Savage Girl (11 page)

I had them take away the gin.

The lavish surroundings served to undercut my feeling of disappointment in leaving the microcosmic world of Sandobar behind. The spell had for the moment been broken. I think we all felt it, the sense that we could have rolled across the Plains forever, lost in time.

On the third night of our stay, when I emerged from my bedroom and entered the drawing room of our suite, Tu-Li and the berdache performed a mock-formal presentation of Savage Girl, her long black hair glossy and completely combed out at last, a cinch-waisted light yellow frock from Marshall Field’s looking pretty on her slender silhouette.

Bronwyn performed an awkward, truncated curtsy.

Surprised and delighted, I smiled broadly and moved forward on impulse, opening my arms as if to embrace her.

But I was brutally rebuffed. She hissed at me like a snake—no, not like a snake, like a cat might spit at a threatening dog. Then she buried her face in Tu-Li’s shoulder.

Both Tu-Li and the berdache laughed, but I was dumbfounded. I found the incident distinctly unfunny. I was further enraged to realize that, with her head still pressed against Tu-Li, Savage Girl was laughing, too.

I retreated to my parents’ suite. They were in the midst of a discussion on whether Bronwyn could maintain her composure in a formal hotel dining room.

“I don’t think so,” Freddy said. “We’ll have dinner in our rooms, as before.”

“Nonsense, the child is perfectly presentable,” Anna Maria said. “What do you think, Hugo?”

I thought it would at least be interesting. Maybe she’d hiss at the maître d’. “I vote yes,” I said.

“Luckily, this family is not a democracy,” Freddy said.

“The poor dear has been so patient with her instruction, she deserves a prize,” said Anna.

We went down to the dining room. With Bronwyn. Not a democracy, no. Mother ruled.

Dinner proved lavish. Evening attire all around. I looked across the table and saw Anna Maria as others must see her, her handsome features complemented by a pearly satin décolletage and dangling emeralds. She beamed to be together with her family. Freddy, ruddy and exuding western health, in a stiff boiled shirtfront and jet-black clawhammer coat with grosgrain lapel facings, me the same.

“If Nicky were here, we’d be complete,” Anna Maria said.

Tu-Li dressed herself in a pastel pink silk smock. The berdache, for once, took the masculine route and donned a tailcoat. Simpler that way, he felt, no jeers in the restaurant. Seeing him in male clothes had a feel of the tragic.

Bronwyn was at first glance just another ladylike young woman, in puffed sleeves of the lightest yellow and a rose velvet ribbon tied round her honey-colored throat. Tu-Li had lifted Bronwyn’s black locks up at the back of her head and inserted a white gardenia behind one blush-pink ear.

The girl’s restless fingers drummed upon the white linen tabletop. She gazed around the room. I could barely get her to glance at me. Her first faux pas: She lifted her water glass and downed it in a gulp, as though she had never tasted water before.

The headwaiter approached, his minions ranked behind him. “The boiled leg of mutton with caper sauce is excellent, sir,” he began, addressing my father directly.

“Tonight we also have a beautiful joint of roast beef and a boned turkey with truffles and jelly. If you care for game, we offer woodcock and black duck. For fish the smelts are popular, of course there
is lobster, and this evening we have something different: eels à la tartare.”

I noticed Bronwyn noticing a junior waiter, a handsome, blocky young man who could have wrestled in a show on the Bowery. He parted his sandy hair severely down the center, but a strand of it wanted to stray to his forehead.

The wrestler-waiter, assigned to her side of the table, lavished attention on Bronwyn. The roast beef, as advertised, was delicious. Bronwyn, who had not yet become wholly accustomed to using a fork, forgot herself momentarily to seize a slice in her hands, pull it apart with her fingers, and gnaw on it so the juices ran down her chin.

The waiter rushed to the table with finger bowls in which slices of lemon floated. When Bronwyn moved to drink that down, too, I shook my head. Anna Maria took her hands and gently bathed them and with her linen napkin dipped some water and held it to her face to cleanse the blood. I had seen my brother’s nurse wash his face in just this way a dozen times. Bronwyn stoically underwent the treatment.

That night my parents decided to turn in early, as we would depart on Sandobar the next morning just before dawn. I felt restless and took a turn down to Lake Michigan. Whiskey had begun to taste good to me again for the first time since my shooting-gallery tear, so I took a bottle along from the bar in my room.

As I strode the shoreline, sleek Chicago rats darted in and out of the bushes. My mind seized upon the wrestler-waiter who had paid Bronwyn such fawning attention at dinner. Slugging the drink, I brushed away the thought. Why did it even bother me?

Throughout my walk I had the persistent sensation of being watched. Thugs and footpads come out at night. I resolved to take Colm Cullen along on any future midnight strolls.

But it was just my imagination taking flight. No one was there; the thin sand beach remained empty. The moon had waxed for the whole time Sandobar traveled east and now hung over the rippling surface of the lake. Passing a shuttered fish shack on the beach, I saw the moon in the water mirrored in a dirty windowpane, the light of a weak, faraway sun, thrice reflected, from moon to lake to glass.

A thought occurred to me. Savage Girl might be mute, but perhaps words were unnecessary. That damned big-muscled server boy, she could seduce him with a smile, a look, by her mere presence.

As though they stood before me I summoned up the image of her and the waiter coupling like goats, smeared up against each other, face pressing upon face, bodies eager for the greasy sheets of lust.

A boozy jealousy tormented my mind. I left the beach and rushed back to the hotel, thinking I would check on the girl, knowing I was acting stupidly but unwilling to alter my course. The mighty hostelry stood silent, ghostly, its hallways inhabited by spectral shadows. The rising room, which took passengers up from the lobby to their floors, had shut down for the night.

Mounting the dark, empty staircase, my climb slowed to a trudge. I became short of breath, to the degree I felt I had to sit down. I uncapped the whiskey and took a long pull.

What floor was this? Only the third. On a dread whim, I opened the door onto the corridor.

She stood there at the dim end of the hall, twenty yards away, wearing the artful hand claws, clacking the blades together like a butcher at his knives.

Breathless, I slammed shut the door.

No, no, no. She hadn’t been there. Not really. Weaving drunkenly, thinking that I must be hallucinating, I staggered up a flight and entered into the fourth-floor corridor.

There she stood once more, swallowed in the gloom but now with her long black hair streaming over her face. This time she started to run at me in loping strides.

Again I ran into the stairwell, panicked, climbing the flights, suppressing an urge to bellow out the alarm. The steps seemed to delight in tripping me up. I felt caged in the tight space, not knowing what I was doing or where I was going. A door slammed down below.

Giving up, I dropped to my knees, feeling that should she come for me, so be it. It was not her, not the she that I knew; it was some other creature. Which did not, it turned out, pursue me. The sixth-floor landing where I had halted remained silent and safe. With fumbling
hands I located a barlow knife in my jacket pocket, opened it and waited.

No threat appeared.

My penthouse suite was one flight up, on the seventh. I rose to my feet, still dizzy, and opened the door into the sixth-floor corridor. Not wanting to know, not trusting my senses, not being able to help it.

A narrow corridor, lined with closed doors and golden, tomblike walls, receding into the darkness at the end of the hall. The lamps had been turned down low, the light was murky, the floor awash in red.

They were there, the two of them, just as I had prefigured them on the beach, a slight woman and a hulking man, clinging together. Her light yellow dress. Speeded-up time, both of them grinning wolfishly at me, white-pale teeth, blank-black eyes. Rage gripped me. I wanted to murder the man.

My mind must have walked away just then, for I have no consecutive memory of what happened. I regained my senses, which had been siezed with a killing fear. The lovers were gone. Whether my mind was disturbed by an actual incident or simply by the idea that I had just undergone a disruption of reality, I couldn’t readily decide.

But no, no, this was all delusion. I had seen nothing, done nothing. I was alone in an empty hallway.

No terror exists so powerful as feeling that your grasp upon sanity might slip-slide away like a buggy on an icy road, not knowing what is real, not knowing what you’ve done.

Up in my suite, I examined my face in the room’s massive, gilt-edged mirror. My nose appeared elongated, bulbous. I looked like a sad clown. My head felt full of sand.

Still shaken, still breathing hard, I poured myself another shot of whiskey, wishing I had my pen and ink, left behind in Sandobar. Anything to distract my reeling thoughts. Instead I sat down with the
Chicago Tribune,
wanting diversion, wanting normalcy above all.

I sat there, half reading, half musing, not wholly comprehending the printed words swimming before my eyes.

A commotion outside, rushing footsteps, and a muffled, horrified
kind of shout. I opened my door and peered into the corridor, hoping desperately not to see the phantasms that had so recently afflicted me.

On the seventh floor, nothing. I took the stairway down a floor to the sixth. Four people stood in the middle of the corridor, speaking in hurried whispers, leaning into the open door of one of the guest chambers. Only too aware of my distracted thoughts, I proceeded toward them. But they ignored me, so intent were they on their activity.

Two males and two females in hotel livery, houseboys, maids. They gathered around a human form that lay twisted in the doorway, feet splayed out into the hall.

“I’m a doctor,” I said. Not strictly true, but they stepped aside for me.

Crouching, the first thing I saw was blood, a lot of blood, staining the man’s left leg. Cutting open the slice in his trousers with my knife, I found his adductors slashed at the artery.

Arteria femoralis.
The femoral artery. One of the body’s major vulnerabilities. Breach it and use your waning minutes to say your prayers.

The victim’s torso also demonstrated signs of violence. Stripes across his chest, slicing through his shirt and vest as though it had been raked by a powerful and vicious knife attack.

The groin area had been totally destroyed.

I bent my ear to the man’s mangled chest. No pulse, no hope. I judged him fifteen minutes gone, at least.

There was nothing I could do.

The wrestler-waiter lay dead, his sandy hair, formerly so carefully parted in the middle, now completely unkempt.

•   •   •

Something happened after Chicago, some sort of divide. In order to make a line connection, we left the Palmer House before daybreak, allowing me to avoid any immediate repercussions from the murder of the waiter. Though Chicago officialdom did not manage to question me, I was still rattled by the event.

What had happened? The terror of the sixth floor dissipated like
wisps of a passing nightmare. I cleansed myself of the dead man’s blood and wiped down my knife. Bundling up my room towels and stained clothes, I discarded them in a street-side trash bin as we took a carriage to the railhead.

And I told no one. Not Freddy, not Anna Maria, not Colm, keeping secret my involuntary excursion into a violent mental twilight.

Shut away also was a tiny, niggling, shivery suspicion. Did Savage Girl have a heavy-bladed hand in the death of the waiter? Was that the truth of it? No, no, the possibility was too absurd, too dark, too dangerous for me even to think on it.

What I saw were morbid fantasies, nothing more. My mind that night had been “disguised by drink,” a phrase my grandfather used.

Sandobar traveled east, through the farms and small towns of the more settled part of the country.

But as I said, a divide. Bronwyn was no longer with us. She took to her sleeping compartment in the sixth car, did not come out, ate her meals there (I imagined Cookie tossing in a piece of raw meat, then running away).

Anna Maria, the berdache and Tu-Li visited the girl briefly, but no one else—no men, not Freddy nor myself. My mother informed us it was a “female situation” and warned us to stay away.

Despite the violence in the Palmer House, I was careful to act normal and not display any inner turmoil around the family. None of them even knew of what had occurred in Chicago. I was unsure if I myself knew.

During this fallow period of her isolation, I was often in the parlor car, waiting for Savage Girl to appear. She never did.

As we drew closer to New York, like Bronwyn, I, too, became more and more withdrawn. The Palmer House nightmare, which I thought safely repressed, cropped up at unlikely intervals. Nothing had happened, I convinced myself. I had simply blundered into the aftermath of a crime.

What is your connection?
Only that of the observer and observed. The witness is not, after all, a participant.

“You shouldn’t moon about so much, dear boy,” Freddy said to me,
coming into the parlor car one morning. “You make it obvious how much you miss your playmate.”

“It won’t work,” I said.

“What won’t?”

“You and Anna Maria plan to groom and school her, in view of making her over into a polite young lady. Then you will introduce her into society as a test of your theories.”

“We haven’t exactly made a secret of it,” Freddy said.

“They will never accept her,” I said. “Because of her past.” I spoke from firsthand knowledge of the snake-pit social world of Manhattan, where pedigree was all.