The Savage Kind

by John Copenhaver

  As our run became a walk, we drew close, interlocking our arms to stave off the chill. I thought of Moira’s strange embrace after Bogdan had struck me. At first, it’d seemed cruel, like an attempt to keep me from saving Judy, who I was convinced Bogdan meant to harm, who I’m sure he still means to harm. But I became aware of something motherly in the way she was holding me. Not gentle, but not rough either. “Stop struggling, dear,” she said in my ear, “I won’t be able to protect you.” Moira protect me? She was supposed to be threatening us, not protecting us—wasn’t that the point of her introducing us to Three-piece and Bogdan? Maybe her threat was toothless or merely intended to scare—or maybe it had more bite than she’d intended.

  After wandering the neighborhood, we found Wisconsin Avenue and hopped on the next streetcar regardless of its destination. We shook snow from our hair and inspected the damage to our clothes and bodies. I had no idea what I’d say to Dad and Bonnie—about the bruise on my face, my damaged dress, or where I’d been. I’d have to lie, but I was getting used to it. After we settled next to each other, Judy slipped her arm around me and whispered, “Jesus, Philippa.” She gave a little, weary laugh and pulled me to her. I wanted her to know that I didn’t care who her parents were, or for that matter, who her sister was. I was certain that she worried that it would change the way I saw her, but I was exhausted and couldn’t call up the right words, so I just leaned my head on her shoulder and closed my eyes.

  * * *

  When I arrived home that night, Bonnie embraced me. She didn’t ask me where I’d been or what happened. I’ll give her credit; she seemed to understand it wasn’t something I could talk about. Moira had made an indelible impression on her. She even permitted me to lie to Dad about my ruined dress and the mark on the side of my face (“I slipped in the snow. Ouch!”). I suppose she didn’t want to him to know she’d left me alone with a viper—or maybe she just wanted to share a secret with me, reinforce our bond. Who knows?

  Adults, it seems to me, think teenagers hide things from them to cultivate our private lives and stake out our individuality. That’s not entirely true. Most of the time, we don’t know what to tell them. We know we aren’t who they think we are, and we suspect we aren’t even who we think we are, because we aren’t who we were a month ago, a day ago, a minute ago. We’re too busy becoming something else, molting into something new, to know what that is. In that fragile limbo, so much can happen; so much can be discovered, so much can be destroyed.

  I spent yesterday in bed, reading and watching the snow drift past my window, trying not to think. Judy phoned in the evening to tell me that Bart and Edith had moved up the timetable for their sojourn to the tropics. Moira had spooked them as well.

  So, since school was canceled today due to snowfall, I flung on my boots and trudged over to Judy’s house through the snow-speckled air and slushy streets, hoping to catch her before she departed. As I neared the house, I spotted a yellow-topped taxi idling in front with its trunk open and tailpipe spewing exhaust. I stopped a few houses down and waited for Edith, who had stepped out to greet the cab, to vanish back inside. Judy materialized and brought her valise to the driver. She was wearing her best coat, a tailored dark purple trench with onyx buttons, and a black-and-white checked tam. Rosie was on a short leash cinched around her opposite wrist. I whistled softly, and the dog perked up, saw me, and started toward me, towing Judy behind him down the shoveled sidewalk. As he neared, I kneeled and greeted him with coos and puppy talk, and his little pink tongue darted out for kisses.

  “Have you come to save me?” she asked, and I rose to meet her. Her face was meticulously made-up: olive skin smooth, lips burgundy, eyeliner heavy but not excessive, a hint of rouge. The snowflakes trapped by her eyelashes weren’t melting. She was beautiful.

  “I was worried you’d already left.”

  “Soon,” she said with a groan.

  The dog jumped up and planted his paws on my thigh. He was wearing a tight red knit sweater and looked sharp.

  “Rosie!” she snapped.

  Puzzled, he dropped down and started sniffing a frozen leaf. We watched him as he followed a crack on the sidewalk, snowflakes dotting his black fur.

  Yesterday, when I was trying hard not to think, the secret I’d kept from Judy continued to surface. Of course, Charlene’s diary made the contents of the secret irrelevant, but I’d held on to it because I liked the way it made me feel, like I had a way to get to Judy. But we were beyond secret-keeping and petty manipulations. “I need to tell you something,” I said.

  She sniffed. “What?”

  “I kept something from you, a secret.”

  A deep line formed in her brow. “Okay.”

  I shook my head. “It’s something you know already—you figured it out on your own.”

  “What is it?” she said, still irritated.

  I considered how all the contours and planes in her face, smooth and luminous in the overcast haze of the day, could easily collapse with distress. I couldn’t bear to watch it happen. But I felt dutybound to be honest and ask for forgiveness, so I said, “It has to do with Halo’s death.” She gestured for me to continue. “Seconds before you jostled the board, he told me that he might be your father. Of course, you knew he wasn’t—or soon figured it out—but I didn’t know that, and I kept it from you. I was a little afraid of you and a little angry with you for keeping me at arm’s length. It was wrong. I’m sorry.”

  I wasn’t sure how she’d respond. At best, she’d show her disappointment with a barbed quip and let it go, knowing that the secret made no difference now. At worst, she’d feel utterly betrayed and turn her back on me. I crossed my arms, bracing myself for her reply. She cocked her head and said, “What do you mean ‘jostled the board’?”

  I blinked. “You shook the bridge with your foot,” I said. “It’s what sent Halo into the alley.”

  “I didn’t touch it,” she said flatly. “You did.”

  My gears locked up. I gawked at her. That couldn’t be, I thought. She was pulling my leg. She had to be. “No…” I said, drawing out the word and smiling uneasily. “It was you.”

  “What difference does it make?” She shrugged.

  I stepped back and gazed at her from another angle as if gaining a new perspective would allow me to detect a tell in her and soothe the panic fluttering in my chest. “But it was your plan,” I murmured. “It was you. I mean, of course, it was.”

  “Listen,” she said. “It’s okay. I would’ve done the same thing if I’d arrived there first, but I wasn’t touching the plank when he fell. That’s the truth.”

  I stared at her inscrutable face. A total deadpan. She was joking, trying to get a rise out of me. This was my punishment for having kept a secret from her. She’d swat it away as soon as she’d soaked up enough pleasure from my agony. “Of course, you did it,” I said, emitting a jittery laugh. “I didn’t put pressure on the board. I didn’t have the—I don’t have the—”

  “Philippa,” she said loudly and scowled. “I didn’t touch it. He lurched toward you, and your foot was on the plank. It was you.”

  My entire body shook; it was impossible. I would’ve never done something like that, killed someone, sent a man to his death. “Maybe he fell—on his own, I mean.”

  “Maybe,” she said, looking askance, “but seriously, what difference does it make?”

  Exasperated and terrified, I blurted, “All the difference! I’m not a killer!”

  She smiled a clever, pregnant smile: close-mouthed, chin cocked, eyes sparkling. She seemed smug, even superior, and then, ever so slightly, her expression shifted, and I detected something else in it: tenderness. “You think it makes you a better person,” she said without judgment, “that it makes you better than me.”

  “No—just not a murderer.”

  She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “It’s why you confessed your secret to me. Keeping it was a burden. You’re just unburdening yourself.” She mocked the sign of the cross,
finishing with a flick of the wrist, more high fashion than Holy Ghost. “Consider yourself absolved, my child.”

  Maybe I jostled the board, but it wasn’t on purpose. I don’t know. In the moment before he fell, it’s true, I’d learned a secret that left me reeling, not because of what it meant, but because it gave me leverage over Judy. I enjoyed having that power, but I wouldn’t have killed for it. Maybe I nudged the board in a reflex reaction, a subconscious tremor. “He lost his balance,” I said with a punch of certainty. “It couldn’t have happened any other way.”

  “Whatever,” she said, “but remember, he and his bitch of a mother sent me to live at Crestwood. If you’d driven a stake through his heart, I would’ve helped you hammer it in.”

  I’ll never tell her that, seconds before he plunged to his death, he seemed truly earnest, that he wanted to confirm that she was his daughter. I’ll also never tell her that, as he fell, I was immensely relieved. He was like a wall closing in, and then he was gone, an opening. “I don’t want to think about him,” I said, waving it away. “Let’s think about Miss Martins. Remember the good times with her.”

  “Call her Charlene,” she said, her gaze drifting away from me. “It’s her real name.” Darkness seeped into her mood, and her eyes strained as if she were staring at all the empty spaces in her childhood: her time at the orphanage, her foster parents, her ordeal with the cats, her adoption by the Peabodys, and her attempt to fit into Jackie’s outline, a hole within a hole. And then Miss Martins, not a void, not a shadow, was snatched away from her, from us: a sinkhole opening under us. “When I return,” she added, “I’m going to change my last name to Nightingale.”

  “It’s a literary name,” I said. “That’s what Miss—Charlene told me.”

  Judy reached inside her coat and fished out a red leather-bound book, Charlene’s diary. “No wonder Cleve was so angry at Charlene and at me,” she said. “She broke up his family, and I was the reason she returned to DC. The day she kicked him out of class, he had this out on his desk. It was a threat.” She sighed and handed it to me. “After I found it, I wanted to tell you about it. I wanted to tell you everything. But I was still thinking it through, trying to find the words.”

  “So, Cleve was your half brother.”

  “Apparently, I have half-siblings all over the place.”

  “Have you seen Iris?” I said, treading carefully on what I suspected was a tender subject. We hadn’t discussed her since she had learned the truth.

  “No,” she said, still distant, “I’m not ready to. I need time.”

  It’s impossible for me to imagine how she feels: One day Iris is your friend and the next she’s your half sister. One day you’re white and the next you’re half Negro. How do you make sense of it? There were a few clues along the way, little impulses built into her machinery: Her persistent defiance of the norm, the black bob and the pearls. Her keenness for civil rights. Her affection for Iris. Her musings on the true meaning of the Emancipation Memorial—every time we gazed up into the freed slave’s face, perhaps she was plucking an invisible chord in her heart. It all indicates something: a deep, buried need to be the thing that she actually is.

  I studied the closed diary, wondering at what might be in its pages. It had the feel of a sacred text. In gilded lettering on its weathered cover, it could’ve read, “Herein are all the truths, all the mysteries, and all the answers to your questions.” With my heart full and sad, I said, “Moira said that Charlene used you—the fact of you—to blackmail her,” I looked at Judy. “But I don’t believe it.”

  She offered me an ambiguous smile, took the journal from me, and leafed through it. “Here,” she said, “read this.” Before me, there was an entry from October 21, 1930, Washington, DC. Approximately a month after Judy’s birth.

  I reread “Ode to a Nightingale” today, and I thought of you, my little niece, my little nightingale—

  Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

  Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

  But on the viewless wings of Poesy…

  You’ve flown away from me now, and like Keats, I’ll do my best to imagine what your life will be like, what you’ll look like, what tune you’ll sing. You’re not mine, not exactly, but somehow, I must believe that, impossibly, you are, making my cruelty in giving you up even harsher. It’s terrible, but necessary. I’ll never know you, and you’ll never know me, but I’ll invent you, molded from what I remember and from my wishes for you. As I sit here, staring up at the trees, at the blue sky, at Lincoln’s melancholy countenance, I’m creating you, will always be creating you, and you—somewhere out there—maybe one day you’ll create me, the mother you didn’t have, the aunt you never knew, filling that space in your heart.

  Her presence, like her faint lilac perfume, floated up from the page. No, she didn’t blackmail Moira. The woman who wrote those lines couldn’t have used her niece as a bartering chip. Moira was being spiteful or, at the very least, cynical. As I reread the entry, it seemed like she was talking to me as my mother might have. What dreams did my mother have for me? How much had she invented me in months leading up to my birth? How much had I invented her over the years? I thought about her portrait, peering out at me from the top of my dresser at home, her white hat cocked, her inscrutable smile forever unchanged.

  “May I read the rest of this?” I asked Judy.

  She considered the request but said, “Not yet.”

  I wiped a few snowflakes from its pages, closed it, and handed it back to her.

  Judy tucked it in her coat, and from a side pocket, she produced a small black velvet jewelry box. “Here’s something I want you to have,” she said. “I was going to mail it if I didn’t see you.” I took it and flipped it open. Inside was Elaine’s crescent moon pin. “I told Edith it was mine and that I had accidentally stepped on it. She had it fixed. It’s yours now.”

  I studied the sliver of moon. “Why do you think it was damaged?”

  Judy shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe Charlene crushed it—a symbolic end to her sisterhood.” Would it be bad luck? Sophie’s warning against Judy rose up again: “All around her, there’s a backdrop of shadows.” But it was just a faint whisper.

  “It’s repaired now,” Judy said. “I’ll wear mine, and you’ll wear yours. We’re more sisters than Charlene and Elaine ever were.”

  I closed the box and slipped it in my pocket. “Thank you,” I said and smiled. Judy touched my arm, and I returned the gesture, grasping her by the forearms, feeling the wet snow from her sleeve on my palms. The snow was falling steadily now; another storm was sweeping through tonight. She checked the street and bent toward me, her damp skin blotting out the spiraling snowflakes, and kissed me. It wasn’t a deep kiss, but it was tender and lingering and changed everything. The thread that had drawn me to her that first day in the cafeteria was no longer outside of me, being pulled by some mysterious force, some fickle cosmic puppet master, or even Judy herself, but inside me, its end in my hand. Perhaps it was always there.

  Edith called out: “Judy, we’re leaving! Bring Rosie.”

  The dog heard his name and jerked the leash.

  Edith was standing by the car with her hands propped on her hips. I wondered if she’d seen us kiss; I wondered what horrors were spinning through her head. Judy released me, and I felt a swift and sudden pang of sadness. It surged up from deep within me. I didn’t want her to go. If she did, I felt certain that I’d never see her again, that my life after her would cease to make sense—that it might end all together. I reached for her, missing her arm and snatching instead her sleeve. “Don’t go,” I begged, exposing my desperation.

  “I have to,” she said, pulling away gently.

  “I can’t—I can’t—” I said, shaking my head. “I’ll miss you terribly.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, her voice clear, resolute. “We’ll find a way to be together.”

  “Okay,” I said, tears pushing up t
hrough me.

  “I’ll try to find ridiculous postcards and send them to you. A new one from each stop. Colorized sunsets. Synchronized swimmers. Coconut bikinis!”

  Edith called out: “Judy! It’s time!” Rosie barked and yanked on her wrist again.

  I threw my arms around her, held her tight. I smelled her body powder, the spicy odor of her hair. I soaked her in, hoping she’d leave traces of herself on my coat, in my hair, on my skin.

  “You shouldn’t be talking to her!” Edith snapped.

  I released her and stared into her dark, gleaming eyes.

  “Goodbye,” she said, stepping back and waving. “Give those MBBS girls hell!”

  I watched her spin and follow Rosie to the cab. I waited there for a minute, wondering what she sees when she gazes back at me. Does she see everything? My mother’s ghost trailing me, guiding me at times and misleading me at others? Or my father’s guilt, pulling me toward him and shoving me away? All my gaps, all my flaws, all my little savageries? No, she couldn’t. There’s so much I haven’t told her, so much I’ve tucked away from myself. What does she see then? If not the entire picture, then perhaps the spaces between the fragments? An opportunity? Fissures she can grow into, fill up, and live in? Suddenly, I wanted to stop the taxi and tell her who I was, to let it out, the expansiveness of it, of me, but as soon as the impulse arose, I heard Sophie’s warning, so faint now I knew it only by its rhythm, and I retreated, finding shelter again in my secret life. I gave a little wave toward the cab and turned away.

  JUDY, JANUARY 4, 1949

  I only had two days between the Sunburn Tour and the first day of spring semester classes at Agnes March. Philippa had been whisked away by her parents to the yet unsold house in Harpers Ferry for the holidays, surely a coordinated effort between B and E and the Watsons. So, arms peeling, cheeks sunburned, I pushed past my fear, and, in the short window of time I had, I confronted my half sister at Horsfield’s after her shift last night.