'Yes, yes,' said Ferenczi. 'Oh, look at that little cherub in the corner, with the tiny grapes hanging out of his little mouth. Isn't he adorable?'
Freud was engrossed in conversation with James Hyslop, retired professor of logic at Columbia, who sported an ear trumpet the size of the horn on a Victrola talking machine. Jelliffe had attached himself to Charles Loomis Dana, the eminent neurologist and, unlike our host, a member of the same circles as my Aunt Mamie. In Boston, the Danas are royalty: Sons of Liberty, intimates of the Adamses, and so on. I knew one of Dana's distant cousins, a Miss Draper, from Newport, where she had more than once brought down the house with her impersonation of an old Jewish tailor. Jelliffe reminded me of a glad- handing senator. He had a look of high self-worth, carrying his impressive girth as if corpulence were next to manliness.
Jelliffe pulled me into his group, whom he was regaling with stories about his famous client, Harry Thaw, apparently living like a king in the hospital where he was confined. Jelliffe went so far as to say he would trade places with Thaw at the drop of a hat. What I drew from these remarks was that Jelliffe relished the celebrity of being Thaw's psychiatrist. 'Can you imagine?' he added. 'A year ago he had us all attesting to his insanity, to clear him of murder. Now he wants us to swear to his sanity to get him out of the asylum! And we shall get him out!'
Jelliffe roared with laughter, his arm around Dana's shoulder. Several of his listeners joined in; Dana decidedly did not. About a dozen guests, all told, were scattered about the room, but I understood that one more was expected. Soon enough, a butler opened the doors and preceded a woman into the room.
'Mrs Clara Banwell,' he announced.
'Can you psychoanalyze anyone, Dr Freud?' asked Mrs Banwell, as the party entered Jelliffe's dining room. 'Can you psychoanalyze me?'
On certain social occasions, otherwise dignified and serious men will begin behaving unconsciously like players on a stage, performing as they talk, acting as they gesticulate. The cause is invariably a woman; Clara Banwell produced that effect on Jelliffe's male guests. She was twenty- six, her skin the white of a powdered Japanese princess. Everything about her was perfectly formed. Her shape was exquisite. Her hair was forest-dark, her eyes sea-green, with the luster of a fine provoking intelligence. An iridescent Oriental pearl hung from each ear, and a single large pink conch pearl, encased in a basket of diamonds and platinum, hung below her neck on a silver thread. When she hinted at a smile - and she never more than hinted - men fell at her feet.
In 1909, the guests at a fashionable American dinner made a pairwise procession when called to table, every woman escorted on the arm of a man. Mrs Banwell was not on Freud's arm. She had lightly dropped her fingers on Younger's wrist at the decisive moment, but still she managed to address herself to Freud, while capturing the attention of the entire party as she did so.
Only that morning, Clara Banwell had returned to town from the country, in the same car with Mr and Mrs Harcourt Acton. Jelliffe had run into her in the lobby of their building quite by accident. The moment he learned that her husband, Mr George Banwell, was to be otherwise engaged, he begged Clara to attend his dinner that evening. He assured her she would find the guests most interesting. Jelliffe found Clara Banwell utterly irresistible - and her husband equally unbearable.
'What women want,' Freud replied to her question, as the guests took their seats at a table shimmering with crystal, 'is a mystery, as much to the analyst as to the poet. If only you could tell us, Mrs Banwell, but you cannot. You are the problem, but you are no better able to solve it than are we poor men. Now, what men want is almost always apparent. Our host, for example, instead of his spoon, has picked up his knife by mistake.'
All heads turned to the smiling, bulky form of Jelliffe at the head of the table. It was so: he had his knife - not his bread knife, but his dinner knife - in his right hand. 'What does that signify, Dr Freud?' asked an elderly lady.
'It signifies that Mrs Banwell has aroused our host's aggressive impulses,' said Freud. 'This aggression, arising from circumstances of sexual competition readily comprehensible to everyone, led his hand to the wrong instrument, revealing wishes of which he himself was unconscious.'
There was a murmur around the table.
'A touch, a touch, I do confess it,' cried Jelliffe with unembarrassed good spirits, wagging his knife in Clara's direction, 'except of course when he says that the wishes in question were unconscious.' His civilized scandalousness elicited a burst of appreciative laughter all around.
'By contrast,' Freud went on, 'my good friend Ferenczi here is fastidiously securing his napkin to his collar, as a bib is tucked into a child. He is appealing to your maternal instinct, Mrs Banwell.'
Ferenczi looked about the table with good-natured perplexity: only then did he notice that he was alone in this particular use of his dinner napkin.
'You conversed at length with my husband before dinner, Dr Freud,' said Mrs Hyslop, a grandmotherly woman seated next to Jelliffe. 'What did you learn about him?'
'Professor Hyslop,' replied Freud, 'will you confirm something for me, sir? You did not mention to me your mother's first name, did you?'
'What's that?' said Hyslop, holding his ear trumpet high.
'We didn't speak of your mother, did we?' asked Freud.
'Speak of Mother?' repeated Hyslop. 'Not at all.'
'Her name was Mary,' said Freud.
'How did you know that?' cried Hyslop. He looked accusingly around the table. 'How did he know that? I didn't tell him Mother's name.'
'You certainly did,' said Freud, 'without knowing it. The puzzle to me is your wife's name. Jelliffe tells me it is Alva. I confess I had predicted a variant of Mary. I felt quite certain of it. Thus I have a question for you, Mrs Hyslop, if you will permit me. Does your husband by any chance have a pet name by which he calls you?'
'Why, my middle name is Maria,' said a surprised Mrs Hyslop, 'and he has always called me Marie.'
At this admission, Jelliffe let out a whoop, and Freud received a round of applause.
'I woke up with a catarrh this morning,' interjected a matron across from Ferenczi. 'At the end of summer, too. Does that mean anything, Dr Freud?'
'A catarrh, madam?' Freud paused to consider. 'Sometimes a catarrh, I'm afraid, is only a catarrh.'
'But are women really so mysterious?' Clara Banwell resumed. 'I think you are being much too forgiving of my sex. What women want is the simplest thing in the world.' She turned to the exceedingly good-looking, dark-haired young man on her right, whose white bow tie was just slightly askew. He had said nothing so far. 'What do you think, Dr Younger? Can you tell us what a woman wants?'
Stratham Younger was having difficulty taking Clara Banwell's measure. Although he did not know it, he was laboring to put out of his mind a recurrent image of Mrs Banwell's lovely bare back, undulating gently in the moonlight as she tossed her hair over her shoulder. He was also having trouble separating the idea of Mrs George Banwell from that of Mr George Banwell, whom Younger could not stop thinking of as a murderer, despite the mayor's exculpation of him.
Younger believed that Nora was the loveliest girl he had ever seen. Yet Clara Banwell was quite nearly as attractive, if not more so. Desire in man, says Hegel, always begins with a desire for the other's desire. It was impossible for any man to look on Clara Banwell without wanting her to single him out, favor him, want something from him. Jelliffe, for example, would gladly have dived on a sword if Clara had only seen fit to grace him with a request to do so. On their way into the dining room, when Clara's hand had rested on his arm, Younger had felt the contact throughout his person. Yet there was something about her that distanced him too. Perhaps it was his having met Harcourt Acton. Younger did not consider himself a puritan, but the idea of Mrs Banwell gratifying so weak-looking a man insensibly provoked him.
'I'm sure, Mrs Banwell,' he replied, 'that if you would enlighten us on the subject of woman, it would be far more interesting than if I tried to
.'
'I could tell you, I suppose, how women really feel about men,' said Clara invitingly. 'At least about the men they care for. Would you like that?' A groundswell of assent was heard around the table, at any rate among the male guests. 'But I won't, not unless you men promise to say how you really feel about women.' The bargain was promptly struck by general acclamation, although Younger held his tongue, as did Charles Dana at the foot of the table.
'Well, since you force me, gentlemen,' said Clara, 'I'll confess our secret. Women are men's inferiors. I know it is backward of me to say so, but to deny it is folly. All of mankind's riches, material and spiritual, are men's creations. Our towering cities, our science, art, and music - all built, discovered, painted, and composed by you men. Women know this. We cannot help being overmastered by stronger men, and we cannot help resenting you for it. A woman's love for a man is half animal passion and half hate. The more a woman loves a man, the more she hates him. If a man is worth having, he must be a woman's superior; if he is her superior, part of her must hate him. It is only in beauty we surpass you, and it is therefore no wonder that we worship beauty above all else. That is why a woman,' she wound up, 'is at her greatest peril in the presence of a beautiful man.'
Her audience was mesmerized, a reaction to which Clara Banwell was not unaccustomed. Younger felt she had thrown him the most fleeting glance at the very end of her remarks - he was not the only man at table who had this impression - but he told himself he had imagined it. It also occurred to Younger that Mrs Banwell might have just explained the wild extremes of conflicting emotion his own mother had displayed toward his father. Younger's father killed himself in 1904; his mother had not remarried. He wondered whether his mother had always both loved and hated his father, in the manner Mrs Banwell had described.
'Envy is certainly the predominant force in women's mental lives, Mrs Banwell,' said Freud. 'That is why women have so little sense of justice.'
'Men are not envious?' asked Clara.
'Men are ambitious,' he replied. 'Their envy derives chiefly from that source. A woman's envy, by contrast, is always erotic. The difference can be seen in daydreams. All of us daydream, of course. Men, however, have two kinds: erotic and ambitious. A woman's daydreams are exclusively erotic.'
'I am sure mine are not,' declared the rotund woman with the catarrh.
'I think Dr Freud is quite right,' said Clara Banwell, 'on all counts, but particularly about men's ambitiousness. My husband, George, for example. He is the perfect man. He is not at all beautiful. But he is handsome, twenty years older than I, successful, strong, single-minded, indomitable. For all those things, I love him. He also hasn't the slightest awareness that I exist, the moment I am out of his sight; his ambition is that strong. For that, I hate him. Nature requires me to. The happy consequence, however, is that I am free to do whatever I like - for example, being here tonight at one of Smith's delightful dinner parties - and George will never even know I left the apartment.'
'Clara,' responded Jelliffe, 'I'm wounded. You never told me you had such freedom.'
'I said I was free to do as I like, Smith,' Clara replied, 'not as you like.' Laughter again was general. 'Well, now I've confessed. What do the men say? Don't men secretly despise the bonds of marital fidelity? No, Smith, please; I know what you think. I'd like a more objective opinion. Dr Freud, is marriage a good thing?'
'For society or for the individual?' Freud responded. 'For society, marriage is undoubtedly beneficial. But the burdens of civilized morality are too heavy for many to bear. How long have you been a wife, Mrs Banwell?'
'I married George when I was nineteen,' Clara answered, and the thought of a nineteen-year-old Clara Banwell on her wedding night occupied the minds of several guests - not only of the male variety. 'That makes seven years.'
'In that case you will know enough,' Freud went on, 'if not from your own experience, then that of your friends, not to be surprised by what I say. Satisfying intercourse does not last long in most marriages. After four or five years, marriage tends to fail utterly in this respect, and when this happens it spells the end of spiritual communion too. As a result, in the great run of cases, marriage ends in disappointment, spiritual as well as physical. The man and the woman are thrown back, psychologically speaking, to their premarital state - with only one difference. They are poorer now. Poorer by the loss of an illusion.'
Clara Banwell stared intently at Freud.
'What is he saying?' old Professor Hyslop called out, trying to get his ear horn nearer to Freud.
'He is justifying adultery,' replied Charles Dana, speaking for the first time. 'You know, Dr Freud, apart from the parlor tricks, it is your focus on the maladies of sexual frustration that surprises me. Our problem is surely not that we place too much constraint on sexual license; it is that we place too little.'
'Oh?' said Freud.
'A billion people now live on this earth. A billion. And the number is growing geometrically. How are they to live, Dr Freud? What are they to eat? Millions flood our shores every year: the poorest, the least intelligent, the most prone to criminality. Our city is near anarchy because of them. Our jails are bursting. They breed like flies. And they steal from us. One cannot blame them; if a man is too poor to feed his children, he must steal. Yet you, Dr Freud, if I understand your ideas, seem concerned only with the evils of sexual repression. I would think a man of science ought to be more concerned with the dangers of sexual emancipation.'
'What do you propose, Charles, an end to immigration?' asked Jelliffe.
'Sterilization,' replied Dana sanguinely, dabbing a napkin to his mouth. 'The meanest farmer knows not to let his worst stock breed. Men are no more created equal than castle. If cattle were allowed to breed freely, we should have very poor meat indeed. Every immigrant to this country without means should be sterilized.'
'Not involuntarily, Charles, surely?' asked Mrs Hyslop.
'No one compels them to come here, Alva,' he replied. 'No one compels them to stay. How then can it be called involuntary? If they wish to reproduce, let them leave. What is involuntary is our being required to bear the charge of their unfit offspring, who end up as beggars and thieves. I make an exception, of course, for those who can pass an intelligence test. Splendid soup, Jelliffe, a true turtle, isn't it? Oh, I know, you will all say I am cruel and heartless. But I am only taking away their fertility. Dr Freud would take away something far more important.'
'What is that?' asked Clara.
'Their morality,' answered Dana. 'What sort of world would it be, Dr Freud, if your views became general? I can almost picture it. The lower orders come to scorn "civilized morality." Gratification becomes god. All join in rejecting discipline and self-denial, without which life has no dignity. The mob will run riot; why should they not? And this mob, what will they want when the rules of civilization are lifted? Do you think they will want only sex? They will want new rules. They will want to obey some new madman. They will want blood - your blood, probably, Dr Freud, if history is any guide. They will want to prove themselves superior, as the lowest always do. And they will kill to prove it. I picture bloodletting, great bloodletting, on a scale never seen before. You would pipe away civilized morality - the only thing that keeps man's brutality in check. What do you offer in exchange, Dr Freud? What will you put in its place?'
'Only the truth,' said Freud.
'The truth of Oedipus?' said Dana.
'Among others,' said Freud.
'A great deal of good it did him.'
A candle flickered at Nora Acton's bedside. The lamplight from Gramercy Park played palely at her curtains. The illumination was insufficient even to give a silhouette to the man whose presence Nora felt, rather than saw, inside her room. She wanted to cry out, but her mind would not operate on her body. It had somehow broken free, her mind, and was wandering off on its own. It or she seemed to float up from her own bed, rising toward the ceiling, leaving her small nightgowned body on the bed below.
Now she saw her assailant distinctly, but from above. Looking down on herself, she saw him remove the handkerchief from her face. She saw him dab a woman's red lipstick onto her sleeping, yielding mouth. Why would he put color on her lips? She liked how it looked; she had always wondered. What would the man do next? From above, Nora watched him light a cigarette in the flame of her bedside candle, place a knee against her supine form, and extinguish the glowing cigarette directly on her skin, down there, only an inch or two from her most private part.
Her body flinched against the knee that held her down. She saw it from above; she saw herself flinch. It was as if she were in pain. But she wasn't, was she? Observing everything from above, she felt nothing at all. And if she, watching herself, was not in pain, then there was no pain - there was no one else to feel it - was there?
Part 4
Chapter Sixteen
I will have to act as if I don't love her, as if I have no feelings for her at all. So I told myself while shaving Thursday morning. At ten-thirty I was to call at the Actons' to resume Nora's analysis. I knew I could have her. But that would be exploitation, manipulation, taking advantage of her therapeutic vulnerability - violating the oath of care I took when I became a doctor.
It is impossible to describe what ideas come to mind when I picture this girl, and I picture her nearly every waking moment. Well, not impossible, but inadvisable. What I literally cannot describe is the hollowness in my lungs when I am out of her presence. It is as if I were dying from the want of her.
I feel like Hamlet, paralyzed. With this difference: I feel I will die if I do not act, while Hamlet feels he will die if he does. For Hamlet, 'to be' is not to act. To take action is to die; it is 'not to be':
To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them. To die…
The Interpretation Of Murder Page 21
