Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  He emitted a hmmn and went at the tumor with a set of dental picks. A teratoma is an odd little thing, one of the ghastliest growths known to man, a blood-infused ball the size of a child’s fist, made up entirely of teeth and hair.

  The two of us each wore a pair of ocular devices, inventions of mine that Dr. James commended very highly and adopted at once, high-power magnifying lenses set into eyeglass frames and designed to be worn for dissection and surgery.

  In fact, James tended to praise me often, perhaps too much for my equilibrium, since I admired the man so fervently. He liked my anatomical drawings.

  “These are very good,” he said when I presented some of the sketches I had done on the train ride across the continent. “Would you like me to speak to a publisher about them?”

  Concentrating on the clot in front of us, we teased out its layers, peeling them back like the leaves of some rank, diminutive cabbage, flaying the epithelial tissues one after another. By an effort of will, I steadied my hands. It was fine work, but gross in the fastidious sense of the word, since the thing smelled foul enough to strip paint.

  “Hair and teeth,” James murmured. “The human irreducibles, sex and death.”

  I tried to understand what he meant. Hair, the alluring, and teeth, the slashing bloodletters.

  “Except by fire, human hair is nearly indestructible,” he said. Except by fire. Meaning: anger. The only force capable of destroying love.

  “So love wins out,” I said, speaking broadly. “Over violence, I mean.”

  “Oh, teeth, teeth last forever, too,” he said. “Who has not felt the urge to tear and rip and maim? Do you know your Hindoo deities? Shiva, the Destroyer?”

  I quoted a tidbit of Emerson: “If the red slayer think he slays, / Or if the slain think he is slain, / They know not well the subtle ways / I keep, and pass, and turn again.”

  He raised his head and beamed a smile at me, his eyes swimming behind the lenses.

  I first encountered Professor James two years before, when he acted as my instructor in physiology. I took to him at once, and he, I thought, to me. I saw in him a like-minded figure, an intellectual, but one who felt emotions perhaps too deeply.

  This year he had invited me to participate in a small, informal practical-anatomy curriculum, a course that often consisted of just the two of us, wearing our eyeglasses, cutting and prying, picking and exposing. Close work. The mere sounds made by a dissection—gelatinous, mucky, moist—have been known to send some people into a faint.

  James kept a middle part to his hair and wore a pointed, well-clipped beard that made him look rather more Bohemian than less. His necktie, a striped creation that he let droop beyond his collar, would have elicited a laugh from Bev Willets, but though I didn’t take up the style myself, it looked rather dashing on him. His face retained its youth (he was thirty-three that year) and normally wore a kind, soft expression.

  “I wonder, Dr. James,” I said after passing a silent moment working at the mass, “if the study of a wild child has any benefit for the furtherance of science.”

  “A wild child? You mean feral, one supposedly raised by animals?”

  “Such as the Wild Girl of Songi or Victor of Aveyron,” I said.

  “Mostly hoaxes, I would have thought, though I haven’t made any concerted study of them myself.”

  “But if we could posit the existence of such a creature, verifiable and genuine, would not the field of natural science be the better for a thorough investigation?”

  “Certainly,” he said. “However, these figures are almost always ruses, sideshow-carnival types of things, tricked up to inflame the popular imagination.”

  He stopped, propping his examination glasses on his forehead, making himself resemble some four-eyed beast. “I was assuming your query to be hypothetical, but perhaps not.”

  I was silent, bending to the work.

  “Male or female?”

  Again I refrained from answering, embarrassed that I had opened the subject with him.

  “Is it planned to exhibit the creature?”

  When I remained wordless, he rapped the table sharply. “Lord’s sake, boy!”

  I straightened, removed my eye device and met his gaze.

  “I suppose,” he said slowly, “that some compelling knowledge could accrue from a study of a feral child. Various propositions could be tested. One hypothesis that might be put to the proof, for example, is that some people have too much money, which they employ to toy and trifle with other people’s lives.”

  We stared at each other until I dropped my eyes. “Shall we continue with the work at hand?” he said.

  When we had stripped the whole tumor away, flattening it out on our examination table, James and I both remarked upon its peculiar shape at once.

  “A homunculus,” he said.

  “Why, it’s the shape of a man,” I said.

  We had fixed the product of our labors like an insect upon the table. The flayed tumor did indeed display a vague human outline, arms, legs, torso and head, a gingerbread man rendered in swirls of black blood, matted brown-blond hair and sharp, sparkling white teeth.

  A little man.

  I recited some popular doggerel of the day: “Run, run, as fast you can. / You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man.”

  “Except they always are caught, aren’t they?” James said, closely inspecting the specimen, his eyeglasses only inches away from its mottled surface. “They are apprehended, then quite crunched down upon by pointed little teeth.”

  Later in the term, as Thanksgiving approached, James suggested I might be better off applying for a leave from the college.

  “Is my work deficient in some way?”

  “Not at all, not at all,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder. “You only appear as if you want to be elsewhere.”

  “I am quite happy where I am,” I said. I felt as though I were always having to tell him this. Though James was my anatomy professor, he very much tended toward the relatively new field of “mental science,” or psychology, for which Harvard had no chair. He was a great reader of moods.

  “You’re not doing yourself or anyone else much good,” he said, adding, a bit unkindly I thought, “Your head is in the clouds somewhere, you may want to change your academic focus, look into meteorology.”

  I didn’t wish to be mulish, and after thinking it over I decided he was right. The ills that had afflicted me the previous term threatened to return. I couldn’t deny that my mind felt somewhat unsettled.

  Instead of waiting to go back to New York for Christmas, as I had planned, by mid-November, just days before Thanksgiving, I was on a train leaving Boston, Colm Cullen at my side, and me brooding the whole time.

  • • •

  On the way to the city, we changed trains in New Haven, recalling to my mind the sporting event I had attended earlier in the fall with Delia Showalter, a game of American football between Harvard and Yale.

  Harvard won, 4–0, but the day should have been more successful than it was. The contest on the field was played with some sort of modified rugby rules that I did not wholly understand, involving a special oblate spheroid of a ball. I stumbled explaining the game to Delia, was caught out in my ignorance about field goals versus touchdowns and experienced an irritating sense of comeuppance.

  Delia journeyed from Manhattan chaperoned by her aunt, and she elicited admiring glances all around by the eager male students on the stadium benches, but her quality of fatuous blandness (or bland fatuousness) grated on me for the whole visit.

  We were allowed to sit together beneath an immense buffalo robe. Though the sense of physical closeness had its inevitable effect on me, I felt irritation even about that. As though I somehow resented her power.

  Now, on my return trip to New York from Cambridge only a few weeks after Harvard-Yale, I decided not to telegraph the Showalters about my arrival. I wondered at my recalcitrance. Delia would surely be upset if she found out I was in New York wit
hout telling her, and she would indeed find out. I was being petty, and I couldn’t understand why.

  Well, I hadn’t told my parents I was coming home either, but that was more in the way of a surprise. And also, I suppose, to avoid Freddy’s displeasure at my leaving school.

  Dear old New York, dear old Manhattan. Rumbling along the coast, past Greenwich, down through the Bronx and Harlem, I felt a rising sense of excitement all out of proportion to the event. Rather than arriving in the city with my tail tucked between my legs for having left Harvard, I had a sense of new beginnings.

  Colm and I arrived at Grand Central Depot, then took a hansom cab up Fifth Avenue to Sixty-third Street.

  A double château, our house and my grandmother’s next door, both big enough for a regiment, together taking up the whole blockfront.

  The Citadel, Nicky always called our half, not entirely in jest. It sat on that stretch of Fifth like a proud thumb stuck in the eye of social convention. With it, the family seemed to say, here be the Delegates, and let none dare to judge us.

  Fashion had not yet caught up with our choice of neighborhood. All around, especially to the north and east, were rock outcroppings, feral pigs, the poor. A favored specialized activity of the neighborhood, bone boiling.

  The Citadel stood out. Built right to the sidewalk in mulberry-colored stone, two wings and four floors with a twenty-foot-high first story and a deep mansard roof, the residence reflected the iconoclasm of its builder, my grandfather.

  Richard Morris Hunt, the architect responsible for all the important residential buildings in New York, had given The Citadel the likeness of a full-fledged sixteenth-century château, a fairy-book castle if there ever could be one in Manhattan, inhabiting a different world from the terrible cast-down hovels all around.

  The trio of marble “white houses” on Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth, owned by a family of shipping magnates, were our closest neighbors or, as August Delegate had thought of it, our closest competitors.

  Inside, the place was all Anna Maria. Tapestries, wainscoting, window dressings. Public rooms on the second floor, private on the third, servants on the top floor, stables at the back.

  A space designed as a conservatory had been given over to an aviary for my mother’s birds of plumage—parrots, cockatoos, chaffinches. It was immense, with little-visited, leafy corners where weather splattered the leaded skylights.

  Freddy indulged in the training of a little kestrel in this sanctuary, taking the hawk over to the East River on occasion to fly. The back of our house sounded like a bird-thronged forest and was where we much preferred to live, away from the traffic noise of the avenue.

  Stationed beneath the Fifth Avenue portal’s copper canopy, Paul Rogers acted as The Citadel’s gatekeeper and pig shooer. Freddy couldn’t be satisfied with just a butler to receive callers, he had to have a doorman as well. A well-muscled slab of a man and a great favorite of Nicky’s, Paul took an instant disliking to Colm, as someone who might be infringing on his territory.

  “Back in residence, Mr. Hugo?” Paul said when I arrived.

  “For the foreseeable future,” I said.

  Paul maneuvered aside the hansom hack trying to help with the luggage. “You there, boy,” he said to Colm. “Servants’ entrance at the back.”

  Colm just laughed, and we strolled in through the front door together.

  “Mr. Hugo! This is a surprise,” our butler, George Winston, said, nodding in a polite bow.

  I put my finger to my lips and brushed past him, calling back over my shoulder, “Inform my parents they have a visitor in the front drawing room, but don’t tell them who it is. And tea!”

  I sent Colm away with my kit and took the stairs two at a time, feeling buoyant, exuberant. Unhushed by the gleaming mahogany all around, the burgundy Oriental carpets, the golden sunflower wallpaper.

  I fairly burst into the upstairs drawing room, empty at this time of day, standing there, taking in the sights and smells of home, becoming infused with “Delegacy,” as Nicky would have it.

  Good old drawing room, full of good old furniture! The tall, curved cabinet of butterfly specimens, shrine to one of Freddy’s serial obsessions. In one corner a full suit of armor, holding its lance as though it would charge across the room and impale the gilded statue of Diana in the opposite corner.

  On the ceiling floated a large Chinese parasol—Anna Maria had filled the house with chinoiserie—and on the floor lay a fluffy satin pillow, one of many scattered throughout the house for our brindled mastiff, Rags, so that she never need bother herself to search for a bed when she wanted to lie down. The interior remained practically invisible in the murk of the evening, since none of the sconces were yet lit.

  I startled at a figure in the room I hadn’t immediately noticed. Bronwyn stood at a window on the Fifth Avenue side of the house, the washed-out light of the waning afternoon bathing her in fading gold. She was dressed in tightly fitted indigo plaid and wore a cameo that I recognized as belonging to my mother.

  Our foundling had matured a great deal since I saw her last, over three months before. She looked at once more normal, less wild and at the same time more ethereal. She had grown out of her girlishness and into something else. She had a pretty figure. I could even believe she was taller by an inch.

  Hearing me come in, she turned from the window. “Oh,” she said quietly, “the other son.” As if remarking on a cloud in the sky or a carriage in the street, something so very everyday.

  Her words were like a punch to my gut, a gut that had already been sent flip-flopping by the new distinction of her appearance. To hear her speak at all was extraordinary. But on top of that, that she was so casual, so dismissive. The other son. As though I were totally uncentral to her life.

  Shall I describe her voice? Husky, totally different from the breathy sibilance of Delia Showalter and her kind, velvet with some grit in it. An unplaceable, childish accent, enchanting.

  I was about to greet her—we were old Sandobar pals, after all—but the words stuck in my throat.

  Then Winston threw open the door to the central hall, and Freddy and Anna Maria came in, and Nicky spilled into the room also, and I was caught up in their surprised hellos. Rags filled the air with welcoming bellows. At least she recognized her master.

  Towheaded Nicky plowed into me with a hug. My mother fussed, assuming that I had left school because of illness once again. I assured her I was fine.

  “Then why?” Freddy said.

  An embarrassed pause. “We’ll talk about it later,” Anna Maria said.

  The berdache and Tu-Li entered, and the moment passed with their greetings.

  “We have news for you,” Freddy said. He gestured to Bronwyn and took her under his arm when she approached. “Hugo, we’d like to introduce you to your new sister. We’ve given Bronwyn the Delegate name.”

  Bronwyn performed the prettiest curtsy that could be demanded of anyone. Maybe she really had become domesticated, over the course of these months when I hadn’t seen her.

  “Kiss your brother, dear,” Anna Maria said.

  Bronwyn stepped forward and moved to place her lips to mine. Anna Maria said, “On the cheek, dear,” and my new sister tacked to one side. A brief, whispery-soft warmth, the fragrance of oranges.

  “We lost her governess!” Nicky said, an unaccountable note of triumph in his voice.

  “And why would that be?” I had depended on the fact that a governess might provide a buffer, if one was needed, between my friends and the strange new addition to the family.

  “Bronwyn stabbed her,” Nicky said.

  “Oh, shush,” Anna Maria said quickly. “It was an accident.”

  “The cut was not deep,” Tu-Li said.

  Bronwyn turned her face to the window.

  “Miss Peel called Bronnie a hellion,” Nicky said. “She said she would never be a member of civilized society.”

  Bronnie? He calls her “Bronnie”? “What on earth happened?” I asked.r />
  “It’s too absurd even to recount,” Anna Maria said. “No one’s fault. It seemed Bronwyn carried a scissors of some sort, and Miss Peel turned around hastily, and they collided. . . .”

  “There was blood,” Nicky said. “I saw it. Miss Peel shrieked like a stuck pig.”

  “When have you ever heard a stuck pig?” I asked, mussing his hair.

  “They never got along,” Anna Maria said. “The woman could not appreciate the girl’s qualities.”

  “Which qualities are those?” I asked.

  “She’s a ripping acrobat!” Nicky shouted, and attempted a cartwheel. He landed it, staggered and crashed against a lacquered Chinese stool, knocking it over.

  Bronwyn laughed, something I had not often heard her do before.

  By my lights Anna Maria’s mothering impulse appeared to be entirely diverted to my new sister. I caught myself responding with a glimmer of jealousy that I could never express outright. But my mother sensed it, since she broke off favoring Bronwyn to place her hands on my shoulders and look searchingly into my face.

  “But you’re all right, Hugo, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Marvelous,” I said, at least partially propitiated.

  “I never know when you are being serious, dear,” Anna Maria said.

  “I love you, Mother,” I said. She stood on her tiptoes to kiss me on the forehead, and I glanced beyond the crown of her head to the others in the room, my siblings, two of them now.

  In his heart of hearts, Freddy did not care a whit whether I stayed in school or not, so wrapped up was he in his own inscrutable affairs. But he was my father nonetheless.

  “Good you’re home, son,” he said, wrapping me in a bear hug. “We need you here.”

  13

  Shakespeare tells us “it is a wise father that knows his own child,” and wiser still, I’d say, is the child who knows his own father. In the days following my arrival home, Freddy showed himself to be fretful and worried over his new ward. I understood Bronwyn’s rebellion in her studies to be the cause.

  I sat in on one of her morning lessons. Deportment, or posture, or some such. Her teacher, an athletic woman named Genevieve Stebbins, had her cornered in the drawing room. Anna Maria attended for moral support.