A Deadly Affection

by Cuyler Overholt

  I started reaching toward her, but the professor stopped me with a quick shake of his head. She writhed and moaned for a few more moments before her body went slack. She turned her face against the sofa and sobbed, openmouthed, into the fabric.

  The professor waited until her tears had subsided, then said quietly, “It’s all right, Bitty. It’s over now.”

  She drew a deep, shuddering breath.

  “You can rest.”

  Her breath left her in a long, weary sigh as her head dropped toward her chest.

  I sank back in my seat. Never in my wildest imaginings had it occurred to me that Eliza’s father might also be Olivia’s. And yet, it explained everything. Dr. Huntington had been right in suspecting that paternal transmission was the reason for the early onset of Olivia’s disease. He could never have guessed, however, that in this case, father and grandfather were one and the same.

  “Now look at the clock and see the hands moving forward to the present,” the professor was saying. He waited a moment, then asked, “May I speak with Eliza again?”

  Her head rose once more from her chest.

  “Eliza?” the professor asked.

  “Yes?” she replied, in Eliza’s familiar voice.

  “Bitty was just here, speaking with Dr. Summerford and me. She was telling us about your father.”

  “Bitty never liked Father very much,” she observed.

  “Do you know why?”

  “I suppose because he favored me over her.”

  “Ah, yes. You were his little princess, weren’t you? Tell me, Eliza, did you love your father?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Was he kind to you?”

  “Oh yes. He was always giving me treats and telling me stories.”

  “Did he ever do anything to hurt you?”

  “Goodness, no!”

  “He never asked you to do things you didn’t want to do?”

  “I told you, I was his princess. Elizabeth was the one who had to do the chores.”

  “Elizabeth?” The professor cocked his head. “Who’s Elizabeth?”

  “She’s the old one. Dr. Summerford met her at the church.”

  “I did?” I asked in astonishment.

  “Don’t you remember? She was there at the beginning. She didn’t want to stay, though; she didn’t like what you were saying. But I did. I could tell you knew what it was like to miss someone the way I do, every single day. I thought you could help me find my Joy.”

  I recalled how sullen and withdrawn Mrs. Miner had seemed at the start of my first class, twisting her hands in apparent distress and protesting that she didn’t belong there. It had been a different woman altogether who’d unburdened herself to me after the others were gone. Indeed, I remembered thinking how young and vulnerable that confiding woman seemed in contrast to the dour persona of before. “Call me Eliza,” she had said—not Elizabeth, the name Reverend Palmers and Mrs. Braun called Mrs. Miner by.

  “I remember,” I said, trying to behave as though this was the most normal conversation in the world, although my mind was turning somersaults.

  “Then you can understand why Papa never cared for her. She really is the most disagreeable thing.”

  The “old one,” she had called her; did that mean that Elizabeth was the “real” Mrs. Miner? I stared at the familiar face in front of me, trying to sort out the parade of personalities that apparently existed behind it. In the Felida X case, the original or primary personality had been an introverted, uncommunicative girl who worked hard but took little joy in life—not unlike the somber woman I had glimpsed that first day of class, and perhaps again outside the Tombs, and even on my first visit to Mrs. Miner’s home after her release. Felida experienced frequent pains in her temples, followed by a brief state of deep lethargy from which the secondary personality emerged. This secondary personality was less constrained than the original, more sensitive and open to others—much like the “Eliza” I had come to know.

  But if Eliza was a secondary personality, what purpose did she serve? Her love for Joy was unconditional; of that I was certain. Finding her daughter was the be-all and end-all of her existence. But Joy, I now knew, was the result of a paternal rape. Why would a personality be dedicated to remembering such an abomination, let alone trying to find her?

  In the next second, the question answered itself: it was precisely because of the impossibility of loving the child with knowledge of its conception that Eliza needed to exist. Unaware of the rape, Eliza had been able to feel love for the child blossoming inside her womb, a love untainted by shame or anger or self-hatred. Eliza was the loving mother, the personality allowed to experience both the miracle of Joy’s birth and the pain of her loss. She was the one who kept Joy’s memory alive.

  “Tell me about Elizabeth,” the professor was saying.

  “She really is too tedious to talk about,” Eliza replied with a sigh. “Although I’ll admit, she’s had me worried lately. She seems to have gotten worse and worse since the boy died.”

  The professor turned to me, one eyebrow cocked.

  I’d almost forgotten about Mrs. Miner’s second child, conceived during her brief marriage to a dock worker. “You mean the one who died in his crib a few years ago.”

  “Yes,” she said. “She took it very badly.”

  “What do you mean when you say she’s gotten worse and worse?” the professor asked.

  “Just the other day, she tried to cut herself with the box knife. I had to take it away from her.”

  “Was she trying to kill herself?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I think she was just punishing herself.”

  “What for?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. She’s always punishing herself for one thing or another. That’s just the way she is.”

  The professor pondered this for a moment. “Does Elizabeth know about you and Bitty?” he asked.

  “Heavens no, she doesn’t know anything. Although I think Bitty leaves her little presents sometimes to try to make her feel better.”

  The professor glanced briefly at my writing pad as if trying to work out the appropriate classification. Apparently abandoning the effort for the time being, he turned back to Eliza and asked, “Has she ever managed to actually hurt herself?”

  “Well, I can’t always be there to stop her. One time, when Papa didn’t like the way she ironed his shirts, she burned her hand on the flatiron. And once, when he shouted at her from the window for taking too long with his growler, she ran in front of a delivery cart—on purpose. It’s just lucky that the driver saw her in time.”

  “Has she ever hurt anyone else?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Are you aware of everything she does?”

  “Lord, no! I couldn’t stand to watch her all the time. All that praying and ‘yes, Mother’ and ‘no, Mother’…”

  The discovery that Mrs. Miner was a multiple personality explained many things that had perplexed me. But it also raised a frightening possibility. I still believed that the woman I’d come to know and care for, the personality that called herself Eliza, was incapable of murder. But I couldn’t vouch for Elizabeth, or Bitty, or whoever else might exist in that crowded mind. I believed Eliza had told me the truth about what she witnessed in Dr. Hauptfuhrer’s office on the morning of the murder. But what if she hadn’t been there the whole time? What if some other personality had emerged to kill him, returning at a later date to kill his daughter too?

  I told myself it was too fantastic an idea to consider seriously, that none of the reported cases had demonstrated such a radical schism in moral functioning. And yet, I couldn’t help thinking of the most familiar double personality of them all: the infamous Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There was a case of two minds in one body—and one of them had belonged to a killer. But of course, tha
t was just fiction. Mr. Stevenson had been using the device to examine the dual nature that existed in us all. It couldn’t happen in real life—or could it?

  Leaning toward the professor, I asked, “Do you think we could get Elizabeth to speak with us?”

  He frowned and shook his head. “If she isn’t aware of the others’ existence, it could be very confusing for her,” he murmured. “Possibly even harmful. Better to wait until a later session when we’ve had a chance to lay the groundwork.” He turned back to his subject. “Now, Eliza, I’m going to count from ten to one. When I reach one your eyes will open, and you will be fully awake.”

  She was very tired when she came around, which the professor assured us both was a normal reaction. He confirmed for Eliza, when she asked, that she had achieved the trance state, then gave her a draught of opium and henbane and told her she should sleep for a while, promising that we would review the session with her when she woke up. I helped her off the sofa and guided her into her bedroom down the hall. The windowless room looked different to me now, no longer an ordinary bedchamber, but instead, a trap for a helpless young girl. Tamping down my revulsion, I turned on the bedside lamp to soften the gloom and folded down the coverlet.

  She removed her shoes and lay on her side, fully clothed, on the bed. “Mother will be upset if I don’t finish adding up the accounts,” she said drowsily, tucking an arm under her pillow. “I promised I’d get it done today.”

  Once again, in my mind’s eye, I saw again the image of Mrs. Braun locking herself into her bedroom, so blinded by self-righteous anger over her husband’s drinking that she couldn’t see what was happening to her daughter on the other side of the door.

  “Don’t worry,” I said to Eliza. “You just get some rest. Leave your mother to me.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The professor was sitting at the kitchen table, writing on my pad when I emerged. Looking over his shoulder I saw the words Multiple Successive, Partially Mutually Cognizant, One-Way Amnestic?? scrawled across the top.

  “You believe it, then,” I said, dropping into the chair next to him.

  “Of course I do. Don’t you?”

  I sighed. “I suppose I’m just finding it all a little hard to digest.”

  He laid down his pen. “Which part—the paternal rape, or the existence of a multiple consciousness?”

  “Both.” I shook my head. “I can’t believe a father could use his own daughter so abominably.”

  “Fathers are just human beings like the rest of us. And just as capable, unfortunately, of falling prey to their baser instincts.”

  “It must have been because of the disease,” I insisted. “It must have destroyed his moral judgment.”

  “Possibly, but I wouldn’t assume it. Many men without mental defect have been guilty of the same transgression.”

  I supposed that if Mr. Braun had been sufficiently intact physically to carry out the rape, it was likely he’d also still had enough willpower to restrain himself if he’d been so inclined. I couldn’t excuse him so easily.

  “It was a tragic breach of trust, to be sure,” the professor was saying, “but perhaps we can turn it to some good, by using the case to shed light on the effects of such trauma on the mind. You and I have been given a rare opportunity, Doctor, to contribute a new case analysis to the multiple consciousness literature.”

  I was unable to respond with any enthusiasm, still coming to grips with the fact that the woman I’d thought I’d known so well was actually an amalgam of unfamiliar parts.

  “I suppose you consider multiple consciousness a freakish event,” he said, gazing at me over the tops of his spectacles.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “I believe it’s much closer to the norm than people realize. We’re all made up of many parts, after all. Our need to get along in society may require our logical, reasoning self to dominate, but there’s far more to us than that. We also have our creative selves, our intuitive selves, our dreaming selves. These are the parts that enlarge and enrich us. Who’s to say they’re any less valid than the authoritarian self we regularly present to the world?”

  “They may be valid,” I protested, “but they don’t take on a life of their own. When we have a creative thought, we don’t lose contact with our everyday reality.”

  “Don’t we? What about the poet in his moment of inspiration, or the inventor achieving his breakthrough? What about any of us when we’re ‘lost’ in thought, or just doing one thing while thinking about another? The only difference between you and me and that woman in there is that our selves are synthesized, while hers have broken apart.”

  “And you think the rape caused the break?”

  “It could have been the rape, or the smaller, repeated assaults that led up to it, or even some earlier trauma from her childhood. You say her mother remarked that she’s always been ‘strange,’ which suggests the initial split may have occurred when she was younger, with additional personalities emerging to handle the later crisis. As best as we’ve been able to determine, any physical blow or strong negative emotion can cause the disintegration to occur, if the neural constellations are so predisposed. The effect is similar to the cerebral shock induced in experiments on localization, where the frontal lobes are cut.”

  “So Eliza was twice cursed,” I summed up, “in her father’s flawed character, and in the predisposition of her mind.”

  “Although we could consider the dissociation a blessing in this case, don’t you think?” he remarked. “It did, after all, give her a way to cope with unbearable conflict.”

  To cope, perhaps, I thought, but not to conquer. The burden seemed merely to have been split three ways: between poor, suffering Bitty, consigned to bear the shame of the rape; and dreamy-eyed Eliza, charged with preserving some shred of filial affection along with her love for Joy; and sour, reclusive Elizabeth, driven to please others even as she tried to destroy herself. I sighed and rubbed my eyes.

  “What’s troubling you?” the professor asked.

  “It’s just that Eliza seems so normal. It’s hard not to think of her as the ‘real’ Mrs. Miner. She’s so much more alive than Elizabeth, so tender and full of feeling.”

  “You make a good point. It’s not uncommon for a new personality to be livelier and more attractive than the original; the original has, after all, lost a large portion of consciousness, leaving it necessarily constricted. But you mustn’t forget that the secondary self, while often more appealing in respects, is almost always unsuited to the practical purposes of life.”

  This led me to a distressing thought. “Does that mean that Eliza will have to be…‘eliminated’ for Mrs. Miner to be cured?”

  He frowned. “First of all, you must understand that achieving a complete cure in these cases is difficult at best. Cures have been reported, of course—Boris Sidis’s Hanna case, in particular, comes to mind—but just as often, all that can be achieved is a longer time between alternations, or perhaps elimination of the most troubling symptoms, regardless of the doctor’s dedication. Even Professor James, despite his best efforts, was unable to unite the divided selves in the Ansel Bourne case.

  “But to answer your question, where a cure has been effected, the selves have been able to merge and achieve a single, continuous memory that includes the experiences of each. This, I think, is what we must strive for in Mrs. Miner’s case. Not the dominion of the personality you know as Eliza. Eliza, stripped of the defenses of skepticism and selfishness, would be helpless on her own.”

  Although I could see the sense in what he was saying, it distressed me to think of losing Eliza as I knew her. It was hard to appreciate, moreover, what qualities the disagreeable Elizabeth would bring to a united identity. “What about the personality of Elizabeth?” I asked him. “Would you consider her helpless as well?”

  He peered at me over his spectacles. “If you’re as
king me if I think she murdered the doctor and his daughter, I’m afraid I don’t have the answer. We’re in uncharted territory here, Doctor. But it is at least theoretically possible that she did without the others being aware.”

  “And if so? Would that be grounds for sending them all to prison?”

  “It’s a fascinating question, isn’t it? But you’re getting ahead of yourself. Nothing I’ve heard so far indicates that any of the personalities is guilty of murder.”

  Nothing he’d heard, perhaps, but he hadn’t seen what I’d seen. “There’s something I have to show you,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” I returned to Eliza’s bedroom to retrieve the sketchbook from the bedside table and brought it into the kitchen. “These are all Eliza’s,” I told him, flipping the pages until I came to the charcoal figure. “Except this one. She claims not to know where it came from.”

  He leaned over it, his eyes darting from one detail to another. “And you’re concerned that this implicates Elizabeth in the murders,” he said after a moment.

  “Well, look at it,” I said, thrusting my hand toward the bold line across the figure’s neck.

  He nodded thoughtfully. “It does strike me as something Elizabeth might have drawn, knowing what we do about her so far. But it doesn’t necessarily depict someone else. It could just as well be a self-portrait. Remember, Elizabeth has no memory of what happened to her physical body during the rape, or of the pregnancy afterward. In a sense, her mental and physical lives have been severed. The line across the neck could be a subconscious recognition of that separation.”

  “What about the eyes? They’re completely blind, with no pupils at all. Couldn’t that represent a denial of the crimes?”

  “It could. Or it could symbolize a more general disconnection from the world. Especially when taken together with the practically absent feet and hands. The figure appears to exist in a vacuum, ungrounded and out of contact with the physical reality that surrounds her.”

  I fervently hoped that he was right, but I didn’t think we should count on it. “I suppose I ought to inform the police, if there’s even a chance that Elizabeth is dangerous.”