The Interpretation of Murder

Chapter Four

It was almost seven on Monday evening when Freud,

Ferenczi, and I returned to the hotel. Brill had gone home, tired and happy. I believe Coney Island is Brill's favorite place in America. He once told me that when he first arrived in this country at the age of fifteen, penniless and alone, he used to spend entire days on the boardwalk and sometimes nights beneath it. All the same, it wasn't obvious to me that Freud's first taste of New York should have included the Live Premature Incubator Babies show or Jolly Trixie, the 685-pound lady, advertised under the rapturous slogan holy smoke — she's fat! she's awful fat.

But Freud seemed delighted, comparing it to Vienna's Prater — 'only on a gigantic scale,' he said. Brill even persuaded him to rent a bathing costume and join us in the enormous saltwater swimming pool inside Steeplechase Park. Freud proved a stronger swimmer than either Brill or Ferenczi, but in the afternoon he had an attack of prostatic discomfort. We sat down, therefore, at a boardwalk cafe, where, punctuated by the clattering roar of the roller coasters and the steadier pounding of surf, we had a conversation I will never forget.

Brill had been ridiculing the treatment of hysterical women practiced by American physicians: massage cures, vibrating cures, water cures. 'It is half quackery and half sex industry,' he said. He described an enormous vibrating machine recently purchased — for four hundred dollars — by a doctor he knew, a professor at Columbia no less. 'Do you know what these doctors are actually doing? No one admits it, but they are inducing climax in their women patients.'

'You sound surprised,' replied Freud. 'Avicenna practiced the same treatment in Persia nine hundred years ago.'

'Did he make himself rich from it?' asked Brill, with a note of bitterness. 'Thousands a month, some of them. But the worst of it is their hypocrisy. I once pointed out to this august physician, who just happens to be my superior at work, that if his treatment worked it was a proof of psychoanalysis, establishing the link between sexuality and hysteria. You should have seen the look on his face. There was nothing sexual in his treatment, he said, nothing at all. He was simply allowing patients to discharge their excess neural stimulation. If I thought otherwise, what it proved was the corrupting effect of Freud's theories. I'm lucky he didn't fire me.'

Freud merely smiled. He had none of Brill's bitter edge, none of his defensiveness. One could not blame the ignorant, he said. In addition to the inherent difficulty of uncovering the truth about hysteria, there were powerful repressions, accumulated over millennia, which we could not expect to vanquish in a day. 'It is the same with every disease,' said Freud. 'Only when we understand the cause can we claim to understand the sickness, and only then can we treat it. For now the cause remains hidden from them, so they remain in the Dark Ages, bleeding their patients and calling it medicine.'

It was then that the conversation took its remarkable turn. Freud asked if we would like to hear one of his recent cases, about a patient obsessed with rats. Naturally we said yes.

I had never heard a man speak as Freud did. He recounted the case with such fluency, erudition, and insight that he held us rapt for over three straight hours. Brill, Ferenczi, and I would periodically interrupt, challenging his inferences with objections or questions. Freud would answer the challenge before the questioner had even got the words out of his mouth. I felt more alive in those three hours than at any other moment in my life. Amid the barkers, screaming children, and thrill seekers of Coney Island, the four of us, I felt, were tracing the very edge of man's self- knowledge, breaking ground in undiscovered country, forging uncharted paths the world would some day follow. Everything man thought he knew about himself — his dreams, his consciousness, his most secret desires — would be changed forever.

Back at the hotel, Freud and Ferenczi were preparing to go to Brill's for dinner. Unfortunately, I was committed to dine elsewhere. Jung was meant to go with them but was nowhere to be found. Freud had me knock on Jung's door, to no avail. They waited until eight, then set off for Brill's without him. I changed hurriedly but irritably into evening dress. Under any circumstances, I would have been annoyed by the prospect of a ball, but to miss dinner with Freud as a result was vexing beyond description.

New York society in the Gilded Age was essentially the creation of two very rich women, Mrs William B. Astor and Mrs William K. Vanderbilt, and of the titanic clash between them in the 1880s.

Mrs Astor, nee Schermerhorn, was highborn; Mrs Vanderbilt, nee Smith, was not. The Astors could trace their wealth and lineage to New York's Dutch aristocracy of the eighteenth century. To be sure, the term aristocracy in this usage is a bit of a stretch, since Netherlandish fur traders in the New World were not exactly princes in the Old. European ladies and gentlemen may not have read their Tocqueville, but the one difference between the United States and Europe on which they all agreed was that America, to its misfortune, lacked an aristocracy. Nevertheless, by the late nineteenth century, the fabulously monied Astors would be received at the Court of St. James and would soon have their aristocratic claims confirmed by English titles of nobility, which were far superior to Dutch ones, had there been any Dutch ones.

By contrast, a Vanderbilt was a nobody. Cornelius 'Commodore' Vanderbilt was merely the richest man in America — indeed, the richest man in the world. Being worth a million dollars made one a man of fortune in the mid- nineteenth century; Cornelius Vanderbilt was worth a hundred million when he died in 1877, and his son was worth twice that a decade later. But the Commodore was still a vulgar steamship and rail magnate who owed his wealth to industry, and Mrs Astor would call on neither him nor his relations.

In particular, Mrs Astor would not set foot in the home of the young Mrs William K. Vanderbilt, wife to the Commodore's grandson. She would not even leave her card. It was thus established that the Vanderbilts were not to be received in the best Manhattan houses. Mrs Astor let it be known that there were only four hundred men and women in all New York City fit to enter a ballroom — that number being, as it happened, the quantity of guests who fit comfortably into Mrs Astor's own ballroom. The Vanderbilts were not among the Four Hundred.

Mrs Vanderbilt was not vindictive, but she was intelligent and indomitable. No penny would be spared to break the Astor ban. Her first measure, achieved with a liberal dose of her husband's largesse, was to procure an invitation to the Patriarchs' Ball, a significant event in New York's social calendar, attended by the city's most influential citizens. But she was still excluded from Mrs Astor's more rarefied circle.

Her second step was to have her husband build a new house. It would be located on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street and like no house yet seen in New York City. Designed by Richard Morris Hunt — not only the most famous American architect of the time but a welcome guest of the Astors — 660 Fifth Avenue became a white limestone French chateau in the style of the Loire Valley. Its stone entry foyer was sixty feet long, with a double-height vaulted ceiling, at the end of which rose a magnificent carved Caen stairwell. Among its thirty-seven rooms were a soaring dining hall lit by stained-glass windows, an enormous third-and-fourth-floor gymnasium for her children, and a ballroom capable of holding eight hundred guests. Throughout the house were Rembrandts, Gainsboroughs, Reynoldses, Gobelin tapestries, and furniture that once belonged to Marie Antoinette.

As the mansion neared completion in 1883, Mrs Vanderbilt announced a housewarming party, on which she would eventually spend some $250,000. The cleverest use of her wealth, by far, lay in securing in advance the attendance of a few notable but purchasable guests not beholden to Mrs Astor s rules, including several English ladies, a smattering of Teutonic barons, a coterie of Italian counts, and one former United States president. Dropping hints of these advance bookings, as well as of sumptuous and unheard-of entertainments, Mrs Vanderbilt issued a total of twelve hundred invitations. Her anticipated ball became the talk of the town.

One especially eager little partygoer happened to be Carrie Astor, Mrs Astor's favorite daughter, who all summer long had been preparing with her friends a Star Quadrille for Mrs Vanderbilt's ball. But of those twelve hundred invitations, not one had gone to Carrie Astor. All Carrie's friends had been invited — they were already excitedly planning the gowns they would wear for their quadrille — but not the tearful Carrie herself. To everyone who would listen, Mrs Vanderbilt expressed sympathy for the poor girl's plight, but how could she invite Carrie, the hostess asked the world, when she had never been introduced to the girl's mother?

So it happened that Mrs William Backhouse Astor took to her carriage one afternoon in the winter season of 1883 and had her footman, clad in blue livery, present her engraved card at 660 Fifth Avenue. This gave Mrs Vanderbilt an unprecedented opportunity to snub the great Caroline Astor, an opportunity that would have been irresistible to a less farsighted woman. But Mrs Vanderbilt immediately responded by delivering to the Astor residence an invitation to her ball, as a result of which Carrie was able to attend after all, accompanied by her mother — in a diamond bodice that cost $200,000 — and the rest of Mrs Astor's Four Hundred.

By the turn of the century, New York society had been transformed from Knickerbocker bastion into a volatile amalgam of power, money, and celebrity. Anyone worth a hundred million could buy his way in. Society gentlemen mixed with showgirls. Society ladies left their husbands. Even Mrs Vanderbilt was Mrs Vanderbilt no longer: she had obtained a shocking divorce in 1895 in order to become Mrs Oliver H. P. Belmont. Mrs Astor's own daughter Charlotte, the mother of four children, ran away to England with another man. Three sons and one grandson of the multimillionaire Jay Gould took actresses for wives. James Roosevelt Roosevelt married a prostitute. Even the occasional murderer could be lionized, provided he was of the right breed. Harry Thaw, heir though he was to a modest

Pittsburgh mining fortune, would never have achieved celebrity in New York had he not killed the renowned architect Stanford White on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden in 1906. Although Thaw shot the seated White full in the face in plain view of a hundred diners, a jury acquitted him — by reason of insanity — two years later. Some observers said that no American jury would convict a man for murdering the scoundrel who had bedded his wife, although, to be fair to White, his liaison with the young lady in question occurred when she was only a sixteen-year-old unmarried showgirl rather than the respectable Mrs Harry Thaw. Others opined that this jury was especially disinclined to convict, having received too great a sum from Thaw's attorney to feel free, in conscience, to reject his closing plea.

In the summers, Manhattan's rich repaired to marble palaces in Newport and Saratoga, where yachting, horsing, and cardplaying were the principal occupations. In those days, the leading families could still demonstrate why they were their country's finest. Young Harold Vanderbilt, who grew up at 660 Fifth Avenue, would successfully defend the America's Cup three times against British assault. He also invented contract bridge.

As September approached in 1909, a new season was about to begin. Everyone agreed that the crop of debutantes that year was among the choicest in recent memory. Miss Josephine Crosby, the Times observed, was a particularly handsome girl, gifted with a beautiful singing voice. The shapely Miss Mildred Carter had returned with her father from London, where she had danced with the king. Miss Hyde, the heiress, was also to debut, as were Miss Chapin and Miss Rutherford, who was last seen as a bridesmaid to her cousin, the former Miss White, at the latter's marriage to Count Sheer-Thoss.

The inaugural event of the season was a charitable ball, thrown by Mrs Stuyvesant Fish on Monday night, August 30, to raise funds for the city's new Free Hospital for Children. It had become fashionable at that time to hold parties at the city's grand hotels. Mrs Fish's party was to take place at the Waldorf-Astoria.

That grand hotel on Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street stood on the spot where Mrs Astor had lived a quarter century earlier, when she was bested by Mrs Vanderbilt. By comparison with the gleaming Vanderbilt mansion, the Astors' fine old brick townhouse had suddenly looked small and drab. Therefore Mrs Astor unceremoniously razed it and built herself a double-sized French chateau — not in the Loire style but in the more dignified Second Empire fashion — thirty blocks north, with a ballroom big enough for twelve hundred. On the land vacated by Mrs Astor, her son erected the world's largest and the city's most luxurious hotel.

Society entered the Waldorf-Astoria through a wide, three-hundred-foot-long corridor off Thirty-fourth Street, known as Peacock Alley. On the occasion of a fancy ball, blue-stockinged doormen would greet the carriages as they drew up, and Peacock Alley would be lined with hundreds and hundreds of spectators, an audience of groundlings for the procession of wealth and importance making its stately way inside. The Palm Garden was the Waldorf's massive domed and gilded restaurant, walled in glass to ensure continuing visibility to the outside world and paneled everywhere with full-length mirrors to ensure that the ladies and gentlemen of the inner world saw even more of themselves than outsiders could. To accommodate her party, Mrs Stuyvesant Fish had booked not only the Palm Garden but also the Empire Room, the outdoor Myrtle Room, and the entire orchestra and company of the Metropolitan Opera.

It was the strains of this music that greeted Stratham Younger as he strolled the length of Peacock Alley, his arm in the grasp of his cousin Miss Belva Dula, a half hour after his European guests had departed for their dinner at the Brills'.

My mother was a Schermerhorn. Her sister married a Fish. These two majestic genealogical facts got me invited to every royal ball in Manhattan.

Living in Worcester, Massachusetts, supplied an excuse sufficient to dodge most of these engagements. But I had to make an exception for parties thrown by my outre Aunt Mamie — Mrs Stuyvesant Fish — who, though not really my aunt, has insisted on my calling her so since I was little, when I used to spend summers in her Newport house. After my father died, it was Aunt Mamie who made sure my mother was comfortable and did not have to vacate the Back Bay house where she had lived throughout her marriage. As a result, I could never say no when Aunt Mamie asked me to one of her galas. On top of this obligation, there was also cousin Belva, whom I had agreed to escort down the alley.

'What is that again?' Belva asked me, referring to the music, as we made our way down the endless hallway with throngs of onlookers on either side of us.

'It is Mr Verdi's Aida,' I answered, 'and we are the marching animals.'

She pointed to a rotund woman escorted by her husband not far ahead of us. 'Oh, look, the Arthur Scott Burdens. I have never seen Mrs Burden in a huge crimson turban before. Perhaps we are meant to think of elephants.'

'Belva.'

'And there are the Conde Nasts. Her Directoire hat is much more suitable, don't you think? Her gardenias I approve as well, but I'm less sure about the ostrich feathers. It may incline people to bury their heads in the sand when she passes.'

'Heel, Belva.'

'Do you realize there must be a thousand people watching us right now?' Belva was manifestly relishing the attention. 'I'll bet you have nothing like this in Boston.'

'We are sadly behind in Boston,' I said.

'The one with the perfect mass of jewels in her hair is the Baroness von Haefton, who excluded me from her party last winter for the Marquis de Charette. Those are the John Jacob Astors — they say he's been seen everywhere with Maddie Forge, who is not a day older than sixteen — and our hosts, the Stuyvesant Fishes.'

'Fish.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'The plural of Stuyvesant Fish,' I explained, 'is Stuyvesant Fish. One says "the Fish," not "the Fishes." It was rare that I could even pretend to correct Belva on a point of New York etiquette.

'I don't believe that for a moment,' she replied. 'However, Mrs Fish is looking almost plural herself this evening.'

'Not a word against my aunt, Belva.' Cousin Belva was my age almost exactly, and I had known her since infancy. But the poor, scrawny, ungainly thing had come out almost ten years ago, and no one had taken the bait. At twenty- seven, she was, I'm afraid, quite desperate, the world already consigning her to spinsterhood. 'At least,' I added, 'Aunt Mamie hasn't brought her dog tonight.'

Aunt Mamie had once thrown a ball in Newport for a new French poodle, which made its entrance prancing down a red carpet in a diamond-encrusted collar.

'But look, she has brought her dog,' replied Belva pleasantly, 'and still wearing the diamond collar.' Belva was pointing to Marion Fish, Aunt Mamie's youngest daughter, to whose stunning debut Belva had not been invited.

'That's it, cousin. You're on your own.' Having come to the end of the corridor, I discharged Belva, or rather Aunt Mamie prised me from her, pairing me off instead with a Miss Hyde, who was plainly rich but had few other charms. I danced with several other misses as well, including the tall and balletic Eleanor Sears, who was quite amiable, although I was obliged constantly to duck her hat, which was shaped like a sombrero. And of course I took a turn with poor Belva.

After the requisite oyster cocktail, we were fed — according to the gilt-edged menu — a buffet russe, roast mountain sheep with chestnut puree and asparagus, champagne sherbet, diamondback Maryland terrapin, and ruddy duck with an orange salad. This was only the first of two suppers, the second to be served after midnight. After the second supper, the cotillion would get under way, with the formal dances — probably a Mirror, if I knew Aunt Mamie — starting around one-thirty in the morning.

I really didn't mind the occasional party in New York. I had stopped attending social functions in Boston, where I could not escape the whispers and sidelong glances owing to the circumstances of my father's death. The difference between Boston and New York society was this: the goal in Boston was to do nothing but what had always been done; in New York it was to outdo anything that had ever been done. But the sheer spectacle of a New York party — and one was of course supposed to be part of that spectacle — was a thing my Boston blood could never quite grow used to. The debutantes in particular, while far more plentiful than their Bostonian counterparts, and far better looking, were too sparkly for my taste. They were an efflorescence of diamond and pearl — on their corsages, around their necks, dangling from their ears, draped on their shoulders, nested in their hair — and though all these articles were doubtless genuine, I could not help the feeling that I was looking at paste.

'Here you are, Stratham!' cried Aunt Mamie. 'Oh, why must you be cousins with my Marion? I would have married you off to her years ago. Now listen to me. Miss Crosby is asking everyone who you are. She is eighteen this year, the second handsomest girl in New York, and you are still the single handsomest man — I mean the handsomest single man. You must dance with her.'

'I have danced with her,' I replied, 'and I have it on good authority that she means to marry Mr de Menocal.'

'But I don't want her to marry de Menocal,' answered Aunt Mamie. 'I wanted de Menocal to marry Franz and Ellie Sigel's granddaughter Elsie. She, however, has run away to Washington. It was my understanding that people ran away from Washington. What can the girl have been thinking? One might as well elope to the Congo. Have you said hello to Stuyvie yet?'

Stuyvie was, of course, her husband, Stuyvesant. As I had not yet exchanged greetings with Uncle Fish, Aunt Mamie conducted me toward him. He was engaged in close conversation with two men. Next to Uncle Fish, I recognized Louis J. de G. Milhau, whom I knew as a fellow undergraduate at Harvard. The other man, perhaps forty-five years old, looked familiar, but I couldn't place him. He had closely cropped dark hair, intelligent eyes, no beard, and an air of authority. Aunt Mamie solved my difficulty when she added, under her breath, 'The mayor. I shall introduce you.'

Mayor McClellan, it turned out, was just departing. Aunt Mamie cried out in protest, objecting that he would miss Caruso. Aunt Mamie detested opera, but she knew the rest of the world considered it the pinnacle of taste. McClellan apologized, thanking her cordially for her beneficence to the city of New York, and swore he would never leave at such an hour, were it not for a very serious matter demanding his immediate attention. Aunt Mamie objected even more strenuously, this time to the use of the term 'very serious matter' in her presence. She did not want to hear about any very serious matters, she said, fleeing us in a cloud of chiffon.

To my surprise, Milhau then said to the mayor, 'Younger here is a doctor. Why don't you tell him about it?'

'By gad,' exclaimed Uncle Fish, 'that's right. A Harvard doctor. Younger will know the man for the job. Tell him about it, McClellan.'

The mayor surveyed me, made some sort of internal decision, and put a question. 'Do you know Acton, Younger?'

'Lord Acton?' I responded.

'No, Harcourt Acton of Gramercy Park. It's about his daughter.'

Miss Acton had apparently been the victim of a brutal assault earlier this evening, in her family's house, while her parents were away. The criminal had not been apprehended, nor had he even been seen by anyone else. Mayor McClellan, who knew the family, desperately wanted from Miss Acton a description of the criminal, but the girl could neither speak nor even remember what had happened to her. The mayor was returning to police headquarters this instant; the girl was still there, attended by her family doctor, who had professed himself mystified by her condition. He could find no physical injuries capable of producing her symptoms.

'The girl is hysterical,' I said. 'She is suffering from crypto-amnesia.'

'Crypto-amnesia?' repeated Milhau.

'Loss of memory brought on by repression of a traumatic episode. The term was coined by Dr Freud of Vienna. The condition is essentially hysterical and can be found with aphonia — speech loss — as well.'

'By gad,' said Uncle Fish again. 'Speech loss, did you say? That's it!'

'Dr Freud,' I went on, 'has a book on speech dysfunction.' Freud's monograph on the aphasias was read in America long before his psychological writings became known. 'He is probably the world's leading authority on the subject and has specifically shown an association with hysterical trauma — especially sexual trauma.'

'Pity your Dr Freud is in Vienna,' said the mayor.