Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  Anna Maria had directed the furnishings and ornamentation of the cars, rich carvings of oiled walnut, plush upholstery, a Brussels carpet in one, Turkish in another. There were great expanses of mirrors in gilt frames. From home she brought a tiger pelt, with its large, proud head, its striped fur still untattered, sleek and glossy years after Friedrich’s late brother, Sonny, my uncle, brought it back from India.

  We spent most of our time on our trip in the big, unpartitioned parlor car, second to last in the consist, called Crucible. It was here that we drowsed in the overstuffed chairs by the windows, sometimes catching a lucky break to witness a bald eagle soaring alongside, flying with us as though it were one of our party.

  The berdache and Tu-Li played at the game of Chinese tiles or at cards, dealing hands of vingt-et-un while Savage Girl knelt beside them on the carpet, watching their faces as they managed the play. She had been entirely mild these few days, wholly unsavage, as a matter of fact.

  Late morning on our second day out from the Comstock, the quartet of ladies gathered in a tight grouping in the corner of the parlor car: Tu-Li and the berdache working at Virginia’s hair, Ginny herself with eyes closed, leaning back on a red satin fainting couch, Anna Maria reading to them from David Copperfield.

  My new life had lasted for more than a week, and I was stronger than ever in those tremendous practical resolutions that I felt the crisis required. . . .

  I crossed the parlor to witness the detangling process, a futile one, I thought, doomed to fail. And unnecessary. I didn’t understand why Savage Girl warranted all the attention.

  One single hair separated laboriously from a strand, teased out to the length of its tangle, traced back to its knot, picked at, freed. Tu-Li employed the paired sticks the heathen Chinese use in place of eating utensils. Tahktoo worked only with his fingers, which were thick but surprisingly deft. All that knitting and weaving he did.

  As yet, Little Dora was quite unconscious of my desperate firmness, otherwise than as my letters darkly shadowed it forth. . . .

  Watching them work, staring down at her closed, expressionless face, I thought I might go mad from impatience right on the spot. They had been at it for a day and a half and had completed a portion but three inches in length.

  How many individual hairs on a human head? As an anatomist I was distressed that I didn’t know. Thousands. I turned and left the parlor, finding my own refuge at my drawing table. Shave her bald, for all I would care.

  • • •

  My car, Fury, divided itself into four generous compartments. First my sleeping quarters, with water closet. Next was supposed to be my brother Nicky’s room, but I had taken it over for anatomical specimens. My glass specimen jars ranged in serial ranks, inside a cabinet I kept locked, more to prevent surprises to the staff than over any worry about theft.

  Adjacent to this, what I called my office, with the custom-made drawing table that Anna Maria had installed in front of an expanse of windows. Finally my parlor, in which I entertained guests, of which there were never any.

  I sat down and lost myself in my drawing.

  After a light supper at noon, which we took in the main parlor car (omelets, kippered salmon, Cookie’s fresh-baked rolls), Anna Maria, ever the ringleader, announced that we would perform tableaux vivants.

  “We will simply get out whatever old costumes we have, and all the spare sheets and blankets,” she said. “I will assign the roles.”

  Having always abjured taking part in a tableau, I had nevertheless observed, in the last few years at dinner dances, charity balls and coming-out parties, most of the girls I knew throw themselves wholeheartedly into their performances.

  Dowler, Mrs. Kate and B. C. Coyle rigged sheets in the parlor car into something near resembling a framed space in which to perform.

  My mother was an inveterate raffle rigger. She only pretended to draw names of participants from a hat.

  “Freddy?” she said. “Hugo?”

  Tu-Li laughed and clapped her hands.

  My father looked game, so I could not very well refuse, though I felt unaccountably shy. Colm Cullen joined in, that we might further dilute the humiliation among three of us.

  We rooted through the costume trunk and awaited our instructions. But a simple representational painting or a biblical scene was not the particular hoop through which my mother intended us to jump.

  She made a show of drawing another slip of paper from the “subject” hat. “Woman’s rights!” she announced.

  What an assignment! I looked at my father, Colm looked at me, and we shook our heads helplessly. However might we represent such an abstract concept?

  But we did what we could, and as Dowler drew back the theatrical “curtain,” we appeared motionless, figures in a still life.

  Me, adorned with a mophead for hair, Anna Maria’s paisley shawl around my shoulders, a look of the fierce crusader on my features (or what I thought was such a look, though I am afraid I only managed to appear to be suffering an attack of gas), I stood, eyes trained on the far horizon of equality.

  Freddy and Colm, vanquished and humbled males, lay sprawled at my feet, doing their best to look like wounded animals. I had my foot athwart my father’s neck. Lightly, of course.

  Anna Maria and the girl sat on the divan in front of us, Mother gleefully laughing and holding Virginia’s hand in hers. Tu-Li and the berdache stood behind the divan, clapping politely and smiling.

  We were a success.

  That afternoon I worked at my drawings, and when I returned to the parlor, they were still seated in a tight grouping. Savage Girl retained the exact same position as when I had left her, curled on the divan, as lazy as a cat.

  “Hugo,” Anna Maria said, rising from her chair, “read to them. I have to go up front and speak to Cookie.”

  “All right,” I said. “But not David Copperfield.”

  For whatever reason, I had brought my own novel along to the parlor, Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus. I wasn’t even reading it at the time and had no thought of doing so. I sat down, opened the volume randomly, and began.

  A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon, to whom I had given life.

  So far during her time with us, Savage Girl had remained absolutely docile, with no inclination to run off. Why would she? Enthroned in opulence, the center of all attention, with plenty of meat on the table. In fact, she usually seemed sleepy and passive.

  Can one think without words? Observers of feral children endlessly tugged at the issue of language. Of all the wild ones—raised by bears, by wolves, by wild goats, even, in one reported case, by rats—most were unable to learn to speak and thus were deemed idiots.

  After innumerable lessons by the kindly Dr. Itard, Victor of Aveyron managed only two words, eau, for “water,” and Dieu, for “God.” He mainly sat and rocked. King George’s Wild Peter could play for hours with a watch or a glove. He was an expert pickpocket but never spoke.

  Such creatures lived in the nunc stans, the Eternal Now. Gusts of identifiably human emotion blew through savage children, and Napoleon once described Victor with an inimitable phrase, remarking on “the boy’s sad pleasure in the natural world.” He loved snowfall and could lapse into melancholy looking into a pool of water.

  Sad pleasure. I understood that.

  Against such historical evidence, what did we have in the girl Virginia? Wordless yes, but somehow, we were all convinced, very smart.

  That afternoon a singular incident struck me during my reading from the Frankenstein epic. As I spoke the words, I glanced occasionally at Virginia. She sat expressionless as before. But once or twice a sadness crossed her face, and something else, a sense that I could not readily admit.

  Understanding.

  The mute, language-bereft creature was somehow following the ta
le.

  • • •

  I pause, lost in memory. One of Howe’s minions scuttles up to me with a glass of water. I have the impression that everyone in the room is waiting, poised, as if another boot will drop.

  Your illness, Mr. Hugo, William Howe says. I do not wish to be indelicate. A malady of the mind?

  What could I tell him? That I was not ashamed, when I was indeed ashamed? That a few of my friends had similar episodes?

  It’s something that’s going around, I say.

  “Hysteria,” the word to describe nervousness in women, had attained ready currency. Probably everyone knew someone so afflicted. The sanatoriums were full of sufferers, put away by harried husbands or fathers.

  No such popular term had been devised for nervousness in men, though William James, my physiology professor, had a name for it. “Americanitis.”

  Causes: modern civilization, steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, the mental activity of women. Consequence: indulgence of appetites and passions. Symptoms: As far as I was concerned, violent fantasies. Fainting spells. Inanition. A terrible, stalking fear that I would lose my mind.

  I have encountered an urge to false confession before, Howe says. Perhaps it soothes your affliction to take on responsibility for a heinous act of murder?

  I am responsible, I say. My confession is not false. I killed my friend.

  We shall reserve judgment, says Howe.

  May I continue? I say, cross.

  Howe and Hummel exchange a look. This is another feature of my infirmity, the certainty that others notice some aspect about me—that I have noxious body odor, for example, or that I am displaying a facial twitch—of which I myself remain unaware.

  Shall we take an intermission? Howe asks, directing his question not at me but at Hummel.

  No, we shall not, I say.

  • • •

  A train always harbors secrets.

  I am no great believer in ghosts, or any aspect of the supernatural, no matter how popular such beliefs are today, being a rationalist to the death. Yet when one is working at one’s drawing table in the dead of night, sketching sections of dissected human cadavers, and no other being is awake apart from the parlor brakeman, the assistant engineer and perhaps Colm Cullen, and one hears footsteps in the stillness, rogue thoughts do tend to cross the mind.

  Next car up from me in the consist was United States, the Lincoln car. As I have said, we were taking it back for refitting at the New York yards as a favor to Collis Huntington of the Central Pacific. Our largesse was not entirely selfless, since as a collateral benefit of accepting the car we enjoyed a director’s right-of-way on the line.

  Several times, hearing or at least thinking I heard sounds from the empty and scrubbed-neat Lincoln car, I crossed over into it, only to find it deserted.

  There the deceased president had lain in state. The outlines of the catafalque remained visible on the floor. When he was alive, he never saw or rode in United States. Yet could his great spirit haunt the living? I didn’t think so. But the noises from the car next door seemed to contradict my most determined certainties.

  It was Colm Cullen who put the mystery to rest. He was the solitary soul who patrolled Sandobar after we had all retired, taking regular late-hour strolls the entire length of the train. Checking trackside, observing our progress, seeing all was right. Our night watchman who never seemed to need sleep.

  Colm’s father had fled Galway during the first famine year, 1845, washing up on the Boston waterfront, inhabiting a wooden hovel in an alley off Batterymarch. He took a wife, doubling his misery, and together they spawned a family, Colm being the second of twelve. Cholera took off six of the children and then, finally, both parents.

  In those brutal days, the North End acted as a proving ground for muscles, teeth, fists, heart. Colm joined the thousand or so child beggars in the streets of the neighborhood, hurling brickbats at the NO IRISH, NO DOGS signs that the good Yankees of Boston displayed.

  “I couldna grown up faster any way but I did,” Colm said. “Fightin’ for every scrap. I used to slam my hands into buckets full of rocks to toughen ’em.” Fleeing a criminal charge in Boston of precipitating riot (“A frame,” he said simply), the twenty-five-year-old bruiser eventually wound up in Virginia City, handling security at the Brilliant Mine.

  Colm told me he actually preferred his watchman duty on the train to being welcomed into its drawing rooms and parlors, having to make conversation with too many well-meaning people.

  One night Colm performed his regular rounds, padding silently up and down the corridors of the sleeping compartments. He was midway through The Brave, he told me later, when he sensed a vibration above his head. A sound as soft as the footfall of a rabbit. Then a scratching, sliding noise. Some creature hiding in the insulation of the train? A rat?

  Simply a rain of pebbles, Colm decided, falling off onto our cars from a cliff face in a cut of the track. A familiar sound, like rocks skittering down a mine shaft. He made to move on.

  But no, it was footsteps. Colm halted. Whoever or whatever passed above imitated him, stepping, then stopping. He repeated his maneuver and the sounds again matched him.

  “Well, I had a smile then,” Colm told me. “I thought I knew what was what.”

  Sure enough, a hand appeared on the thick window glass immediately beside him, fingers spread, and a pale arm, white against the rushing black of the Utah desert. Then a face, upside down. And the face wore across it a broad, impish smile.

  The wild little sprite!

  Savage Girl rode the flat, smooth top of the train with total confidence, total ease. Feeling the dry night winds of summer gusting through her hair and turning her face up to the faint-burning stars.

  For a quick second, she hung inverted, gripping the open clerestory vents all while hurtling forward atop Sandobar at forty-five miles per hour.

  As quickly as she appeared, she pulled up and vanished. Colm heard the soft sound of her bare feet a few seconds more, then silence.

  “That explains the noises in the night inside the Lincoln car,” I said after hearing the story. “She must drop down into it. What do you think she does in there? Communes with Abe Lincoln’s spirit?”

  “I know she don’t sleep much,” Colm said. “Shall we tell Freddy?”

  “Not just yet,” I said.

  8

  Mostly, I stayed to myself and composed my anatomical sketches.

  On the train, while I couldn’t bring all the equipment I had at home, I had my trusty technical pen, India ink, compasses and metal-edged rulers, watercolors, sharp-lead pencils and enough high-rag, bright white stock to last me through half a dozen trips across the country. I loved the subject, its exactitude and precision. And I equally loved the materials utilized to evoke that precision upon the page.

  My inks I could not use while the train was rocking, so I contented myself with charcoal. And watercolor washes.

  My specimen jars contained human hearts (two), hands (six, a special study of mine), a flayed gluteus, a complete male reproductive system, assorted abdominal and thoracic viscera and, most rare, the cerebellum and brain stem of a ten-year-old child whose torso had been crushed in a streetcar accident.

  My constant companion as I labored over my drawings, a gentleman I had requested join me on our travels, a fully articulated skeleton. I had named it Napoleon Bonaparte for its small stature. Boney had formerly hung from a metal hook stand in my study at home, and now he hung on a hook in my study aboard Sandobar.

  Then I had my blades: lancets, scalpels and curettes, as well as carrying knives, everything from barlows to bowies.

  Seeking to devise a new way of portraying anatomical subjects, I created a method by which the viewer might see the realistic portrait of the subject. An athlete stands in full fencing regalia in en garde posture—and then his skin is presented cut away to show the workings underneath, the muscles, arteries and bones that enable him to take his pose.
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  I planned to preview the in situ technique with Dr. James when I returned to class in the fall. He had praised my earlier sketches.

  The hours rolled out dreamily. I’d bend to my drawing, look up at the passing landscape, bend to my drawing some more. Tennyson’s “Lotos-Eaters” continually ran through my head.

  The Lotos blooms below the barren peak

  The Lotos blows by every winding creek

  All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone

  Thro’ every hollow cave and alley lone

  Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown.

  Breaking our monotony, Freddy declared the stopover at the Great Salt Lake. We reached the depot at Kelton, there to be met with three excursion wagons, all arranged beforehand via telegraph.

  The Kelton stop, west of Ogden, was one of those lonely, unpeopled outposts, at the same time the scene of some unlikely activity. A mountain man in full leathers waited for the eastern train. He was going back home, he told us, revealing his birthplace, surprising for one wearing a raccoon hat, as Flushing Park, Queens. His traveling companion banged tunelessly on a battered guitar.

  Toad in the road (he sang)

  Toad in the road

  Along come a wagon

  Whoopsie! (he yodeled)

  Road in the toad!

  Anna Maria tossed him an unnecessary coin.

  Kelton lay at the western piedmont of the Wasatch, a range of unsmiling, unpretty mountains, craggy and brown. Above us the sun already burned hot in an expanse of blue, and delicate bright-white clouds floated aimlessly on the horizon.

  Our party had descended the three metal steps to the railbed and now stood stretching by the side of the train, taking deep breaths. The berdache, resplendent in a new dress, turned her face up to the sun. My father actually thumped his chest with pleasure. Anna Maria just stood there, eyes closed as if in prayer, her arms around Savage Girl.