Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  “Bronwyn!” I called out.

  She poised a moment on the sash, said “Hugo,” over her shoulder, and disappeared.

  I rushed to the window, in time to see her clamber downward on the ornamental crenellations of the exterior, cross the stable courtyard and slip out toward Sixty-third.

  Thunderstruck, I rushed down the corridor to my own rooms in the opposite wing, dressed hurriedly in evening clothes and took the stairs down two at a time.

  I found Freddy and Anna Maria in the aviary. Crossing the space quickly, spooking a fluttering cockatoo, I peered outside into the courtyard.

  “Going out?” Freddy asked.

  “Is there something wrong, dear?” Anna Maria asked.

  “She’s—” I began, then broke off.

  “You look entirely out of sorts, Hugo,” Anna Maria said. “Doesn’t he, Freddy? Stop a bit, take a cigarette, you should never leave the house upset.”

  I’m sure I reminded her of the unhinged way I looked when I was carted off to the sanatorium.

  “No, no, I’m all right,” I said. “It’s just— I must go!”

  Freddy followed me out of the aviary as I crossed the stairhall. “Take the brougham,” he called.

  “I’ll get a hack,” I said back to him.

  “Take Colm!” he called.

  But this was not a night for Colm Cullen to know about. I needed his protection but more particularly wanted to keep Bronwyn’s misconduct secret.

  Once out on the street, I felt at a loss which way to turn. I proceeded the short half block up to Sixty-third, looked east, found the street empty. The whole district was quiet as a cemetery, as befitted a neighborhood of two homes only.

  Winds shook the trees in the park and along Fifth. I pulled my topper close, tightened my scarf around my neck and crossed the avenue. I didn’t know where I would find her. The only thing I could think of was that day at the Zoo, when she had known all the park’s nooks and crannies, all the places a person could slip in and slide through unseen.

  So I clambered over the gray stone retaining wall and entered the park, also empty at this time of night. I tried to make myself think like Bronwyn, act like Bronwyn. I hurried deeper into the wilder, sylvan precincts beyond the Zoo, hearing the caged animals snort and wheeze in the darkness, restless with the gusty wind.

  Peering into the gloom, I saw nothing, no one, wandering for a full half hour.

  On the verge of giving up, I reached Bethesda Fountain. Then the sound of music carried from somewhere nearby. I couldn’t make sense of the direction whence it came. A Gypsy guitar, a bandoneón. In a nearby copse huddled a group of figures, gathered around a small, wavering campfire.

  This, too, as with the rest of what Bronwyn had shown me of the park, was something new to me. Though I lived directly across from it, I had without thinking considered the whole park a dead zone at night, closed, depeopled, perhaps dangerous. Not a place of music and warmth.

  Visible by firelight were dark men in the clothes of laborers, black-eyed women with black hair and colorful kerchiefs, wearing the same jackets as the men, brown and coarse. The guitarist played a fast, jiglike air, holding his instrument up near his face as he sang into the night. The women clapped rhythmically and took to dancing near the fire, one after another.

  One of the men, a hugely muscled brute with a slouch hat and a sad, drooping mustache, swept into the dance with a girl in his arms.

  Bronwyn.

  They looked transported, the two of them whirling madly, the wild wind blowing her long hair about, the clapping tempo of the women keeping time, the assembled dancers and spectators crying out foreign, unintelligible words.

  A dizzying scene. Before me I witnessed Bronwyn revert to Savage Girl, unloosed, abandoned, purely physical. I couldn’t bear to look, and I couldn’t look away. Weakness overcame my gut, my knees, my groin, and I sat directly on the ground. She had taken her hair down, but her male garb maddened me, as did seeing her smile at her partner. The music . . .

  Bronwyn and the Gypsy dancer quit the group, breathless, practically staggering from exertion. They drifted off into the darkness around the Lake.

  I could not help myself. I followed. I saw the Gypsy dip his whole head into the water, then rear back with a shout and fling his wet hair, glints of the far-off firelight playing upon the splashing droplets.

  Savage Girl laughed. A rare event that spawned an agony in my chest.

  Sagging against a tree, its rough bark digging into my cheek, I blanked out for a moment. Then I saw the Gypsy man walk away into the night. Where was he going? Where had Bronwyn gone? I pressed my fists against my eyes like a small boy doubting what he was seeing. Then I plunged deep into the woods beside the Lake.

  I felt at the same time as if I were chasing someone and as though I were being chased. Complete and utter darkness. Visions, waking dreams. A black-haired woman appeared and then abruptly vanished.

  A man lay sprawled out on a bed of autumn leaves, eviscerated. I swayed for a second over him. I smelled the ferrous stench of blood, thick as mucus, pooling beside the body.

  Incarnadine stillness. Time suspended, adjourned. Far away, the group of Gypsies at the campfire. The silence of their open mouths.

  A deeper darkness, into which I plummeted.

  • • •

  Waking at dawn in the Central Park after spending a chill November night laid out on the ground can never be easy. I had evidently been clubbed from behind, since a blood-pulped mass swelled from the back of my head. I was certain I had a concussion but was unclear as to how severe it was.

  Of course I had been robbed, my shoes, coat and wallet stolen, my pockets turned out like the wings of flapping birds. My knife was missing. Poor me. A recollection tantalized the edge of my mind.

  I had seen something terrible. I had done something terrible.

  No sign of anyone. I tried to wash the black blood from my shirtfront, but the mucky water from the Lake seemed only to stain me further. In the Gypsy campfire, dead embers.

  Summoning a cab on Terrace Drive cost me all the effort I had. Making it home at last, I woke Paul the doorman to pay the driver and staggered up to the third floor.

  Not to my room, no, that would have been too simple. I must needs go to the South Wing and see what kind of damage had been done to Bronwyn—or if indeed she had managed to survive at all.

  Not bothering to knock this time.

  It must have been before six o’clock when I entered her room, since the light had not come all the way up and the streets of the city were not yet fully awake. Expecting blood and mayhem, instead I found a sweetly sleeping fairy nymph, dressed not in rough male clothes but in a frilly nightgown of candy floss.

  Bronwyn lay nestled in spotlessly fresh linen bedclothes, warmed by her pink goose-down quilt. Her lips parted in a pretty dreamland pout.

  My head throbbed like a steam engine. My first urge was to shake her awake and upbraid the girl for putting me through what I had just been put through. I wanted to demand what she knew of the man whom I saw gutted like a fish on the carpet of autumn leaves.

  Instead I sank back into a satin-tufted chair at her bedside, the one Anna Maria used when she wanted to read Bronwyn to sleep. And soon fell asleep myself.

  • • •

  Between waking and dreaming, I suffered the awful conviction that I had somehow killed the Gypsy dancer. The images crowded my brain: me rushing furiously forward to assault him, slashing wildly with some sort of blade, dragging Bronwyn away. The blow to my skull had somehow scrambled thought and memory.

  Groggy, I half woke and trailed my hands down my shirtfront, which did indeed have blood spatters on it. Was it my own blood or that of my victim? The whole idea was bizarre. But the scenes that beset my mind had a vivid reality about them.

  Sleep took me again, and again I experienced that same strange, tension-filled hovering at the boundary of consciousness.

  “Why, Master Hugo, sir, what are you doing in
the miss’s bedroom?” Shrieking female speech, crashing into my skull.

  “Good glory, Jorny, lower your voice.” The upstairs maid, midmorning. The sun slanted across the shutters of the window through which Bronwyn had escaped the night before.

  “Why, it’s not proper!” Jorny bellowed. Actually, she was whispering, as Miss Bronwyn was still fast asleep, no surprise after her spree. It was only the voice that I heard within my aching head that shouted so loudly.

  “Stop, stop,” I begged.

  “You look a mess,” she said. “Your ear is cauliflowered, in case you didn’t know.”

  I attempted to keep the world from spinning off its axis. “She . . . she . . . had a low fever, didn’t she? I was watching over her to see . . .” Trailing off, wretched.

  “Had she really?” Jorny demanded. “I hadn’t heard about that.” She stepped over to Bronwyn’s bedside and lightly laid a hand on her forehead.

  “Well, she’s all right now,” Jorny said. “No fever, I don’t think. You’d best remove yourself.”

  My head in my hands, I heard Jorny growl, “You are a low, filthy, dirty beast, aren’t you, sir?”

  I looked up. “What? What?”

  “I didn’t say nothing, sir,” Jorny said. “Now, shoo, I have to wake Miss Bronwyn for her breakfast and lessons.”

  “Don’t speak anymore, Jorny,” I said. “Your voice is extremely grating on my nerves.”

  She looked crestfallen, and immediately I felt I had acted badly. “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “You go run me a piping-hot bath, and I’m sure I’ll be human again sometime within the next week or so.”

  I could tell she didn’t want to leave me alone with the sleeping girl. Me, the girl’s own brother. “Keep the door open if you must,” I said snappishly.

  Checking under the armoire to see if the set of razor hand claws was inside the canvas bag (it was), I nearly passed out as I bent over. Feeling my gorge rise—I had a concussion, for sure—I made it to the hallway of the North Wing before I vomited, discreetly, into a decorative Chinese vase Anna Maria kept near the door to her chambers.

  The following day remained quiet chez Delegate. I slept until the afternoon, took a dry-toast repast, cadged a fingernail slice of opium tar from Tu-Li, which I admixed with brandy, and then slept again for a full round of the clock.

  Colm checked in on me the next noontide. I was already awake, still in bed and brooding. The house was silent.

  “The way things have been going lately,” I said to Colm, “I almost prefer unconsciousness.”

  He told me he had Douglas the footman on the alert to bring me up a full breakfast tray. “Them’s all upset on account Miss Bronwyn hasn’t left her room, same as you, since the night before last,” Colm told me.

  “Them? Who might ‘them’ be?”

  “Wouldn’t come down for her lessons, wouldn’t have Madam in to read to her. The maids swear they hear her weeping.”

  “What about me?” I said. “I haven’t emerged from my room for two days straight, I haven’t been able to see to my responsibilities, I could have shed a tear or two in the depths of dread night, and do the maids gossip and my parents show alarm over me?”

  “What responsibilities might those be, Mr. Hugo?”

  “Don’t be insolent,” I said calmly. “Tell Tu-Li to come visit me, will you?”

  “She won’t,” Colm said. “She has cut you off, on account she says the American mind cannot handle the poppy but that it makes for a slide into horrible degeneracy.”

  I groaned, and he told me Mr. Bev had called looking for me, and Cousin Willie was offering his new chestnut gelding to me for a pop around the park, and Delia Showalter’s aunt had left a card.

  I groaned some more.

  “Another thing,” Colm said. “I don’t know if you recall the heavy-bearded lunatic we nicknamed the Stone-Thrower, the one who chucked rocks at Sandobar while we was idled on the siding in Virginia. Sad kind of guy.”

  “Pining about his love for the girl,” I said.

  “He’s in town,” Colm said.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I chased him off from in front of the house,” Colm said.

  “Our house?” I said, incredulous. “Was he tossing rocks at the place?”

  “What with railroads crossing the continent, it’s becoming a little too easy for people to move around,” Colm said, getting up to leave. He would come back to check on me, he said, that I should stay in bed, that I still looked a little peaked.

  I ate a full breakfast, and though I didn’t think I was up to facing my parents and the screeching birds of the aviary, I did venture to the drawing room in the South Wing that Tu-Li and Tahktoo shared as their own.

  “She won’t come out,” Tu-Li said as soon as she saw me. “What did you do to her?”

  She and the berdache appeared to be wearing matching green silk kimonos.

  Song Tu-Li’s great shame were her broad unbroken feet, flopping around at the ends of her legs, she believed, like a duck’s. In the past this had led her to fraternize with Americans, who she felt were less judgmental about her hideous handicap.

  Born in Kwangtung, smuggled as an infant across the sea to the “Gold Mountain” (the Chinese name for California), she worked for five years as a translator for the Central Pacific. Since being engaged as my mother’s helpmate, Tu-Li had added a slight flavor of mockery to the family mix, something for which we all came to develop a taste.

  She was always Anna Maria’s girl; they were intimates, and a sense of deep understanding existed between them. Lately, though, that allegiance seemed to have shifted. How could loyalty to Bronwyn trump her loyalty to my mother?

  I eased myself onto a chaise longue and called for tea.

  “What did you do to her?” Tu-Li asked again, accusatory.

  “Tell me something,” I said, avoiding the question. “How often has she been going out at night?”

  “What are you talking about?” Tu-Li said. “I don’t see anything, I never saw her go anywhere, I don’t know anything.”

  The berdache busied himself arranging the gambling tiles into the four-square pattern that began a new game. “You’re not talking either?” I asked him.

  The tea came, and I sat and savored it, soothed by the clacking of the tiles, the sound of hoofbeats passing on the avenue outside the window, the tick-tocking of the mantel clock. Underneath it all, an odd whispery sound—I’ve noticed it often before—of the city breathing.

  My disturbing night thoughts gradually evaporated with the tea, the company, the light of day. I laughed at myself. Dreaming that I was a killer. Waking to think that she was.

  Bronwyn was in the room immediately next to this one, with a communicating door between us. I could rise to my feet and open it, confront her. See here, young lady, what is this business of shutting yourself in?

  “It’s locked,” Tu-Li said, reading my thoughts. “She locks it.”

  In a low voice, I said, “She won’t attend her lessons, the whole project will fail, and Freddy will turn her out.”

  The tile clacking halted for a beat and then began again.

  “No,” Tu-Li said. “Madam loves her.”

  “If we all worked together, we could help her,” I said. “We could be partners in the effort.”

  “Leave her to us,” Tu-Li said. “You go about your business, we’ll take care of her.”

  “But it isn’t working, is it?” I said. “Whatever any of us is doing isn’t working. She is just as wild as when we found her in Virginia.”

  They knew the truth of what I was saying but would not admit it. Clack, clack, clack. I had an impulse, not for the first time, to kick apart their game.

  15

  “I wish to make a Thanksgiving toast,” said Freddy, who always made the holiday toasts for the family.

  We had consumed the oyster soup and the cod with egg sauce, fallen hungrily upon the slivered carrots and celery in their crystal boats, and n
ow an expectant silence had descended upon the table in preparation for the main course.

  “To absent friends,” I said, and Freddy stared me down.

  “Hugo is correct, if impertinent. Not all of us are here this evening. That is a pity. We wish for her sake”—he made a vague gesture upward, toward the ceiling—“that our new daughter emerges out of her melancholy soon, to take her place en famille.”

  “Hear, hear,” I said, eager to get the champagne down my throat as quickly as possible. But Freddy still held his flute arrested in midair.

  “We have much to be thankful for indeed,” he said. “We have had a good year, we have survived the worst that Wall Street had to throw at us. We made a transcontinental voyage together, as a family, that proved stimulating, informative and inspirational.”

  Mary, in her white mobcap, appeared at the pass-through door holding the silver platter on which rested the golden, crisp-skinned turkey, so large that it was a wonder it didn’t slip from her grip and skid across the floor. She hesitated, not wanting to interrupt what she supposed was the solemnity of the toast.

  Winston took the turkey from her and laid the platter down atop the burgundy runner in the middle of the ivory-clothed side table.

  “We do, however, have someone here to welcome anew.” Freddy nodded at the wiry, satin-swathed, steely-coifed woman to his right, his mother, my grandmother. She sat examining the engraving on her silverware setting.

  “Swoony. We are so glad to have you here again.”

  Cynthia Delegate, née Belmont, called Swoony ever since her childhood, carried on regally after Grandfather’s death. Like him, she suffered mightily when my Uncle Sonny passed away prematurely. She hadn’t been the same since she lost her son.

  Having just arrived that afternoon from gilded Newport, leaving her bright marble mansion on the sea, Grandmother would take up residence for the winter in the house that adjoined ours, the mirror-image château occupying the other half of the block from The Citadel.

  But as Freddy’s mother, she had the run of the whole place, her home and ours. There was a door cut through from her second-floor central hall that accessed an upper corridor in our North Wing, a door that was never locked.