Savage Girl (20 page)

Freddy told me it was a fairly new phenomenon, within his lifetime, this passion on the part of the mob to spectate on the affairs of the wealthy. The newspapers reported breathlessly about the “uppertens,” as they referred to the wealthiest ten percent of the population. Caroline Hood, the reigning queen of society, told us she kept away from the windows of her mansion at Thirty-eighth and Fifth, in order to avoid the prying eyes of the public.

I guided Bronwyn around the block, up Third Avenue to Fifteenth, down the street to the rear of the hall.

“Now, don’t ask where we are going,” I said. “You are in perfectly good hands.”

At the back of the enormous Academy of Music structure, a door stood partially open, yellow light spilling out to the street. A stagehand loitered outside, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

“We’ll just be a minute,” I said, slipping one of the new silver twenty-cent pieces into his palm.

Up one back staircase, then the next, then the next, all of them dirty and untended but with Bronwyn never uttering a complaint. We finally reached the door I was seeking.

It opened onto the manager’s box, far up the side of the theater, one level above the parterres, so high the blaze of the orblike chandelier struck us blind at first. We overlooked the nobby assembly down below, swirls of satin, men in stark and shining black, decorative arrangements of flowers so towering that you could smell their perfume even from our elevation.

Also in the air, a sensual electricity, from the touch of the men and women as they moved about the room together. But that might have been my imagining.

Bronwyn stared downward, cheeks flushed, eyes shining, clearly enthralled.

“They own the world,” I murmured, putting my lips close to her ear. “The ones down there. It is not so much their wealth, though there is that. It is entrée. The ability to go wherever one wants.”

I thought that would appeal to her, but it was not enough. “Another thing: These people are bulletproof. If you join their ranks, whatever trouble you encounter, whatever threat you face, you can get out from under it merely by being one of their number.”

She drew her gaze from the dance floor and looked at me, her hazel eyes searching mine. How pretty she was, I thought, how honest.

“Are you in trouble, Bronwyn?”

She shook her head. “Don’t try to help,” she said.

“But I want to. Whyever shouldn’t I?”

“Because I’m poison,” she said.

“What? What do you mean?” She looked away, and I let it drop. I decided I didn’t after all really want to know what she meant by that.

“One last thought, very important,” I said. “You cannot take society seriously. You must, must, must treat this all as a game. Otherwise you are lost. You can have it as long as you don’t want it.”

“A beautiful game,” she murmured, looking down again at the elegant couples. Strains of music filtered up to us. The cotillion was about to begin.

“A bird in my hair?” Bronwyn asked.

“It doesn’t have to be with a bird,” I said.

Outside on the street, I realized I had made a blunder. Instead of directing Randall to bring the carriage around to the back of the hall, I had left him parked in front, at the entrance. Returning to the brougham, we encountered the two people I had no wish at all to see.

Beverly Willets and Delia Showalter.

They spied us just as we slipped into the carriage.

“Delegate!” Willets roared out, alerting the whole crowd to my presence. Delia looked stricken. I waved uncertainly.

“Go, go, go!” I called to Randall, wanting him to get us out of there before I was forced to engage in what would have been an awkward conversation.

16

I wanted Bronwyn to come into my world, the real world, the precisely cut diamond of Manhattan society, and I now believed she wanted it, too. We recognized a shared goal. The alchemy of that evening spent spying upon the Patriarchs’ Ball rendered our relationship much clearer.

Later that night, into the early morning, as if in reward for our newfound intimacy, we sat before a dying fire in Freddy’s library and Bronwyn told me her story.

Her words, while she traced her background from childhood to the present day, served to bind us as close together as any brother and sister ever could be. To say that the facts of her life newly altered my feelings for her would be misleading, since those feelings had been in constant transformation since the day I first set eyes on her in Dr. Scott’s barn.

We did not finish talking until the dawn came up, imbuing the leafless winter dogwoods in the park with a ghostly materialism. The recounting had a good effect. In the weeks that followed her confession, Bronwyn applied herself to her studies with such focus and enthusiasm that everyone remarked upon it, from Freddy to the tutors to the household staff.

Bronwyn was, in a word, tireless.

“You’ve worked a miracle, dear boy,” my father said, giving me all the credit.

Freddy and Anna Maria set the last day of February as the date for her debut, and all our efforts were geared toward that. Bronwyn had progressed to the degree that by New Year’s week we felt she was ready to take her first tentative step into society.

Dancing school.

Specifically, Madame Eugénie’s Académie de Danse, attendance at which was de rigueur in our circle—

•   •   •

Wait, wait, Bill Howe interrupts me again. You’re jumping ahead.

Yes?

Well, you can’t do that, he says.

Do what?

Tell it that way. Mention that the girl has told you her story and then slide over it as an inconsequential detail.

Bronwyn’s story is well known by now, isn’t it?

Howe splutters. But . . . but . . . but—there are so many different versions, from the newspapers, the authorities, even the clergy, it is imperative we hear the account she relayed to you. With utter completeness, if you will, Mr. Hugo, with utter completeness.

Might that not derail the momentum of the narrative, I say, by entering us into a previous chronological period? Doesn’t Aristotle preach a strict unity of time?

Bugger Aristotle, Howe says.

From what I’ve heard of the great man, I say, he might enjoy that.

Howe says, Go back, if you please. Leave nothing out. That evening after your visit to the Patriarchs’ Ball. What she told you.

Bronwyn’s Story

My life comes out of a cloud of not knowing. The truth is, I don’t have a birthday, I don’t know how old I am. Sixteen or seventeen or eighteen. Which means I was born sometime before 1860.

I don’t remember my papa. I remember Mama better. My father had a beard, a black beard. He used to come into where we were, in whatever camp it was, all dirty from work. He did mining.

I think we came from Wales. That’s what occurred to me during my geography lessons with Freddy. Mama talking about Wales. Or maybe Cornwall, since either Cornwall or Wales is where the mine
workers in America always come from. But I think I remember her telling me about our village in Wales. Her mother and father. They were coal miners.

This is hard for me, since all I have is pieces. A baby cradle in front of the fire. Mama could never nurse, she had no milk. The baby cried. My mother’s hands smelled clean from the washtub. My father’s smooth, dark hair and his eyes that were serious so much of the time. Once I was able to look into mirrors, I came to believe that I had his eyes.

I’m not sure about any of it. We lived first back east, and I don’t remember how we got west. There was a lot of walking, but it could have been anywhere. Both my parents pushed wheelbarrows full of our things, and at night we’d turn the barrows on their sides and put our canvas over them and that was where we slept. Glynn, the baby, died.

We were in Colorado. After all the flat country, seeing the mountains for the first time was one of my clearest early memories. Standing there staring at them. I can close my eyes right now and see them still. The peaks with snow on them made me feel tiny.

We were very poor, but everyone was poor, so it didn’t matter. We’d go to a camp, stay for a while, then move on. I don’t remember the names of the camps. Leadville, I think. They were sad places.

I learned to read from the family Bible, sounding out sentences to Mama as she did her work. I could write my name. I was always smart, always ahead. My mother gave me instruction, as much as she had time for. She handed me a stick to write with in the dust. The letters came easily for me.

In Colorado they hung my father and three other men for stealing gold they dug but that wasn’t theirs. They made the whole camp watch the hanging. Mama covered my eyes, but I looked.

We went south along the mountains. Somebody called them the Blood of Christ Mountains. And there we found paradise. Like in Genesis: “And a river went out of Eden to water the garden.” Everything was beautiful and sunny and fresh.

Mr. Hugh Brace, my next papa, took care of us. He was a hunter,
and there was always lots of game and fish in the streams. We even had a cabin. I sang a hymn to the camp. I can see the close, dark walls we lived within. I remember the window and how the sun came in and made a patch on the dirt floor, and how glad we were for the sunlight. For a miner, light is precious.

Then Mr. Brace said we all had to go. I couldn’t understand why we had to leave, but we went south again. Along the mountains. Every sunset was like fire. And that was when I was taken by the Numunuh. I must have been about four or five. They rode down on the train of wagons we were with, and first they drove off the stock. I didn’t know what was happening, but everyone was crying, so I cried, too. Darkness and a storm of horse hooves.

Rough hands yanked the back of my pinafore, throwing me across the pony behind the rider. This was Tabekwine, Sun-Eagle, my next father. I cried, and he cracked me across the cheek, so I didn’t cry anymore, not out loud anyway.

We rode for days and nights, changing off ponies. I slept tied to the mane. I was thirsty, hungry. He gave me some chopped-up corn from a little pouch and a piece of greasy dried meat.

After a while I ached so and was exhausted and sunstruck. I wanted nothing apart from getting down off the pony.

Until that day I had never been on a horse before. After that I was rarely off one. I cried every day for the next month. A woman took care of me sometimes, Nautda. I called her “Old Mother.” Her children, Cos and Ogin.

My white skin made me strange, but I soon burned brown. No one harmed me, no one beat me, I was free. They let me keep a doll, the only thing I had from my old life. I made deerskin clothes for it, learning to sew with sinew.

It is difficult to believe, I am sure, the way you live here in New York City, that my life among the Numunuh was anything but a hardship. It wasn’t. After a time I began to be happy. The children were let go. We could do anything. We raced ponies in the arroyos. We all had our own bows. I could put an arrow into a knothole better than any of my brothers. They called me Naivi, which just means “girl.” They loved me.

Let’s say you are like the wizard Merlin in the books Nicky reads to me and had magic and could say to me, “I will fly you back to life among the Numunuh.” You would think that I wouldn’t go, that of course this life now in New York City is better. The one in the lodges, where everything smelled like smoke, where I was wild, that is a poor life, you would say.

But for me, in my heart, it’s different. I might go or I might not, but it would be a hard choice. I am a Numunuh girl. Those years made me who I am. They made me free.

We never called ourselves Comanche. That was the name others gave us, the Mexicans, I think. It means “Those Who Want to Fight Us All the Time.” Given all the horses we stole and the wars we fought, I can’t blame anyone for naming us that. We were Lords of the World.

After I had spent two summers with them, Sun-Eagle and Naudta took me as their own daughter. I might have been seven. They led me into a lodge, and an elder lifted me up in the smoke of the fire four times, saying, “Her name is Hutsu.” It meant “bird,” and after that I was really a part of the clan.

We began to move. Something had changed. I heard the word
taiboo,
meaning “white men.” I think this was at the end of your big war, when the cavalry came west again and pushed hard against my people. We ran, but there seemed nowhere to run.

Then Sun-Eagle began to follow a wise elder named Victory Dance, who had a vision that we must cross the mountains and the great desert to find peace from the
taiboo.
Some of us went and some others did not. I left behind many of my friends then.

The march across the desert killed us all. Nautda died, then Sun-Eagle. And there was no peace, no paradise. At the end of the desert, only more mountains and more
taiboo.
The soldiers captured Victory Dance and scattered the clan. It was a disaster. I was lost among these new mountains in a land I had never known.

Then, for a long time, I was alone. This will be the part you will choose not to believe. I knew what berries and green shoots to eat, I could fashion a bow and arrows, and I could hunt, but I still felt a loneliness in my heart. I went deeper into the hills. I found a valley, huge
and empty of people. I thought if I ever saw another
taiboo,
I would be murdered. So I made this big valley my hidden home.

I discovered a group of caves. In one of them, a hot springs formed a pool all the way at its back, warm and clean year round. The pool I named Kaatu, and it was holy to me. It was my religion. I bathed every day as if I were worshipping.

This is the part I hesitate to let anybody hear.

It is not that I am ashamed.

But it is so difficult, I think, for people to understand. You have not been in my shoes, is that how you say it? Funny, since I never wore shoes until I came to you.

One day I hunted in the forested hills near the caves, searching out a kind of mushroom I knew grew under the trees there. I heard something then that I didn’t think possible: the crying of my infant brother, Glynn, a soft sobbing when he was beginning to get hungry but when my mother couldn’t nurse him.

Maybe solitude had made me crazy. I walked in the direction of the sound. I looked to the ground, to see if there was really a baby anywhere nearby.

And, in fact, there was.

The cat crouched near the body of its dead mother. When I say cat, I should say kitten. This fuzzy creature had giant ears as big as yours, Hugo, and stood about as tall as my knee. She just kept up her crying, the most forlorn sound I ever heard.

The Numunuh taught me caution as the first rule of the wild. I wasn’t sure it was a wise idea, coming up on an untamed animal, even a young one.

But with its mother gone, I reached out to the kitten. The animal lifted her head but continued her crying. I went down on my knees. Very slowly I reached out and touched the cat’s fur. Soft, softer than anything, a newborn softness.

The kitten’s pelt might be tawny-colored, like a cougar, but the dead body of her adult mama bore a quilt of dark spots, some looking like paw prints, others a single black rose, and every shape in between.

Jaguar. That is the name I have since found in one of Freddy’s books here in the library. The Numunuh would have said
wah-ew.

Terror, delight, mother feelings, these all rushed through me as I began to stroke the little cat. Her whiskers were the length of my fingers. Her paws were almost the size of my fists. She showed me needle teeth already as long as my thumb.

The kitten now quieted, rolling over to have her belly scratched. Downy, cream-colored tufts.

I wasn’t going to go back to my cave alone.

I buried the mother (dead from I couldn’t find out what, no marks on the body) and picked up the kitten (she squalled in my arms, complaining loudly).