Savage Girl (9 page)

How many individual hairs on a human head? As an anatomist I was distressed that I didn’t know. Thousands. I turned and left the parlor, finding my own refuge at my drawing table. Shave her bald, for all I would care.

•   •   •

My car,
Fury,
divided itself into four generous compartments. First my sleeping quarters, with water closet. Next was supposed to be my brother Nicky’s room, but I had taken it over for anatomical specimens. My glass specimen jars ranged in serial ranks, inside a cabinet I kept locked, more to prevent surprises to the staff than over any worry about theft.

Adjacent to this, what I called my office, with the custom-made drawing table that Anna Maria had installed in front of an expanse of windows. Finally my parlor, in which I entertained guests, of which there were never any.

I sat down and lost myself in my drawing.

After a light supper at noon, which we took in the main parlor car
(omelets, kippered salmon, Cookie’s fresh-baked rolls), Anna Maria, ever the ringleader, announced that we would perform tableaux vivants.

“We will simply get out whatever old costumes we have, and all the spare sheets and blankets,” she said. “I will assign the roles.”

Having always abjured taking part in a tableau, I had nevertheless observed, in the last few years at dinner dances, charity balls and coming-out parties, most of the girls I knew throw themselves wholeheartedly into their performances.

Dowler, Mrs. Kate and B. C. Coyle rigged sheets in the parlor car into something near resembling a framed space in which to perform.

My mother was an inveterate raffle rigger. She only pretended to draw names of participants from a hat.

“Freddy?” she said. “Hugo?”

Tu-Li laughed and clapped her hands.

My father looked game, so I could not very well refuse, though I felt unaccountably shy. Colm Cullen joined in, that we might further dilute the humiliation among three of us.

We rooted through the costume trunk and awaited our instructions. But a simple representational painting or a biblical scene was not the particular hoop through which my mother intended us to jump.

She made a show of drawing another slip of paper from the “subject” hat. “Woman’s rights!” she announced.

What an assignment! I looked at my father, Colm looked at me, and we shook our heads helplessly. However might we represent such an abstract concept?

But we did what we could, and as Dowler drew back the theatrical “curtain,” we appeared motionless, figures in a still life.

Me, adorned with a mophead for hair, Anna Maria’s paisley shawl around my shoulders, a look of the fierce crusader on my features (or what I thought was such a look, though I am afraid I only managed to appear to be suffering an attack of gas), I stood, eyes trained on the far horizon of equality.

Freddy and Colm, vanquished and humbled males, lay sprawled at
my feet, doing their best to look like wounded animals. I had my foot athwart my father’s neck. Lightly, of course.

Anna Maria and the girl sat on the divan in front of us, Mother gleefully laughing and holding Virginia’s hand in hers. Tu-Li and the berdache stood behind the divan, clapping politely and smiling.

We were a success.

That afternoon I worked at my drawings, and when I returned to the parlor, they were still seated in a tight grouping. Savage Girl retained the exact same position as when I had left her, curled on the divan, as lazy as a cat.

“Hugo,” Anna Maria said, rising from her chair, “read to them. I have to go up front and speak to Cookie.”

“All right,” I said. “But not
David Copperfield.
”

For whatever reason, I had brought my own novel along to the parlor, Mary Shelley’s
Modern Prometheus.
I wasn’t even reading it at the time and had no thought of doing so. I sat down, opened the volume randomly, and began.

A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon, to whom I had given life.

So far during her time with us, Savage Girl had remained absolutely docile, with no inclination to run off. Why would she? Enthroned in opulence, the center of all attention, with plenty of meat on the table. In fact, she usually seemed sleepy and passive.

Can one think without words? Observers of feral children endlessly tugged at the issue of language. Of all the wild ones—raised by bears, by wolves, by wild goats, even, in one reported case, by rats—most were unable to learn to speak and thus were deemed idiots.

After innumerable lessons by the kindly Dr. Itard, Victor of Aveyron managed only two words,
eau,
for “water,” and
Dieu,
for “God.” He mainly sat and rocked. King George’s Wild Peter could play for hours with a watch or a glove. He was an expert pickpocket but never spoke.

Such creatures lived in the
nunc stans,
the Eternal Now. Gusts of identifiably human emotion blew through savage children, and Napoleon once described Victor with an inimitable phrase, remarking on “the boy’s sad pleasure in the natural world.” He loved snowfall and could lapse into melancholy looking into a pool of water.

Sad pleasure. I understood that.

Against such historical evidence, what did we have in the girl Virginia? Wordless yes, but somehow, we were all convinced, very smart.

That afternoon a singular incident struck me during my reading from the
Frankenstein
epic. As I spoke the words, I glanced occasionally at Virginia. She sat expressionless as before. But once or twice a sadness crossed her face, and something else, a sense that I could not readily admit.

Understanding.

The mute, language-bereft creature was somehow following the tale.

•   •   •

I pause, lost in memory. One of Howe’s minions scuttles up to me with a glass of water. I have the impression that everyone in the room is waiting, poised, as if another boot will drop.

Your illness, Mr. Hugo, William Howe says. I do not wish to be indelicate. A malady of the mind?

What could I tell him? That I was not ashamed, when I was indeed ashamed? That a few of my friends had similar episodes?

It’s something that’s going around, I say.

“Hysteria,” the word to describe nervousness in women, had attained ready currency. Probably everyone knew someone so afflicted. The sanatoriums were full of sufferers, put away by harried husbands or fathers.

No such popular term had been devised for nervousness in men, though William James, my physiology professor, had a name for it. “Americanitis.”

Causes: modern civilization, steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, the mental activity of women.
Consequence: indulgence of appetites and passions. Symptoms: As far as I was concerned, violent fantasies. Fainting spells. Inanition. A terrible, stalking fear that I would lose my mind.

I have encountered an urge to false confession before, Howe says. Perhaps it soothes your affliction to take on responsibility for a heinous act of murder?

I am responsible, I say. My confession is not false. I killed my friend.

We shall reserve judgment, says Howe.

May I continue? I say, cross.

Howe and Hummel exchange a look. This is another feature of my infirmity, the certainty that others notice some aspect about me—that I have noxious body odor, for example, or that I am displaying a facial twitch—of which I myself remain unaware.

Shall we take an intermission? Howe asks, directing his question not at me but at Hummel.

No, we shall not, I say.

•   •   •

A train always harbors secrets.

I am no great believer in ghosts, or any aspect of the supernatural, no matter how popular such beliefs are today, being a rationalist to the death. Yet when one is working at one’s drawing table in the dead of night, sketching sections of dissected human cadavers, and no other being is awake apart from the parlor brakeman, the assistant engineer and perhaps Colm Cullen, and one hears footsteps in the stillness, rogue thoughts do tend to cross the mind.

Next car up from me in the consist was
United States,
the Lincoln car. As I have said, we were taking it back for refitting at the New York yards as a favor to Collis Huntington of the Central Pacific. Our largesse was not entirely selfless, since as a collateral benefit of accepting the car we enjoyed a director’s right-of-way on the line.

Several times, hearing or at least thinking I heard sounds from the empty and scrubbed-neat Lincoln car, I crossed over into it, only to find it deserted.

There the deceased president had lain in state. The outlines of the
catafalque remained visible on the floor. When he was alive, he never saw or rode in
United States.
Yet could his great spirit haunt the living? I didn’t think so. But the noises from the car next door seemed to contradict my most determined certainties.

It was Colm Cullen who put the mystery to rest. He was the solitary soul who patrolled Sandobar after we had all retired, taking regular late-hour strolls the entire length of the train. Checking trackside, observing our progress, seeing all was right. Our night watchman who never seemed to need sleep.

Colm’s father had fled Galway during the first famine year, 1845, washing up on the Boston waterfront, inhabiting a wooden hovel in an alley off Batterymarch. He took a wife, doubling his misery, and together they spawned a family, Colm being the second of twelve. Cholera took off six of the children and then, finally, both parents.

In those brutal days, the North End acted as a proving ground for muscles, teeth, fists, heart. Colm joined the thousand or so child beggars in the streets of the neighborhood, hurling brickbats at the
NO IRISH, NO DOGS
signs that the good Yankees of Boston displayed.

“I couldna grown up faster any way but I did,” Colm said. “Fightin’ for every scrap. I used to slam my hands into buckets full of rocks to toughen ’em.” Fleeing a criminal charge in Boston of precipitating riot (“A frame,” he said simply), the twenty-five-year-old bruiser eventually wound up in Virginia City, handling security at the Brilliant Mine.

Colm told me he actually preferred his watchman duty on the train to being welcomed into its drawing rooms and parlors, having to make conversation with too many well-meaning people.

One night Colm performed his regular rounds, padding silently up and down the corridors of the sleeping compartments. He was midway through
The Brave,
he told me later, when he sensed a vibration above his head. A sound as soft as the footfall of a rabbit. Then a scratching, sliding noise. Some creature hiding in the insulation of the train? A rat?

Simply a rain of pebbles, Colm decided, falling off onto our cars from a cliff face in a cut of the track. A familiar sound, like rocks skittering down a mine shaft. He made to move on.

But no, it was footsteps. Colm halted. Whoever or whatever passed above imitated him, stepping, then stopping. He repeated his maneuver and the sounds again matched him.

“Well, I had a smile then,” Colm told me. “I thought I knew what was what.”

Sure enough, a hand appeared on the thick window glass immediately beside him, fingers spread, and a pale arm, white against the rushing black of the Utah desert. Then a face, upside down. And the face wore across it a broad, impish smile.

The wild little sprite!

Savage Girl rode the flat, smooth top of the train with total confidence, total ease. Feeling the dry night winds of summer gusting through her hair and turning her face up to the faint-burning stars.

For a quick second, she hung inverted, gripping the open clerestory vents all while hurtling forward atop Sandobar at forty-five miles per hour.

As quickly as she appeared, she pulled up and vanished. Colm heard the soft sound of her bare feet a few seconds more, then silence.

“That explains the noises in the night inside the Lincoln car,” I said after hearing the story. “She must drop down into it. What do you think she does in there? Communes with Abe Lincoln’s spirit?”

“I know she don’t sleep much,” Colm said. “Shall we tell Freddy?”

“Not just yet,” I said.

8

Mostly, I stayed to myself and composed my anatomical sketches.

On the train, while I couldn’t bring all the equipment I had at home, I had my trusty technical pen, India ink, compasses and metal-edged rulers, watercolors, sharp-lead pencils and enough high-rag, bright white stock to last me through half a dozen trips across the country. I loved the subject, its exactitude and precision. And I equally loved the materials utilized to evoke that precision upon the page.

My inks I could not use while the train was rocking, so I contented myself with charcoal. And watercolor washes.

My specimen jars contained human hearts (two), hands (six, a special study of mine), a flayed gluteus, a complete male reproductive system, assorted abdominal and thoracic viscera and, most rare, the cerebellum and brain stem of a ten-year-old child whose torso had been crushed in a streetcar accident.

My constant companion as I labored over my drawings, a gentleman I had requested join me on our travels, a fully articulated skeleton. I had named it Napoleon Bonaparte for its small stature. Boney had formerly hung from a metal hook stand in my study at home, and now he hung on a hook in my study aboard Sandobar.

Then I had my blades: lancets, scalpels and curettes, as well as carrying knives, everything from barlows to bowies.

Seeking to devise a new way of portraying anatomical subjects, I created a method by which the viewer might see the realistic portrait of the subject. An athlete stands in full fencing regalia in
en garde
posture—and then his skin is presented cut away to show the
workings underneath, the muscles, arteries and bones that enable him to take his pose.

I planned to preview the in situ technique with Dr. James when I returned to class in the fall. He had praised my earlier sketches.

The hours rolled out dreamily. I’d bend to my drawing, look up at the passing landscape, bend to my drawing some more. Tennyson’s “Lotos-Eaters” continually ran through my head.

The Lotos blooms below the barren peak

The Lotos blows by every winding creek

All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone

Thro’ every hollow cave and alley lone

Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown.

Breaking our monotony, Freddy declared the stopover at the Great Salt Lake. We reached the depot at Kelton, there to be met with three excursion wagons, all arranged beforehand via telegraph.

The Kelton stop, west of Ogden, was one of those lonely, unpeopled outposts, at the same time the scene of some unlikely activity. A mountain man in full leathers waited for the eastern train. He was going back home, he told us, revealing his birthplace, surprising for one wearing a raccoon hat, as Flushing Park, Queens. His traveling companion banged tunelessly on a battered guitar.

Toad in the road
(he sang)

Toad in the road

Along come a wagon

Whoopsie!
(he yodeled)

Road in the toad!

Anna Maria tossed him an unnecessary coin.

Kelton lay at the western piedmont of the Wasatch, a range of unsmiling, unpretty mountains, craggy and brown. Above us the sun already burned hot in an expanse of blue, and delicate bright-white clouds floated aimlessly on the horizon.

Our party had descended the three metal steps to the railbed and now stood stretching by the side of the train, taking deep breaths. The berdache, resplendent in a new dress, turned her face up to the sun. My father actually thumped his chest with pleasure. Anna Maria just stood there, eyes closed as if in prayer, her arms around Savage Girl.

The staff, too, tumbled out of the forward end of the train, laughing, talking, in high spirits.

Long days on a train, even so comfortable a one as ours, can get tiresome.

I myself felt my irritable mood lift and drift away with those small clouds.

To the south stretched the immense inner sea, its surface looking greasy and pellucid in the morning light. The Great Salt Lake.

“Stupendous!” said Freddy.

“Perfectly lovely,” said Anna Maria.

And it was. The air was cool, almost cold when it hit the skin, refreshing even under the burning mountain sun. I removed my jacket, thinking ahead to stripping down altogether for a swim in the Great Salt Lake. I had heard many tales of it, and now there it was. How insane everyone would make me out to be as I plunged in splashing, naked as a newborn!

That was what I loved about the hunting trips I had been on with my friends in the Adirondacks. You could go about free and unclothed, embracing one’s beasthood amid the streams and little lakes. It was expected. Everyone at home was so decorous, and I had no choice other than to fall in line. But in the wild, one could be free.

A strange incident at the depot: A dirty white cur rushed at us, barking, and Virginia suddenly erupted, snarling back at the thing, which ran yelping away, tail between its legs.

Freddy and Anna and I exchanged glances. What have we here? It took our breaths away, how quickly she had descended into viciousness. Savage Girl indeed. Was she at last beginning to reveal her true nature?

Anna Maria directed the loading of the excursion wagons and the
dispensation of the staff. She had laid the plans for our picnic to be assembled a mile from the tracks, on a small hillock above the lake at the fringe of a stand of cedars. The railroad man Collis Huntington had recommended her the place.

We would take our luncheon there in the deliciously cool shade. This was not to be an ordinary picnic, though, but a grand endeavor, one that would re-create, out in the wastelands, the civilized features of our life.

Dowler and a few of his men went ahead in a dray, and by the time we arrived, the little hillside had become our gracious home away from home. The servants spread out a half dozen Oriental rugs, along with small tables, chairs and stools that had been stored in baggage for just such an occasion. Even the tiger rug from the parlor car took its place in our adventure.

My mother fell into a comfortable chair and opened her
Copperfield,
her face shaded by the mammoth brim of a straw hat, its cornflower-blue ribbons tied beneath her chin. Tu-Li and the berdache laid out on a carpet, beginning their inevitable game of ivory tiles. Freddy and I took a turn among the cedar trees, and not for the first time I wished I had my dog Hickory along.

We returned to our picnic, flopped into our comfort and drowsed in a pleasant stupor, spending the morning in “a land in which it seemed always afternoon” (as Tennyson had it). The lake, the sky, the murderous sunshine.

Savage Girl coiled up on her side on a thick, patterned rug, a little ways from the chair that had been set out for her, her eyes closed. I found myself staring and had to look away.

Freddy roused me for a swim. We headed down the slope to the Great Salt Lake, but as we did so, an immense stink rose up to greet us. Fetid, unbearable. Is this how it always was?

At the shore, disappointment. The lake was rimmed with an incredible mass of dead grasshoppers, their decaying bodies the source of the smell. From the actual shore, the mass extended forty feet into the lake.

“Well, I’ve swum in it before, you know,” Freddy said. “Cold and
bracing, extremely high salinity, as it is at the Dead Sea—you bob like a cork in it.”

“Not today,” I said. “I don’t bob like a cork in that mess.”

“Not today,” Freddy said.

The stench was so bad it made us laugh, gag, dry-heave, then laugh some more.

“The Saints,” Freddy said, laughing so hard that tears came to his eyes. “They’ve really made the desert bloom.”

He meant the Mormons. Later we heard that a work party of Latter-day Saints harvested the dead bug carcasses with enormous skimmers, dried the husks and pressed the results into salt licks for their stock. Waste not, want not.

“Those people are clearly out of their minds,” was Freddy’s head-shaking comment.

Leaving the lake unswum and the dead grasshoppers commercially unexploited, we hiked back up the slope to our little campsite.

•   •   •

Finally, lunch. All of us gathered around a buffet table under the cedars, loading up our plates.

Back at the depot, Cookie had bargained with a hunter in a sand-colored cap and coveralls, gun still slung over his shoulder, hoisting his tray of quail. The tiny birds looked more like children’s toys than edible meat.

Rose now laid down a platter of the cooked quail and paused. “Begging your pardon, ma’am,” she said to Anna, curtsying. “Cookie asked me to apologize to you for the birds. We had a dozen, but two disappeared even before they was plucked.”

She curtsied again and hurried off.

“Can you imagine?” said my mother. “Who would abscond with a quail?”

I felt an impulse to check Savage Girl’s mouth for feathers.

We had more than enough food as it was, with the ten quail, grilled and scrumptious, as well as asparagus from the train’s ice closet,
drenched in sweet butter, plus orange fritters and chow-chow with green olives.

As we ate, we luxuriated in the panorama, inhaling the spicy scent of the conifers. Anna Maria and Freddy toasted our adventure with crystal goblets of icy Liebfraumilch. As a palate cleanser, licorice sorbet.

Gilbert Gates took over the fire, boiled water with a dash of vinegar, and blued the fish. These were fresh local rainbows (another depot purchase), and Gates explained that if you could parboil a catch like that quickly enough, when the natural coating on the fish’s skin was still intact, the vinegar chemically reacted and rendered an effect that was startling and excellent.

Yes, it was. The trout showed bright, bright blue skin, bluer than berries, eye-hurting blue. Gasps and exclamations of pleasure as Gates presented the dish. They tasted good, too.

Savage Girl grabbed a fish in her fist and gnawed on the thing as though she were starving, mashing it into her mouth and devouring it bones, fins and head.

We all stopped eating and stared. We had witnessed the grossness of her manners before, of course—she had come to us never employing any utensil except her fingers—but this was something on a different level.

“Fork, dear,” said Anna Maria gently. My mother had been previously trying to teach her. In vain. The girl merely picked up another of the blued rainbows and ate it with the same animal gusto.

After luncheon a few in our party scattered about the little lakeside meadows. Here was at least partial relief from the unending desert.

The berdache and Tu-Li wandered hand in hand. As it was the end of June, coneflowers and poppies and Queen Anne’s lace mingled in a multicolored tapestry that came to nearly waist high on the young Chinese maid.

Breaking away from Tahktoo, Tu-Li began to select flowers, choosing carefully. As I watched her, I felt glad that she had brought some companionship to my mother. She was more than a maid. Tu-Li
seemed ever calm, serious beyond her years. She was a listener, an anchor, and Anna Maria needed that.

Savage Girl joined Tu-Li down in the meadow. I watched her walk behind, the two of them wading through the luxuriant flowers, bending and picking as they went.

“Freddy,” I said.

My father, his hat pulled over his eyes, pretended not to hear me.

“This business of nature versus nurture, don’t you have to consider the part played by imitation?”

“Certainly,” he said, his eyes still concealed. “Very good point. But that raises the issue of who is the imitator and who is the imitated.”

Man, said Linnaeus, is a mimic animal. I looked down the slope to the two women.

“Perhaps she would make a suitable subject of study after all,” I said.

“Mmn-hmm,” Freddy mumbled from beneath his bowler.

I sketched a close-up view of one of the immense dead grasshoppers from the lake. The thing was the length of my hand. In its workings, the acute angle of its legs, the tripartite body segments covered in articulated armor, it appeared to me like a messenger from the future, a completely modern machine.

Tu-Li and the berdache came back up the hill. Virginia followed behind them, then walked directly up to me. Avoiding my eyes, she opened her hands and dropped the results of her flower-gathering efforts on the white lawn picnic cloth in front of my chair.