The Interpretation Of Murder (10 page)

    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 Torún
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.