A figure in a blousy, shapeless dress, wild black hair. I felt her body upon mine. I even smelled her. I had denied that specific memory at the time, but it was true. Lost amid the chaos, a scent of oranges, fleeting but nonetheless there.
And if that were so, then Bronwyn resembled what I had lately feared myself to be, an unhinged individual, two personages stuffed into a single body, one capable of at least acting sane, the other quite mad. Perhaps we had made her so with all our meddling. Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, the creator and the created, two faces in the same mirror.
A girl in halves. It would be an unsurprising result of her tumultuous life if she was indeed like that. I ached, mawkish with the tragedy of my love. I had developed deep feelings of attachment for a person unworthy of it. After all that, I wasn’t able to give her up. Once more I just felt sorry for myself. And still I loved her.
I couldn’t force myself to bring her to justice. The only other choice was to condemn myself. It was I who was the creature in halves. I again went over the events in my mind.
The ravine completely black. I felt the heft of the knife in my hand. A man lay dead. I didn’t know what made him dead. Then I myself was attacked. By something with long claws.
I thought of the bear chained at the Mountain Man camp. For a brief moment, I fixed on this possibility. The bear had gotten loose and rampaged through the darkness. First attacking the man on the ground, then me, then Colm.
Of course.
But the explanation did not hold water for long. A bear wearing a dress?
Equally unlikely, Bronwyn, a slight girl, embarked upon a murderous rampage.
So it had to be me. I was the killer. The beast on my back was my own insanity, riding me in the guise of Savage Girl. Spurred by some insane fit of mental instability, I had lashed out, first at the cowboy, then at my poor friend. It all sounded pretty unlikely. Even crazy. But I felt that I was, in fact, out of my mind.
The Cullens of Dudley Square in Roxbury summoned up a good hundred mourners for their favorite son’s wake. They behaved with surprising kindness to me, the unintentional author of Colm’s death. I never detected a hint of blame or anger.
At least I was bringing him back with his manhood intact.
“Shouldn’t’ve never crossed the Muddy,” said Colm’s grand-uncle, old Pap Mahoney. The Muddy River being the demarcation line of the neighborhood in which Pap Mahoney Cullen himself had passed all his days. Quite a few members of the family demonstrated the same rootedness, professing uncaring ignorance of all aspects of life outside their self-imposed boundaries. They had everything they needed right where they were. Whiskey could be brought in.
As the night progressed, the wake settled into an endurance trial. The songs, the stories, the drunk. Colm Cullen had been a peach, a stalwart, the best man ever to walk the earth. Do you remember the time . . . ? Yeah, Jay-sus, and how about . . . ? The phrase “fookin’ died at a fookin’ fair” got a thorough airing-out, accompanied by head-shaking wonder at the sad ironies of life.
In the front parlor, the man himself, tight-lipped on ironies, sad or otherwise. Laid out, asleep. He had somehow maintained a stubborn sunburn in the clouded-over East, his sensitive Irish skin, pink-red even in death.
I should have left him where I found him, in the hoist at the Brilliant Mining and Milling Company of Virginia City, Nevada. His example had taught me to speak up, speak straight, but don’t speak too much. He saved my life at the end.
My friend Colm really was, really had been, what they said. The best man ever to walk the earth.
• • •
While in Boston I again visited with Professor James and his dear sister, Alice, in Cambridge, strolled the brick-accented Yard again, cut Teddy Roosevelt once more. I thought James might be able to shine a light on what mental disturbances could prompt a girl to murder.
At first I couldn’t bring myself to ask. Here I had before me one of the world’s most sensitive observers of human psychology, and I held back. Some instinct arose that made me want to shield her secrets.
Instead we spoke about nature versus nurture. When I asked James for his opinion, he said, “My first act of free will is to believe in free will.” We are stamped ineradicably by nature, in other words, but after that we are free to make our own way however we can.
Slowly, though, after more conversational sallies and more avoidance, I divulged the outlines of a “special case” that I thought might interest him.
I didn’t mention Bronwyn. Rather I spoke again about myself, as a disturbed individual unsure if he had performed unspeakable acts or not. Until suddenly the light broke through and his burden was lifted. Parsing out the circumstances of the latest killing, I suggested it proved at least that I was no longer a suspect in the series of crimes.
“I wouldn’t be entirely sure,” James said.
“But why?” I asked. “I experienced that attack myself, I felt the real murderer actually leap upon my back.”
“I have encountered patients who are certain beyond doubt that they have physically wrestled with a demon of some sorts,” James said. “They can even demonstrate bruises, abrasions. So this latest incident might simply be another symptom of an unsettled mind.”
Ah, thank you, Professor, for demolishing what small hope I had.
“Consider the act of mutilation, of postmortem castration,” James said, ruminating.
“Wouldn’t that indicate a female was the assailant?” I said.
“A female, yes,” he said. “Or an insanely jealous male.”
Looking at me, it seemed, with an accusatory air.
Leaving James much more ill at ease than when I’d arrived, I hesitated over what to do next. Freddy had wired me from London, instructing that I should present myself, while in Boston, at Uncle Ezekiel Saltonstall’s countinghouse. For a job.
Like Bartleby, I preferred not to.
Instead I went home to Bronwyn.
It actually felt a shade dangerous, taking up residence with her in Swoony’s house. Not because of any physical threat, though there was that. But rather because I caught myself thinking of us as newlyweds, starting out married life together with our aged matriarchs in tow, a mastiff before the hearth and a green-plumed African parrot squawking on its perch.
We could have done anything with ourselves—with each other! There were a dozen empty bedrooms, their canvas-draped mattresses waiting to be uncovered. Swoony and Mallt Bowen were certainly unfit chaperones. One of them dotty and the other immolating before our eyes like a stalled Congreve rocket.
Bronwyn’s mother customarily sat in the comfortable corner club chair, handkerchief always in hand. She would often go for hours doing nothing but staring into the distance. She rarely spoke. Occasionally she spit.
Incredible what she looked like. The wasting disease made her increasingly thin, which paradoxically rendered her younger-looking, until she came to resemble her daughter’s invalid doppelgänger. She burned up like a candle. We could all see the flame get weaker and weaker.
Swoony persisted in calling Bronwyn “Virginia,” Mallt “Anna Maria” and me “Friedrich.” Random phrases dominated her conversation. “Never washed in his life” was one. “The floor has a door” was another.
Adjacent to us, a constant reminder of our demise, The Citadel had been taken by the bank as a prelude to sale. Passing through a hall in Swoony’s South Wing one afternoon, I noticed Bronwyn standing in front of the now-locked communicating passageway between the two houses.
She motioned me forward. I put my ear to the door next to hers. A woman humming, the whisper of a broom against the floorboards. We never saw anyone enter or leave the next-door château. We avoided it. Now this. Renters? Caretakers?
“I suppose we should go over and introduce ourselves to whoever is in there,” Bronwyn said. “Be neighborly, take them a fruitcake or something.”
“I don’t feel like it,” I said.
“Neither do I,” Bronwyn said.
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Bronwyn and I existed in a suspended, timeless realm. She felt it, I think, as I did. We waited for what was to happen. Two clock springs coiled tight side by side deep within the escapement, anticipating release by the turning of some unknown gear. I could not help but wish she would take up the pastime of kissing me again. But I felt myself caught, unable to get unstuck.
Bronwyn cared for Mallt and Swoony. The butler Mike served us, Swoony’s lady Sally dressed her, the cook Nancy prepared our meals, a nurse came in some days, there were two other housemaids besides. We weren’t so badly off. Except for everything.
Occasionally, on afternoons when the weather was pleasant, Bronwyn and I went out with the two older women, pushing two wheelchairs around the Zoo. If the day was especially fine, we proceeded on to the Dene, that beautiful landscaped valley running near to the open, sunlit Sheep Meadow. Bronwyn loved the Dene the best, she told me, of all the places in Manhattan.
“If ever you lose me, find me here in the Dene,” she said, holding out her arms as though embracing the sunshine.
At the Zoo Bronwyn would do a trick, getting Charlemagne the tigon to follow her back and forth in his run, back and forth. Swoony laughed and clapped. Mallt coughed. It seemed the big cat would do whatever the girl bade him to do. He’d jump out of the enclosure and do a pirouette if she asked.
After a few days of this life, I’d had enough. I wanted somehow to smash the ice between us but could not settle on how to do it.
I tried out various lines. See here, let’s just get married. . . . You and I really ought to be wed, don’t you think? . . . What do you say, chuck it all, no ceremony, a quick trip to City Hall and we’re man and wife.
No, no, none of it would do. Earlier she told me to come to her as a man. In the train hadn’t I done that? Why couldn’t she make a reciprocal move now? As time went on, I felt a slow eroding of my nerve. My faults and weaknesses grew in my imagination until they blotted out the sun. I was inept, lily-livered, a milksop. I stood skinless before her. She could pour herself into me and I would have no defense.
What served to break the impasse appeared in Swoony’s wicker call basket on May 19, 1876. A Friday. Of course I will always remember the date well. I had closed myself in my room that afternoon, rehearsing the question I felt sure I would finally be able to pose to Bronwyn.
When I emerged and went downstairs for tea at four, I found the usual tableau of Bronwyn, Mallt and Swoony arranged in the sitting room, my grandmother with her ever-present teacup potion. Three feline females, two aged cats and one more kittenish, lounging on a sleepy afternoon, waiting for their saucers of milk.
The western sun had started to flood in through the parkside windows. For once, Fifth Avenue was still.
“Friedrich, dear,” Swoony said. “I want to follow you around.” She made no move to rise from her chair to do so.
Idly I examined the cards in Swoony’s call basket. Among four others, all impudent climbers, a carte de visite from Bev Willets.
Back in town.
His card had always annoyed me. It was a striking one, well celebrated among the Circle. Bev had pictured himself as an English gentleman about to embark upon a hunt, blunderbuss in hand, eyes fixed on some far-off prey. The costume managed to be fashionable and significant at the same time, as though indicating a questing character in search of truth and honor.
What infuriated me about it was that I knew Bev’s hunt to be surely more ignoble than the image. Truth and honor could be well damned. The man limited his quest strictly to the human female. Case in point, Delia Showalter’s tragic death.
I wanted to say, I think I’ll just pop downtown and murder Bev Willets. What I said instead: “Was Bev here today?”
“Yes, he was,” Bronwyn said.
“Why wasn’t I told?”
“He wanted me,” Bronwyn said.
The atmosphere became instantly fraught, Swoony and Mallt both oblivious. I wanted to scream at Bronwyn as I’m sure she wanted to scream at me.
You foul creature!
You’re the foul one!
I know you want to go to him!
Maybe I will!
Instead Bronwyn said coolly, “I’m to see him tonight.”
“Don’t do it,” I managed, choking myself off. I’d rather see you dead!
I couldn’t believe that after everything we knew of Bev’s perfidy, she would want to have any truck with him at all. She truly was cold.
“Don’t do it,” I repeated. “Don’t go to him. You don’t know what could happen.”
She merely gave me a look. Was it pitying? I felt it so. For as long as she and I lived in this world, Bronwyn Delegate—was she Bronwyn Bowen now?—could always stare me down.
When she left Swoony’s that evening—not bothering to dress in her usual male guise, a single woman in a dark brown dress, unaccompanied at night, like a common Tenderloin prostitute—I didn’t have to follow right on her heels. I knew where she was going.
Before leaving the house, I slipped into Bronwyn’s room. I located her sacred childhood bag and checked its contents. The books yes, and the doll and mirror, but the hand-razor rig was gone.
I returned to my study and hurriedly retrieved a Number 20 lancet, sheathing it in a leather case. Dressed informally, I went down to the sitting room and kissed a dozing Swoony good night, nodding good-bye also to the animated skull in the corner, Bronwyn’s mother, peering out at me from the furnace within.
Gusts of early-evening rain had previously darkened the streets, but the night was gentle. What had I planned? I didn’t know. She would kill him or I would. I was she. She was I. Somehow it would happen. How, I could not predict.
Its being quite possible to walk the length and breadth of Manhattan, I disdained a cab and headed south on foot, crossing over to Lexington from Fifth.
Past the Grand Central Depot. Should I drop all this and board a train? Flee? It was, as Hamlet had it, “a consummation devoutly to be wished.” But I declined the option.
Down the island on Lexington, through cluttered, unfashionable neighborhoods, tradesman tenements, the precincts of the poor. Gaslights only at the major intersections, otherwise a spring dark. A drunk staggered across my path, shouted and faded into shadows behind me.
Finally Gramercy Park. There my nerve failed. I made several circuits, stopping each time across the street from the Willets town house. Bronwyn was inside, of that I felt certain. Silhouettes showed on a second-floor window shade.
But I could not force myself to confront her. I even walked down Irving once, to pass by the Lotos Club. Shuttered this time of night but closed to me whatever o’clock it was. I had been blackballed at my club since the scandal hit.
Then I returned to the park, lingering on the bluestone sidewalk beside the spiked iron fence. Waiting to kill a man.
Part Four
The Dene in the Central Park
30
I talk to Howe and Hummel through Sunday night. In the Tombs dawn is blocked by the limestone hulk of City Hall to the east, and the prison remains gloomy long after sunrise. They keep placing tea with lemon and honey in front of me. Talk, sip tea, walk over to pee into a chamber pot in the corner, come back, talk some more.
What is the precise disposition of a spider watching a fly struggle in its web? The two lawyers stare at me dolefully.
I want to say, I have finished my story, for pity’s sake. I’m at Bev’s the night of May 19. This is where we came in.
Monday morning. Silence from a chatterbox such as Bill Howe can be supremely unnerving.
So? Is what I finally say. I put my arms out as if for shackles. A joke. Sort of.
No response. Howe uncharacteristically mute.
Then not Howe but Hummel begins to talk, with words that might be more frightening than the other’s silence.
That was all just a lie, Hummel says. Rising slowly to stand over me.
I say, You know, sometimes I think I’m telling a tale like Scheherazade
. When I stop, I’m dead.
Hummel insists, But you haven’t told the truth, have you?
None of this can be used in court, I say. You two just want to hear all the sordid details. People get carried away by the story.
Three hours from now, Hummel says, we will be standing before a judge for your arraignment. You can’t bring your lies in there.
We want to help you, Hugo, Bill Howe says, but Hummel shushes him.
You lie when you tell us you killed Bev Willets, Hummel says. We know the girl did it.
You know nothing of the sort, I say.
This whole madness business, Hummel says, being unsure of your own mind, that’s just some sort of cheap story.
A tale told by an idiot, I say, signifying nothing.
She did it all, Hummel says, hammering at me. Didn’t she, now? Didn’t she? Your confession is a ruse. Your knives? A fabrication.
I feel myself already on the witness stand. I told you, I say, the blood, the claws, the severed artery. All my doing.
Liar! Hummel shouts. He is trying to unman me. But even knowing that is what he is trying to do, I still feel a bit unmanned. This is harder than I thought it would be.
Hummel puts his face right into mine. You’ve been a nasty little boy, haven’t you?
I blink.
Haven’t you?
All right! Bill Howe says.
Hummel is about to dig at me more, but Howe stops him, calling off his partner, the firm’s ghostly attack dog. The corpulent lawyer crosses to look out the window at the enormous sign advertising Howe & Hummel’s services. We shall soon enough have to give the prison director back his office, he says.
Howe orders breakfast from one of the scurrying beck-and-call lackeys surrounding him, and for the next hour we speak of nothing except for the food that arrives posthaste in enormous quantities.
I surprise myself to discover a healthy appetite. Howe, of course, tucks in. Hummel sips hot water.
No matter what they may believe, no matter what untruths I have told, I feel as though I have put my case convincingly forward.
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