Savage Girl (16 page)

“Is it planned to exhibit the creature?”

When I remained wordless, he rapped the table sharply. “Lord’s sake, boy!”

I straightened, removed my eye device and met his gaze.

“I suppose,” he said slowly, “that some compelling knowledge could accrue from a study of a feral child. Various propositions could be tested. One hypothesis that might be put to the proof, for example, is that some people have too much money, which they employ to toy and trifle with other people’s lives.”

We stared at each other until I dropped my eyes. “Shall we continue with the work at hand?” he said.

When we had stripped the whole tumor away, flattening it out on our examination table, James and I both remarked upon its peculiar shape at once.

“A homunculus,” he said.

“Why, it’s the shape of a man,” I said.

We had fixed the product of our labors like an insect upon the table. The flayed tumor did indeed display a vague human outline, arms, legs, torso and head, a gingerbread man rendered in swirls of black blood, matted brown-blond hair and sharp, sparkling white teeth.

A little man.

I recited some popular doggerel of the day: “Run, run, as fast you can. / You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man.”

“Except they always are caught, aren’t they?” James said, closely inspecting the specimen, his eyeglasses only inches away from its mottled surface. “They are apprehended, then quite crunched down upon by pointed little teeth.”

Later in the term, as Thanksgiving approached, James suggested I might be better off applying for a leave from the college.

“Is my work deficient in some way?”

“Not at all, not at all,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder. “You only appear as if you want to be elsewhere.”

“I am quite happy where I am,” I said. I felt as though I were always having to tell him this. Though James was my anatomy professor, he very much tended toward the relatively new field of “mental science,” or psychology, for which Harvard had no chair. He was a great reader of moods.

“You’re not doing yourself or anyone else much good,” he said, adding, a bit unkindly I thought, “Your head is in the clouds somewhere, you may want to change your academic focus, look into meteorology.”

I didn’t wish to be mulish, and after thinking it over I decided he was right. The ills that had afflicted me the previous term threatened to return. I couldn’t deny that my mind felt somewhat unsettled.

Instead of waiting to go back to New York for Christmas, as I had planned, by mid-November, just days before Thanksgiving, I was on a train leaving Boston, Colm Cullen at my side, and me brooding the whole time.

•   •   •

On the way to the city, we changed trains in New Haven, recalling to my mind the sporting event I had attended earlier in the fall with Delia Showalter, a game of American football between Harvard and Yale.

Harvard won, 4–0, but the day should have been more successful than it was. The contest on the field was played with some sort of modified rugby rules that I did not wholly understand, involving a
special oblate spheroid of a ball. I stumbled explaining the game to Delia, was caught out in my ignorance about field goals versus touchdowns and experienced an irritating sense of comeuppance.

Delia journeyed from Manhattan chaperoned by her aunt, and she elicited admiring glances all around by the eager male students on the stadium benches, but her quality of fatuous blandness (or bland fatuousness) grated on me for the whole visit.

We were allowed to sit together beneath an immense buffalo robe. Though the sense of physical closeness had its inevitable effect on me, I felt irritation even about that. As though I somehow resented her power.

Now, on my return trip to New York from Cambridge only a few weeks after Harvard-Yale, I decided not to telegraph the Showalters about my arrival. I wondered at my recalcitrance. Delia would surely be upset if she found out I was in New York without telling her, and she would indeed find out. I was being petty, and I couldn’t understand why.

Well, I hadn’t told my parents I was coming home either, but that was more in the way of a surprise. And also, I suppose, to avoid Freddy’s displeasure at my leaving school.

Dear old New York, dear old Manhattan. Rumbling along the coast, past Greenwich, down through the Bronx and Harlem, I felt a rising sense of excitement all out of proportion to the event. Rather than arriving in the city with my tail tucked between my legs for having left Harvard, I had a sense of new beginnings.

Colm and I arrived at Grand Central Depot, then took a hansom cab up Fifth Avenue to Sixty-third Street.

A double château, our house and my grandmother’s next door, both big enough for a regiment, together taking up the whole blockfront.

The Citadel, Nicky always called our half, not entirely in jest. It sat on that stretch of Fifth like a proud thumb stuck in the eye of social convention. With it, the family seemed to say, here be the Delegates, and let none dare to judge us.

Fashion had not yet caught up with our choice of neighborhood.
All around, especially to the north and east, were rock outcroppings, feral pigs, the poor. A favored specialized activity of the neighborhood, bone boiling.

The Citadel stood out. Built right to the sidewalk in mulberry-colored stone, two wings and four floors with a twenty-foot-high first story and a deep mansard roof, the residence reflected the iconoclasm of its builder, my grandfather.

Richard Morris Hunt, the architect responsible for all the important residential buildings in New York, had given The Citadel the likeness of a full-fledged sixteenth-century château, a fairy-book castle if there ever could be one in Manhattan, inhabiting a different world from the terrible cast-down hovels all around.

The trio of marble “white houses” on Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth, owned by a family of shipping magnates, were our closest neighbors or, as August Delegate had thought of it, our closest competitors.

Inside, the place was all Anna Maria. Tapestries, wainscoting, window dressings. Public rooms on the second floor, private on the third, servants on the top floor, stables at the back.

A space designed as a conservatory had been given over to an aviary for my mother’s birds of plumage—parrots, cockatoos, chaffinches. It was immense, with little-visited, leafy corners where weather splattered the leaded skylights.

Freddy indulged in the training of a little kestrel in this sanctuary, taking the hawk over to the East River on occasion to fly. The back of our house sounded like a bird-thronged forest and was where we much preferred to live, away from the traffic noise of the avenue.

Stationed beneath the Fifth Avenue portal’s copper canopy, Paul Rogers acted as The Citadel’s gatekeeper and pig shooer. Freddy couldn’t be satisfied with just a butler to receive callers, he had to have a doorman as well. A well-muscled slab of a man and a great favorite of Nicky’s, Paul took an instant disliking to Colm, as someone who might be infringing on his territory.

“Back in residence, Mr. Hugo?” Paul said when I arrived.

“For the foreseeable future,” I said.

Paul maneuvered aside the hansom hack trying to help with the luggage. “You there, boy,” he said to Colm. “Servants’ entrance at the back.”

Colm just laughed, and we strolled in through the front door together.

“Mr. Hugo! This is a surprise,” our butler, George Winston, said, nodding in a polite bow.

I put my finger to my lips and brushed past him, calling back over my shoulder, “Inform my parents they have a visitor in the front drawing room, but don’t tell them who it is. And tea!”

I sent Colm away with my kit and took the stairs two at a time, feeling buoyant, exuberant. Unhushed by the gleaming mahogany all around, the burgundy Oriental carpets, the golden sunflower wallpaper.

I fairly burst into the upstairs drawing room, empty at this time of day, standing there, taking in the sights and smells of home, becoming infused with “Delegacy,” as Nicky would have it.

Good old drawing room, full of good old furniture! The tall, curved cabinet of butterfly specimens, shrine to one of Freddy’s serial obsessions. In one corner a full suit of armor, holding its lance as though it would charge across the room and impale the gilded statue of Diana in the opposite corner.

On the ceiling floated a large Chinese parasol—Anna Maria had filled the house with chinoiserie—and on the floor lay a fluffy satin pillow, one of many scattered throughout the house for our brindled mastiff, Rags, so that she never need bother herself to search for a bed when she wanted to lie down. The interior remained practically invisible in the murk of the evening, since none of the sconces were yet lit.

I startled at a figure in the room I hadn’t immediately noticed. Bronwyn stood at a window on the Fifth Avenue side of the house, the washed-out light of the waning afternoon bathing her in fading gold. She was dressed in tightly fitted indigo plaid and wore a cameo that I recognized as belonging to my mother.

Our foundling had matured a great deal since I saw her last, over three months before. She looked at once more normal, less wild and at
the same time more ethereal. She had grown out of her girlishness and into something else. She had a pretty figure. I could even believe she was taller by an inch.

Hearing me come in, she turned from the window. “Oh,” she said quietly, “the other son.” As if remarking on a cloud in the sky or a carriage in the street, something so very everyday.

Her words were like a punch to my gut, a gut that had already been sent flip-flopping by the new distinction of her appearance. To hear her speak at all was extraordinary. But on top of that, that she was so casual, so dismissive. The other son. As though I were totally uncentral to her life.

Shall I describe her voice? Husky, totally different from the breathy sibilance of Delia Showalter and her kind, velvet with some grit in it. An unplaceable, childish accent, enchanting.

I was about to greet her—we were old Sandobar pals, after all—but the words stuck in my throat.

Then Winston threw open the door to the central hall, and Freddy and Anna Maria came in, and Nicky spilled into the room also, and I was caught up in their surprised hellos. Rags filled the air with welcoming bellows. At least
she
recognized her master.

Towheaded Nicky plowed into me with a hug. My mother fussed, assuming that I had left school because of illness once again. I assured her I was fine.

“Then why?” Freddy said.

An embarrassed pause. “We’ll talk about it later,” Anna Maria said.

The berdache and Tu-Li entered, and the moment passed with their greetings.

“We have news for you,” Freddy said. He gestured to Bronwyn and took her under his arm when she approached. “Hugo, we’d like to introduce you to your new sister. We’ve given Bronwyn the Delegate name.”

Bronwyn performed the prettiest curtsy that could be demanded of anyone. Maybe she really had become domesticated, over the course of these months when I hadn’t seen her.

“Kiss your brother, dear,” Anna Maria said.

Bronwyn stepped forward and moved to place her lips to mine. Anna Maria said, “On the cheek, dear,” and my new sister tacked to one side. A brief, whispery-soft warmth, the fragrance of oranges.

“We lost her governess!” Nicky said, an unaccountable note of triumph in his voice.

“And why would that be?” I had depended on the fact that a governess might provide a buffer, if one was needed, between my friends and the strange new addition to the family.

“Bronwyn stabbed her,” Nicky said.

“Oh, shush,” Anna Maria said quickly. “It was an accident.”

“The cut was not deep,” Tu-Li said.

Bronwyn turned her face to the window.

“Miss Peel called Bronnie a hellion,” Nicky said. “She said she would never be a member of civilized society.”

Bronnie? He calls her “Bronnie”? “What on earth happened?” I asked.

“It’s too absurd even to recount,” Anna Maria said. “No one’s fault. It seemed Bronwyn carried a scissors of some sort, and Miss Peel turned around hastily, and they collided. . . .”

“There was blood,” Nicky said. “I saw it. Miss Peel shrieked like a stuck pig.”

“When have
you
ever heard a stuck pig?” I asked, mussing his hair.

“They never got along,” Anna Maria said. “The woman could not appreciate the girl’s qualities.”

“Which qualities are those?” I asked.

“She’s a ripping acrobat!” Nicky shouted, and attempted a cartwheel. He landed it, staggered and crashed against a lacquered Chinese stool, knocking it over.

Bronwyn laughed, something I had not often heard her do before.

By my lights Anna Maria’s mothering impulse appeared to be entirely diverted to my new sister. I caught myself responding with a glimmer of jealousy that I could never express outright. But my mother sensed it, since she broke off favoring Bronwyn to place her hands on my shoulders and look searchingly into my face.

“But you’re all right, Hugo, aren’t you?” she said.

“Marvelous,” I said, at least partially propitiated.

“I never know when you are being serious, dear,” Anna Maria said.

“I love you, Mother,” I said. She stood on her tiptoes to kiss me on the forehead, and I glanced beyond the crown of her head to the others in the room, my siblings, two of them now.

In his heart of hearts, Freddy did not care a whit whether I stayed in school or not, so wrapped up was he in his own inscrutable affairs. But he was my father nonetheless.

“Good you’re home, son,” he said, wrapping me in a bear hug. “We need you here.”

13

Shakespeare tells us “it is a wise father that knows his own child,” and wiser still, I’d say, is the child who knows his own father. In the days following my arrival home, Freddy showed himself to be fretful and worried over his new ward. I understood Bronwyn’s rebellion in her studies to be the cause.

I sat in on one of her morning lessons. Deportment, or posture, or some such. Her teacher, an athletic woman named Genevieve Stebbins, had her cornered in the drawing room. Anna Maria attended for moral support.

They had set up a huge gilt-framed mirror and posed Bronwyn in front of it. My newfound sister stared blankly at her reflection. She wore a modest, lace-collared gray gown, her copious hair controlled in French braids.

“Now,” said Mrs. Stebbins, directing her movements. “Drop forearm from elbow as if dead.”

Bronwyn allowed her arm to fall limp, then stuck out her tongue and went cross-eyed. Her imitation of death, I supposed.

“Shake it,” said the teacher. “Vital force arrested at elbow.”

The world waited breathlessly as Mrs. Stebbins was in the process of writing a book. Her inspiration, a performer at the Paris Opéra-Comique named François Delsarte, whose method linked voice, breath and movement as expressive agents of human impulses.

The Delsarte Technique was all the rage.

“These are essential decomposing exercises,” Mrs. Stebbins explained to my mother.

I thought the whole business complete bunkum. But Anna Maria
loved to help with lessons; it was her favorite thing. She felt that it brought her closer to her daughter. Afterward they’d curl up together in front of an open hearth and my mother would read to Bronwyn for hours. All the fairy tales and children’s stories Anna Maria had missed reading to her lost Virginia.

“Don’t hunch, don’t slouch,” barked Mrs. Stebbins at her pupil. “It is rude and ill befits a lady. Also, slumping affects the voice.” She reached out and physically pulled Bronwyn’s shoulders back.

“Not so extreme,” said Anna Maria. “She appears animalistic.”

“He looks at me!” Bronwyn cried. Meaning that I was making her self-conscious.

Mrs. Stebbins told her to never mind.

Bronwyn sat down hard on a straight-backed chair and glared angrily across the room, once more reverting to a farouche child.

“She balks at her lessons and is headstrong in the extreme,” Freddy told me over his after-dinner cigar that evening. “She will be proceeding along fine, making good progress, then suddenly regresses horribly. Anna Maria, really, is the only one who can do anything with her.”

“I rather found her very much changed,” I said. “I noticed it on my return home anyway. She speaks now, for pity’s sake! What was I, fifteen weeks away? You are like a parent who sees his offspring every day and thus doesn’t realize its incremental development, whereas a relative who comes only once or twice a year remarks upon how the child has grown.”

“Well, yes, surely she has changed,” Freddy said. “But when you start at zero, coming up to one or two is no large accomplishment. To be able to introduce her into society, we need her at a ten.”

I suggested that the whole approach might be wrong. That before she could progress, Bronwyn had first to understand why she needed to learn. “You teach her table manners when perhaps she needs philosophy.”

He snorted. “You haven’t worked with her.”

“I will if you want me to,” I said.

He looked at me keenly. “Honestly, I have been contemplating aborting the whole venture.”

“Shipping her back to Dr. Scott,” I said.

“Well, no, that wouldn’t do. Anna Maria would never have it. But, you see, that’s part of the problem. What
would
do? How does one dispose of a half-finished human?”

“Your compassion leaks through your intent,” I said, but I don’t think he detected my sarcasm.

“She reads, you know.”

I was shocked. “She does not.”

“Yes, she does. Whether we have taught her or if she had some dimly remembered learning in her childhood, we don’t know. But if sufficiently coaxed, she can understand a simple text well enough. More and more every day.”

“That is great news, isn’t it?”

“At times she demonstrates a voracious intelligence,” Freddy said. “Quite remarkable. Except, notably, in the moral sphere, where she is an imbecile. And there’s something else, too. I can’t deny she has a quality of self that is very attractive to people. She has charmed the household staff. Winston is taken with her. They slip her delicacies when she is confined to her room.”

“Do you confine her often?”

“When the occasion warrants, more often lately than before. I don’t know what can be troubling her. We give her a place at our table, dress her sumptuously, she has every luxury. We spend a fortune on her toilette. Her willfulness smacks of ingratitude.”

“You are asking a great deal of the girl, Freddy, attempting to cram years of education into just a few months. Professor James refers to the process as ‘socialization.’ It’s very complex. She’s not some trick pony.”

“You said you would help, Hugo. Will you see what you can do with her? Perhaps a guiding hand, one nearer to her own age, a dear sibling, patient and understanding . . .”

“Don’t lay it on too thick,” I said.

“Anna Maria and I have been invited on a weekend away to Edward Livingston’s country place. This is an example of a social affair to which we cannot possibly take Bronwyn in her present state. We have been terribly constrained in all our engagements, in fact,
oftentimes having to leave her behind with Nicholas and Mrs. Herbert, the poor girl a virtual prisoner.”

Mrs. Herbert acted as our head housekeeper and was a capable no-nonsense woman. Nicky had his nurse also, but somehow I did not feel them a match for Bronwyn.

“Take her into the park,” Freddy said. “Take her on the ferry, read to her—that always soothes her—but take her in hand, will you? See what you can do, because I tell you right now, I am at my wit’s end with her.”

I had seen it before, one of my father’s projects somehow not playing out precisely the way he expected it to, how he could jettison an obsession and move on as if it were only a passing whim. His collection of exotic lepidopterans left unfinished, half the specimens unpinned. He embarked upon a campaign against mediums who claimed they could communicate with the dead, dropping it abruptly. He began and then abandoned an assemblage of Bibles that had stopped bullets during the War of the Rebellion.

Bronwyn would be discarded, too, relegated to the status of an urchin-in-residence or perhaps kept chained in the attic like Edward Rochester’s mad wife.

Thus it was a few days after my talk with Freddy, equipping myself with a bullwhip, a cattle goad, a pair of ready manacles and a flask of whiskey (only the last being the truth), I hied myself forth with Nicky and Bronwyn for an afternoon constitutional in the Central Park.

When we left the house, Bronwyn in a demure funnel bonnet with a satin bow, we all but bumped into a forlorn little group standing just outside the door, gaping upward at our windows. Two women, a man and two children, huddled together, looking at us as though we had stepped out of a dream.

“Coming through, coming through!” announced Nicky, holding out his arm as though to move them aside.

“A moment,” I said. It was not a surprise to find them there. For as long as we had been at the Citadel, we had seen a steady stream of gawkers and curiosity seekers, some of whom trekked the eighty
blocks from the East Side docks to see the house. Freddy employed Paul the doorman primarily to hustle such onlookers away.

As I fumbled past our admirers, Bronwyn paused and removed from the pocket of her cloak a little velvet purse. She untied its ribbon and with pretty, delicate movements, proceeding from one to the other, beginning with the children, deposited a coin into the hand of each. When she got to the father, finding her purse exhausted, she reached into her pocket again, this time pulling out a white handkerchief, which she solemnly conveyed to the man.

The gape-mouthed grouping parted for us then, and we moved across the avenue into the park.

Evidently my brother and my new sister had ventured into Olmsted and Vaux’s American masterpiece many times before. The two of them walked confidently forward as we entered the commons at East Sixtieth, via Scholars’ Gate, its name marked prominently on a stone plinth beside the portal.

“Do you know the role of the scholar in society, Bronwyn?” I asked, thinking to begin my lessons slantwise. In reply she scampered off with Nicky up Wien Walk, in a race toward the not-yet-frozen skating pond, leaving me trailing behind.

I soon realized that if I thought of taking them to the park, they in fact were taking me. The two of them treated the whole sprawling expanse as their backyard. Riding the bridle trails together almost every day. Bronwyn showing herself to be nowhere as much at home as on a horse.

We headed west, deeper into the park, skirting the Zoo and stopping at the Dairy for some fresh milk. I attempted to use the occasion for a discourse on the Dairy building itself, and Calvert Vaux’s excellent grasp of Victorian Gothic architecture, but Bronwyn and Nicky were too busy comparing milk mustaches.

“Nicky wants the Carousel,” Bronwyn said.

“I do not,” Nicky said. “I’m too old for that business.”

He turned out to be an eager child after all, however, since when we approached the amusement, he dutifully took his place in the line, leaving me alone with Bronwyn.

Gesturing to a black-streaked rock outcropping nearby, I was about to launch into a précis on the geology of Manhattan schist and gneiss, planning to crown my talk with a superb pun (“One is schist as gneiss as the other”). But Bronwyn abruptly took my hand and led me to the rear of the merry-go-round, where a dirt ramp descended toward an understory.

“I don’t think the public is allowed here,” I said. She dragged me down along the incline anyway.

The Carousel had a lower level. At the terminus of the ramp, a pair of weathered wooden doors hung half off their hinges. She dropped my hand, slipped one of hers into the gap between the panels and sprang the latch.

“You are going to get us into trouble.”

She didn’t listen but stepped forward into the darkened interior. Above, the calliope gave off its manic music and the painted wooden horsies went round and round. I felt the scene turning bizarre. Not knowing what else to do, I followed her through the barely cracked door.

Inside, one of the more curious displays in all of New York. In the musty basement, two ancient, swaybacked mules plodded around a circular dirt track, hitched to the center pole of the Carousel, their pathetic straining providing the power that turned the ride. I recollected the Toad, turning the tub at Dr. Scott’s sideshow. The beasts performed their labors all out of sight of the merrymakers only a few feet above them.

No groom or boy watched over the mules. A bell rang, they halted. Two bells rang, they trudged forward again.

“Blind,” Bronwyn said, approaching them during one of their respites.

The strangeness of the tableau trumped my thoughts of trespass, and I followed her onto the track. She fished into her frock and brought out a folded paper, which when opened proved to contain sugar. The first mule strained at its harness to get at the treat, lapping it eagerly with a hideous red-gray mop of a tongue.

The bell sounded twice, the mules lurched forward, forcing the Carousel upstairs to revolve. We walked alongside them.

“This one is Archie, and that one is Maud,” Bronwyn told me.

The scene really did have a wonderful incongruity to it. I could hear the squeals of the children above us, my brother being one of them, though probably not among those so undignified to cry out.

The multicolored fantasia of the Carousel, its public face up top, contrasted sharply with the sad spectacle in the pit. The children, whirling about without care, while here underneath was the truth of things.

Archie and Maud had consumed their sugar and were chomping on the paper envelope. Nicky stuck his head through the door.

“Let’s go,” he said. “It’s almost time.”

Time for what?
I wanted to ask, but felt myself borne along by their enthusiasm and by something else as well, their grasp of the secrets of a place that I had lived directly across Fifth Avenue from for years now but did not really know.