A Deadly Affection

by Cuyler Overholt

  “I’m going to ask you a question, Eliza, that can only be answered by your subconscious mind,” the professor was saying. “For while your conscious mind is like a tiny harbor, shallow and hemmed in, your subconscious is as wide and deep as the ocean. Your conscious mind can guess at how your subconscious will answer my question, but it cannot know. Only your subconscious can give me the answer. The question I am asking is this: Does your subconscious mind think it will go into a trance instantly, or within the next few moments? If the answer is instantly, then the index finger of your right hand will lift from the pillow automatically. If the answer is in the next few moments, then the index finger of your left hand will lift from the pillow automatically. Your subconscious mind can tell my conscious mind what it thinks or understands by simply causing a finger on your right or your left hand to lift. Now be aware of your hands and see what the answer is. Feel the slight movement in your finger as your subconscious tells it what to do. Feel the finger beginning to move upward, off the pillow, as your subconscious responds to my question.”

  Eliza’s right index finger twitched and rose off the pillow.

  “Good. Notice that your finger feels like something separate and distinct, moving under its own will. This is your subconscious mind revealing itself. Now that your subconscious has answered this question, it can answer other questions as well, using your voice just as easily as your finger, as easily as if it were your conscious mind responding. Now let your finger return to the pillow. When your finger touches the pillow, you will be ready to go into an even deeper state of relaxation.”

  As her finger dropped to the pillow, he continued, “Imagine, now, that you are walking down a long staircase. The staircase leads to a special place deep inside you. This is a very safe place where only you can go. Imagine walking down the steps—one, two, three, four—staying in contact with my voice as you descend, allowing yourself to go deeper and deeper into this special place. This is the trance state. You don’t have to think about it; it just is, like your breathing or the waves in the ocean. While you are in this deep place, a part of you is able to hear me and to answer my questions. Can you describe to me what you are feeling?”

  “Heavy,” Eliza muttered, her lips hardly moving around the word.

  “Tell me where you are if you can.”

  “A safe place,” she murmured. “A secret place.”

  “Now that you are in this safe, secret place, I want you to imagine that you are looking at the hands of a clock. Note that the hands are moving in reverse, going backward in time. As the hands of the clock move backward, you will be able to go with them. You can go back a day, or a year, or many years, remembering events now as clearly as you experienced them at the time. Some of these memories will be happy, and some will be sad. Some of them may have been hidden away or forgotten over time. But remember that all of your memories are welcome here.

  “Now, watch the hands of the clock turning back, through the years, to the time when you were pregnant with your daughter, Joy. Try to remember how your body felt when you were about to give birth, how round and heavy you were. Perhaps you can feel a slight pressure in your back or lower abdomen. Perhaps you can even feel the baby moving inside of you…”

  Eliza’s hands slipped off the pillow and cradled her belly.

  “Good, you’re remembering. Now, try to recall all the sights and sounds and smells as vividly as if you were experiencing them for the first time.”

  Her face tightened. “It hurts,” she said, her fingers closing now over her belly.

  “What hurts?”

  “The baby. It’s coming.”

  “Are you having a contraction?”

  She grimaced in response. Rousing myself from my stupor, I noted with amazement that her contorted face looked exactly like those of laboring women I’d observed during my internships.

  “Can you tell me where you are?” the professor asked.

  “At the hospital,” she said breathlessly.

  “Why are you having your baby at the hospital instead of at home?”

  “The doctor is here. Mother arranged it.”

  “Are your mother and the doctor there with you now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is anyone else there?”

  “The nurse…” She stopped, her face twisting again at another apparent contraction.

  I glanced at the professor, wondering if it was a good idea to reenact the entire labor.

  As if having the same thought, he instructed, “Now, look at the hands on the clock again, Eliza. Notice that they are moving forward in time, to the moment your baby is born. Go with them to that moment. Your baby is here; can you see it?”

  “It’s a girl!” she said with a smile. “She’s so beautiful! They’re wrapping her up in a little pink blanket…” Seconds passed, and her smile began to fade.

  “What’s happening now?” the professor asked.

  “The nurse won’t give her to me. She’s taking my baby to the door.”

  “What do you see?”

  “There’s someone there, in the hallway outside.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know; a lady, in a black veil.” She stiffened. “They’re—they’re giving her my baby! Mama, help! Don’t let them take my baby…” She shrank back against the sofa with a strangled gasp.

  “What is it?” asked the professor.

  “She…she slapped me,” she said in a small voice.

  “Who did?”

  “Mama. She says to be quiet and stop making a fuss. She says I’m lucky someone’s willing to take the bastard off my hands.”

  The color had drained from her face. Though she was apparently describing something from her past, her physical body was undeniably reacting in present time. I glanced at the professor in concern.

  “Now look at the clock hands,” he instructed, “and notice that they are moving back in time again, to the summer before your baby was born. It’s August, and the flowers are in full bloom. The park is green, and the air is lush and warm.”

  She sighed softly, her arms relaxing on the cushion. “I can smell it,” she said, lifting her face serenely to an invisible breeze, as if the scene she’d just relived had never occurred.

  “Your baby has been growing inside you for several months now.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I can feel it moving.”

  “Where are you, Eliza?”

  “On the roof.”

  “The roof of your building?”

  “Mmm.”

  “What are you doing up there?”

  “Just thinking. I moved some boards against the old pigeon coop to make a lean-to, so no one can see me when I’m inside.”

  “Do you go there often?”

  “Whenever I can get the key. Mother doesn’t like me to come up here; she keeps the key on her ring in the kitchen. But she wasn’t watching today.”

  “Have you ever taken someone up there with you?”

  “No.”

  “What about the baby’s father?”

  “Who?”

  “The father of the baby you’re carrying. Has he ever seen the lean-to?”

  “My baby doesn’t have a father.”

  The professor glanced at me. I shrugged.

  He thought a moment, then asked, “Eliza, have you ever been kissed by a man?”

  “Grandfather kisses me when he visits at Christmas.” She grimaced. “I don’t like it, though. I don’t like his mustache.”

  “Has a man ever kissed you on the lips?”

  “Oh no. I don’t think I should care for that at all.”

  “Tell me, Eliza, do you know how babies are created?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then you know it requires sexual intercourse between a man and a woman?”

  She di
dn’t answer.

  “Eliza? Can you answer me?”

  “That may be true for other babies, but it isn’t true for mine.”

  “It isn’t? How do you suppose your baby came to be, then?”

  “God gave her to me for being such a good girl.”

  “You must be a very good girl, indeed.”

  “I try to be.”

  “But you took the key to the roof against your mother’s wishes. That wasn’t being very good, was it?”

  “That’s different. The baby was for being good to Papa when Mother was mean to him.”

  The professor cocked his head. “Is your mother mean to your papa?”

  “Sometimes. But I can always make him feel better.”

  “You’re close to your papa, then.”

  “Oh yes. I’m his little princess.”

  “Have you told him about your baby?”

  “Mother told him,” she said, her voice turning grim. “She wanted him to beat me, but he wouldn’t.”

  “Did you tell him who made you pregnant?”

  “Yes, I told them both.”

  He leaned forward, palms inching forward on his knees. “Tell me what you told them, Eliza.”

  “That the baby is a gift from God.”

  The professor sat back in defeat. I gestured to him to let me have a try.

  “Eliza,” I began, “remember that this is a safe place. No harm or shame can come to you here for remembering. It’s all right to see the father’s face, Eliza, and to say his name.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Your baby is going to want to know who her father is. Do you think you could tell us, for her sake?”

  A tear appeared at the corner of her eye and trickled down her cheek.

  “I’m sorry to make you cry,” I said gently. “But maybe if you tell us, you’ll feel better.”

  “I’m not crying,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice.

  “I can see a tear on your face.”

  “That’s not my tear.”

  “It’s not?” I couldn’t help smiling. “Whose is it, then?”

  “It’s hers.”

  “Whose?”

  “The sad one’s.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t—” I stopped, as Professor Bogard’s hand landed on my arm.

  “Why is the sad one crying, Eliza?” he broke in.

  “I don’t know,” she said carelessly. “She’s always crying.”

  “Does the sad one have a name?”

  “She’s called Bitty.”

  He turned to me, jabbing his finger toward the writing pad. “Double personality,” he rasped in my ear. “One-way cognizant at the very least!”

  Turning back to Eliza, he asked, “Do you think Bitty would be willing to talk to us?”

  “I don’t know… She’s never talked to anyone before.”

  “Could we ask her?”

  “If you like.” Her chin drooped toward her chest as her breath left her in a deep exhale. Several seconds passed.

  “Bitty?” the professor said tentatively.

  Eliza’s head rose. “Yes?”

  My hand froze on the writing tablet.

  “Hello, Bitty. My name is Dr. Bogard. My assistant, Dr. Summerford, and I would like to ask you some questions if you don’t mind.”

  “What do you want to know?” she asked.

  Chapter Thirty

  The professor wagged his eyebrows urgently toward the writing pad, but I couldn’t get my hand to move. For although it was Eliza’s face I was looking at, and Eliza’s lips that were uttering the words, the voice that I was hearing belonged to someone else.

  It was lower, sadder, emptier somehow than Eliza’s. Her posture had changed as well, her chin and knees drawing toward each other, hunching her over as if to ward off potential attack. I was, of course, familiar with the phenomenon of divided personality; we’d studied it at school, giving particular attention to both Azam’s “Felida X” analysis and the Bourne case reported in Henry James’s Principles of Psychology. But while I’d always accepted the concept in theory, I’d never before been asked to accept that it was sitting on the sofa across from me.

  “We’re trying to find someone,” the professor was saying. “We hoped you might be able to help.”

  “I know,” replied Eliza, or Bitty, or whomever we were speaking with. “I’ve been listening.”

  The professor lifted the pen and pad from my lap. Successive and mutually cognizant, he scratched across the paper, underlining it twice before handing it back to me.

  The pad lay idle on my knees as I struggled to accept the fact that the woman I’d become so intimately involved with over the past two weeks was actually two personalities in one. Though it was a deeply unnerving idea, I couldn’t reject it out of hand. The theory behind divided personality was well established. We knew that the mind was made up of individual neurons that acted together to form organizations of increasing complexity. Some very distinguished thinkers had posited that these complex organizations were in effect subordinate minds, each with its own mental continuity. It was believed that in unstable individuals, a physical or emotional blow could produce a disintegration of the primary, conscious organization, permitting one or more of these alternate, unconscious systems to push through.

  “It’s very important that we find the father of Eliza’s baby,” the professor said to Bitty. “But Eliza won’t tell us who he is.”

  “She can’t,” Bitty said. “She doesn’t know.”

  “You mean she doesn’t know his name?”

  “She doesn’t know, because she wasn’t there.”

  “I see,” the professor said slowly. “But you were there, is that correct?”

  She nodded.

  “Could you tell us who he is, then?”

  “I want to,” she said softly, “but I’m afraid.”

  “What are you afraid of, Bitty?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Bitty?”

  “He…he said if I told, he wouldn’t let me go to Bridget’s house anymore. And that he wouldn’t buy me a new coat, and I’d have to wear a secondhand one from Rosenbergs, like Eva Hertz.”

  The professor sat slowly back in his chair. “I see,” he said again with a trace of sadness in his voice.

  I looked at him in bewilderment. What did he see? What on earth did the baby’s father have to do with secondhand coats?

  “It’s all right, Bitty. You don’t have to tell me,” the professor said. “I think I already know. You’re talking about your own father, aren’t you?”

  Her head tipped forward in the barest of nods. I felt a crawling sensation in my stomach.

  “It must be very hard to talk about what your father did,” the professor said. “But it’s safe to tell us if you wish to.”

  She hesitated for a long moment, as another tear trickled down her face. “I didn’t mind it at first,” she said hoarsely. “He used to tickle me with his whiskers after he came home late from the saloon and play Indian Bill on my back. Sometimes, he even gave me pennies for candy…”

  “But then something changed?”

  She nodded.

  “What was it that changed, Bitty?”

  Her tears were flowing more freely now. “He said he was cold,” she said in hardly more than a whisper, “and needed to come under the covers to warm up.”

  “Your father came into your bed with you?”

  “I didn’t want him to. I didn’t like the way he talked or the way he smelled. He kept rubbing up against me and making funny noises. Sometimes, he squeezed me so tight, it made me want to cry.”

  “Did this happen more than once?”

  She nodded. “I tried to give him his pennies back,” she said, her voice breaking. “I told him I didn’t w
ant them anymore.”

  “Did you ever tell anybody?” the professor asked somberly.

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Because he wouldn’t let you see your friend.”

  “Not just because of that,” she said, becoming agitated. “I was afraid he’d be angry if he found out. But it didn’t matter. He got angry anyway. The time…the time the baby happened.”

  I didn’t want to hear any more; I wanted to tell her to stop right there, as if by staunching the memory, I could somehow stop the thing itself from happening. But the professor was already urging her on.

  “I want you to go back to that time, Bitty. To the time the baby happened. I want you to try to remember everything you saw and heard and felt as clearly as though it were happening right now.” He waited for a moment, then asked, “Is it nighttime?”

  “Yes,” she answered thickly.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Helping Mother with the dishes.”

  “Where’s your father?”

  “He’s coming up the stairs. I can hear him cursing, and bumping into the walls. Mama hears him too. She says I have to finish the dishes, because she’s going in to bed.” She was pushing the words out in short bursts, her breath coming fast and shallow. “But I don’t want to stay out here alone! I want to go in with Mama—” She stopped.

  “What is it, Bitty?” asked the professor.

  “The door won’t open. She locked the door! Mama, let me in! I don’t want to be alone with Papa!” Suddenly, she shrank back, hugging herself.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Papa heard.” Her face blanched. “No, Papa, don’t!”

  “What’s happening?”

  “He’s grabbing my hair,” she wailed. “He’s pulling me into my bedroom and calling me names, horrible names…” Her head rocked back against the sofa. “No, Papa, don’t; get off of me! Papa, that hurts—”