The Interpretation of Murder

Part 2
Chapter Six

Coroner Hugel's sunken cheeks, Detective Littlemore noticed on Tuesday morning, were looking even hollower than usual. The pouches below his eyes had pouches of their own, the dark circles their own circles. Littlemore felt sure his discoveries would boost the coroner's spirits.

'Okay, Mr Hugel,' said the detective, 'I went back to the Balmoral. Wait till you hear what I got.'

'You spoke with the maid?' Hugel asked immediately.

'Doesn't work there anymore,' answered the detective. 'She was fired.'

'I knew it!' the coroner exclaimed. 'Did you get her address?'

'Oh, I found her all right. But here's the first thing: I went back to Miss Riverford's bedroom to look at that molding on the ceiling — you know, the bowling-ball thing you said she was tied up to? You were right. There were rope threads on it.'

'Good. You secured them, I trust?' said Hugel.

'I got 'em. And the whole ball too,' said Littlemore, provoking an unpleasant look of foreboding on the coroner's face. The detective continued: 'I didn't think it looked very strong, so I got up on the bed and gave it a good yank, and it broke right off.'

'You didn't think the ceiling looked very strong,' the coroner repeated, 'so you gave it a yank, and it broke. Excellent work, Detective.'

'Thanks, Mr Hugel.'

'Perhaps you could destroy the whole room next time. Is there any other evidence you damaged?'

'No,' answered Littlemore. 'I just don't get the way it broke off so easy. How could it hold her up?'

'Well, it obviously did.'

'There's more, Mr Hugel, something big. Two things.' Littlemore described the unknown man who left the Balmoral around midnight on Sunday carrying a black case. 'How about that, Mr Hugel?' asked the detective proudly. 'It could be him, right?'

'They're certain he wasn't a resident?'

'Positive. Never saw him before.'

'Carrying a bag, you say?' asked Hugel. 'In what hand?'

'Clifford didn't know.'

'You asked?'

'Sure did,' said Littlemore. 'Had to check the guy's dexterity.'

Hugel grunted dismissively. 'Well, it's not our man anyway.'

'Why not?'

'Because, Littlemore, our man has graying hair, and our man lives in that building.' The coroner grew animated.

'We know Miss Riverford had no regular visitors. We know she had no visitors from outside the building on Sunday night. How then did the murderer get into her apartment? The door was not forced. There is only one possibility. He knocked; she answered. Now, would a girl, living alone, open her door to just anyone? In the nighttime? To a stranger? I doubt it very much. But she would open it to a neighbor, someone who lived in the building — someone she was expecting, perhaps, someone to whom she had opened her door before.'

'A laundry guy!' said Littlemore.

The coroner stared at the detective.

'That's the other thing, Mr Hugel. Listen to this. I'm down in the basement of the Balmoral when I see this Chinaman tracking clay — red clay. I took a sample; it's the same clay I saw up in Miss Riverford's room, I'm sure of it. Maybe he's the killer.'

'A Chinaman,' said the coroner.

'I tried to stop him, but he got away. Laundry worker. Maybe this guy makes a laundry delivery to Miss Riverford on Sunday night. She opens the door for him, and he kills her. Then he goes back down to the laundry, and nobody's the wiser.'

'Littlemore,' said the coroner, taking a deep breath, 'the murderer was not a Chinese laundry boy. He is a wealthy man. We know that.'

'No, Mr Hugel, you figured he was wealthy because he strangled her with a fancy silk tie, but if you work in a laundry you clean silk ties all the time. Maybe this

Chinaman steals one from there and kills Miss Riverford with it.'

'With what motive?' asked the coroner.

'I don't know. Maybe he likes killing girls, like that guy in Chicago. Say, Miss Riverford comes from Chicago. You don't think — ?'

'No, Detective, I don't. Nor do I think your Chinaman has anything to do with Miss Riverford's murder.'

'But the clay — '

'Forget the clay.'

'But the Chinaman ran when — '

'No Chinaman! Do you hear me, Littlemore? No Chinaman figures in any way in this murder. The killer is at least six feet tall. He is white: the hairs I found on her body are Caucasian. The maid — the maid is the key. What did she tell you?'

I got to breakfast with about fifteen minutes to spare before I was to call on Miss Acton. Freud was just sitting down. Brill and Ferenczi were already at table, Brill with three empty plates in front of him and at work on a fourth. I had told him yesterday that Clark would pay for his breakfast. He was evidently making up for lost time.

'Now this is America,' he said to Freud. 'You begin with toasted oats in sugar and cream, then hot leg of lamb with French-fried potatoes, a basket of raised biscuits with fresh butter, and finally buckwheat cakes with syrup tapped from Vermont maples. I am in heaven.'

'I am not,' Freud replied. He was apparently in some digestive distress. Our food, he said, was too heavy for him.

'For me too,' complained Ferenczi, who had nothing but a cup of tea before him. He added unhappily, 'I think it was mayonnaise salad.'

'Where is Jung?' asked Freud.

'I haven't any idea,' answered Brill. 'But I do know where he went Sunday night.'

'Sunday night? He went to bed Sunday night,' said Freud.

'Oh, no, he didn't,' Brill replied, in what was evidently meant to be a tantalizing tone. 'And I know whom he was with. Here, I'll show you. Look at this.'

From below his seat, Brill withdrew a thick sheaf of papers, wrapped in rubber bands, perhaps three hundred pages. The top page read, Selected Papers on Hysteria and Other Psychoneuroses by Sigmund Freud, translation and preface by A. A. Brill. 'Your first book in English,' said Brill, handing the manuscript to Freud with a glowing pride I had never seen him reveal before. 'It will be a sensation, you'll see.'

'I am overjoyed, Abraham,' said Freud, returning the manuscript. 'Really I am. But you were telling us about Jung.'

Brill's face fell. He rose from his seat, lifted his chin, and declared haughtily, 'So that is how you treat my life's work of the last twelve months. Some dreams do not require interpretation; they require action. Good-bye.'

Then he sat down again.

'Sorry, don't know what came over me,' he said. 'Thought

I was Jung for a moment.' Brill's rendition of Jung — which had been remarkable — put Ferenczi in stitches but left Freud unmoved. Clearing his throat, Brill directed our attention to the name of his publisher, Smith Ely Jelliffe, on the manuscript's tide page. 'Jelliffe runs the Journal of Nervous Disease,' said Brill. 'He's a doctor, rich as Croesus, very well connected, and another convert to the cause, thanks to me. By God, I will make this Gomorrah a very Eden for psychoanalysis; you'll see. Anyway, our friend Jung had a secret rendezvous with Jelliffe on Sunday night.'

It turned out that Jelliffe, when Brill picked up the manuscript from him this morning, had mentioned having Jung to dinner at his apartment on Sunday night. Jung had told us nothing about such a meeting. 'Apparently their chief topic of conversation was the location of Manhattan's best brothels, but listen to this,' Brill continued. 'Jelliffe has asked Jung to give a series of lectures on psychoanalysis next week at Fordham University, the Jesuit school.'

'But that is excellent news!' Freud exclaimed.

'Is it?' asked Brill. 'Why Jung, rather than you?'

'Abraham, I am giving a lecture every day in Massachusetts beginning Tuesday of next week. I couldn't possibly lecture in New York at the same rime.'

'But why the secrecy? Why conceal his meeting with Jelliffe?'

To this question, none of us had an answer. Freud, however, was unconcerned, commenting that there was undoubtedly a good reason for Jung's reticence.

All this time, I had been holding Brill's thick manuscript. Having read the first couple of pages, I turned to the next and was surprised by the sight of an almost completely blank sheet. On it were only five lines of print: centered, italicized, capitalized. It was a biblical verse of some kind.

'What's this?' I asked, displaying the page.

Ferenczi took the page from my hand and read as follows:

Take away the foreskins of your heart, ye men of Jerusalem: lest my fury come forth like fire, and burn that none can quench it, because of the evil of your doings.

'Jeremiah, no?' Ferenczi added, demonstrating a knowledge of scripture considerably superior to my own. 'What is Jeremiah doing in your hysteria book?'

Odder still, at the bottom of the page — which Ferenczi now placed in the center of our table — was the ink- stamped image of a face. It was a wizened Oriental sage of some kind, with a turban on his head, a long nose, a longer beard, and wide-open, mesmerizing eyes.

'A Hindoo?' asked Ferenczi.

'Or an Arab?' I suggested.

Oddest of all, the next page of the manuscript was just the same — blank but for the biblical passage in the center — although there was no wide-eyed, turbaned face stamped on it. I riffled through the remaining pages. All were the same, minus the face.

'Is this a joke, Brill?' said Freud.

Judging by the look on Brill's face, it was not.

Detective Littlemore was sorely disappointed by the coroner's dismissal of his discoveries, but he allowed Hugel to change the subject back to Miss Riverford's maid, who had also provided interesting information.

'She's real bad off, Mr Hugel; I wish I could do something for her,' said the detective. In fact, he had: finding Betty reluctant to speak with him at first, Littlemore had taken her to a soda fountain. When he told her he knew she had been let go, she burst out about how unfair it was. Why had they fired her? She hadn't done anything. Some of the other girls stole from the apartments — why didn't they fire one of them? And what would she do now? It turned out that Betty's father had passed away the year before. For the last two months, Betty had been supporting her whole family — her mother and three little brothers — with her wages from the Balmoral.

'What did she tell you, Detective?' asked the coroner, biting his lip.

'Betty says she didn't like going into Miss Riverford's apartment. She said it was haunted. Twice she was sure she heard a baby crying, but there wasn't any baby; the apartment would be empty. She says Miss Riverford was strange. Just shows up one day about four weeks ago. No moving trucks; no nothing. The apartment was furnished before she got there. Real quiet type, very private. Never any mess. Always made her own bed and kept her things just so — one of her closets was always locked. She tried to give Betty a pair of earrings once. Betty asked were they real — real diamonds, that is — and when Miss Riverford said yes, Betty wouldn't take them. But Betty almost never saw her. Betty worked nights for a while, and she saw Miss Riverford a couple of times then. Otherwise she was always up and out of the apartment before seven, when Betty got there. One of the doormen told me Miss Riverford left the building a couple of times before six. What's that mean, Mr Hugel?'

'It means,' answered the coroner, 'you are going to send a man to Chicago.'

'To talk to the family?'

'Correct. What did the maid tell you about the bedroom when she first discovered the body?'

'The thing is, Betty doesn't remember that part too well. All she can remember is Miss Riverford's face.'

'Did she see anything near the dead girl or lying on top of her?'

'I asked her, Mr Hugel. She can't remember.'

'Nothing?'

'She just remembers Miss Riverford's eyes, open and staring.'

'Weak little idiot.'

'You wouldn't say that if you talked to her,' he said. Littlemore was taken aback. 'How do you figure something changing anyway?'

'What?'

'You're saying something in the room changed from when Betty first went in to when you got there. But I thought they locked the apartment right away and put that butler guy in the hall to keep everybody out until you got there.'

'I thought so too,' the coroner replied, pacing the short length of his cramped office. 'That's what we were told.'

'So why do you think someone got in the room?'

'Why?' repeated Hugel, scowling. 'You want to know why? Very well, Mr Littlemore. Follow me.'

The coroner strode out the door. The detective followed him — down three flights of old stairs and through a maze of peeling corridors, eventually emerging in the morgue. The coroner unlocked a vaulted door. When he opened it, Littlemore felt the blast of stale, freezing air, then saw rows of cadavers on wooden shelves, some naked and stretched out for all to see, others covered by sheets. He could not help looking at their privates, which repulsed him.

'No one else,' announced the coroner, 'would have examined her body closely enough to see this clue. No one.' He strode to the back of the chamber where a body lay on the farthest shelf. A white sheet covered it, on which was written Riverford, E.: 29.8.09. 'Now look at her carefully, Detective, and tell me exactly what you see.'

The coroner threw back the sheet with a flourish. Littlemore's eyes went wide, but Hugel looked even more astonished than the dectective. Beneath the sheet lay not Elizabeth Riverford's corpse, but that of a. black-toothed, slack-skinned old man.

I took the elevator to Miss Acton's floor — and then remembered that I had to go back to my own first, to get paper and pens. The bizarre biblical passage in his manuscript had affected Brill deeply. He seemed actually frightened. He said he was going straight back to Jelliffe, his publisher, for an explanation; I felt there might be something he wasn't telling us.

I had expected Freud to be present at my initial sessions with Miss Acton. Instead, he instructed me to report to him afterward. His presence, he felt, would disrupt the transference.

The transference is a psychoanalytic phenomenon. Freud discovered it by accident, and much to his surprise. Patient after patient reacted to analysis by worshiping him — or occasionally by hating him. At first he tried to ignore these feelings, viewing them as unwelcome and unruly intrusions into the therapeutic relationship. Over time, however, he discovered how crucial they were, to both the patient's illness and the cure. The patient was reenacting, inside the analyst's office, the very same unconscious conflicts that caused the symptoms, transferring to the doctor the suppressed desires that lay at the heart of the illness. This was not fortuitous: the entire disease of hysteria, Freud had found, consisted of an individual's transferring to new persons, or sometimes even to objects, a set of buried wishes and emotions formed in childhood but never discharged. By dissecting this phenomenon with the patient — by bringing the transference to light and working it through — analysis makes, the unconscious conscious and removes the cause of the illness.

Thus the transference turned out to be one of Freud's most important discoveries. Would I ever have an idea of comparable importance? Ten years ago, I thought I already had. On December 31, 1899, I excitedly announced it to my father, actually interrupting him in his study a few hours before the guests would arrive for the New Year's Eve dinner party my mother always threw. He was quite surprised and, I suppose, irritated that I would bother him at his work, although of course he didn't say so. I told him I had made a discovery of potentially great moment and asked permission to inform him. He tilted his head. 'Proceed,' he said.

Since the dawn of the modern age, I argued, a peculiar fact held true of all man's supreme revolutionary bursts of genius, whether in art or in science. Every one of them had occurred at the turn of a century and — more specifically still — in the first decade of the new century.

In painting, poetry, sculpture, natural science, drama, literature, music, physics — in each one of these fields — which man and which work, above all others, has the best claim to world-altering genius, the kind of genius that changes the course of history? In painting, the cognoscenti uniformly point to the Scrovegni Chapel, where Giotto reintroduced three-dimensional figuration to the modern world. He painted those frescoes between 1303 and 1305. In verse, surely the crown belongs to Dante's Inferno, the first great work written in the vernacular, begun soon after the poet's banishment from Florence in 1302. In sculpture, there is only one possibility, Michelangelo's David, carved from a single block of marble in 1501. That same year marked the fundamental revolution of modern science, for it was then that a certain Nicolaus of Torun traveled to Padua, ostensibly to study medicine but secretly to continue the astronomical observations from which he had glimpsed a forbidden truth; we know him today as Copernicus. In literature, the choice has to be the grandsire of all novels, Don Quixote, who first tilted at windmills in 1604.

In music, none will dispute Beethoven's pathbreaking symphonic genius: he composed his First in 1800, the defiant Eroica in 1803, the Fifth by 1807.

This was the case I made to my father. It was juvenile, I know, but I was seventeen. I supposed it a great thing to be alive at the turn of a century. I predicted a wave of groundbreaking works and ideas in the next few years. And what would one not give to be alive at the turn of the millennium a hundred years hence!

'You are certainly — enthusiastic' was my father's phlegmatic reply. His only reply. I had made the mistake of showing excitement. Enthusiastic was for my father a term of utmost deprecation.

But my enthusiasm was vindicated. In 1905, an unknown Swiss patent agent of German-Jewish extraction produced a theory he called relativity. Within twelve months, my professors at Harvard were saying that this Einstein had changed our ideas of space and time forever. In art, I concede, nothing happened. In 1903, the crowd at St. Botolph's made a great fuss over a Frenchman's water lilies, but these proved to be the work of an artist who was merely losing his eyesight. When it came, however, to man's understanding of himself, my predictions were again fulfilled. Sigmund Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. My father would have scoffed, but I am convinced that Freud too will have changed our thinking forever. After Freud, we will never look at ourselves or others in the same way again.

My mother was always 'protecting' us from my father. This was an irritant to me; I didn't need it. My elder brother did, but her protection in his case was quite ineffectual. What an advantage to come second: I saw it all. Not that I was favored, but by the time my father came around to me, I had learned to be impenetrable, and he could do no serious damage. I did have an Achilles' heel, however, which he eventually found. It was Shakespeare.

My father never said aloud that my fascination with Shakespeare was excessive, but he made his opinion clear: there was something unwholesome about my taking a greater interest in a fiction, especially Hamlet, than in reality itself, and something arrogant as well. Once only did he give voice to this sentiment. When I was thirteen, thinking no one home, I delivered Hamlet's What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her? Possibly I sawed the air a little hard on bloody, bawdy villain; conceivably I was a little earsplitting on Oh vengeance! or Fie upon 't! Foh! My father, unbeknownst to me, witnessed the whole thing. When I was done, he cleared his throat and asked what Hamlet was to me, or I to Hamlet, that I should weep for him?

Needless to say, I had not wept. I have never cried at all, in conscious memory. My father's point, if not solely to embarrass me, was that my devotion to Hamlet could mean nothing in the scope of things: nothing in my future, nothing in the world. He wanted to make me understand this early on. He succeeded and, what's more, I knew he was right.

Yet that knowledge did not impair my devotion to Shakespeare. It will have been noticed that I left the poet of Avon off my list of world-changing geniuses. I also left him off the list when I made the case to my father in 1899. The omission was strategic. I wanted to see if my father might take the bait. It would have appealed to him to use my 'beloved Shakespeare,' as my father used to refer to him, against me. He was far too subtle to cite a Dickens or a Tolstoy: he would have seen at once that I would call them classic mid-century giants, masters of existing forms rather than inventors of new ones. But he also would have known that I could never deny the tide of revolutionary genius to Shakespeare, who might thus have been presented as an instant, devastating rebuttal of my argument.

Perhaps my father smelled the trap. Perhaps he knew his history better than I expected. At any rate he didn't ask, so I didn't get to tell him that Hamlet was written in 1600.

Nor did I get a chance to point out that I was hardly the only one impassioned about Shakespeare. Men were once ready to die over Hamlet. My father did not know it — indeed, nearly everyone has forgotten it — but there was once a riot over Hamlet even here in the uncultured United States. Only sixty years ago, the storied American actor Edwin Forrest toured England, where he saw the famous William Macready, the aristocratic British tragedian, playing the Prince of Denmark. Forrest volubly expressed his disgust. According to Forrest, who was of muscular build and haled from an impoverished, democratic upbringing, Macready's Hamlet pranced across the stage in effete, mincing steps absurd in themselves and degrading to the noble prince.

So began a public and escalating quarrel between these two international celebrities. Forrest was driven from the boards in England, and when Macready came to America the favor was returned. Eggs of doubtful purity, old shoes, copper coins, and even chairs were catapulted from audience to stage. The culmination of the quarrel took place in front of the old Astor Place Opera House in Manhattan on May 7, 1849, when fifteen thousand belligerents gathered to disrupt a Macready performance. The inexperienced mayor of New York, who had taken office only the week before, called up the militia, and the order was eventually given to open fire on the crowd. Some twenty or thirty men died that night.

And all for nothing, my father would have said: for Hamlet. But that is how it always is. Men care most about that which is least real. Medicine, to me, stood for reality. Nothing I did before medical school seems real any longer; it was all play. That is why fathers have to die: to make the world real for their sons.

It is the same with the transference: the patient forms an attachment to the doctor of the most strenuously emotional nature. A female patient will weep for her doctor; she will offer herself to him; she will be ready to die for him. But it is all a fiction, a chimera. In reality, her feelings have nothing to do with the doctor, onto whose person she is projecting some violent, roiling affect properly directed elsewhere. The grossest blunder an analyst can make is to mistake these artifactual feelings, whether seductive or hateful, for reality. So I steeled myself as I strode down the corridor to Miss Acton's room.