The Alienist (20 page)

Imagine, he said, that you enter a large, somewhat crumbling hall that echoes with the sounds of people mumbling and talking repetitively to themselves. All around you these people fall into prostrate positions, some of them weeping. Where are you? Sara’s answer was immediate: in an asylum. Perhaps, Kreizler answered, but you could also be in a church. In the one place the behavior would be considered mad; in the other, not only sane, but as respectable as any human activity can be. Kreizler went on to try some other examples: If a woman and her children were threatened with every kind of violence by a group of attackers, and the only weapon at the mother’s disposal was something along the lines of a meat cleaver, would Sara consider the woman’s necessarily gruesome efforts to dispatch the men the work of a mad savage? Or if another mother were to learn that her husband was beating and having sexual relations with their children, and she cut his throat in the middle of the night, would that qualify as unacceptable brutality? Sara said that, while she would answer no to those questions, she also considered such cases very different from the one we were presently dealing with. That brought a quick rejoinder from Laszlo: The only difference, he declared, was among Sara’s perceptions of the various examples. An adult protecting a child, or a child protecting itself, was apparently a context in which Sara could justify even fearsome violence; but what if our murderer viewed his current work as just that sort of protection? Could Sara shift her point of view enough to grasp that every victim and situation leading up to a murder resonated within the killer to a distant experience of threat and violence and led him for reasons that we had not yet fully defined to take angry measures in his own defense?

Sara remained more reluctant than unable to follow all this; I, on the other hand, was surprised to find my own thoughts falling right into line with Kreizler’s. Perhaps the brandy was pushing my mind past its usual limits; whatever the case, I piped up to say that each dead body seemed, in the light Laszlo was casting, to be a kind of mirror. Kreizler lifted a satisfied fist and said, Precisely—the bodies were a mirror image of some savage set of experiences that were central to the evolution of our man’s mind. Whether we took the biological approach, and concentrated on the formation of what Professor James called “neural pathways,” or the philosophical route, which would lead into a discussion of the development of the soul, we would arrive at the same conclusion: the idea of a man for whom violence was not only deeply ingrained behavior but the starting point of his meaningful experiences. What he saw when he looked at those dead children was only a representation of what he felt had been done to him—even if only physically—at some point deep in his past. Certainly, when
we
looked at the bodies our first thoughts were of vengeance for the dead and protection of future victims. Yet the profound irony was that our killer believed he was providing himself with just those things: vengeance for the child he had been, protection for the tortured soul he had become.

Despite the care Kreizler took in explaining all this to Sara, the effort brought no change in her attitude. It was simply too soon to expect her to put the experience of Castle Garden away and get back to business. She shifted and writhed in her chair, shaking her head and protesting that everything Kreizler said sounded like a somewhat absurd rationalization: Laszlo was comparing the emotional and physical trials of childhood with the worst kind of adult blood lust, she stated defiantly, whereas no such correlation existed—the two phenomena were out of all proportion to each other. Kreizler answered that such might seem to be the case, but only because Sara was deciding the proportions herself, based on the context of
her
experience. Anger and destructiveness were not the guiding instincts of her life—but what if they had been, since long before she’d become capable of conscious thought? What mere physical action could satisfy such deep-seated rage? In the case of our man, not even the brutal killings could achieve it; had they been able to, he would still have been quietly going about his business, hiding the bodies and never courting discovery.

Seeing that all these sound points were continuing to have little effect on our intransigent partner, I took the opportunity to suggest that we all try to get some sleep. The sun had begun to creep up over the city during our talk, bringing with it that state of extreme disorientation that accompanies most all-night vigils. I’m sure that Kreizler also knew that rest would put many things right; all the same, he made one last request, as Sara left with me, that she not allow horror and anger to lead her too far from the course of our undertaking. Her role had, that night, been revealed as even more important than he’d originally thought it: Our murderer had spent his childhood among men
and
women, and whatever else the rest of us could suppose about the women involved in those experiences, our theories would never amount to more than a badly flawed set of assumptions. It would be up to Sara to provide us with a different perspective, to create for us a woman (or series of women) who might have helped foster such rage. We could not succeed without that.

Sara nodded wearily at the thought of this new responsibility, and I knew I’d better get her away from Kreizler, who was exhausting enough even on a full night’s sleep. I opened the front door and guided her out into the elevator, and as we descended to the ground the only audible sound was the quiet, strangely comforting hum of the device’s engine echoing in the dark shaftway.

On the first floor we ran into the Isaacsons, whose return had been delayed not by the mob at Castle Garden (which had dissipated fairly soon after our departure) but by Theodore, who had insisted that they accompany him to one of his favorite Bowery haunts for a victory breakfast of steak and beer. The two detective sergeants looked just as exhausted as Sara and I, and since they had to go up and report before they’d be allowed any sleep, we didn’t talk much. Marcus and I made a quick plan to meet the following afternoon and venture over to the Golden Rule Pleasure Club, and then it was into the elevator for them and out to find a cab on largely deserted Broadway for Sara and myself.

There weren’t many hacks braving the early morning cold, though what few there were had mercifully congregated outside the St. Denis Hotel across the street. I helped Sara into a hansom, but before giving the driver her destination she looked up at the still-lit windows of the sixth floor of Number 808.

“He never seems to stop,” she said quietly. “It’s almost as if—as if he has a personal stake in it.”

“Well,” I answered, yawning broadly, “a lot of his professional ideas could be validated by the result.”

“No,” Sara said, still quietly. “Something else—something more…”

Following her gaze up to our headquarters, I decided to express a concern of my own: “I wish I knew what was going on with Mary.”

Sara smiled. “You never were the most romantically perceptive man, John.”

“Meaning?” I asked, genuinely baffled.

“Meaning,” Sara answered, somewhat indulgently, “that she’s in love with him.” As I stood there agape, she tapped on the roof of the hansom. “Gramercy Park, driver. Goodbye, John.”

Sara was still smiling as the cab pulled around and headed up Broadway. A couple of the other hacks asked me if I also needed a rig, but after that last bit of intelligence I could only shake my head blankly. Maybe the walk—or, as it was, stumble—home would help me make some sense of it, I thought; but I couldn’t have been more wrong. The implications of Sara’s statement, and the look on her face as she delivered it, were all too bizarre to be made sense of in a few weary minutes. All the walk did was exhaust me further, and by the time I hit the sheets in my grandmother’s house I was far too weak in body and disturbed in spirit to even remove my muddy clothes.

CHAPTER 16

A
n altogether unpleasant mood took hold of me during my sleep, and I woke at noon to find that my temper had shortened to a lamentable extent. This black outlook deepened when a messenger boy appeared with a note from Laszlo, written that morning. Apparently a Mrs. Edward Hulse of Long Island had been arrested during the night after trying to kill her own children with a carving knife. Though the woman had been released into her husband’s custody, Kreizler had been asked to assess her mental condition, and had invited Sara along. There was no thought of establishing a connection between Mrs. Hulse and our case, Laszlo explained; rather, Sara’s interest (which, sure enough, had been revitalized by several hours’ sleep) was in assembling details of character for the imaginary women that Laszlo had asked her to create as a way of further understanding our imaginary man. None of this was cause for annoyance on my part; it was more the way Kreizler phrased it all, as if he and Sara were off for a pleasant, stimulating day in the country together. As I crumpled the note up, I acidly wished them a lovely time; and I believe I spat in a sink afterwards.

A telephone call from Marcus Isaacson set our meeting for five o’clock, at the El station at Third Avenue and Fourth Street. I then dressed and surveyed the possibilities for my own afternoon—they appeared few and bleak. Emerging from my room, I discovered that my grandmother was giving a luncheon; the party consisted of one of her dim-witted nieces, the niece’s equally engaging husband (who was a partner in my father’s investment firm), and one of my second cousins. All three guests were full of questions about my father, questions that I, having been out of touch with him for many months, had no way of answering. They also made a few polite inquiries about my mother (who I did know was at that moment traveling in Europe with a companion), and politely dodged the subject of my former fiancée, Julia Pratt, whom they were acquainted with socially. The entire conversation was punctuated by insincere smiles and chuckles, and its general effect was to make me thoroughly morose.

The truth is, it had been many years since I’d been able to speak pleasantly with most members of my family, for reasons that, while powerful, were not difficult to explain. Right after I got out of Harvard, my younger brother—whose passage into adulthood had been even more troubled than my own—had fallen off a Boston boat and drowned. A lengthy autopsy revealed what I could have told anyone if they’d asked: that my brother had been a habitual user of alcohol and morphine. (During his last years he’d become a regular drinking companion of Roosevelt’s younger brother, Elliot, whose life was also ended by dipsomania some years later.) The funeral that followed was full of respectful but perfectly nonsensical tributes, all of which avoided the subject of my brother’s adult battle with terrible bouts of melancholy. There were many causes of his unhappiness, but at heart I believe now, as I believed then, that it was essentially the result of growing up in a household, and a world, where emotional expression of any kind was at best frowned on and at worst strangled. Unfortunately, I stated this opinion during the funeral, and was nearly forced into an asylum as a result. Relations between myself and my family had never quite recovered. Only my grandmother, who had doted on my brother, displayed any understanding of my behavior or any willingness to allow me into her home and her life. The rest of them regarded me as at least mentally impaired, and perhaps downright dangerous.

For all these reasons, the arrival of my relatives on Washington Square that day was a sort of crowning blow, and my disposition could not have been worse as I walked out the front door of the house into the chilly day. Realizing that I had absolutely no idea where I was going, I sat down on the steps, hungry and cold—and suddenly aware that I was jealous. The realization was so surprising that my tired eyes popped fully open. Somehow my unconscious mind had drawn some unpleasant conclusions from the pieces of information that I had received the night before: if Mary Palmer was in fact in love with Kreizler, and she saw Sara as a threat, and both Kreizler and Sara were aware of it, and Kreizler didn’t want Mary around as a result, but had no trouble spending swimming little spring afternoons with Sara—well, it was all fairly clear. Sara was obviously entranced by the mysterious alienist; and the iconoclastic Kreizler, who’d only had one romance in his life that I knew of, was taken with Sara’s fiercely independent ways. Not that it was a romantic sort of jealousy that had crept into me; I had only considered an amorous link with Sara once, years ago, and then just for a few drunken hours. No, I was more injured at the thought of being excluded. On such a morning (or afternoon) a jaunt to Long Island with friends would definitely have been beneficial.

I spent several minutes debating whether or not I should call on an actress with whom I’d passed many days (and still more nights) since the end of the Julia Pratt business; and then, for no reason that I could divine, my thoughts turned to Mary Palmer. Bad as I felt, she must have been feeling worse, if what Sara had said to me was true. Why not make a quick trip up to Stuyvesant Park, I mused, and give the girl an afternoon out? Kreizler might not approve; but Kreizler was off having a pleasant day with a splendid girl, and his complaints were therefore invalid. (Thus did spite work its inevitable way into my thoughts.) Yes, as I walked by the new arch at the north end of Washington Square Park, the idea only grew more appealing—but where exactly to take the girl?

On Broadway I corralled several paperboys, and relieved them of some of their wares. The previous night’s events at Castle Garden received much attention on the front pages. Apparently there was growing concern over the mood in the immigrant neighborhoods. A citizens’ committee was being formed to go to City Hall and express concern about both the murders and, more emphatically, the possible effect of those crimes on civic order. All of which meant little or nothing to me at that particular moment—I quickly turned to the entertainment pages. The pickings seemed slim, until I caught a notice for Koster and Bial’s theater on Twenty-third Street. In addition to singers, gymnastic comedians, and a Russian clown, Koster and Bial were offering a program of short projected films, the first ever in New York, according to the notice. It seemed the right fare, and the theater was certainly convenient to Kreizler’s house. I grabbed the first cab I saw.

Mary was alone in the house on Seventeenth Street when I arrived, and in as depressed a mood as I’d expected to find her. She was also, at first, very resistant to the idea of venturing out. She looked away from me and shook her head vigorously, pointing around the rooms as if to indicate that her housekeeping chores were too extensive for her to even consider such an idea. But I had been inspired by the notion of cheering someone up: I described the bill at Koster and Bial’s with rare zest and to her wary glances replied that the outing would be nothing more than an expression of thanks for the excellent early morning breakfast. Reassured and obviously excited, she soon gave in and fetched her coat, as well as a small black hat. Not a sound escaped her as we went out of the house, but she smiled in a very pleased and grateful way.

For an idea that had grown out of such questionable feelings, this turned out to be a remarkably good one. We got into our seats at Koster and Bial’s, a very average theater of only moderate capacity, just as a music hall comedy team from London was winding up its performance. We were in time for the Russian clowns, whose silent antics Mary quite enjoyed. The comedic gymnasts, who threw barbs and jokes at each other while executing some truly remarkable physical feats, were also good, though I could have lived without the French singers and a rather strange dancer who followed them. The audience was large but good-natured, and Mary seemed to enjoy watching them almost as much as the acts.

There were no wandering eyes, however, when a glittering white screen descended across the proscenium and the house went completely black. Light flashed from somewhere behind us, and then there was near-panic in the first few rows when we were all faced with the image of a wall of blue seawater seemingly crashing into the theater. Naturally, none of us was familiar with the phenomenon of projected images, an experience that in this case had been heightened by the hand-tinting of the black-and-white film. After order had been restored in the theater and the first offering, “Sea Waves,” had come to an end, we were treated to eleven other brief subjects, including a pair of “Burlesque Boxers,” and some less amusing pictures of the German kaiser reviewing his troops. Sitting there in that nondescript theater one hardly had the sense that one was witnessing the advent of a new form of communication and entertainment that would, in the hands of such modern masters as D. W. Griffith, drastically change not only New York City but the world; I was far more concerned with the fact that those flickering, tinted images brought Mary Palmer and me closer together for a brief time, relieving the loneliness that was for me transitory and for her a permanent aspect of existence.

It wasn’t until we were back out on the street that my mental repose was turned to restless inquisitiveness by the training I’d struggled through during the last several weeks. As I watched my very pleased, very attractive companion enjoying the cold, bright afternoon, I wondered: How could this girl have killed her father? I fully appreciated that there were few things so reprehensible as a man violating his own daughter; but there were other girls who’d endured the experience without chaining the guilty party to a bed and roasting him alive. What had pushed Mary to the act? The beginnings of an explanation, I soon realized, were quite easy to detect even years after the fact. As Mary watched the dogs and pigeons in Madison Square Park, or when her blue eyes were captured by such glittering treasures as the enormous golden statue of naked Diana atop the square spire of Madison Square Garden, her lips moved as if to give expression to her pleasure—and then her jaws clamped closed, her face displaying a fear of what incoherent, humiliating noises might emerge should she try to speak. I remembered that Mary had been considered idiotic in her youth; and most children are anything but kind to idiots. In addition, her mother had considered her fit for nothing more than charwork. Thus by the time her father’s sexual advances began, Mary must already have been so frustrated and tormented that she was near ready to explode. Removal of any one of these disadvantages and wretched experiences might have changed the outcome of her life; together, they wove a fatal pattern.

Perhaps life had been very similar for our killer, I posited as Mary and I entered Madison Square Garden in order to have a cup of tea in the arcade restaurant on the roof. By now I had realized that a companion’s extensive chatter only made Mary feel more keenly her inability to participate verbally, so I began to communicate through smiles and gestures, privately pursuing what seemed a fertile line of psychological reasoning as I did so. With Mary sipping her tea and craning her neck in order to gather all the sights that were available from the excellent vantage point of the Garden’s roof arcade, I remembered what Kreizler had said the night before: that violence, for our murderer, had been the childhood starting point. In all likelihood that meant beatings administered by adults—such would fit with Laszlo’s theory that there were both self-protective and vengeful instincts at work in the man. But thousands of young boys suffered such torment. What had pushed this one, like Mary, over a seemingly indefinable but very real line into violence? Had he, too, suffered from some crippling impairment or deformity that during his youth made him an object of derision and scorn, not only on the part of adults, but of other children as well? And, having endured this, had he gone on to suffer (again like Mary) some sort of outrageous, degrading sexual assault?

It still seems odd that so lovely a girl as Mary Palmer should have inspired me to such grim cogitations; but odd or no, I felt I was onto something, and wanted to get Mary back to Kreizler’s place so that I could meet Marcus Isaacson on time and share my thoughts with him. I felt a bit bad about ending an outing that had brought Mary such apparent joy—by the time we reached Stuyvesant Park she was absolutely radiant—but she also had duties to attend to; and her mind was brought back to them in a rush, I could see, when she spotted Kreizler’s calash sitting outside the house on Seventeenth Street.

Stevie was brushing the horse Frederick down, while Kreizler was standing and smoking a cigarette on the small iron balcony that ran outside the French windows of the parlor on the second floor. Both Mary and I braced for trouble as we entered the small front yard; and we were both surprised when a very genuine smile came into Kreizler’s face. He took out his silver watch, checked the time, and spoke in a cheerful voice:

“You two must have had quite an afternoon—was Mr. Moore a satisfactory host, Mary?”

Mary smiled and nodded, then rushed to the front door. There she turned and, after removing the small black hat, said “Thank you” with a big smile and only a trace of difficulty. Then she disappeared inside, and I looked up at Kreizler.

“I believe we may yet get spring, John,” he said, indicating Stuyvesant Park with a wave of his cigarette. “Despite the cold, the trees are budding.”

“I thought you’d still be on Long Island,” I answered.

He shrugged. “There’s little for me to learn there. Sara, on the other hand, seemed quite fascinated by Mrs. Hulse’s attitude toward her children, so I left her. It may prove very useful for her, and she can take a train back tonight.” That seemed a bit strange, given the theories I’d cooked up earlier that day; but Kreizler’s manner was quite normal. “Will you come up for a drink, John?”

“I’ve got to meet Marcus at five—we’re going to explore the Golden Rule. Any interest?”

“A great deal of interest,” he answered. “But it will be better if I’m not seen in too many places associated with the case. I trust the pair of you to take copious mental notes. Remember—the keys will be in the details.”