Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  The Lincoln car long gone, reclaimed by Huntington.

  We were down to six cars. My father had managed to sell the others at auction in New York, and he had a buyer in Philadelphia for the rest of the consist. We would live on board as we had during our trip from Virginia City. Since the galley was unstaffed, we would order in our meals.

  “Why spend money on a hotel?” said Freddy, who had not, in fact, the money to spend on a hotel.

  It was hard to say whether we were visiting Philadelphia or escaping New York. The plan was to spend a weekend at the fair, after which my parents and Nicky would sail from there for Europe.

  “Our time to the City of Brotherly Lu-uh-uvv: three hours, three minutes, three seconds!” Nicky announced, acting as our bombastic conductor.

  If you crave anonymity, the best tactic is to locate the nearest large crowd of people. Philadelphia was putting on the biggest, most lavish fair ever mounted in the United States, the Centennial Exposition of 1876, a party for our country’s one-hundredth birthday.

  It was the age of exhibitions. Similarly ambitious world’s fairs had been held in London, Paris and other international venues. Vienna’s, the latest, attracted well over ten million visitors in 1873. Ever eager to tub-thump America’s vast superiority, local civic chauvinists wanted our homegrown exposition to outstrip them all.

  Bronwyn’s erstwhile friends Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin would be present at the fair, both as scheduled speakers and in a booth, shilling their newspaper. There were over three hundred such exhibit booths, featuring everything from phrenology to newfangled potato peelers. All in the space of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park.

  “Colossal” was the word bandied about in the press.

  We shall go to the fair. As spectators or as exhibits? See! The Amazing Delegate Family, oddities, ironies, a collection of freaks and wonders.

  As soon as we left Pennsylvania Station and headed south, the deluge began. Another furious downpour, lightning stitched across low thunderclouds, sheets of rain drenching the windows that made it feel as though we were not in a train but in a ship on a gale-beset ocean.

  Naturally, Bronwyn and I relived the storm of the tragic night we had just endured. We were chary with each other, I believe that is the word, two bruised people delicately attempting to avoid contact lest we exacerbate our unhealed hurts.

  Hard to confess, but I felt sorry for myself. I missed Delia, my childhood sweetheart. I rediscovered her in death as a friend, our early days on Staten Island, a picture in my mind of her and her black-bearded father in his sailboat, just offshore, cutting through the bright green waves of the Lower Bay.

  There had been no public funeral. That was how the Showalter family attempted to diminish its disgrace.

  I had struggled with my love for Bronwyn, then finally stopped denying it. In reply she had tossed a gauntlet at my feet. You think you love me? See if you can handle this, boyo. And this. And this. A shoot-out at a grand debut? How about a little trip to Madam Restell’s? How does your precious love hold up under something like that?

  Challenge after challenge, crucible after crucible. Starting anew almost every day. I despaired of ever getting truly close to her.

  Ten miles out of Newark, Sandobar was confronted by a flood of storm runoff overflowing the tracks. We halted in the middle of a vast expanse of empty New Jersey marshland, bluebirds flying in the rain, terns passing over in sullen flocks.

  “Here we are again,” said Anna Maria as brightly as she could. She had the lamps lit in the parlor car even though it was still early morning. They glowed against the outside gray. Nicky lay on the floor, reading his new book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, exclaiming “Cracking!” every once in a while.

  No jolly Sandobar tableau this time. As fat-bellied black clouds rumbled along the horizon, we gathered around the piano in the parlor car and sang sad songs. Anna Maria did a passable version of the Easter aria from Handel, “He Was Despised.” Colm sang “Londonderry Air.” Nicky, of all people, flattened them both with a thirteen-year-old’s reedy-voiced turn on Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More.”

  Bronwyn got up and sang the old tavern ballad “The Weary Whore.”

  The light is dim

  As the gold he pays.

  She welcomes him

  With a weary gaze.

  The night has come

  Like the one before.

  A glass of rum

  For the weary whore.

  Standing there, one hand resting on the baby grand, she sang in her pleasantly husky voice. Then, on the chorus, Colm joined her with a harmony tenor.

  The weary whore cannot lie down,

  Not one time more, not one time more.

  The weary whore can’t find the peace

  That she longs for, that she longs for.

  Afterward a cold-meat lunch. The storm-dark afternoon closed around us, the tracks were still blocked, and every other second the interiors of the cars were lit as if by bonfire. An ennui set in, and I dozed.

  Dreaming suddenly, seized by her, I woke. She was gone.

  “I need to get my drawing materials,” I announced, feeling foolish upon realizing that no one cared. I escaped from the parlor car to the front of the train. I passed through our living quarters, knocking lightly on all the doors.

  No response. Where could she be?

  I made my way up to the locomotive deck. Getting shouted at by Cratchit and thoroughly soaked in the process, I clambered forward onto the sleigh bench above the cowcatcher, where Bronwyn and I had once flown together toward New York.

  Nothing.

  The yellow swamplands ran on forever, stark and friendless. Impenetrable even in good weather and terrifying when lit by stroboscope lightning.

  Coming back, I stopped in Sandobar’s baggage compartment to extract my drawing paper and pencils from my kit bag. I was cold and wet and couldn’t wait to towel off, but I desired something with which to occupy my mind. There was nothing to do but think, and I didn’t want to think.

  “I see you,” I heard from the corner, a playful, spooky voice. Bronwyn. Her words seemed to emanate from the air. Was I really hearing her, or was it my own sick mind?

  “In here,” she whispered.

  I found her inside the oversize tub that my parents had installed for her back in Virginia City, when they first understood her love for bathing.

  I peered over the side. The tub was dry. She sat on the floor of the receptacle, her feet stretched out in front of her. Wearing her artist’s gown, the only dress she would put on of late. She had had it with corsets.

  “Here,” said Bronwyn, patting the floor of the tub beside her.

  I climbed over the side but stayed opposite her. I leaned against the copper wall, shivering.

  “The parlor car feels so close,” she said.

  Silence.

  “No one knows what to do,” I said.

  Silence.

  Was this what love did to you? Made you stupid and dull?

  “I thought I’d draw,” I said. “Maybe I could draw you sometime?”

  “Now? In the dark?” Gloom had settled in the windowless bath closet.

  “I could draw you by lightning flash.” Perhaps the dumbest thing I’d ever said to her.

  It had been a stormy spring on the East Coast, one of the worst in recent memory. I could hardly make out Bronwyn’s face. She was over there in the shadows, probably grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

  “I’m so in love with you,” I said.

  A long, heart-stopping beat. Lightning flashed, and I saw that she was looking right at me. Not smiling.

  “Big secret,” she said when the blackness fell again. “You’ve been in love with me . . . well, at least since that evening stroll I took back in Virginia City, when I saw you emptying your stomach behind Costello’s Shooting Gallery. A lovely image, I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.”

  My half-strangled feelings. “Are you in love with
me?” I asked.

  “You can’t be in love with me,” she said, sounding impatient. “Do you know why?”

  “Because I’m my sister?” I said, fumbling up the words.

  She laughed. I so much wanted to kiss her, there in the dark.

  “I’m not your sister, Hugo,” she said solemnly. “You better stop thinking that way, or your Professor James is going to have at you in his psychological laboratory.”

  I insisted. “Why can’t I love you?”

  “Oh, because I’m poison,” she said. “Didn’t I already tell you that? Everybody who loves me dies.”

  No answer for that. Or an unacceptable one: that I would willingly sacrifice myself for her.

  Silence. Paralysis. Three hours, three minutes, three seconds. It was impossible to judge how long we waited.

  A sudden insane clatter as Nicky tore through the baggage car, shouting at the top of his lungs like a newsboy. “Extra! Extra! Fierce Hadrosaurus dinosaur sighted in the Jersey meadowlands! Read all about it!”

  “But I’ll tell you what,” Bronwyn said, leaning over.

  She gave me a long, deep kiss, caressed my face for a moment, then abruptly bounded up in one athletic leap over the lip of the tub and out of the little bath closet, howling along after Nicky.

  “Hadrosaurus coming!” she shouted.

  Leaving me alone in the lightning-streaked dark.

  Vesalius has an anatomical drawing where he has stripped away the muscles around the skull, peeling them back and letting them hang. It looks as though the subject’s head has exploded.

  • • •

  I floated through the fair. How could it be otherwise? I went to the greatest exposition ever mounted in America, a sprawling, multifold event with untold thousands in attendance, marvels at every turn, and for me the sole attraction stood only a few feet away.

  I saw nothing else. I had kissed many women in my life, mock-kissed light women and actresses and ladies of the night, bussed my lady friends in the Circle, but that one on the train with Bronwyn I swore was my first real kiss. I still felt the heat of it.

  “You need to fall in love,” said Alice James. Or, earlier, when I bemoaned my nervous mental state to my brother, Nicky had said, “You think you’re going pots? You’re just in love, that’s all, you idiot!”

  So we attended the fair. I am fairly certain of that, ha-ha. We parked Sandobar on a siding west of the grounds and entered into the Centennial Exposition of 1876.

  Freddy and Anna Maria acted as if the whole weight of New York had lifted off them. Nicky, of course, Nicky was over the moon. I was cognizant of the others being there but was really actually wholly oblivious to everyone—the crowds, the performers, my family.

  We all got to see something we wanted. Nicky, being the loudest, steered the course first, to the Machinery Hall, where the monstrous Great Corliss Engine, raging with the power of twenty-five hundred horses, hummed like hellfire.

  “Sixty-five cars required to transport it from Providence!” Nicky informed us, reading from the official program. He stared slack-jawed at the Krupp Gun. But what he really loved there—although not so much as Colm—was the cone of hot sugar-popped corn sold from a cart near the entrance.

  At the Nevada Quartz Mill, Freddy determinedly steered us elsewhere, the memory of his Comstock collapse too raw. The crusher at the mill furnished silver for exposition souvenir coins, an exhibit tout announced, at two dollars apiece.

  Anna Maria sighed over the statue of the Freed Slave in Memorial Hall and insisted we spend an hour (it felt like a week) in the Women’s Pavilion. Freddy lingered by the manufacturing exhibits. The science of silk was under heavy promotion, it seemed, and he had many questions concerning making a go of silkworms. Perhaps he’d get into the trade himself.

  Reinvention. The true American pastime.

  He appeared at times like the old Freddy, mercurial and optimistic about all the “marvelous opportunities” that awaited him in the world. But then he would turn away, quiet, with a hollow look about his eyes.

  We followed my father to the Turkish Pavilion, where the coffee was “clear as amber, black as ebony.” Freddy fell into a seat and somberly fingered a tobacco hookah.

  Outside, in the midway, stood the hand holding Liberty’s torch, transplanted from Madison Square.

  Walking the grounds, Bronwyn enjoyed the sunken gardens with their vivid blooms. I had been thinking of her as the strongest of all girls, but amid the flowers I had a brief appreciation of her fragility. In the Pavilion of the States, she stood before the “oldest doll in America,” molded in pure wax, imported to Rhode Island in 1792, with eyelids that still batted. I thought of Bronwyn’s own pathetic rag doll, hidden away like a secret in her canvas bag.

  Dolls and murder. It seemed both conceivable and inconceivable at the same time.

  Freddy and Anna Maria sampled a few glasses of champagne at the French exhibition area. At Nicky’s insistence we left them nodding off to an orchestral performance in the Main Building. The four of us—Colm, Nicky, Bronwyn and I—felt less constrained without the parents.

  I was aware of my brother only as a vague, buzzing presence, repeating his wish to journey into town on the trolley to see the fossilized Hadrosaurus skeleton at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. Bronwyn made much of him, and I tried to be affable.

  On our way to the Sawyer Observatory tower, reachable by elevator and perched four hundred feet above the Schuylkill River, Bronwyn pulled up short.

  “Hugo,” she said. Nicky scampered ahead.

  She took my arm. “Over there. Isn’t that . . . ?”

  “Who?” I asked, looking where she gestured.

  “The Sage Hen.”

  Was it her former keeper? Hard to say. The stubby little form made its way along the riverside toward the stockyard at the edge of the grounds, where we had been earlier in the day to see some of Bronwyn’s favorite exhibits, the quarter horses and the bulls and buffalo.

  “Colm,” I said, calling him over from where he walked with Nicky. “See her?”

  “That’s a familiar figure,” he said.

  “She’s heading on that little path into the woods,” I said.

  “Let’s not catch up,” said Bronwyn.

  “We’ll just see where she goes,” I said.

  28

  The path wound down a small incline, at the end of which lay one of the fair’s more idiosyncratic attractions, a compound grandly called “The Hunter’s Camp in Lansdowne Ravine.” Bronwyn and I had wanted to visit earlier but were distracted by Nicky’s engine and Freddy’s silkworms and Anna Maria’s statuary.

  We now passed a small sign made of rough-hewn wood, guiding us in the direction of the site. A stream flowed below the bank, and a log cabin, one of its walls left open for display, sat square in front us.

  The Sage Hen had vanished.

  “Howdy, miss!” called out a handsome mountain man in a skunk-fur cap and an outfit of buckskin and denim.

  He stirred a pot over a smoky fire. Behind him, in the half cabin, were arrayed the horns of Rocky Mountain rams, buffalo hides, stuffed mallard ducks. Outside, a knocked-together plank table and a rope hammock that was strung between two trees.

  “I’ve got my little friend over there to help protect the camp,” said Mountain Man. Tethered to a stake, a small black bear, about the height of my chest, preoccupied with gorging on a bucket of slops. “Don’t you worry, I’ve got him pretty well trussed.”

  “What goes on here?” said Colm.

  “Well, sometimes we take a ride,” he said, motioning with his thumb to a canoe tied up at the bank of the stream. “Other times we sit and whittle.”

  Bronwyn looked as if she would have liked to move right in, and I suddenly became irritated by the fake young Mountain Man. His buckskin-wrapped muscles.

  “What would you like to do?” he asked, coming up beside Bronwyn.

  “That,” she said, pointing to an animal hide pegged out on the gr
ound and in the process of being tanned.

  “The wolf pelt?” he said.

  Bronwyn nodded.

  “Sure.”

  Three additional men emerged from behind the cabin. One, shorter and slighter than the others, held a banjo with a collection of small game birds hanging off the neck of it. The other two carried shotguns on their shoulders.

  “Hey,” said Mountain Man. “My buddies.”

  Upon seeing us, they tossed aside their irons. Banjo Boy hit it, and Mountain Man produced a jaw harp and began a stomping rhythm. A bandy-legged cowboy creature in chaps and a red-checkered shirt immediately swept Bronwyn up in a dance. One of the others grabbed me, and I found myself jerked forward and back by a smelly slob of a mule skinner.

  Nicky choked himself laughing, then ran off to investigate the canoe. Colm raised his hands and stepped back when a third camp character tried to get him into the square dance.

  Bronwyn smiled as she spun around with the bandy-legged cowboy. Breathless, they fell aside and stood together over the staked-out wolf pelt.

  “We use brains to cure the hide,” Mountain Man said, going back into guide mode.

  “I know,” Bronwyn said.

  “Missy,” Mountain Man said, eyeing her, “you ain’t never cured a wolf pelt in your sweet little life.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Bronwyn said.

  Putting his arms around her from the back, the bandy-legged cowboy dancer guided Bronwyn’s scraping of the hide.

  Colm and I looked at each other, having the same idea at once.

  “Maybe I’ll stick around here some,” Colm said. “Keep an eye on that checker-shirted cowboy, see if he runs into trouble later on tonight.”

  “It’s been known to happen before,” I said, watching the two of them.

  Nicky ran up, having escaped drowning himself with the canoe. He had gone totally fair-wild, overexcited, red-faced.

  “There’s a cat head mounted in the cabin,” he announced breathlessly. “Its teeth are like razors, and I think it’s a Mexican jaguar.”