The Interpretation Of Murder

by Jed Rubenfeld

  The inaugural event of the season was a charitable ball, thrown by Mrs Stuyvesant Fish on Monday night, August 30, to raise funds for the city's new Free Hospital for Children. It had become fashionable at that time to hold parties at the city's grand hotels. Mrs Fish's party was to take place at the Waldorf-Astoria.

  That grand hotel on Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street stood on the spot where Mrs Astor had lived a quarter century earlier, when she was bested by Mrs Vanderbilt. By comparison with the gleaming Vanderbilt mansion, the Astors' fine old brick townhouse had suddenly looked small and drab. Therefore Mrs Astor unceremoniously razed it and built herself a double-sized French chateau - not in the Loire style but in the more dignified Second Empire fashion - thirty blocks north, with a ballroom big enough for twelve hundred. On the land vacated by Mrs Astor, her son erected the world's largest and the city's most luxurious hotel.

  Society entered the Waldorf-Astoria through a wide, three-hundred-foot-long corridor off Thirty-fourth Street, known as Peacock Alley. On the occasion of a fancy ball, blue-stockinged doormen would greet the carriages as they drew up, and Peacock Alley would be lined with hundreds and hundreds of spectators, an audience of groundlings for the procession of wealth and importance making its stately way inside. The Palm Garden was the Waldorf's massive domed and gilded restaurant, walled in glass to ensure continuing visibility to the outside world and paneled everywhere with full-length mirrors to ensure that the ladies and gentlemen of the inner world saw even more of themselves than outsiders could. To accommodate her party, Mrs Stuyvesant Fish had booked not only the Palm Garden but also the Empire Room, the outdoor Myrtle Room, and the entire orchestra and company of the Metropolitan Opera.

  It was the strains of this music that greeted Stratham Younger as he strolled the length of Peacock Alley, his arm in the grasp of his cousin Miss Belva Dula, a half hour after his European guests had departed for their dinner at the Brills'.

  My mother was a Schermerhorn. Her sister married a Fish. These two majestic genealogical facts got me invited to every royal ball in Manhattan.

  Living in Worcester, Massachusetts, supplied an excuse sufficient to dodge most of these engagements. But I had to make an exception for parties thrown by my outré Aunt Mamie - Mrs Stuyvesant Fish - who, though not really my aunt, has insisted on my calling her so since I was little, when I used to spend summers in her Newport house. After my father died, it was Aunt Mamie who made sure my mother was comfortable and did not have to vacate the Back Bay house where she had lived throughout her marriage. As a result, I could never say no when Aunt Mamie asked me to one of her galas. On top of this obligation, there was also cousin Belva, whom I had agreed to escort down the alley.

  'What is that again?' Belva asked me, referring to the music, as we made our way down the endless hallway with throngs of onlookers on either side of us.

  'It is Mr Verdi's Aida,' I answered, 'and we are the marching animals.'

  She pointed to a rotund woman escorted by her husband not far ahead of us. 'Oh, look, the Arthur Scott Burdens. I have never seen Mrs Burden in a huge crimson turban before. Perhaps we are meant to think of elephants.'

  'Belva.'

  'And there are the Condé Nasts. Her Directoire hat is much more suitable, don't you think? Her gardenias I approve as well, but I'm less sure about the ostrich feathers. It may incline people to bury their heads in the sand when she passes.'

  'Heel, Belva.'

  'Do you realize there must be a thousand people watching us right now?' Belva was manifestly relishing the attention. 'I'll bet you have nothing like this in Boston.'

  'We are sadly behind in Boston,' I said.

  'The one with the perfect mass of jewels in her hair is the Baroness von Haefton, who excluded me from her party last winter for the Marquis de Charette. Those are the John Jacob Astors - they say he's been seen everywhere with Maddie Forge, who is not a day older than sixteen - and our hosts, the Stuyvesant Fishes.'

  'Fish.'

  'I beg your pardon?'

  'The plural of Stuyvesant Fish,' I explained, 'is Stuyvesant Fish. One says "the Fish," not "the Fishes." It was rare that I could even pretend to correct Belva on a point of New York etiquette.

  'I don't believe that for a moment,' she replied. 'However, Mrs Fish is looking almost plural herself this evening.'

  'Not a word against my aunt, Belva.' Cousin Belva was my age almost exactly, and I had known her since infancy. But the poor, scrawny, ungainly thing had come out almost ten years ago, and no one had taken the bait. At twenty- seven, she was, I'm afraid, quite desperate, the world already consigning her to spinsterhood. 'At least,' I added, 'Aunt Mamie hasn't brought her dog tonight.'

  Aunt Mamie had once thrown a ball in Newport for a new French poodle, which made its entrance prancing down a red carpet in a diamond-encrusted collar.

  'But look, she has brought her dog,' replied Belva pleasantly, 'and still wearing the diamond collar.' Belva was pointing to Marion Fish, Aunt Mamie's youngest daughter, to whose stunning debut Belva had not been invited.

  'That's it, cousin. You're on your own.' Having come to the end of the corridor, I discharged Belva, or rather Aunt Mamie prised me from her, pairing me off instead with a Miss Hyde, who was plainly rich but had few other charms. I danced with several other misses as well, including the tall and balletic Eleanor Sears, who was quite amiable, although I was obliged constantly to duck her hat, which was shaped like a sombrero. And of course I took a turn with poor Belva.

  After the requisite oyster cocktail, we were fed - according to the gilt-edged menu - a buffet russe, roast mountain sheep with chestnut puree and asparagus, champagne sherbet, diamondback Maryland terrapin, and ruddy duck with an orange salad. This was only the first of two suppers, the second to be served after midnight. After the second supper, the cotillion would get under way, with the formal dances - probably a Mirror, if I knew Aunt Mamie - starting around one-thirty in the morning.

  I really didn't mind the occasional party in New York. I had stopped attending social functions in Boston, where I could not escape the whispers and sidelong glances owing to the circumstances of my father's death. The difference between Boston and New York society was this: the goal in Boston was to do nothing but what had always been done; in New York it was to outdo anything that had ever been done. But the sheer spectacle of a New York party - and one was of course supposed to be part of that spectacle - was a thing my Boston blood could never quite grow used to. The debutantes in particular, while far more plentiful than their Bostonian counterparts, and far better looking, were too sparkly for my taste. They were an efflorescence of diamond and pearl - on their corsages, around their necks, dangling from their ears, draped on their shoulders, nested in their hair - and though all these articles were doubtless genuine, I could not help the feeling that I was looking at paste.

  'Here you are, Stratham!' cried Aunt Mamie. 'Oh, why must you be cousins with my Marion? I would have married you off to her years ago. Now listen to me. Miss Crosby is asking everyone who you are. She is eighteen this year, the second handsomest girl in New York, and you are still the single handsomest man - I mean the handsomest single man. You must dance with her.'

  'I have danced with her,' I replied, 'and I have it on good authority that she means to marry Mr de Menocal.'

  'But I don't want her to marry de Menocal,' answered Aunt Mamie. 'I wanted de Menocal to marry Franz and Ellie Sigel's granddaughter Elsie. She, however, has run away to Washington. It was my understanding that people ran away from Washington. What can the girl have been thinking? One might as well elope to the Congo. Have you said hello to Stuyvie yet?'

  Stuyvie was, of course, her husband, Stuyvesant. As I had not yet exchanged greetings with Uncle Fish, Aunt Mamie conducted me toward him. He was engaged in close conversation with two men. Next to Uncle Fish, I recognized Louis J. de G. Milhau, whom I knew as a fellow undergraduate at Harvard. The other man, perhaps forty-five years old, looked familiar, but I cou
ldn't place him. He had closely cropped dark hair, intelligent eyes, no beard, and an air of authority. Aunt Mamie solved my difficulty when she added, under her breath, 'The mayor. I shall introduce you.'

  Mayor McClellan, it turned out, was just departing. Aunt Mamie cried out in protest, objecting that he would miss Caruso. Aunt Mamie detested opera, but she knew the rest of the world considered it the pinnacle of taste. McClellan apologized, thanking her cordially for her beneficence to the city of New York, and swore he would never leave at such an hour, were it not for a very serious matter demanding his immediate attention. Aunt Mamie objected even more strenuously, this time to the use of the term 'very serious matter' in her presence. She did not want to hear about any very serious matters, she said, fleeing us in a cloud of chiffon.

  To my surprise, Milhau then said to the mayor, 'Younger here is a doctor. Why don't you tell him about it?'

  'By gad,' exclaimed Uncle Fish, 'that's right. A Harvard doctor. Younger will know the man for the job. Tell him about it, McClellan.'

  The mayor surveyed me, made some sort of internal decision, and put a question. 'Do you know Acton, Younger?'

  'Lord Acton?' I responded.

  'No, Harcourt Acton of Gramercy Park. It's about his daughter.'

  Miss Acton had apparently been the victim of a brutal assault earlier this evening, in her family's house, while her parents were away. The criminal had not been apprehended, nor had he even been seen by anyone else. Mayor McClellan, who knew the family, desperately wanted from Miss Acton a description of the criminal, but the girl could neither speak nor even remember what had happened to her. The mayor was returning to police headquarters this instant; the girl was still there, attended by her family doctor, who had professed himself mystified by her condition. He could find no physical injuries capable of producing her symptoms.

  'The girl is hysterical,' I said. 'She is suffering from crypto-amnesia.'

  'Crypto-amnesia?' repeated Milhau.

  'Loss of memory brought on by repression of a traumatic episode. The term was coined by Dr Freud of Vienna. The condition is essentially hysterical and can be found with aphonia - speech loss - as well.'

  'By gad,' said Uncle Fish again. 'Speech loss, did you say? That's it!'

  'Dr Freud,' I went on, 'has a book on speech dysfunction.' Freud's monograph on the aphasias was read in America long before his psychological writings became known. 'He is probably the world's leading authority on the subject and has specifically shown an association with hysterical trauma - especially sexual trauma.'

  'Pity your Dr Freud is in Vienna,' said the mayor.

  Chapter Five

  I hammered on Brill's door until at last his wife, Rose, answered. I was bursting to tell them not only that I had arranged Freud's first American consultation but that a motorcar and driver were waiting downstairs to take him there, sent by the mayor of New York himself. The scene into which I intruded, however, was so full of good spirit and conviviality that I could not immediately see my way to breaking it up.

  Brill's place was on the fifth floor of a six-story apartment house on Central Park West. And it was tiny - just three rooms, each smaller than my chamber at the Manhattan. But it looked out directly on the park, and nearly every inch of it was crammed with books. A homey smell of cooked onions hung in the air.

  Jung was there, as well as Brill, Ferenczi, and Freud, all crowded around a small dining table in the middle of the main room, which served as kitchen, dining area, and parlor all at once. Brill shouted out that I must sit down and have some of Rose's brisket; wine was poured for me before I could reply. Brill and Ferenczi were in the middle of a story about being analyzed by Freud, with Brill acting the part of the Master. Everyone was laughing, even Jung, whose eyes, I noticed, lingered on Brill's wife.

  'But come, my friends,' said Freud, 'that does not answer the question: why America?'

  'The question, Younger,' Brill clarified for my benefit, 'is this. Psychoanalysis is excommunicated everywhere in Europe. Yet here, in puritanical America, Freud is to receive his first honorary degree and is asked to lecture at a prestigious university. How can that be?'

  'Jung says,' Ferenczi added, 'it is because you Americans don't understand Freud's sexual theories. Once you do, he says, you will drop psychoanalysis like hot apple.'

  'I don't think so,' I said. 'I think it will spread like wildfire.'

  'Why?' asked Jung.

  'Precisely because of our puritanism,' I answered. 'But there is something I -'

  'That is opposite,' said Ferenczi. 'A puritan society should ban us.'

  'It will ban you,' said Jung, laughing out loud, 'as soon as it figures out what we are saying.'

  'America puritan?' Brill put in. 'The devil was more puritan.'

  'Quiet, all of you,' said Rose Brill, a dark-haired woman with firm, no-nonsense eyes. 'Let Dr Younger explain what he meant.'

  'No, wait,' said Freud. 'There is something else Younger wants to say. What is it, my boy?'

  We trundled down the four flights of stairs as quickly as we could. The more he heard of the affair, the more intrigued Freud became, and when he learned of the mayor's personal involvement, he was as excited as I to get downtown, notwithstanding the hour. The motorcar being a four-seater, there was one extra place, so Freud decided Ferenczi would accompany us. Freud had first invited Jung, who seemed strangely uninterested and declined; he had not even come down to the street.

  Just before we drove off, Brill said, 'I don't like your leaving Jung here. Let me go get him; you can squeeze him in and drop him at the hotel.'

  'Abraham,' Freud replied with surprising severity, 'I have told you repeatedly how I feel about this. You must overcome your hostility to Jung. He is more important than the rest of us put together.'

  'It's not that, for heaven's sake,' protested Brill. 'I've just given the man dinner in my own home, haven't I? It's his - condition - I'm talking about.'

  'What condition?' asked Freud.

  'He's not right. He's flushed, overly excited. Hot one minute, cold the next. Surely you noticed. Some of what he says makes no sense at all.'

  'He's been drinking your wine.'

  'That's another thing,' said Brill. 'Jung never touches alcohol.'

  'That was Bleuler's influence,' Freud remarked. 'I've cured him of it. You don't object to Jung's drinking, Abraham?'

  'Certainly not. Anything is better than Jung sober. Let's keep him drunk all the time. But there's something unsettling about him. From the moment he came in. Did you hear him ask why my floor was so soft - my wood floor?'

  'You are imagining things,' said Freud. 'And behind the imagination there is always a wish. Jung is merely unused to alcohol. Just make sure he gets back to the hotel safely.'

  'Very well.' Brill bade us good luck. As we pulled away, he called out, 'But there can also be a wish not to imagine.'

  In the open-roofed car, rattling down Broadway, Ferenczi asked me if it was normal in America to eat a melange of apples, nuts, celery, and mayonnaise. Rose Brill had evidently served her guests a Waldorf salad.

  Freud had fallen silent. He appeared to be brooding. I wondered if Brill's comments were troubling him; I myself had begun to think something might be wrong with Jung. I also wondered what Freud meant when he said that Jung was more important than the rest of us put together.

  'Brill is a paranoiac,' Ferenczi said abruptly, addressing Freud. 'It is nothing.'

  'The paranoid is never entirely mistaken,' Freud replied. 'Did you hear Jung's slip?'

  'What slip?' said Ferenczi.

  'His slip of the tongue,' answered Freud. 'He said, "America will ban you" - not us but you.'

  Freud relapsed into silence. We took Broadway all the way down to Union Square, then Fourth Avenue to the Bowery Road through the Lower East Side. As we passed the closed stalls of the Hester Street market, we had to slow down. Although it was nearly eleven, Jewish men crowded the streets, wearing their long beards and peculiar outfits, bla
ck from head to foot. Perhaps it was too hot to sleep in the airless, crammed tenements in which so many of the city's immigrants lived. The Jews walked arm in arm or gathered in small circles, with much gesturing and loud disputation. The sound of their mongrel low German, which the Hebrews call Yiddish, was everywhere.

  'So this is the New World,' Freud observed from the front seat, not favorably. 'Why on earth would they come so far, only to recreate what they left behind?'

  I hazarded a question: 'Are you not a religious man, Dr Freud?'

  It was infelicitous. At first I thought he hadn't heard me. Ferenczi answered instead: 'It depends on what is meant by religious. If, for example, religious means believing God is gigantic illusion inspired by collective Oedipal complex, Freud is very religious.'

  Freud now fixed on me for the first time the piercing gaze I had seen on the quay. 'I will tell you your thought process in asking me that,' he said. 'I asked why these Jews had come here. It occurred to you to say They came for religious freedom, but you reconsidered, because it seemed too obvious. You then reflected that if I, a Jew, could not see that they came for religious freedom, it must be that religion does not signify much for me - indeed, so little that I failed to see how important it is for them. Hence your question. Do I have it right'

  'Completely,' I replied.

  'Not to worry,' interposed Ferenczi. 'He does this to everyone.'

  'So. You ask me a direct question,' said Freud; 'I will give you a direct answer. I am the deepest of unbelievers. Every neurosis is a religion to its owner, and religion is the universal neurosis of mankind. This much is beyond doubt: the characteristics we attribute to God reflect the fears and wishes we first feel as infants and then as small children. Anyone who does not see that much cannot have understood the first thing about human psychology. If it is religion you are looking for, do not follow me.'