Savage Girl (23 page)

“No,” she said. She drove while I sagged backward in the seat. No? Did she mean,
No, I will never go to such places when I am a lady?
Or,
No, I will not have you telling me where I can and cannot go?

“This whole neighborhood,” I said, swinging wide my arm drunkenly.

She looked back at me. “Then it will be our secret, just between the two of us.” Touching me lightly on the arm.

I thrilled. I was inebriated. I hauled myself upright, peering at her in the gaslight gleam of Fifth Avenue.

“I wonder, Bronwyn, how many other secrets do you harbor?”

The frigid air on my face, our exhalations pluming in the night.

“How many secrets?” I said, the question floating off in a cloud like my breath. I didn’t expect her to answer, but she did.

“Everything,” she said.

•   •   •

Delia and I had several brief, pouty encounters in passing, at Delmonico’s and once on the promenade around the top of the Murray Hill Reservoir at Forty-second Street. I had to admit that one reason I still held on to Delia, beyond all logic and kindness, was that I knew Bev Willets had been waiting in the wings for her. If there was ever a hint of trouble between me and Delia, he would pounce.

But finally I dropped a card at her home, suggesting I wanted to speak with her, giving a time I’d call. Later that afternoon, at the appointed hour, I arrived at the Showalter place on Twenty-eighth, off Madison.

“My, you’re formal,” Delia said when the butler opened the door. “A calling card and all. And your forehead looks positively scrunched.”

She came up and gave me a light buss on the cheek.

“Can we go someplace?” I said.

“Hmmm, that’s an interesting suggestion,” she said, teasing me a little.

“The drawing’s in use?” I asked, refusing to play along.

“Well, Mother and my sister are in the drawing room, entertaining the mayor,” Delia said. “Anything but that.”

“Will it be too chilly for you outside?” I felt an automatic gentlemanly posture take hold whenever I saw Delia.

“I have my wool wrap,” she said. “And the most cunning new fur bonnet. You’ll see.”

Her words were gay, and she tried for her usual light breathiness, but her voice had a wavering quality. Did she know what was coming?

Delia turned quickly to get her things and made her red dress and petticoats fly up behind her in a whirl. I caught a glimpse of an ankle, trim in its white stocking and high-heeled black slipper.

I tried to flatten out the flutter in my heart.

The winter sun shone weak and remote. We made our way to
Gramercy Park from her house. I couldn’t hold back until we got to a place more private, more appropriate. I told her the truth.

“Delia,” I said, “this isn’t meant to be.”

“I know,” she said lightly, but with a slight look of concern rising in her eyes. “It’s just too cold out here. Not the day for a walk.”

“No, it’s just— You know what I mean.” I looked at her and saw that she did in fact know. She realized, I think, that this break had been coming for a long time. Even so long ago as the midsummer ball at The Ditches, when we waltzed and behaved to all the world as though we were engaged.

“I don’t think—” I said, and then, strangely, my eyes filled with tears even before hers did.

We held hands and spoke for a good half hour. The neighborhood sidewalks were deserted on this frigid afternoon, aside from lone pedestrians who hurried along, looking past our faces. Freezing tears on cold cheeks. Across the gated park enclosure stood the mansion belonging to the Willets family, a place Delia and I knew well, having visited, danced, had dinner parties there many times over the years.

“Are you sure?” One of the things she repeated several times.

“Sure? What is sure?” I said sadly. “But—”

“You’ll always be my friend, I know,” she said, interrupting.

I was silent.

“May I tell you something? Will you promise not to get angry?”

“How can I promise if I don’t know what you are going to say?”

“Before this you’d promise just at my asking,” she said.

I shrugged. “What is it?” Trying not to sound impatient.

“Watch out for that sister of yours,” Delia said. “You think you know everything about her? But you don’t.”

I did indeed feel a pulse of anger.

“She has nothing to do with this, or with you,” I said. “You’ll always be my pet, even if we can’t be together.”

What a wretch I was, pronouncing that insipid phrase.

And how my spirits rose! as I detached myself from Delia Showalter at her front door and wordlessly we went our separate ways.

18

In that first week of the New Year, Bronwyn took her initial step into the public sphere.

Prior to this she had remained safe within the family. After her archery triumph at The Ditches, the Bliss brothers tried to call on the new prodigy, but we put them off. They had come pestering by our house, dropping their cards. With Bronwyn safely cocooned in the South Wing, they never made any headway.

Bev Willets was more subtle, and therefore more dangerous. He had buttonholed me at school a few times (he was also at Harvard, when he bothered to attend), probing my family circumstance. He, too, wanted to know about the archery girl. Realizing that to discourage him would only put the scent of blood in the water, I had affected a casual offhandedness.

“You know Freddy—he collects people like Greek sculpture,” I said. I had described Bronwyn as a distant cousin from San Francisco, a summer visitor.

But rumors and gossip persisted about a new ward of the Delegates. Freddy managed to keep her actual name out of the newspapers. That didn’t entirely eliminate interest in her existence. Money was the draw, of course, since anyone associated with us, especially a female, might conceivably act as a doorway into our countinghouse.

More than that, high society just then felt itself under siege. Nicky had been right. Climbers of every sort sought a way in. All interlopers were treated as a species of burglar. Any new figure within the stockade invited intense scrutiny and, until proven otherwise, was assumed by the hens to be a fox.

From when I first came to understand my father’s audacious plan for the Savage Girl, back in the wilds of Nevada, I declined to believe that it would work. Initially I stood cynically apart, then became swept up in the effort myself. At every turn, as I watched it move forward, I thought the project would crash.

Yet here I was, in the first week of January, sipping a cup of weak Ceylon in the gallery of Madame Eugénie’s Académie de Danse. This cultural institution lodged itself off Washington Square and was perhaps fading with the neighborhood but still retained an almost mystical significance for our set. I had attended there. Nick would also, though I could hardly credit the idea.

In Madame Eugénie’s ancient ballroom with its smoothly varnished oak-wood floorboards, the rosebud petals of the prominent New York families first came into bloom, gently bred young women of seventeen or eighteen, sent forth for a final round of finishing before their social debuts.

This was the season, the short two months after the holidays and before Lent. This was the first and last best chance. To come out successfully meant love, security, standing. Really, it meant life itself, since failure was a sort of death.

Entering Madame Eugénie’s was, for these girls, a miniature debut. It resembled the claiming races of the season’s Thoroughbred three-year-olds at Saratoga: a chance to survey the field. Who will my horse be running against when the derbies begin in earnest? Which entry will be the strongest? Where may I locate the competition?

I sipped my tea and waited for Anna Maria to show up with Bronwyn. When I left The Citadel around noon, they were involved in a fitting, and now, at the two-o’clock bell, they had still not arrived.

Below me, drifting across the floor in clouds of white, the first few nervous daughters had entered the arena. They were, to a girl, irresistible, denizens of that fairyland that is the female coming-of-age period. Desire washed over me like a blush.

“Delegate, the man of the hour,” Bev Willets said, sliding onto the divan next to me. “You have a bitch in this hunt, don’t you?”

“Employing your usual delicacy of phrase, Beverly.”

“Your ward who was only a summer visitor, a Miss Brennan, correct?” he said.

I smiled inwardly, thinking that our strategy of secrecy had not been fully a failure if Bev Willets hadn’t been able to ferret out Bronwyn’s correct name.

He gazed down at the dance floor below where we sat in the gallery. “You are a cur for keeping her from us. Why all the secrecy? Which one is she?”

I told him that my sister had not yet arrived.

“‘Sister’ now,” Bev said. “I thought she was your cousin. You Delegates have to get your stories straight.”

He was just tweaking me. That my parents had adopted a ward was by this point commonly known. I could just as well have questioned Bev as to why he was there, since entry into the dance academy was ostensibly carefully controlled. He would probably have pleaded cousinage of some sort to one of the belles below, but his real purpose was titillation.

The balcony gallery at Madame Eugénie’s was the proper territory of mothers, brothers and chaperones of the girls
à l’école.
A variety of ottomans, chaises and divans, all Second Empire castoffs, all antimacassared to the inch, were scattered throughout, alternating with frowsy palms that had seen better centuries.

Madame Eugénie Brochet never took to the dance floor herself, having long since vanished into a twilight of chintz and phlebitis. She sat to the side, ensconced in a thronelike armchair, one gouty leg propped up before her, muttering about the glory days of the world when she was young. Her companion and opposite number in a Boston-style marriage that had drifted south to Manhattan, a Miss Renée, trotted forth from her side with instructions, imprecations and random irrelevancies.

The two ladies occupied a downstairs garden apartment to which they strictly forbade admittance.

The true powers at the school were the dancing masters, Messieurs Henri and Sébastien, cousins and rivals. Conjoined almost to
the same degree as Chang and Eng Bunker, they differed from those celebrated Siamese twins in the fact that they actively hated each other.

Dressed formally and identically in ditto suits, pleated ascot ties and wing-collared shirts, they strolled among the growing crowd of mothers and daughters on the floor below, being introduced, bowing flamboyantly, keeping an eye out lest one gain some imperceptible advantage over his adversary. The only way to tell them apart: monocle (Henri) or pince-nez (Sébastien).

Anna Maria glided in with Bronwyn, and at the same moment Delia Showalter appeared at my side.

“Hugo, Beverly,” she said, her inevitable aunt hovering in the background. “At last we see the new crop of fashionables.”

“Some of them less fashionable than others,” Bev said, always a precise judge of couture.

“And yours,” Delia said to me. “She comes to us quite without experience, I’m told.”

“Don’t believe everything you hear,” I said. It was the first time we had spoken since we broke it off.

“Why, she’s really very pretty,” Delia exclaimed as Bronwyn passed beneath us. “She must be a nurse, since she accompanies you out and about when you are sick.” This was Delia’s pointed reference to the evening she saw Bronwyn and me in a carriage outside the Young Patriarchs’ Ball, an event I had begged off of, pleading illness.

“Yes, what was
that
all about?” Bev asked, twisting the knife.

“So fresh and unworldly,” Delia said, still on Bronwyn. “I shall have to put her together with my sister.”

Young Marcella Showalter had taken her place among the debuting mademoiselles on the dance floor.

“A tragic figure, Marcella, in that her beauty can never approach that of her older sibling,” Bev said.

“Thank you,” Delia said. “Marcie can very well hold her own.”

I turned from them and approached the rail, eavesdropping on the chatter below. Anna Maria had left Bronwyn and, accompanied by an
elderly battle-ax named Mrs. Blight (of the Philadelphia Blights, grandmother of debutante Penelope Blight), headed toward the stairway to the gallery.

I have to admit my heart caught in my throat, seeing my little sister cast off to sink or swim on her own.

She sank. Anna Maria had left her with a cousin of ours, Beldonna Griswold, who immediately jettisoned her wallflower relative and set off to seek smarter company. Bronwyn remained alone, directly below me. Clots of debutantes formed themselves into hierarchies, throwing off furious hooded glances at their competition. The musk of female rivalry rose from the floor like a rain squall on the ocean.

I had the impulse to leap like Booth from the balcony, take Bronwyn’s hand, stand beside her, act her champion. The same refrain occurred, the one that had sounded ever since I’d first encountered the girl.

Who will protect her from harm?

Oh, no! Danger! Danger!
I wanted to shout. A certain Miss Croker, singularly ill-favored, perhaps the one girl in the whole coterie without prospects or grace, approached Bronwyn. She was the kind of young lady who wore spectacles to dancing school. Edna Croker was social death, her family tainted by financial reverses in the latest panic, enduring the additional onus of an overly public suffragist uncle.

“Will we do the Lancers, do you think?” Edna asked Bronwyn. “I quake at the Lancers.”

Bronwyn smiled at the girl and said that the Lancers dance steps gave her difficulty, too.

“I’m so very shy and nervous,” Edna said. “Will you be my friend?”

It was hideous, gruesome, but Bronwyn merely said that she would. Marcie Showalter and one of the Buchanan twins detached themselves from a chattering clutch of pretty girls and approached the two outliers.

“I must say hello to you,” Marcie announced, addressing Bronwyn and ignoring Edna. “Your brother Hugo was fated for my sister, Delia, in which case you and I would be relatives of sorts.”

“But Hugo Delegate isn’t your real brother, is he?” Pauline Buchanan said. “Just a cousin?”

“It must be romantic, to be the poor ward of a wealthy man,” Marcie said. “Like in Sir Walter Scott.”

“Who is Sir Walter Scott?” Bronwyn asked, and I groaned inwardly.

“What an ignorant boobie you are! What a foolish question!” Pauline exclaimed.

“Baronet Scott, the great author?” Edna said helpfully. “
Peveril of the Peak
? I love
Redgauntlet
!”

“Oh, do be quiet, you homely mouse,” Pauline said.

Marcie assessed Bronwyn coolly. “Miss Delegate might have a wee bit of catching up to do, in order to come level with the rest of us,” she said. “Whatever do they teach you way out in San Francisco?”

“They teach us not to bully our lessers and that there is no such thing as a foolish question,” said Bronwyn.

“She’s quaint,” Pauline said, and made to turn away.

Bronwyn reached out and laid a hand on Marcie’s arm, and the girl froze at the impertinence. My sister leaned in close and murmured something I couldn’t catch. Marcie gave a look of horror and flinched backward. But Bronwyn had her toe on Marcie’s slipper, so the girl lost her balance and stumble-stepped.

And with that they were finished with each other.

Later on I asked Bronwyn what she had said to cause such a reaction in Marcie. “I asked if she wanted her pretty little nose bloodied,” she said. After this initial encounter, the younger Showalter girl gave Bronwyn a wide berth.

Madame Eugénie struck a small gong at her elbow. She then fell back, exhausted by the effort. The dancing masters took to the floor, clapping their hands. The well-practiced girls and boys assembled themselves in cotillion lines, facing one another across the floor, separated by gender.

Once again Bronwyn blundered, being out of place and finding herself lined up alongside the boys. Titterings. Monsieur Henri had to guide her physically to her mark.

But something happened then that worked to retrieve the whole afternoon.

Monsieur Henri cleared his throat. “Gentlemen, advance.”

The boys lumbered across the room to pick their preferred partners. Much jostling and elbowing, and suddenly—the waiting girls watched, dismayed—a dozen of the young men clustered in front of Bronwyn. There would have been more, but there wasn’t space.

Observing from the railing above, I saw the dynamics in the room shift. The girls could carp all they wanted and disdain the newcomer as “the poor ward of a wealthy man.” The boys had other ideas.

Bronwyn took the first suitor in front of her by his shoulders.

“Edna is a very accomplished dancer,” she said, guiding him to the diffident (and wholly partnerless) Miss Croker, extending a kindness to her new friend. She enlisted the second boy in line for herself.