Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  “Come now, gents,” I said. “I am a poor audience for your quarrel. Mr. Stockton, my father challenges you to a debate on the subject of your article, nature versus nurture. Better to hash out the question before a genteel gathering of philosophers than here on the street.”

  Stockton twirled his cane in a quick, insolent arc, making me flinch. Freddy stood his ground.

  “I suppose I must accept, Delegate, if only to silence your silly natterings,” Stockton said. “You shall hear from me.”

  He bowed stiffly and strolled away.

  “Good Lord, Freddy,” I said. “The man will take you apart.”

  “Not if I bring Bronwyn to the podium with me,” he said. “Exhibit A.”

  My stomach turned. “You’re not serious, I hope.”

  I looked across Broadway to where my sister and mother walked with the flock of black-garbed ministers. At the urging of the clerics, Anna Maria appeared to be admiring the new Gothic steeple of Grace Church, the pride of all Manhattan. Bronwyn, I noticed, had her eyes fixed on the pigeons that infested the grounds. Luckily for the birds, my mother had her arm linked firmly in her daughter’s.

  Dust kicked up from the thoroughfare, thick with omnibus traffic and coaches. I didn’t want Savage Girl hauled into public, at least not in the way my father had planned. She remained still so unformed. I thought to keep her out of the communal fray for at least a little bit longer.

  “Perhaps Cooper Union,” Freddy said, musing on a suitable venue for what he envisioned as a Clash of Titans. Lincoln had secured his presidential candidacy with a speech there in 1860, before a packed house. Freddy pictured his debate triumph along the same lines.

  “I was thinking more of our drawing room at home,” I said.

  • • •

  Whether I sought to shield her from public exposure or not, I found it increasingly entertaining to squire my young sister around Manhattan. Not to social events—not yet—but to the kind of unusual, nook-and-cranny attractions that make wandering New York City so agreeable. On occasion we would take Nicky, or Tu-Li and the berdache, though rarely all three.

  Bronwyn very much enjoyed the Block of Cowboys, that stretch of East Forty-second Street near Lexington where stables, blacksmiths and corrals concentrated and where a proliferation of Stetson-hatted, spur-wearing western characters walked the streets. Shipments of horses for the city’s businesses and residents arrived there, and a market in equine flesh went on six days a week.

  The dray horses took our fancy especially, immense Belgians, Percherons and Clydesdales. Bronwyn had only to glance at one of the cowboys to find herself swept up and seated on one of the heavy-maned beasts.

  We also went to view the ice-yacht racing on the Hudson, rode the rising-room passenger elevators to the dizzying top of the seven-story Equitable Life Assurance building on Cedar Street, played at hide-and-seek (Nicky was with us) amid the vast, snow-powdered Christmas-tree markets of the flower district, near the Thirty-fourth Street ferry landing.

  Like a pair of truants, we snuck into the construction site for the Catholic cathedral they were calling St. Patrick’s, on Fifth Avenue at Fiftieth Street. The white marble structure as yet had no spires and no stained glass, and it rose from a lot that was wooded and remote from the bustle of downtown. I trailed the nave aisle behind Bronwyn like a forlorn groom.

  For New Year’s Eve, Freddy brought us out to the West Brighton Hotel on Coney Island. An odd choice for a winter holiday, but he was supposedly investing in a streetcar line and had come to inspect the road. The hotel itself was closed for the season, but they opened part of it for us, with great roaring fires in every hearth.

  Bronwyn said she thought she had seen the ocean once, in dim childhood. As we walked along the shore, she told me it called to her in her dreams.

  A pack of wild dogs troubled us, coming out of the wind-swirled snow.

  “Watch, now,” Bronwyn said. “You see there are a dozen of them? I can tell you which ones will snarl at me.”

  The mongrels approached.

  “The two on the left, the white one and the dirty gray,” she predicted.

  Sure enough, the ones she had marked out rushed her with bared teeth. She reacted as I had seen her do before, way back at Kelton station, shouting at them and backing them off.

  “How did you know?”

  “Beware of pink-skinned dogs,” she said. “I’ve always had trouble with them, I don’t know why.”

  She explained that with some dogs you can see the pink flesh under their short fur. I recalled that our white bull terrier Hickory was pink-skinned, and because of Bronwyn he had been exiled.

  We left the dogs behind and kept walking along the beach.

  “Too bad it’s too cold to swim,” I said then. Pellets of sleet and sand blistered our skin. She did prove to be a regular fish later, in the hotel’s saltwater pool. When the two of us swam races, we came up even. Deal of a good swimmer.

  A few times during that holiday season, we stayed quietly at home, sitting in Freddy’s library, reading, the hush of snow outside the windows. Bronwyn came in to find Nicky and me there one afternoon during New Year’s week.

  “Do you think it matters that we have an insane drunk for a doorman?” Bronwyn asked, flopping down on the tiger rug in front of the fire.

  “No, I would think it rather makes sense,” Nicky said. “Keeps the riffraff away.”

  “He is riffraff,” I said. Often one floated into The Citadel on a cloud of Paul’s brandy breath.

  “You two lay off Master Paul,” Nicky said. “He’s the only man who stands between us and the mob.”

  Nicky loved to fill Bronwyn’s head with his trenchant analysis of Manhattan’s social strata. He did so now.

  “The whole purpose of society,” he lectured her, “is to keep everybody else out of the cream so the cats can have it all to themselves.”

  “Meow,” said Bronwyn.

  “There’s a lot of people out who want in. They are called climbers and strivers, and we turn up our noses at them.”

  He demonstrated, holding his nose in the air with two fingers and prancing around the room with exaggerated superciliousness. Bronwyn imitated him.

  “Very good,” he said. “You think it’s enough to have fancy clothes and filet mignon? It’s not. Money isn’t everything. These days even the worst kind of people have money. If you have money but no standing in society, it’s a terrible sort of limbo. We call these folk arrivistes, and parvenus, and we turn up our noses at them.”

  Once again he paraded and Bronwyn followed.

  “Much more of this, I’ll lose my mind,” I said.

  “So,” Bronwyn said to Nicky.

  “So,” Nicky said to Bronwyn. “If you’re outside, like you are, Miss Bronwyn, how do you get in? You need first of all a patron. Grandmother holds the key, because she knows all the old families. And the old families are the gatekeepers.”

  He pantomimed knocking at a door. “May I come in?” he said to the empty air, shouting out “No!” in reply and slamming an imaginary door in his own face.

  “Poor Nicholas,” Bronwyn said.

  “But, but, but!” Nicky said. “If you have an old family angel looking over you, inviting you, approving you . . .”

  Bronwyn approached the imaginary door, and Nicky opened it for her in a sweeping motion. She performed a full curtsy.

  “You two ought to take that act down to the Bowery,” I said.

  “Envy is a most disagreeable human emotion, is it not?” Nicky said to Bronwyn, looking at me with exaggerated pity.

  “’Tis,” said Bronwyn. “But I’m wondering, dear Nicholas, who these fearsome old gatekeepers might be.”

  “Ah, yes,” Nicky said. “Right now in Manhattan, they number three. The two Tremont aunts, Fabrice and Gladys, and Caroline Hood, Mrs. Donald Hood, a woman so toplofty and refined she even powders her butt.”

  “Nicky!” I warned.

  “She does, I saw her do it myse
lf,” Nicky said.

  “You did not,” I said, scoffing.

  “No, really, I’ve seen her, her grandson Eric and I used to be friends. We hid in her boudoir.”

  “You did not,” I repeated. “Don’t listen to him, Bronwyn.”

  “Behind the arras,” Nicky said in his Shakespearean voice. “Her heiress behind, spied from behind the arras.”

  “For pity’s sake,” I said, laughing in spite of myself.

  “Lucky for you,” Nicky continued to Bronwyn, “Swoony and Caroline Hood debuted together. And if Caroline Hood receives your call and returns it, you’re in. If not, you are loaded onto the oblivion express. Back to the Comstock wid ya!”

  “Oh, no!” Bronwyn said, dragging her hand across her forehead. “Anything but that!”

  “We love well in the higher echelons of society, Miss Delegate, but we hate even better. You think the Washoe is savage? Wait until you come out in Manhattan.”

  “You’ve never been to the Washoe,” I said. “You know nothing about it.”

  “I know that the quality of meanness here in Manhattan is superb,” Nicky said. “Really first rank, tiptop. You haven’t been well hated until you’ve been hated in New York City. Are you ready for that, Bronwyn?”

  I was about to tell Nicky to leave her alone, but Bronwyn shook her head and took his hand in hers, a serious expression crossing her face.

  “Ah, Nicholas,” she said. “Don’t you know?”

  “I know everything. What don’t I know?”

  “The opposite of love is not hate, dear Nicky.”

  “No?” Nicky said.

  “The opposite of love is loneliness,” Bronwyn said. And she flopped back down in front of the hearth. She who knew a little about loneliness.

  • • •

  I took her to my New York, and at times Bronwyn surprised me by taking me to hers.

  “Tahktoo has a job,” she said to me one morning when I sat with her in the South Wing drawing room.

  “I can’t quite believe that is so,” I said. I had noticed the berdache absent from The Citadel rather more of late.

  “It’s true, and I’d like to go there,” she said. “Will you take me tonight?”

  Secretive about the where and what of this startling new development, Bronwyn herself arranged for us to take the fly out that evening. The lightweight pleasure carriage obviated the necessity of a driver, so no report of our activities could redound on us back at home. She wore black, the better to fade into the night.

  I understood the need for mystery when she directed me on our way. “Downtown on Fifth,” she said, very much the little New Yorker by now, “then west on Twenty-eighth Street.”

  The Tenderloin.

  The neighborhood of faro casinos, saloons, sporting houses and dance halls had long been a haunt of mine, a favorite as well for many of the more unbuttoned young males in the Circle (Bev Willets was a regular). But the idea of visiting it with a female, and a family member at that, struck me as so outlandish as to throw me into mental disarray.

  I should have immediately turned back the fly. That I felt myself, lately, increasingly under the sway of Bronwyn did not excuse the fact that I drove on, though I grew moody and silent.

  She, for her part, began an athletic process in the seat next to me, changing out of the gown in which she had left the house. She garbed herself not in the rough laborer’s outfit of her adventure in the Central Park but in a quite respectable suit jacket and trousers of black worsted.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, though I well knew.

  “My disguise,” she said.

  Performing her transformation beneath her cape, she managed to slip her male clothes over her female ones, resulting in a lumpy, disordered costume, but one that could pass muster in the dim gaslight for which the Tenderloin was justly famous. Bronwyn tucked her hair beneath a tight-fitting black bowler.

  With her thus reconfigured, we were simply two young swells out for the evening, one perhaps a little sweller than the other but both well within the normal range of the demimonde.

  The streets of the Tenderloin roared every night of the week, including the Sabbath. Vice stopped for no man, but quite a few stopped for it. Men of the cloth liked to rail against the neighborhood as “Satan’s Circus.” Twenty-fifth between Fifth and Seventh was for faro, Twenty-sixth for dice, Twenty-seventh for low brothels and Twenty-eighth for high. Unescorted light women of all price ranges roamed the sidewalks, some in bosom-baring dresses, some in chaste gowns.

  “Ho, hi there, you handsome devil!” hailed one of them I recognized, sending me into choking embarrassment. Bronwyn pretended not to notice, taking the reins as I coughed myself red in the face. I felt paradoxically both mortified and aroused to be with my sister amid such company. The effect would only grow more pronounced as the evening wore on.

  “Here,” Bronwyn said. She pulled up in front of a three-story brownstone on the far western reaches of the Tenderloin, a louche precinct to which even I had never ventured before. The stoop risers of the entrance were painted a lurid shade of purple.

  Inside, it was all scarlet and flame. Even the glass of the lampshades shone red. The heavy velvet window dressings, pulled tight, were darkest crimson. I recognized the atmosphere instantly—a luxury sporting house, for sure—and knew there would be curtained cubicles lining the hallways upstairs. But the clientele proved wholly alien.

  Women were as rare here as in Virginia City.

  A massive bar ran along the wall of the first floor, with a cracked, spiderwork mirror that had pictures of current vocal stars pasted up to the glass. Men of all stripes congregated at the rail, mostly of the middle class but also gents in elegant evening dress. Among the milling crowd, a half dozen individuals stood out, strange rouged men wearing the full makeup of women, like Elizabethan actors on the stage.

  And Tahktoo. The most outlandish of them all (I caught myself, briefly, actually being proud of his flamboyance), standing posed beside a grand piano in the conservatory past the bar, one hand placed gracefully upon the instrument, the other reserved for gesture.

  Costumed in the sexually ambiguous dress of his station, the Zuni flourishes on his flowing gown acting as bizarre accents, he stood erect and sang.

  Or warbled. Or yodeled. Whatever it was, it could not be found in any other throat this side of an insane asylum. His register wandered from baritone to soprano in the course of a song or, really, in the space of a refrain. When we came in, he had just launched into “Dixie” and drew the song out, singing every verse two or three times, favoring his audience members.

  Which were, surprisingly, many and, astoundingly, enthusiastic. At the berdache’s feet crouched a young man with curly blond hair whom I might have recognized as the brother of an acquaintance had not the rules of the Tenderloin strictly precluded recognizing anybody at any time. Staring up at Tahktoo, the catamite wore an enthralled expression on his face.

  “Baths upstairs on the third,” Bronwyn murmured into my ear. “Tahktoo told me he likes the cold vodka rub, the rock salt massage and the platza beatings, being whipped with a branch of dried oak leaves.”

  “Don’t tell me any more,” I pleaded.

  “This house is called The Point,” she said. “The New York Sun labels it a debauch, but you know what Tahktoo says? ‘I don’t read the Sun,’ he says.”

  She laughed.

  The berdache went into a novelty song, a strange histrionic number with verses that always ended the same way: “Come up, you fool.” He’d give a come-hither gesture, the crowd said it in unison along with him, and I understood it was his favorite identifying phrase.

  Come up, you fool. I tried to carry off our visit with something like Bronwyn’s brand of savoir faire, but at first I wasn’t quite up to it. A pair of triple brandies aided the process.

  I thought Tahktoo might be abashed in the setting, but I was wrong. It seemed that he knew everybody and that his own strangeness simply accented the strangen
ess of everything else. A plump man-woman in a goatee and Chinese pigtails. Boys that looked to be as young as my brother, bewitching sirens of the soused. Shirtless men transiting through the place. A gaggle of Yalies.

  The berdache finally noticed us in the crowd, and his face split open in a huge smile. Instantly he crossed the room, maneuvering among his admirers, and took Bronwyn by the hand. He brought her to the piano, introduced her as “my muse” and launched into a popular number, “O Were My Love a Sugar Bowl.”

  Upon the second refrain, she joined him! Making a mess of the German accent required of the song, but still.

  O vere my lofe a sugarpowl,

  De ferry shmallest loomp,

  Vouldt shveet the seas from bole to bole

  Und make the children shoomp.

  The whole raucous crowd joined on the chorus.

  O it vouldn’t be no dime at all

  Before I’d shoomped the fence!

  At the end of the second verse (“She is de holiest animile dat rooms oopon de earth”), Bronwyn wowed the crowd by doffing her bowler and shaking out her hair, revealing herself to be, among all the outlandish creatures in that house, a true girl.

  Wild, shocked applause. She was a hit, a palpable hit.

  On our way home, the chill night air clearing off my brandy haze, I said, “Those are the very types of places that a proper young lady can never attend.”

  “No,” she said. She drove while I sagged backward in the seat. No? Did she mean, No, I will never go to such places when I am a lady? Or, No, I will not have you telling me where I can and cannot go?

  “This whole neighborhood,” I said, swinging wide my arm drunkenly.

  She looked back at me. “Then it will be our secret, just between the two of us.” Touching me lightly on the arm.

  I thrilled. I was inebriated. I hauled myself upright, peering at her in the gaslight gleam of Fifth Avenue.

  “I wonder, Bronwyn, how many other secrets do you harbor?”

  The frigid air on my face, our exhalations pluming in the night.

  “How many secrets?” I said, the question floating off in a cloud like my breath. I didn’t expect her to answer, but she did.