Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  “You were here when?” Colm asked.

  A month back. Christmas week.

  “And at night . . .” Colm said. “Was she ever alone?”

  “She had her own room. We were in separate wings, actually, Nicky and I in one and she and my mother in another.”

  I paused to remember an incident that I had failed to confess to Colm.

  Restless after dinner, I had ventured out to the storm-lashed beach. My mental state oscillated between nervous exhilaration and nervous exhaustion. After struggling against the wind, I huddled in the lee of a stone breakwater, a small refuge invisible to the nearby stretch of sand.

  A woman had gone by me where I hid. Her hair showed black against the black sky, and her dress lifted in the wind. She seemed magically unaffected by the howling gale and walked past as if floating. I had been thinking intently of Bronwyn and wondered if here appeared the incarnation of my thoughts.

  “Bronwyn,” I had called out, but the gale swallowed my words as if they never were spoken.

  The wind blew, the woman vanished, the wind blew some more, she reappeared once again. I can’t explain the desolation I felt, the horror of this solitary figure on the darkling beach.

  But she was gone, only a vision, taken away by the storm, blown wildly above the white-capped waves and wheeling into the black clouds over the ocean.

  The next morning I had crept into Bronwyn’s quarters while the family sat downstairs at breakfast. Next to her bed, a heap of wet, sandy garments.

  Should I now tell Colm Cullen about all this? What would I say? A ghost flown off like a succubus in a tempest, plus some beach clothes discarded at our girl’s bedside? What was that? That was nothing.

  I remained silent. We trekked to nearby Gravesend, Colm, Tahktoo and I, where we located a police station among the storm-brutalized buildings of the beach town.

  We queried. Yes, there had been a recent death.

  A corpse had been dragged up out of the ocean in tatters, gnawed at all different angles by all different beasts—crabs and sharks and fishes. He was the Human Polar Bear, a big brute who made a living diving into icy waters and hoping passersby would toss him two bits. The police we spoke to all thought it was odd and, in the way of gallows humor, funny.

  The Gravesend sergeant said, “Middle of the holidays, cold as a witch’s tit, only a few people on the beach, this brazen hero who swims so good drowns.”

  Bronwyn and I had in fact met the victim when we’d walked the same beach back in December. Bronwyn told him he didn’t have to swim, it was too cold; she gave him a dollar anyway. He immediately dove in, coming out streaming, the water icing on his skin.

  Dick Pollard, the Human Polar Bear. His corpse long gone now, collected from the coroner by a tubercular wife, mother of his brood. “Him the family’s only earner, and them with six under the age of ten,” the sergeant said.

  “Can you tell us where Pollard lived?” I asked.

  “Norton’s Point,” said the sergeant. “You don’t want to go there.”

  “We have just come from there,” Tahktoo said. The sergeant looked at him oddly. People were always looking at Tahktoo oddly. For the berdache the customary human expression must be one of puzzlement.

  “Look here, I’m from the Harvard Medical School,” I said to the sergeant. “I’m studying wounds in a criminal context, and I wonder if you have a postmortem on the body.”

  “You’re wasting your time,” he said. “Officially, the Human Polar Bear drowned.”

  “Unofficially?” Colm said, slipping a folded sawbuck across to him. The Gravesend sergeant pawed his desktop, came up with a document and handed it to me.

  The Brooklyn coroner’s office had miraculously produced a full autopsy report, labeled “Death Narrative.” Among other details, “deep incision to the femoral artery,” with the hand-scrawled notation, “mort.” Meaning fatal. But the coroner had ruled for drowning, since the lungs were full of seawater.

  “I’ve seen corpses bumped on the breakers here, battered around pretty good, seawater gets beaten into them before they’re finally fished out,” the Gravesend sergeant said. “Doesn’t matter they’re dead before they went into the drink. Coroner’s finding is always drowned.”

  • • •

  While I had murder on my mind, Anna Maria and Bronwyn conducted the arduous social preparations of the debutante.

  Calling and returning calls represented a chief occupation. Acting as Anna Maria’s social secretary, Tu-Li had spent much time this season in Anna Maria’s North Wing drawing room, plotting the social strategy of my mother and Bronwyn. She calculated that there were one hundred twenty homes at which they had to pay calls.

  To accomplish them all before Bronwyn’s debut in late February required an exercise of military precision, a quick march of three visits a day (excepting Saturday, the day for shopping the Ladies’ Mile, and Sunday, for the late service at Grace Church).

  Coming back with Colm from Gravesend, I was present at one such call, a triumph of Anna Maria’s life at that time, since it virtually secured the success of Bronwyn’s coming-out.

  My mother skillfully employed Swoony’s status as a society power, knowing all and being known to all, in order to receive a call from the Tremont aunts, Fabby and Gladys, perhaps the ultimate social arbiters of our day (Caroline Hood notwithstanding). For Bronwyn to be introduced to the Tremonts, and for them to accept her introduction, was an imprimatur of the highest order.

  A wicker basket sat on a credenza in the front stairhall, holding the cards deposited by the society ladies and their daughters awaiting their debuts. These cards displayed a remarkable uniformity, as did the ladies’ dress and their decorum. Each card was no more than two and seven-eighths of an inch long, each bore the lady’s name and, written in script in the upper left-hand corner, the name of the debutante daughter, granddaughter or niece.

  The Tremonts came to The Citadel, they saw, and Bronwyn conquered. The aunts brought their own debutante to show off, a great-niece, Gertrude, a girl with uneven skin and bouncing brown curls. Bronwyn knew her from Madame Eugénie’s.

  “Darling,” said Swoony, kissing Fabby Tremont on the cheek. Darlings all around from Swoony to Gladys, Gladys to Swoony, Fabby and Gladys to Anna Maria. I stayed out of the line of fire, introduced but ignored.

  “My nephew’s daughter, Gertrude Debry,” said Fabby Tremont, pushing forward her prize. The Tremonts both wore royal blue gowns and matching beribboned hats in a style that had gone out with the war. Their grandniece seemed a smaller imitation of them, in a lighter shade of blue and similar matching hat.

  “Please do come in for a cup,” said my mother.

  “Gertrude, remove your mantle,” said Aunt Gladys. “No one will do it for you.”

  Gertrude looked about for a servant. Ours had vanished in the direction of the tea service, and Colm was the only man left standing. When he stepped forward into the center of the drawing room, all six foot three of him, dressed not in livery but in a dark suit with a pistol bulge at the hip, she looked to faint.

  Gladys Tremont stared him up and down before handing off her own wrap.

  “I believe you know my godchild, Edna Croker,” Fabby said to Bronwyn. “She calls you courteous and warm.”

  “Thank you,” Bronwyn said, performing an artful curtsy. “Her I love, and you are very kind.”

  Fabby Tremont’s massive sculptural head nodded slowly up and down, and Bronwyn was made.

  “We are parched,” Gladys Tremont said in the direction of my mother, as Randall and Douglas came in to serve. “We come from calls at half a dozen houses, and no one was at home.”

  “All out on calls themselves,” Swoony said.

  Anna Maria gestured to the tea service. “The silver came from our mines in the Comstock,” she said airily. “We had it fabricated in London.”

  Aunt Fabby looked dubiously into the bone china cup with which she had been presented. “If this is tea, bring me coffee,”
she said. “If this is coffee, bring me tea.” A shopworn Lincoln witticism, dated now like everything else about the Tremonts. But we Delegates were known for our weak tea.

  Bronwyn wore the “artist’s gown” she had purchased at Richardson’s and slippers without heels. She looked positively Pre-Raphaelite. The niece Gertrude, as a rival debutante, stared at the dress as though she would tear it to shreds.

  “I admire your hat,” said Bronwyn, a creation that young Gertrude had poised like a pillow atop her skull.

  “Stewart’s,” said Gertrude, touching its brim. “The milliner called it champignon style.”

  “Yes!” Bronwyn bubbled with laughter. “A mushroom!”

  From across the room, the drone male brother (myself) had to laugh with her. Proud of her also for the French. Finally Gertrude laughed, too.

  And that was that, that was enough. Peace between the young ladies at least.

  Nicky thrust his head in the doorway closest to me. “You know how old I’ll be in 1930?” he demanded loudly. “I’ll be sixty-eight years old. Sixty-eight!”

  He was shooed away. Swoony held up her cup for replenishment and beckoned to Colm, whom she had entrusted with the brandy.

  Tomorrow, in the Herald perhaps, or the Sun, or (knowing Anna Maria’s energy at such matters) both, notice of the afternoon tea would appear, Madam and Mademoiselle Delegate hosting Mesdames Tremont. Orders for artist’s gowns worn without corsets would emanate from numerous households.

  And Bronwyn Delegate’s debut, in the eyes of Those Who Matter, would be granted legitimacy, her coming-out ball marked upon the calendar as Not to Be Missed.

  21

  Lorenzo Delmonico had recently opened another restaurant to save us all from having to traipse down to the old place on unfashionable William Street.

  The new venue took up the length of Twenty-sixth Street between Fifth Avenue and Broadway, looking out over the wintry flower beds and callow, shivering trees of Madison Square Park. This season it also overlooked the copper arm and torch of Liberty, the gargantuan allegoric statue (La Liberté éclairant le monde, or Liberty Enlightening the World) that organizers were trying to install on an island in New York Harbor.

  They had not yet the money subscribed for the full sculpture so put this small part of it on tour to raise funds. There it stood in all its unlikely glory in one corner of the park. A metal flame poured out the top of the torch, and sightseers were welcome to climb a cat ladder up fifty feet to take in the view from the top of the marvel.

  Inside our private dining room at the new Delmonico’s, all was lively and lovely. Mirrors lined each wall, and silver chandeliers hung from the frescoed ceiling, beside golden sconces, swags of shot silk and fringed shades pulled down halfway. An urn of lilies and roses stood atop a column to one side of the room. And there, out the window, Liberty’s torch burned under a splash of moonlight.

  I could see Colm outside, pacing the walk, scanning the landscape, ever on the alert for our bogeyman from Virginia City, Butler Fince.

  We made a strange crew that evening, assembled in honor of my Harvard anatomy professor. William James was in town to squire his sister, Alice, a dark-eyed chronic invalid in her mid-twenties, to a series of medical treatments, including something called a “blistering bath.”

  James invited a pair of notorious women, Victoria Woodhull, the spiritualist and sometime presidential candidate (on the Equal Rights Party ticket), and Woodhull’s sister, Tennessee Claflin. The two of them were up to all sorts of shenanigans—a radical newspaper, scandalous “free love” advocacy, a Wall Street brokerage firm underwritten by Cornelius Vanderbilt.

  The sisters arrived in black waistcoats and jackets and long black crepe skirts, but they behaved as charmingly as any high-society ladies. Alone, without men, as was their wont. Victoria’s husband, Colonel James Blood, was busy dying in the gold fields of West Africa, the same miasmic precincts that took the life of my ill-starred uncle, Sonny Delegate.

  I brought Bronwyn.

  I wanted to expose her to the kind of intellectual soiree that she might encounter as she made her entry into New York society. Coming out was really a series of small, aggregate debuts—at an afternoon tea, at the dance academy, at a call to a great lady’s home, at the final culminating ball. And at intimate gatherings such as this.

  When I heard that Professor James would be in town, I told Bronwyn I wanted to take her out to a real Manhattan dinner party.

  “I read about one of those in the Herald,” she said. “Mrs. Hunter Beaumont from Dallas and P. T. Barnum, the showman.”

  “It’s different when there’s real people,” I said.

  “At Delmonico’s,” she said. “The new one on Madison Square.” She already knew everything.

  “You remember we went to the traveling circus in the Hippodrome at Coney Island? The lady tightrope walker?”

  “The one who carried an umbrella and did somersaults on the wire,” Bronwyn recalled.

  “Right,” I said. “Your performance at the dinner party will be similar to hers.”

  “I can do that,” she said, laughing.

  Even now there were times when she was like the old Bronwyn, my friend of the transcontinental trip. We could still be easy with each other. Tahktoo’s trademark phrase, “Come up, you fool,” had become a well-used joke between us, invoked in casual, quite silly ways, when we climbed stairs together, say, or when I stepped on her toe as we practiced dance steps.

  All the different roles she played in my life . . . Her laughter might make me happy that night in Delmonico’s, but I thought back to how miserable I was, how beset and confused, lost beside the bloody Lake in the park or crouched that night on the beach in Brooklyn. She was tearing me apart, yet I could sit next to her at a restaurant table and appear perfectly normal.

  To make Bronwyn more comfortable, I brought along Tu-Li and the berdache. Tahktoo caused a stir when he sat down at the table (dressed impeccably in white tie) and Tennessee Claflin recognized him from his appearances at The Point.

  “Gentlemen and ladies, we are in the presence of Zuni royalty,” Tennessee announced sententiously, actually rising from her seat and bowing to Tahktoo, who took the attention in stride. I had presented him (her?) with a diamond brooch for Christmas, and it gleamed at his throat, providing a feminine counterpoint to his otherwise male garb.

  Bronwyn’s friend Edna Croker met us at the restaurant. She had removed her eyeglasses, by which simple act rendering herself much prettier. For a chaperone she brought along her cousin, the strapping footballer Percy Roehm. Aware of Bronwyn’s taste for hulking men, I seated them as far away from each other as was possible.

  The radical sisters, Percy and I all drank the Moët Imperial Brut. James abstained, as he never took alcohol. His sister, Alice, looked as though a glass of champagne might cause her to expire. The others in the party sipped chocolate out of demitasse cups, excepting the berdache, who nursed a succession of absinthes throughout the evening.

  We began the feast with East River oysters, eight dozen for the table. Edna did not partake, but the rest of us, Bronwyn included, tossed back our heads and slid the oysters down our throats, one after the other. We went on to the menu I had ordered in advance, the terrapène à la Maryland, the canards à tête rouge, the artichokes for which the restaurant was famous, the turbot and the grouse, with petits pois, fleurette. And the steak Delmonico, of course.

  James held his sister’s hand under the table. “Sweetlington,” he called Alice, cooing like a schoolboy. She addressed him as “Willy.”

  “I like the drapes,” the berdache said to Alice James, who winced out a smile.

  Tu-Li attacked her artichoke. “You place them between your teeth?” she asked Tennessee Claflin.

  “Like so,” said the woman universally known to the press by the punning tag of “Tennie C.”

  The conversation, and the inebriation, became general.

  “That nefarious project you mentioned,” Jam
es said to me. “The domestication of a wild child.”

  “Oh, that,” I said. “That never came off.”

  “I’m very glad of it,” James said. “You have better things ahead of you.”

  I looked across at Bronwyn, certainly the most striking young woman in the room, displaying what I considered a faultless grace and civility, even while quaffing oysters.

  “Your sister,” James said, following my gaze. “Very fine, very self-possessed, with some ineffable quality . . .”

  Words failed him. “Duende,” I said.

  “That’s it exactly!” James cried. “How astonishing that you mention this concept, as I have just been thinking of it.”

  He looked over at Bronwyn again. “Duende.”

  James told me he had recently taken on an Irish setter pup, Dido. “I don’t know why a dog should bring out the human in one, but it’s true,” he said. “I find myself wanting to return to Cambridge for no greater reason than to see the creature.”

  I said, “How goes the phrase? ‘Plus je vois les hommes, plus j’admire mon chien.’”

  I saw Bronwyn across the table trying to puzzle out the French. The more I see of men, the more I like my dog. When she had it, she smiled and mentioned to Edna that she preferred cats.

  “‘What’s time?’” James asked, quoting a poem by Robert Browning. “‘Leave Now for dogs and apes! / Man has forever!’” To read these lines always strengthened his backbone, he said.

  “Miss Delegate,” said Percy, actually moving his chair around the table to pull up next to Bronwyn. “May I ask whence your Christian name derives? I’ve never encountered it before.”

  “I suppose my parents gave it to me because they hadn’t any other,” said Bronwyn.

  “Rather,” Percy said, apropos of nothing. “The name sounds magical. Out of a fairy tale.”

  “Oh, my,” Edna said.

  That evening Bronwyn wore a nutmeg-colored ensemble with long sleeves and a modest skirt, lending her more of a schoolgirl appearance than I would have wished, given the elegance of the evening.