A Deadly Affection (39 page)

“Did you tell him who made you pregnant?”

“Yes, I told them both.”

He leaned forward, palms inching forward on his knees. “Tell me what you told them, Eliza.”

“That the baby is a gift from God.”

The professor sat back in defeat. I gestured to him to let me have a try.

“Eliza,” I began, “remember that this is a safe place. No harm or shame can come to you here for remembering. It's all right to see the father's face, Eliza, and to say his name.”

She didn't respond.

“Your baby is going to want to know who her father is. Do you think you could tell us, for her sake?”

A tear appeared at the corner of her eye and trickled down her cheek.

“I'm sorry to make you cry,” I said gently. “But maybe if you tell us, you'll feel better.”

“I'm not crying,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice.

“I can see a tear on your face.”

“That's not my tear.”

“It's not?” I couldn't help smiling. “Whose is it, then?”

“It's hers.”

“Whose?”

“The sad one's.”

“I'm sorry, I don't—” I stopped, as Professor Bogard's hand landed on my arm.

“Why is the sad one crying, Eliza?” he broke in.

“I don't know,” she said carelessly. “She's always crying.”

“Does the sad one have a name?”

“She's called Bitty.”

He turned to me, jabbing his finger toward the writing pad. “Double personality,” he rasped in my ear. “One-way cognizant at the very least!”

Turning back to Eliza, he asked, “Do you think Bitty would be willing to talk to us?”

“I don't know… She's never talked to anyone before.”

“Could we ask her?”

“If you like.” Her chin drooped toward her chest as her breath left her in a deep exhale. Several seconds passed.

“Bitty?” the professor said tentatively.

Eliza's head rose. “Yes?”

My hand froze on the writing tablet.

“Hello, Bitty. My name is Dr. Bogard. My assistant, Dr. Summerford, and I would like to ask you some questions if you don't mind.”

“What do you want to know?” she asked.

The professor wagged his eyebrows urgently toward the writing pad, but I couldn't get my hand to move. For although it was Eliza's face I was looking at, and Eliza's lips that were uttering the words, the voice that I was hearing belonged to someone else.

It was lower, sadder,
emptier
somehow than Eliza's. Her posture had changed as well, her chin and knees drawing toward each other, hunching her over as if to ward off potential attack. I was, of course, familiar with the phenomenon of divided personality; we'd studied it at school, giving particular attention to both Azam's “Felida X” analysis and the Bourne case reported in Henry James's
Principles of Psychology
. But while I'd always accepted the concept in theory, I'd never before been asked to accept that it was sitting on the sofa across from me.

“We're trying to find someone,” the professor was saying. “We hoped you might be able to help.”

“I know,” replied Eliza, or Bitty, or whomever we were speaking with. “I've been listening.”

The professor lifted the pen and pad from my lap.
Successive and mutually cognizant
, he scratched across the paper, underlining it twice before handing it back to me.

The pad lay idle on my knees as I struggled to accept the fact that the woman I'd become so intimately involved with over the past two weeks was actually two personalities in one. Though it was a deeply unnerving idea, I couldn't reject it out of hand. The theory behind divided personality was well established. We knew that the mind was made up of individual neurons that acted together to form organizations of increasing complexity. Some very distinguished thinkers had posited that these complex organizations were in effect subordinate minds, each with its own mental continuity. It was believed that in unstable individuals, a physical or emotional blow could produce a disintegration of the primary, conscious organization, permitting one or more of these alternate, unconscious systems to push through.

“It's very important that we find the father of Eliza's baby,” the professor said to Bitty. “But Eliza won't tell us who he is.”

“She can't,” Bitty said. “She doesn't know.”

“You mean she doesn't know his name?”

“She doesn't know, because she wasn't there.”

“I see,” the professor said slowly. “But you were there, is that correct?”

She nodded.

“Could you tell us who he is, then?”

“I want to,” she said softly, “but I'm afraid.”

“What are you afraid of, Bitty?”

She didn't answer.

“Bitty?”

“He…he said if I told, he wouldn't let me go to Bridget's house anymore. And that he wouldn't buy me a new coat, and I'd have to wear a secondhand one from Rosenbergs, like Eva Hertz.”

The professor sat slowly back in his chair. “I see,” he said again with a trace of sadness in his voice.

I looked at him in bewilderment. What did he see? What on earth did the baby's father have to do with secondhand coats?

“It's all right, Bitty. You don't have to tell me,” the professor said. “I think I already know. You're talking about your own father, aren't you?”

Her head tipped forward in the barest of nods. I felt a crawling sensation in my stomach.

“It must be very hard to talk about what your father did,” the professor said. “But it's safe to tell us if you wish to.”

She hesitated for a long moment, as another tear trickled down her face. “I didn't mind it at first,” she said hoarsely. “He used to tickle me with his whiskers after he came home late from the saloon and play Indian Bill on my back. Sometimes, he even gave me pennies for candy…”

“But then something changed?”

She nodded.

“What was it that changed, Bitty?”

Her tears were flowing more freely now. “He said he was cold,” she said in hardly more than a whisper, “and needed to come under the covers to warm up.”

“Your father came into your bed with you?”

“I didn't want him to. I didn't like the way he talked or the way he smelled. He kept rubbing up against me and making funny noises. Sometimes, he squeezed me so tight, it made me want to cry.”

“Did this happen more than once?”

She nodded. “I tried to give him his pennies back,” she said, her voice breaking. “I told him I didn't want them anymore.”

“Did you ever tell anybody?” the professor asked somberly.

“I couldn't.”

“Because he wouldn't let you see your friend.”

“Not just because of that,” she said, becoming agitated. “I was afraid he'd be angry if he found out. But it didn't matter. He got angry anyway. The time…the time the baby happened.”

I didn't want to hear any more; I wanted to tell her to stop right there, as if by staunching the memory, I could somehow stop the thing itself from happening. But the professor was already urging her on.

“I want you to go back to that time, Bitty. To the time the baby happened. I want you to try to remember everything you saw and heard and felt as clearly as though it were happening right now.” He waited for a moment, then asked, “Is it nighttime?”

“Yes,” she answered thickly.

“What are you doing?”

“Helping Mother with the dishes.”

“Where's your father?”

“He's coming up the stairs. I can hear him cursing, and bumping into the walls. Mama hears him too. She says I have to finish the dishes, because she's going in to bed.” She was pushing the words out in short bursts, her breath coming fast and shallow. “But I don't want to stay out here alone! I want to go in with Mama—” She stopped.

“What is it, Bitty?” asked the professor.

“The door won't open. She locked the door! Mama, let me in! I don't want to be alone with Papa!” Suddenly, she shrank back, hugging herself.

“What's the matter?”

“Papa heard.” Her face blanched. “No, Papa, don't!”

“What's happening?”

“He's grabbing my hair,” she wailed. “He's pulling me into my bedroom and calling me names, horrible names…” Her head rocked back against the sofa. “No, Papa, don't; get off of me! Papa, that hurts—”

I started reaching toward her, but the professor stopped me with a quick shake of his head. She writhed and moaned for a few more moments before her body went slack. She turned her face against the sofa and sobbed, openmouthed, into the fabric.

The professor waited until her tears had subsided, then said quietly, “It's all right, Bitty. It's over now.”

She drew a deep, shuddering breath.

“You can rest.”

Her breath left her in a long, weary sigh as her head dropped toward her chest.

I sank back in my seat. Never in my wildest imaginings had it occurred to me that Eliza's father might also be Olivia's. And yet, it explained everything. Dr. Huntington had been right in suspecting that paternal transmission was the reason for the early onset of Olivia's disease. He could never have guessed, however, that in this case, father and grandfather were one and the same.

“Now look at the clock and see the hands moving forward to the present,” the professor was saying. He waited a moment, then asked, “May I speak with Eliza again?”

Her head rose once more from her chest.

“Eliza?” the professor asked.

“Yes?” she replied, in Eliza's familiar voice.

“Bitty was just here, speaking with Dr. Summerford and me. She was telling us about your father.”

“Bitty never liked Father very much,” she observed.

“Do you know why?”

“I suppose because he favored me over her.”

“Ah, yes. You were his little princess, weren't you? Tell me, Eliza, did you love your father?”

“Of course I did.”

“Was he kind to you?”

“Oh yes. He was always giving me treats and telling me stories.”

“Did he ever do anything to hurt you?”

“Goodness, no!”

“He never asked you to do things you didn't want to do?”

“I told you, I was his princess. Elizabeth was the one who had to do the chores.”

“Elizabeth?” The professor cocked his head. “Who's Elizabeth?”

“She's the old one. Dr. Summerford met her at the church.”

“I did?” I asked in astonishment.

“Don't you remember? She was there at the beginning. She didn't want to stay, though; she didn't like what you were saying. But I did. I could tell you knew what it was like to miss someone the way I do, every single day. I thought you could help me find my Joy.”

I recalled how sullen and withdrawn Mrs. Miner had seemed at the start of my first class, twisting her hands in apparent distress and protesting that she didn't belong there. It had been a different woman altogether who'd unburdened herself to me after the others were gone. Indeed, I remembered thinking how young and vulnerable that confiding woman seemed in contrast to the dour persona of before. “Call me Eliza,” she had said—not Elizabeth, the name Reverend Palmers and Mrs. Braun called Mrs. Miner by.

“I remember,” I said, trying to behave as though this was the most normal conversation in the world, although my mind was turning somersaults.

“Then you can understand why Papa never cared for her. She really is the most disagreeable thing.”

The “old one,” she had called her; did that mean that Elizabeth was the “real” Mrs. Miner? I stared at the familiar face in front of me, trying to sort out the parade of personalities that apparently existed behind it. In the Felida X case, the original or primary personality had been an introverted, uncommunicative girl who worked hard but took little joy in life—not unlike the somber woman I had glimpsed that first day of class, and perhaps again outside the Tombs, and even on my first visit to Mrs. Miner's home after her release. Felida experienced frequent pains in her temples, followed by a brief state of deep lethargy from which the secondary personality emerged. This secondary personality was less constrained than the original, more sensitive and open to others—much like the “Eliza” I had come to know.

But if Eliza was a secondary personality, what purpose did she serve? Her love for Joy was unconditional; of that I was certain. Finding her daughter was the be-all and end-all of her existence. But Joy, I now knew, was the result of a paternal rape. Why would a personality be dedicated to remembering such an abomination, let alone trying to find her?

In the next second, the question answered itself: it was precisely because of the impossibility of loving the child with knowledge of its conception that Eliza needed to exist. Unaware of the rape, Eliza had been able to feel love for the child blossoming inside her womb, a love untainted by shame or anger or self-hatred. Eliza was the loving mother, the personality allowed to experience both the miracle of Joy's birth and the pain of her loss. She was the one who kept Joy's memory alive.

“Tell me about Elizabeth,” the professor was saying.

“She really is too tedious to talk about,” Eliza replied with a sigh. “Although I'll admit, she's had me worried lately. She seems to have gotten worse and worse since the boy died.”

The professor turned to me, one eyebrow cocked.

I'd almost forgotten about Mrs. Miner's second child, conceived during her brief marriage to a dock worker. “You mean the one who died in his crib a few years ago.”

“Yes,” she said. “She took it very badly.”

“What do you mean when you say she's gotten worse and worse?” the professor asked.

“Just the other day, she tried to cut herself with the box knife. I had to take it away from her.”

“Was she trying to kill herself?”

“No, I don't think so. I think she was just punishing herself.”

“What for?”

“Oh, I don't know. She's always punishing herself for one thing or another. That's just the way she is.”

The professor pondered this for a moment. “Does Elizabeth know about you and Bitty?” he asked.

“Heavens no, she doesn't know anything. Although I think Bitty leaves her little presents sometimes to try to make her feel better.”

The professor glanced briefly at my writing pad as if trying to work out the appropriate classification. Apparently abandoning the effort for the time being, he turned back to Eliza and asked, “Has she ever managed to actually hurt herself?”

“Well, I can't always be there to stop her. One time, when Papa didn't like the way she ironed his shirts, she burned her hand on the flatiron. And once, when he shouted at her from the window for taking too long with his growler, she ran in front of a delivery cart—on purpose. It's just lucky that the driver saw her in time.”

“Has she ever hurt anyone else?” I asked.

“I don't think so.”

“Are you aware of everything she does?”

“Lord, no! I couldn't stand to watch her all the time. All that praying and ‘yes, Mother' and ‘no, Mother'…”

The discovery that Mrs. Miner was a multiple personality explained many things that had perplexed me. But it also raised a frightening possibility. I still believed that the woman I'd come to know and care for, the personality that called herself Eliza, was incapable of murder. But I couldn't vouch for Elizabeth, or Bitty, or whoever else might exist in that crowded mind. I believed Eliza had told me the truth about what she witnessed in Dr. Hauptfuhrer's office on the morning of the murder. But what if she hadn't been there the whole time? What if some other personality had emerged to kill him, returning at a later date to kill his daughter too?

I told myself it was too fantastic an idea to consider seriously, that none of the reported cases had demonstrated such a radical schism in moral functioning. And yet, I couldn't help thinking of the most familiar double personality of them all: the infamous Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There was a case of two minds in one body—and one of them had belonged to a killer. But of course, that was just fiction. Mr. Stevenson had been using the device to examine the dual nature that existed in us all. It couldn't happen in real life—or could it?