By Liz Soares
Hugo Delegate has found the body of his best friend, Beverly Willett, in the study of the Willett’s family home at Gramercy Park, Manhattan. He is accused of murder. In 1876, the penalty for this crime is death. But Hugo is only worried that he will get off. He wants to be convicted.
Though readers will sense the reason for Hugo’s strange attitude after a few chapters, the sorry tale of the privileged Delegate family, and the tragic consequences of their actions, will take the entire novel to unfold.
As the book opens, Hugo is sitting in The Tombs, New York City’s infamous prison. His family has arranged for him to be represented by the esteemed law firm of Howe and Hummel. The attorneys are famous for getting their clients off the hook.
Hugo tells them how he came to be at the scene of the crime. It’s a story that begins a year earlier, in Virginia City, Nevada.
The Delegates have traveled west in their private train, to inspect the silver mine that is the source of their fabulous wealth. Anna Maria and Freddy (Hugo has always called his parents by their first names), out of a lack of any other productive activity, fancy themselves amateur anthropologists. Hugo and his mother make an interesting spectacle as they stroll down the dusty main street of Virginia City accompanied by Ti-Lu, Anna Maria’s Chinese maid, and Tahktoo, a Zuni Berdache, or transvestite.
When the family comes upon a shoddy freak show featuring a "savage girl," the urge to bring her back east with them is irresistible. They have always wanted to keep a "feral child," Hugo relflects.
According to an odd creature, the Sage Hen, who purports to be her guardian, the girl was abandoned in the wild by her parents. In the show, the "savage girl" flicks around long metal claws, growls and shrieks, and then takes a bath in a large tub, which is about as erotic as it gets in 19th century America.
Freddy tries to buy out the show’s organizers, but when that fails, he uses his wiles to wrest the girl from her life on the stage.
Eventually, the Delegates learn the girl's name is Bronwyn, and exactly what her story is. Bronwyn appears willing to leave her wild life behind, and enter fully into New York society. This delights Anna Maria, who turns the girl into the most sparkling debutante of the season.
But Hugo is disturbed. He thinks Bronwyn is manipulative. He doesn't understand why she hates him. Then, he begins to notice that whenever a man flirts with her or otherwise shows her attention, he is killed. And not just murdered, but disemboweled.
Hugo is not a reliable narrator. An anatomy student at Harvard, he's obsessed with sharp objects and spends much of his time creating intricate drawings of preserved body parts. Hugo has spent time in a sanitarium — he's "nervy" — and may black out from time to time. He suspects Bronwyn of the crimes — and himself.
This novel is rich in detail and colorful language. Christmas dinner at the Delegates' includes "roast duck succulent in its onion sauce, baked potatoes with their jackets crisped in duck fat, chicken pie, stewed carrots...hickory nut macaroons and chocolate drops." Hobbledehoys, "assorted dips, tossers and clips" and gandy dancers pepper the pages. When the family arrives back home in New York, the "berdache lay atop of a mountain of freight piled upon a wicker baggage cart, borne along as though it were Cleopatra's barge."
The story takes us from Bronwyn's exquisite coming out ball to the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia, where a "wild west" exhibit stirs up the festering remains of Bronwyn's past life, to a final showdown in Central Park's Sheep Meadow.
New York is vividly described, as the characters traverse the horse-dung covered streets and view the copper arm and torch of the future Liberty, which is on display in Madison Square Park as a fundraising effort to erect the statue. The conspicuous consumption of the Gilded Age is a persistent theme: Willett's father, an ultra-conservative, has created at one of his summer homes "an exact replica of Marie Antoinette's play farm at Versailles."
Real-life people also figure in the story. P.T. Barnum wants to sign up Bronwyn. Radical sisters Victoria Woodhall and Tennessee Claflin find her a kindred spirit. And Hugo visits psychologist William James, who happens to be his anatomy mentor, to talk about his troubled feelings. Alice, James' sister, suggests the antidote to suicidal thoughts is to "clothe oneself in neutral tints, walk by still waters and possess one's soul in silence."
Unfortunately, Hugo doesn't have that option. The raw west (George Armstrong Custer's troops are decimated at the Little Big Horn in 1876) is colliding with the uneasily civilized east, with the "savage girl" at the epicenter. The reader is glad to see that not only does she remain true to her soul, she helps Hugo to find his.
