The Angel Of Darkness

CHAPTER 15

Frederick had just bounded at a crisp trot off of the Central Park carriage drive and onto the broad grass plain of Sheep Meadow (a questionable thing for me to ask of him, I know, but a shortcut’s a shortcut) as the Doctor began to speak to his assembled colleagues:

“When we first undertook criminal investigative work together,” he said, “we accepted as our starting point the idea that the criminal mind could be, medically speaking, sound, and formed like any other healthy person’s-through the context of individual experience. I have seen nothing, professionally, during the last twelve months to convince me that the true incidence of mental disease among criminals is any higher than I thought then. Nor have I heard anything about this Hunter woman which would suggest that she suffers from either dementia praecox”-which was the term alienists used in those days for what they’re now starting to call ‘schizophrenia’-“or one of the lesser mental pathologies. She may be impulsive, and extremely so-but impulsiveness, like extreme anger or melancholia, does not on its own indicate a disease of the mind. The fact that she is also capable of elaborate calculation, particularly within compressed time frames, supports the notion that we are dealing with someone who is quite sane.”

Mr. Moore shook his head and looked off toward Central Park West as we rejoined the carriage path. “Why do I find myself wishing we could be up against a lunatic this time?” he said with a sigh.

“You’ve got good cause to, John,” Lucius said. “Lunatics may be dangerous sometimes, but they’re a hell of a lot easier to track.” The detective sergeant started scratching at his pad again. “Please go on, Doctor.”

“We begin, then,” the Doctor continued, “with the notion that this woman is sane-she has kidnapped a child and may well have killed others, for reasons that we can postulate.”

“And what do we do if we catch her?” Marcus asked. “You’re talking about a real sacred cow, Doctor-no matter how many women knock off kids in baby farms, no matter how many crones make fortunes running abortion parlors, no matter how many mothers kill their offspring, people don’t like to get near cases that deal with women’s relationships toward children being anything other than healthy and nurturing. You heard Mrs. Cady Stanton the other night. That’s the majority opinion: if women are doing something bad concerning birth and kids, either they’re crazy or men and the society that men have created are behind it somewhere.”

The Doctor was trying to stop Marcus with an impatient hand. “I know, I know, Detective Sergeant, but it will be our job, again, to ignore popular sentiment and focus on facts. And the most salient fact is this: we are faced with a woman whose behavior embodies what appear to be two diametrically opposed attitudes and acts. The one is nurturing; the other, destructive. Perhaps even murderous. If we accept that she is sane, we must link them.”

“Tough,” Mr. Moore said. “Very tough.”

“Why, John?” the Doctor asked as we exited the comforting greenery of the park at its southwest corner, then passed by the Riding Academy and moved through some very sparse traffic around the Columbus Monument. “Who among us can’t claim to embody conflicting urges and conflicting goals at times? Take yourself. How often do you go out and ingest enormous amounts of a liquid poison, in the form of expensive alcohol, while at the same time inhaling dose after dose of a toxic alkaloid called nicotine-?”

“And who,” Mr. Moore asked indignantly, “very often accompanies me?”

“You miss my point,” the Doctor answered. “Sometimes, after these bouts of marginal self-destruction, you must spend hours caring for yourself, nurturing yourself, as if you were a child. Where is the consistency in that?”

“All right, all right,” Mr. Moore said in annoyance. “But it’s a long jump from mocking my bad habits to showing how a woman can be nurturing-can be a nurse in natal care, for Christ’s sake-and harbor a desire to kill infants, and be sane, all at the same time.”

“Has your research helped you at all, Doctor?” Lucius asked.

“I fear not,” he answered with the same gloominess he’d shown on the subject for days. “As I’ve told Sara, there is precious little in the current psychological literature that touches on the subject. Both Krafft-Ebing and Freud are willing to discuss the sexual dimension of a mother’s relationship to her children, particularly in the context of male children. And such men will even discuss the desire of children to destroy their parents, either literally or figuratively, again emphasizing boys. In addition, there are some explorations of violence by men against children, although these usually occur within broader discussions of the secondary effects of alcoholism and drug addiction. But I have searched in vain for truly meaningful discussions of women attacking children that are in their care, whether the children are their own or someone else’s. The general consensus is that such cases are either extreme or delayed manifestations of postpartum psychosis or, where that cannot be made to apply, mental disease of unknown etiology. I’m afraid that legal records and explorations have been far more helpful than psychological ones, in this respect.”

“Really?” Marcus said with some surprise: he’d had a fair degree of legal training before joining the force. “Progressive thinking from lawyers-that’s a switch.”

“Indeed,” the Doctor replied. “And I don’t mean to imply that there’s been anything like a systematic study of the phenomenon in legal or judicial circles. But the courts are forced to acknowledge the realities that are placed before them-and those realities, all too often, include cases of mothers, governesses, and other adult women committing violence against children. Very often infants.”

“But if I’m not wrong,” Marcus commented, “the act of infanticide is usually laid at one of two doors in the legal system: poverty or illegitimacy.”

“True, Marcus-but there have been cases, even a few celebrated ones, that could not be explained by either the mother’s being too poor to support the child or her being unmarried. Nor could they be hidden under the rug with a sweeping pronouncement of some unknown kind of insanity. You will recall the case of Lydia Sherman?”

At the drop of that infamous name, which occurred just as we were making our way across Forty-second Street on Eighth Avenue, both of the Isaacsons and Miss Howard went into a kind of rapture.

“Lydia Sherman,” Lucius said wistfully. “ ‘Queen Poisoner.’ Now, there was a case…”

“We’ll never know how many people she actually murdered,” Marcus said in the same tone. “It could’ve been dozens.”

“And,” Miss Howard added, bringing things a bit more to the point, “some of them were children-including her own children. And she was neither poor nor unmarried when she poisoned them.”

“Exactly, Sara,” the Doctor said. “She had killed the children’s father, desired to marry again, and found her children to be simply, as she put it, ‘in the way.’ The newspaper accounts were quite abundant. But as far as the alienists of the day, as well as those of subsequent years, were concerned, the case might as well have never existed-even though many of them judged her to be perfectly sane at her trial, and that was a good twenty-five years ago.”

“I hate to break up this little admiration society,” Mr. Moore said, “but Lydia Sherman was no nurse-she was a lying fortune hunter.”

“Yes, John,” Miss Howard said, “but a living demonstration that the simple accident of being born a woman doesn’t necessarily bring with it a talent for nurturing-or even an inclination toward it.”

“And by using her case, along with similar examples,” the Doctor added, “we can dispense with Professor James’s sentimental drivel about the parental instinct being stronger in women than in men and the nobility of the mother caring for the sick child. Lydia Sherman had sick children, to be sure, but she’d made them sick by poisoning them with arsenic-and her noble ministrations consisted of further doses of the same poison. No, I am increasingly brought back to a single brief statement that I encountered several days ago-”

Miss Howard guessed what he was referring to: “Herr Schneider’s remark about maternal egotism.”

The Doctor nodded. “For the benefit of the rest of you, Schneider noted that the mother, once her baby is delivered, transfers-and I quote-‘her entire egotism to the child.’ ”

“How’s that supposed to help us?” Mr. Moore asked. “The children at the Lying-in Hospital weren’t the Hunter woman’s, and neither is the Linares kid.”

“But the way in which she took Ana,” Lucius said, “indicates that she may have felt-how did you put it, Marcus? That she felt entitled to the child?”

“Correct.” I heard the Doctor snap his cigarette case closed. “And never forget her behavior on the train-caring for the child as if it were her own. Then, too, such psychological bonding often occurs between nurses and patients in general-especially where children are concerned. This is unquestionably not a woman to let something like what Sara refers to as the ‘accident of birth’ prevent her from feeling maternal in an intensely proprietary fashion about other people’s children. That much is obvious, John.”

“Oh,” Mr. Moore said, lighting up a stick of his own. “Sorry I missed it, then.” I could hear him letting out some smoke, and then he spoke more pointedly to the Doctor. “But you’re mixing something up, Kreizler. Let’s say all this is true, and she has these feelings about any kid she takes a shine to-for whatever reason, she ‘transfers her egotism to them.’ Fine-but unlike your very considerate example of my personal habits, she starts from a nurturing attitude and moves toward a destructive one. None of the kids are sick when she gets hold of them-but they end up dead. What happens? They can’t be ‘in the way,’ like Lydia Sherman’s children were-these are kids she’s picked out and chosen to put herself close to. So what happens?”

“Excellent, Moore,” the Doctor said. “That is the true mystery of this case. The woman invests her entire self-worth in these infants; yet she destroys them. What, indeed, happens?”

“Could it be a form of indirect suicide?” Lucius asked.

“No-too easy,” Miss Howard said. “If you’ll pardon my saying so, Lucius. How many times can you kill yourself, even by proxy? I think-I think we need to stay with the ideas we were discussing at the museum, Doctor. The duality-woman as creator alongside woman as destroyer.”

A general sort of “Wha-?” sound came out of the others all at once, to which Miss Howard and the Doctor gave out with a brief summary of their thoughts outside the Metropolitan.

“Then you’re saying that some part of this woman identifies with the notion of a woman having destructive power?” Marcus asked.

“Why not?” Miss Howard said simply. “Haven’t you ever in your life identified with a destructive male figure, Marcus?”

“Well, of course, but-”

I didn’t turn, but I could tell that Miss Howard was probably shaking her head in disappointment; I hoped she wasn’t going for the derringer. “But you were a boy,” she said, fairly bitterly. Marcus didn’t answer-he didn’t have to. “Which means that girls don’t have destructive or angry thoughts,” Miss Howard went on, “and so never dream of having the power to embody them. Correct?”

“Well,” Marcus answered, a bit sheepishly, “when you say it like that, it sounds fairly stupid.”

“Yes,” Miss Howard answered, “it does.”

“And it is,” the Doctor added. “My apologies, Detective Sergeant. But, as Sara said to me, look at the paradoxical examples young girls are offered when growing up-they are taught, on the one hand, that theirs is the pacific, nurturing sex. No outlet is provided for their feelings of anger and aggression. Yet they are human-it is, as Sara says, no more than stupidity to believe that they don’t experience anger, hatred, feelings of hostility. And as they do, they also hear different sorts of stories, from oblique sources-mythology, history, legend-of cruel goddesses and wanton queens, whose very creative or supreme power permits them to indulge in rage, revenge, and destruction. What lesson would you take from it all?”

There was a break in the talk, and then Lucius said, very softly, “The iron fist in the velvet glove…”

“Detective Sergeant,” the Doctor said good-naturedly. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you come so close to poetry. An excellent image, truly-is it your own?”

“Oh. No, I”-Lucius squirmed a bit-“I think I heard it somewhere.”

“Well, it fits admirably,” the Doctor said. “Deadly anger, hidden behind a veil that approximates as closely as possible our society’s notion of ideal, or at least acceptable, feminine behavior.”

“That’s very neat,” Mr. Moore said impatiently. “But it still doesn’t answer the question: Why, if you’re feeling all this shrouded anger, do you decide to go out and be a mother, or a natal nurse, or kidnap somebody else’s kid to take care of it like it’s your own? Doesn’t sound very angry to me.”

“We’re not suggesting that it is, John,” Miss Howard said. “Not at that stage. Taking care of the child is the manifestation of the first half of the character-the one that’s acceptable, the one that’s responding to the constant statement that women are supposed to be nurturing, and aren’t fulfilling their basic role if they’re not. That’s when the transference of ego occurs.”

“Okay,” Mr. Moore said, now pounding one foot on the step of the carriage so that the whole thing shook. “So where the hell does all this ‘evil goddess’ garbage come in?!”

“Let me put a case to you, John,” the Doctor said. “You are such a woman. You have perhaps had your own children, but lost them-through disease, mishap, any number of misfortunes that may or may not have been your fault, but have certainly left you feeling that your own most basic role in life and in society has been taken away. You’ve been left to feel utterly worthless, even to yourself. So you find other ways to care for children. You become a nurse. But something happens-something that threatens your renewed ability to fulfill your primeval function. Something that enrages you so that you feel-to use Marcus’s term-entitled to become the wrathful, primitive goddess, the taker as well as the giver of life.”

“And what is that something?” Mr. Moore asked anxiously, suspecting, now, that an answer was close.

We’d reached Twenty-third Street, and were passing, on the northwest corner, the old, decaying Grand Opera House. Bolted to its Eighth Avenue side was a huge, ugly sign composed of electrical light bulbs what spelled out the hall’s current entertainment staple: VAUDEVILLE.

I heard the Doctor say, “Ah, the old Grand,” in a voice that made me wonder if he was truly recalling fond memories or was just tormenting Mr. Moore. “There used to be some marvelous productions in there…”

“Kreizler!” Mr. Moore was reaching his limit. “What is that something?”

The Doctor’s voice stayed quiet: “Sara?”

“There’s really only one possibility,” Miss Howard said. “The children don’t cooperate. At least, from her point of view they don’t. She tries to nurture, but they don’t accept it. They cry. Develop health problems. Reject her attention and her care, no matter how much effort she puts into it. She tells herself it’s their fault. She has to. Because the alternative-”

Mr. Moore finally picked it up: “The alternative-is to admit that she has no nurturing skills.” He let out a low whistle. “My God… do you mean to tell me that this woman has structured her whole life around something she can’t do?”

“Given the way that she has, in all probability, been raised,” the Doctor said, “what choice has she? In the face of failure she must always try again, with another candidate and even harder.”

“I wonder, John,” Miss Howard added pointedly, “if you understand how truly difficult, how unbearable, it is to be a woman and acknowledge that you have no talent for maternity, in this society. In any society. How can most women acknowledge such a thing even to themselves? Oh, you can choose to say that you won’t be a mother-but to have it openly displayed that you can’t?”

Mr. Moore had to give that a minute; and when he came back to the conversation, it wasn’t very gracefully. “But-well, I mean-why can’t she? What-well, what’s wrong with her?”

I was sure I could hear the derringer cocking at that point; but it was only Miss Howard’s clicking tongue. Feeling compelled to turn around, I saw the others staring in amazement at Mr. Moore. “You really are insufferable sometimes, John,” Miss Howard spat out. “That’s a marvelously enlightened attitude. ‘What’s wrong with her?’ Why, I ought to-” She balled a fist, but the Doctor stayed her hand.

“If, Moore,” he said, “by ‘what’s wrong with her?’ you in fact mean, what context could possibly have produced such a woman, then that is what we must determine. And the process won’t be helped by presuming fault or evil on the woman’s part. Remember-we must, as we did in our last case, try to see the situation through her eyes, understand it and experience it as she must have.”

“Oh.” Mr. Moore’s voice had grown what you might call contrite. “Yes. Right.”

“We’ve reached Fourteenth Street,” Lucius announced. “Just a few blocks to Bethune.”

Turning west on Fourteenth and heading for Greenwich Street, we started to make our way past the shuttered packing houses of the meat district, where the stench of blood had so completely seeped into every cobblestone and building over the years that even on a pleasant, cool Sunday afternoon it was very noticeable: not exactly a good omen for what lay in front of us. Once we were south of Horatio Street on Greenwich, the structures around us turned back into residential houses, some three and four stories tall, some just old two-story jobs with dormers what seemed almost as big as the houses themselves. Trees of varying sizes and ages lined the blocks, and some of their branches had reached clear out into the street, only to be snapped off at the ends by passing traffic.

As we moved through all this scenery, we began to discuss what strategy we should adopt once we arrived at Number 39 Bethune Street. The first move, made at the Doctor’s suggestion, was for me to draw Frederick up to a halt and jump down to raise the cover over the calash’s seat. Since not all of us were going to knock on the Hunters’ door-that would’ve looked a bit ridiculous-it would be best for those what stayed behind to be out of sight. That figured to be me, Cyrus, and at least one other person; and as we got back under way, it looked like Miss Howard was the only logical choice. Everybody agreed the detective sergeants should take the lead, and that the Doctor should accompany them: if Nurse Hunter and her husband still lived at Number 39 and were at home, it would be best to let Lucius and Marcus take a strict law enforcement line, being as the Linares child would probably be somewhere in the house and fairly easy to locate. And on the chance that the child needed medical help, the Doctor should be right there.

If the Hunters still lived in the house but were not at home, on the other hand, the Isaacsons would question the neighbors on when the couple were likely to get back, while the rest of us kept an eye out for their approach. Finally, if the Hunters had moved on to another address, Lucius and Marcus again said that it would be best to let them flash their badges and frighten the new tenants or owners into saying where their predecessors had gone.

As there wouldn’t be room for four of us to hide in the carriage while the detective sergeants and the Doctor approached the house, it was decided that Mr. Moore, too, would go along. Miss Howard was sort of miffed, at first, that she wasn’t going to be in the door-knocking delegation. But the Doctor explained that, given the type of woman we were speculating that Nurse Hunter was, the presence of another female was only likely to throw sand into the wheels of progress. This was especially true given what the woman had been through with the other nurses at the Lying-in Hospital. There was no real way for Miss Howard to argue with this reasoning, so she let the matter go. By way of consolation, I told her that I’d be sure to park the calash right up close to the entrance of the house, so that even though she, Cyrus, and I would be out of sight behind the raised cover, we’d be able to monitor whatever went on when and if Nurse Hunter came to greet the others.

All in all, the thing seemed pretty straightforward; and I began to wonder, as we turned off of Greenwich Street onto Bethune and once again came within sight of the waters of the Hudson, why all the philosophical conversation had even been necessary. It seemed like the detective sergeants were just going to go in, get the kid if she was there, and then quietly return her to her mother. Open and shut, you might say.

That, I soon discovered, was what alienists meant when they talked about “delusions.”