The Interpretation Of Murder

by Jed Rubenfeld

  'You are wondering if Nora is a homosexual,' he said.

  'I am so transparent?'

  'No man can keep a secret,' Freud answered. 'If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips.'

  I resisted the urge to glance at my fingertips.

  'No need to look at your fingertips,' he went on. 'You are not transparent. With you, my boy, I merely ask myself how I would have felt in your place. But I will answer your question. Homosexuality is certainly no advantage, but it cannot be classified as an illness. It is no shame, no vice, no degradation at all. In women in particular, there may be a primary narcissism, a self-love, that directs their desire toward others of their sex. I would not call Nora a homosexual, though. I would say, rather, she was seduced.

  But I should have seen her love for Mrs Banwell at once. It was plainly the strongest unconscious current in her mental life. You told me the first day how fondly she spoke of Mrs Banwell, when of course she ought to have felt the fiercest jealousy toward a woman engaged in a sexual act with her father - an act she wished to be performing on him herself. Only the most powerful desire for Mrs Banwell could have allowed her to repress that jealousy.'

  Naturally I could not wholly join in this observation. I only nodded in reply.

  'You don't agree?' he asked.

  'I don't believe Nora was jealous of Clara,' I said, 'in that way.'

  Freud raised his eyebrows. 'You can't disbelieve that unless you reject Oedipus.'

  Again I said nothing.

  'Ah,' said Freud. And he repeated it: 'Ah.' He took a deep breath, sighed, and observed me closely. 'That is why you are not coming to Clark with us.'

  I considered broaching with Freud my reinterpretation of the Oedipus complex. I would have liked to; I would have liked even more to discuss Hamlet with him. But I found I couldn't. I knew how much he had suffered from Jung's seeming defection. There would be other occasions. I would be in Worcester by Tuesday morning, in time for his first lecture.

  'In that case,' Freud resumed, 'let me raise one possibility with you before I go. You are not the first to reject the

  Oedipus complex. You will not be the last. But you may have a special reason for doing so, associated with my person. You have admired me from afar, my boy. There is always a kind of father love in such relationships. Now, having met me in the flesh, and having the opportunity to complete this cathexis, you fear doing so. You fear I will take myself away from you, as your real father did. Thus you forestall my anticipated withdrawal by denying the Oedipus complex.'

  The rain beat down. Freud looked at me with kindly eyes. 'Someone has told you,' I said, 'that my father committed suicide.'

  'Yes.'

  'But he didn't.'

  'Oh?' asked Freud.

  ' 'I killed him.'

  'What?'

  'It was the only way,' I said, 'to overcome my Oedipus complex.'

  Freud looked at me. For a moment I was afraid he might actually take me seriously. Then he laughed aloud and shook my hand. He thanked me for helping him through his week in New York, and especially for rescuing his lectures at Clark. I accompanied him onto the boat. His face seemed much more deeply furrowed than it had been a week ago, his back slightly bent, his eyes a decade older. As I began to disembark, he called out my name. He was at the railing; I had taken a step or two down the gangway. 'Let me be honest with you, my boy,' he said, from under his umbrella, as the rain poured down. 'This country of yours: I am suspicious of it. Be careful. It brings out the worst in people - crudeness, ambition, savagery. There is too much money. I see the prudery for which your country is famous, but it is brittle. It will shatter in the whirlwind of gratification being called forth. America, I fear, is a mistake. A gigantic mistake, to be sure, but still a mistake.'

  That was the last time I saw Freud in America. The same night, I took Nora to the top of the Gillender Building at the corner of Nassau and Wall, a place where vast fortunes were made and lost every day. On a Saturday night, Wall Street was deserted.

  I had gone to the Actons' directly after seeing Freud off. Mrs Biggs greeted me like an old friend. Harcourt and Mildred Acton were nowhere to be seen; they were evidently not receiving. I asked after Nora's condition. Mrs Biggs noisily withdrew, and Nora came down presently.

  Neither of us could find a word to say. Finally, I asked if she would care for a walk; I opined that it would be medically advisable. Suddenly I was sure she would decline and I would never see her again.

  'All right,' she said.

  The rain had stopped. The smell of wet pavement, which in the city passes for freshness, rose pleasantly in the air. Downtown, the pavement turned to cobblestone, and the clip-clop of distant horses, with no motorcar or omnibus in sight, reminded me of the New York I knew as a boy. We spoke little.

  The doorman at the Gillender heard we wished to see the famous view and let us in. In the dome room, nineteen stories up, four great pointed windows overlooked the city, one facing each direction of the compass. Uptown, we could see mile after mile of the ever-expanding northward march of electric Manhattan; to the south was the tip of the island, the water, and the burning torch of the Statue of Liberty.

  'They are going to demolish the building any day now,' I said. The Gillender, when erected in 1897, was one of the tallest skyscrapers in Manhattan. With its slender silhouette and classical proportions, it was also one of the most widely admired. 'It will be the tallest building in the history of the world to be torn down.'

  'Have you ever been happy?' Nora asked abruptly.

  I considered. 'Dr Freud says that unhappiness is caused when we cannot let go of our memories.'

  'Does he say how one is supposed to let go of one's memories?'

  'By remembering them.'

  Neither of us spoke.

  'That does not sound quite logical, Doctor,' said Nora.

  'No.'

  Nora pointed to a rooftop about a block to the north. 'Look. That's the Hanover Building, where Mr Banwell forced himself on me three years ago.'

  I said nothing.

  'You knew?' she asked. 'You knew I would see it from here?'

  Again I made no answer.

  'You are still treating me,' said Nora.

  'I never treated you.'

  She gazed out. 'I was so very stupid.'

  'Not nearly so stupid as I.'

  'What will you do now?' Nora asked.

  'Return to Worcester,' I said. 'Practice medicine. The students will be coming back in a few weeks.'

  'My classes start the twenty-fourth,' Nora replied.

  'Then you are going to Barnard after all?'

  'Yes. I have bought my books already. I'm leaving my parents' house. I'll be living uptown, in a dormitory called Brooks Hall.'

  'And what will you be studying at Barnard, Miss Acton?' I asked. 'Shakespeare's women?'

  'As a matter of fact,' she replied airily, 'I am thinking of a concentration in Elizabethan drama and psychology. Oh - and also detection.'

  'An absurd combination of interests. No one will take it seriously.'

  There was another pause.

  'I guess,' I said, 'we ought to say good-bye then.'

  'I've been happy once,' she answered.

  'Once?'

  'Last night,' she said. 'Good-bye, Doctor. Thank you.'

  I didn't answer. It was a good thing. Had I not given her the extra instant, she might not have said the words I longed to hear:

  'Are you going to kiss me good-bye at least?' she asked.

  'Kiss you?' I replied. 'You are underage, Miss Acton. I wouldn't dream of it.'

  'I'm like Cinderella,' she said, 'only in reverse. At midnight I turn eighteen.'

  Midnight came. And so it fell out that I could not bring myself to leave New York City even once all the rest of that young month.

  Epilogue

  In July of 1910, George Banwell was found not guilty of murdering Seamus Malley, the judge dismissing the charge for want of evidence. Banwell was c
onvicted, however, of the attempted murder of Nora Acton. He spent the rest of his life in prison.

  Charles Hugel served eighteen months for accepting a bribe and falsifying evidence. He slept badly in prison, on some nights not at all, contracting nervous illnesses from which he never recovered.

  One fine summer day in 1913, Harry Thaw walked out the front door of the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, stepped into a waiting car, and rode off to Canada. He was captured there and extradited back to New York, where he stood trial for escape. The prosecution was unwise. To convict Thaw, the prosecutor had to convince the jury that he was sane at the time of the escape, but if the jury found him sane, he had a legal right to escape, because a sane man cannot lawfully be confined in a lunatic asylum. By the end of the proceedings, Thaw had obtained a complete and unconditional release. Nine years later, he horsewhipped a young man and was incarcerated again.

  Chong Sing was released from custody on September 9, 1909, his earlier confession deemed to have been the product of coercion. No charges were brought against him. Despite an international manhunt, William Leon was never found.

  George McClellan did not run in the mayoral election of 1909 and never held elected office again. But he made good on his pledge to complete the Manhattan Bridge if it was the last thing he did in office. In those days, a mayor's term ended on the last day of the calendar year. On December 31, 1909, McClellan cut the ribbon on the Manhattan Bridge, opening it to traffic.

  Jimmy Littlemore was officially promoted to lieutenant on September 15, 1909. He and Betty were married just before Christmas. Greta was one of the guests, accompanied by her baby.

  Ernest Jones never learned of Freud's involvement in the investigation of the crimes of George and Clara Banwell. Freud did not want his role, such as it was, made public, and he did not trust Jones to keep the secret. Jones did, however, hear all about the Charaka society. He was especially taken with their signet ring. He resolved to have such a ring made for Freud's genuinely loyal followers, to identify themselves to one another wherever they should go. Jung, needless to say, did not get one.

  In the decades after Freud's lectures at Clark, it became clear that 1909 marked a watershed in American psychiatry and culture. Freud's appearance at the university was a signal success. Brill's translation of Freud's papers on hysteria came out - a little behind schedule - after the proceedings came to a close. Psychoanalysis took root in American soil and quickly rose to stunning prominence. Freud's sexual theories triumphed, and the psychotherapeutic culture began to spread its roots.

  Jung's Fordham lectures, in which he openly broke with Freud, finally took place in 1912. That same year, the Times published both its admiring full-page story on Jung and Moses Allen Starr's allegations about Freud's 'peculiar' life in Vienna. But it was too late. Jung's star never rose anywhere near as high as Freud's. His rupture with Freud precipitated in him a bout of deep depression, marked by several psychotic or quasi-psychotic episodes. He would later deride Freud's ideas as 'Jewish psychology.'

  Psychoanalysis sundered the connection between neurology and nervous disease. Indeed, it made the term nervous disease obsolete, replacing it with a whole new vocabulary of repressed desire, unconscious fantasy, id, ego, superego, and of course sexuality. Psychology was reborn, and the somatic neurological treatment of mental illness would for almost a century be spurned as obsolete, backward, unenlightened.

  Freud himself never took the satisfaction one would have expected from the success of psychoanalysis in this country. Mystifying his colleagues, he called Smith Ely Jelliffe a criminal. His ideas might be famous in America, he said, but they were not understood. 'My suspicion of America,' Freud confided to a friend toward the end of his fife, 'is unconquerable.'

  Author's Note

  The Interpretation of Murder is a work of fiction from beginning to end, but much is based on actual fact. Sigmund Freud did of course visit the United States in 1909, arriving aboard the steamship George Washington with Carl Jung and Sandor Ferenczi on the evening of August 29 (notwithstanding the fact that Ernest Jones's classic biography originally gave the date as September 27, 'corrected' in later editions to the still-erroneous August 27). Freud did stay at the Hotel Manhattan in New York City for a week before traveling to Clark University to deliver his famous lectures, and he did contract a kind of horror of America. While in the United States, Freud was indeed asked to render impromptu psychoanalyses, although never, so far as we know, by the mayor of New York City.

  The Manhattan of 1909 described in this book was painstakingly researched. The architecture, the city streets, high society - almost every detail, down to the color of the paneling on the taxis, is based on fact. Errors undoubtedly remain; readers who find any are encouraged to tell me about them at www.interpretationofmurder.com.

  I could not, however, stick to fact on every New York detail. To begin with, a few locations had to be changed. The main city morgue, for example, was at that time in Bellevue Hospital, on Twenty-sixth Street, whereas I have located Coroner Hugel - a fictional character - and his morgue downtown in an invented building. Similarly, I had to invent the Balmoral, where Elizabeth Riverford's body is found, but knowledgeable readers will recognize at once the real building - the Ansonia - on which the Balmoral, including its fountain with seals cavorting within, is based. Or again, while the Manhattan Bridge caisson is factual in most respects, it would have been filled with concrete by September 1909, and it did not have the pressurized debris- elimination chambers, opening onto the river, described as 'windows' in this book. In reality, there would have been a longer pressurized debris chute, but I needed the 'windows' for reasons I need not explain to those who have already read the book.

  I have also moved certain historical events backward or forward in time. A small example involves Abraham Brill's reference to Theodore Roosevelt's 'hyphenated Americans.' History buffs will point out that Roosevelt did not give his well-known 'hyphenated Americans' speech until 1915. (The disparaging term was, however, already in widespread use by 1909, and the press would have reported Roosevelt's views before 1915. Interested readers may, for example, consult the New York Times of February 17, 1912, page 3, which tells us that Ropsevelt 'excoriate[e] hyphenated Americans' in an article he had just published in Germany.

  Brill, conscious of his German accent throughout his life, would have been highly sensitive to this issue.) Or again, the texts Dr Younger consults to discover the cause of Nora Acton's vision of herself lying in her own bed are real, but several were written after 1909. On the other hand, Detective Littlemore might indeed have read H. G.Wells's short story describing a similar event; that story, Under the Knife, first appeared around 1896.

  Another slight temporal relocation concerns the strike at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, where Betty is hired; the strike did not take place until November 1909 (the famous fire occurred in 1911). Another is Mrs Fish's fictitious ball at the Waldorf-Astoria. In reality, the 1909 social season in Manhattan would have begun later. Incidentally, the Waldorf-Astoria described here is not the hotel we know by the same name today, located on Park Avenue north of Grand Central Terminal. The first Waldorf-Astoria stood on Fifth Avenue at Thirty-fourth Street; it was demolished in 1930 to make way for the Empire State Building.

  A more significant case of time-shifting is my treatment of Jung's break with Freud, which in reality occurred over a three-year period culminating around 1912.1 have telescoped the relevant events and moved some of them to America even though they took place elsewhere. Nevertheless, the scenes between Freud and Jung described in my book - amazing as they may seem - did apparently take place. For example, a loud and mysterious report really did interrupt the two men in the middle of an argument about the occult (with Freud taking a skeptical position), and Jung really did claim to have caused the noise telekinetically through what he called a 'catalytic exteriorization.' When Freud scoffed, Jung predicted an immediate recurrence of the sound to prove his poi
nt, and, inexplicably, his words came true. This episode took place, however, not in a room at the Hotel Manhattan in September 1909, but rather in Freud's house in Vienna in March of that year. Moreover, Freud twice fainted in Jung's presence, including one occasion on August 20, 1909, the day before the voyagers set off for America. Freud's enuretic 'mishap' in New York City was disclosed by Jung himself in 1951 - although Jung may have invented the story to discredit Freud.

  Jung's biographers disagree about his alleged philandering, delusions, and anti-semitism. The portrait of Jung in this book is just that - a portrait, based on his writings, his letters, and the conclusions reached by some, but not all, of those who have written about him.

  Readers may wonder whether Freud and Jung would really have expressed the views I attribute to them in The Interpretation of Murder. The answer, in almost every case, is that they did express them. Much of Freud and Jung's dialogue is drawn from their own letters, essays and statements reported in other published sources. For example, in my book Freud says, 'Satisfying a savage instinct is incomparably more pleasurable than satisfying a civilized one.' Interested readers can find the corresponding observation in Freud's 1930 Civilization and Its Discontents, in volume 21, page 79, of the Standard Edition of Freud's collected works. The physical attacks, however, and the murder mystery are of course entirely imaginary.

  As Freud aficionados will have instantly recognized, Nora is based on Dora, the young woman described in Freud's most controversial case history. Dora's real name was Ida Bauer; she was not American, nor was she treated by Freud in America, although she died in New York City in 1945. Nora is in no sense a carbon copy of Dora, but the basic facts of Nora's predicament - the advances made on her by her father's best friend, her father's refusal to take her side, her father's affair with this same friend's wife, and the attraction Nora herself feels toward the wife - can all be found in the Dora case. The Oedipal interpretation of Nora's hysteria that Freud offers Younger in my book, including the oral component, is the actual interpretation that Freud offered the real-life Dora.