Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  My father sighed. “Her parents might well be dead,” he said.

  “Someone will be looking for her.” It felt wrong, or anyway there was a moral question lingering in our treatment of Savage Girl. She wasn’t ours to keep. Or was she?

  “I plan to put detectives on it,” Freddy said. “There have been several instances, you know, of captives who insist, when they’re found, on staying with the Indians that kidnapped them. They decline to come home.”

  “Ho-ho,” I said, gleeful. “Given the choice, they choose wild savagery. Perhaps we should take that as an argument against the vaunted superiority of our culture, which we always so smugly assume.”

  “I sometimes think that Nicky, at least, might prefer a Comanche life,” Freddy said. “When he was very young, he’d take off any clothing we tried to put on him. A real savage boy.”

  “It’s our duty to find out all we can about her,” I said.

  Freddy wanted to switch the subject. “It will make it a great deal easier to train her up when she begins to speak English,” he said.

  God had to be invented, in order that men may play at being Him. Men such as Freddy.

  With Kelton everything changed. Tu-Li and the berdache spent all their time with Bronwyn, modeling proper manners. Anna Maria and Freddy had her into their drawing room an hour a day for “instruction.” In the art of being civilized.

  How to behave (she wouldn’t). The wearing of shoes (they killed her). Eating without making everyone else at the table ill (uneven results).

  After the Wasatch came the Rockies, then the endless Plains. Comanche country. Bronwyn stayed glued to the window.

  Once, far off, a swarm of black animal forms surged across the grasslands, but the big herds were gone. The bison didn’t like the railroad, and the railroad returned the favor, killing them in hordes. Teams of men, blasting away off shooting cars like the one Sandobar dragged in its rear, only multiplied by a thousand. Death trains, hauling hunters, skinners, teamsters.

  Everything but the skins they left to rot. The vulture, rat and coyote populations exploded. Not so the buffalo. Nor, for that matter, the Comanche. Soon teams of scavengers would pick over the endless bone fields, collecting wagonloads to be ground up for fertilizer.

  We saw antelope, too, many within rifle range of the train, but the truth was none of us had much of a taste for shooting.

  During our long trip across the American Plains, everyone else warmed to Bronwyn, and I found that even I could no longer remain aloof. I think she transformed me into a child again, something I resisted and denied but finally, in fits and starts, gave in to.

  We had become chums, you see. Part of it was that we were bored, thrown together as the only two young people in the family quarters. We went on tiny adventures together. She was a spirited girl, always up for something. The most physical and acrobatic creature I have ever encountered.

  I surprised her on one of those nights when she slipped into the Lincoln car. She saw me, bristled, and for a quick instant I thought she would attack me.

  Instead she did something just as startling. Taking a long-legged head start, she ran up one wall of the car, getting quite high up before gravity pulled her back down.

  She marked the spot she had reached with a swipe of her hand. Wordlessly challenging me. I can race up a vertical surface in my bare feet this high. How high can you go?

  I felt we were somehow desecrating the holy realm of Lincoln’s ghost. But then I thought this was precisely the kind of physical challenge Old Abe would have relished. So I doffed my shoes and tried the trick myself, matching her top spot.

  She went again and set the mark higher. Then me. We went back and forth. Once she managed to touch the roof of the car with her foot.

  Another day, one of terminal boredom on the endless Plains, she led me to the front of the train. She didn’t need words; she pulled me onward with a glance, through the baggage car and past her bath closet, out along the rail of the tender, onto the locomotive deck to smile hello to Bob and Brownie, then onto the catwalk beside the boiler.

  She moved easily and fearlessly, and I found myself admiring her grace. Slipping past the strutwork, she guided me to the little sleigh bench directly above the cowcatcher. It was a rare spot. The endless rails stretched ahead, rolled beneath us, vanished behind.

  Bob went extra slow because we were up there, but Bronwyn kept pulling the bell cord connected to the cab, pulling and pulling on it: Go faster, go faster.

  So Bob Cratchit balled the jack across the yellow Nebraska plains.

  Fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty miles an hour. Too fast for me to estimate how fast we were going. He said, later, fifty.

  “Pound her out, Bob!” I screamed, laughing like a madman. “Pound her out!”

  If I squinted my eyes half shut, I could imagine that the train wasn’t even there, that my body was propelled over the Plains entirely on its own. We held hands. We were flying together, she and I.

  In the wake of such episodes of childishness, I always felt ashamed, and I’d retreat to my anatomical studies.

  • • •

  Chicago. On the evening of the fifth day out from the Washoe. The city had burned flat in 1871. Four years later we could still see patches of blackened earth as Sandobar rocked into town.

  Entering Chicago resembled nothing so much as coming into New York, as after a long stretch of Great Plains isolation we were picking up again on a big-city way of living. Urban world. Horsecars, fine restaurants, people about the streets in fashionable clothes. My sensibility immediately readapted itself. Downtown Chicago had more in common with Manhattan than it did with anywhere else in between, or anywhere else in the world.

  Palmer House, a fabulous, glorious, lyrical hotel. The hotel porters floated us into the place on a cloud. Sprays of flowers in the lobby stood as tall as a man.

  “I do believe this might be the best hotel in the world,” Freddy said when we entered our suites.

  Chicago impressed us. Union Stock Yard & Transit Company ran at full capacity. Trainloads of cattle, sheep and pigs came in, some of them over the same railroad lines we had just traveled. Freddy took me down there, and we marveled at the efficiency of the butchering. They did everything after the Cincinnati model, pigs hauled squealing by their back hooves onto a hoist, carotid artery opened, bled out, gutted, quartered and carved, all within the space of minutes.

  This went on without cessation night and day, Christmas and Easter included.

  As an anatomist I approved; as a moralist I was confounded. A stench of death hung over the whole neighborhood. The South Fork of the Chicago River bubbled like a witch’s cauldron from all the offal discarded into its depths. I was glad Anna Maria had not come along. Bronwyn, I was not so sure. Savage Girl might have enjoyed it.

  We took Bronwyn instead to Marshall Field’s to buy her a suitable wardrobe. In a major step forward (so to speak), she had through Tu-Li’s ministrations learned to wear the soft black slippers of the Celestials, so at least she did not traipse through the store in bare feet.

  While her dresses were being tailored, I squired her all over the sprawling establishment, each of the five stories, packed with dry goods, haberdashery, furniture, carpets, paintings, cabinet work, toys, tools, plus a regular Parisian café right there on the premises (we had tea, without incident).

  When she and I came back to Freddy and Anna Maria, my father asked her, “What did you like best in the whole place?”

  She looked down, stubborn. Freddy had been pushing her to say her first English words, to no avail.

  He repeated the same question in Plains sign language: What good here?

  Bronwyn grabbed Freddy and Anna Maria by the hand and led them to the drinking fountain.

  We all laughed. Yes, of course. Pure, cool, fresh water, free and available at the push of a button, the most miraculous thing in the world for anyone who has lived in the Great American Desert. Much more wonderful than all the finery in the store.<
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  Palmer House stood like the gilded queen of Chicago, enthroned at State and Monroe streets, all sparkling jewels, flounces and good bones, regal amid the innocuous streetside shops and restaurants. Freshly rebuilt, seven stories tall, with a grand lobby ceiling in Moroccan tile and a fireproof guarantee that was, given the town’s recent conflagration, a comfort to its guests. The floor of the hotel’s barbershop was embedded with silver dollars.

  “Some of them minted from Brilliant blue,” sniffed Freddy upon walking past it. He himself preferred that the barber come to him, and he was shaved, trimmed, clipped and powdered in the privacy of his rooms.

  President Grant had stayed in our suite before us, and Sarah Bernhardt (though I rush to say not at the same time). Our penthouse chambers had a view of the lake, a freshwater-blue expanse a block to the east. It looked as bracing as an ice bath.

  The black lacquer bar in my drawing room held bottles of whiskey and gin and a bucket of cracked ice, with a small ivory-colored card alongside that suggested if I needed anything I should pull the bell rope by the door and summon “our most dutiful assistance.”

  I had them take away the gin.

  The lavish surroundings served to undercut my feeling of disappointment in leaving the microcosmic world of Sandobar behind. The spell had for the moment been broken. I think we all felt it, the sense that we could have rolled across the Plains forever, lost in time.

  On the third night of our stay, when I emerged from my bedroom and entered the drawing room of our suite, Tu-Li and the berdache performed a mock-formal presentation of Savage Girl, her long black hair glossy and completely combed out at last, a cinch-waisted light yellow frock from Marshall Field’s looking pretty on her slender silhouette.

  Bronwyn performed an awkward, truncated curtsy.

  Surprised and delighted, I smiled broadly and moved forward on impulse, opening my arms as if to embrace her.

  But I was brutally rebuffed. She hissed at me like a snake—no, not like a snake, like a cat might spit at a threatening dog. Then she buried her face in Tu-Li’s shoulder.

  Both Tu-Li and the berdache laughed, but I was dumbfounded. I found the incident distinctly unfunny. I was further enraged to realize that, with her head still pressed against Tu-Li, Savage Girl was laughing, too.

  I retreated to my parents’ suite. They were in the midst of a discussion on whether Bronwyn could maintain her composure in a formal hotel dining room.

  “I don’t think so,” Freddy said. “We’ll have dinner in our rooms, as before.”

  “Nonsense, the child is perfectly presentable,” Anna Maria said. “What do you think, Hugo?”

  I thought it would at least be interesting. Maybe she’d hiss at the maître d’. “I vote yes,” I said.

  “Luckily, this family is not a democracy,” Freddy said.

  “The poor dear has been so patient with her instruction, she deserves a prize,” said Anna.

  We went down to the dining room. With Bronwyn. Not a democracy, no. Mother ruled.

  Dinner proved lavish. Evening attire all around. I looked across the table and saw Anna Maria as others must see her, her handsome features complemented by a pearly satin décolletage and dangling emeralds. She beamed to be together with her family. Freddy, ruddy and exuding western health, in a stiff boiled shirtfront and jet-black clawhammer coat with grosgrain lapel facings, me the same.

  “If Nicky were here, we’d be complete,” Anna Maria said.

  Tu-Li dressed herself in a pastel pink silk smock. The berdache, for once, took the masculine route and donned a tailcoat. Simpler that way, he felt, no jeers in the restaurant. Seeing him in male clothes had a feel of the tragic.

  Bronwyn was at first glance just another ladylike young woman, in puffed sleeves of the lightest yellow and a rose velvet ribbon tied round her honey-colored throat. Tu-Li had lifted Bronwyn’s black locks up at the back of her head and inserted a white gardenia behind one blush-pink ear.

  The girl’s restless fingers drummed upon the white linen tabletop. She gazed around the room. I could barely get her to glance at me. Her first faux pas: She lifted her water glass and downed it in a gulp, as though she had never tasted water before.

  The headwaiter approached, his minions ranked behind him. “The boiled leg of mutton with caper sauce is excellent, sir,” he began, addressing my father directly.

  “Tonight we also have a beautiful joint of roast beef and a boned turkey with truffles and jelly. If you care for game, we offer woodcock and black duck. For fish the smelts are popular, of course there is lobster, and this evening we have something different: eels à la tartare.”

  I noticed Bronwyn noticing a junior waiter, a handsome, blocky young man who could have wrestled in a show on the Bowery. He parted his sandy hair severely down the center, but a strand of it wanted to stray to his forehead.

  The wrestler-waiter, assigned to her side of the table, lavished attention on Bronwyn. The roast beef, as advertised, was delicious. Bronwyn, who had not yet become wholly accustomed to using a fork, forgot herself momentarily to seize a slice in her hands, pull it apart with her fingers, and gnaw on it so the juices ran down her chin.

  The waiter rushed to the table with finger bowls in which slices of lemon floated. When Bronwyn moved to drink that down, too, I shook my head. Anna Maria took her hands and gently bathed them and with her linen napkin dipped some water and held it to her face to cleanse the blood. I had seen my brother’s nurse wash his face in just this way a dozen times. Bronwyn stoically underwent the treatment.

  That night my parents decided to turn in early, as we would depart on Sandobar the next morning just before dawn. I felt restless and took a turn down to Lake Michigan. Whiskey had begun to taste good to me again for the first time since my shooting-gallery tear, so I took a bottle along from the bar in my room.

  As I strode the shoreline, sleek Chicago rats darted in and out of the bushes. My mind seized upon the wrestler-waiter who had paid Bronwyn such fawning attention at dinner. Slugging the drink, I brushed away the thought. Why did it even bother me?

  Throughout my walk I had the persistent sensation of being watched. Thugs and footpads come out at night. I resolved to take Colm Cullen along on any future midnight strolls.

  But it was just my imagination taking flight. No one was there; the thin sand beach remained empty. The moon had waxed for the whole time Sandobar traveled east and now hung over the rippling surface of the lake. Passing a shuttered fish shack on the beach, I saw the moon in the water mirrored in a dirty windowpane, the light of a weak, faraway sun, thrice reflected, from moon to lake to glass.

  A thought occurred to me. Savage Girl might be mute, but perhaps words were unnecessary. That damned big-muscled server boy, she could seduce him with a smile, a look, by her mere presence.

  As though they stood before me I summoned up the image of her and the waiter coupling like goats, smeared up against each other, face pressing upon face, bodies eager for the greasy sheets of lust.

  A boozy jealousy tormented my mind. I left the beach and rushed back to the hotel, thinking I would check on the girl, knowing I was acting stupidly but unwilling to alter my course. The mighty hostelry stood silent, ghostly, its hallways inhabited by spectral shadows. The rising room, which took passengers up from the lobby to their floors, had shut down for the night.

  Mounting the dark, empty staircase, my climb slowed to a trudge. I became short of breath, to the degree I felt I had to sit down. I uncapped the whiskey and took a long pull.

  What floor was this? Only the third. On a dread whim, I opened the door onto the corridor.

  She stood there at the dim end of the hall, twenty yards away, wearing the artful hand claws, clacking the blades together like a butcher at his knives.

  Breathless, I slammed shut the door.

  No, no, no. She hadn’t been there. Not really. Weaving drunkenly, thinking that I must be hallucinating, I staggered up a flight and entered into the fourth-floor corridor.r />
  There she stood once more, swallowed in the gloom but now with her long black hair streaming over her face. This time she started to run at me in loping strides.

  Again I ran into the stairwell, panicked, climbing the flights, suppressing an urge to bellow out the alarm. The steps seemed to delight in tripping me up. I felt caged in the tight space, not knowing what I was doing or where I was going. A door slammed down below.

  Giving up, I dropped to my knees, feeling that should she come for me, so be it. It was not her, not the she that I knew; it was some other creature. Which did not, it turned out, pursue me. The sixth-floor landing where I had halted remained silent and safe. With fumbling hands I located a barlow knife in my jacket pocket, opened it and waited.

  No threat appeared.

  My penthouse suite was one flight up, on the seventh. I rose to my feet, still dizzy, and opened the door into the sixth-floor corridor. Not wanting to know, not trusting my senses, not being able to help it.

  A narrow corridor, lined with closed doors and golden, tomblike walls, receding into the darkness at the end of the hall. The lamps had been turned down low, the light was murky, the floor awash in red.

  They were there, the two of them, just as I had prefigured them on the beach, a slight woman and a hulking man, clinging together. Her light yellow dress. Speeded-up time, both of them grinning wolfishly at me, white-pale teeth, blank-black eyes. Rage gripped me. I wanted to murder the man.

  My mind must have walked away just then, for I have no consecutive memory of what happened. I regained my senses, which had been siezed with a killing fear. The lovers were gone. Whether my mind was disturbed by an actual incident or simply by the idea that I had just undergone a disruption of reality, I couldn’t readily decide.

  But no, no, this was all delusion. I had seen nothing, done nothing. I was alone in an empty hallway.

  No terror exists so powerful as feeling that your grasp upon sanity might slip-slide away like a buggy on an icy road, not knowing what is real, not knowing what you’ve done.