Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  Her words made no sense to me, as though she were speaking a foreign language.

  “It’s Bev Willets, isn’t it? Don’t you know he will never marry you now?”

  “He might take me as a lover,” she said.

  I made a move to slap her, but my hand could not complete its stroke. I collapsed into a chair.

  “All right, I don’t want to upset you, but I will put it in plain words,” she said. “That sandwich-board man down there? He can’t harm me. And your believing that he can makes me think less of you. Your offer is insulting, the desperate ploy of a small child who just wants everything to be put right.”

  A carriage went by on Fifth, the hoofbeats deadened by the dirt and muck of the street.

  “Come to me as a man, Hugo,” Bronwyn said.

  She patted my head and left me alone, heading off down the hall toward the North Wing, cool, calm and undestroyed.

  • • •

  A week later, just past midnight, I stood holding two horses, a roan gelding and a gray charger, trying to fade back into the shadows of our stable courtyard.

  Colm had informed me that Bronwyn had once again taken to going out at night. We had nailed shut her bedroom window, but still she somehow managed to roam.

  Standing there in the dark, I witnessed her do it yet could not readily tell how it was accomplished. A human outline moved across the crenellated façade of the South Wing, disappearing, reappearing, vanishing again, then suddenly a boyish figure in a bowler hat was slipping through the courtyard archway onto Sixty-third Street.

  Colm stepped up beside me. “You see her?”

  I nodded, and we quickly mounted. We needed to give her enough of a head start not to spook her but not too much that we would lose her. We went around the block the other way, on Sixty-second, and lay in wait in the shadows off Fifth, assuming she would head downtown.

  We were not wrong. Bronwyn climbed into a cab a block away. The uptown streets were so empty at that time of night that I thought it unlikely a hansom would have been in the area trolling for customers. She must have arranged for the driver to be waiting.

  Allowing the cab to pass by on its way down Fifth, we fell in behind it, keeping a good twenty-yard gap between us. Plunging through a ghost Manhattan in the moonless dark, I saw a world of half-built cathedrals, barren undeveloped stretches of avenue, the brick-clad Murray Hill Reservoir looming to our right at Forty-second Street, all sites of our more innocent past.

  Downslope at a canter as the hansom ahead of us picked up speed.

  Past Delmonico’s, Liberty’s lonely torch in Madison Square and then the venue of our recent disaster, the Fifth Avenue Hotel, brightly lit and bustling even at the late hour. I wondered how the denizens of the area would react had they known that the notorious Wild Child of the Washoe had even then returned to the scene of the crime. I had an awful moment thinking this might be Bronwyn’s destination, but the cab didn’t linger, heading farther south.

  Fourteenth Street marked the Rialto, a neighborhood of more activity, more people on the streets, yellow gaslight illuminating the thoroughfare. We pulled up as the hansom bearing Bronwyn stopped.

  She descended from the cab without a look our way and, to our surprise, immediately entered another carriage waiting curbside on Fourteenth, an expensive private coach drawn by a matched set of docked and plumed grays.

  “Do you know it?” I asked Colm.

  He nodded. “Mrs. Woodhull’s,” he said, and we followed along behind. Only a brief journey, across Fourteenth and up Irving Place, finally to arrive at the Willets mansion on the north side of Gramercy Park.

  “That Bev fellow has been cultivating them,” Colm said. “He calls on the Woodhulls almost every afternoon.”

  “And when did you think to inform me of this?” I cried.

  “I’ve been keeping my eye on it,” Colm said.

  Bronwyn at Bev’s. I had been dreading the eventuality as soon I discerned that the Woodhull coach was headed for the rich-if-faded Gramercy neighborhood, knowing the domicile of the Willets family intimately, having whiled away many hours there throughout my younger years.

  Bev’s parents spent little time in Manhattan, handing the Gramercy Park place almost wholly over to their reckless son. Located on the lip of the Tenderloin as it was, the luxurious home served as a convenient jumping-off place for nighttime forays and had itself hosted its share of riotous parties.

  Colm and I held back, peering between the spikes of the iron fence that surrounded the private park. The coach disgorged its occupants, Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee, then my own sister. Somewhere along the way, Bronwyn had ditched her boy’s outfit and reverted to female dress.

  Laughing and chattering with the others, Bronwyn entered the lion’s den—a metaphor that, given her history, seemed especially apt. I had a brief, jealous glimpse of an effusive Bev Willets, welcoming the three women to his humble, million-dollar abode.

  We waited outside considerably longer than was dignified. The horses nickered, impatient. Colm kept silent watch, and I said little, inwardly seething.

  It pained me to stare up at the shaded windows, painted with moving silhouettes. I did not want to look, did not want to hear the faint, dying laughter, but could not help myself.

  “With those three women, what naturally comes to mind is the witches in Macbeth,” I finally said. “But I don’t believe she’s up to murder most foul tonight, do you?”

  “You’re mixing up your tragedies, ain’t ye?” Colm said.

  Then suddenly he gestured down East Twenty-first. “I see her!” he yelled. “What color is her dress?”

  “Black!” I shouted, but he was already galloping away.

  The roan balked and would not go. Colm came back after only a few minutes.

  “What?” I asked, breathless, still trying to get my horse in line.

  “Someone was there,” he said. “A woman.”

  “Was it Bronwyn?”

  “I couldn’t tell,” he said.

  I slipped off the skittish roan and tossed the reins to Colm.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  But I was already on my way across the street, up the steps of the Willets town house, blowing past Margolis, Bev’s beleaguered butler.

  “Mr. Hugo,” he managed. I didn’t stop, racing up the steps and into the drawing room.

  “Where is she?” I shouted.

  Woodhull, Tennie C., Bev.

  With a shock I recognized one of the mulatto women we had hosted at East Chatham. Several assorted others, epicene men and daguerreotype women. A Mameluke servingman in harem pants. A male-female couple in complete dishabille, her richly nippled breasts spilling out of her stays.

  No Bronwyn.

  “Misplaced someone near and dear, have you, Delegate?” Bev said.

  “You know damned well,” I said. Wild-eyed, out of control.

  “How men lose their heads around her,” Victoria Woodhull murmured.

  “You shouldn’t go looking for something you may not want to find,” Bev said.

  “Poor little man,” said Tennessee. “All the proud penis owners.”

  I felt, suddenly, deflated. It came upon me in a rush. They were all laughing at me! Wild-eyed, out of control . . . and pitiable.

  I turned heel and left.

  Bev caught up with me on the stairway. “Bloody hell, Delegate,” he said. “Show some self-respect.”

  “What would you know about that?” I yelled. I waved my arm in the direction of the salon, crowded with Woodhull and her group of layabouts. “You don’t believe their claptrap, do you?”

  “Please don’t underestimate me,” he said. “If I know one thing, it’s that those two words don’t go together—‘free love.’ It’s rarely love, and it’s never free.”

  “Then what?” I said.

  Bev shrugged his shoulders. “You’re behaving as if you don’t know your own mind.”

  “Just stay away from her. Stay away!”


  Bev shook his head in mock sadness, infuriating me further. “Margolis!” he called. “Show young Mr. Delegate out!”

  Where had Bronwyn gone? There was another way out of the town house, I knew, a back entrance that led via a lane to Twenty-second Street. Was she at dinner with some rounder at Delmonico’s? Wandering the streets, sad and lost?

  Or out employing her hand razors. I couldn’t always think of her as a murderess. If I did, I would go crazy. More than I already was.

  Colm and I turned our mounts uptown, the party within the Willets place still going strong, lights blazing, Bev’s laughter ringing in my ears.

  • • •

  A small, cheerless fire crackled in the grate when I arrived in the dining room early the next morning, and Freddy sat at the end of the long table with the Sun opened before him.

  Anna Maria filled cups of tea from the sideboard—we followed the English way in having no servants at breakfast—laying one down in front of Freddy and one at her own place beside him.

  Outside the windows the gawker circus hadn’t yet begun its performance and the sky threatened an early spring rain.

  “Late night, dear?” my mother asked me. “Or are you feeling unwell? You appear highly disturbed.”

  “We just need tea,” Freddy said to her. “Not talk.”

  Freddy looked as though he’d had a few late nights himself. The pouches beneath his eyes had grown darker, more swollen. With a shock I realized that the scandal of the past weeks had aged him.

  I sat down beside Nicky. “No news for you today, chum?” I said. Nicky usually scanned the paper front to back alongside my father.

  “Banal,” he said, no doubt imitating a grandee he had encountered somewhere on his rounds. “So terribly banal.”

  “Is that right?” I said. “Well, eat your grapefruit.”

  The last grapefruit of the season, shipped direct from Safety Harbor in Florida.

  “Too bitter,” Nicky said. “Don’t you think, Freddy?”

  Freddy, distracted, hmmn’d my brother.

  “Needs a spoonful, eh, old chap?” said Nicky, offering his father the sugar bowl.

  Still immersed in the paper, Freddy piled the top of his grapefruit with sugar and passed the bowl to my mother.

  Nicky started to slide on his chair until only his head remained visible and he was holding on to the edge of the table white-knuckled.

  Freddy took a segment of citrus into his mouth, twisted up his face and choked. “Bbbwhatt??” Sputtering.

  “April Fools’!” cried Nicky, laughing.

  The old salt-for-sugar trick, hoary from childhoods past. Normally every one of us would have been on the lookout for it, this day of all days. A distracted Freddy was easy prey.

  He swiped at his tongue with his linen napkin and shook his head violently from side to side. “What? What?”

  Nicky ducked under the table.

  “April Fools’, Your Eminence,” we heard from beneath us.

  Freddy usually had a sense of humor, even at his own expense. This morning he became enraged, jumping up with his hands gripping the table, then swatting the grapefruit off his plate onto the floor.

  “Up, sir!” he said. “I want you here. Now.”

  Nicky struggled out from under the table and went to Freddy’s side, ducking his head in contrition. “Cookie helped,” he offered.

  “Darling,” said my mother. “It is April Fools’ Day, after all.”

  “Good morning, everyone.” Bronwyn stood at the dining-room door. She was elegantly dressed, not in morning clothes but in the striped lilac outfit from Richardson’s. She wore a cloak, short gray gloves and a peaked hat of the kind a woman adopted when she went out about town.

  Embarrassed now, Freddy sat down.

  “I got him!” Nicky crowed, dashing back to his seat. “I nailed Freddy, Bronnie!”

  “Tea?” said Anna Maria.

  “I won’t,” said Bronwyn. “Or rather I can’t. I’m leaving.”

  Anna Maria gave a sideways glance toward Freddy. “I thought we said going out wasn’t such a good idea just now,” she said. “Freddy?”

  “What?”

  “I won’t be back,” Bronwyn said.

  “It’s just, everything is at sixes and sevens, with the newspapers,” Anna Maria said. “You know that.”

  “Wait,” I said to Bronwyn. “What do you mean? What are you talking about? ‘Won’t be back’?”

  “April Fools’!” said Nicky.

  No. It was something else. A sick, panicked feeling crept over me.

  “I guess, if you are careful and just go for the afternoon, perhaps wear a veil, it may be all right,” Anna Maria said. “What do you think, Father?”

  “No,” said Bronwyn. “It’s not that.”

  “April Fools’?” asked my father.

  I noticed that Bronwyn’s dress was looped up to knee height and she wore what looked like Turkish slippers, as well as some sort of outlandish lacy trousers above her white stockings. Exactly like underwear, I thought, except that she was on her way out into decidedly public New York City.

  Bloomers. Or, rather, to render it as it occurred in my mind, Bloomers!

  “I can’t bring this trouble down on you anymore,” Bronwyn said. “It isn’t fair.”

  “Oh, dear, none of us feels that way,” Anna Maria said. “It’s not your fault. It’s those wretched journalists.”

  “This is just something I’ve decided I have to do,” Bronwyn said.

  “It’s all too banal, Bronnie,” Nicky said, employing his new favorite word. “Too, too banal.”

  “But I don’t understand,” Anna Maria said. “You’re going?”

  “She’s going, Mother,” I said. “Didn’t you hear her? She’s moving out.”

  “But where will she . . . Where will you live?” a bewildered Anna Maria said. “This is your home.”

  Nicky went back under the table.

  It had begun to rain, a sparkling, sunlit downpour, the kind that required boots and a voluminous umbrella.

  “You’ll get wet . . . Your slippers . . .” Anna Maria had tears forming in her eyes, we could all see them. Bronwyn stepped up to her and laid her hand against my mother’s cheek.

  “Well, it may be for the best,” said Freddy gloomily, rising to his feet again.

  “Oh, Friedrich!” Anna Maria said, blubbering now, clutching Bronwyn’s hand and pressing it to her lips.

  Freddy said, “This episode, this thing that has taken us all over, it must come to an end.”

  “But where will you go?” Anna Maria repeated.

  “I’ll be perfectly all right,” Bronwyn soothed.

  “Answer her!” I cried.

  “I know two ladies who want to take me in. Very elegant, very civilized ladies.”

  “Who?” I demanded. “Who is bringing you away from us?”

  “You know very well, Hugo,” said Bronwyn. “Since you and Colm saw me with them last night.”

  Anna Maria: “What? What? What is going on?”

  “Victoria Woodhull,” I said.

  “Oh, my Lord,” said Anna Maria, seeing fresh disaster looming.

  “Running for president when she can’t even vote,” Freddy sneered. “That makes a lot of sense.”

  “Don’t forget her charming radical sister,” I said. “The one who advocates legalized prostitution.”

  “Hugo!” wailed Anna Maria.

  “April Fools’, April Fools’,” Nicky said weakly. Bronwyn dragged him out from under the table and hugged him.

  “Tami,” she whispered to him. Comanche for “younger brother.”

  “Patsi,” he said back to her. Older sister. Then he dove back under the table so the rest of us couldn’t read his distress. He began kicking methodically at the table leg.

  “It’s better for you all if I go,” Bronwyn said. Approaching Freddy, who tried to turn away, she seized his arm and kissed his cheek.

  “I’ll always remember what you did
for me,” she whispered to him. His eyes brimmed with emotion.

  Bronwyn walked out of the dining room and down the stairs that led to the front door, her train flowing over each step like a waterfall. Anna Maria and I pursued her, my mother holding the girl’s hand and promising her that things would change if only she were to reconsider.

  In the stairhall, Bronwyn kissed my mother. I pitied Anna Maria. She had opened her heart to the girl and had gotten so little in return. Now this. A second daughter was deserting her just as the first one had.

  Nicky came plunging down the stairs after Bronwyn. She ruffled his hair.

  “Tell Tahktoo and Tu-Li that I will see them soon,” she said.

  She reached out her hand to me. But I kept my mine at my side, saying only, “You have no bags.”

  “I have everything I need,” she said.

  24

  And then, disaster.

  It rolled up on us slowly. Or at least it did on me. Freddy and Anna Maria knew all along what was happening, like a giant wave they saw far out in the ocean, coming closer, rising, rising, until it towered over them and they realized it was going to crash.

  There could have been signs that I didn’t notice, mired as I was in a brown study, my thoughts poisonous and morose. I embarked upon a project to draw a complete human musculature, after Vesalius.

  At one time in the not-too-remote past, Andreas Vesalius had been my god. He was the founding genius of anatomical art. A sixteenth-century Flemish physician based in Brussels, he published in 1543 De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body). The book exploded like a thunderclap in the storm of ideas that was the Northern Renaissance.

  Vesalius did the dissections, but no one was precisely sure who drew the brilliant, shattering, diabolical illustrations. Most definitely a student in the studio of Titian, probably a Dutch painter and draftsman named Jan Stephan van Calcar. Here in these superb anatomical drawings was the human being demystified, man as meat, man as animal.

  Vesalius gave us human muscles, bones, organs. He did not manage to picture the human soul. He peered into the heart of man and found . . . muck. Blood, sinew, tissue.