Savage Girl (35 page)

Reinvention. The true American pastime.

He appeared at times like the old Freddy, mercurial and optimistic about all the “marvelous opportunities” that awaited him in the world. But then he would turn away, quiet, with a hollow look about his eyes.

We followed my father to the Turkish Pavilion, where the coffee was “clear as amber, black as ebony.” Freddy fell into a seat and somberly fingered a tobacco hookah.

Outside, in the midway, stood the hand holding Liberty’s torch, transplanted from Madison Square.

Walking the grounds, Bronwyn enjoyed the sunken gardens with their vivid blooms. I had been thinking of her as the strongest of all
girls, but amid the flowers I had a brief appreciation of her fragility. In the Pavilion of the States, she stood before the “oldest doll in America,” molded in pure wax, imported to Rhode Island in 1792, with eyelids that still batted. I thought of Bronwyn’s own pathetic rag doll, hidden away like a secret in her canvas bag.

Dolls and murder. It seemed both conceivable and inconceivable at the same time.

Freddy and Anna Maria sampled a few glasses of champagne at the French exhibition area. At Nicky’s insistence we left them nodding off to an orchestral performance in the Main Building. The four of us—Colm, Nicky, Bronwyn and I—felt less constrained without the parents.

I was aware of my brother only as a vague, buzzing presence, repeating his wish to journey into town on the trolley to see the fossilized
Hadrosaurus
skeleton at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. Bronwyn made much of him, and I tried to be affable.

On our way to the Sawyer Observatory tower, reachable by elevator and perched four hundred feet above the Schuylkill River, Bronwyn pulled up short.

“Hugo,” she said. Nicky scampered ahead.

She took my arm. “Over there. Isn’t that . . . ?”

“Who?” I asked, looking where she gestured.

“The Sage Hen.”

Was it her former keeper? Hard to say. The stubby little form made its way along the riverside toward the stockyard at the edge of the grounds, where we had been earlier in the day to see some of Bronwyn’s favorite exhibits, the quarter horses and the bulls and buffalo.

“Colm,” I said, calling him over from where he walked with Nicky. “See her?”

“That’s a familiar figure,” he said.

“She’s heading on that little path into the woods,” I said.

“Let’s not catch up,” said Bronwyn.

“We’ll just see where she goes,” I said.

28

The path wound down a small incline, at the end of which lay one of the fair’s more idiosyncratic attractions, a compound grandly called “The Hunter’s Camp in Lansdowne Ravine.” Bronwyn and I had wanted to visit earlier but were distracted by Nicky’s engine and Freddy’s silkworms and Anna Maria’s statuary.

We now passed a small sign made of rough-hewn wood, guiding us in the direction of the site. A stream flowed below the bank, and a log cabin, one of its walls left open for display, sat square in front us.

The Sage Hen had vanished.

“Howdy, miss!” called out a handsome mountain man in a skunk-fur cap and an outfit of buckskin and denim.

He stirred a pot over a smoky fire. Behind him, in the half cabin, were arrayed the horns of Rocky Mountain rams, buffalo hides, stuffed mallard ducks. Outside, a knocked-together plank table and a rope hammock that was strung between two trees.

“I’ve got my little friend over there to help protect the camp,” said Mountain Man. Tethered to a stake, a small black bear, about the height of my chest, preoccupied with gorging on a bucket of slops. “Don’t you worry, I’ve got him pretty well trussed.”

“What goes on here?” said Colm.

“Well, sometimes we take a ride,” he said, motioning with his thumb to a canoe tied up at the bank of the stream. “Other times we sit and whittle.”

Bronwyn looked as if she would have liked to move right in, and I suddenly became irritated by the fake young Mountain Man. His buckskin-wrapped muscles.

“What would you like to do?” he asked, coming up beside Bronwyn.

“That,” she said, pointing to an animal hide pegged out on the ground and in the process of being tanned.

“The wolf pelt?” he said.

Bronwyn nodded.

“Sure.”

Three additional men emerged from behind the cabin. One, shorter and slighter than the others, held a banjo with a collection of small game birds hanging off the neck of it. The other two carried shotguns on their shoulders.

“Hey,” said Mountain Man. “My buddies.”

Upon seeing us, they tossed aside their irons. Banjo Boy hit it, and Mountain Man produced a jaw harp and began a stomping rhythm. A bandy-legged cowboy creature in chaps and a red-checkered shirt immediately swept Bronwyn up in a dance. One of the others grabbed me, and I found myself jerked forward and back by a smelly slob of a mule skinner.

Nicky choked himself laughing, then ran off to investigate the canoe. Colm raised his hands and stepped back when a third camp character tried to get him into the square dance.

Bronwyn smiled as she spun around with the bandy-legged cowboy. Breathless, they fell aside and stood together over the staked-out wolf pelt.

“We use brains to cure the hide,” Mountain Man said, going back into guide mode.

“I know,” Bronwyn said.

“Missy,” Mountain Man said, eyeing her, “you ain’t never cured a wolf pelt in your sweet little life.”

“You’d be surprised,” Bronwyn said.

Putting his arms around her from the back, the bandy-legged cowboy dancer guided Bronwyn’s scraping of the hide.

Colm and I looked at each other, having the same idea at once.

“Maybe I’ll stick around here some,” Colm said. “Keep an eye on that checker-shirted cowboy, see if he runs into trouble later on tonight.”

“It’s been known to happen before,” I said, watching the two of them.

Nicky ran up, having escaped drowning himself with the canoe. He had gone totally fair-wild, overexcited, red-faced.

“There’s a cat head mounted in the cabin,” he announced breathlessly. “Its teeth are like razors, and I think it’s a Mexican jaguar.”

Her hands wet with cow brains, Bronwyn stopped scraping the wolf pelt and shrugged off the bandy-legged cowboy.

“Time to go?” I said.

As we took the little path out of the ravine, a ragged urchin dashed up, thrust a handbill at me and ran off again.

I was about to toss it away unread when Bronwyn stopped me. She took the paper, and we looked at it together.

“The Wild Child of the Washoe!” read the handbill. “In person, revealing all, the scandalous wolf-girl who shocked the world.” And, down below, in smaller script, “Professor Dr. Calef Scott’s Traveling Spectacle, direct from appearing before the Crowned Heads of Europe!”

The handbill steered us to something called the Street of Wonders, outside the exposition grounds proper, one of the numberless commercial attractions seeking to siphon coins off the free-spending fairgoers.

“Do you think it really can be?” I said.

“Well, that was the Sage Hen we saw earlier,” she said. “I was sure of it.”

“Let’s all go,” Nicky said. “It’s you onstage!”

“I’m here with you, Nick, I’m not onstage,” Bronwyn said. “Get us some lemonade, will you? You look like to drop dead of heatstroke.”

He dashed off.

“Let me ask,” I said, brandishing the handbill. “Does this make you feel like running the other way or running toward it?”

She shrugged. “The Street of Wonders,” she said. “Doesn’t that sound worth a look?”

It did, and it was, though the “Street” wasn’t actually a street and the “Wonders” weren’t all that wonderful. Along a decrepit alleyway inches deep in mud, near the stockyards outside one of the
exposition’s back entrances, the attractions presented were mostly extremely sad affairs, pigment disorders, misshapen people, accidents of stature.

The Half Lady. The Lion-Faced Boy and His Snake. The Human Owl. I was curious, as an anatomist, about Juan Baptista dos Santos, the Man with Two Penises.

Nicky wanted to see them all.

Most engaging to us, of course, as we approached a sagging canvas banner advertising
THE WILD CHILD OF THE WASHOE
, was Bronwyn’s return to her former milieu. For my part the tension spiraled almost out of control.

But the Savage-Girl-Who-Once-Was remained a cipher. Bronwyn resembled a traveler in time who could see it all from a level distance. Here were the same eager men, the same lurid come-ons, the same handlers who had once dished her up to the world. She responded with no tears, no balking, no spilling out of emotion.

“Have you a veil?” I asked. Given her notoriety from New York, Bronwyn had already been recognized, once or twice, but we had so far managed to avoid a mob scene.

She unraveled a band of black netting around her hat, bringing it down over her face. Nicky helped her position it.

At the entrance to the show, where I expected a Toad, we met a gangly boy in his late teens. “You’re too young,” he said to Nicky, and to Bronwyn, “We don’t admit no women to the afternoon or evening shows, ma’am, but you can come back tomorrow morning.”

“Let’s leave,” I said, thinking I was doing Bronwyn a favor by getting us out of there.

“Run tell Dr. Scott something for me, will you?” Bronwyn said, sweet as butter, smiling at the gangly youth. “Tell him Savage Girl is outside wanting to come in and say hello.”

As if under a spell, the youth left his post and trotted through the canvas doorway, but he almost collided with Dr. Scott, bursting out to greet Bronwyn with an immense, beaming smile on his face.

“My dearest, darling girl, you’ve come back to us!” he exclaimed, seizing her hands in his and kissing her on both cheeks, European style. She stepped back to avoid a full-on embrace.

He lowered his voice. “We’ve followed your exploits in the East,” he said. “Very nicely done, missy.”

Then he turned to me. “Young Delegate! The lady’s paladin, whisking her away from her livelihood to ever greater fortune in the vast metropolis of Manhattan!”

Again, sotto, his wet lips near to my ear. “Though of late I hear of some reversals. If you wish to borrow a sum, I let out loans at twenty percent.”

He gave a formal bow to Nicky. “I have not a doubt this is young Nicholas Delegate. He exhibits the family intelligence, handsome look and, most importantly”—extracting a silver Seated Liberty dime from behind my brother’s ear—“their wealth.”

A corny trick, but one with a hidden sting, as if a thin dime were all we had left of the family fortune.

I had been unsure of our welcome, and the one that occurred seemed innocuous enough, though beneath the dappled surface of the encounter between Scott and Bronwyn I detected darker eddies and undercurrents. These deepened when the Sage Hen emerged and gave a silent curtsy to Bronwyn.

“The Sage Hen,” Bronwyn said in a strained voice. “We saw you this forenoon at the Hunter’s Camp, but you were too far away and we lost you in the crowds.”

“I weren’t never at the Hunter’s Camp today, your ladyship,” the Sage Hen said.

“Come now, it’s me,” Bronwyn said. “No need to be so formal.”

“Oh, you have rose to ’nother different level than us folks, haven’t you?” the Sage Hen said.

Neither Dr. Scott nor I liked the trend of the conversation. “Why don’t you see the show? Free of charge, my compliments,” Scott said, all false heartiness. “We have a secret box next to the stage, specially rigged for our incognito visitors.”

“A stage, you say?” Bronwyn said, taking Dr. Scott’s arm and walking in.

“We have left barns long behind,” Dr. Scott said.

“And who is your ingenue?”

“You shall see, my dear. Although she shall never rise to your genius, she does a journeyman’s service.”

Glancing back as we entered, bowing politely to indicate that the Sage Hen should proceed before me and Nicky, I caught a look of pure spite on the older woman’s face, staring daggers at Bronwyn. Perhaps this visit had been ill-advised after all. Why would the creature lie about being at Hunter’s Camp? And did she not truly love Bronwyn?

Dr. Scott handed us off to the gangly youth, who conducted us to a box, stage right. A screen hid us from the other audience members, who stood restless before the raised and curtained proscenium stage.

The hollow Indian drumbeat began.

“Cast your minds into the blank and trackless emptiness of the Sierra wilderness,” Dr. Scott proclaimed. “Savage, wild, forsaken by God and man. Thronged with ferocious packs of bloodthirsty beasts!”

Of the show itself, one need only imagine a pale imitation of the spectacle presented in Virginia City. It resembled Bowery Shakespeare after one’s having seen the Royal Company perform in the West End. The exact same lines, but a more impoverished effect.

I contented myself with watching Bronwyn watch the show. She covered Nicky’s eyes at the naughty bits. I detected her occasionally mouthing some of the passages in the script. The stick-figure child playing Savage Girl went mechanically through the routine.

The bath was, as before, the true raison d’être of the whole affair. The water level a little lower this time, the steam a little thinner, the breasts more paltry but on more prominent display.

Scott had completely reengineered his third act, quickly sketching out Bronwyn’s rise to the top of New York society. Stick-Figure Girl emerged from the wings to trumpets, dressed in a ludicrous costume, a red satin creation that would have had an enraged Bev Willets rushing the stage in protest. Bronwyn merely laughed.

She sobered again, though, at the reenactment of the Fince shooting, displayed to dramatic effect, with a gilt-painted cardboard-cutout carriage standing in for Caroline Hood’s Cinderella coach.

The audience enjoyed the shooting, Tu-Li’s killing of Fince, the
miraculous Lady Lazarus resurrection of the Wild Child. But what the spectators really wanted was to see the girl go back into the bath.

Afterward Scott introduced us briefly to his actress, a dull-eyed, wet-haired waif in a robe. “Hullo,” she said without expression, shaking Bronwyn’s hand. It was a moment
Harper’s Bazar
or
Leslie’s Illustrated
would dearly have loved to document, the real Savage Girl and the manquée, meeting there unheralded in the darkness backstage.

The Sage Hen was not present. Leading us out of the tent, Scott again took Bronwyn’s arm, intent on claiming his place, it seemed, among the serial parade of her fathers. How many were there? Dan Bowen and Hugh Brace and Sun-Eagle and Dr. Calef Scott and Freddy. Too many.

“May we call on you at Sandobar?” Dr. Scott said to me. “Or perhaps the Fifth Avenue place. You’re with your grandmother now, next door to the old mansion, aren’t you?”