The Interpretation of Murder

Chapter Three

For Freud's first destination in America, Brill chose Coney Island, of all places. We set off by foot for the Grand Central Station, just down the block from our hotel. The sky was cloudless, the sun already hot, the streets clogged with Monday morning traffic. Motorcars accelerated impatiently around horse-drawn delivery wagons. Conversation was impossible. Across from the hotel, on Forty-second Street, a colossal scaffold had been erected where a new building was going up, and the pneumatic drills set up a deafening clatter.

Inside the terminal, it was suddenly quiet. Freud and Ferenczi stopped in awe. We were in a fabulous glass and steel tunnel, six hundred fifty feet long and a hundred feet high, with massive gas-fueled chandeliers running the entire length of its curved ceiling. It was a feat of engineering far surpassing Mr Eiffel's tower in Paris. Only Jung seemed unimpressed. I wondered if he was well; he looked a little pale and distracted. Freud was shocked, as I had been, to learn they were about to tear the station down. But it was built for the old steam locomotives, and the era of steam had come to an end.

As we descended the stair to the IRT, Freud's mood blackened. 'He is terrified of your underground trains,' Ferenczi whispered in my ear. 'A bit of unanalyzed neurosis. He told me so last night.'

Freud's humor did not improve when our train lurched to a violent halt in a tunnel between stations, its lights flickering out, plunging us into a pitch, hot darkness. 'Buildings in the sky, trains in the earth,' said Freud, sounding irritated. 'It is Virgil with you Americans: if you cannot bring the heavens down, you are determined to raise hell.'

'That is your epigraph, no?' asked Ferenczi.

'Yes, but it was not supposed to be my epitaph,' answered Freud.

'Gentlemen!' Brill cried out without warning. 'You still haven't heard Younger's analysis of the paralyzed hand.'

'A case history?' said Ferenczi enthusiastically. 'We must hear it, by all means.'

'No, no. It was incomplete,' I said.

'Nonsense,' Brill upbraided me. 'It's one of the most perfect analyses I've ever heard. It confirms every tenet of psychoanalysis.'

Having little choice, I recounted my small success, as we waited in the stifling dark for the train to return to life.

I graduated from Harvard in 1908, with a degree not only in medicine but also in psychology. My professors, impressed by my industry, brought me to the attention of G. Stanley Hall, the first man ever to receive a Harvard psychology degree, a founder of the American Psychological Association, and now the president of Clark University in Worcester. Hall's ambition was to make the upstart, fabulously endowed Clark the leading institution of scientific research in the country. When he offered me a position as an assistant lecturer in psychology, with the ability to begin my medical practice — and get out of Boston — I accepted at once.

One month later, I had my first analytic patient: a girl, whom I shall call Priscilla, sixteen years old, delivered to my office by her distraught mother. Hall was responsible for the family's decision to bring her to me. More than that I can't say without revealing the girl's identity.

Priscilla was short and heavy but had a pleasing face and an uncomplaining character. For a year she had been suffering from bouts of acute shortness of breath, occasional incapacitating headache, and a total paralysis of her left hand — all of which baffled and embarrassed her. Hysteria was plainly indicated by the paralysis, which afflicted the whole of her hand, including the wrist. As Freud had pointed out, paralyses of this kind do not conform to any genuine derma- tone innervation and hence can claim no real physiological basis. For example, genuine neurological damage might cause certain fingers to be incapacitated, but not the wrist. Or the use of the thumb might be lost, leaving the other digits unaffected. But when a paralysis seizes an entire body part across all its differentiated neural reticulations, it is not physiology but psychology that must be consulted, for this kind of seizure corresponds solely to an idea, a mental image — in Priscilla's case, the image of her left hand.

The girl's doctor had naturally found no organic basis for her complaints. Nor had the chirologist, brought in from New York; his prescription had been rest and a complete withdrawal from active endeavors, which had almost certainly exacerbated her condition. They had even called in an osteopath, who of course accomplished nothing.

After ruling out the various neurological and orthopaedic possibilities — palsy, Kienbock's lunate disease, and so on — I decided to attempt psychoanalysis. At first I made no headway. The reason was the presence of the girl's mother. No hints were sufficient to induce this good woman to leave doctor and patient to the privacy psychoanalysis requires. After the third visit, I informed the mother that I would not be able to help Priscilla, or indeed to receive her in future as my patient, unless she — the mother — absented herself. Even then I could not at first make Priscilla talk. Following Freud's most recent therapeutic advances, I had her lie down with her eyes closed. I instructed her to think of her paralyzed hand and to say whatever came into her mind in association with this symptom, giving voice to any thoughts that entered her head, no matter what they were, no matter how seemingly irrelevant, inappropriate, or even impolite. Invariably, Priscilla responded only by repeating the most superficial description of the onset of her sufferings.

The critical day, as she always told the story, had been August 10, 1907. She remembered the exact date because it was the day after the funeral of her adored elder sister, Mary, who had been living in Boston with her husband, Bradley. That summer, Mary died of influenza, leaving

Bradley with two infant children to take care of. On the day after the funeral, Priscilla had been charged by her mother with writing acknowledgments to the many friends and relatives who had expressed their condolences. That evening, she experienced sharp pains in her left hand — her writing hand. She saw nothing unusual in this, both because she had written so many letters and because she had felt occasional pain in that hand for the last several years. That night, however, she awoke unable to breathe. When the dyspnea subsided, she tried to go back to sleep but could not. By morning, she was suffering the first of the headaches that would plague her for the next year. Worse, she found her left hand completely paralyzed. And in that condition it had remained, hanging uselessly from her wrist.

These and other such facts she would constantly repeat to me. Long silences would follow. No matter how forcefully I assured her that there was more she wanted to tell me — that it was quite impossible for there to be nothing in her head at all — she steadfastly insisted that she could think of nothing else to say.

I was tempted to hypnotize her. She was plainly a suggestible girl. But Freud had unequivocally rejected hypnosis. It used to be a favored technique, in the early period when he was still working with Breuer, but Freud had discovered that hypnosis was neither lasting in effect nor productive of reliable memory. I decided, however, that I might safely attempt the same technique Freud deployed after abandoning hypnosis. That is what led to the breakthrough.

I told Priscilla that I was going to place my hand on her forehead. I assured her there was a memory that wanted to come out, a memory of central importance to everything she had told me, without which we would understand nothing. I told her that she knew this memory very well, even if she did not know she knew it, and that it would emerge the moment I laid my hand on her forehead.

I did the deed with some trepidation, for I had put my authority at risk. If nothing came of it, I would be in a worse position than I had been before. But in fact the memory did emerge, just as Freud's papers suggested it would, at the very moment Priscilla felt the pressure of my hand against her head. 'Oh, Dr Younger,' she cried out, 'I saw it!'

'What?'

'Mary's hand.'

'Mary's hand?'

'In the coffin. It was terrible. They made us look at her.'

'Go on,' I said.

Priscilla said nothing.

'Was there something wrong with Mary's hand?' I asked.

'Oh no, Doctor. It was perfect. She always had perfect hands. She could play the piano beautifully, not like me.' Priscilla was struggling with some emotion I could not decipher. The color of her cheeks and forehead alarmed me; they were almost scarlet. 'She was still so beautiful. Even the coffin was beautiful, all velvet and white wood. She looked like Sleeping Beauty. But I knew she wasn't asleep.'

'What was it about Mary's hand?'

'Her hand?'

'Yes, her hand, Priscilla.'

'Please don't make me tell you, 'she said. 'I'm too ashamed.'

'You have nothing to be ashamed of. We are not responsible for our feelings; therefore no feeling can cause us shame.'

'Really, Dr Younger?'

'Really.'

'But it was so wrong of me.'

'It was Mary's left hand, wasn't it?' I said at a venture.

She nodded as if confessing a crime.

'Tell me about her left hand, Priscilla.'

'The ring,' she whispered, in the faintest voice.

'Yes,' I said. 'The ring. 'This yes was a lie. I hoped it would make Priscilla think I already understood everything, when in reality I understood nothing. This act of deception was the only aspect of the entire business that I regretted. But I have found myself repeating the same deception, in one form or another, in every psychoanalysis I have ever attempted.

She went on. 'It was the gold ring Brad gave her. And I thought, What a waste. What a waste to bury it with her.'

'There is no shame in that. Practicality is a virtue, not a vice,' I assured her with my usual acuity.

'You don't understand,' she said. 'I wanted it for myself.'

'Yes.'

'I wanted to wear it, Doctor,' she practically shouted. 'I wanted Brad to marry me. Couldn't I have taken care of the poor little babies? Couldn't I have made him happy?' She buried her head in her hands and sobbed. 'I was glad she was dead, Dr Younger. I was glad. Because now he was free to take me.'

'Priscilla,' I said, 'I can't see your face.'

'I'm sorry.'

'I mean I can't see your face because your left hand is covering it.'

She gasped. It was true: she was using her left hand to wipe away her tears. The hysterical symptom had disappeared the instant she regained the memory whose repression caused it. A year has now passed, and the paralysis never recurred, nor the dyspnea, nor the headaches.

Reconstructing the story was simple enough. Priscilla had been in love with Bradley since he first came to call on Mary. Priscilla was then thirteen. I will shock no one, I hope, by observing that a thirteen-year-old girl's love for a young man can include sexual desires, even if not fully understood as such. Priscilla had never admitted to these desires, or to the jealousy she felt toward her sister as a consequence, which irresistibly led in the child's mind to the dreadful but opportunistic thought that, if only Mary were dead, the way would be open for her. All these feelings Priscilla repressed, even from her own consciousness. This repression was doubtless the original source of the occasional pains she felt in her left hand, which probably commenced on the day of the wedding itself, when she first saw the golden ring slipped onto her sister's finger. Two years later, the sight of the ring on Mary's hand in the coffin excited the same thoughts, which very nearly emerged — or perhaps, for a moment, did emerge — into Priscilla's consciousness. But now, in addition to these forbidden feelings of desire and jealousy, there was the utterly impermissible satisfaction she took in her sister's untimely death. The result was a fresh demand for repression, infinitely stronger than the first.

The role played by the thank-you letters is more complex. One can only imagine how Priscilla must have suffered at the sight of her bare left hand, ungraced by a wedding ring, repeatedly conjoined with the act of expressing sorrow at her sister's demise. Possibly this was a contradiction Priscilla could not bear. At the same time, the laborious writing may have provided a physiological underpinning for what followed. In any event, her left hand became an offense to her, reminding her of both her unmarried state and her unacceptable wishes.

Three objectives therefore became paramount. First, she must not have such a hand; she must rid herself of a hand that had no wedding ring where a wedding ring should be. Second, she had to punish herself for her wish to replace Mary as Bradley's wife. Third, she had to make the consummation of this wish impossible. Every one of these objectives was accomplished through her hysterical symptoms; the economy with which the unconscious mind performs its work is marvelous. Symbolically speaking, Priscilla rid herself of the offending hand, simultaneously fulfilling her wish and punishing herself for having it. By making herself an invalid, she also ensured that she could no longer take care of Bradley's children or otherwise, as she so tactfully put it, 'make him happy.'

Priscilla's treatment, from start to finish, took all of two weeks. After I reassured her that her wishes were perfectly natural and beyond her control, she not only shed her symptoms but became fairly radiant. News of the invalid s cure spread through Worcester as if the Savior had brought sight to one of Isaiah's blind men. The story people told was this: Priscilla had fallen ill from love, and I had cured her. My placing a palm on her forehead was imbued with all sorts of quasi-mystic powers. While this made my reputation and caused my medical practice to thrive, there were less comfortable consequences too. There came a rush of thirty or forty would-be pyschoanalytic patients to my office, each of whom claimed to be suffering from symptoms disturbingly similar to Priscilla's and all of whom expected a diagnosis of unrequited love and a cure through the laying on of hands.

The train was pulling into City Hall station when I finished. We had to change there for the BRT at Park Row, where an elevated would take us all the way to Coney. No one commented on Priscilla's case, and I began to think I must have made a fool of myself. Brill saved me. He told Freud I deserved to know what 'the Master' thought of my analysis.

Freud turned to me with, I hardly dared to believe it, a twinkle in his eyes. He said that, a few minor points aside, the analysis could not have been improved on. He called it brilliant and asked my permission to refer to it in subsequent work. Brill clapped me on the back; Ferenczi, smiling, shook my hand. This was not the most gratifying moment of my professional life; it was the most gratifying moment of my entire life.

I had never realized how splendid City Hall station was, with its crystal chandeliers, inlaid murals, and vaulted arches. Everyone remarked on it — with the exception of Jung, who suddenly announced that he was not coming with us. Jung had made no comments either during or after my case history. Now he said he needed to get to bed.

'Bed?' Brill asked. 'You went to bed last night at nine.' While the rest of us had retired well past midnight after dining together in the hotel, Jung had gone to his room as soon as we arrived and had not come down.

Freud asked Jung whether he was all right. When Jung replied that it was only his head again, Freud instructed me to take him back to the hotel. But Jung declined assistance, insisting he could easily retrace our steps. Hence Jung took the train back uptown; the rest of us went on without him.

When Detective Jimmy Littlemore returned to the Balmoral Monday evening, one of the doormen had just come on duty. This man, Clifford, had worked the graveyard shift the night before. Littlemore asked if he knew the deceased Miss Riverford.

Apparently Clifford had not received the order to hold his tongue. 'Sure, I remember her,' he said. 'What a looker.'

'Talk to her?' asked Littlemore.

'She didn't talk much — not to me, anyway.'

'Anything special you remember about her?'

'I opened the door for her some mornings,' said Clifford.

'What's special about that?'

'I'm off at six. The only girls you see at that hour are working girls, and Miss Riverford didn't look like a working girl, if you know what I mean. She would have been going out at, I don't know, maybe five, five-thirty?'

'Where was she going?' asked Littlemore.

'Beats me.'

'What about last night? Did you notice anybody or anything unusual?'

'What do you mean unusual?' asked Clifford.

'Anything different, anybody you had never seen before.'

'There was this one fella,' said Clifford. 'Left about midnight. In a big hurry. Did you see that fella, Mac? Didn't look right, if you ask me.'

The doorman addressed as Mac shook his head.

'Smoke?' said Littlemore to Clifford, who accepted the cigarette, pocketing it since he wasn't permitted to indulge on duty. 'Why didn't he look right?'

'Just didn't. Foreigner, maybe.' Clifford was unable to articulate his suspicion with any greater specificity, but he asserted positively that the man did not live in the building. Littlemore took a description: black hair, tall, lean, well dressed, high forehead, mid- to late thirties, wearing glasses, carrying a black case of some kind. The man climbed into a hackney cab outside the Balmoral, heading downtown. Littlemore questioned the doormen for another ten minutes — none remembered Clifford's black-haired man entering the building, but he might well have gone up unremarked with a resident — and then asked where he could find the Balmoral's chambermaids. They pointed him downstairs.

In the basement, Littlemore came to a hot low-ceilinged room with pipes running along its walls and a clutch of maids folding linen. All knew who Miss Riverford's girl was: Betty Longobardi. In whispers, they confided to the detective that he wouldn't find Betty anywhere in the building. She was gone. Betty had left early without saying good-bye to anyone. They didn't know why. Betty was a handful but such a nice girl. She didn't take any lip, not even from the wing manager, the women told Littlemore. Maybe she'd had another fight with him. One of the maids knew where Betty lived. With this information secured, Littlemore turned to go. It was then that he noticed the Chinaman.

Clad in a white undershirt and dark shorts, the man had come into the room carrying a wicker basket overflowing with freshly cleaned sheets. Having deposited the contents of this basket onto a table filled with like items, he was walking out again when he attracted the detective's attention. Littlemore stared at the retreating man's thick calves and sandals. These were not in themselves particularly interesting; nor was his gait, which involved the sliding of one foot after the other. The result, however, was arresting. Two wet stripes were left on the floor in the man's wake, and these stripes were flecked with a glistening dark-red clay.

'Hey — you there!' cried Littlemore.

The man froze, his back to the detective, shoulders hunched. But the next moment he started off again at a run, disappearing around a corner, still carrying his basket. The detective sprang after him, turning the corner just in time to see the man pushing through a pair of swinging doors at the end of a long corridor. Littlemore ran down the corridor, passed through the doors — and gazed out at the Balmoral's cavernous and noisy laundry, where men were laboring at ironing boards, washboards, steam presses, and hand-cranked washing machines. There were Negroes and whites, Italians and Irish, faces of all kinds — but no Chinamen. An empty wicker basket lay on its side next to an ironing board, rocking gently as if recently set down. The floor was thoroughly wet, disguising any tracks. Littlemore pushed up the brim of his boater and shook his head.

Gramercy Park, at the foot of Lexington Avenue, was Manhattan's sole private park. Only the owners of the houses opposite the park's delicate wrought-iron fence had the right to enter. Each house came with a key to the park gates, offering access to the small paradise of flower and greenery within.

To the girl emerging from one of those houses early Monday evening, August 30, that key had always been a magical object, gold and black, delicate yet unbreakable. When she was a little girl, old Mrs Biggs, their servant, used to let her carry the key in her tiny white purse on their way across the street. She was too small to turn the key by herself, but Mrs Biggs would guide her hand and help her do it. When the iron gate released, it was as if the world itself were opening up before her.

The park had grown much smaller as she grew up. Now, at seventeen, she could of course turn the key without assistance — and did so this evening, letting herself in and walking slowly to her bench, the one she always sat on. She was carrying an armload of textbooks and her secret copy of The House of Mirth. She still loved her bench, even though the park had somehow become, as she got older, more an attachment to her parents' house than a refuge from it. Her mother and father were away. They had repaired to the country five weeks earlier, leaving the girl behind with Mrs Biggs and her husband. She had been delighted to see them go.

The day was still oppressively hot, but her bench lay in the cool shade of a willow and chestnut canopy. The books sat unopened beside her. The day after tomorrow, it would be September, a month she had been looking forward to for what seemed an eternity. Next weekend, she would turn eighteen. Three weeks after that, she would matriculate at Barnard College. She was one of those girls who, despite a fervent wish to be living another life, had staved off womanhood as long as she could, through the ages of thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, clinging to her stuffed animals even while school friends were already discussing stockings, lipstick, and invitations. At sixteen, the stuffed animals had finally been relegated to the upper reaches of a closet. At seventeen, she was lithe, blue-eyed, and heart-stoppingly beautiful. She wore her long blond hair tied with a ribbon in the back.

When the bells of Calvary Church struck six, she saw Mr and Mrs Biggs hurrying down the front stoop, rushing off to the shops before they closed. They waved to the girl, and she to them. A few minutes later, brushing tears from her eyes, she set off slowly toward home, clutching her textbooks to her chest, looking at the grass and the clover and the hovering bees. Had she turned to her left, she might have seen, on the far side of the park, a man watching her from outside the wrought-iron fence.

This man had been watching her a long time. He carried a black case in his right hand and was dressed in black — overdressed, in fact, given the heat. He never took his eyes from the girl as she crossed the street and climbed the stairs to her townhouse, a handsome limestone affair with two miniature stone lions mounting an ineffectual guard on either side of the front door. He saw the girl open the door without having to unlock it.

The man had observed the two old servants leaving the house. Glancing left, right, and over his shoulder, he started off. Quickly he approached the house, ascended the steps, tried the door, and found it still unlocked.

A half hour later, the summer-evening silence of Gramercy Park was ruptured by a scream, a girl's scream. It carried from one end of the street to the other, hanging in the air, persisting longer than one would have thought physically possible. Shortly thereafter, the man burst out the back door of the girl's house. A metal object no larger than a small coin flew from his hands as he stumbled down the rear steps. It hit a slate flagstone and bounced surprisingly high into the air. The man nearly fell to the ground himself, but he recovered, fled past the garden potting shed, and escaped from the garden down the back alley.

Mr and Mrs Biggs heard the scream. They were just returning, laden with bags of groceries and flowers. Horrified, they trundled into the house and up the stairs as quickly as they were able. On the second floor, the master bedroom door was open, which it should not have been. Inside that room, they found her. The shopping bags fell from Mr Biggs's hands. A pound of flour spread out around his old black shoes, raising a little cloud of white dust, and a yellow onion rolled all the way to the girl's bare feet.

She stood in the center of her parents' bedroom, clad only in a slip and other undergarments not meant for servants' eyes. Her legs were naked. Her long slender arms were outstretched above her head, the wrists bound by a thick rope, which was secured in turn to a ceiling fixture from which a small chandelier depended. The girl's fingers nearly touched its crystal prisms. Her slip was torn, both front and back, as if rent by the lashes of a whip or cane. A man's long white tie or scarf was wound tightly around her neck and between her lips.

She was not, however, dead. Her eyes were wild, staring, unseeing. She looked on the familiar old servants not with relief but with a kind of terror, as if they might be murderers or demons. Her whole frame shivered, despite the heat. She made to scream again, but no sound came out, as if she had expended all her voice.

Mrs Biggs came to her senses first and ordered her husband out of the room, telling him to fetch the doctor and a policeman. Gingerly she went to the girl, trying to calm her, unwinding the tie. When her mouth was freed, the girl made all the motions that normally accompany speech, but still no sound came out, no words at all, not even a whisper. When the police arrived, they were dismayed to learn that she could not speak. A still greater surprise lay in store for them as well. Paper and pencil were brought to the girl; the police asked her to tell them in writing what happened. I can't, she wrote. Why not? they asked. Her reply: I can't remember.