The Savage Kind

by John Copenhaver

  Then Ramona ascended the stage—and when I say ascended, I mean she floated up there like she was accepting an award for best actress. I slung the bag over the catwalk railing, holding the rope tethered to it. In all her preening glory, Miss MBBS was just below us, and I aimed the bag at her. I could easily release it and smash her skull.

  That’s the moment I thought that Philippa would flinch, scamper back down the stairs, and escape into the sunny afternoon—or gasp that I might kill her “friend” and beg me to stop. But she just stared at me, offering me a slight “oh well” shrug. Was she going to let me release twenty pounds of grit on Ramona’s well-coifed noggin? For a moment, we locked eyes, and she said, “Go ahead. Do it.” A subtle smirk crept into her lips. She was calling my bluff. Damn it. The tension in her shoulders released, and she said, “I get it. You’re still testing me.”

  “If this is a test,” I said, “then here.” I shoved the rope at her, and she took it, its weight jerking her upper body forward; the sandbag started swaying. Below us, Ramona had begun to coo Roxane’s lines, destroying any hope that her Roxane—a role she was sure to land—would be anything other than a superficial twit. As Philippa listened, an unpleasant grimace spread across her face, like she’d just smelled shit. It wasn’t a pantomime to ingratiate herself with me. She was really disgusted at the spectacle of Ramona and, I imagined, would feel the same about those other fools. At that moment, I knew we were going to be friends. Then the rope slipped through her hands—or she let it go. I couldn’t tell which. I lunged for it, grabbing it inches from its frayed end. The bag swung wide, struck the edge of a piece of scenery or lighting rig, and split open, raining sand down on the stage. Even the universe was protesting Ramona as a casting choice! I pulled up the empty bag quickly. Mrs. Q and the others stirred with confusion. I glanced at Philippa, and she offered me a faux cringe and threw up her hands. I smiled, shook my head, and said, “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  We plummeted down the stairs and slipped out the stage door before Mrs. Q and the presumptive cast members figured out that, perhaps, the sandstorm was a critique, not a random prop malfunction. On our walk home, we replayed the scene, each time reveling more in what we imagined to be the expression on Ramona’s face—a red-lipsticked gape of horror—as the stream of sand swept across the stage from the pendulating bag. Fate had intervened, and everything happened exactly as it was supposed to.

  * * *

  When I first saw B and E’s stately three-story townhouse, I was eleven. The car door swung open, and there it was, dominating the 100 block of Tennessee Avenue, as unreal as the facade from a Hollywood melodrama: large bay windows, a romantic balcony, a glossy red front door, and smooth walls the color of mouse fur. I gaped. I was suddenly a fairy-tale princess. Dyspeptic and sullen and full of shit, but a princess, nonetheless. Inside, sumptuous dark velvets, shantungs, and taffetas draped every window and covered every sofa, love seat, and armchair. Stuffy oil portraits and dim bucolic landscapes hung in gilt frames. A staircase rose in a dramatic semicircle to the second floor. In the center of the hall, the chandelier dangled from an elaborate plaster rosette, scattering light across the woodwork. Boy, I ate it up: I was saved! All this was mine! I was a fool, too blinded by the polished silver and Austrian crystal to realize that it was a trap.

  When Philippa stepped into the front hall after our narrow escape from Mrs. Q, I said, “Welcome to Château de Peabody!” with a sharp punch of sarcasm. I wanted her to know how I felt about all this, about where I stood in relationship to it.

  Playing along, she curtsied.

  “This way, madam,” I said, like a prim lady-in-waiting.

  Dropping the act, I said, “Thank God B and E aren’t in,” as we walked up the staircase. I waited for a question: Who are B and E? Are they your parents? If she asked, I could begin to explain how all this came to be. Not the wealth from the drugstore franchise—that was obvious—but how I ended up here, surrounded by it. But she remained mute, mesmerized by the surroundings, or still reeling from the sandbagging of Miss Carmichael.

  “I want to show you something,” I said at the top of the stairs. She trailed me into the bathroom at the end of the second-floor hall, and I swept back the shower curtain. She flinched but didn’t demand an explanation. As she had in the theater, she followed me, but not as a brainless lemming. She had a flaneur-like curiosity. I sensed that about her, that passive daring. She wasn’t going to charge into a risky situation, but she was happy to be led. Deep down, I think, she wanted to feel what it was like to disobey her social mores and break the rules, but she didn’t want the responsibility for taking the first step. I hopped into the clawfoot tub and tugged on the sash of the room’s only window. A blast of warm air rushed in.

  “Watch your step,” I said as I heaved myself across the windowsill.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “It’s a secret.”

  I stepped onto the fire escape and mounted its wobbly, rust-coated iron stairs. Philippa hesitated. Was she reconsidering? I imagined her thinking: “Enough climbing already.” But I wasn’t about to slow down. Not my style. As I started on the stairs, I heard her clamor over the tub. Curiosity killed the cat. (Better curiosity than a sandbag!)

  Once we made it to the top, I headed toward Hill Estates, crossing four townhouses to get there, hopping up eight inches for the Cranes’ house and then down again to the Webbers’ roof. Philippa trailed me, navigating the chimneys and furnace pipes, huffing and puffing. I called over my shoulder: “If you want, you can use the plank.” I nodded toward the wide twelve-foot-long board propped against a large vent. I wanted to see what she’d do. I dashed forward, leaping over the ten-foot gap between the Smiths’ townhouse and the apartment building’s roof.

  She slowly approached the lip of the roof and peered over, rubbing her hands together, wary. After all, it’s a four-story plunge into the alley below. I wanted to tell her that she could make it, that I’d done it thousands of times, but I held back. She looked at the board and then the gap again. She backed up several yards, planted her right foot behind her, leaned forward, placed her hands on her thighs, breathed in, and began the dash to the edge. Only a few feet from the alley, she screeched to a halt, spraying bits of the crumbling roof. She shook her head, smiled apologetically, and went to get the board. I was disappointed, but hell, maybe I was expecting too much.

  On the other side of the plank, she dropped down to the roof and said, “Where are we?” as she scanned the uneven expanse of tar and gravel dotted with fat pigeons and lined with corroded stovepipes.

  “The roof of Hill Estates apartments. I come here to get away from B and E,” I said. “Not very romantic, but you know…”

  “Who are B and E?” she asked, adjusting her blouse. “Your parents?”

  “Bart and Edith Peabody. Peabody isn’t my real name,” I said. “I don’t want to have anything to do with the Peabodys and their damn drugstores.” That’s not entirely true. What I want is to be free of them, but I need them—well, their means.

  “Peabody Drug! That’s you?”

  I frowned. “Cigarette?”

  Without waiting for an answer, I crossed the roof to the chimney that was pitched forward like the Tower of Pisa, kneeled, and wiggled a brick loose. I fished out my crumpled pack of Chesterfields and offered one to her. She hesitated, a little afraid of it, and took it. I struck a match on a brick and lit the cigarette for her. We smoked in silence, leaning on the backside of the raised brick cornice and peering out at Capitol Hill. The streets below swirled with noisy traffic. The smell of exhaust and baking bread wafted up. Lincoln’s dark head shone through a break in the fiery oak trees lining the park. I glanced over at her. She was attempting to hold her cigarette just so, like she was Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep—head cocked back, an ironic smirk, smoke drifting from the lips. But she wasn’t pulling it off. After a minute or two, she gave up on the cigarette-smoking routine and held it off to the side. “S
o, who are they again? Bart and Edith?” she asked.

  “They adopted me when I was eleven,” I said. “When I turn eighteen, I’m going to change my last name.” The name “Peabody” feels unnatural, like living in someone else’s skin. I want to slough it off and start over.

  “You don’t like them?”

  “They’re miserable. It’s a long, painful story.”

  Philippa’s gaze fell on something in the distance, a bird maybe, and she said, “Do you remember your birth parents?”

  “I don’t remember a damn thing before I came to live here.”

  She looked at her with wide eyes. “Nothing?”

  “Well, almost nothing. I was just a kid.”

  “Still, that’s strange,” she said, lifting an eyebrow.

  “Is it? Really?” I frowned at her. “Here, hold my cigarette.”

  She took it between her fingers, and I pushed my sweater’s droopy sleeves past my elbows. There, angled in all directions, were my scars—short pink ridges, a half-of-an-inch to an inch long, etched into my skin like hieroglyphics.

  “Ouch,” she said, captivated. “It looks like you fell in Br’er Rabbit’s briar patch.”

  I tugged open the collar of my blouse and showed her more scars around my throat. “I’ve had them since I can remember,” I said. “They’re all over me. I have no idea how they happened.”

  She craned in for a closer look. Before she could ask a stupid question or say something tactless, I adjusted my collar and demanded, “Cigarette, please.” She returned the Chesterfield to my lips.

  I turned away, a little worried that I shouldn’t have shone her my graffiti. I’m used to my scars, but they can have a dramatic effect on people. Either they’re revolted, smile, and go on their way, or they start digging for an explanation. But there’s no explanation—well, at least none that I can recall. Anyway, I decided to point us in a different direction: “So, you must hate your stepmom,” I said. “Is she a total monster?”

  Philippa seemed baffled. “What? God no! She’s okay, but I liked it better when it was just Dad and me. He married her because of the war, I think. He was the captain of a destroyer, and he knew he’d be insanely busy. He needed someone to look after me.” She picked at a crumbling brick by her hand. “I would’ve preferred to live with my aunt, but Dad, he thinks she’s off her rocker. I suppose she is, a little.”

  “What about your mom?” I said and added, “Your birth mom?”

  “Never knew her,” she said, biting her lower lip. I’d hit on something. Her eyes drifted out over the park, and she took a long, uneven drag from her neglected cigarette. How did her mother die? What happened? Perhaps, like me, she has a dark place in her heart, a little fissure that’s never fully healed. God, that would be such a relief. Someone who might understand how it feels.

  “Hey,” I said, flicking my butt out over the street and watching it disappear. “What do you make of Cleve Closs?”

  “The guy who sits at the back of the class like a broken desk?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What’s his story?” She pulled her hair back into a ponytail, exposing her pale, freckled neck. Is she freckled all over? I have my scars; she has her freckles. Both branded with the mark of Cain! Not the same thing, but still.

  “He gives me the creeps,” I said.

  “Me too. He must hate English.” She plucked a pink ribbon out of her dress pocket with her free hand and began winding it around her captured hair.

  “It’s more than that.”

  Her expression narrowed. “He doesn’t like Miss Martins?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How can anyone not like Miss Martins?” she said, finishing with her hair and swinging her ponytail back and forth, showing it off. “She’s so smart and kind and not, not—”

  “Crusty.”

  She smiled. “I love her voice, the way she recites poetry.”

  “ ‘Darkling I listen; and, for many a time. I have been half in love with easeful Death,’ ” I said, trying and failing to approximate Miss M’s modulating tone.

  “Oh, that’s good.” She gave her nose a coy twitch. “Those lines suit you.”

  “What do you mean?” I said, a little annoyed.

  She crossed her arms and gave me a once over. “Your style. Flapper-vamp, circa 1920. The moody lines fit the moody look.”

  “Okay?” I said, put off.

  “Why do you dress that way?”

  “Why do you wear pink bows and saddle oxfords?”

  “To blend in.”

  “Well…”—I thought about it—“I like to stand out.”

  She smiled. “I mean, why a flapper?”

  I didn’t want to explain my Louise Brooks infatuation. How I’d stumbled on an article about Brooks in a disintegrating edition of The Red Book that I’d found in B and E’s attic. With her severe black bob, wry smile, and sparkling eyes, she seemed so exotic and direct. She didn’t suffer fools. I read about her famous movies, notably Diary of a Lost Girl, which had been made and then banned in Germany before the war. There was no way to see it in the US, so I tracked down the book it was based on. It felt like my story: a girl cast out from society, then lured back in, only to be tortured again, broken again… and finally triumphant! Two years ago, despite B and E’s protests, I chopped my hair off.

  Philippa tightened her mouth. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to strike a nerve.”

  “ ‘Half in love with easeful Death.’ ” I repeated, a little to myself, a little to her. “They are moody lines. I think of Cleve when I say them. Why was he staring at Miss M that way? His eyes were so full of… What? Something?”

  She shook her head and breathed in. “I didn’t see them,” she said and, humoring me, added, “but I’m sure there’s something to it.”

  “Menace,” I said as it popped into my head. “That’s it. That’s what I saw.”

  JUDY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1948

  This afternoon, as I waited for Philippa on a bench in Lincoln Park, I read another of Keats’s odes, “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” and scribbled a few thoughts in the margins. Keats’s lines are so dreamy and intangible. As soon as you’ve looked up the words you don’t know, picked apart the grammar, and are certain you know what he means, they change, as if the letters are alive like ants and are now marching in a different direction.

  A shadow drifted over me, and I glanced up, expecting Philippa. I was surprised to see Miss M. “I was just on my way home,” she said. With the sun behind her, her face was shaded. A few hairs from her updo caught the light like a fiery spider’s web. She pointed to the open pages on my lap, “But now I’m saving you from too much sweet melancholy. You can overdose on that stuff, you know. It’s more addicting than opium.”

  I wedged a piece of paper into the book and closed it.

  She sat beside me, crossing her legs and adjusting her skirt over her knee. A fresh, floral scent wafted from her skin. It reminded me of something, a memory, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. She didn’t say anything at first. She just breathed in and observed the other park-goers, the cloudless blue sky, and swaying trees. A round art deco pin in the shape of a waxing moon held her scarf around her neck. Dark pearlescent enamel coated the eclipsed portion, and paste diamonds dazzled in the silver crescent. It was a bit glitzy, but it worked for her. She rotated through a colorful array of scarves—raspberry, peacock, lavender, chartreuse, tulip yellow—and she always held them in place with that pin. “So,” she said at last, “how are you?”

  “Fine.”

  She turned to me, her eyes alert. “Really?”

  “Horrible, then. Is that the right answer?”

  She smiled. “No, there’s no right answer.”

  Come on, Judy! She’d just dragged me out of my pensive mood, but I shouldn’t have snapped at her. I didn’t want her to go. I combed my mind for conversation topics. Perhaps music? Had she gone to the National Symphony lately? Or maybe she’d taken in a show at Club Caverns? Or
perhaps something about class? Or Keats? Or…? Ugh, I felt so stupid. Finally, it occurred to me that I should ask about Cleve. She’d been rattled by his bizarre behavior, his eyes like daggers. But before I could ask, she said, “Are you friends with Philippa Watson?”

  I blinked and said, “I am now.”

  “She’s a nice girl. Smart, too.” Her gaze drifted out over the park.

  “I like seeing you with a friend. You need a good friend. We all do.”

  My mind turned to the incident in the theater. I thought of Philippa’s expression of horror when she overheard Ramona auditioning for Roxane. Did she let the rope slip intentionally, or was she just startled by Ramona’s bad acting? I don’t know, but it was a sign: Sure, she wore a kind of camouflage of sweater sets and bobby socks and strawberry blond curls, but underneath lurked something darker, coarser, and more honest. Yes, I am happy to have her as a friend.

  “I’m glad you gave her a chance,” Miss M said, gripping her slim leather purse and turning to me. “You’re not the easiest person to know.” Her eyes were parsing, edged with something: frustration?

  I pulled back, just a millimeter, and she noticed.

  “You’ve studied Greek mythology, right?” she said, her voice bright and teacherly.

  “When I was twelve, I was obsessed with mythology,” I said. “Norse myth, too. My favorite was Freyja, goddess of love, death, war, and… sex.”

  She laughed warmly. “Well, do you remember the three fates of Greek myth? The Moirai?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “There are three sisters. Clotho, who spins the thread of life, a mother of sorts, Lachesis, who directs it, shapes it, and Atropos, who cuts it.” She started moving her right hand in little circles, a tic she has when she lectures. “Gods and men had to submit to them. They were the weavers of history and all-powerful. Lachesis, the drawer of lots, is the most important to understand. She determines what a life is going to be.” She leaned toward me, resting her hand on my forearm. Her touch was electric, and her voice pulled me out of myself and drew me in. If I’d still felt any trace of jealousy for Philippa, like I had that day in class, it’d vanished. We’re connected by something profound, beyond Philippa’s grasp—beyond mine, really.