on you, the politeness, the pretending.

  There was nothing sweet and accommodating about Judy. Apparently, she kills cats. I loathe them too. They make my eyes water, and my arms and legs break out in hives. Their back-alley screeching slides under my skin. Of course, I’m not going to kill a cat, but from where I stand, it’s justifiable homicide or… felicide? Seriously, is it even possible to bomb a cat with a brick?

  When Judy’s black eyes met mine, I smiled. In return, she scowled, and it stung. I bowed my head and began twisting my congealed spaghetti into a tight ball around my fork. For the rest of lunch, I slurped down my noodles, and as I took my last bite, a shadow passed over me. I looked up, and there she was. “Welcome to paradise,” floated from her lips, tinged with scorn. But the heat of her glare had been replaced with something else. Confusion? Curiosity? I wasn’t sure. Then suddenly, violently, she smiled. It was a cool, inscrutable smile, but all the same, it gave me a strange shock, like accidentally catching your reflection in a mirror. I felt seen by her—or was it that she’d seen some hidden part of me that the others hadn’t? It was horrifying and thrilling, and I was temporarily struck dumb. I wanted to say something like, “Nice to meet you,” or “The spaghetti is revolting, isn’t it?” but before I could, she was gone.

  During afternoon classes, Judy’s dark eyes pooled around me and seeped into my pores. Her powdered face, her thin lips, her glossy hair, and her slender, craning neck seemed designed to display them, to announce them as her dominant feature. I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Staring at me, judging me, wondering about me. They pushed my attention far from trigonometric functions or the Battle of Waterloo. After school, I spotted her beelining up East Capitol Street. I wanted to introduce myself, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it, so I stalled out. For a few seconds, I watched her pass in and out of the shadows of overhanging trees. Then, gathering the nerve, I followed her.

  “Um, hi,” I said, my books clutched to my chest, breathless. “I’m Philippa.” I offered her my hand as I walked beside her.

  She glanced at it and quickened her pace.

  “I know what you think, but I don’t like the MBBS crew,” I said, struggling to keep up. “They’re such namby-pambies.” I was trying too hard.

  “Good for you,” she said, not even glancing at me, keeping her stride steady. “Why are you telling me?”

  “You’re not like them either.”

  “So what?” She shrugged, eyes still aimed forward.

  “You don’t care what they think.”

  “Look,” she stopped and gazed right at me, her pupils black and unsettling, “you’ve been arm-in-arm with those preening bitches since you got here. I get it. You’re new, you’re lonely. It’s all just a little too pathetic for me.”

  My heart sank. “Well, I—”

  “Go away.” She started walking again, moving faster.

  “Wait,” I called after her. “My father’s a Navy lawyer, and anyway, we were just transferred here, and I left all my friends in San Francisco, and my stepmother is driving me crazy. So yes, I’m a little pathetic right now.”

  Judy halted and muttered, “Hmm.”

  Did I say the right thing? It’d rolled out like an overturned basket of fruit. The glitter in her eyes told me that she approved of it—or maybe of my rawness, my honesty. I was feeling puny and desperate, and somehow, she seemed like the solution. Then her expression flickered—amused perhaps?—but she didn’t smile. On either side of the street, the brick row houses peered out over wrought-iron fences. Their mum-stuffed gardens stirred in a breeze, and their old, uneven windowpanes reflected patches of irritating bright white light. Aside from a few parked cars with their chrome grills flashing in the sun, East Capitol was oddly deserted for mid-afternoon. We were the only people within blocks.

  Judy began walking again, slowly. I kept pace beside her, but I didn’t say anything. I hoped she wouldn’t speed up again and dash off. One thing was true: her magnetism—if that’s the right word for it—was unmistakable. Aunt Sophie told me that some people have stronger auras than others, that if you have “the gift,” you can see another person’s aura. Judy’s aura must be blazingly intense, but I had no idea what color it was. Blue? Purple? Black?

  East Capitol Street gave way to the wide, tree-lined expanse of Lincoln Park. Silhouetted by the yellows and oranges of the turning trees, the Emancipation Memorial loomed at the far end, depicting an imperious Lincoln waving his hand over a kneeling slave. Behind it, fifteen blocks away, the dome of the Capitol rose to the sky like a giant igloo. Judy nodded toward the memorial’s dark bronze figures: “Is he freeing him or making him beg for his freedom?”

  I didn’t know how to respond, worried that I’d say the wrong thing and scare her off, so I squeaked out, “I don’t know.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. Well, I would know. I understand what being shackled is all about.”

  What a thing to say! I smiled, but she didn’t, her face as grim as a tragedian’s mask. “Do you?” I said quietly.

  “I do,” she said with a kind of finality, as if stating a fact.

  I wanted to respond but held my tongue. I didn’t want to blunder. But seriously, what did she mean? Why say something like that? The tendrils of her strange energy were curling around my feet and twisting up the backs of my legs. A quotation popped into my head—something we’d studied last year, Jane Eyre—and I blurted it: “I’m no bird, and no net ensnares me—”

  Judy whipped around, and her eyes flashed. “You’re a reader,” she said. I couldn’t tell if it was a question or a statement, but I detected a glimmer of interest.

  “I love Gothic literature,” I said. “The moors, the castles, ghosts wailing from the battlements. You know.”

  “Well,” she said, “that’s not what I was expecting.” Her eyebrows lifted, but she didn’t offer anything more.

  When we reached the end of the park, I said, “I have to go this way.” I stretched out my hand.

  She gave me a brief, puzzled rumination and sighed. “You don’t want to be friends with me. Trust me.” She didn’t wait for a response. She just turned on her heels and walked north, leaving my hand extended in the air.

  I didn’t know what to make of it. Was it a brush off? A challenge?r />
  There’s just something about her. She’s so confident and singular. She doesn’t waffle; she doesn’t prevaricate. She floats above life, judging everything and everyone absolutely—and with good reason. The MBBS girls are skin-deep and brainless. Beyond them, the entire concept of high school deserves contempt. It’s full of old fools teaching young fools, tedious routines, and absurd rituals, like pep rallies and football games and Sadie Hawkins dances. Like Aunt Sophie says, “The only true faux pas is to be boring.” Well, Judy isn’t boring. She’s no dim housewife-in-training, no serial placater, like the MBBS girls, like Bonnie, like my old friends in San Fran. No, she’s not that at all.

  JUDY, SEPTEMBER 11, 1948

  Miss M is a standout. She’s not a crusty schoolmarm wearing stiff wool like an exoskeleton. She doesn’t pin a dusty felt hat to her head like a dead butterfly and pine for the war—or worse, the goddamn Depression. She doesn’t preach about “moral correctness” and “ladylike aplomb,” and being “an obliging conversationalist.” None of the bullshit the other teachers spew. She insists that I should be forward-thinking like her and not chained to some boy. She’s cultured, wry, and whip smart. She’s the future.

  She swoons over nineteenth-century French composers, especially Satie, Debussy, and Emmanuel, and when we talk, she goes on about jazz, its layering of rhythms and the “sublimity of improvisation.” Sublimity. I’m sticking that one in my pocket for later. She usually reaches for Ellington and Fitzgerald, but has been working her way into Parker, Gillespie, and others. When we’re together, I don’t want it to end.

  She’s nuts about poetry, particularly Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Rossetti, and recites it for the class, swaying and gesturing, her voice drifting out over us, spellbinding and ethereal. In those moments, she’s a dream.

  So, is it wrong of me to hate her a little for what she did today?