Savage Girl (34 page)

“Miss Bowen,” she said in a calm voice, moving forward to take Bronwyn’s hand. “This must be too, too sad for you and your”—looking at us, choosing her words—“friends.”

Wanting to pound her to the floor, I remained paralyzed in her presence.

“All will be well,” Restell said. “I have stood in this room with countless weeping females and seen those same young ladies but a short month later, all gay and laughing in carriages on the concourses of the Central Park.”

“We should go!” Delia cried out.

“Now is not the time to lose your nerve,” Restell said, still addressing Bronwyn. She turned to me. “And this? Is this the man responsible?”

The strangeness of the surroundings, the appalling circumstance I found myself fallen into, most of all Bronwyn’s degraded status served
to rob me entirely of words. I could not answer Madam Restell. I would have known my lines, if I could have but said them, drawing myself up like the hero in a melodrama. “Me, madam? I am not her betrayer! But I shall be her avenger!”

“Yes, yes,” Restell said, as if responding to my unspoken sentiment. “It is always the same. The men are always right, but it is the women who are wronged.”

Edna wept, too, now, the whole waiting room awash in emotion. Clucking, Madam Restell said, “Who comes with her to the examination?”

She glanced at me. “Not you. You look as if you like to faint. You had better sit down.”

“No!” I shouted, and took Bronwyn protectively in my arms.

Restell shrugged. “Then her,” she said, indicating Edna. With that the abortionist gathered up Delia Showalter and, Edna Croker following, conducted her into the examination room.

I had been well pummeled by blows the whole evening, serial realizations that led me into ever darker regions of my mind, but now I formed a new understanding that staggered me all over again.

It was not in fact Bronwyn who was here for Madam Restell. It was Delia Showalter.

“Tell me something, Hugo,” Bronwyn said as we were left alone. “Have you been a fool your whole life?”

I sank back into a chair, all clear thought thwarted by emotion.

“We’re lucky the poor girl didn’t die of shame simply from your presence,” Bronwyn said.

Bile rose in my throat, and I felt sick to my stomach. Bronwyn kicked a spittoon over from a corner and positioned it in front of me.

“You could actually help, you know,” she said. “Instead of being a drag on the whole enterprise.”

“The enterprise!” I wailed.

“She needs a strong arm to lean on,” Bronwyn said. “Let’s leave judgments and upsets and anger behind for now, all right? Let’s just get through this night.”

I looked up at her. I am sure my face was a mask of distress. I could
not understand her expression. It appeared cold to me. Savage. Yes, yes, all very well to say, leave judgments behind. But here she was, judging me!

“I am sorry we ever brought you here from Virginia City,” I whispered.

“You didn’t bring me,” she said. “I came.”

Bronwyn told me to do nothing but sit upon the small chair in the waiting room, exactly where I was, not to move until I was called upon. Then she went into the examination room.

“Don’t stir from this place,” she said as she left. “But be ready.”

How could I not? The weeping in the next room, the doom-laden striking of the ormolu clock, the certain crime in which I had become involved worked on my mind incessantly.

Time passed, the weeping died, then was replaced by wretched, impossible, horrible shrieks of pain, choked and pitiable.

“Mama, oh, Mama, Mama!” Delia cried. I could not just sit there helplessly! But I did.

Four
A.M.
The deserted hour.

Bronwyn burst through the door. “Hugo, come quickly,” she said.

What I encountered in Madam Restell’s examination room will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Restell, in a gore-streaked surgeon’s apron. Delia only semiconscious, her legs splayed under a stained sheet and flopping pathetically whenever they were repositioned. Edna Croker standing alongside the abortionist, her eyeglasses splattered with flecks of blood.

From some dim recess, I summoned up the memory that Edna volunteered as a nurse, and she seemed to be steady and stoic, holding up better than even the grim, worried Restell. I feared for Edna, though, thinking that another trip to the rest home might be in store for her.

Bronwyn stood at the head of the table, holding tight to one of Delia’s bloodless hands, whispering desperate soothings into the girl’s unhearing ear.

“She’s bleeding out,” Restell said to me. “You’re a medical student, they tell me. Can you do anything?”

Four
A.M.
The desperate hour.

Yes, I tried. Edna and I tried. I attempted to locate and stanch the bleeding at its source, but it kept coming, not pulsing, not arterial at least, but venous, a slow draining-away of life. Finally, after I packed her wounded uterus with a tamponade of gauze, she stabilized.

At dawn, as the light rose . . . well, you really couldn’t call it a rally, but Delia came around sufficiently to be able to talk.

“I want to go home,” she whispered. “I want my mama.”

“You can’t be moved, darling,” Bronwyn said.

Madam Restell was frantic not to have the dying girl there. “A litter, a closed coach,” she said. “We have done it often before.”

“No, no,” said Delia. “I can walk.”

We did get the poor patient to her family’s Twenty-eighth Street brownstone, Edna acting as friend and nurse, smoothing the way for Delia, holding her up for the few steps from hired coach to home.

Halting briefly at the Showalter back door—the servants’ entrance, I noticed, less public that way—the sick, ruined girl turned and gave a wave and an ashen, uncertain smile, then disappeared inside.

•   •   •

Dawn after a big rain. The city washed fresh and clean. Ice and coal wagons on the street. The sidewalks just starting to become peopled. Bronwyn and I proceeded by hansom cab from Twenty-eighth north up Fifth toward Swoony’s. I tied my mount on behind. Inside the cab we were largely silent.

Hugely silent. The kind of silent filled with empty words. I had a lot to say to her, but none of it mattered.

Instead, after a few blocks, when we reached Thirty-fourth Street or so, she began to talk. “Nothing in her life prepared her for any of this,” Bronwyn said.

Delia.

“Her mother counseled her, but only delicately. The needs of her future husband. Her mother said to open her heart to her spouse, don’t smother him, physicality is not wrong, nor is it paramount.
Delia hoped fervently that she would make a good wife. But she was a girl sent out into the world without defenses.”

“Please,” I said. “I’m not sure I can bear it.”

A blow, another blow, then one more.

“Beverly Willets wrestled her down in a closed carriage on a cold night last February. He parked on an empty street at the far western edge of town, by the docks. He held her hard by the neck, squashing her windpipe while unbuttoning his trousers. She had no way of responding, it was so far out of her ken. She was strong, you just saw in there how strong she is, but she wasn’t raised to fight. And the man she thought was her friend simply outmuscled her.”

Stupid fool.
All I could think. Not about Bev—there were harsher judgments reserved for him—but about myself. I had been foolish in regard to Delia. Not realizing that by jettisoning her I had made her vulnerable to any predator who happened by.

“Afterward she straightened herself and he walked her into her family’s home, the perfect gentleman.”

“I want to kill the man,” I said.

“I have, too, ever since I finally heard the whole confessed truth from Delia,” Bronwyn said. “But of course the coward has fled town.”

“How did you get involved?” I asked. “Surely there were others who could have helped her.”

“Who? Do you really think this is rare, Hugo? A girl spoiled? Come along with me and the Crushed Daisy Alliance some night, see how common it is. What’s rare is people willing to help instead of condemn.”

“Crushed Daisy? Could you possibly have come up with a more ridiculous name?” I said.

“You’re avoiding the issue,” she said.

“It was you who knew Madam Restell,” I said. “You who arranged it. Victoria Woodhull taught you all this.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I kept your holy Delegate name out of it.”

She saw that the shot hit home and laid her hand on my arm. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You were fine in there at the end. Really fine. I felt as though it was a privilege to know you. You saved her life.”

I sobbed silently. “She doesn’t have a life,” I said. “Not anymore.”

“Sure she does,” Bronwyn said. “Look, Hugo darling, the strong savage the weak. Men brutalize women. What did Restell say? The men are always right, but the women are always wronged. What can you or I do against any of it? This was nothing. This was only doing what had to be done. She will survive.”

“I feel like an outlaw,” I said.

“Me, too,” Bronwyn said. “I think it might be safer for us right now if we did what outlaws tend to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Leave town.”

Not right away, she said. That might arouse suspicion. The Showalters would be as anxious as we were to conceal the truth of what had happened. But given the awareness that Bronwyn had of being stalked continually by the press, it might be better simply to leave the field of battle for a while.

“An expedition,” she said. “We’ll take Nicky to the fair.”

I stared at her. After the abattoir of emotion we had just been through, to be able to pronounce that word, “fair.” To be able even to think of it. Bronwyn’s heart was truly ice. There was indeed a massive world’s fair in Philadelphia just then. But how could she suggest a visit?

Against gallows humor nothing measures up so much as a physician’s dark brand of sardonic observation. I have witnessed words spoken in an operating theater, the patient lying etherized on the table, that would have carried the poor soul off just to hear. A method of coping, no doubt, but an extreme one.

Around Harvard Medical School the previous term, a doctor’s satirical witticism got repeated over and over, passing from student to student as a sort of common reference that demonstrated the cool-hearted knowingness of the teller.

“The operation was entirely successful, but the patient succumbed.”

Ah, yes, boys, very funny, that. With Delia Showalter the sentiment came brutally true. We were, in fact, successful in ending her
pregnancy. We got her home. Pale to ghostly, complaining of terrible pain, she spoke, walked on her own, even appeared at dinner once, all the time bleeding, seeping into her menstrual rag.

Two nights later, at the hour of sleep, the blank hour, four
A.M.
, the patient succumbed, her heart struck by a clot and stopped like a broken clock.

27

Sandobar, poor Sandobar. It would be the last journey we would make in our magical machine.

I thought of Vesalius’s drawings in which the skin and skeleton and arterial systems are all stripped away, leaving only the nervous system. That was what was left of Sandobar, that was what was left of me.

The train at least had her still-twitching torso: the parlor car, sleeping compartments for my parents and for Bronwyn, a separate car containing a shared compartment for Colm, Nicky and me. The stoves were cold, though, and the boiler heating system disconnected.

The Lincoln car long gone, reclaimed by Huntington.

We were down to six cars. My father had managed to sell the others at auction in New York, and he had a buyer in Philadelphia for the rest of the consist. We would live on board as we had during our trip from Virginia City. Since the galley was unstaffed, we would order in our meals.

“Why spend money on a hotel?” said Freddy, who had not, in fact, the money to spend on a hotel.

It was hard to say whether we were visiting Philadelphia or escaping New York. The plan was to spend a weekend at the fair, after which my parents and Nicky would sail from there for Europe.

“Our time to the City of Brotherly Lu-uh-uvv: three hours, three minutes, three seconds!” Nicky announced, acting as our bombastic conductor.

If you crave anonymity, the best tactic is to locate the nearest large crowd of people. Philadelphia was putting on the biggest, most lavish
fair ever mounted in the United States, the Centennial Exposition of 1876, a party for our country’s one-hundredth birthday.

It was the age of exhibitions. Similarly ambitious world’s fairs had been held in London, Paris and other international venues. Vienna’s, the latest, attracted well over ten million visitors in 1873. Ever eager to tub-thump America’s vast superiority, local civic chauvinists wanted our homegrown exposition to outstrip them all.

Bronwyn’s erstwhile friends Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin would be present at the fair, both as scheduled speakers and in a booth, shilling their newspaper. There were over three hundred such exhibit booths, featuring everything from phrenology to newfangled potato peelers. All in the space of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park.

“Colossal” was the word bandied about in the press.

We shall go to the fair. As spectators or as exhibits? See! The Amazing Delegate Family, oddities, ironies, a collection of freaks and wonders.

As soon as we left Pennsylvania Station and headed south, the deluge began. Another furious downpour, lightning stitched across low thunderclouds, sheets of rain drenching the windows that made it feel as though we were not in a train but in a ship on a gale-beset ocean.

Naturally, Bronwyn and I relived the storm of the tragic night we had just endured. We were chary with each other, I believe that is the word, two bruised people delicately attempting to avoid contact lest we exacerbate our unhealed hurts.

Hard to confess, but I felt sorry for myself. I missed Delia, my childhood sweetheart. I rediscovered her in death as a friend, our early days on Staten Island, a picture in my mind of her and her black-bearded father in his sailboat, just offshore, cutting through the bright green waves of the Lower Bay.

There had been no public funeral. That was how the Showalter family attempted to diminish its disgrace.

I had struggled with my love for Bronwyn, then finally stopped denying it. In reply she had tossed a gauntlet at my feet. You think you
love me? See if you can handle this, boyo. And this. And this. A shoot-out at a grand debut? How about a little trip to Madam Restell’s? How does your precious love hold up under something like that?

Challenge after challenge, crucible after crucible. Starting anew almost every day. I despaired of ever getting truly close to her.

Ten miles out of Newark, Sandobar was confronted by a flood of storm runoff overflowing the tracks. We halted in the middle of a vast expanse of empty New Jersey marshland, bluebirds flying in the rain, terns passing over in sullen flocks.

“Here we are again,” said Anna Maria as brightly as she could. She had the lamps lit in the parlor car even though it was still early morning. They glowed against the outside gray. Nicky lay on the floor, reading his new book,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,
exclaiming “Cracking!” every once in a while.

No jolly Sandobar tableau this time. As fat-bellied black clouds rumbled along the horizon, we gathered around the piano in the parlor car and sang sad songs. Anna Maria did a passable version of the Easter aria from Handel, “He Was Despised.” Colm sang “Londonderry Air.” Nicky, of all people, flattened them both with a thirteen-year-old’s reedy-voiced turn on Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More.”

Bronwyn got up and sang the old tavern ballad “The Weary Whore.”

The light is dim

As the gold he pays.

She welcomes him

With a weary gaze.

The night has come

Like the one before.

A glass of rum

For the weary whore.

Standing there, one hand resting on the baby grand, she sang in her pleasantly husky voice. Then, on the chorus, Colm joined her with a harmony tenor.

The weary whore cannot lie down,

Not one time more, not one time more.

The weary whore can’t find the peace

That she longs for, that she longs for.

Afterward a cold-meat lunch. The storm-dark afternoon closed around us, the tracks were still blocked, and every other second the interiors of the cars were lit as if by bonfire. An ennui set in, and I dozed.

Dreaming suddenly, seized by her, I woke. She was gone.

“I need to get my drawing materials,” I announced, feeling foolish upon realizing that no one cared. I escaped from the parlor car to the front of the train. I passed through our living quarters, knocking lightly on all the doors.

No response. Where could she be?

I made my way up to the locomotive deck. Getting shouted at by Cratchit and thoroughly soaked in the process, I clambered forward onto the sleigh bench above the cowcatcher, where Bronwyn and I had once flown together toward New York.

Nothing.

The yellow swamplands ran on forever, stark and friendless. Impenetrable even in good weather and terrifying when lit by stroboscope lightning.

Coming back, I stopped in Sandobar’s baggage compartment to extract my drawing paper and pencils from my kit bag. I was cold and wet and couldn’t wait to towel off, but I desired something with which to occupy my mind. There was nothing to do but think, and I didn’t want to think.

“I see you,” I heard from the corner, a playful, spooky voice. Bronwyn. Her words seemed to emanate from the air. Was I really hearing her, or was it my own sick mind?

“In here,” she whispered.

I found her inside the oversize tub that my parents had installed for her back in Virginia City, when they first understood her love for bathing.

I peered over the side. The tub was dry. She sat on the floor of the
receptacle, her feet stretched out in front of her. Wearing her artist’s gown, the only dress she would put on of late. She had had it with corsets.

“Here,” said Bronwyn, patting the floor of the tub beside her.

I climbed over the side but stayed opposite her. I leaned against the copper wall, shivering.

“The parlor car feels so close,” she said.

Silence.

“No one knows what to do,” I said.

Silence.

Was this what love did to you? Made you stupid and dull?

“I thought I’d draw,” I said. “Maybe I could draw you sometime?”

“Now? In the dark?” Gloom had settled in the windowless bath closet.

“I could draw you by lightning flash.” Perhaps the dumbest thing I’d ever said to her.

It had been a stormy spring on the East Coast, one of the worst in recent memory. I could hardly make out Bronwyn’s face. She was over there in the shadows, probably grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

“I’m so in love with you,” I said.

A long, heart-stopping beat. Lightning flashed, and I saw that she was looking right at me. Not smiling.

“Big secret,” she said when the blackness fell again. “You’ve been in love with me . . . well, at least since that evening stroll I took back in Virginia City, when I saw you emptying your stomach behind Costello’s Shooting Gallery. A lovely image, I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.”

My half-strangled feelings. “Are you in love with me?” I asked.

“You can’t be in love with me,” she said, sounding impatient. “Do you know why?”

“Because I’m my sister?” I said, fumbling up the words.

She laughed. I so much wanted to kiss her, there in the dark.

“I’m not your sister, Hugo,” she said solemnly. “You better stop thinking that way, or your Professor James is going to have at you in his psychological laboratory.”

I insisted. “Why can’t I love you?”

“Oh, because I’m poison,” she said. “Didn’t I already tell you that? Everybody who loves me dies.”

No answer for that. Or an unacceptable one: that I would willingly sacrifice myself for her.

Silence. Paralysis. Three hours, three minutes, three seconds. It was impossible to judge how long we waited.

A sudden insane clatter as Nicky tore through the baggage car, shouting at the top of his lungs like a newsboy. “Extra! Extra! Fierce
Hadrosaurus
dinosaur sighted in the Jersey meadowlands! Read all about it!”

“But I’ll tell you what,” Bronwyn said, leaning over.

She gave me a long, deep kiss, caressed my face for a moment, then abruptly bounded up in one athletic leap over the lip of the tub and out of the little bath closet, howling along after Nicky.

“
Hadrosaurus
coming!” she shouted.

Leaving me alone in the lightning-streaked dark.

Vesalius has an anatomical drawing where he has stripped away the muscles around the skull, peeling them back and letting them hang. It looks as though the subject’s head has exploded.

•   •   •

I floated through the fair. How could it be otherwise? I went to the greatest exposition ever mounted in America, a sprawling, multifold event with untold thousands in attendance, marvels at every turn, and for me the sole attraction stood only a few feet away.

I saw nothing else. I had kissed many women in my life, mock-kissed light women and actresses and ladies of the night, bussed my lady friends in the Circle, but that one on the train with Bronwyn I swore was my first real kiss. I still felt the heat of it.

“You need to fall in love,” said Alice James. Or, earlier, when I bemoaned my nervous mental state to my brother, Nicky had said, “You think you’re going pots? You’re just in love, that’s all, you idiot!”

So we attended the fair. I am fairly certain of that, ha-ha. We parked Sandobar on a siding west of the grounds and entered into the Centennial Exposition of 1876.

Freddy and Anna Maria acted as if the whole weight of New York had lifted off them. Nicky, of course, Nicky was over the moon. I was cognizant of the others being there but was really actually wholly oblivious to everyone—the crowds, the performers, my family.

We all got to see something we wanted. Nicky, being the loudest, steered the course first, to the Machinery Hall, where the monstrous Great Corliss Engine, raging with the power of twenty-five hundred horses, hummed like hellfire.

“Sixty-five cars required to transport it from Providence!” Nicky informed us, reading from the official program. He stared slack-jawed at the Krupp Gun. But what he really loved there—although not so much as Colm—was the cone of hot sugar-popped corn sold from a cart near the entrance.

At the Nevada Quartz Mill, Freddy determinedly steered us elsewhere, the memory of his Comstock collapse too raw. The crusher at the mill furnished silver for exposition souvenir coins, an exhibit tout announced, at two dollars apiece.

Anna Maria sighed over the statue of the Freed Slave in Memorial Hall and insisted we spend an hour (it felt like a week) in the Women’s Pavilion. Freddy lingered by the manufacturing exhibits. The science of silk was under heavy promotion, it seemed, and he had many questions concerning making a go of silkworms. Perhaps he’d get into the trade himself.