“We’d certainly have to question the truth of her story,” the professor said. “You say the Reverend never mentioned a daughter?”
“Well, no,” I said, scrambling to follow this line of thinking, “but he only came to the parish a few years ago. I assume he arrived after the daughter was born.”
“Or the whole birth story is a hysterical fantasy,” Mayhew persisted. “You did consider the possibility?”
I felt a flush creeping up my temples. “I saw nothing in her file or in her interactions with me to suggest such a thing.”
“That might indicate more a failure of observation than a refutation of the fact, might it not?” he asked with a shrug.
“You say her son suffocated while she was taking a bath,” Professor Bogard broke in, seemingly oblivious to Mayhew’s needling.
“Yes,” I told him. “That’s in Reverend Palmer’s records.”
He drummed his fingers over his waistcoat. “From what the Reverend told you about the hours she spends in church, I think we can safely say she holds herself responsible for the death.”
“I expect that’s true,” I agreed.
“One can only imagine the pain such a belief would cause,” he went on. “It could, quite literally, become unbearable. In such a case, the fantasy of another, living child might provide some relief.”
I sat slowly back in my seat.
“The doctor’s involvement is a nice touch,” Mayhew said. “She doesn’t just give the baby up; it’s taken from her forcibly, leaving her helpless and therefore, in this scenario, blameless.”
I didn’t know whether to be intrigued or horrified by their suggestion. If there really was no baby girl, then there was no reason for Eliza to have killed the doctor. At least, no rational reason. But then again, if she believed there was a baby, I supposed the result might have been the same. It would all depend on the power and persistence of the fantasy. “Surely, Professor, it would be difficult for her to maintain such a fantasy if all those around her knew it to be untrue,” I ventured. “She’d have to doubt its reality on some level, wouldn’t she?”
“To the contrary,” Mayhew answered, stroking his mustache. “To her, it would be very real indeed. The greater her guilt, the more energy she would have to invest in the defense against it. The mind, Dr. Summerford, is more complex than you give it credit for.”
Still addressing Professor Bogard, I persisted, “But what if a key player in the fantasy were to repudiate it? What if she confronted the doctor, for example, and he insisted that none of it had ever happened? Might that be sufficient to pierce the hysterical belief?”
“Not necessarily,” Bogard replied. “The fantasy would be protecting her from powerful feelings of guilt and incompetence—providing a relief valve, as it were. It wouldn’t be easy to dispel. If one were to try without defusing those emotions first…” He shook his head.
“What? What would happen then?”
He shrugged. “Who knows? Let’s just say it would be best not to find out.” He must have sensed my distress, for he added in a not unkindly tone, “You must be patient, my dear. I know the desire to see immediate results when you’re just starting out can be very strong, but overnight cures are rare in our line of work. You have to uncover the underlying complex before the symptoms will disappear. Take your time, and get to know the patient in your weekly sessions. That’s where the cure will take place.”
I don’t think he could have made me feel worse if he had tried. It had never occurred to me that Eliza’s story might all be a hysterical fantasy. If they were right, then Dr. Hauptfuhrer was completely blameless—and my own failure all the more glaring. “But what if she really did have another child?” I pleaded.
“Let’s examine that possibility, shall we?” Bogard said brightly, as though we were in class and this was all just some academic exercise. “We have before us an unmarried girl, carrying a bastard in her womb. On the one hand, she is deeply ashamed of her illicit sexual activity and the pregnancy it has initiated. On the other, she can’t help but feel some natural affection for the infant growing within her.”
“Producing,” Mayhew chimed in, “an irreconcilable conflict: one part of her wants to love and protect the child, while another wants to destroy the symbol of her shame.”
“And so,” Bogard continued, slapping his palm against his blotter, “she projects her destructive urges onto the doctor who delivers it, bringing us right back where we were before: with this fantasy wherein the doctor forces her to give the child up against her wishes, allowing her to deny her own hatred for the baby at the same time she rids herself of it!” They beamed at each other over the desktop.
“But isn’t it possible that her story is true?” I interjected. “After all, men do take sexual advantage of women every day. It seems quite plausible to me that she had this baby and wanted to keep it, but was forced to give it up.”
“Of course it’s possible, my dear,” Professor Bogard said, “but in the absence of any corroborating evidence, it mustn’t be assumed.” Peering at me over his spectacles, he added, “Remember, it isn’t only the patient’s story that must be questioned. The psychotherapist must constantly examine his own objectivity as well. It isn’t unusual for a patient’s experience to trigger memories and emotions in the therapist that could distort his understanding of the issues.”
I shrank in my chair as the meaning of his words sank in. “I’m aware of that possibility,” I said stiffly, hoping Mayhew didn’t detect my discomfort.
“Being aware and seeing it in ourselves are often two different things,” the professor said mildly, inspecting a fingernail.
My ears were so hot I thought they must be glowing like horseshoes on a forge. I hadn’t suffered the same misfortune as Eliza, but as the professor knew, I had come close—so close that just thinking about it still made me blush to the roots of my hair. I’d told Professor Bogard about it one evening at school, while we were reviewing an article on control of the sexual impulse in male juveniles. I’d attempted a joke—a caustic allusion to the randy young seducer in Donne’s “The Flea”—which the professor, typically, had refused to take at face value. After much teasing, I’d finally confessed the whole story, striving for a tone of sophisticated nonchalance that was very different from what I’d felt.
I had told him about Simon Shaw. Just thinking the name, even now, was like stirring a bucket of muddy water. The first image to rise up was of the lock of dark hair that used to fall over one eye when he tilted his head, as he tended to do on sight of me. Next came his coat: a man-size garment of shearling-lined suede, baggy on his young frame and stained around the cuffs from hard use. It had smelled of sweet leather and sweat and something bitter, like acorns, and when he wrapped it around me the night I snuck down to the stable, it was as cozy as a lap robe on a midwinter sleigh ride.
The mantel clock chimed the hour. “I’m afraid we’re out of time,” the professor said. “Much as I love Louis, I don’t trust him to hold our table for very long. Is there anything else we need to discuss, my dear?”
I edged forward on my seat. He couldn’t go yet; he hadn’t told me what to do. “I’m still not sure how to proceed with my patient. I wouldn’t want my inexperience to hamper her treatment.”
“Don’t worry. You know much more than you think you do,” he cheerfully assured me, collecting his pipe and tobacco. “Besides, the best way to overcome a lack of experience is to simply throw yourself into the trenches. You never know what you’re capable of until you’re pushed to it.”
“But…couldn’t we meet one more time before you go? So that I could fill you in on the details?”
He frowned down at his engagement book, shaking his head. “I’m afraid I’m going to be awfully busy preparing for the trip.” He looked up, his face brightening. “Just trust your instincts, my dear. Psychotherapy isn’t as easy as knowing where to
place the stitches or how to tie the knots. Sometimes you just have to feel your way.”
I sat back in defeat, feeling as though the last lifeboat was floating away without me.
“With all due respect,” Mayhew said to the professor, “if she wants to eliminate the fabrication, she could try removing the patient’s uterus.”
I barely suppressed a groan. The idea that hysterical fantasies could be triggered by nervous reflexes originating in the uterus had been almost universally discredited, the removal of the uterus having proved no more helpful than cauterization of the cervix, enlargement of the anus, or any of the other techniques that had been tried to stem the pathological flow of reflex from organs to the mind. Only a misogynist like Mayhew would cling to such an ineffectual solution.
“I thought you believed the delusion grew out of her unconscious,” I said.
He shrugged. “I do. But it’s telling, is it not, that hysterical fantasies are seen almost exclusively in females? I don’t believe we can rule out a physiological predisposition in the weaker sex.”
Again, I looked to Professor Bogard, waiting for him to refute this drivel, but he was busy rifling through some papers on his desk. I turned back to Mayhew. “A hysterectomy strikes me as extreme, especially when we haven’t even established that we’re dealing with a fantasy.”
“Haven’t we?” he asked, his eyes widening in surprise. “Why, I didn’t think any doubt remained.”
I could feel myself succumbing to that state of mute humiliation I’d experienced so often in class, when he’d caught me with one of his barbs. But we weren’t in the classroom now, and there was too much at stake to let him bully me. “I still have doubts,” I said.
“Do you really?” He folded his hands delicately in his lap. “Then I’m afraid we must conclude that your tender feminine heart has caused you to mistake a hysterical woman’s wishes for the truth.”
The ratty tails of his mustache twitched with satisfaction, as I’d seen them twitch so many times before. This time, however, I couldn’t hold back the anger the sight provoked. “Or we could conclude that she’s telling the truth,” I blurted out, “and that you, having so little regard for either women or the truth, are unable to recognize it.”
For one exultant moment, I reveled in the flush that mottled his face—before the realization of what I’d done came bearing down on me. The last thing I needed now was the enmity of my professional peers. We stared at each other, he in outrage, I in an agony of regret.
The professor unknowingly broke the silence. “Here it is!” he exclaimed, pulling a sheaf of papers from under his pipe rack and holding it out to me over the desk. “This is for you. It’s my response to Pierre Janet’s Harvard lectures on the major states of hystericals.”
Another research assignment. I reached for it with a leaden arm.
“It’s a bit rough, I know, but I was short on time. Most of the lecture material is reprinted in these.” He passed me a heavy stack of Journal de Psychologie back issues. “I’ve jotted down the basic points, but you should of course feel free to add your own ideas.”
I balanced the journals on my lap and flipped through his notes. A few handwritten lines were scrawled across each page, heavily punctuated with question marks and ellipses.
“Well, what do you say?” he asked jovially, as though offering me an irresistible treat. “Are you game?”
“Yes, of course,” I said mechanically, removing the journals I’d brought with me from my bag and replacing them with the new ones. “When do you need it?”
“Would the end of next week be too soon?”
“Next week!”
“I know, I know, but there’s a publication deadline to meet.”
“Well then,” I answered with a sigh, “I suppose I can manage it.”
“Marvelous!” He got to his feet. “I knew I could count on you.” He stepped jauntily around his desk toward the door, the picture of confidence, a man clearly in charge of his affairs. My heart ached at the sight. It was all I could do not to grab hold of his sleeve and beg for his help.
“We’ll see you out,” he said, reaching for the doorknob.
I walked beside him down the hallway as Mayhew trailed behind. I imagined I could feel Mayhew’s eyes on my back, full of contempt for a woman who’d had the nerve to step outside the bounds of nature to assume a man’s job. He had once said, in an anatomy lecture in which I was the only woman present, that the female brain was “rather too small for great intellect, but just large enough for conceit.” As I stepped out the front door into a world newly fraught with uncertainty, I wondered for the first time if he might be right.
Chapter Six
I rode the Third Avenue El up to 116th Street and walked the last five blocks to the Harlem Police Court. This was a fortresslike structure with a grim corner tower and thick bars over the windows of the attached jail. I followed two men carrying document cases past the jail’s vehicular entrance and through the door into the courthouse. An iron staircase spiraled upward from the entry hall. Following the signs, I climbed the polished terrazzo steps to the magistrate’s courtroom.
Pushing through the heavy doors, I found myself inside a spacious room with a vaulted, coffered ceiling and carved wainscoting on the walls. A dozen wide benches in the back half of the room were filled end-to-end with all manner of humanity, from women holding squalling infants to elderly gentlemen in fastidious business attire. The magistrate sat across from them with his back to a two-story window. Between the benches and the magistrate’s platform sat the lawyers and court personnel, boxed off by wooden railings.
I edged through the odiferous crowd at the door, craning my neck for a glimpse of Eliza. A long line of prisoners and their arresting officers stretched to the clerk’s desk from a door at the side of the room, but I didn’t see her among them. The steam pipes were going full tilt, spewing unchecked heat into the crammed courtroom. As more people pushed in behind me, I moved to a spot farther up along the wall, fanning myself with a section of the professor’s notes as I waited for Eliza to arrive.
I still wasn’t sure how I would feel or what I was going to say when I finally spoke with her—or, for that matter, what she might be feeling or might say to me. For all I knew, she might be blaming me for whatever had transpired. I listened with half an ear as the parade of prisoners took their turns before the magistrate: a grocer accused of selling skimmed milk, a shabbily dressed young woman charged with prostitution, and a rotund man accused of stealing three pairs of trousers by concealing them under his waistband. By the time the magistrate had named four reporters in the front row an “investigative committee” and charged them with determining whether the latter’s waistband was capable of such a feat, sweat was trickling steadily down my ribs, and I was feeling faint from the heat. When the reporters rose to follow the man into the magistrate’s private chamber, I scurried over to claim a spot on the vacated bench.
I had just sat down when the side door opened and Eliza stepped into the room, accompanied by the officer who’d driven her away in the van. She looked terrible—her face deathly pale, her hair falling from its pins, her skirt stiff with dried blood. She cowered behind the officer as they joined the line and shuffled toward the clerk’s desk. I tried to observe her with a detached eye, searching for the unhinged woman I had failed to detect before. But no matter how hard I stared, I saw only a more frightened, confused version of the docile young woman I remembered.
As they approached the clerk’s desk, she glanced out toward the gallery and drew up short. At first, I thought she was looking at me, but then realized it was at something behind me. I turned to see a stoop-shouldered woman in a threadbare coat laboring up the center aisle, leaning heavily on a bamboo walking stick. She had thinning gray hair pulled back under a shapeless felt hat, and pale blue eyes that were trained on Eliza. She reached the gate and stopped, her shoulders droo
ping.
The roundsman started toward her from the other side of the rail. Before he had taken two steps, she crumpled forward, whacking the gate with her stick as she grabbed for it with both hands. I jumped up to catch her from behind at the same instant the roundsman lunged for her over the rail.
“Whoa there, easy does it,” he said, securing her in a beefy grip.
I wrapped my arm around the woman’s shoulders to steady her while he came around through the gate, and together we lowered her onto the front bench.
“What are they going to do to her?” she whimpered, clutching her stick in both hands.
“To who?” the roundsman asked.
She looked past him toward Eliza. “My daughter.”
My arm dropped reflexively from her shoulders. “You’re Eliza’s mother? Mrs. Braun?”
She turned to me in a daze. “A man called me from the police station. He said I should get her a lawyer. But I don’t have any money for a lawyer.”
“Are you going to be all right, ma’am?” asked the roundsman, peering into her face.
“She’s in shock,” I told him. “I think she’ll be all right if she just rests for a minute. You can leave her with me. I’ll keep an eye on her.”
Looking relieved, he returned to his post on the other side of the rail.
I eased off Mrs. Braun’s coat and fanned her with the professor’s notes. At close range, I realized she wasn’t as old as I’d first supposed—not much older than my own mother, most likely. It was the heaviness of her movements, her air of long-suffering resignation, that had misled me. I could see now a clear resemblance to her daughter in the long, oval shape of her face, and the pale blue of her eyes.
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