The Alienist

by Caleb Carr

  I spent the next half hour asking Dury some obvious questions about what had happened on that day in 1880, requesting clarification of details that we were not, in fact, confused about, as a method of concealing our true interests. Then I managed, by asking him why any Indians should have wanted to kill his parents, to lead him into a more detailed discussion of what life in his home during the Minnesota years had been like. From there, it was no great job to expand the discussion to a history of the family’s private dealings more generally. As Dury related these, Laszlo stealthily withdrew his small notebook and began to silently scribble a record of the account:

  Though born in New Paltz in 1856, Adam Dury’s earliest memories dated back only as far as his fourth year, when his family had relocated to Fort Ridgely, Minnesota, a military post inside that state’s Lower Sioux Agency. The Durys lived in a one-room log house about a mile outside the fort, the kind of residence that afforded young Adam an excellent vantage point from which to study his parents and their relationship. His father, as Kreizler and I already knew, was a strictly religious man, who made no attempt to sugarcoat the sermons he delivered to those curious Sioux who came to hear him speak. Yet Laszlo and I were both surprised to learn that, despite this vocational rigidity, the Reverend Victor Dury had not been especially cruel or violent to his older son; rather, Adam said that his earliest memories of his father were happy ones. True, the reverend could deliver painful punishments when required; but it was usually Mrs. Dury who called for such action.

  As he spoke of his mother, Adam Dury’s aspect grew darker and his voice became far more hesitant, as if even her memory held some tremendous threatening power over him. Cold and strict, Mrs. Dury had apparently not offered her son much in the way of comfort or nurturing during his youth; indeed, as I listened to his description of the woman, I couldn’t help but think back to Jesse Pomeroy.

  “Much as it pained me to be shunned by her,” Dury said, as he attempted to fit the now-repaired wheel back onto the manure spreader, “I believe her remote spirit hurt my father even more—for she was no real wife to him. Oh, she performed all the menial domestic duties, and kept a very tidy home, despite our meager circumstances. But when your family lives in one small room, gentlemen, you cannot help but be aware of the—the more intimate dimension of your parents’ marriage. Or the lack thereof.”

  “You’re saying they weren’t close?” I asked.

  “I’m saying that I don’t know why she married him,” Dury answered gruffly, making the axle and wheel before him bear the brunt of his sadness and anger. “She could scarcely abide his slightest touch, much less his—his attempts to build a family. My father, you see, wanted children. He had ideas—dreams, really—of sending his sons and daughters out into the western wilderness to expand and carry on his work. But my mother…Their every attempt was an ordeal for her. Some of these she suffered through, and some she—resisted. I honestly do not know why she ever took the vow. Except—when he preached…My father was quite an orator, in his way, and my mother attended nearly every service he ever held. She did seem to enjoy that part of his life, strangely enough.”

  “And after you returned from Minnesota?”

  Dury shook his head bitterly. “After we returned from Minnesota things deteriorated completely. When my father lost his post he lost the only human connection he had to my mother. They rarely spoke in the years after that, and never touched, not that I can recall.” He looked up at the filthy window. “Except once…”

  He paused for several seconds, and to urge him on I murmured: “Japheth?”

  Dury nodded, slowly rousing himself from his sad reverie. “I’d taken to sleeping outdoors when it was warm enough. Near the mountains—the Shawangunks. My father had learned the sport of mountaineering in Switzerland from his own father, and the Shawangunks were an ideal spot to keep his hand in, as well as to pass the techniques on to me. Though I was never very good at it, I always went along with him, because they were happier times—away from the house and that woman.”

  If the words had been explosives I don’t think their concussion could have hit Kreizler and me any harder. Laszlo’s weak left arm shot out, and his hand grabbed my shoulder with surprising force. Dury saw none of it and, unaware of the effect his words were having on us, continued:

  “But during the coldest months there was no avoiding the indoors, not unless I wanted to die of exposure. And I remember one February night when my father…he may have been drinking, though he rarely did. But, sober or no, he began to finally rebel against my mother’s inhuman behavior. He spoke of the duties of a wife, and the needs of a husband, and he began to grab at her. Well…My mother screamed in protest, of course, and told him he was acting like the savages we’d left behind in Minnesota. But my father wouldn’t be stopped that night—and despite the cold I fled the house through a window, and slept in an old barn that belonged to a neighbor of ours. Even from that distance I could hear my mother’s cries and sobs.” Once again, Dury seemed to lose all awareness of his present surroundings and spoke in a detached, almost lifeless voice: “And I wish I could say that those sounds horrified me. But they didn’t. In fact, I distinctly remember urging my father on…” His presence of mind returned, and, somewhat embarrassed, he picked up his hammer and began pounding at the wheel once more. “No doubt I’ve shocked you, gentlemen. If so, I apologize.”

  “No, no,” I answered quickly. “You’re only giving us a better understanding of the background, we quite understand that.”

  Dury shot Laszlo another quick, skeptical look. “And you, Doctor? Do you quite understand, too? You haven’t had much to say.”

  Kreizler kept very cool under Dury’s scrutiny. There was, I knew, little chance that this man of the earth was going to make so seasoned a madhouse campaigner as Kreizler uneasy. “I have been too absorbed to comment,” Laszlo said. “If you’ll allow me to say so, Mr. Dury, you are very well-spoken.”

  Dury laughed once humorlessly. “For a farmer, you mean? Yes, that was my mother’s doing. She made us work at our school lessons for hours every night. I could both read and write before the age of five.”

  Kreizler cocked his head in appreciation. “Laudable.”

  “My knuckles didn’t think so,” Dury answered. “She used to come across them with a stick like—but once again, I’m off the subject. You wanted to know what became of my brother.”

  “Yes,” I answered. “But before that, tell us—what sort of a boy was he? You’ve said odd—odd in what way?”

  “Japheth?” Having secured the wheel to the manure spreader’s axle, Dury stood and laid hold of a large pole. “In what way was he not?…I suppose you couldn’t expect much more, from a child born out of anger and unwanted by both his parents. To my mother he was a symbol of my father’s savagery and lust, and to my father—to my father, much as he wanted more children, Japheth was always a symbol of his degradation, of that terrible night when desire made an animal of him.” Using the long pole, Dury knocked the piled rocks out from under the spreader’s axle, at which the machine fell to the earthern floor of the barn and rolled a few feet forward. Satisfied with his work, Dury took up a shovel and kept talking. “The world is full of pitfalls for a boy left on his own. I tried to give Japheth what help I could, but by the time he was old enough for us to be real friends I had been sent to work on a nearby farm and saw little of him. I knew that he was suffering all that I’d endured in that house, and even more. And I wished that I could have been more help.”

  “Did he ever tell you,” I asked, “just what was happening?”

  “No. But I saw some of it,” Dury said as he began to shovel manure from the floor of several livestock stalls into the spreader. “And on Sundays I’d try to spend time with him, and show him that there was much he could still enjoy about life, whatever happened at home. I taught him how to climb the mountains, and we spent whole days and nights up there. But in the end…In the end, I don’t believe that anyone could have coun
teracted my mother’s influence.”

  “Was she—violent?”

  Dury shook his head, and spoke in a voice that seemed judicious and honest. “I don’t think Japheth suffered in that way any more than I had. The occasional strap to the backside from my father, and nothing more. No, I believed then, and I still believe now, that my mother’s ways were far more—devious.” Dury laid his shovel aside, sat down on one of the large rocks that had supported the spreader, and took out a pouch of tobacco and a pipe. “I suppose, in a way, that I was luckier than Japheth, only because my mother’s feelings toward me had always taken the form of thorough indifference. But Japheth—it didn’t seem enough for her to merely deprive him of love. She took issue with his every action, his every move, however insignificant. Even when he was an infant, even before he had any awareness or control over himself—she’d badger him about everything he did.”

  Kreizler leaned forward, offering a match that Dury took only reluctantly. “What do you mean by ‘everything,’ Mr. Dury?” Laszlo asked.

  “You’re a medical man, Doctor,” Dury answered. “I think you can guess.” Smoking for a few seconds to get a good coal going in his pipe, Dury finally shook his head and grunted angrily. “The cruel bitch! Hard words, I know, for a man to assign to his own dead mother. But if you could have seen her, gentlemen—at him, always at him. And when he complained, or cried, or went into a rage over it, she’d say things so despicable that I would’ve thought them beyond even her.” Dury stood up and continued shoveling. “That he wasn’t her son. That he was the child of red Indians—dirty, man-eating savages who’d left him in a bundle at our door. The poor little fellow half-believed it, too.”

  Pieces were falling into place with every passing minute; and as they did, it became steadily more difficult for me to control a profound, swelling sense of discovery and triumph. I almost wished that Dury would end his account, just so I could run outside and scream to the heavens that, all opposition be damned, Kreizler and I were going to catch our man. But I knew that self-control was more important now than it had ever been, and I tried to follow Kreizler’s self-composed example.

  “And what happened,” Laszlo asked, “when your brother got a bit older? Old enough, that is, to—”

  With savage, terrifying suddenness, Adam Dury screamed incomprehensibly and threw his shovel against the rear wall of the barn. The chickens in the adjacent coop sent up a flurry of frightened clucks and feathers, and, hearing them, Dury wrenched his pipe from his mouth and attempted to regain control over himself. Kreizler and I made no move, though I know my own eyes had gone quite wide with shock.

  “I think,” Dury seethed, “that we had all best be honest with each other. Gentlemen.”

  Kreizler said nothing, and my own voice quavered badly as I asked, “Honest, Mr. Dury? But I assure you—”

  “Damn it!” Dury shouted, slamming a foot to the earth. Then he waited a few more seconds, until he could speak more calmly again. “Don’t you think there was talk of it at the time? Do you imagine that simply because I’m a farmer I’m also an idiot? I know what it is you’re here to find out!”

  I was about to offer further protests, but Kreizler touched my arm. “Mr. Dury has been exceptionally forthright with us, Moore. I believe we owe him the same courtesy.” Dury nodded, and his breathing became something like regular as Kreizler went on: “Yes, Mr. Dury. We believe there is every chance that your brother murdered your parents.”

  A pitiable sound, half-sob and half-gasp, got out of our host. “And is alive?” he said, almost all traces of anger gone from his voice.

  Kreizler nodded slowly, and Dury held his arms up helplessly. “But why should it matter now? So long ago—it’s over, done. If my brother is alive, he’s never contacted me. Why should it matter?”

  “Then you suspected it yourself?” Kreizler said, avoiding the question as he produced a flask of whiskey and held it out to Dury.

  Dury nodded again and took a drink, no longer displaying the resentment toward Laszlo that he’d shown earlier. I had thought that attitude the result of Kreizler’s accent; I could see now that it had been spawned by Dury’s suspicion that this visit—from what he must have thought a very strange sort of doctor—might reach just such a pass.

  “Yes,” Dury said at length. “You must remember, Doctor, that I’d lived among the Sioux, as a boy. I had several friends, in their villages. And I’d witnessed the uprising in ’62. I knew that the explanation the police finally accepted of my parents’ death was almost certainly a lie. And more than that, I knew—my brother.”

  “You knew that he was capable of such an act,” Kreizler said softly. He was maneuvering very carefully, now, just as he’d done with Jesse Pomeroy. His voice remained calm, but his questions became steadily more pointed. “How, Mr. Dury? How did you know?”

  I felt a twinge of real sympathy when a tear appeared on Dury’s cheek. “When Japheth was—oh, nine or ten,” he said softly, after taking another deep pull from the flask, “we spent a few days up in the Shawangunks. Hunting and trapping small game—squirrel, possum, coons, and such. I’d taught him to shoot, but he wasn’t much for it. A born trapper, Japheth was. He’d spend a whole day searching out an animal’s lair or nest and then wait for hours, alone in the dark, to spring his scheme. It was a talent. But one day we were hunting separately—I’d gone to trail some bobcat tracks I’d spotted—and as I came back to camp I heard a strange, terrible scream. A wail. High-pitched and faint, but awful. As I came into the camp I caught a glimpse of Japheth. He’d trapped himself a possum, and he was—he was cutting the thing to pieces while it was still alive. I ran up and put a bullet in the poor creature’s brain, and took my brother aside. He had an evil sort of light in his eyes, but after I’d hollered at him for a while, he began to cry and seemed truly sorry. I thought it was a lone incident—the kind of thing a boy might do if he knew no better, and wouldn’t do again once he’d been told.” Dury began to poke at his pipe, which had gone out.

  Kreizler offered another match. “But it wasn’t,” he said.

  “No,” Dury answered. “It happened several times over the next few years—several times that I knew of, that is. He never bothered the big animals, the cattle or horses on the farms around us. It was always—always the small creatures that seemed to bring it out in him. I kept trying to put a stop to it; and then…”

  His voice trailing off, Dury sat and stared at the ground, seemingly unwilling to go on. Kreizler, however, kept after him gently: “And then something worse happened?”

  Dury smoked and nodded. “But I didn’t hold him responsible, Doctor. And I think you’ll agree that I was right not to.” One of his hands became a fist and he slammed it into his thigh. “But my mother, damn her, just took it as another example of Japheth’s devilish behavior. Claimed he brought it on himself, as if any boy would!”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to explain, Mr. Dury,” I said.

  He nodded quickly, then took a final sip of whiskey before handing the flask back to Kreizler. “Yes, yes. I’m sorry. Let me see—this would have been during the summer of—hell, it was just before I moved away, the summer of ’75 it must’ve been. Japheth was eleven. At the farm where I’d been working they’d recently hired a new man; he was just a few years older than me. A charming character, to all appearances. Seemed to have quite a way with children. We got to be friendly, and eventually I invited him along on a hunting trip. He took a great interest in Japheth, and my brother took a real liking to him—so much so that the fellow came along on a few more outings. Japheth and he would go off trapping together, while I hunted larger game. I’d explained to this—this thing that I thought was a man that Japheth was to be discouraged from tormenting any animals they might catch. The fellow seemed to understand the situation thoroughly. I trusted him, you see, to look after my brother.” A dull knocking sound came from the outer wall of the barn. “And he betrayed that trust,” Dury said, getting to his feet. “In the wors
t way a man can.” Opening the filthy window and sticking his head out it, Dury called: “Now, you! Go on away from there, I’ve told you—go on!” He came back inside, scratching at the few hairs on his head. “Fool horse. Covers himself in burrs to get at a little patch of clover that grows behind the barn, and I can’t seem to…I’m sorry, gentlemen. At any rate, I found Japheth in our camp one evening, half-naked and weeping, bleeding from the—well, bleeding. The fiend I’d left him with was gone. We never saw him again.”

  From the exterior of the barn came the same muffled pounding, prompting Dury to grab a long, thin switch and head for the door. “If you’ll just give me a moment, gentlemen.”

  “Mr. Dury?” Kreizler called. Our host stopped and turned at the barn doorway. “This fellow, the farmhand—can you recall his name?”

  “Indeed I can, Doctor,” Dury answered. “Guilt has burned it into my memory. Beecham—George Beecham. Excuse me.”

  The name struck me harder than had any piece of information that had been revealed thus far, and turned much of the triumphant exhilaration that I’d been feeling back into confusion. “George Beecham?” I whispered. “But, Kreizler, if Japheth Dury is, in fact—”

  Kreizler held up an urgent, silencing finger. “Save your questions, Moore, and remember one thing—if we can avoid it, let’s keep our true object from this man. We know almost everything we need to know. Now—make an excuse, and let’s depart.”

  “Everything we need—well, you may know everything you need to know, but I’ve still got a thousand questions! And why should we keep it from him, he’s got a right—”

  “What good can it do him?” Kreizler whispered harshly. “The man has suffered and agonized over this affair for years. What purpose can it serve, of his or ours, to tell him that we believe his brother responsible not only for his parents’ murders, but for the deaths of half a dozen children?”