Savage Girl (13 page)

More patriotic parades in the street always lead to more crutches on the sidewalks. My anatomy instructor at Harvard told me there were fifty thousand amputations during the war.

For once, practice outran theory. The nation’s doctors, and especially its surgeons, were well practiced by the end of the conflict in the use of bullet probes, bone forceps and conical trephines, their blades rusted not by water but by blood. America had the finest anatomists in the world. My teachers at medical school were former field doctors who had tossed discarded limbs outside hospital tents onto piles that rose to the height of a man.

Perhaps growing up in such a sanguinary time dictated my later interests. All those shattered arms and legs in my dreams naturally metamorphosed into a passion for anatomical studies.

When I draw, I defuse. Veins and sinews and flesh all get put down safely upon the page. These days I no longer dream of severed limbs.

I’ve noticed a shared quality among my peers. We are a haunted generation. We were too young to serve, or to be served up. A horror happened, but it occurred behind the translucent screen that separates the child from adulthood. We saw it only darkly.

The war took older brothers, uncles, fathers. There were riots, speeches, broadsides. New York City was infested by Southern
sympathizers. Once in a while, during public unrest, smoke drifted up to us from burning buildings farther downtown. Once in a while, a ceremonial cannon boomed outside the Fighting Sixty-ninth’s Armory on Twenty-fifth Street, but it was shotless, impotent, just a muzzle flash and a gout of white-black smoke.

We sat by the window and watched.

All this affected us in various ways, producing highly varied results. I grew up with a boy named Beverly Willets, around the same age as me, the oldest son in a family close to ours and a more or less constant presence throughout my early years.

The murder victim.

I hesitate, lately, to label Bev a friend, since we passed through several periods of estrangement, and his response to our common war-haunted childhood was so unlike my own.

I might have turned inward, or so others have told me. Bev I know turned outward. With a vengeance. He tore through the world like a princeling. He was too different from me to be a true friend and too close, with too many shared experiences, to be anything else.

It was to Bev Willets’s country place in upstate New York that I went when I wished to cleanse myself of the prickly, shut-in emotions aroused by the western trip. I felt like Hamlet, too much in the sun. Too much Freddy, too much closeness. I wanted to breathe.

Returning from Virginia City, disembarking from Sandobar with my family at Manhattan’s brand-new Grand Central Depot at the end of June, a restlessness immediately settled upon me. The city steamed, the cobblestones and stone façades forming the walls of an oven, radiating heat back and forth, multiplying it.

On our two-hundred-yard march within the depot, rubbing shoulders with all and sundry, to where our carriages waited on Forty-second, Colm ranged out front, clearing the way. Freddy had vanished, off arranging things. The berdache lay atop a mountain of freight piled upon a wicker baggage cart, borne along as though it were Cleopatra’s barge.

I walked behind Bronwyn. I wanted to observe her. She was with Anna Maria and Tu-Li. I wished to see her cowed by the city. It would pummel and reshape and vanquish her as it did all of us, I felt sure.

Manhattan appeared more foreign than I usually saw it. The fashions looked strange. The surface of Forty-second Street had a thick, brown-yellow mat of horse dung laid over it. Crossing the crowded thoroughfare was like treading on a manure carpet. The ladies couldn’t let down their skirts and walked hobbled.

Coming home meant coming back to myself and realizing I had changed. It took some getting used to. Part of it, I will not deny, had to do with Bronwyn. I could not connect her new presence with my old life.

We—all of us, my family and I—kept waiting for Bronwyn to be impressed. By the vastness of America. By our private train, its servants and luxury equipage. By the stone canyons and frenetic bustle of Manhattan. By something.

The first time I saw Bronwyn on the streets of New York City, the thought came to me, powerfully and with disturbing certainty: She’s doomed for sure. She was too strange, too autonomous, too . . . something, I didn’t know what, eerie.

I had visions of Frankenstein’s monster and the chase across the ice floes.
A being which had the shape of a man . . .
The townspeople gather round with their torches. They hound Savage Girl until she goes to ground. Then they unleash the dogs.

Bronwyn proceeded down Forty-second Street not hesitantly, like a gawker tourist, but already walking with the velocity of a New Yorker, tromping along determinedly, shoulders hunched, maneuvering people out of the way. Paying no heed and being paid none.

It made me nervous to witness her loose on the unfeeling street. I had come to think more and more protectively of her. Who would protect her from harm? Was it my job? Colm’s? My mother’s? Freddy’s?

Then, on the trip uptown, quite suddenly, the city grabbed me by the throat. As much as I was distracted by Savage Girl’s reaction to it, my old home of Manhattan snuck up and claimed its prodigal. I was left breathless by my love for New York.

Rolling northward on Fifth Avenue in our carriages—my parents, Bronwyn, Tu-Li in one, Colm, the berdache and I following in a heavily laden coach—it all came rushing back, the traffic, the marble
towers, the feeling of being at the center of it all, what my friends and I used to call “the zoom.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, opening the door of the moving carriage. “Tell my father and mother . . .”

Tell them what? I didn’t say but leaped out onto the street like a gandy dancer, hailed a hansom cab and headed off into my own damned life. Laughter in a public room, a well-aged New York strip, champagne. Top priority! Be quick about it! And friends. Friends!

So I was absent for the Event, the kairos, Bronwyn’s turning point, out with my Circle cohorts for porter and skittles at the Maison Dorée. I spent the whole afternoon at lunch.

Ça prends qu’un moment pour que le boulevard revienne.
Who said that? It takes but a moment for the boulevard to come rushing back.

When I returned, exalted, to the family bosom early that evening, I was fully prepared to be immune to its charms.

The Delegate mansion on upper Fifth. The butler, Winston, the doorman, Paul. They ignored my rumpled state, welcoming me back. But I wasn’t back, I wasn’t there, I was already elsewhere.

“My good man, my good man,” I mumbled to them.

Inside, I met with giddiness, tears, exultation. Everyone aflutter.

“What?” I asked Freddy, passing me in the stairhall, wearing a smile as big as a cigar. Something had happened.

“Wait, wait,” he said, and disappeared up the center stairway. Another Freddy escapade.

The wine died in me then, the family uproar put me out of sorts. I realized they hadn’t really noticed I was gone. Either Freddy had made some sort of killing in the market or it had something to do with Savage Girl.

It was left to Winston the butler to tell the firstborn son what had transpired.

“It appears Miss Bronwyn spoke,” Winston said, the tone of quiet pride in his voice indicating that he, too, was swept up in the enthusiasm of the household.

Well, yes, I thought, she spoke. She spoke to me on Sandobar, said the word “yes,” hadn’t she? I wished that I had announced it then. She
spoke to me first. And did I make a grand occasion of it? No, because it was our private moment. What was Freddy going to do, call in the newspaper reporters?

Later on, Tu-Li filled me in.

“She told your mother ‘thank you,’” Tu-Li said.

“That’s it?”

“Yes,” Tu-Li said. “It was quite emotional for Anna Maria. The two of them were in the bedchamber in the South Wing, and Anna Maria told her that it would be hers and that they had commissioned a special bath for her use, and then Bronwyn said it.”

Another special bath. I imagined the world dotted with them. You could trace her trail by the tubs installed for her soaking pleasure.

“Just those two words, ‘thank you’?” I asked. “In English, not Comanche, not sign language.”

“Yes, out loud,” Tu-Li said. “Then, later on this afternoon, she said another two words in English to your father. Or three, I forget.”

“The child is a prodigy,” I said.

“I take your tone,” Tu-Li said. “But you weren’t there. It was— I can’t describe it by any other word than ‘sweet.’”

I wished at that moment that I had heard the girl. The bath, when I eventually saw it, was indeed a marvel, an enormous white-enameled claw-foot tub, seven feet in length, you could fit about four Bronwyns in it.

What she had said to Freddy that day: “I am Numunuh.” Pounding her splayed-out hand against her chest.

Numunuh.
I found out later that this was what the Comanche called themselves. She was telling Freddy that she was a Comanche girl.

“Her voice has a strange quality,” Tu-Li said.

She spoke to me once.

Yes
.

The miracle word, the word that is a miracle every time you hear it, the word that performs miracles.

“The thing is, her speech, it emerged out of nothing,” Tu-Li said. “She has the whisper of an accent.”

Of course, I thought. She would. She did.

For some reason I found myself becoming enraged. Perhaps because I had been left out. I was on the margin, and my first impulse was to leave my parents to their fantastically important pet project with my very best regards.

“Tell them I’m going out,” I said to Winston.

“You don’t wish to see Miss Bronwyn?” he asked.

I dressed in evening attire and left for Delmonico’s, plunging back into Manhattan as into a steeplechase. I wanted them to witness me leave, but neither Anna Maria nor her new favorite was anywhere to be seen.

After a four-day stay in the city, just long enough to pass Independence Day and during which time I was only rarely at home, I left New York behind. Summer was not the season to remain in town anyway. The whole family made preparations to leave. I got out first.

•   •   •

“Delegate, old dog!” Bev Willets greeted me at his family’s country place in East Chatham. Just returned from a late-afternoon hunt, his manservant trailing behind him with a brace of rabbits.

“Your keepers let you loose from the sanatorium, have they? Are we safe with you?”

“I come seeking refuge from my family,” I said, ignoring the slight. A commercial train to Albany, an overnight stopover, a twenty-mile ride on a rented horse had put me at the Willetses’ farm.

“Then you’ve come to the right place, since my revered progenitors are not at the moment present,” Bev said. “We have the place to ourselves.”

No parents, no family, no oversight. I had traveled to Bev’s alone, having granted Colm Cullen two weeks’ leave to smooth out his legal difficulties in his hometown of Boston.

Bev, pretending at the country squire, wore a comical Scottish-huntsman costume that afternoon, a hat tied beneath his chin with string ribbons. In his face I caught a first glimpse of his fleshy future self—rich, sensuous lips, a sloppy shock of blond hair falling over a lightly freckled forehead.

“Good Lord, Delegate,” he said, “what is that creature you rode in here? Is it even a horse? It appears bovine.”

My ancient chestnut, the only mount I could scare up in Albany on short notice.

“I shall put it out of its misery at once,” Bev said. “Jookie, the Beaumont.”

His much-put-upon manservant offered him the weapon, a beautiful blued carbine with a decorative stock. He made a show of aiming it at the head of the horse.

“Bev,” I said, knowing he wasn’t really going to do it and merely wanted to show off his new rifle to me.

“That nag is a disgrace to quadrupeds everywhere,” he said, lowering the gun. “Come up to the house for champagne. Dad made me promise not to uncrate the new cuvée of Krug he pillaged from his British cousins, but this is an occasion.”

“Dad” was Martin Willets, a reactionary financier so committed to his conservative brand of politics that he had erected, at East Chatham, one of his numerous country homes, an exact replica of Marie Antoinette’s play farm at Versailles.

The main building had a rustic Norman inflection, an ocher tint, a thatched roof and fifty charming rooms tucked inside. Martin Willets considered this a modest endeavor compared with his mansions at Newport and Staten Island.

It was all too much, the dovecote and the dairy, the cozy little barn with its precious sheep and pigs, the tower in the shape of a lighthouse and an inscription in brass,
QU’ILS MANGENT DE LA BRIOCHE,
the martyred French queen’s “Let them eat cake.” All done up by Martin Willets in an effort to horrify his liberal friends (he had no liberal friends).

La Ferme, as the Willetses called it, The Farm, had long ceased to shock me. I had visited many times. Without Martin and his meek, willowy wife, Lillianne, at home, with Bev as its master, the place took on something of a carnival atmosphere.

We ate the fowl we shot, drank Dad’s wine and smashed our glasses in Marie Antoinette’s cold hearth. At a dinner party two evenings on, besides myself, were a crew of raucous and rough-hewn
neighborhood friends, as well as Cindy Pokorski, Bev’s nineteen-year-old mistress-in-residence, another local, introduced, with a sly wink, as his niece.

Also there, honored guests just in from Albany, two mulatto women and their retinue, a group of abolitionists rendered supernumerary by the Emancipation, left somewhat confused by the success of the Glorious Cause. Dedicate your life to a battle, win it, what’s next?

The two regal and strikingly beautiful women had been made darlings during the war, notorious for having been purchased as twenty-year-old, light-skinned, mixed-race slaves by abolitionists, stripped naked and displayed at the auction block in Nashville, for all appearances entirely Caucasian females put forth as shaming spectacles to the slavers.