by Amanda Cross
“The horrible thing is,” Nicola continued, “none of them understands in the least what we’re like; they all think we’re some special species of madmen who have taken to psychiatry because all sane pursuits are beyond us. I don’t mean that they don’t know all about psychiatry in a theoretical sort of way—I suppose they are used to the testimony of psychiatrists and all that—but people like us who take unscheduled walks, and talk frankly about jealousy and feelings of aggression, and yet insist that because we talk about them we are not likely to act them out, well, the only thing about me that seemed to make sense to one detective was that my father had gone to Yale Law School. They got out of me that you and Emanuel had once been lovers, by the way, and then concluded, I am certain, that we must all be living in some fantastic Noel Cowardish sort of way because we are all friends now and I allow you into my house. You know, Kate, they could understand a man’s cheating on his expense account, or going out with call girls when his wife thinks he’s on a business trip, but I think we frighten them because we claim to be honest underneath, though a bit casual on the surface, whereas they understand dishonesty, but not the abandonment of surface rectitude. Probably they are convinced there’s something indecent about a man’s taking twenty dollars from a woman so that she can lie on a couch and talk to him.”
“I think,” Kate said, “that the police are rather like the English as Mrs. Patrick Campbell saw them. She said the English didn’t care what people did as long as they didn’t do it in the street and frighten the horses. I don’t suppose the police are actively opposed to anything about Emanuel or you or me or psychiatry. It’s just that all this has frightened the horses, and unfortunately the police do not sufficiently understand the integrity of psychiatry—where it is practiced with integrity, and we might as well admit it isn’t always—to know that Emanuel is the last person who could have murdered the girl. Where were you, yesterday morning, by the way, and why the hell didn’t you mention that you hadn’t been to your analyst’s when you were outlining the day?”
“How did you learn I hadn’t been there?”
“I have my methods; answer the questions.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t tell you, Kate. I meant to, every time it came up, but one dislikes behaving like a coward, and dislikes even more talking about it. Believe it or not—and the police don’t—I was walking around in the park, by the castle and the lake there, where the Japanese cherry blossoms are. It’s always been my favorite place, ever since I was very little and held my breath and turned blue if the nurse tried to go somewhere else.”
“But why, why did you have to pick this one morning to revive childhood memories, when you could have been doing it on Dr. Sanders’s couch, and giving yourself a magnificent alibi at the same time?”
“Nobody told me Janet Harrison was going to be murdered on Emanuel’s couch. At any rate, I think it’s better this way; if I had an alibi, that would leave Emanuel the chief and only suspect. This way, the police aren’t quite ready to arrest him. After all, they’ve got just as much against me as against Emanuel.”
“Does the psychiatrist’s wife usually come in, in a natural sort of way, and sit down behind the patient? Never mind; I still want to know why you didn’t go to your appointment with Dr. Sanders.”
“Kate, you’re getting like the police, wanting neat, reasonable answers to everything. There are some people who keep every appointment with their analyst, and always arrive promptly—I’m sure there are—but more people like me turn cowardly. There are several common defenses: arriving late, saying nothing, talking about other matters and avoiding the troublesome problem—in which case, of course, one just keeps coming back to it until one does face it. Mostly I use the system of intellectualizing, but on the day I just felt it was spring and I couldn’t manage it. I got as far as Madison Avenue and decided, so I went to the park instead. Needless to say, I had no idea Emanuel would be wandering around the park at the same time.”
“Did you call Dr. Sanders and say you weren’t coming?”
“Of course; it would be most unfair to keep him sitting there, instead of letting him have the hour free. Possibly he likes to run around the reservoir; it’s a pity he didn’t; he might have met Emanuel.”
“Would Emanuel know him?”
“Well, they’re both at the institute.”
“Nicki, did anybody see you leave for what you thought would be an appointment with your psychiatrist? Did anyone see you make the telephone call at Madison Avenue?”
“No one saw me make the phone call. But Dr. Barrister saw me leave. Almost always he’s busy with patients at that time, but today, for some reason, he was at the door, showing a patient out or something. He saw me leave, but what does that prove? I could easily have come back and stabbed the girl.”
“What sort of doctor is he?”
“Woman. I mean, he treats women.”
“Gynecology? Obstetrics?”
“No, he doesn’t seem to operate very much, and he certainly doesn’t do obstetrics; he doesn’t strike me as the sort who would want to be dragged out of the theater or out of bed to deliver babies. Emanuel looked him up, actually, on my insistence, and he’s got excellent credentials. Emanuel doesn’t like him.”
“Why not?”
“Well, partly because Emanuel doesn’t like most people, particularly not people who are smooth, but mostly, I gather, because Barrister and he met once in the hall, and Barrister mentioned something to the effect that they were both doing the same sort of work, and at least neither of them ever buried any patients. A turn, I guess, on the old joke about the dermatologist who never cures anyone and never kills anyone, but it annoyed Emanuel, who said Barrister sounded like a doctor in the movies.”
“Well, nature does imitate art; Oscar Wilde was quite right.”
“I told Emanuel it was plain envy. Dr. Barrister is very good-looking.”
“He sounds more suspicious by the minute; I just about decided, the other night, that he must have done it.”
“I know. I’ve been searching madly for suspects myself and one of the problems is that we aren’t exactly seething with suspects. Apart from you and me, and Emanuel, who are innocent by definition, so to speak, we have only the elevator man, Dr. Barrister or his patients or nurse, the patients on either side of Janet Harrison or the homicidal maniac. Not very encouraging. Actually, this whole thing is horrible for Dr. Barrister, though he’s been quite nice about it. Police questioning him, and a policeman in the hall outside his office—his patients may not care for that—and then being dragged in by me to look at a body. The fact is, if he were going to murder someone he’d want to murder her as far from himself as possible.”
“We’ve left out one other possible suspect: someone Janet Harrison met here by arrangement. He canceled the patients, saw that everyone had left, enticed her into the office and killed her.”
“Kate, you’re a genius! That’s exactly how it must have happened.”
“No doubt. All we’ve got to do is find this man, if he exists.”
It was, however, with this probably nonexistent man in mind, that Kate tracked Emanuel down in his office some time later. She had, of course, determined that he was free, and, knocking first, had gone in and shut the door behind her.
“Emanuel, I am sorry, or have I said that already? I keep thinking of all this as like Greek drama; that from the moment of that collision off the Merritt Parkway, we have been heading for this crisis. I suppose there is some comfort in thinking, however literarily, that fate concerns itself with our destinies.”
“I’ve thought much the same thing myself; you weren’t sure you wanted to be a college teacher, and I had all sorts of ambivalences about psychiatry. Yet here we are, you as a teacher having sent me, a psychiatrist, one of your students as a patient. It seems to have a pattern, yet of course it can’t. If we could just show that it hasn’t a pattern, or that we’re seeing the pattern the wrong way, we’d be clear of all this.”
“Emanuel! I think you’ve just said something very important and profound.”
“Have I? It doesn’t seem to make any sense at all.”
“Well, never mind; I’m sure the reason for its profundity will occur to me later. What I want now is to have you sit down at your desk and tell me everything you know about Janet Harrison. Perhaps what you say will remind me of something I know, and have forgotten. I’m convinced of one thing: if we find the murderer, always supposing he isn’t a homicidal maniac casually in off the streets, we will find him through some knowledge we get about that girl. Will you try to be helpful?”
Rather to Kate’s surprise he didn’t flatly refuse, he merely shrugged, and continued to gaze out of the window onto a courtyard in which there was almost certainly nothing to see. Kate, with a certain studied carelessness, sat down on the couch. One of the chairs would have been more comfortable, but not to sit on the couch was to avoid it.
“What can I tell you? The tape recording of an analysis, for example, would be meaningless, in any important sense, to someone not trained to interpret. It’s not full of clues like a Sherlock Holmes detective story, at least not the sort of clues that would be any use to a policeman. She didn’t tell me one day that she would probably be murdered, and that if she were, such-and-such a person would probably have done it. Believe me, had she said something definite of that sort, I would not hesitate to reveal it, certainly not from any misguided sense of idealism. The other vital thing to remember is that, to the analyst, it is unimportant whether something actually happened, or whether the occurrence was merely a fantasy on the part of the patient. To the analyst, there is no essential difference; to the policeman there is, of course, all the difference in the world.”
“I should think it would matter very much to a patient whether something had really happened or not. I should think that would be the whole point.”
“Exactly. But you would be wrong. And I can’t explain all this simply, without grossly falsifying it, and by making it too simple, making it false. But if you want, I’ll give you, reluctantly, an example. When Freud began on his treatment of patients, he was astonished to discover how many women in Vienna had had, as children, sexual relations with their fathers. It appeared for a time that at least a handful of Viennese fathers had been sexual maniacs. Then Freud realized that none of these sexual experiences had ever taken place, that they had been fantasies. But his important realization came with the understanding that, for the purposes of the patients’ psychological development (though not of course for the purposes of sexual morality in Vienna) it did not matter at all whether the incidents had taken place actually or not. The fantasy had an immense importance of its own. Kate, have you ever tried to explain Ulysses to a self-satisfied person whose idea of a great novelist was Lloyd Douglas?”
“All right, all right, I see your point, really I do. But let me go on being a nuisance, will you? I never knew, for example, why she thought she needed an analyst. What did she say the first time she came to see you?”
“The beginning is always rather routine. I ask, of course, what the trouble is. Her answer was not unusual. She slept badly, had a work problem, was unable to read for more than a short period, and had difficulty, as she put it in regrettable social-worker jargon, in relating to people. Her use of that term was the most significant thing she said that day; it indicated how the problem was intellectualized, to what degree emotion had unconsciously been withdrawn from it. Most of this policemen could discover; the rest they would find useless to their purpose. I asked her to tell me something about herself; that’s routine also. The facts are usually not important, but the omissions may be greatly so. She was the only child of strict, compulsive parents, both now dead. They were quite old when she was born—if you want the details I can look them up. She neglected to mention at that time any love affairs, even of the most casual nature, though it emerged later that she had had one love affair in which she was deeply involved. Occasionally associations would bring her to this, break through her resistance, but she always immediately moved away from the subject. We had just begun to touch on some real material when this happened.”
“Emanuel, don’t you see how important that is? By the way, had she—was she a virgin?” He turned to her with surprise, at the question, at Kate’s asking it. Kate shrugged. “Possibly my salacious mind, but I have an odd feeling it may be important.”
“I don’t know the answer, as a fact, for certain. If you want my professional guess, I would say that the love affair had been consummated. But it’s a guess.”
“Do patients in the beginning talk mostly about the past or present?”
“About the present; the past of course comes in, more and more as you continue. I had a hunch—though do try not to overestimate its importance—that there was something in the present she was not mentioning, something connected, though perhaps only in the sense of the same guilt, with the love affair. Ah, I particularly admire you when you get that gleam in your eye like a hawk about to dive. Do you think she was a key figure in a drug ring?”
“You can laugh later; one other question. You mentioned the other evening that she had become angry, that transference had begun. What is transference when it’s at home, as Molly Bloom would say?”
“I loathe simplified explanations of psychiatry. Let’s say merely that the anger inherent in some situation becomes directed at the analyst, who becomes the object of those emotions.”
“Don’t you see, Emanuel? That’s good enough. Put together two things you’ve casually told me. One, possibly connected with her past, which she was hiding. Two, emotion had begun to be generated in her relationship with you. Conclusion: she might have told you, or might have revealed to your sensitive professional ear something which someone didn’t want anyone to know. Perhaps there was someone to whom she talked—she thought casually—about her analysis—people do talk somewhat about their analyses; I know, I’ve heard them—and whoever that person was knew she had to die. It was easy enough to discover from her the routine around here, and he came in and killed her, leaving you with the body. Q.E.D.”
“Kate, Kate, I have never heard such drastic oversimplification.”
“Nonsense, Emanuel. What you lack, what all psychiatrists lack, if you’ll forgive my saying so, is a firm grip on the obvious. Well, I won’t keep you. But promise me, at any rate, that you’ll answer any idiotic questions that I want to ask.”
“I promise to cooperate in your gallant attempt to save me from disaster. But you know, my dear, speaking of the obvious, the police have quite a case.”
“They don’t know you; that’s the advantage I have over them. They don’t know the sort you are.”
“Or the sort Nicola is?”
“No,” Kate said. “Not that either. It’ll come out all right; you’ll see.”
She felt, nonetheless, as she stood indecisively in the hall, like a knight who has set off to slay the dragon but has neglected to ask in what part of the world the dragon may be found. It was all very well to decide upon action, but what action, after all, was she to take? As was her habit, she extracted notebook and pen and began to make a list: see Janet Harrison’s room, and talk to people who knew her in dormitory; find out about ten and twelve o’clock patients; find out who person in picture Janet Harrison had was (lists always had a devastating effect on Kate’s syntax).
“I’m sorry to intrude. Is Mrs. Bauer in?” Kate, who had been writing with the notebook balanced against her purse, dropped notebook, pen, and purse. The man stooped with her to help her retrieve the articles, and as they straightened up Kate became aware of that peculiar quality of masculine beauty to which no woman can help reacting, however superficially. It did not really attract Kate, yet she felt herself become somehow more girlish in its presence. She remembered once having met at a dinner party a beautiful, modest young Swedish man. He had perfect manners, there was not anything even suggestive of flirtation in his manner, yet Kate h
ad been horrified to notice that every woman in the room seemed aware of him; her horror had turned to amusement as later, when he had spoken to her, she had found herself simpering.
This man was not that young; his hair was flecked with gray at the temples. “You’re Dr. Barrister, aren’t you?” Kate said. With difficulty she kept herself from adding, “our favorite suspect.” “I’m Kate Fansler, a friend of Mrs. Bauer’s; I’ll call her.”
As Kate walked to the back of the apartment for Nicola, she realized how great, in fact, was the connection between appearance and reality. Considered in the abstract, good looks seemed sinister; yet, in the presence of good looks, Kate found them innocent. It was, of course, no accident that in Western literature, certainly in Western folklore, beauty and innocence were usually joined.
The three of them ended by standing, on this patientless day, in the living room. Not that Nicola had asked them to sit down; it was not so much that Nicola ignored the social amenities—she seemed never to have known that they existed.
“I stopped in to see how you were bearing up,” Dr. Barrister said to Nicola. “I know there’s nothing I can do, but I find it difficult to resist the impulse to be neighborly, even in New York where neighbors are not supposed to know one another.”
“Aren’t you from New York?” Kate asked, to say something.
“Are any New Yorkers?” he asked.
“I am,” said Nicola, “and my father before me. His father, however, came from Cincinnati. Where are you from?”
“One of those highbrow critics has discovered, I understand, a new sort of novel about the young man from the provinces. I was a young man from the provinces. But you haven’t told me how it’s all going.”
“Emanuel has had to call off the patients for today. We hope in a day or two he can get back to having patients.”
“I hope so too. Do let me know, won’t you, if there’s anything I can do? I’m full of good will, but rather lacking in ideas.”