Chapter Fourteen
I endured a strained breakfast with my parents the next morning, during which no one said a word about either my class or the detective’s visit. My father instead delivered a running commentary on the death of the Shah of Persia and the other front page stories in the newspaper, seeming to believe that if he didn’t mention the unpleasantness of the evening before, it would simply go away. As usual, my mother followed his lead, acting as though nothing had happened to upset our delicate familial harmony, although her eyes flitted constantly between my father and me over her teacup.
As soon as I reasonably could, I pushed back my chair and announced I was going to the library to work on my paper for Professor Bogard. This was not a complete lie. Dressing warmly for what promised to be another nose-numbing day, I hoisted my book bag over my shoulder and set out for the library—by way of Mrs. Braun’s shop.
I found number 230 on the south side of Eighty-Third Street, midway between Third and Second Avenues. It took up half the ground floor of a five-story brick tenement, squeezed between a tailor shop on the left and a bakery in the adjacent building. BRAUN’S QUALITY MEATS was painted in gold letters on the window. Except for a box of cured sausages and a placard advertising the weekly specials, the display area was bare. Peering through the glass, I saw that the interior was equally spartan: a narrow room with plain white walls and a service counter running across the back. Mrs. Braun was standing at the register in a striped apron, making change for a customer. I waited for the customer to leave and then slipped in the door.
“What are you doing here?” she asked the moment she saw me.
“I need to ask you some questions.”
“I have nothing to say to you. I thought I made that clear.”
Her eyes were puffy and rimmed with violet, leading me to guess she hadn’t slept much since I’d last seen her.
“Mrs. Braun, please,” I said, stepping up to the counter. “The police found a letter in Dr. Hauptfuhrer’s files that could be detrimental to Eliza’s case. I need you to help me determine if what it says is true.”
“What letter? What are you talking about?”
Before I could reply, the door bells jingled, and a woman in a maid’s cap entered the shop. “I’ll wait,” I said quickly, stepping out of the customer’s way.
Lips still pursed in displeasure, Mrs. Braun turned to the customer and took her order. I watched her closely as she selected some chops from the tray beneath the counter and dropped them onto the scale, looking for the choreic movements I’d read about. She worked with a slow, deliberate air, rather like an old horse that, knowing there’s no escape from the harness, has set its pace for the long haul. But there was nothing jerky or uncoordinated in her movements as she wrapped the meat, marked its weight with a thick red pencil, and secured it with loops of twine.
As soon as the customer was out the door, she turned to me and asked again, “What letter?”
“Have you ever heard of Huntington’s chorea?”
“No, I haven’t,” she answered, wiping her hands on her apron.
“Dr. Hauptfuhrer never mentioned it to you?”
“I told you, I’ve never heard of it.”
Since I didn’t know how much time I had before she threw me out, I decided I’d have to get straight to the point. “It’s a progressive disease that affects both the mind and the body. According to a letter in his files, Dr. Hauptfuhrer believed that Eliza has it.”
She stared at me, uncomprehending.
“But it’s not at all clear that he was right,” I went on. “The disease has to be passed directly from a parent. I can see that you’re not affected. If we can establish that your husband was free of it as well, we can prove that Dr. Hauptfuhrer’s suspicions were unfounded and keep the prosecution from using them against Eliza.”
The door bell jingled again, and another customer walked in. Once again, I stood aside and waited for Mrs. Braun to serve her. This time, when she was done, she locked the shop door and turned out a sign that said Be Back Soon!
“You’d better come with me,” she said grudgingly, folding back a hatch in the counter.
I followed her behind the counter and through a narrow door into the back room. A square table covered by a pea-green oilcloth occupied the center of the space, surrounded by four plain chairs. There was a walk-in meat locker on the left, a chopping block on the right, and a double sink hanging on the back wall beneath the windows. The bare wood floor was scrubbed clean and scattered with fresh sawdust around the chopping block, while the block itself, although pitted, had been scoured down to new wood. Except for an assortment of mops and brooms hanging from pegs near the door, and a shelf holding twine and brown paper above the chopping block, the walls were bare.
Mrs. Braun took off her apron and hung it on the back of the door, replacing it with a moth-eaten sweater. She lowered herself into one of the chairs and gestured for me to take the one across from her. “What is it you want to know?”
“Why don’t we start with your husband’s age at the time of his death?”
“My husband was forty years old when he died.”
“What was the cause of his death?”
“He broke his neck.”
“Oh, I’m sorry; I didn’t realize…”
“His passing was a blessing,” she said curtly.
I sat back. “Why is that?”
“He was a drunk. He couldn’t stay away from the bottle, no matter how foolish it made him. I tried to make him stop, but he wouldn’t listen. It did him in at the end.”
“Do you mean he was drunk at the time he died?”
She snorted. “He was drunk nearly all the time by then. That night was no different.”
“Could you tell me how it happened?”
She pulled her sweater more tightly around her. “He’d just come home from the saloon. It was very late, past midnight, but he didn’t care; he started bellowing from the bottom of the stairs for his dinner like he always did, making a ruckus for the whole neighborhood to hear.” She paused, her eyes clouding with the memory. “I heard him start up the stairs, cursing like a fiend on fire and bumping off the walls. And I—I just couldn’t bear it anymore. I got up and locked the door, locking him out, praying to God with all my heart to end my misery. And that’s when it happened. He lost his balance and fell back to the bottom. They said he landed on his head.”
“Oh my God, how dreadful.”
“He brought it on himself with his infernal drinking.”
Remembering Dr. Huntington’s reference to the appearance of intoxication in his choreic patients, I felt compelled to ask, “Are you sure that he’d been drinking?”
She laughed bitterly. “As if I wouldn’t know! There was hardly a time when he hadn’t been. Of course, he’d say he’d only had a drink or two, but anyone could see. The man could hardly walk on his own two feet without falling. And the language that came out of him!” She pressed her hand to her chest. “It got so the only time I had any peace was when he was asleep.”
Uneven gait, bursts of temper, uninhibited speech—all could be signs of Huntington’s chorea. “Had he always been that way?” I asked uneasily.
“Lord, no. Do you think I would have married him if he had? He was a good provider in the beginning.” She gestured around the room. “He built this business from nothing. Bought the building outright after two years, and the one next door just a few years later, and filled them both with good tenants.” She frowned. “God gave him a good mind, but he ruined it with the drink.”
“When did the trouble start, can you recall?”
She thought a moment. “It was a year or so before Eliza started working in the store. I remember I was worried the customers would notice he was slurring his words, so I put her on the register as soon as she was done with school.”
“He was sl
urring his words?” I repeated, adding this reluctantly to the list of suspect symptoms.
“Oh yes. He’d try to hide it, but if he said anything more than hello or good-bye, you could tell.”
“And how old was he at that point?”
“I suppose he would have been thirty-three or thirty-four.”
According to Dr. Huntington’s monograph, symptoms of Huntington’s chorea typically appeared in the third or fourth decade of life and progressed gradually over the next several years.
“Mrs. Braun,” I said slowly, “in light of what you’ve just told me, I think we have to at least consider the possibility that your husband did have the disease I was telling you about and was showing symptoms before his death. What you thought was drunken behavior could have been caused in part by the illness. The staggering walk, for instance—that’s a classic symptom.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “I saw the beer go down.”
“I’m not saying alcohol wasn’t a factor. But the drinking might only have been making his symptoms worse. Did Dr. Hauptfuhrer ever examine him?”
“My husband hated doctors. He used to say, ‘God heals and doctors take the fee.’ The only time he went to Dr. Hauptfuhrer that I know of was when he broke his arm, and then only because he couldn’t cut the meat without a cast. Not that he was much help with the meat by then.”
“When was that, do you remember?”
“Oh, about a year before he died. It was in the spring, just after the lamb came in.”
By which time his symptoms, if he had the disease, would have been relatively pronounced. But were they symptoms of chorea? I had hoped this interview would put an end to my uncertainties, but instead, it had only added new ones. Chorea might have produced Mr. Braun’s symptoms. Or he might simply have been an alcoholic, as his wife believed.
It was time to ask the question I’d been dreading. “Mrs. Braun, when we were talking at the magistrate’s court, you told me Eliza wasn’t ‘right in the head.’ What exactly did you mean?”
Her gaze dropped to the tabletop. “It was nothing,” she muttered. “I was upset.”
“Please,” I urged, “you know I only want to help.”
“She’s my daughter. My only child. I don’t want to say anything against her.”
“I would never use anything you told me against Eliza, I swear to you. I’m just trying to make sense of everything that’s happened, for her sake.”
She sighed and raised her eyes to mine. “I thought it must have been because I dropped her when she was a baby. I suppose I should have known better than to try to carry her. I was so sick after I gave birth, I could hardly walk. But she was crying loud enough to bring down the house, and when I took her out of the basket, she just…squirmed out of my hands. I always thought that must be why she turned out so strange.”
“But what do you mean by ‘strange’? I haven’t seen anything unusual.”
“Well, you’re not around her all the time, are you?” she snapped.
I sat back, clasping my hands tightly in my lap. “Please, tell me what you mean.”
She shook her head in frustration. “It’s just…the way she goes from hot to cold with no reason at all. And says she doesn’t remember things. I don’t know how many times she’s told me straight to my face she didn’t say something when I heard it with my own two ears. And all that fidgeting with her hands! I tell her it will make the customers nervous, but she pays no attention.”
I had noticed Eliza’s hand-wringing, of course, but concluded it bore no resemblance to the palms-up, rolling motion described in the literature. As for the not remembering, “forgetfulness” was a fairly common weapon in the childhood arsenal. I imagined that Mrs. Braun, forced to run the store and raise a child largely by herself, had not always been the most patient of mothers. As an only child, Eliza might have needed to resort to subterfuge at times to escape her firm hand—a habit that could easily have persisted into adulthood. The key, of course, was in the timing.
“When did you start noticing these things?” I asked her. “Has it only been in the last few years?”
“Lord, no. She’s been like that ever since she was old enough to have a mind of her own.”
I was very glad to hear it. “What about the hand-wringing you mentioned? Does it remind you of her father? For that matter, do any of her physical movements ever remind you of Mr. Braun?”
“I told you, he was a drunk. Elizabeth may be a trial, but she can’t abide even the smell of beer.”
“You haven’t noticed that she’s more prone to stumbling or falling, then, in the last few years?”
“No, I certainly haven’t.”
“Does she ever have emotional outbursts?”
She frowned. “Now that’s a different story. She can have a temper when things don’t go her way.”
“Could you give me an example?”
“Just the other day, I told her to clean out the things under her bed so I could store some orange crates the grocer gave me. She nearly snapped my head off, telling me it was her room and I had no right to tell her how to use it.”
This didn’t strike me as completely unwarranted. “There’s usually a reason for her outbursts, then, would you say?”
“Well, I suppose so,” she sniffed, “but not necessarily a good one.”
I sat back, digesting what she’d told me.
“So what does it mean?” she asked. “Is Elizabeth sick, like the doctor said?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I still can’t be sure. We need to have her examined by an expert.”
“But if she is? You said they could use it against her.”
Someone was knocking on the door out front. “As I mentioned before, Huntington’s chorea affects the mind as well as the body. There are reports of it causing people to act impulsively. Even…aggressively.”
Her eyes widened. “You mean it could have made her do what she did?”
Once again, I was struck by her apparent willingness to accept Eliza’s guilt. “Mrs. Braun, do you really believe that Eliza murdered the doctor?”
Her mouth worked silently as she pulled at the misshapen sweater. I sensed the one thing we hadn’t talked about, the most important thing of all, hovering in the air between us. Mrs. Braun may have kept Joy’s birth and adoption a secret from others all these years, but I guessed it was affecting her own perceptions of what had transpired in the doctor’s office.
“I know about Eliza’s baby,” I said. “The one Dr. Hauptfuhrer took away. Eliza told me.”
Fear flared in her eyes. She shrank back in her chair, reminding me of a sow bug scurrying from the light.
“Just because the doctor took her baby against her will twenty years ago doesn’t mean she killed him,” I said firmly.
“They found her there, with that sword,” she said, her voice shaking, “and the doctor dead at her feet.”
“Someone else could have attacked him while she was waiting.”
She shook her head. “I saw how agitated she was that morning. I could feel it in her. And now you say she might have this disease…”
“You mustn’t give up on her!” I drew a deep breath, trying to calm myself. “We haven’t even established for certain that her father was a carrier. I want to contact your husband’s family next, to find out if there’s any history of the disease among his relatives.”
“His family lives in Germany, I don’t know where. I’ve never met them.” She started pushing herself up from the table as the knocking at the front door grew louder.
This was undeniably a setback. But I couldn’t let her see my disappointment. “We can still have her examined by an authority on the disease,” I insisted.
She drew herself erect. “And if he says that she’s sick? What will you do then?”
“I don’t know,” I
conceded. “I’ll just have to cross that bridge when I come to it.”
She frowned down at me. “I know you think you can help, Doctor. But what’s done is done. There’s nothing anyone can do now.” She started for the door.
“We have to try!” I said, following after her. “We can’t just sit back and do nothing—”
She abruptly stopped and turned, silencing me with an upraised palm. “There is a time to fight,” she said sharply, “and a time to accept. It’s in God’s hands now. Just let it be.”
• • •
I trudged down Second Avenue, feeling as though I were towing a sack of bricks behind me. I seemed to be the only one, with the possible exception of Reverend Palmers, who was inclined to believe that Eliza was innocent. Was Mrs. Braun right when she said there was nothing I could do to help? Was I, as Simon had suggested, allowing my guilt to blind me to the truth?
Unfortunately, obsessing over the question didn’t bring me any clarity. Turning my mind to more concrete matters, I stopped at Fessenden’s Pharmacy on Seventy-Seventh Street to pick up some medications I’d ordered for Mrs. Petrikova. I’d read about a new consumption treatment showing promise in Berlin, a mixture of eucalyptus, sulfur, and charcoal that I was hoping might offer the ailing woman some relief. Arriving at the tenement flat a few minutes later, I showed Mrs. Petrikova how to warm the Sanosin mixture in a dish over a spirit lamp and breathe in the fumes to ease her pain and coughing. With the assistance of Fiala, who’d stayed home from school to help meet the family’s weekly production quota, I also instructed her on the safe use of digitalin for her palpitations, writing down the proper dosage and showing her how to check her pulse to be sure she didn’t take too much. When we were done, they all saw me to the door, thanking me warmly, Fiala most profusely of all. I promised to return with more supplies in a few weeks, for although I didn’t expect to cure Mrs. Petrikova, I did think I might at least stave off the inevitable, and make her a little more comfortable in the interim.
From there I continued by streetcar to the medical library. Since there was nothing more I could do for Eliza before her meeting with Simon the following morning, I was planning to use the rest of the day to put a dent in Professor Bogard’s paper. Though I found it difficult to concentrate, I forced myself to stay with it, stopping only for a quick lunch at a nearby tearoom. When the streetlights came on outside the library windows, I’d managed to cobble together the professor’s outline with sufficient supporting research to call the thing a first draft.
A Deadly Affection Page 20