The Interpretation Of Murder (27 page)

    'Can you psychoanalyze anyone, Dr
Freud?' asked Mrs Banwell, as the party entered Jelliffe's dining room. 'Can
you psychoanalyze me?'

    On certain social occasions,
otherwise dignified and serious men will begin behaving unconsciously like
players on a stage, performing as they talk, acting as they gesticulate. The
cause is invariably a woman; Clara Banwell produced that effect on Jelliffe's
male guests. She was twenty- six, her skin the white of a powdered Japanese
princess. Everything about her was perfectly formed. Her shape was exquisite.
Her hair was forest-dark, her eyes sea-green, with the luster of a fine
provoking intelligence. An iridescent Oriental pearl hung from each ear, and a
single large pink conch pearl, encased in a basket of diamonds and platinum,
hung below her neck on a silver thread. When she hinted at a smile - and she
never more than hinted - men fell at her feet.

    In 1909, the guests at a fashionable
American dinner made a pairwise procession when called to table, every woman
escorted on the arm of a man. Mrs Banwell was not on Freud's arm. She had
lightly dropped her fingers on Younger's wrist at the decisive moment, but
still she managed to address herself to Freud, while capturing the attention of
the entire party as she did so.

    Only that morning, Clara Banwell had
returned to town from the country, in the same car with Mr and Mrs Harcourt
Acton. Jelliffe had run into her in the lobby of their building quite by
accident. The moment he learned that her husband, Mr George Banwell, was to be
otherwise engaged, he begged Clara to attend his dinner that evening. He
assured her she would find the guests most interesting. Jelliffe found Clara
Banwell utterly irresistible - and her husband equally unbearable.

    'What women want,' Freud replied to
her question, as the guests took their seats at a table shimmering with
crystal, 'is a mystery, as much to the analyst as to the poet. If only you
could tell us, Mrs Banwell, but you cannot. You are the problem, but you are no
better able to solve it than are we poor men. Now, what
men
want is
almost always apparent. Our host, for example, instead of his spoon, has picked
up his knife by mistake.'

    All heads turned to the smiling,
bulky form of Jelliffe at the head of the table. It was so: he had his knife -
not his bread knife, but his dinner knife - in his right hand. 'What does that
signify, Dr Freud?' asked an elderly lady.

    'It signifies that Mrs Banwell has
aroused our host's aggressive impulses,' said Freud. 'This aggression, arising
from circumstances of sexual competition readily comprehensible to everyone,
led his hand to the wrong instrument, revealing wishes of which he himself was
unconscious.'

    There was a murmur around the table.

    'A touch, a touch, I do confess it,'
cried Jelliffe with unembarrassed good spirits, wagging his knife in Clara's
direction, 'except of course when he says that the wishes in question were
unconscious.' His civilized scandalousness elicited a burst of appreciative
laughter all around.

    'By contrast,' Freud went on, 'my
good friend Ferenczi here is fastidiously securing his napkin to his collar, as
a bib is tucked into a child. He is appealing to your maternal instinct, Mrs
Banwell.'

    Ferenczi looked about the table with
good-natured perplexity: only then did he notice that he was alone in this
particular use of his dinner napkin.

    'You conversed at length with my
husband before dinner, Dr Freud,' said Mrs Hyslop, a grandmotherly woman seated
next to Jelliffe. 'What did you learn about him?'

    'Professor Hyslop,' replied Freud, 'will
you confirm something for me, sir? You did not mention to me your mother's
first name, did you?'

    'What's that?' said Hyslop, holding
his ear trumpet high.

    'We didn't speak of your mother, did
we?' asked Freud.

    'Speak of Mother?' repeated Hyslop.
'Not at all.'

    'Her name was Mary,' said Freud.

    'How did you know that?' cried
Hyslop. He looked accusingly around the table. 'How did he know that? I didn't
tell him Mother's name.'

    'You certainly did,' said Freud,
'without knowing it. The puzzle to me is your wife's name. Jelliffe tells me it
is Alva. I confess I had predicted a variant of Mary. I felt quite certain of
it. Thus I have a question for you, Mrs Hyslop, if you will permit me. Does
your husband by any chance have a pet name by which he calls you?'

    'Why, my middle name is Maria,' said
a surprised Mrs Hyslop, 'and he has always called me Marie.'

    At this admission, Jelliffe let out a
whoop, and Freud received a round of applause.

    'I woke up with a catarrh this morning,'
interjected a matron across from Ferenczi. 'At the end of summer, too. Does
that mean anything, Dr Freud?'

    'A catarrh, madam?' Freud paused to
consider. 'Sometimes a catarrh, I'm afraid, is only a catarrh.'

    'But are women really so mysterious?'
Clara Banwell resumed. 'I think you are being much too forgiving of my sex.
What women want is the simplest thing in the world.' She turned to the
exceedingly good-looking, dark-haired young man on her right, whose white bow
tie was just slightly askew. He had said nothing so far. 'What do you think, Dr
Younger? Can you tell us what a woman wants?'

    Stratham Younger was having
difficulty taking Clara Banwell's measure. Although he did not know it, he was
laboring to put out of his mind a recurrent image of Mrs Banwell's lovely bare
back, undulating gently in the moonlight as she tossed her hair over her
shoulder. He was also having trouble separating the idea of Mrs George Banwell
from that of Mr George Banwell, whom Younger could not stop thinking of as a
murderer, despite the mayor's exculpation of him.

    Younger believed that Nora was the
loveliest girl he had ever seen. Yet Clara Banwell was quite nearly as
attractive, if not more so. Desire in man, says Hegel, always begins with a
desire for the other's desire. It was impossible for any man to look on Clara
Banwell without wanting her to single him out, favor him, want something from
him. Jelliffe, for example, would gladly have dived on a sword if Clara had
only seen fit to grace him with a request to do so. On their way into the
dining room, when Clara's hand had rested on his arm, Younger had felt the
contact throughout his person. Yet there was something about her that distanced
him too. Perhaps it was his having met Harcourt Acton. Younger did not consider
himself a puritan, but the idea of Mrs Banwell gratifying so weak-looking a man
insensibly provoked him.

    'I'm sure, Mrs Banwell,' he replied,
'that if you would enlighten us on the subject of woman, it would be far more
interesting than if I tried to.'

    'I
could
tell you, I suppose,
how women really feel about men,' said Clara invitingly. 'At least about the
men they care for. Would you like that?' A groundswell of assent was heard
around the table, at any rate among the male guests. 'But I won't, not unless
you men promise to say how you really feel about women.' The bargain was
promptly struck by general acclamation, although Younger held his tongue, as
did Charles Dana at the foot of the table.

    'Well, since you force me,
gentlemen,' said Clara, 'I'll confess our secret. Women are men's inferiors. I
know it is backward of me to say so, but to deny it is folly. All of mankind's
riches, material and spiritual, are men's creations. Our towering cities, our
science, art, and music - all built, discovered, painted, and composed by you
men. Women know this. We cannot help being overmastered by stronger men, and we
cannot help resenting you for it. A woman's love for a man is half animal
passion and half hate. The more a woman loves a man, the more she hates him. If
a man is worth having, he must be a woman's superior; if he is her superior,
part of her must hate him. It is only in beauty we surpass you, and it is
therefore no wonder that we worship beauty above all else. That is why a woman,'
she wound up, 'is at her greatest peril in the presence of a beautiful man.'

    Her audience was mesmerized, a
reaction to which Clara Banwell was not unaccustomed. Younger felt she had
thrown him the most fleeting glance at the very end of her remarks - he was not
the only man at table who had this impression - but he told himself he had
imagined it. It also occurred to Younger that Mrs Banwell might have just
explained the wild extremes of conflicting emotion his own mother had displayed
toward his father. Younger's father killed himself in 1904; his mother had not
remarried. He wondered whether his mother had always both loved and hated his
father, in the manner Mrs Banwell had described.

    'Envy is certainly the predominant
force in women's mental lives, Mrs Banwell,' said Freud. 'That is why women
have so little sense of justice.'

    'Men are not envious?' asked Clara.

    'Men are ambitious,' he replied.
'Their envy derives chiefly from that source. A woman's envy, by contrast, is
always erotic. The difference can be seen in daydreams. All of us daydream, of
course. Men, however, have two kinds: erotic and ambitious. A woman's daydreams
are exclusively erotic.'

    'I am sure mine are not,' declared
the rotund woman with the catarrh.

    'I think Dr Freud is quite right,'
said Clara Banwell, 'on all counts, but particularly about men's ambitiousness.
My husband, George, for example. He is the perfect man. He is not at all
beautiful. But he is handsome, twenty years older than I, successful, strong, single-minded,
indomitable. For all those things, I love him. He also hasn't the slightest
awareness that I exist, the moment I am out of his sight; his ambition is that
strong. For that, I hate him. Nature requires me to. The happy consequence,
however, is that I am free to do whatever I like - for example, being here
tonight at one of Smith's delightful dinner parties - and George will never
even know I left the apartment.'

    'Clara,' responded Jelliffe, 'I'm
wounded. You never told me you had such freedom.'

    'I said I was free to do as I like,
Smith,' Clara replied, 'not as
you
like.' Laughter again was general.
'Well, now I've confessed. What do the men say? Don't men secretly despise the
bonds of marital fidelity? No, Smith, please; I know what you think. I'd like a
more objective opinion. Dr Freud, is marriage a good thing?'

    'For society or for the individual?'
Freud responded. 'For society, marriage is undoubtedly beneficial. But the
burdens of civilized morality are too heavy for many to bear. How long have you
been a wife, Mrs Banwell?'

    'I married George when I was
nineteen,' Clara answered, and the thought of a nineteen-year-old Clara Banwell
on her wedding night occupied the minds of several guests - not only of the
male variety. 'That makes seven years.'

    'In that case you will know enough,'
Freud went on, 'if not from your own experience, then that of your friends, not
to be surprised by what I say. Satisfying intercourse does not last long in
most marriages. After four or five years, marriage tends to fail utterly in
this respect, and when this happens it spells the end of spiritual communion
too. As a result, in the great run of cases, marriage ends in disappointment,
spiritual as well as physical. The man and the woman are thrown back,
psychologically speaking, to their premarital state - with only one difference.
They are poorer now. Poorer by the loss of an illusion.'

    Clara Banwell stared intently at
Freud.

    'What is he saying?' old Professor Hyslop
called out, trying to get his ear horn nearer to Freud.

    'He is justifying adultery,' replied
Charles Dana, speaking for the first time. 'You know, Dr Freud, apart from the
parlor tricks, it is your focus on the maladies of sexual frustration that
surprises me. Our problem is surely not that we place too much constraint on
sexual license; it is that we place too little.'

    'Oh?' said Freud.

    'A billion people now live on this
earth. A billion. And the number is growing geometrically. How are they to
live, Dr Freud? What are they to eat? Millions flood our shores every year: the
poorest, the least intelligent, the most prone to criminality. Our city is near
anarchy because of them. Our jails are bursting. They breed like flies. And
they steal from us. One cannot blame them; if a man is too poor to feed his
children, he must steal. Yet you, Dr Freud, if I understand your ideas, seem
concerned only with the evils of sexual repression. I would think a man of
science ought to be more concerned with the dangers of sexual emancipation.'

    'What do you propose, Charles, an end
to immigration?' asked Jelliffe.