'Hey - you there!' cried Littlemore.
The man froze, his back to the detective, shoulders hunched. But the next moment he started off again at a run, disappearing around a corner, still carrying his basket. The detective sprang after him, turning the corner just in time to see the man pushing through a pair of swinging doors at the end of a long corridor. Littlemore ran down the corridor, passed through the doors - and gazed out at the Balmoral's cavernous and noisy laundry, where men were laboring at ironing boards, washboards, steam presses, and hand-cranked washing machines. There were Negroes and whites, Italians and Irish, faces of all kinds - but no Chinamen. An empty wicker basket lay on its side next to an ironing board, rocking gently as if recently set down. The floor was thoroughly wet, disguising any tracks. Littlemore pushed up the brim of his boater and shook his head.
Gramercy Park, at the foot of Lexington Avenue, was Manhattan's sole private park. Only the owners of the houses opposite the park's delicate wrought-iron fence had the right to enter. Each house came with a key to the park gates, offering access to the small paradise of flower and greenery within.
To the girl emerging from one of those houses early Monday evening, August 30, that key had always been a magical object, gold and black, delicate yet unbreakable. When she was a little girl, old Mrs Biggs, their servant, used to let her carry the key in her tiny white purse on their way across the street. She was too small to turn the key by herself, but Mrs Biggs would guide her hand and help her do it. When the iron gate released, it was as if the world itself were opening up before her.
The park had grown much smaller as she grew up. Now, at seventeen, she could of course turn the key without assistance - and did so this evening, letting herself in and walking slowly to her bench, the one she always sat on. She was carrying an armload of textbooks and her secret copy of The House of Mirth. She still loved her bench, even though the park had somehow become, as she got older, more an attachment to her parents' house than a refuge from it. Her mother and father were away. They had repaired to the country five weeks earlier, leaving the girl behind with Mrs Biggs and her husband. She had been delighted to see them go.
The day was still oppressively hot, but her bench lay in the cool shade of a willow and chestnut canopy. The books sat unopened beside her. The day after tomorrow, it would be September, a month she had been looking forward to for what seemed an eternity. Next weekend, she would turn eighteen. Three weeks after that, she would matriculate at Barnard College. She was one of those girls who, despite a fervent wish to be living another life, had staved off womanhood as long as she could, through the ages of thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, clinging to her stuffed animals even while school friends were already discussing stockings, lipstick, and invitations. At sixteen, the stuffed animals had finally been relegated to the upper reaches of a closet. At seventeen, she was lithe, blue-eyed, and heart-stoppingly beautiful. She wore her long blond hair tied with a ribbon in the back.
When the bells of Calvary Church struck six, she saw Mr and Mrs Biggs hurrying down the front stoop, rushing off to the shops before they closed. They waved to the girl, and she to them. A few minutes later, brushing tears from her eyes, she set off slowly toward home, clutching her textbooks to her chest, looking at the grass and the clover and the hovering bees. Had she turned to her left, she might have seen, on the far side of the park, a man watching her from outside the wrought-iron fence.
This man had been watching her a long time. He carried a black case in his right hand and was dressed in black - overdressed, in fact, given the heat. He never took his eyes from the girl as she crossed the street and climbed the stairs to her townhouse, a handsome limestone affair with two miniature stone lions mounting an ineffectual guard on either side of the front door. He saw the girl open the door without having to unlock it.
The man had observed the two old servants leaving the house. Glancing left, right, and over his shoulder, he started off. Quickly he approached the house, ascended the steps, tried the door, and found it still unlocked.
A half hour later, the summer-evening silence of Gramercy Park was ruptured by a scream, a girl's scream. It carried from one end of the street to the other, hanging in the air, persisting longer than one would have thought physically possible. Shortly thereafter, the man burst out the back door of the girl's house. A metal object no larger than a small coin flew from his hands as he stumbled down the rear steps. It hit a slate flagstone and bounced surprisingly high into the air. The man nearly fell to the ground himself, but he recovered, fled past the garden potting shed, and escaped from the garden down the back alley.
Mr and Mrs Biggs heard the scream. They were just returning, laden with bags of groceries and flowers. Horrified, they trundled into the house and up the stairs as quickly as they were able. On the second floor, the master bedroom door was open, which it should not have been. Inside that room, they found her. The shopping bags fell from Mr Biggs's hands. A pound of flour spread out around his old black shoes, raising a little cloud of white dust, and a yellow onion rolled all the way to the girl's bare feet.
She stood in the center of her parents' bedroom, clad only in a slip and other undergarments not meant for servants' eyes. Her legs were naked. Her long slender arms were outstretched above her head, the wrists bound by a thick rope, which was secured in turn to a ceiling fixture from which a small chandelier depended. The girl's fingers nearly touched its crystal prisms. Her slip was torn, both front and back, as if rent by the lashes of a whip or cane. A man's long white tie or scarf was wound tightly around her neck and between her lips.
She was not, however, dead. Her eyes were wild, staring, unseeing. She looked on the familiar old servants not with relief but with a kind of terror, as if they might be murderers or demons. Her whole frame shivered, despite the heat. She made to scream again, but no sound came out, as if she had expended all her voice.
Mrs Biggs came to her senses first and ordered her husband out of the room, telling him to fetch the doctor and a policeman. Gingerly she went to the girl, trying to calm her, unwinding the tie. When her mouth was freed, the girl made all the motions that normally accompany speech, but still no sound came out, no words at all, not even a whisper. When the police arrived, they were dismayed to learn that she could not speak. A still greater surprise lay in store for them as well. Paper and pencil were brought to the girl; the police asked her to tell them in writing what happened. I can't, she wrote. Why not? they asked. Her reply: I can't remember.
Chapter Four
It was almost seven on Monday evening when Freud,
Ferenczi, and I returned to the hotel. Brill had gone home, tired and happy. I believe Coney Island is Brill's favorite place in America. He once told me that when he first arrived in this country at the age of fifteen, penniless and alone, he used to spend entire days on the boardwalk and sometimes nights beneath it. All the same, it wasn't obvious to me that Freud's first taste of New York should have included the Live Premature Incubator Babies show or Jolly Trixie, the 685-pound lady, advertised under the rapturous slogan holy smoke - she's fat! she's awful fat.
But Freud seemed delighted, comparing it to Vienna's Prater - 'only on a gigantic scale,' he said. Brill even persuaded him to rent a bathing costume and join us in the enormous saltwater swimming pool inside Steeplechase Park. Freud proved a stronger swimmer than either Brill or Ferenczi, but in the afternoon he had an attack of prostatic discomfort. We sat down, therefore, at a boardwalk cafe, where, punctuated by the clattering roar of the roller coasters and the steadier pounding of surf, we had a conversation I will never forget.
Brill had been ridiculing the treatment of hysterical women practiced by American physicians: massage cures, vibrating cures, water cures. 'It is half quackery and half sex industry,' he said. He described an enormous vibrating machine recently purchased - for four hundred dollars - by a doctor he knew, a professor at Columbia no less. 'Do you know what these doctors are actually doing? No one admits it, but
they are inducing climax in their women patients.'
'You sound surprised,' replied Freud. 'Avicenna practiced the same treatment in Persia nine hundred years ago.'
'Did he make himself rich from it?' asked Brill, with a note of bitterness. 'Thousands a month, some of them. But the worst of it is their hypocrisy. I once pointed out to this august physician, who just happens to be my superior at work, that if his treatment worked it was a proof of psychoanalysis, establishing the link between sexuality and hysteria. You should have seen the look on his face. There was nothing sexual in his treatment, he said, nothing at all. He was simply allowing patients to discharge their excess neural stimulation. If I thought otherwise, what it proved was the corrupting effect of Freud's theories. I'm lucky he didn't fire me.'
Freud merely smiled. He had none of Brill's bitter edge, none of his defensiveness. One could not blame the ignorant, he said. In addition to the inherent difficulty of uncovering the truth about hysteria, there were powerful repressions, accumulated over millennia, which we could not expect to vanquish in a day. 'It is the same with every disease,' said Freud. 'Only when we understand the cause can we claim to understand the sickness, and only then can we treat it. For now the cause remains hidden from them, so they remain in the Dark Ages, bleeding their patients and calling it medicine.'
It was then that the conversation took its remarkable turn. Freud asked if we would like to hear one of his recent cases, about a patient obsessed with rats. Naturally we said yes.
I had never heard a man speak as Freud did. He recounted the case with such fluency, erudition, and insight that he held us rapt for over three straight hours. Brill, Ferenczi, and I would periodically interrupt, challenging his inferences with objections or questions. Freud would answer the challenge before the questioner had even got the words out of his mouth. I felt more alive in those three hours than at any other moment in my life. Amid the barkers, screaming children, and thrill seekers of Coney Island, the four of us, I felt, were tracing the very edge of man's self- knowledge, breaking ground in undiscovered country, forging uncharted paths the world would some day follow. Everything man thought he knew about himself - his dreams, his consciousness, his most secret desires - would be changed forever.
Back at the hotel, Freud and Ferenczi were preparing to go to Brill's for dinner. Unfortunately, I was committed to dine elsewhere. Jung was meant to go with them but was nowhere to be found. Freud had me knock on Jung's door, to no avail. They waited until eight, then set off for Brill's without him. I changed hurriedly but irritably into evening dress. Under any circumstances, I would have been annoyed by the prospect of a ball, but to miss dinner with Freud as a result was vexing beyond description.
New York society in the Gilded Age was essentially the creation of two very rich women, Mrs William B. Astor and Mrs William K. Vanderbilt, and of the titanic clash between them in the 1880s.
Mrs Astor, nee Schermerhorn, was highborn; Mrs Vanderbilt, nee Smith, was not. The Astors could trace their wealth and lineage to New York's Dutch aristocracy of the eighteenth century. To be sure, the term aristocracy in this usage is a bit of a stretch, since Netherlandish fur traders in the New World were not exactly princes in the Old. European ladies and gentlemen may not have read their Tocqueville, but the one difference between the United States and Europe on which they all agreed was that America, to its misfortune, lacked an aristocracy. Nevertheless, by the late nineteenth century, the fabulously monied Astors would be received at the Court of St. James and would soon have their aristocratic claims confirmed by English titles of nobility, which were far superior to Dutch ones, had there been any Dutch ones.
By contrast, a Vanderbilt was a nobody. Cornelius 'Commodore' Vanderbilt was merely the richest man in America - indeed, the richest man in the world. Being worth a million dollars made one a man of fortune in the mid- nineteenth century; Cornelius Vanderbilt was worth a hundred million when he died in 1877, and his son was worth twice that a decade later. But the Commodore was still a vulgar steamship and rail magnate who owed his wealth to industry, and Mrs Astor would call on neither him nor his relations.
In particular, Mrs Astor would not set foot in the home of the young Mrs William K. Vanderbilt, wife to the Commodore's grandson. She would not even leave her card. It was thus established that the Vanderbilts were not to be received in the best Manhattan houses. Mrs Astor let it be known that there were only four hundred men and women in all New York City fit to enter a ballroom - that number being, as it happened, the quantity of guests who fit comfortably into Mrs Astor's own ballroom. The Vanderbilts were not among the Four Hundred.
Mrs Vanderbilt was not vindictive, but she was intelligent and indomitable. No penny would be spared to break the Astor ban. Her first measure, achieved with a liberal dose of her husband's largesse, was to procure an invitation to the Patriarchs' Ball, a significant event in New York's social calendar, attended by the city's most influential citizens. But she was still excluded from Mrs Astor's more rarefied circle.
Her second step was to have her husband build a new house. It would be located on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street and like no house yet seen in New York City. Designed by Richard Morris Hunt - not only the most famous American architect of the time but a welcome guest of the Astors - 660 Fifth Avenue became a white limestone French chateau in the style of the Loire Valley. Its stone entry foyer was sixty feet long, with a double-height vaulted ceiling, at the end of which rose a magnificent carved Caen stairwell. Among its thirty-seven rooms were a soaring dining hall lit by stained-glass windows, an enormous third-and-fourth-floor gymnasium for her children, and a ballroom capable of holding eight hundred guests. Throughout the house were Rembrandts, Gainsboroughs, Reynoldses, Gobelin tapestries, and furniture that once belonged to Marie Antoinette.
As the mansion neared completion in 1883, Mrs Vanderbilt announced a housewarming party, on which she would eventually spend some $250,000.The cleverest use of her wealth, by far, lay in securing in advance the attendance of a few notable but purchasable guests not beholden to Mrs Astor s rules, including several English ladies, a smattering of Teutonic barons, a coterie of Italian counts, and one former United States president. Dropping hints of these advance bookings, as well as of sumptuous and unheard-of entertainments, Mrs Vanderbilt issued a total of twelve hundred invitations. Her anticipated ball became the talk of the town.
One especially eager little partygoer happened to be Carrie Astor, Mrs Astor's favorite daughter, who all summer long had been preparing with her friends a Star Quadrille for Mrs Vanderbilt's ball. But of those twelve hundred invitations, not one had gone to Carrie Astor. All Carrie's friends had been invited - they were already excitedly planning the gowns they would wear for their quadrille - but not the tearful Carrie herself. To everyone who would listen, Mrs Vanderbilt expressed sympathy for the poor girl's plight, but how could she invite Carrie, the hostess asked the world, when she had never been introduced to the girl's mother?
So it happened that Mrs William Backhouse Astor took to her carriage one afternoon in the winter season of 1883 and had her footman, clad in blue livery, present her engraved card at 660 Fifth Avenue. This gave Mrs Vanderbilt an unprecedented opportunity to snub the great Caroline Astor, an opportunity that would have been irresistible to a less farsighted woman. But Mrs Vanderbilt immediately responded by delivering to the Astor residence an invitation to her ball, as a result of which Carrie was able to attend after all, accompanied by her mother - in a diamond bodice that cost $200,000 - and the rest of Mrs Astor's Four Hundred.
By the turn of the century, New York society had been transformed from Knickerbocker bastion into a volatile amalgam of power, money, and celebrity. Anyone worth a hundred million could buy his way in. Society gentlemen mixed with showgirls. Society ladies left their husbands. Even Mrs Vanderbilt was Mrs Vanderbilt no longer: she had obtained a shocking divorce in 1895 in order to become Mrs Oliver H. P. Belmont. Mrs Astor's own daughter Charlotte, th
e mother of four children, ran away to England with another man. Three sons and one grandson of the multimillionaire Jay Gould took actresses for wives. James Roosevelt Roosevelt married a prostitute. Even the occasional murderer could be lionized, provided he was of the right breed. Harry Thaw, heir though he was to a modest
Pittsburgh mining fortune, would never have achieved celebrity in New York had he not killed the renowned architect Stanford White on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden in 1906. Although Thaw shot the seated White full in the face in plain view of a hundred diners, a jury acquitted him - by reason of insanity - two years later. Some observers said that no American jury would convict a man for murdering the scoundrel who had bedded his wife, although, to be fair to White, his liaison with the young lady in question occurred when she was only a sixteen-year-old unmarried showgirl rather than the respectable Mrs Harry Thaw. Others opined that this jury was especially disinclined to convict, having received too great a sum from Thaw's attorney to feel free, in conscience, to reject his closing plea.
In the summers, Manhattan's rich repaired to marble palaces in Newport and Saratoga, where yachting, horsing, and cardplaying were the principal occupations. In those days, the leading families could still demonstrate why they were their country's finest. Young Harold Vanderbilt, who grew up at 660 Fifth Avenue, would successfully defend the America's Cup three times against British assault. He also invented contract bridge.
As September approached in 1909, a new season was about to begin. Everyone agreed that the crop of debutantes that year was among the choicest in recent memory. Miss Josephine Crosby, the Times observed, was a particularly handsome girl, gifted with a beautiful singing voice. The shapely Miss Mildred Carter had returned with her father from London, where she had danced with the king. Miss Hyde, the heiress, was also to debut, as were Miss Chapin and Miss Rutherford, who was last seen as a bridesmaid to her cousin, the former Miss White, at the latter's marriage to Count Sheer-Thoss.
The Interpretation Of Murder Page 5
