Savage Girl (37 page)

Bronwyn cared for Mallt and Swoony. The butler Mike served us, Swoony’s lady Sally dressed her, the cook Nancy prepared our meals, a nurse came in some days, there were two other housemaids besides. We weren’t so badly off. Except for everything.

Occasionally, on afternoons when the weather was pleasant, Bronwyn and I went out with the two older women, pushing two wheelchairs around the Zoo. If the day was especially fine, we proceeded on to the Dene, that beautiful landscaped valley running near to the open, sunlit Sheep Meadow. Bronwyn loved the Dene the best, she told me, of all the places in Manhattan.

“If ever you lose me, find me here in the Dene,” she said, holding out her arms as though embracing the sunshine.

At the Zoo Bronwyn would do a trick, getting Charlemagne the tigon to follow her back and forth in his run, back and forth. Swoony laughed and clapped. Mallt coughed. It seemed the big cat would do whatever the girl bade him to do. He’d jump out of the enclosure and do a pirouette if she asked.

After a few days of this life, I’d had enough. I wanted somehow to smash the ice between us but could not settle on how to do it.

I tried out various lines.
See here, let’s just get married. . . . You and I really ought to be wed, don’t you think? . . . What do you say, chuck it all, no ceremony, a quick trip to
City Hall and we’re man and wife.

No, no, none of it would do. Earlier she told me to come to her as a man. In the train hadn’t I done that? Why couldn’t she make a reciprocal move now? As time went on, I felt a slow eroding of my nerve. My
faults and weaknesses grew in my imagination until they blotted out the sun. I was inept, lily-livered, a milksop. I stood skinless before her. She could pour herself into me and I would have no defense.

What served to break the impasse appeared in Swoony’s wicker call basket on May 19, 1876. A Friday. Of course I will always remember the date well. I had closed myself in my room that afternoon, rehearsing the question I felt sure I would finally be able to pose to Bronwyn.

When I emerged and went downstairs for tea at four, I found the usual tableau of Bronwyn, Mallt and Swoony arranged in the sitting room, my grandmother with her ever-present teacup potion. Three feline females, two aged cats and one more kittenish, lounging on a sleepy afternoon, waiting for their saucers of milk.

The western sun had started to flood in through the parkside windows. For once, Fifth Avenue was still.

“Friedrich, dear,” Swoony said. “I want to follow you around.” She made no move to rise from her chair to do so.

Idly I examined the cards in Swoony’s call basket. Among four others, all impudent climbers, a carte de visite from Bev Willets.

Back in town.

His card had always annoyed me. It was a striking one, well celebrated among the Circle. Bev had pictured himself as an English gentleman about to embark upon a hunt, blunderbuss in hand, eyes fixed on some far-off prey. The costume managed to be fashionable and significant at the same time, as though indicating a questing character in search of truth and honor.

What infuriated me about it was that I knew Bev’s hunt to be surely more ignoble than the image. Truth and honor could be well damned. The man limited his quest strictly to the human female. Case in point, Delia Showalter’s tragic death.

I wanted to say,
I think I’ll just pop downtown and murder Bev Willets.
What I said instead: “Was Bev here today?”

“Yes, he was,” Bronwyn said.

“Why wasn’t I told?”

“He wanted me,” Bronwyn said.

The atmosphere became instantly fraught, Swoony and Mallt both oblivious. I wanted to scream at Bronwyn as I’m sure she wanted to scream at me.

You foul creature!

You’re the foul one!

I know you want to go to him!

Maybe I will!

Instead Bronwyn said coolly, “I’m to see him tonight.”

“Don’t do it,” I managed, choking myself off.
I’d rather see you dead!

I couldn’t believe that after everything we knew of Bev’s perfidy, she would want to have any truck with him at all. She truly was cold.

“Don’t do it,” I repeated. “Don’t go to him. You don’t know what could happen.”

She merely gave me a look. Was it pitying? I felt it so. For as long as she and I lived in this world, Bronwyn Delegate—was she Bronwyn Bowen now?—could always stare me down.

When she left Swoony’s that evening—not bothering to dress in her usual male guise, a single woman in a dark brown dress, unaccompanied at night, like a common Tenderloin prostitute—I didn’t have to follow right on her heels. I knew where she was going.

Before leaving the house, I slipped into Bronwyn’s room. I located her sacred childhood bag and checked its contents. The books yes, and the doll and mirror, but the hand-razor rig was gone.

I returned to my study and hurriedly retrieved a Number 20 lancet, sheathing it in a leather case. Dressed informally, I went down to the sitting room and kissed a dozing Swoony good night, nodding good-bye also to the animated skull in the corner, Bronwyn’s mother, peering out at me from the furnace within.

Gusts of early-evening rain had previously darkened the streets, but the night was gentle. What had I planned? I didn’t know. She would kill him or I would. I was she. She was I. Somehow it would happen. How, I could not predict.

Its being quite possible to walk the length and breadth of Manhattan, I disdained a cab and headed south on foot, crossing over to Lexington from Fifth.

Past the Grand Central Depot. Should I drop all this and board a train? Flee? It was, as Hamlet had it, “a consummation devoutly to be wished.” But I declined the option.

Down the island on Lexington, through cluttered, unfashionable neighborhoods, tradesman tenements, the precincts of the poor. Gaslights only at the major intersections, otherwise a spring dark. A drunk staggered across my path, shouted and faded into shadows behind me.

Finally Gramercy Park. There my nerve failed. I made several circuits, stopping each time across the street from the Willets town house. Bronwyn was inside, of that I felt certain. Silhouettes showed on a second-floor window shade.

But I could not force myself to confront her. I even walked down Irving once, to pass by the Lotos Club. Shuttered this time of night but closed to me whatever o’clock it was. I had been blackballed at my club since the scandal hit.

Then I returned to the park, lingering on the bluestone sidewalk beside the spiked iron fence. Waiting to kill a man.

The Dene in the Central Park

30

I talk to Howe and Hummel through Sunday night. In the Tombs dawn is blocked by the limestone hulk of City Hall to the east, and the prison remains gloomy long after sunrise. They keep placing tea with lemon and honey in front of me. Talk, sip tea, walk over to pee into a chamber pot in the corner, come back, talk some more.

What is the precise disposition of a spider watching a fly struggle in its web? The two lawyers stare at me dolefully.

I want to say,
I have finished my story, for pity’s sake. I’m at Bev’s the night of May 19. This is where we came in.

Monday morning. Silence from a chatterbox such as Bill Howe can be supremely unnerving.

So? Is what I finally say. I put my arms out as if for shackles. A joke. Sort of.

No response. Howe uncharacteristically mute.

Then not Howe but Hummel begins to talk, with words that might be more frightening than the other’s silence.

That was all just a lie, Hummel says. Rising slowly to stand over me.

I say, You know, sometimes I think I’m telling a tale like Scheherazade. When I stop, I’m dead.

Hummel insists, But you haven’t told the truth, have you?

None of this can be used in court, I say. You two just want to hear all the sordid details. People get carried away by the story.

Three hours from now, Hummel says, we will be standing before a judge for your arraignment. You can’t bring your lies in there.

We want to help you, Hugo, Bill Howe says, but Hummel shushes him.

You lie when you tell us you killed Bev Willets, Hummel says. We know the girl did it.

You know nothing of the sort, I say.

This whole madness business, Hummel says, being unsure of your own mind, that’s just some sort of cheap story.

A tale told by an idiot, I say, signifying nothing.

She did it all, Hummel says, hammering at me. Didn’t she, now? Didn’t she? Your confession is a ruse. Your knives? A fabrication.

I feel myself already on the witness stand. I told you, I say, the blood, the claws, the severed artery. All my doing.

Liar! Hummel shouts. He is trying to unman me. But even knowing that is what he is trying to do, I still feel a bit unmanned. This is harder than I thought it would be.

Hummel puts his face right into mine. You’ve been a nasty little boy, haven’t you?

I blink.

Haven’t you?

All right! Bill Howe says.

Hummel is about to dig at me more, but Howe stops him, calling off his partner, the firm’s ghostly attack dog. The corpulent lawyer crosses to look out the window at the enormous sign advertising Howe & Hummel’s services. We shall soon enough have to give the prison director back his office, he says.

Howe orders breakfast from one of the scurrying beck-and-call lackeys surrounding him, and for the next hour we speak of nothing except for the food that arrives posthaste in enormous quantities.

I surprise myself to discover a healthy appetite. Howe, of course, tucks in. Hummel sips hot water.

No matter what they may believe, no matter what untruths I have told, I feel as though I have put my case convincingly forward.

Sopping up the last bit of gravy with the last bit of corn bread, Howe says, When I am presented with a case, I never ask, What are the charges? I always ask, Who is the judge? Sitting on the bench this morning will be Bowman Harkington, a Democrat. He is a man
whom the newspapers will characterize as one ill disposed to look kindly upon a wealthy scion such as yourself.

Formerly wealthy, I say.

Howe looks pained. It is the wrong thing to bring up, inadvertently reminding him that my father’s long purse had recently been rendered considerably shorter. He whispers to one of the lackeys, who runs out of the room as if on fire. Off to loot what remains of the Delegate bank accounts, no doubt.

There are certain aspects of Harkington’s background, Howe says, that make him preferable to us as the presiding judge over your arraignment, and especially over the hearing for bail. He is a man with whom we have worked in the past and will work again this morning.

Bribable, in other words.

Hummel nods and coughs into his hand. While in the courtroom, Howe continues, you will not speak. You will stand up and sit down as commanded. You are a mere poor player on the stage, but you do neither strut nor fret. You may not understand the proceedings. That doesn’t matter.

I recall the last I saw of Bronwyn, the Friday night of Bev’s death, three days ago now. I am still determined to save her. At present she could be anywhere in Manhattan. Or riding the transcontinental back to Virginia City. I hope, at least, that she remains safe.

I’m not at all innocent, I say.

Which one of us is? Howe says. You labor under a common misperception of the law. The law does not find you innocent, it merely judges you not guilty. And though you may not believe in your own innocence, in the unlikely event this case comes to trial, you will be proved not guilty. But first we will bail you out from this jail.

Two hours later I am led by a bailiff through the mazelike Tombs and into a courtroom on a lower floor. William Howe’s grand prediction of a controlled and tidy judicial process goes off the rails almost at once.

•   •   •

Nothing demonstrates the awesome power of the firm of Howe & Hummel like the emptiness of Courtroom Four. By some method devious or masterful, they have been able to head off the press from covering the next installment of the Humiliations of the Delegates.

The empty chamber hosts only a few warm bodies. Apart from myself, there are two clerks, a bailiff, a tipstaff, my two lawyers and Judge Harkington, a man who appears to me to be comically unlike a jurist. With hair sprouting in all directions, he seems a hobbledehoy character out of Shakespeare, swallowed by his robes.

I am about to say,
Where did they exhume him?
when the words die in my mouth, as a second bailiff leads another defendant into court.

Bronwyn. In shackles. I had no idea she had been taken.

Her presence momentarily stuns me. Then, leaping to my feet like a stage actor, I call out, We’re betrayed! Unthinking, I react, moving to strike the person nearest at hand, Bill Howe. The bailiff behind me wrestles me back into my chair.

Bronwyn is led across the room to take her place at a defendant’s table a few feet away, wearing her now-somewhat-tatty brown dress, blood smears visible upon it, her black hair uncombed but that immensely frustrating unruffled expression on her face.

No more the lady, no more the fresh-faced debutante of the last few months.

The return of Savage Girl.

I readily grasp what her presence means, the depth of the lies Howe and Hummel have told me. They let me sit there talking for forty-eight hours straight, spilling all our secrets, but never once in that entire time did they divulge that the law had her in cuffs, too.

At the women’s prison on Blackwell’s Island, I find out later.

I realize instantly that while I am going to be freed on bond, Bronwyn is to be made a scapegoat.

Freddy. It is my father’s doing. The transatlantic telegraph cables must have been buzzing the whole weekend.

Let the girl swing, but save my son.

I still have my suspicions about Bronwyn’s activities. But when I
see her standing there surrounded by burly jailers, alone and cast out, my fears melt away.

Though all men will set themselves against you, I take your side.

Your Honor, I call out, I wish to discharge these gentlemen and act as my own counsel.

Sit there and be silent, Mr. Delegate, Harkington says.

I insist, I say. My plea is guilty.

Silence! the hairy little judge cries. Shall I have you removed?

Excellence, Bill Howe says, rumbling to his feet, you see a defendant come before you unsettled in mind.

I cast a desperate look over at Bronwyn, who raises her shackled hands and puts a finger to her lips. Something I had not realized before, for all my reading in Spenser and Sir Walter Scott: Distress is exactly what renders the damsel-in-distress beautiful.

With Bronwyn’s presence I understand even less how it is that Howe and Hummel have managed to keep a lid on the proceedings. The Wild Child of the Washoe appearing in court on a murder charge? Fresh meat for the jackals of the fourth estate.

I refuse to be silenced. I call out, Why is she shackled and I am not? Why am I represented and she is not?

Remove the defendant, remove the defendant, Harkington says. Straggly white hairs shoot out of his ears like flames.

Your Honor, Your Honor, Bill Howe says.

Hummel leans over, seizes my neck and twists me back into my seat. One more outburst, he hisses, and all your tawdry little secrets will be spilled.

This will take but a moment, Your Honor, Howe says to the judge, your forbearance, please. Harkington sinks back into his robes, momentarily placated.

Plea? Harkington says.

Not guilty, Howe says.

Bail?

A ten-thousand-dollar surety upon the Fifth Avenue mansion of his grandmawmaw, Howe says.

Mr. Newark?

A man rises to speak, a person so colorless I had not noticed him before. The prosecutor.

The state accepts the terms of bail, he says.

Stand, Mr. Delegate, Harkington says.

Howe hauls me to my feet. You may discharge your counsel, as you wish, the judge says. In which case the bond arrangement proposed by Mr. Howe and Mr. Hummel and accepted by the state prosecutor will be voided and you will be thrown into the lowest cell of this prison that I can find for you.

May I speak to my codefendant? I ask.

No, you may not, Judge Harkington says.

I lean toward Bronwyn. If I’m out, I can get you out, I say. If they keep me in, I won’t be able to do anything.

Bronwyn gazes back at me, her face a mask.

Harkington erupts, banging his gavel, slapping me with a hundred-dollar contempt-of-court fine.

I’m wrenched back facing forward by the bailiff.

What about her? I say.

As if my words have unleashed the Furies, the courtroom explodes. Dozens upon dozens of reporters, news hacks and magazine writers invade the place at once, shouting, feverish, jockeying for seats. I have never seen a single room so transformed so quickly.

Wild Child, they call. Savage Girl!

Harkington’s last few words are lost amid the general disorder. The bailiff leads Bronwyn away, the frantic journalists leaping at her like a pack of pink-skinned dogs. Deprived of their primary prey, they turn on me.

•   •   •

The Point is quiet on a Monday forenoon, though various bottles lie scattered across the sidewalk, dead soldiers left over from the campaigns of the weekend. Leaving the Tombs proved less difficult than losing the trailing newsmen. Bailed out of the prison, I only barely
extract myself from their clutches through means of sequential hansom cabs, by the end of which subterfuge I am out of ready coin.

I proceed to the Tenderloin nightclub, where I suspect that Tu-Li and the berdache are holed up.

Penniless, hounded and betrayed, feeling bitter and weary, such is my present status. I am cored out. If someone would bother to ask, What are you feeling? I would say, I feel hollow. But no one bothers to ask. Neither do other questions plaguing my mind receive much in the way of answers.

Why did Howe and Hummel conceal Bronwyn’s arrest from me? For the entire time of my weekend interrogation, she was lodged in a cell on Blackwell’s Island. Yet they failed to mention this salient fact.

They have shown their true colors. They represent not my interests but Freddy’s. I can look for no more help from that quarter. It was only my own naïveté that made me trust them in the first place.

And Freddy and Anna Maria? They, too, have proved themselves unworthy. They fled the country, abandoning their children in need. Then they callously directed their minions to allow Bronwyn to rot in jail.

Was this really all my father’s doing? Did my mother actively aid and abet or merely stand by? Either way I judge her culpable. Why would she turn on the former object of her maternal affection?

Save the son, sacrifice the daughter. Adults, I have noticed, often behave like cowards.