Savage Girl (32 page)

At ten after nine, I arrived at the town house and was charitably welcomed by Margolis the butler. Marching up the stairs to the garret at the top of the house, I experienced the hollow-stomached, weak-groined sensation I always got before a boxing match. Margolis waited below as I climbed the rickety fourth-floor stairway to the court.

“Best of luck, sir,” he said.

“We who are about to die salute you,” I called back.

Stepping into the gymnasium, I experienced fresh humiliation. Spectators. A few of the billiard-room boys, the Bliss brothers, Jones Abercrombie.

And Bronwyn. She stood to one side with Victoria Woodhull, Tennessee Claflin and a small clutch of other women. Just to distract me, wearing bloomers again.

I would not be spared, it seemed, any possible opportunity for shame.

“Delegate! Finally!” Bev called out with false heartiness. “We thought you might back out.”

“Let’s get to it,” I said, ignoring the audience, which had gathered at the far end of the space. There for amusement and entertainment. I thought back to when Bev and I performed our mock-combat dance during the German at the debut.

“Oh, I like the fights,” I heard Bronwyn chatter. “My old mother told me women always enjoy watching the fights because they like to see some man get what’s coming to him.”

Laughter from the assembly. They loved her.

The overheated racquets court made my head swim. Bev always kept the whole town house blazing, as if to declare himself separate from those faceless poor who could not afford coal. Even before the contest, sweat had broken out on my skin. I’m afraid I appeared nervous.

When Bev stripped off his shirt, I realized I had underestimated
him woefully. Lately he had taken up the gymnasium training craze, employing a medicine ball and Indian clubs. His gym master had him running around a wooden track like a dog.

Next to him my physical shortcomings were thrown into high relief. In the court’s mirror, I appeared hollow-chested, spindly. I had violet shadows beneath my eyes. My beard was in disarray, as though a porcupine had assaulted my face and then stuck itself there.

Bev and I had fought many times throughout our childhood. He always eventually gained the advantage. The rule is that a boxer will beat a brawler every time, but with us such distinctions went out the window, our antipathy for each other quickly taking over, making us flail.

We had done so before in this very same space. Some of the dark stains on the hardwood floor were no doubt the old unscrubbed outlines from blood spilled in childhood, which as everyone knows is ineradicable.

We both oiled. No signal, no bell, simply a “Yup” from Bev and we went at it, larruping each other mightily. For a good five minutes after we started, the only sound was the solid whack and slap of our blows.

Some fights are determined not by skill but by which combatant is angrier. I believed I was gaining the upper hand. Bev was punishing me, though. I could feel my brain caroming around inside my skull like a cue ball. My bum foot was a handicap.

Then we both swung wild punches and, with simultaneous lucky shots, knocked each other out.

The last sensation for me, before a woozy spiral into unconsciousness, was Bronwyn’s chiming laughter and her saying, “Excellent, gents, very well done.”

25

At seven o’clock on May Day morning, slipping past the few hardy souls who still hung in ambush about our block, not waiting for Swoony’s dry-toast-and-weak-tea breakfast, I shook off the gawkers and took a hansom cab down to the East River docks, to board
Saxon,
of the Sprague Line, the last steam coastal headed for Boston that would arrive in daylight.

When I reached the dock and was waiting to board, my skin suddenly bristled, as the skin of a mouse must crawl when it’s around a cat. I felt somehow observed, stalked. I darted a glance over both shoulders, quickly, in order not to attract attention to myself. Nothing.

All the murders, all the bloody gashes, all the obliterated organs. The thought had preoccupied me for the past few weeks, that I had been present at every crime scene. Matthew Donleavy, the waiter at Palmer House in Chicago. Our groom from The Ditches, Graham Barton, his body only recently identified. The nameless Gypsy dancer. Percy Roehm, the young heir at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Pollard, the Human Polar Bear at Coney Island. Even Fince’s brother, Peter—well, I had been in the general vicinity of Virginia City when it happened.

By some lights, by some narrowly suspicious lights—by a policeman’s lights, in other words—I could have done them all.

That the police had not caught up with me yet was tribute only to the gross incompetence of the law. But that didn’t make me feel much better. I often thought the day would arrive when some eager detective would come knocking at my door.

Or the Savage Girl would. Because the only other person I could
think of who was at each and every crime scene was Bronwyn. She might suspect that I knew too much, that I understood there was some kind of a link between her and these horrible murders. Plus, she had a sharp instrument in her possession that she could employ against anyone, including me.

Whenever I saw a young, shapely woman from behind, approaching her so that I could not glimpse her face, seeing only thick black hair pinned up under her hat, I would always think of Bronwyn, the savagery in her waiting only to come out, seeking the opportunity to claim her next victim.

On the dock one such woman triggered in me staccato thoughts of fear and flight. I looked again. Not her.
I am mad. I am mad.
What Fince shouted before Tu-Li finished him, the words now ringing in my brain.

I occupied my time on the way up by reading Professor James’s lecture notes on paranoia. I planned to throw myself on his mercy as a patient, though the only sure cure for what I had would be for me somehow to turn back the clock.

The coastal went along at a fast clip, breasting the shallow gray waves, past Long Island, Connecticut, Nantucket, Cape Cod. The speed of the boat helped me forget my fears, at least for now. By the time I arrived in Cambridge, it was four o’clock in the afternoon. I had gotten over the feeling of being tracked, but I still felt poorly, agitated to the degree that I noticed my hands trembled more than usual.

The James house on Quincy Street had generous proportions, a gracious yard behind a glossy black gate, with banks of late-blooming forsythia all around the verge. I climbed the steps and rang the bell, wondering if escaping my troubles by falling upon the hospitality of my professor was the best idea.

Alice James, attired in spider-gray velvet, came up promptly behind the houseboy.

“Hugo, we were so glad of your telegram. Come in.”

“Ho!” sounded a deep voice behind her. Not Professor James but an older man who resembled him, his father, Henry James Sr. “I have heard about you, young man.” He shook my hand with vigor.

“Have you?” I offered.

“I know that you provided William with an excellent pupil in Cambridge and with excellent fare in Manhattan.”

I had heard something of the senior James, too, that he had gypsied his family around Europe and America while the children were growing up, settling in no place for more than a year or two, parking them in experimental schools and with private tutors and somehow giving them a marvelous education in the middle of all the upheaval.

William told me that he had already toured Europe five times and that he was fluent in five languages. His brother, Henry James, relocated permanently to London, was well on the way toward becoming a serious writer. Within the family, though, the two geniuses were merely “Willy” and “Harry.”

The interior of the house was light and warm, the atrium entry hall toasting under the early-May sun streaming in through a greenhouse-style roof. I remembered something James once said to me when we worked in the science laboratory, our papers spread out in front of us, a beautiful snowfall pressing up against the bank of windows. “The light is shrieking away outside.”

It has been my observation that when you are feeling bad, no environment, no matter how pleasant, can lift the pall. I suspected that these two people, Alice and her father, could not help but notice the corners of my mouth sagging, that they feared I might break into tears at any moment.

“Let our man take your overcoat,” said Mr. James Sr.

“Hugo.” Professor James had joined us. “Glad to see you. A delightful break from reading examination papers.” All around the entrance hall towered a series of palms in square containers on a glossy parquet floor. Three collegial armchairs stood clustered in a corner, with a shawl thrown over the back of one. It was easy to imagine Alice sitting there alone, awaiting company. Me.

“Mary!” shouted William’s father in the direction of the stairs. “We have a guest!”

“She needn’t come down,” said Alice of her mother. “We’ve planned a walk anyway.”

“No, please,” I said. “I’ve just come to consult with Dr. James.”

With that I physically pulled my professor into the little receiving room to the right of the front door.

“Delegate?” he said, baffled at my abrupt treatment of his family. “I thought we might take a stroll around the Yard.”

I shut the door. “You have to help me,” I said. “I believe I am going mad.”

For fifteen minutes I spewed forth a steady stream of anguish. James was fast becoming America’s premier authority on psychology and the human mind. I grabbed at him like a drowning man.

“Can there be such a thing as a dissociative state, a trance a person goes into and afterward he has no awareness of what he has done?”

Certainly, Professor James said. He had seen it occur.

“Can there be two selves in one body?” I asked. “And one goes out and does things, horrible things, and then wakes up to become the other, without memory?”

I ran through it then, the fact that wherever I went, murder seemed to follow. I could not be certain what I had done, but with the memory gaps, the uncanny coincidences, the serial procession of dead bodies, I was beset by doubts.

“It all seems bizarre,” I said. “I know that I’ve been gripped with horrible rages lately. I feel like my head has been in a vise. Could it be paresis?”

“But isn’t it a common characteristic of paresis not to recognize the symptoms of paresis?” James responded.

He questioned me. About the concussion I suffered after the Gypsy killing in the park, whether the memory gaps had been more serious since that time. Did I link the incidents mentally with any other person? My mother or father?

I had left Bronwyn out of the whole story.

He listened. Bless him, he listened. When I finished, he offered no palliatives, but I somehow felt relieved. We fell into a long silence.

“Well, Hugo,” James finally said. “I am truly sorry. Of course, we couldn’t help but hear about your tribulations at home.”

“It’s not good,” I said, choking up slightly.

“I would suggest you remove yourself from the fray a bit. You’ve been up at St. Alban’s before, I recall?”

St. Alban’s Recuperative Home, in Wellesley, an asylum for those beset by nerves and exhaustion. I had retreated there almost exactly a year ago. My doctor-torturers induced seizures, fed me copious amounts of butter, put me in cold baths for hours, afterward covering my body with wet canvas. Strict silence enforced at all times.

None of it helped. My instability of mind had persisted.

Professor James suggested that he should take charge of my pistol, the one that Colm Cullen had given me. “Someday when you tell me you don’t see the need of it anymore, I will give it back to you.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

“Your keeping a pistol is what does not make sense. Guns are like thermometers, only instead of measuring body temperature they measure our fear.”

I gave him the weapon. He slipped it into a desk drawer. It was easier to give up the pistol, knowing I had a trusty sliding knife in my breast pocket.

“Shall we walk out?” said Professor James. “Alice will be anxious for us, and I thought you might want to reacquaint yourself with your school, which has dearly missed your presence.”

We exited the little room into the residence’s entry hall. The professor’s mother, Mary James, peered from behind her full-bearded husband. “Very pleased,” she said. “No tea, then?”

“No, Mother,” said Alice. “We must go if we want to catch the last of the light.”

“Very nice to meet you,” I said, and once again the elder Mr. James gripped my hand.

We crossed the street to the campus, and I was immediately flooded with memories of my Harvard days, of plunging myself into studies so completely that everything else in the world—most of all my small fears and worries—melted away. I rarely socialized when I was at school. Unlike in New York, where there was always temptation, a group of raging young fashionables ready to invade a restaurant or a club or take a rollicking dive into the Tenderloin.

We turned in among all the old familiar red bricks, the Yard greening up with the season. The warm weather pricked at my mood.

Alice said, “The ancient superstition as to spring and youth being the most joyous periods is pretty well exploded, don’t you think?” She took William’s hand. “The one is the most depressing moment of the year, so is the other the most difficult of life.”

“I suppose,” I said, “but my own difficulties are . . .”

“Overwhelming?” asked James. “You know, you can speak before my sister with perfect confidence. Crises and debilitating anxieties have long been my bosom companions. Alice, too—do you mind my saying, Alice?—has struggled often with the idea of self-death. Haven’t you, dearest dear?”

“What to do about it is the question,” said Alice. “My best answer: clothe oneself in neutral tints, walk by still waters and possess one’s soul in silence.”

Well. Another prescription.

“That is precisely what I have thought,” said James.

“Nonetheless I have found that of all the arts,” said Alice, “living is the most exquisite and rewarding.”

“Again, what I was thinking,” said James.

“And your sister, Bronwyn?” Alice asked me. “I was very much impressed to meet her in New York. Such an interesting, intelligent, fierce presence.”

We rounded the corner past Massachusetts Hall. And Harvard Hall, where I had so often labored late into the night, immersed in my studies, never imagining the troubles in my future.

“Let me tell you a beautiful, touching tale,” said Alice.

“Here we go,” said James. “Now, listen.”

“An old couple near Boston who had lived together for half a century became destitute and had to sell all their things, and had nothing before them but the dreaded poorhouse, where they would have meat and drink, to be sure, but where they would be separated. They could handle all but that, so one day they went out together and never came back, and their old bodies were found tied together in the river. How perfect a death!”

“Alice is having a good day,” James said mildly. We silently parsed her tale.

A loose-limbed fellow with big teeth and shaggy brown hair ambled toward us across the Yard.

“Oh, not that fool Roosevelt,” I muttered. I took James’s elbow, he took Alice’s, and we guided ourselves in the opposite direction.

“The newspapers came to attack your sister like wolves,” James said.

“It makes me glad to be of such small moment in the world,” said Alice.

Professor James said, “Tennessee wrote us that Bronwyn had moved in at their town house.”