Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  Her hands wet with cow brains, Bronwyn stopped scraping the wolf pelt and shrugged off the bandy-legged cowboy.

  “Time to go?” I said.

  As we took the little path out of the ravine, a ragged urchin dashed up, thrust a handbill at me and ran off again.

  I was about to toss it away unread when Bronwyn stopped me. She took the paper, and we looked at it together.

  “The Wild Child of the Washoe!” read the handbill. “In person, revealing all, the scandalous wolf-girl who shocked the world.” And, down below, in smaller script, “Professor Dr. Calef Scott’s Traveling Spectacle, direct from appearing before the Crowned Heads of Europe!”

  The handbill steered us to something called the Street of Wonders, outside the exposition grounds proper, one of the numberless commercial attractions seeking to siphon coins off the free-spending fairgoers.

  “Do you think it really can be?” I said.

  “Well, that was the Sage Hen we saw earlier,” she said. “I was sure of it.”

  “Let’s all go,” Nicky said. “It’s you onstage!”

  “I’m here with you, Nick, I’m not onstage,” Bronwyn said. “Get us some lemonade, will you? You look like to drop dead of heatstroke.”

  He dashed off.

  “Let me ask,” I said, brandishing the handbill. “Does this make you feel like running the other way or running toward it?”

  She shrugged. “The Street of Wonders,” she said. “Doesn’t that sound worth a look?”

  It did, and it was, though the “Street” wasn’t actually a street and the “Wonders” weren’t all that wonderful. Along a decrepit alleyway inches deep in mud, near the stockyards outside one of the exposition’s back entrances, the attractions presented were mostly extremely sad affairs, pigment disorders, misshapen people, accidents of stature.

  The Half Lady. The Lion-Faced Boy and His Snake. The Human Owl. I was curious, as an anatomist, about Juan Baptista dos Santos, the Man with Two Penises.

  Nicky wanted to see them all.

  Most engaging to us, of course, as we approached a sagging canvas banner advertising THE WILD CHILD OF THE WASHOE, was Bronwyn’s return to her former milieu. For my part the tension spiraled almost out of control.

  But the Savage-Girl-Who-Once-Was remained a cipher. Bronwyn resembled a traveler in time who could see it all from a level distance. Here were the same eager men, the same lurid come-ons, the same handlers who had once dished her up to the world. She responded with no tears, no balking, no spilling out of emotion.

  “Have you a veil?” I asked. Given her notoriety from New York, Bronwyn had already been recognized, once or twice, but we had so far managed to avoid a mob scene.

  She unraveled a band of black netting around her hat, bringing it down over her face. Nicky helped her position it.

  At the entrance to the show, where I expected a Toad, we met a gangly boy in his late teens. “You’re too young,” he said to Nicky, and to Bronwyn, “We don’t admit no women to the afternoon or evening shows, ma’am, but you can come back tomorrow morning.”

  “Let’s leave,” I said, thinking I was doing Bronwyn a favor by getting us out of there.

  “Run tell Dr. Scott something for me, will you?” Bronwyn said, sweet as butter, smiling at the gangly youth. “Tell him Savage Girl is outside wanting to come in and say hello.”

  As if under a spell, the youth left his post and trotted through the canvas doorway, but he almost collided with Dr. Scott, bursting out to greet Bronwyn with an immense, beaming smile on his face.

  “My dearest, darling girl, you’ve come back to us!” he exclaimed, seizing her hands in his and kissing her on both cheeks, European style. She stepped back to avoid a full-on embrace.

  He lowered his voice. “We’ve followed your exploits in the East,” he said. “Very nicely done, missy.”

  Then he turned to me. “Young Delegate! The lady’s paladin, whisking her away from her livelihood to ever greater fortune in the vast metropolis of Manhattan!”

  Again, sotto, his wet lips near to my ear. “Though of late I hear of some reversals. If you wish to borrow a sum, I let out loans at twenty percent.”

  He gave a formal bow to Nicky. “I have not a doubt this is young Nicholas Delegate. He exhibits the family intelligence, handsome look and, most importantly”—extracting a silver Seated Liberty dime from behind my brother’s ear—“their wealth.”

  A corny trick, but one with a hidden sting, as if a thin dime were all we had left of the family fortune.

  I had been unsure of our welcome, and the one that occurred seemed innocuous enough, though beneath the dappled surface of the encounter between Scott and Bronwyn I detected darker eddies and undercurrents. These deepened when the Sage Hen emerged and gave a silent curtsy to Bronwyn.

  “The Sage Hen,” Bronwyn said in a strained voice. “We saw you this forenoon at the Hunter’s Camp, but you were too far away and we lost you in the crowds.”

  “I weren’t never at the Hunter’s Camp today, your ladyship,” the Sage Hen said.

  “Come now, it’s me,” Bronwyn said. “No need to be so formal.”

  “Oh, you have rose to ’nother different level than us folks, haven’t you?” the Sage Hen said.

  Neither Dr. Scott nor I liked the trend of the conversation. “Why don’t you see the show? Free of charge, my compliments,” Scott said, all false heartiness. “We have a secret box next to the stage, specially rigged for our incognito visitors.”

  “A stage, you say?” Bronwyn said, taking Dr. Scott’s arm and walking in.

  “We have left barns long behind,” Dr. Scott said.

  “And who is your ingenue?”

  “You shall see, my dear. Although she shall never rise to your genius, she does a journeyman’s service.”

  Glancing back as we entered, bowing politely to indicate that the Sage Hen should proceed before me and Nicky, I caught a look of pure spite on the older woman’s face, staring daggers at Bronwyn. Perhaps this visit had been ill-advised after all. Why would the creature lie about being at Hunter’s Camp? And did she not truly love Bronwyn?

  Dr. Scott handed us off to the gangly youth, who conducted us to a box, stage right. A screen hid us from the other audience members, who stood restless before the raised and curtained proscenium stage.

  The hollow Indian drumbeat began.

  “Cast your minds into the blank and trackless emptiness of the Sierra wilderness,” Dr. Scott proclaimed. “Savage, wild, forsaken by God and man. Thronged with ferocious packs of bloodthirsty beasts!”

  Of the show itself, one need only imagine a pale imitation of the spectacle presented in Virginia City. It resembled Bowery Shakespeare after one’s having seen the Royal Company perform in the West End. The exact same lines, but a more impoverished effect.

  I contented myself with watching Bronwyn watch the show. She covered Nicky’s eyes at the naughty bits. I detected her occasionally mouthing some of the passages in the script. The stick-figure child playing Savage Girl went mechanically through the routine.

  The bath was, as before, the true raison d’être of the whole affair. The water level a little lower this time, the steam a little thinner, the breasts more paltry but on more prominent display.

  Scott had completely reengineered his third act, quickly sketching out Bronwyn’s rise to the top of New York society. Stick-Figure Girl emerged from the wings to trumpets, dressed in a ludicrous costume, a red satin creation that would have had an enraged Bev Willets rushing the stage in protest. Bronwyn merely laughed.

  She sobered again, though, at the reenactment of the Fince shooting, displayed to dramatic effect, with a gilt-painted cardboard-cutout carriage standing in for Caroline Hood’s Cinderella coach.

  The audience enjoyed the shooting, Tu-Li’s killing of Fince, the miraculous Lady Lazarus resurrection of the Wild Child. But what the spectators really wanted was to see the girl go back into the bath.

  Afterward Scott introduced us briefly
to his actress, a dull-eyed, wet-haired waif in a robe. “Hullo,” she said without expression, shaking Bronwyn’s hand. It was a moment Harper’s Bazar or Leslie’s Illustrated would dearly have loved to document, the real Savage Girl and the manquée, meeting there unheralded in the darkness backstage.

  The Sage Hen was not present. Leading us out of the tent, Scott again took Bronwyn’s arm, intent on claiming his place, it seemed, among the serial parade of her fathers. How many were there? Dan Bowen and Hugh Brace and Sun-Eagle and Dr. Calef Scott and Freddy. Too many.

  “May we call on you at Sandobar?” Dr. Scott said to me. “Or perhaps the Fifth Avenue place. You’re with your grandmother now, next door to the old mansion, aren’t you?”

  He seemed to know every detail about us. He was negotiating to bring the show to New York City, he said.

  I drew Nicky aside as Bronwyn and Scott said their farewells. It had been decided—I decided—that Colm and I would stay at the exposition while my brother and Bronwyn would return to the train.

  “Listen, old man,” I said to Nicky. “Keep an eye on the girl for me tonight, will you?”

  “Why?” he said suspiciously. “Where are you going?”

  “Keep her close on the way to Sandobar and see that she stays in.”

  “The coochie tents, that’s where you’re headed,” he said.

  “Just do as I say, will you?”

  “Bronwyn is Becky Thatcher,” he said.

  Since I hadn’t read Mr. Twain’s children’s book, I didn’t know what that meant. Nicky said, “Bronwyn is the kind of girl if you had a genie giving you three wishes, like in the Thousand and One Nights, you’d spend all three of them on her.”

  Bronwyn joined us and, as if overhearing, gave Nicky a reward kiss on the cheek. They immediately marched off together arm in arm, leaving me behind, feeling superfluous.

  “Bye,” she said, turning around and flashing me a smile.

  “He needs to go to the coochie tents,” I heard Nicky say to her as they were swallowed up by the crowds surging through the mucky Street of Wonders.

  • • •

  I arrived at the big sycamore at Lansdowne Camp at ten o’clock sharp.

  Earlier in the evening, I did in fact visit the coochie tents. Merely as a psychological experiment. I wondered if my newfound status as an in-love person would affect my appreciation of a flesh show, the kind of spectacle that had repeatedly held my attention in the Tenderloin of New York City. As I surmised, I now took only distracted enjoyment from it.

  No Colm at the sycamore. The cowboys and mountain men gathered around a campfire in front of the cabin, the fellow with the banjo leading them in a mournful prairie song, a rejiggered version of “The Unfortunate Rake” set on the western plains.

  Muffle your drums, play your pipes merrily,

  Play the death march as you go along.

  And fire your guns right over my coffin,

  There goes a cowboy lad to his home.

  I was not a long time waiting. In the darkness at the back of Lansdowne Ravine, a muted shout. I became disoriented, blundering around in the underbrush behind the camp. Finally I broke out into a small clearing.

  Someone was there. Quietly I drew my blade.

  Time went funny, my mind playing tricks. How many minutes passed?

  “Colm?” I called out softly. No moon. All was black.

  Moving forward, I almost tripped across the supine body of a man. Still warm, but quite dead. Lying on his back, blank eyes pointed at the stars.

  Not Colm. I put my hand down to feel the body at the leg. Sopping wet with blood, though the arterial pulsing had ceased.

  The dead body, ripped open from the throat to the groin. Viscera trailed out into the blood-mucked dirt. The man’s hands rested delicately atop the mess, as if he had been vainly trying to shove his guts back inside his body. He lay almost bisected, his fundamental male attribute missing.

  The fury had escalated, victim by victim. This here was on a whole other level.

  A gust of emotion took me, and suddenly I was sobbing. “I did not do this,” I said, a hoarse whisper to God. “I could not, would not, did not.”

  Saying those words aloud, I felt suddenly fearful, exposed.

  “Colm?” I said again to the darkness. Far off, the tinny campfire song continued.

  Over my coffin put handsful of lavender,

  Handsful of lavender on every side,

  Bunches of roses all over my coffin,

  Saying there goes a young cowboy cut down in his prime.

  A figure moved against the far cliffside of the ravine. I stumbled forward, my hands wet with blood, hoping it was Colm and knowing, if it was not, that I had the murderer blocked off. There was no way through but past me. I would discover her. It would come to a head here in Lansdowne Ravine.

  I wanted to confront her, even if in so doing I would become that man, the one on the ground with his innards pulled out.

  The figure danced through the bushes ahead of me like a ghost.

  Full night. The darkness felt tangible, a thick woolen blanket that had fallen over the whole landscape. Bracken, brambles and thickets of sumac rose in the back of the cabin, whipping my whole body as I ventured forward, and I held out my arms to shield my face.

  Then nothing. Breathing hard, I stopped.

  Dead quiet. I had lost her. A long beat of silence.

  With an earsplitting female shriek, a figure tackled me from behind, leaping on my back with surprising weight. I fumbled with my own blade and saw a flash of steel, silver-black in the total dark, as the triple razors sang past my face.

  I blocked that blow, then another. She stabbed at me, stabbed at me and stabbed at me again, aiming for my leg, and I realized that sooner or later one of the thrusts would get through. I couldn’t hold her at bay forever.

  Yelling like a madman, Colm Cullen emerged from the darkness, peeling my attacker off. The triple blades sang once again. The figure jabbed at Colm, hitting him hard in the chest. I lunged recklessly with my knife and connected with something, I didn’t know what.

  Colm fell. Struck by my hand or by the attacker’s? The figure turned and fled.

  Slipping in the blood coursing from the body of my friend, I collapsed. Colm lay in a groaning heap beside me.

  As his lifeblood poured out, he tried to tell me something. “Bron . . . Bron . . .” The word didn’t come.

  “I’ll get help,” I said. But I was too late.

  29

  The sunlit waves of the Atlantic belied my mood. The coastal steamer Phillip Wheeler churned its way northward from Philadelphia toward Boston, its deck filled with fun-stunned fairgoers returning from their Centennial Exposition visits. I stayed in the hold with Colm Cullen’s casket.

  Miraculously, Colm’s death had not yet become connected up to the expanding family scandal. TWO DEAD AT FAIR: MURDER IN LANSDOWNE RAVINE was bad enough as a headline. Adding “Delegate Man Stabbed to Death” as the subhead would bring the press wolves howling.

  The other man killed was the bandy-legged cowboy who danced so merrily with Bronwyn, who put his arms around her to scrape the wolf pelt of its bits of flesh. I recalled the stab of jealousy I felt at the time, watching them.

  Yellow light slanted into the compartment through twin portholes. But a coffin manages to make gloomy even a pretty day in May. This was my duty, bringing Colm Cullen’s body home to his family in Roxbury. I felt like a brother to Colm, a pesky younger brother who had just happened to get him killed.

  Fulsome disaster struck my family, but we continued with our lives as if by momentum. Deadbeat poor, we acted as if we were still rich. During the chaotic aftermath of that night in the ravine, when I saw a police official give deference to Freddy, I wanted to shout, “Don’t you realize? He’s nothing now!”

  Everything disordered, everything confused. Anna Maria hurriedly packing for departure, Bronwyn nowhere in evidence. I tried questioning Nicky as to the girl’s whereabouts that
night but failed to get a straight answer. My parents deserted the field, leaving me to the disposition of Colm’s remains.

  The waves lapped against the hull. Somewhere to the east, Nicky, Anna Maria and Freddy were on the same ocean aboard a transatlantic steamer, having taken passage to Southampton, England, in a first-class cabin that we could scarcely afford.

  Our unhappy family scattered to the winds. We were like Sandobar’s consist—decoupled, shunted aside, parceled off. When we left Philadelphia, we left the proud train behind, to be gutted and sold. I felt more relieved than saddened by the loss. “Every increased possession,” says Ruskin, “loads us with new weariness.”

  Anna Maria had managed to secure a five-thousand-dollar letter of credit from her family in Boston. The Delegates’ annual spring sojourn to Europe would be a lot different from, say, the fifty-thousand-dollar tours my parents were accustomed to take.

  Fleeing to London would lift them out of the maelstrom of bad publicity in New York. Hunted by the gentlemen of the press—what bitter irony lay couched in that phrase, I had never realized—Anna Maria, Freddy and Nicky slipped out of the country at night like a trio of thieves.

  Bronwyn journeyed home on her own, by public commercial railroad, back to Fifth Avenue and Swoony and her dying mother. I finally concluded that the girl had a deadness around her heart. The chaos of her childhood, the breaking of family ties early on, had left Bronwyn emotionally maimed. She reacted with chilling coldness to all developments, including our leave-takings, Delia’s tragedy and even Colm’s death.

  Could that coldness be interspersed with violent, even murderous, outbursts? A terrifying prospect.

  I thought about the other examples of feral upbringing. A certain lack of affect was another attribute of the wild child Victor of Aveyron’s tortured existence. The doctors who examined him considered him so mentally damaged from his abandonment in the forest that they judged him unable to feel affection or attachment to others.

  As the coffin-carrying coastal steamed north, I went over and over the events of that night in the ravine. All had been darkness and jolting, fragmented, disordered images. I was badly frightened. I hadn’t been able to think straight.