Savage Girl (33 page)

I searched his words for irony or disapproval. How could I explain?

“She was so beautiful at her debut, so perfect.” I said. “Everyone loved her. And then it all fell apart.”

We stood in the middle of the Yard, in front of Mass Hall, and the shadows tumbled stone blue all around us. A ripple of coolness passed through the air. Alice pulled her shawl close.

I said, “A shooting, a stabbing, a boy’s body and all the flood of stories—it’s no wonder she went away.” I wiped my eyes. “She went to the Woodhulls, yes.”

“Is she unhappy?” asked Alice.

“The odd thing is, I don’t think so. I don’t know. When she left us, it looked as though she were embarking on a grand adventure.”

“She’ll have an adventure, certainly, with those women,” said Alice as we resumed walking back toward Quincy Street.

“And my heart is so sick,” said I. “I wanted to protect her. To care for her. But those things are impossible.”

“What will you do?” asked Alice.

“What
is
there to do?” I said. I suddenly remembered Bev’s absurd words of advice: All you’ve got to do is shave your beard. But where would that get me?

“There is only one thing for it,” said Alice.

“Tell me,” I begged. For some reason my heart felt totally open to the tiny woman with the sad eyes, my professor’s invalid sister.

“You have got to fall in love,” she said.

“Funny,” said William James, “I was just thinking that.”

•   •   •

I did not resort to St. Alban’s sanatorium. I took the night train home from Boston and walked out of the Grand Central Depot into a brand-new springtime morning.

Manhattan in May. I wondered, for an uncharacteristically euphoric moment, whether there could be any more exciting place on earth. I had to remind myself I was miserable. The mildness of the air tempered the usual street cacophony. Calm self-satisfaction showed on all the handsome passing faces. The lions in the jungle were happy.

Half a block toward Fifth, I entered a storefront barbershop and had the man render me clean-shaven. The strop of the straight razor, the hot towel, the blade at my throat. And I was a newborn babe.

As I walked north, a hot, soft pretzel materialized in my hand. Eventually the green of the park rose up into view like the opening of a picture book. We Delegates could pull through this financial nightmare, I thought bravely. Plus, Bronwyn was in the world, she was somewhere in this city, drinking coffee and wearing Turkish slippers (though not bloomers, I hoped) and smiling her Bronwyn smile.

I had been told to fall in love. It wasn’t hard. I discovered myself already there.

Swoony’s manservant, Mike, shut the door behind me, and I dropped my bag onto the floor and sighed. A deep and dark stairhall, taste that hadn’t changed in years.

“Hugo, dear,” I heard Swoony call. “In here, darling!”

Swoony’s downstairs parlor was the usual place to find her now. I walked in the door talking. “That coastal to Boston
is
really fast, Grandmo—”

Bronwyn sat on the divan beside my grandmother. Clad in a dress of tangerine silk that fell in a pool around her feet. Her lustrous, wavy hair she wore loose around her shoulders. She had changed her appearance, though. I realized that she had cut her hair in a fringe across
her brow, the new style called “bangs” that all the girls would now describe as “charming.”

She rested her hazel eyes on me, a luminous gaze that worked to stop me in my tracks every time.

“Oh,” I said. For some reason I began to back out, as if I had blundered into a private place.

“Hugo, stay, stay, of course,” said Swoony. “We have a guest.” She toasted me with her teacup.

I hadn’t noticed, being overwhelmed by the mere fact of Bronwyn, but there was another woman present.

Seated across from the divan, in the soft velvet chair that we called “the comfortable one,” the elderly lady wore black from head to toe, shabby black, offset by a bright white handkerchief in her lap. At first I thought that Swoony in her unpredictable way had invited a potential housekeeper in for an interview and was now feeding her tea. The woman’s hair, too, was black, a deep, wavy black, pulled up and pinned in back.

Bronwyn’s black hair.

“Hugo,” said Bronwyn. It was the first I had heard her voice in a month. “This is my mother, Mallt Bowen.”

I stood there. Her mother now. So. She didn’t spring from a god’s forehead after all.

“I’m grateful to make your acquaintance,” said Mallt. Her voice faint, with a Gaelic lilt.

As in a dream, I stepped over and bowed to Bronwyn’s mother. Her real mother. Even if I hadn’t been introduced, it would quickly have become obvious. I looked into her face and saw Bronwyn’s brow, Bronwyn’s nose, Bronwyn’s mouth.

“Excuse me,” she said, and spit bloody sputum into the handkerchief.

“How did . . . ?” I said—to the mother or the daughter or Swoony, whoever knew—asking how this impossible reunion had come to pass.

“Freddy found her,” Bronwyn said.

“We missed our daughter,” said Bronwyn’s mother. “We missed
her ever so much. We knew she was taken by those terrible savages. We thought she’d been kilt for sure.”

Swoony petted Bronwyn’s hair. “That’s our Virginia,” she said.

Looking momentarily puzzled, Mallt said, “We heard all the mining jobs was down in Argentina, so we went there.”

“But how did you hear about Bronwyn?”

“A man come looking for us,” she said. “A man your father sent. And Bronwyn kept her name, you see. Didn’t you, darling?”

“Virginia,” purred Swoony.

“I lost Hugh Brace along the way, Bronwyn’s stepfather. He had the consumption. But I made it here, I did.”

“Yes, you did, Mother,” said Bronwyn.

“And there’s only one Delegate family in town,” said Mallt. “You was easy to find.”

“Virginia Delegate,” said Swoony, sipping.

“I don’t like those folks that crowd the streets here,” Mallt said. “Ugly people, ugly.”

“It’s all right,” said Bronwyn.

A coughing spasm racked her mother, the daughter moved to position the old lady more comfortably in the chair, and Mallt Bowen lapsed into a closed-eye meditation.

My emotions piled up like storm clouds. I cannot let anything unsteady me, I told myself. I crossed to the window.

“And Bronwyn,” I said, finally facing her. “You’ve returned.”

“I missed Nicky,” she said. She joined me at the window.

“Really,” I said.

“Those women are false,” she said. “Woodhull and Claflin. I couldn’t trust them after all. Then Freddy sent for me, and I heard I might have a living mother. So here I am.”

Her eyes held me. “You’ve shaved.”

I trembled inwardly, standing so close. The scent of oranges. “You know, you have a small macula,” I said.

Bronwyn stiffened. “A what?”

“A speck,” I said. What was I saying? Babbling on. “Just a little black bar on the rim of the iris. In your left eye. I’ve noticed it before.”

She appeared alarmed. My face felt hot.

“It’s nothing,” I said quickly. “I’m sorry I mentioned it.”

Bronwyn turned away, flustered, and went to Mallt, then knelt and laid her head in the woman’s lap. “I’ll never leave you,” she murmured. But she still looked strangely back at me.

I didn’t know whether to put my arms around the two of them or warn the mother that she had a killer for a daughter.

“What should we do now?” I asked.

“Drink tea,” said Swoony.

26

I wish I could tell you that it was all sunshine and roses from there on in. Nicky returned from exile at Cousin Willie’s. We were a family again, he and Bronwyn and Freddy and Anna Maria and I. But we were like a vase cracked and put back together without glue. One touch could make us fall apart again.

How I read it: Bronwyn had left us in order to be free, and she returned because she was willing to sacrifice that freedom to be with her mother. She knew we would take Mallt in.

Toward me she appeared skittish. When I entered a room, she often as not left it. During the day she stayed by her mother’s side, making sure she was comfortable, helping the nurse whom Swoony had hired. We came slowly to grasp how completely illness had taken over the woman.

We could thank Freddy for Mallt Bowen, and for the few details that she summoned forth regarding Bronwyn’s early life. It took a while, but Freddy’s hired detectives finally tracked down the story of a child taken by wild Indians, a couple bereft, their subsequent travel to South America. Found, too late, the stepfather dead, the mother dying.

Bronwyn had been born in the Port of Philadelphia on July 19, 1857, on the first day of Dan and Mallt Bowen’s arrival in the United States from Wales. The family relocated to the coalfields of northeastern Pennsylvania, then, with the Civil War raging, to the mining towns of Colorado. In an unheralded Comanche raid, she was taken, aged four, in late spring 1862.

So her real name was Bronwyn Bowen. Her real age, eighteen.

Bronwyn might have acted the dutiful daughter during the day, but in the evening she continued to leave the house. Not covertly, dressed as a boy, as she used to, but openly, brazenly.

The ostensible reason, she said, was her charity work with women of the night. She had recruited Edna Croker into the task. Recovering after the Fifth Avenue Hotel tragedy, Edna felt well enough to engage in the pursuit, especially since it meant spending time with her beloved Bronwyn. Several times Colm went with them as a bodyguard, if their target neighborhood was particularly low.

“They pass out bundles,” Colm said when I asked after Bronwyn’s nighttime activities. “She’s keen to get them fallen ladies engaged as seamstresses. They have a doctor with them, and some nurses.”

“And afterward?” I asked. “She goes out?”

“Afterward she comes home,” Colm said. “At least she did when I was along.”

I didn’t entirely trust his account. He appeared to have become a complete Bronwyn partisan. I was surrounded by them. I was also stung she hadn’t invited me to accompany her on her missions of mercy.

Love is a coin played often for its obverse, jealousy. My lovesick neediness appeared not to impress Bronwyn. She continued to avoid me and, when we spent time together, to act distracted and remote.

I swear that I did not actively spy on her. Knowing at least that much, that a sure way to kill love is to worry it.

Why did I follow her that particular night? All that day and the day before, there had been a flurry of activity on her part for which I could not fully account—hurried meetings in the stairhall with Edna Croker, notes sent by messenger, notes received. Something was clearly up.

“The last two missives were to the Showalter place,” Mike the butler told me when I buttonholed him.

“Showalter? That can’t be,” I said.

“Before that, two from Croker, then two more to Croker,” Mike said.

Colm told me he had no idea what was happening, if indeed something was. “Young ladies,” he said, as if that explained it all.

Which it very well could have. But my feelings for Bronwyn were not to be denied. I could not simply settle into an evening of anatomical drawing and forget about her.

A thunderstorm hammered in from the west, bringing hail that afternoon and a drenching rain afterward.

“I hope you have the good sense of staying in tonight,” Anna Maria said to Bronwyn at dinner.

“I’m going to Edna Croker’s,” Bronwyn said. “Her family is having an evening at home.”

“I suppose that’s all right,” Nicky said, assuming the pompous air of a social secretary. “Although I might wish for a more exalted company. The Crokers remain not quite comme il faut.”

“Don’t be precocious, dear,” Anna Maria said.

“They are the only family that will accept me as a guest,” Bronwyn said.

“A recital?” I asked.

“You shan’t come,” she said to me, a tad abruptly, I thought. Softening, she said, “You’d be extremely bored. Bel canto, not to your taste.”

You are lying,
the green-eyed monster within me said.

“Take the barouche,” Freddy said, forgetting we had already sold it.

“She’s picking me up in her coach,” Bronwyn said.

Stormy as it was that night, I made it my business to be waiting in the darkness of Sixty-third Street as the Croker coach pulled up in front of Swoony’s. Mike helped in a heavily veiled Bronwyn. Edna herself, whom I glimpsed as the coachman passed down Fifth, appeared veiled also. I followed them downtown.

The pelting rain transformed the graveled avenue into slop. My suspicions rose to new heights when the coach stopped at Forty-second and Fifth for a new passenger, a woman who left a second carriage parked alongside the reservoir and quickly climbed inside the coach with Edna and Bronwyn. In the rain, that it was indeed a female was all I could see, since furthermore her face remained totally obscured by veils, scarves and wraps.

The coach abruptly swung back north, turning in the middle of
the thoroughfare. I had to pull my mount smartly around to prevent myself from being seen. I needn’t have bothered, for in the next moment the Croker coach pulled to the curb. The trio of occupants got out and, shielding their heads from the downpour, transferred to a hansom cab.

More and more strange. I couldn’t imagine what it was all about, but I didn’t like the feel of it. Back up Fifth Avenue, a block past the rising scaffolds of the Catholic cathedral a-building, to arrive at an elegant, four-story chocolate-stucco mansion at the northeast corner of Fifty-second Street.

The place’s somewhat forbidding aspect stemmed from the dearth of gaslight around it. Oddly, that specific stretch of Fifth lacked streetlamps. Most houses at least illuminated their own doorways and grounds, out of a sense of display or for simple safety. Not so this one, which stood well shrouded by the night, to be only occasionally lit by fissures of lightning.

The three women left the cab, did not approach the front door of the house but instead proceeded along a dark walkway to the side until they were swallowed by the gloom.

The caper began to feel dangerous to me. Whatever they were up to, it did not involve a stay-at-home vocal recital under the watchful gazes of Mr. and Mrs. Croker.

Thoroughly drenched, acting entirely on impulse, I hitched my mount across Fifth Avenue and plunged down the little walkway myself, wishing at least to establish into what door my quarry had disappeared. But when I rounded the back corner of the mansion, I blundered directly into them in the dark.

I make a poor footpad, but in my defense the three of them were dressed head to toe in black, the entrance they stood before was unlit, plus the rain obscured all.

Edna Croker emitted a little gasping shriek as I collided with her.

“Hugo,” I heard Bronwyn hiss. Two things happened. The anonymous woman with them collapsed into a faint, and the door in front of which we stood cracked open, allowing a thin gleam of yellow light to emerge.

By that illumination I saw that the third veiled woman, slumped lifelessly now in Edna Croker’s arms, was Delia Showalter.

I felt weak in the knees myself.

“Don’t you go down, too, damn you,” Bronwyn said, seizing my arm.

“What’s happening here?” I asked. I meant it as a demand, but it came out more resembling a yelp.

“Bronwyn Bowen,” Bronwyn announced to the maidservant who had opened the door. The servant nodded but then reclosed the door sharply.

“Bronwyn,” I said.

“Oh, my God,” Delia moaned, coming back to life. “Oh, my precious God.” She turned her face to the corner of the doorway.

“Why’d you have to come?” Bronwyn asked, her voice fierce.

“Now that he’s here, we need him,” Edna whispered to her. “We need a man.”

Bronwyn shook her head, dismissive. “He won’t be able to take it.”

The maidservant opened the door again, beckoning us in.

“I have to know what’s going on,” I said.

Bronwyn hesitated, then put her face into mine. “We’re in trouble. You make a scene, you do anything except keep your mouth shut and look pretty, I’ll slice open your guts and feed them to Rags.”

The imperative in her words impressed me—authoritarian yes, but with a desperate pleading mixed in, too. Such was her sway over me that I could not, at that moment, do anything except exactly as Bronwyn commanded. I meekly followed them into the dark-lit mansion for I knew not what purpose.

A parlor or waiting room of sorts, replicating the gloom outside by utilizing only a single candelabrum for its uncertain glow. The hearth unlit. Flowered carpets, velvet curtains, engravings of Dutch masterworks hung on the wall beside the ormolu mantel clock. An air of restrained opulence. It did not feel to me like a brothel, but there was something mercantile about it, not a private home. A smell of carbolic in the air.

The maidservant had disappeared, and when she returned I caught
a quick glimpse of the interior: two women walking side by side in loose kimono-style white robes. From somewhere deep within the house, the squall of an infant.

“Madam Restell will soon be with you,” said the maidservant.

With those words the scales fell from my eyes and I felt the world crashing down upon me.

•   •   •

Everyone knew Madam Restell. She had become wealthy even before the war, but after that time her fortune, one of the first big mail-order fortunes ever, rivaled those of some of the wealthiest men in Manhattan. She didn’t earn respect for it, though, but hatred.

Madam Restell helped women to adopt out babies, and she helped women avoid having babies, too. People commonly jeered and spit at her elegant carriage as it conveyed her openly about the town.

I felt it impossible to recover my equilibrium. Madam Restell! “The Most Evil Woman in New York!” A living, breathing, walking scandal, a tempting target for every preacher and Puritan, subject of tirade after tirade in the press.

Naturally, I did not track the exact movements of such an odious personality, but the last I heard, she operated out of an unassuming yellow clapboard house in Greenwich Village. Now here she was on Fifth Avenue, having come up in the world.

Madam Restell, who advertised as a female physician in the
Herald,
promoting herself as a dispenser of pills and nostrums:

Madam Restell’s experience and knowledge in the treatment of cases of female irregularity, is such as to require but a few days to effect a perfect cure.

Madam Restell, abortionist.

I flung myself into one of the upholstered chairs in the waiting room. A boiling wrath erupted inside me and I leaped back to my feet. Somehow I directed my anger not against Bronwyn, the guilty party, but against Delia.

“How could you bring her here?” I snarled, seizing Delia by the arm, wrenching her hand from her weeping eyes.

Delia shrank away as if in horror. “Please, please, please, we must leave!” she cried.

Bronwyn moved in between us.

“No, no, this is not right,” I said. I grabbed Bronwyn and looked her square in the face. “You must have the child!”

She took a single step back.

I spoke quickly to her, a flurry of pleading. “I don’t care who knows, we will accept it into our family, your lying-in, everything will be taken care of, but not this! Not this! Please, Bronwyn. Keep the child!”

Competing angers battled for my attention. Anger toward the man who had spoiled my love. Bev? One of the Bliss brothers? The Gypsy dancer? The candidates were many. Anger toward Delia and Edna, conspirators who had brought Bronwyn to this awful house of shame.

And then the woman herself entered to us, Madam Restell, in a rich black silk gown, lace mantilla trimmed in fur, white satin bonnet. The very luxury of her costume enraged me. It seemed the height of indignity that this woman, who I featured at that moment should be flung into the pits of hell, instead walked the earth in finery.