'Been watching me all this time, have you, Seamus?' asked the man.
'Never in life, sir. I was sleeping all the while,' said Malley, who shivered like a man who had been sleeping in a cold, damp place.
The man in black tie doubted this assertion very much, although it happened to be true. But true or not, it made no difference, because Malley had seen him now. 'Shame on me, Seamus,' he said, 'if I'm the man to fire you for such a thing. Don't you know my mother, God rest her soul, was Irish?'
'I didn't know it, sir.'
'Why, didn't she take me by the hand thirty years ago to see Parnell himself come off the ship, practically right above our heads, where we're standing at this moment?'
'You're a lucky man, sir,' Malley answered.
'I'll tell you what you need, Seamus, and that's a fifth of good Irish whiskey to keep you company down here, which I happen to have in my car. Why don't you come up with me and I'll give it to you, provided you share a drop first. Then you can come back and make yourself comfortable.'
'You're too good, sir, too good,' said Malley.
'Oh, stop your gabbing and come on then.' Ushering Malley up the ramp to the elevator, the man in black tie pulled the lever to begin their ascent. 'I'll be needing to charge you rent, don't you know It's only fair.'
'Why, I'd pay anything at all for the view alone,' replied Malley. 'We're going to miss the first holding stage, sir. You need to stop.'
'Not a bit of it,' said the taller man. 'You're coming straight back down in five minutes, Seamus. No need to stop if you go straight back down.'
'Is that it, sir?'
'That's it. It's all in the tables.' And the man in black tie actually pulled a copy of the decompression tables from his vest, waving them before Malley It was quite true: a man in the caisson could make a quick trip up and down without illness, provided he spent no more than a few minutes on the surface. 'All right: ready to hold your breath?'
'My breath?' Malley asked.
The man in black tie yanked down the elevator brake, jerking the cabin to a sudden stop. 'What are you thinking, man?' he cried. 'We're going straight up, I tell you. You've got to hold your breath from here clear to the top. You want to die of the bends?' They were about a third of the way up the shaft, some sixty-five feet below the surface. 'How long have you been down, fifteen hours?'
'Closer on to twenty, sir.'
'Twenty hours down, Seamus - you'd be paralyzed for sure, if you lived at all. I'll tell you what it is. You take a deep breath, like me, and you hold it for dear life. Don't let go. You'll feel a little pressure, but don't let go, no matter what. Are you ready?'
Malley nodded. The two men each swallowed an immense lungful of air. Then the man in black tie started the elevator once more. As they rose, Malley felt an increasing burden in his chest. The man in black tie felt no such pressure, because he was only pretending to hold his breath. In actuality, he was steadily but invisibly exhaling as the elevator made its way to the surface. Over the throbbing din of the steam engines, the sound of his breath escaping could not be heard.
Malley's chest began to ache. To indicate his discomfort, and his difficulty keeping in his breath, he pointed at his chest and mouth. The man in black tie shook his head and waved his forefinger, emphasizing how important it was that Malley not exhale. He beckoned Malley toward him, put his large hand over Malley's mouth and nose, closing off those passageways completely. He raised his eyebrows as if to ask Malley whether that was better. Malley nodded, grimacing. His face turned redder, his eyes began to bulge, and just as the elevator reached its terminus, he coughed involuntarily into the hand of the man with black tie. That hand was now covered with blood.
The human lung is surprisingly inelastic. It cannot stretch. At sixty-five feet below the earth's surface, when Malley took his last breath, the ambient pressure is approximately three atmospheres, which means that Malley took into his lungs three times the normal quantity of air. As the elevator ascended, this air expanded. His lungs quickly inflated beyond their capacity, like overstretched balloons. Soon the pleura in Malley's lungs - the tiny sacs that hold the air - began to burst, rapid-fire, one after the other. The released air invaded his pleural cavity - the space between chest and lung - causing a condition called pneumothorax, in which one of his lungs collapsed.
'Seamus, Seamus, you didn't exhale, did you?' They had reached the top, but the man in black tie made no move to open the elevator door.
'I swear I didn't,' Malley gasped. 'Mother of God. What's wrong with me?'
'You've lost a lung, is all,' replied the taller man. 'That won't kill you.'
'I need' - Malley collapsed to his knees - 'to lie down.'
'Lie down? No, man: we have to keep you standing, do you hear me?' The taller man seized Malley under the shoulders, hauled him upright, and propped him against the elevator wall. 'That's better.'
Like most gases trapped in a liquid, air bubbles in a man's bloodstream rise straight upward. Keeping Malley vertical ensured that the air bubbles still in Malley's lungs, forcing their way through his ruptured pleural capillaries, would proceed directly to his heart and from there to his coronary and carotid arteries.
'Thanks,' whispered Malley. 'Will I be all right?'
'We'll know any minute now,' said the man.
Malley gripped his head, which began to swim. The veins in his cheeks were showing blue. 'What's happening to me?' he asked.
'Well, I'd say you're having a stroke, Seamus.'
'Am I going to die?'
'I'll be honest with you, man: if I took us straight back down, right now, all the way down, I might just save you.' This was true. Recompression was the only way to save a man dying from decompression. 'But do you know what it is?' The man in black tie took his time, cleaning the blood from his hand with a fresh handkerchief before finishing: 'My mother wasn't Irish.'
Malley s mouth opened as if to speak. He looked at the man who had killed him. Then his head jerked back, his eyes glazed over, and he moved no more. The man in black tie calmly opened the elevator door. No one was there. He returned to his car, found a bottle of whiskey in the back, and returned to the elevator, where he placed the bottle next to the slumped body. Poor Malley's corpse would be discovered in a few hours, to be mourned as yet another victim of the caisson. A good man, his friends would agree, but a fool to have been spending nights down there, in a place unfit for man or beast. Why, some wondered, had he tried to come out in the middle of the night, and how could he have forgotten to stop at the holding stages? Must have been spooked as well as drunk. On the pier, no one would notice the red clay footprints left by the murderer. All the caisson men tracked the same stuff, and the outlines of the man's elegant shoes were soon obliterated by the random treading of a thousand heavy boots.
Part 3
Chapter Eleven
I woke at six on Wednesday morning. I hadn't dreamt of Nora Acton - so far as I knew - but as I opened my eyes in the wainscoted white box of my hotel room, I was thinking of her all the same. Could sexual desire for her father really underlie Miss Acton's symptoms? That was plainly the thrust of Freud's thinking. I didn't want to believe it; the thought repulsed me.
I never liked Oedipus. I didn't like the play, I didn't like the man, and I didn't like Freud's eponymous theory. It was the one piece of psychoanalysis I never embraced. That we have an unconscious mental life, that we are constantly suppressing forbidden sexual desires and the aggressions that arise in their wake, that these suppressed wishes manifest themselves in our dreams, our slips of the tongue, our neuroses - all this I believed. But that men want sex with their mothers, and girls with their fathers - this I did not accept. Freud would say, of course, that my skepticism was 'resistance.' He would say I did not want the Oedipus theory to be true. No doubt that was so. But resistance, whatever else it is, surely does not prove the truth of the idea resisted.
Which is why I kept coming back to Hamlet and to Freud's irresistible but infuriating so
lution to its riddle. In two sentences, Freud had demolished the long-standing notion that Hamlet was, as Jung's 'great-grandfather' Goethe had it, the overly intellectual aesthete, constitutionally incapable of resolute action. As Freud pointed out, Hamlet repeatedly takes decisive action. He kills Polonius. He plans and executes his play-within-a-play, tricking Claudius into revealing his guilt. He sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths. Apparently there is just one thing he cannot do: take vengeance on the villain who killed his father and bedded his mother.
And the reason, Freud says, the real reason, is simple. Hamlet sees in his uncle's deeds his own secret wishes realized: his Oedipal wishes.
Claudius has done only what Hamlet himself wanted to do. 'Thus the loathing which should drive him on to revenge' - to quote Freud - 'is replaced in him by self- reproaches, by scruples of conscience.' That Hamlet suffers from self-reproach is undeniable. Over and over, he castigates himself - excessively, almost irrationally He even contemplates suicide. Or at least that is how the To be, or not to be speech is always interpreted. Hamlet is wondering whether to take his own life. Why? Why does Hamlet feel guilty and suicidal when he thinks of avenging his father? No one in three hundred years had ever been able to explain the most famous soliloquy of all drama - until Freud.
According to Freud, Hamlet knows - unconsciously - that he himself wished to kill his father and that he himself wished to replace his father in his mother's bed, just as Claudius has done. Claudius is, therefore, the embodiment of Hamlet's own secret wishes; he is a mirror of Hamlet himself. Hamlet's thoughts run straight from revenge to guilt and suicide because he sees himself in his uncle. Killing Claudius would be both a reenactment of his own Oedipal desires and a kind of self-slaughter. That is why Hamlet is paralyzed. That is why he cannot take action. He is an hysteric, suffering from the overwhelming guilt of Oedipal desires he has not successfully repressed.
And yet, I felt, there must be some other explanation. There must be another meaning of To be, or not to be. If I could only solve that soliloquy, I somehow imagined it would vindicate my objection to the entire Oedipus theory. But I never had.
At breakfast, I found Brill and Ferenczi at the same table they had occupied yesterday. Brill was manfully assaulting a plate of steak and eggs. Ferenczi was not so hale: he insisted he was not going to touch a crumb all day. Both seemed a little forced in their conversation with me; I think I had interrupted them in private talk. 'The waiters,' said Ferenczi, 'they are all Negro. Is that common in America?'
'Only in the better establishments,' replied Brill. 'New Yorkers opposed emancipation, don't forget, until they realized what it meant: they would get to keep their blacks as servants, only it would cost them less.'
'New York did not oppose emancipation,' I put in.
'A riot is not opposition?' asked Brill.
Ferenczi said, 'You must ignore him, Younger, really you must.'
'Yes, ignore me,' Brill responded. 'Everyone does. Instead, we must attend solely to Jung, because he is "more important than the rest of us put together." '
I saw that Jung had been their topic before I appeared. I asked if they could give me a clearer sense of Jung's relationship to Freud. They did.
Quite recently, over the last two years, Freud had attracted a new set of Swiss followers. Jung was the most prominent. The Zurichers were resented by Freud's original Viennese disciples, whose jealousy had intensified when Freud made Jung editor in chief of the Psychoanalytical Yearbook, the first periodical in the world devoted to the new psychology. In this position, Jung had the power to rule on the merits of everyone else's work. The Viennese objected that Jung had not genuinely embraced the 'sexual aetiology' - Freud's core discovery that repressed sexual wishes lie behind hysteria and other mental illnesses. They felt Jung's elevation demonstrated favoritism on Freud's part. Here, Brill told me, the Viennese were righter than they knew. Freud not only favored Jung but had already selected him as his 'crown prince' and 'heir' - the man who would take over the movement.
I didn't mention having already heard Freud make this very statement to Jung last night, principally because I would then have had to describe Freud's mishap. Instead, I observed that Jung seemed highly sensitive to Freud's opinion of him.
'Oh, we all are,' Ferenczi answered. 'But, not to question, Freud and Jung have very father-son relations. I saw them myself on the ship. Hence Jung is very sensitive to any rebuke. It enrages him. Especially about the transference. Jung has - how shall I say? - a different philosophy when it comes to transference.'
'Really? Has he published it?' I asked.
Ferenczi exchanged a look with Brill. 'Not exactly. I am speaking of his approach to his patients. His - ah - female patients. You understand.'
I was beginning to.
Brill whispered, 'He sleeps with them. He is notorious.'
'Myself, I have never,' said Ferenczi. 'But I have not yet faced too many temptations, so congratulations in my case are sadly premature.'
'Does Dr Freud know?'
This time Ferenczi whispered, 'One of Jung's patients wrote to Freud, most upset, describing everything. Freud showed me letters on the ship. There is even a letter from Jung to the girl's mother - very peculiar. Freud consulted me for guidance.' Ferenczi was distinctly proud of this. 'I told him he should not take the girl's word as proof. Of course I already knew all about it. Everyone does. A beautiful girl - Jewish - a student. They say Jung did not treat her well.'
'Oh, no,' said Brill, looking at the entryway to the breakfast room. Freud was on his way in, but not by himself. He was accompanied by another man, whom I had met in New Haven at the psychoanalytic congress there a few months ago. It was Ernest Jones, Freud's British follower.
Jones had come to New York to join our party for the week. He would then travel up to Clark with us on Saturday. About forty, Jones was as short as Brill but a little stouter, with an exceedingly white face, dark well-oiled hair, almost no chin, and a tight, thin-lipped smile more suggestive of self-satisfaction than amiability. He had the peculiar habit of looking away from a person while addressing him. Freud, who was joking with Jones as they approached our table, was plainly delighted to see him. Neither Ferenczi nor Brill appeared to share this sentiment.
'Sandor Ferenczi,' said Jones. 'What a surprise, old fellow. But you weren't invited, were you? By Hall, I mean, to give a paper at Clark?'
'No,' answered Ferenczi, 'but -'
'And Abraham Brill,' Jones went on, casting his eyes about the room as if expecting to find others he knew. 'How are we getting on? Still only three patients?'
'Four,' said Brill.
'Well, count yourself lucky, old man,' replied Jones. 'I am so crawling with patients in Toronto I don't have a minute to put pen to paper. No, all I have in the pipeline is my handwriting piece for Neurology, a little thing for Insanity, and the lecture I gave at New Haven, which Prince wants to publish. What about you, Brill, anything coming out?'
Jones's remarks had produced an atmosphere less than convivial. Brill assumed an expression of feigned disappointment. 'Only Freud's hysteria book, I'm afraid,' he said.
Jones's lips worked, but nothing came out.
'Yes, only my translation of Freud,' Brill went on. 'My German was rustier than I would ever have believed, but it's done.'
Relief filled Jones's countenance. 'Freud doesn't need translating into German, you sod,' he said, laughing out loud. 'Freud writes in German. He needs an English translator.'
'I am the English translator,' said Brill.
Jones looked dumbfounded. To Freud he said, 'You - you don't - you're letting Brill translate you?' And to Brill, 'But is your English quite up to it, old man? You are an immigrant, after all.'
'Ernest,' said Freud, 'you are displaying jealousy.'
'Me?' answered Jones. 'Jealous of Brill? How could I. be?'
At that moment, a boy carrying a silver platter called out Brill's name. The platter had an envelope on it. With a self-import
ant air, Brill tipped the boy a dime. 'I've always wanted to receive a telegram in a hotel,' he said cheerily. 'I nearly sent one to myself yesterday, just to see how it felt.'
When, however, Brill pulled the message from its envelope, his features froze. Ferenczi seized the missive from his hands and showed it to us. The telegram read:
THEN THE LORD RAINED UPON SODOM BRIMSTONE AND FIRE
STOP AND LO THE SMOKE OF THE COUNTRY WENT UP AS
THE SMOKE OF A FURNACE STOP BUT HIS WIFE LOOKED
BACK FROM BEHIND HIM AND SHE BECAME A PILLAR OF
SALT STOP BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE STOP
'Again,' Brill whispered.
'I say,' Jones responded, 'there's no reason to look as if one had seen a ghost. It is plainly from some religious fanatic. America is full of them.'
'How did they know I would be here?' Brill replied, unreassured.
Mayor George McClellan lived on the Row, in one of the stately Greek Revival townhouses lining Washington Square North. Leaving his house early Wednesday morning, McClellan was startled to see Coroner Hugel rushing toward him from the park across the street. The two gentlemen met between the Corinthian columns framing the mayor's front door.
'Hugel,' said McClellan, 'what are you doing here? Good Lord, man, you look like you haven't slept in days.'
'I had to be sure of finding you,' exclaimed the winded coroner.
'Banwell did it.'
'What?'
'George Banwell killed the Riverford girl,' said Hugel.
'Don't be ridiculous,' replied the mayor. 'I've known Banwell for twenty years.'
'From the moment I entered her apartment,' said Hugel, 'he tried to obstruct the investigation. He threatened to have me removed from the case. He tried to prevent the autopsy.'
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