A Promise of Ruin

by Cuyler Overholt

  “She wants to talk to Caterina?” Angela asked with a frown when she was done.

  “Yes, I know. I told her.” Paulina turned back to me. “Angela has made some headway with the girl, but she still refuses to join in any of our activities. We can’t get her down to meals or out to the water closet, which means she has to use a slop pail and take sponge baths in her own room. I’m letting her have the room to herself for now, but I hate to let the other bed go to waste.”

  “Has she ever spoken with you about her captivity?” I asked Angela.

  “Never. We speak only of simple things.”

  “What about her physical health? Has she had a medical exam?”

  “According to the Society’s cover letter,” Pauline answered, “she was examined immediately after her rescue. She was very thin and had burn marks on her thighs and breasts—”

  “Burn marks?” I broke in, remembering the coroner’s report on Lucia.

  “Courtesy of her abductor in New York apparently,” she said with a frown. “But the most immediate problem is her eye. It’s very red and painful. I was able to convince her to let Dr. Burnham look at it when she arrived, but he told us there was nothing to be done.”

  “Perhaps I could take a look when I meet with her and give you another opinion.” Though the slashed eyelid might be beyond repair, it seemed to me it ought at least be possible to reduce the pain it was causing.

  Pauline turned to Angela. “What do you think? We can’t let her stay in that room forever.”

  “I think,” Angela said, “that it’s a good thing I used some of your precious butter to make a batch of biscotti this morning. They’re Caterina’s favorite.” She lifted a tray of oblong-shaped cookies from the table behind me. “Come on, Doctor. I’ll take you upstairs.”

  She led me up the back stairs and down a narrow hallway to the last room on the right. Propping one side of the pan on her generous hip, she knocked softly on the door. “È Angela, cara, con un’amica,” she crooned. “Possiamo entrare?”

  Several seconds ticked by. “If she doesn’t want to open her door, we can’t force her,” Angela told me quietly. “Every room in this shelter has a lock, and only the girls who live there have the key. It’s one of the promises Pauline makes to them when they come here.”

  She knocked again, singing, “Ho biscotti…”

  Nearly half a minute passed before a key scraped in the lock and the door opened a few inches. A dark eye gazed out at us from behind the crack.

  “There you are!” Angela said in Italian, giving the specter inside an encouraging smile. Turning sideways so the girl could see me, she added, “I’ve brought a doctor friend of Pauline’s who wanted specially to meet with you.”

  The eye turned toward me.

  “Buongiorno, Caterina,” I said.

  “Lei è un dottore?” asked a wispy voice.

  “Yes, dearest, a lady doctor, and a very nice one,” Angela assured her. “Now will you please open the door, so I can put down this heavy tray?”

  The girl opened the door and stepped back. Because I’d been expecting the scarring on her face, I was able to maintain a neutral expression—but it took some doing. A puckered seam ran from her eyebrow down the middle of her right eyelid, pulling the lid away from the eye and preventing it from closing when she blinked. Doubtless because of the dryness this caused, the eye beneath it was red and inflamed. Another, longer scar ran from the base of her ear to the corner of her mouth.

  She backed toward the bed on the right side of the room and sat down, watching me warily.

  “You did better today!” Angela exclaimed, nodding at a tray on the floor near the door that held a crust of bread and a half-eaten bowl of soup. “But there is always room for biscotti, yes?” She lowered the cookies onto a plank-topped barrel between the beds. Except for the beds, the barrel table, and two pine shelves holding folded clothes and toiletries, the room was devoid of furniture. Light poured in through the clean window, however, and a red-and-yellow rag rug added a patch of cheerful color.

  “Please, Doctor, sit,” said Angela, indicating the unoccupied bed.

  “May I?” I asked Caterina in Italian.

  Her eyes slid rapidly between me and Angela, her body tense as a spring-loaded mousetrap.

  Angela settled onto the bed beside her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. I noticed that the girl didn’t flinch or otherwise object to her close proximity. “She’s here to help you,” Angela murmured to her in Italian.

  Some of the tension seemed to leave the girl’s frame under the older woman’s touch. She gave me an almost imperceptible nod.

  I sat down across from her, folding my hands loosely in my lap, trying to make myself as unthreatening as possible. I was dying to ask her about the men who’d taken her in New York, for identifying them could well be the key to finding Teresa. But the poor child was clearly still far too disturbed for me to broach the subject. “Pauline tells me your eye has been bothering you,” I said instead.

  Angela translated. Caterina leaned against her, murmuring into her ear.

  “She says the other doctor told her nothing can be done for it,” Angela told me.

  I bent forward slightly, peering across the space between us at the weeping eye. “Ask her if it feels like there’s sand in it all the time.”

  The question drew a nod from Caterina.

  “And if it hurts when she looks into the light.”

  She answered again in the affirmative.

  “It sounds like a scratched cornea,” I concluded. “I’ll have the druggist deliver some eye drops to clear up the redness and some ointment to take the scratchiness away. Perhaps a cotton eye patch as well that she can wear while she sleeps to help keep it from drying out.”

  A look of wonder came over the girl’s face as Angela translated. She stared at me for a long moment, blinking repeatedly, whether because her eyes were hurting or were damp with tears of relief, I couldn’t be certain. “Grazie,” she said finally.

  I smiled. “You’re welcome.”

  “Time for biscotti!” Angela said, offering up the tray.

  We each took a cookie, Caterina using her left hand to lift hers from the platter. Her right hand, I noticed now, was curled around a terra-cotta doll that was wedged between her hip and the bed pillow. I curiously perused the doll as we nibbled our cookies. It had a young woman’s face, with lifelike glass eyes and painted pink cheeks and chipped lips parted in a half smile. The blue silk dress it wore must have been elegant once, but was now torn at the bottom and streaked with grime. “How do you say ‘doll’ in Italian?” I asked Angela.

  “Bambola.”

  “Che bella bambola,” I said to Caterina.

  She stopped chewing, her hand tightening on the doll’s midriff.

  “It’s a crèche doll,” Angela explained to me. “Italian mothers give them to their daughters when they leave home, to place in the crèche at their new residence at Christmas time.”

  “You mean it came with her from Italy?” I asked. “And she managed to keep it with her through…through everything?”

  “Oh yes, she keeps the doll with her always. She calls her Isabella, and takes great care of her, combing her hair and singing her to sleep.”

  I looked at the doll with heightened interest. Though I knew little about crèche dolls, I doubted it was customary to give them names. “Isabella,” I repeated. In Italian, I said to Caterina, “It’ a beautiful name, for a beautiful doll.”

  “Lei non è bella,” the girl retorted. “È sporca.”

  I paused with my cookie halfway to my mouth, startled by her declaration.

  “She says she isn’t beautiful,” Angela began. “She’s—”

  “Dirty. Yes, I understood,” I said, feeling a frisson of recognition.

  A few minutes later, we took our leave
and returned to the kitchen, where we found Pauline waiting with a fresh pot of coffee.

  She gestured toward three mismatched cups on the table. “Sit, and tell me how it went.”

  “This doctor, she’s all right,” Angela said, patting my shoulder as we all sat down. “She’s going to get some medicine to make Caterina’s eye better.”

  “The medicine will help, but of course, it’s not a cure,” I said. “Once she’s more comfortable with strangers, I’d like to have her examined by a surgeon friend of mine—a woman I went to medical school with, who lives here in the city. There’s a chance she could flatten out the lid so that it closes properly. I can ask her to take a look, if Caterina is willing.”

  “I will speak to her and see,” Angela said.

  “And her mind, Doctor?” Pauline asked as I took a sip of the coffee. “Will she recover?”

  “Considering what she’s gone through, I’d say her behavior is entirely understandable. It’s going to be a long time, if ever, before she regains the basic trust required to function normally. But…there might be a way you can help her.”

  They eyed me over the rims of their coffee cups, waiting for me to go on.

  I hesitated, wondering how best to convey the half-baked idea that had come to me when I saw Caterina interacting with her doll. “In my work, I’ve seen the mind do some extraordinary things,” I began. “I’ve seen how, when it’s subjected to a terrible shock, it can develop an alternate personality to hold and remember the shocking event, relieving the original personality of the burden. Just today, I saw how a feeling that’s too painful or shameful to experience can be projected onto someone else. In both cases, the individual seems to be taking the unbearable thought or feeling or memory and placing it outside of himself, either into a new, separate personality, or onto another person entirely.”

  I paused, searching their faces, wondering if they could even entertain an idea that sounded so far-fetched. Seeing only thoughtful concentration, I continued, “When I saw Caterina with her doll, it occurred to me that something similar might have happened in her case. The doll might be acting as a sort of external personality, bizarre as that may sound, protecting her from having to remember the horrible things she endured in captivity. Or maybe she’s projecting her intolerable feelings of shame and degradation onto the doll. I’m not clear on the exact mechanism, but if something similar is going on, then when she speaks about the doll, she may actually be speaking about herself. When she says that Isabella is dirty, for example, she may really be saying that she thinks she herself is filthy and unacceptable.”

  “Like a child who blames his dog for eating the cake?” Angela suggested.

  “Something like that, only she isn’t aware that she’s doing it.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “So her mind plays tricks on her, to make her feel better.”

  “Exactly! And if I’m right, and the doll has been instrumental in helping her cope with her ordeal, then it seems to me you might be able to use it as a tool in her recovery as well.”

  “You mean, we can find out how she’s feeling by asking her about the doll,” Angela said.

  “Yes. You might even be able to get her to talk about her experiences in captivity eventually.”

  “It’s worth a try,” Pauline said, looking at Angela.

  “I will ask her tonight,” Angela agreed, “when I bring up her dinner.” She turned to me. “And will you come again, to see how we’re doing?”

  I hadn’t meant to become personally involved in the girl’s case; I’d only come to the shelter to find information that might help locate Teresa. But once again, after what I’d seen and heard, I didn’t see how I could refuse. “You can count on it,” I told her. I didn’t know if I, or anyone, had the skills to heal Caterina’s psychic injuries. But I would do what I could to help restore her trust in a world that didn’t deserve it.

  Chapter Eleven

  Hearing Caterina’s story and witnessing her present condition left me in a state of extreme agitation. As usual, when confronted with something utterly outside of my experience, I felt an urgent need to comprehend it—and except for a brief stop at the druggist’s to order Caterina’s medicines, I spent the entire walk home pondering the psychological makeup of the men in the prostitution trade.

  From what Pauline and Detective Petrosino had told me, there were hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of pimps in New York City alone who made a living from selling women’s bodies. Since it was unlikely that all of these people could be mentally abnormal, I had to conclude that the average pimp was simply a particularly vile version of the common street tough, hardened by life and funneled into a parasitic existence. But the men and women involved in the more vicious aspects of the white slave trade struck me as another breed altogether. To mercilessly “break in” an abductee, to starve and deprive her into daily submission, to burn her for pleasure, and beat, cut, or kill her if she disobeyed—surely, these were not the actions of a normal mind.

  When I was in medical school, we’d read about a new category of criminality receiving scrutiny from social scientists: a type that Richard von Krafft-Ebing called “the morally insane” and that Emil Kraepelin referred to as “the psychopathic personality.” It had occurred to me that this might be the type of man or men responsible for the girls’ abductions. As soon as I got home, I ran upstairs to my room and pulled out the trunk of old textbooks from under my bed. Selecting tomes by Kraepelin and Havelock Ellis, I carried them to the reading chair by the window and settled in to read.

  Moral insanity, the authors explained, was the inability to feel or act in accordance with the normal, moral standards of society. Just as some people were born blind to colors, in the morally insane, the psychic retina was insensitive to the rights and feelings of others. These people typically exhibited acts of cruelty from an early age, usually toward their siblings or whatever unlucky animals crossed their path. Cunning, hypocritical, and delighting in falsehood, they could commit atrocious crimes without the slightest remorse, justifying them as necessary to their egotistic ends or even blaming them on their victims. Interestingly, despite a tendency to laziness, they often ran successful organizations thanks to their ability to terrorize their employees.

  I turned and gazed out the window. A successful white slave trader would have to have complete disregard for social and legal norms. He’d need to be a masterful liar and manipulator—capable of both gaining a stranger’s trust and breaking a captive’s will—and impervious to his victim’s distress. He would also have to be able to ruthlessly enforce loyalty and obedience among his subordinates. The psychopathic personality seemed perfectly suited to the job.

  But there was another trait that struck me as intrinsic to the white slave trader: a particularly disturbing trait that these books only touched on. Returning to the trunk, I dug out my copy of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis and found it in the table of contents. Sadism. The Association of Active Cruelty and Violence with Lust. I knelt on the floor and began to read.

  In the normal intercourse of the sexes, the active or aggressive role belongs to the man, while woman remains passive and defensive… This aggressive character, however, under pathological conditions may be excessively developed, and express itself in an impulse to subdue absolutely the object of desire, even to destroy it.

  While the impulse to inflict small amounts of pain while in the throes of lust, as by biting or scratching, was not in itself abnormal, the author asserted, arising from the intense excitation of the entire psychomotor sphere, in the psychopathic individual “the impulse to cruelty which may accompany the emotion of lust becomes unbounded; and at the same time, owing to defect of moral feeling, all inhibitory ideas are absent or weakened.”

  In other words, there was nothing to stop the psychopathic personality from acting on his most primitive impulses, or to keep those impulses from becoming abnormally intensi
fied. I sat back on my heels. This was not a man I’d like to meet in a blind alley. And yet, the deeper I dug into Teresa’s disappearance, the closer I came to putting myself in such a person’s orbit. I put the book down and stood up. I needed a cup of tea.

  I was halfway down the stairs to the basement when I heard people talking in the kitchen and stopped short. It took me a moment to recognize Katie’s voice, for it sounded unusually breathy and high-pitched. I continued to the door and peeked around the doorframe. Maurice sat next to Katie at the kitchen table with his hand over hers on the tabletop. Katie’s cheeks were flushed, and her eyes were lowered to the table. I watched Maurice lean closer and murmur something that made her laugh—then stifled a gasp as he drew her toward him into a kiss.

  I pulled back behind the doorframe. Well done, Katie, I thought, delighted that she’d found love and companionship after all these years. The sight of her bliss, however, triggered a fresh ripple of discontent over my own predicament. How pathetic it seemed that I couldn’t enjoy the gentle intimacy that even gray-haired old Katie had managed to elicit. I must have made a sound, because Katie called out, “Genna? Is that you?”

  I walked briskly around the doorframe into the kitchen. “Katie! I didn’t realize you were back. I just came down to fix myself a cup of tea.”

  “Well, have a seat, and I’ll put on the kettle,” she said, starting up from her chair.

  I laid a hand on her shoulder. “You stay put, and I’ll put on the kettle. You’re not even officially back until tonight.”

  I brewed the tea, poured three cups, and joined them at the table, sampling slices of ripe peaches that Katie had already laid out, while she regaled us with stories of the county fair she’d gone to with her sister, whose health was apparently much improved.

  “It sounds like you had a wonderful time,” I said when she was done, wiping peach juice from my chin.

  “Oh, I did, but it’s good to be home.” She blushed again, glancing at the chauffeur. “Maurice was kind enough to pick me up when the train came in. And it’s a good thing too, or I never would have managed all those bags of peaches!”