The Interpretation of Murder

Chapter Seven

The old woman let me in to Miss Acton's suite, calling out, 'Young doctor's here!'

The girl was perched on a sofa under the window, one leg tucked beneath her, reading what appeared to be a mathematics textbook. She looked up but did not greet me — understandable, since she could not speak. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, its teardrop crystals trembling slightly, perhaps an effect of the underground trains rumbling far below us.

Miss Acton was simply attired in a white dress with blue trim. She wore no jewelry. Around her neck, just above a delicate clavicle, was a scarf the color of the sky. Given the summer heat, there could be only one explanation for the scarf: the bruises on her throat would still have been visible, and she wished to conceal them.

Her appearance was so different from the night before that I might have failed to recognize her. Her long hair, a tangle last night, was now perfectly smooth and shining, gathered in a long braid. Shivering uncontrollably yesterday, she was today a picture of grace, her chin held high over her long neck. Only her lips remained slightly swollen where she had been struck.

From my black bag I removed several notebooks, along with a variety of pens and inks. These were not for myself but for Miss Acton, so she could communicate with me by writing. Following Freud's advice, I never took notes during an analytic session but transcribed the conversation from memory afterward.

'Good morning, Miss Acton,' I said. 'These are for you.'

'Thank you,' she said. 'Which one shall I use?'

'Whichever is — ' I began, before the obvious fact took hold. 'You can speak.'

'Mrs Biggs,' she said, 'will you pour the doctor some tea?'

I declined the tea. To the annoyance I felt at having been taken by surprise was now added the realization that I was a doctor capable of resenting a patient for improving without my assistance. 'Have you also recovered your memory?' I asked.

'No. But your friend, the old doctor, said it would all come back naturally, didn't he?'

'Dr Freud said your voice was likely to come back naturally, Miss Acton, not your memory.' This was a strange thing for me to say, given that I wasn't at all sure I had it right.

'I hate Shakespeare,' she replied.

She kept her eyes on mine, but I saw what had prompted this inconsequent remark. My copy of Hamlet was poking out of the stack of notebooks I had offered her. I retrieved the play, putting it back in my bag. I was tempted to ask why she hated Shakespeare but thought better of it. 'Shall we begin your treatment, Miss Acton?'

Sighing like a patient who had seen too many doctors, she turned and looked out the window, offering her back to me. Evidently the girl thought I was going to use my stethoscope on her or perhaps examine her wounds. I informed her that we were only going to talk.

She exchanged a skeptical glance with Mrs Biggs. 'What sort of treatment is that, Doctor?' she asked.

'It is called psychoanalysis. It's very simple. I must ask your servant to excuse us. Then, if you will be so good as to lie down, Miss Acton, I will ask you questions. You need only say whatever comes into your mind in response. Please don't be concerned if what occurs to you seems irrelevant or unresponsive or even impolite. Just say the first thing that comes to mind, whatever it is.'

She blinked at me. 'You are joking.'

'Not at all.' It took several minutes to overcome the girl's hesitation — and then several more to overcome her servant's declaration that she had never heard of such a thing — but at last Mrs Biggs was persuaded to go and Miss Acton to recline on her sofa. She adjusted her scarf, straightened the skirt of her dress, and looked appropriately uncomfortable. I asked if the injuries to her back troubled her; she said no. Positioning myself on a chair out of her sight, I began. 'Can you tell me what you dreamt last night?'

'I beg your pardon?'

'I am sure you heard me, Miss Acton.'

'I don't see what my dreams have to do with it.'

'Our dreams,' I explained, 'are composed of fragments from the previous day's experiences. Any dream you recall may help us recover your memory.'

'What if I don't want to?' she asked.

'You had a dream you would prefer not to describe?'

'I didn't say that,' she said. 'What if I don't want to remember? You all assume I want to remember.'

'I assume you don't want to remember. If you wanted to remember, you would.'

'What is that supposed to mean?' She sat up, glaring at me with undisguised hostility. As a rule, I am not often hated by people I have only recently met; this case appeared to be an exception. 'You think I am pretending?'

'Not pretending, Miss Acton. Sometimes we don't want to remember events because they are too painful. So we shut them out, especially childhood memories.'

'I am not a child.'

'I know that,' I said. 'I meant you may have memories from years ago that you are keeping out of your consciousness.'

'What are you talking about? I was attacked yesterday, not years ago.'

'Yes, and that is why I have asked you about your dreams last night.'

She looked at me suspiciously, but with considerable cajoling I induced her to lie down again. Gazing at the ceiling, she said, 'Do you ask your other female patients to describe their dreams, Doctor?'

'Yes.'

'How entertaining that must be,' she remarked. 'But what if their dreams are very dull? Do they invent more interesting ones?'

'Please don't be concerned about that.'

'About what?'

'About your dreams being dull,' I answered.

'I didn't have any dreams. You must adore Ophelia.'

'I'm sorry?'

'For her docility. All of Shakespeare's women are fools, but Ophelia is the worst.'

This took me aback. I suppose I always have adored Ophelia. In fact, everything I know of women, I feel I learned from Shakespeare. Miss Acton was obviously changing the subject, and while one can of course be waylaid, it is sometimes useful in analysis to play along with these evasions, since they often lead back to the crux of the matter. 'What is your objection to Ophelia?' I asked.

'She kills herself because her father died — her stupid, pointless father. Would you kill yourself if your father died?'

'My father did die.'

Her hand shot to her mouth. 'Forgive me.'

'And I did kill myself,' I added. 'I don't see what's so unusual about it.'

She smiled.

'When you think about yesterday's events, Miss Acton, what comes to mind?'

'Nothing comes to mind,' she said. 'I believe that's what it means to have amnesia.'

The girl's resistance did not surprise me. The one piece of advice Freud had given me was not to be put off too easily. In hysterical amnesia, some deeply forbidden and long-forgotten episode from the patient's past, stirred into life by a recent event, presses at her consciousness, which in turn fights back with all its strength to keep out the inadmissible memory. Psychoanalysis takes the side of memory against the forces of suppression; it therefore provokes immediate and sometimes intense hostility.

'There is never nothing in one's mind,' I said. 'What is in yours, at this moment?'

'Right now?'

'Yes: don't reflect; just speak it.'

'All right. Your father didn't die. He committed suicide.'

There was a momentary silence. 'How did you know that?'

'Clara Banwell told me.'

'Who?'

'George Banwell's wife,' she said. 'Do you know Mr Banwell?'

'No.'

'He is a friend of my father's. Clara took me to the horse show last year. We saw you there. Were you at Mrs Fish's ball last night?'

I acknowledged the fact.

'You are wondering if my family was invited,' she said, 'but you are afraid to ask, for fear that we were not.'

'No, Miss Acton. I was wondering how Mrs Banwell knew the circumstances of my father's death.'

'Is it awkward when people know?'

'Are you trying to make things awkward?'

'Clara says all the girls find it fascinating — your having a father who killed himself. They think it gives you soul. The answer is that we were invited, but that I would never go to one of your balls in a thousand years.'

'Really?'

'Yes, really. They are sickening.'

'Why?'

'Because they are so — so tiresome.'

'They are sickeningly tiresome?'

'Do you know what a debutante is made to do, Doctor? First, together with her mother, she must call on all her mother's acquaintance — perhaps a hundred houses. I doubt you can imagine how excruciating that is. In every house, the women invariably comment on how "grown up" you look, by which they mean something — quite disgusting. When the grand day arrives, you are exhibited like a talking animal on whom conversational open season has been declared. Then you are forced to endure a cotillion at which every man believes he has a right to make love to you, no matter who he is, no matter how old, no matter how bad his breath. And I haven't even gotten to having to dance with them. I'm starting college this month; I will never come out.'

I chose not to respond to this disquisition, which on the whole seemed quite persuasive. Instead I said, 'Tell me what happens when you try to remember.'

'What do you mean, "what happens"?'

'I want you to tell me whatever thought or image or feeling comes to you when you try to remember what happened yesterday.'

She took a deep breath. 'Where the memory should be, there is a darkness instead. I don't know how else to describe it:

'Are you there, in the darkness?'

'Am I there?' Her voice quieted. 'I think so.'

'Is anything else there?'

'A presence.' She shuddered. 'A man.'

'What does the man make you think of?'

'I don't know. It makes my heart beat faster.'

'As if you had something to fear?'

She swallowed. 'To fear? Let me think. I have been attacked in my own house. The man who attacked me has not been caught. They do not even know who it was. They believe he may yet be watching my house, planning to kill me if I return. And your penetrating question is whether I have something to fear?'

I should have been more sympathetic, but I decided to loose the one arrow I had. 'This was not the first time you lost your voice, Miss Acton.'

She frowned. I noticed, for some reason, the graceful oblique lines of her chin and profile. 'Who told you that?'

'Mrs Biggs told the police yesterday.'

'That was three years ago,' she replied, coloring slightly. 'It is absolutely unconnected to anything.'

'You have nothing to be ashamed of, Miss Acton.'

'I have nothing to be ashamed of?'

I heard the emphasis on I but could not decipher it. 'We are not responsible for our feelings,' I replied. 'Therefore no feeling can cause us shame.'

'That is the least perceptive remark I have ever heard in my life.'

'Oh, really?' I answered. 'What about when I asked if you had something to fear?'

'Of course feelings can cause people shame. It happens all the time.'

'Are you ashamed of what happened when you lost your voice the first time?'

'You have no idea what happened,' she said. Although she didn't sound it, she seemed suddenly fragile.

'That is why I am asking.'

'Well, I am not going to tell you,' she replied, and rose from the sofa. 'This is not medicine. It is — it is prying. ' She raised her voice. 'Mrs Biggs? Mrs Biggs, are you there? 'The door flew open, and Mrs Biggs bustled in. She must have been in the corridor all along, no doubt with her ear to the keyhole. 'Dr Younger,' Miss Acton addressed me, 'I am going out to buy a few things, since no one seems to know how long I shall be staying here. I'm sure you can find your way back to your own room.'

The mayor made Coroner Hugel wait an hour in his anteroom. Impatient under ordinary conditions, Hugel looked irate now. 'It is obstruction in the first degree,' he cried out, when finally admitted into Mayor McClellan's office. 'I demand an investigation.'

George Brinton McClellan, Jr. — son of the famous Civil War general — was the most intellectually accomplished and forward-thinking man ever to have held the office of mayor of New York City. In 1909, only a handful of Americans were recognized as authorities on Italian history; McClellan was one of them. At forty-three, he had already been a newspaper editor, lawyer, author, congressman, lecturer on European history at Princeton University, honorary member of the American Society of Architects, and mayor of the nation's largest city. When the aldermen of New York City passed a measure in 1908 prohibiting women from smoking in public, McClellan vetoed it.

His hold on the mayoralty, however, was tenuous. The next election was less than nine weeks away, and although the candidates had not been officially named, McClellan still had no offer of nomination from any major party or syndicate. He had made two potentially fatal political mistakes! The first was having in 1905 narrowly defeated William Randolph Hearst, who ever since had filled his newspapers with sensational accounts of McClellan's shameless corruption. The second was having broken with Tammany Hall, which hated him for his incorruptibility. Tammany Hall ran the Democratic Party in New York City, and the Democrats ran the city. It was a rewarding arrangement: the Tammany leadership had unburdened the city of at least $500 million over the years. McClellan had originally been a Tammany nominee, but once elected he refused to make the brazen patronage appointments demanded of him. He ousted the most notoriously corrupt officials and brought charges against many others. He hoped to wrest control of the party from Tammany, but in this goal he had not yet succeeded.

On the mayor's walnut desk, in addition to a copy of all fifteen of the city's major newspapers, was a set of blueprints. These depicted a soaring suspension bridge, anchored by two gigantic but marvelously thin towers. Streetcars were shown traversing an upper deck, while below were six lanes of horse, automobile, and rail traffic. 'Do you know, Hugel,' said the mayor, 'you are the fifth person today who has demanded an investigation of one thing or another?'

'Where did the body go?' Hugel replied. 'Did it get up and walk away on its two feet?'

'Look at this,' the mayor replied, gazing at the blueprints. 'This is the Manhattan Bridge. It has cost thirty millions to build. I will open it this year, if it is the last thing I do in office. This arch on the New York side is a perfect replica of the St. Denis portal in Paris, only twice the size. A century from now, this bridge — '

'Mayor McClellan, the Riverford girl — ' 'I know about the Riverford girl,' McClellan said with sudden authority. He looked Hugel full in the face: 'What am I supposed to tell Banwell? What is he to tell the girl's wretched family? Answer me that. Of course there should have been an investigation; you should have completed it long ago.'

'I?' asked the coroner. 'Long ago?'

'How many bodies have we lost in the past six months, Hugel, including the two unaccounted for after we repaired the leak? Twenty? You know as well as I do where they are going.'

'You are not suggesting that I — '

'Of course not,' said the mayor. 'But someone on your staff is selling our cadavers to the medical schools. I am told they are worth five dollars a head.'

'Am I to blame,' responded Hugel, 'with the conditions I am given — no protection, no guards, the corpses piling up, no room for them all, sometimes rotting before they can be disposed of? Every month I have reported on the humiliating conditions at the morgue. But you leave me in that rabbit warren.'

'I am sorry for the state of the morgue,' said McClellan. 'No one could have managed half so well as you have, given the resources. But you have turned a blind eye to this stealing of cadavers, and I am about to pay the price for it. You will interrogate every member of your staff. You will contact every medical school in the city. I want that body found.'

'This body is not at a medical school,' the coroner objected. 'I had already performed the autopsy. I had ventilated the lungs, for God's sake, to confirm asphyxiation.'

'What of it?'

'No medical school wants a cadaver after an autopsy. You want your body intact.'

'So the thieves made a mistake.'

'There was no mistake,' said the coroner vehemently. 'The man who murdered her stole her body.'

'Control yourself, Hugel,' said the mayor. 'You are wild.'

'I am in perfect control.'

'I don't take your meaning. You are saying that Miss Riverford's murderer broke into the morgue last night and absconded with his victim's corpse?'

'Precisely,' said Hugel.

'Why?'

'Because there is evidence on the girl, on her body, evidence he did not want us to have.'

'What evidence?'

The coroner's jaws were working so hard his temples had turned a shade of plum. 'The evidence is — it is — I am not yet sure what it is. That is why we must get the body back!'

'Hugel,' said the mayor, 'you have locks on the morgue, do you not?'

'Certainly.'

'Good. Was the lock broken this morning? Was there any evidence of a burglary?'

'No,' Hugel allowed grudgingly. 'But anyone with a decent skeleton key — '

'Mr Coroner,' said McClellan, 'here is what you will do: make it known to your people immediately that there will be a fifteen-dollar reward to whoever "finds" the Riverford girl at one of the medical schools. Twenty-five dollars if they find her today. That will bring her back. Now: you will excuse me; I'm very busy. Good day.' As Hugel reluctantly turned to leave, the mayor suddenly looked up from his desk. 'Wait a moment. Wait a moment. Did you say the Riverford girl was asphyxiated?'

'Yes,' said the coroner. 'Why?'

'How asphyxiated?'

'By ligature.'

'She was garroted?' asked McClellan.

'Yes. Why?'

The mayor ignored the coroner's question for a second time. 'Were there any other wounds on her body?'

'It was all in my report,' answered the aggrieved Hugel, to whom the knowledge that the mayor had not read his report was a fresh indignity. 'The girl was whipped. There were lacerations on the posterior, spine, and chest. In addition, she was cut twice, by an extremely sharp blade, at the intersection of the S-two and L-two dermatomes.'

'Where? In English, Hugel.'

'On the upper inner thigh of each leg.'

'In the name of God,' replied the mayor.

I went down for a late breakfast, trying to sort out my encounter with Miss Acton. Jung was there, reading an American newspaper. I joined him. The others had set off for the Metropolitan Museum. Jung stayed behind, he explained, because he was going to pay a call this morning on Dr Onuf, a neuropsychiatrist at Ellis Island.

It was my first time alone with Jung. He appeared to be in one of his animated, outgoing moods. He had slept all yesterday afternoon, he said, and the long nap had done him a world of good. Indeed, the pallor that had worried me yesterday was visibly improved. His opinion of America, he told me, was also improving. 'Americans merely lack literature,' he said, 'not all culture.'

Jung meant this, I think, as a compliment. Nevertheless, wanting to show that Americans were not entirely illiterate, I described to him the story of the Astor Place Shakespeare riot.

'So the Americans wanted a muscular American Hamlet,' Jung mused, shaking his head. 'Your story confirms my point. A masculine Hamlet is a contradiction in terms. As my great-grandfather used to say, Hamlet represents man's feminine side: the intellectual, the inward soul, sensitive enough to see the spiritual world but not strong enough to bear the burden it imposes. The challenge is to do both: to hear the voices of the other world but live in this one — to be a man of action.'

I was puzzled by the 'voices' Jung referred to — perhaps the unconscious? — but delighted to find he had an opinion about Hamlet. 'You are describing Hamlet almost exactly as Goethe did,' I said. 'That was Goethe's explanation of Hamlet's inability to act.'

'I believe I said it was my great-grandfather's view,' Jung replied, sipping his coffee.

It took me a moment. 'Goethe was your greatgrandfather?'

'Freud prizes Goethe above all poets,' was Jung's reply. 'Jones, by contrast, calls him a dithyrambist. Can you imagine? Only an Englishman. I cannot understand what Freud sees in him.' The Jones to whom Jung referred was surely Ernest Jones, Freud's British follower, now living in Canada and expected to join our party tomorrow. I had concluded that Jung meant to avoid my question, but then he added, 'Yes, I am Carl Gustav Jung the third; the first, my grandfather, was Goethe's son. It is well known. The allegations of murder were of course ridiculous.'

'I didn't know Goethe was accused of murder.'

'Goethe — certainly not,' Jung answered indignantly. 'My grandfather. Evidently I resemble him in every way. They arrested him for murder, but it was a pretext. He wrote a murder novel, though, The Suspect — quite good — about an innocent man charged with murder; or at least one supposes him innocent. That was before von Humboldt took him under his protection. You know, Younger, I could almost wish your university had not bestowed equal honors on Freud and myself. He is very sensitive on such matters.'

I could not well reply to this abrupt turn in Jung's conversation. Clark was not bestowing equal honors on Freud and Jung. As everyone knew, Freud was the centerpiece of Clark's celebration, the keynote speaker, delivering five full lectures, while Jung was a last-minute substitute for a panelist who had canceled.

But Jung did not wait for an answer. 'I understand you asked Freud yesterday if he was a believer. A perceptive question, Younger.' This was another first: Jung had not previously shown a favorable reaction to anything I said. 'No doubt he told you he was not. He is a genius, but his insight has endangered him. One who spends his whole life examining the pathological, stunted, and base may lose sight of the pure, the high, the spirit. I for one don't believe the soul is essentially carnal. Do you?'

'I am not sure, Dr Jung.'

'But you are not drawn to the idea. It is not inherently appealing to you. To them, it is.'

I had to ask him to whom he was now referring.

'All of them,' Jung answered. 'Brill, Ferenczi, Adler, Abraham, Stekel — the lot. He surrounds himself with this — this kind. They all want to tear down whatever is high, to reduce it to genitalia and excrement. The soul is not reducible to the body. Even Einstein, one of their own, does not believe that God can be eliminated.'.'Albert Einstein?'

'He is a frequent dinner guest at my house,' replied Jung. 'But he too has this same inclination to reduce. He would reduce the entire universe to mathematical laws. It is clearly a characteristic of the Jewish mind. The Jewish male, that is. The Jewish female is simply aggressive. Brill's wife is typical of the race. Intelligent, not unattractive, but so very aggressive.'

'I believe Rose is not Jewish, Dr Jung,' I said.

'Rose Brill?' Jung laughed. 'A woman with that name can be of only one religion.'

I made no reply. Jung had evidently forgotten that Rose's name had not always been Brill.

'The Aryan, 'Jung went on, 'is mythic by nature. He does not try to bring everything down to man's level. Here in

America, there is a similar tendency to reduce, but it is different. Everything here is made for children. All is made simple enough for children to understand: the signs, the advertisements, everything. Even the gait with which people walk is childlike: swinging the arms, like so. I suspect it is the result of your intermingling with the Negro. They are a good-natured race and very religious, but so very simple- minded. They exercise a tremendous influence on you; I notice your Southerners actually speak with the Negro's accent. This is also the explanation of your country's matriarchy. Woman is undoubtedly the dominant figure in America. You American men are sheep, and your women play the ravening wolves.'

I did not like the color in Jung's face. At first I had deemed it an improvement; now he seemed too flushed. The workings of his mind worried me too, for several different reasons. His conversation was disjointed, his logic faulty, his insinuations disturbing. On top of all this, I thought Jung considered himself remarkably well- informed about America for someone who had been in the country two days — particularly on the subject of American women. I changed the subject, informing him that I had just completed my first session with Miss Acton.

Jung's voice went cold. 'What?'

'She has taken rooms upstairs.'

'You are analyzing the girl — you, here, in the hotel?'

'Yes, Dr Jung.'

'I see.' He wished me luck, not very convincingly, and rose to leave. I asked him to convey my regards to Dr Onuf. For a moment, he looked as if I were speaking jibberish. Then he said he would be happy to oblige me.