A Deadly Affection (7 page)

“But isn't it possible that her story is true?” I interjected. “After all, men do take sexual advantage of women every day. It seems quite plausible to me that she had this baby and wanted to keep it, but was forced to give it up.”

“Of course it's possible, my dear,” Professor Bogard said, “but in the absence of any corroborating evidence, it mustn't be assumed.” Peering at me over his spectacles, he added, “Remember, it isn't only the patient's story that must be questioned. The psychotherapist must constantly examine his own objectivity as well. It isn't unusual for a patient's experience to trigger memories and emotions in the therapist that could distort his understanding of the issues.”

I shrank in my chair as the meaning of his words sank in. “I'm aware of that possibility,” I said stiffly, hoping Mayhew didn't detect my discomfort.

“Being aware and seeing it in ourselves are often two different things,” the professor said mildly, inspecting a fingernail.

My ears were so hot I thought they must be glowing like horseshoes on a forge. I hadn't suffered the same misfortune as Eliza, but as the professor knew, I had come close—so close that just thinking about it still made me blush to the roots of my hair. I'd told Professor Bogard about it one evening at school, while we were reviewing an article on control of the sexual impulse in male juveniles. I'd attempted a joke—a caustic allusion to the randy young seducer in Donne's “The Flea”—which the professor, typically, had refused to take at face value. After much teasing, I'd finally confessed the whole story, striving for a tone of sophisticated nonchalance that was very different from what I'd felt.

I had told him about Simon Shaw. Just thinking the name, even now, was like stirring a bucket of muddy water. The first image to rise up was of the lock of dark hair that used to fall over one eye when he tilted his head, as he tended to do on sight of me. Next came his coat: a man-size garment of shearling-lined suede, baggy on his young frame and stained around the cuffs from hard use. It had smelled of sweet leather and sweat and something bitter, like acorns, and when he wrapped it around me the night I snuck down to the stable, it was as cozy as a lap robe on a midwinter sleigh ride.

The mantel clock chimed the hour. “I'm afraid we're out of time,” the professor said. “Much as I love Louis, I don't trust him to hold our table for very long. Is there anything else we need to discuss, my dear?”

I edged forward on my seat. He couldn't go yet; he hadn't told me what to do. “I'm still not sure how to proceed with my patient. I wouldn't want my inexperience to hamper her treatment.”

“Don't worry. You know much more than you think you do,” he cheerfully assured me, collecting his pipe and tobacco. “Besides, the best way to overcome a lack of experience is to simply throw yourself into the trenches. You never know what you're capable of until you're pushed to it.”

“But…couldn't we meet one more time before you go? So that I could fill you in on the details?”

He frowned down at his engagement book, shaking his head. “I'm afraid I'm going to be awfully busy preparing for the trip.” He looked up, his face brightening. “Just trust your instincts, my dear. Psychotherapy isn't as easy as knowing where to place the stitches or how to tie the knots. Sometimes you just have to feel your way.”

I sat back in defeat, feeling as though the last lifeboat was floating away without me.

“With all due respect,” Mayhew said to the professor, “if she wants to eliminate the fabrication, she could try removing the patient's uterus.”

I barely suppressed a groan. The idea that hysterical fantasies could be triggered by nervous reflexes originating in the uterus had been almost universally discredited, the removal of the uterus having proved no more helpful than cauterization of the cervix, enlargement of the anus, or any of the other techniques that had been tried to stem the pathological flow of reflex from organs to the mind. Only a misogynist like Mayhew would cling to such an ineffectual solution.

“I thought you believed the delusion grew out of her unconscious,” I said.

He shrugged. “I do. But it's telling, is it not, that hysterical fantasies are seen almost exclusively in females? I don't believe we can rule out a physiological predisposition in the weaker sex.”

Again, I looked to Professor Bogard, waiting for him to refute this drivel, but he was busy rifling through some papers on his desk. I turned back to Mayhew. “A hysterectomy strikes me as extreme, especially when we haven't even established that we're dealing with a fantasy.”

“Haven't we?” he asked, his eyes widening in surprise. “Why, I didn't think any doubt remained.”

I could feel myself succumbing to that state of mute humiliation I'd experienced so often in class, when he'd caught me with one of his barbs. But we weren't in the classroom now, and there was too much at stake to let him bully me. “I still have doubts,” I said.

“Do you really?” He folded his hands delicately in his lap. “Then I'm afraid we must conclude that your tender feminine heart has caused you to mistake a hysterical woman's wishes for the truth.”

The ratty tails of his mustache twitched with satisfaction, as I'd seen them twitch so many times before. This time, however, I couldn't hold back the anger the sight provoked. “Or we could conclude that she's telling the truth,” I blurted out, “and that you, having so little regard for either women or the truth, are unable to recognize it.”

For one exultant moment, I reveled in the flush that mottled his face—before the realization of what I'd done came bearing down on me. The last thing I needed now was the enmity of my professional peers. We stared at each other, he in outrage, I in an agony of regret.

The professor unknowingly broke the silence. “Here it is!” he exclaimed, pulling a sheaf of papers from under his pipe rack and holding it out to me over the desk. “This is for you. It's my response to Pierre Janet's Harvard lectures on the major states of hystericals.”

Another research assignment. I reached for it with a leaden arm.

“It's a bit rough, I know, but I was short on time. Most of the lecture material is reprinted in these.” He passed me a heavy stack of
Journal de Psychologie
back issues. “I've jotted down the basic points, but you should of course feel free to add your own ideas.”

I balanced the journals on my lap and flipped through his notes. A few handwritten lines were scrawled across each page, heavily punctuated with question marks and ellipses.

“Well, what do you say?” he asked jovially, as though offering me an irresistible treat. “Are you game?”

“Yes, of course,” I said mechanically, removing the journals I'd brought with me from my bag and replacing them with the new ones. “When do you need it?”

“Would the end of next week be too soon?”

“Next week!”

“I know, I know, but there's a publication deadline to meet.”

“Well then,” I answered with a sigh, “I suppose I can manage it.”

“Marvelous!” He got to his feet. “I knew I could count on you.” He stepped jauntily around his desk toward the door, the picture of confidence, a man clearly in charge of his affairs. My heart ached at the sight. It was all I could do not to grab hold of his sleeve and beg for his help.

“We'll see you out,” he said, reaching for the doorknob.

I walked beside him down the hallway as Mayhew trailed behind. I imagined I could feel Mayhew's eyes on my back, full of contempt for a woman who'd had the nerve to step outside the bounds of nature to assume a man's job. He had once said, in an anatomy lecture in which I was the only woman present, that the female brain was “rather too small for great intellect, but just large enough for conceit.” As I stepped out the front door into a world newly fraught with uncertainty, I wondered for the first time if he might be right.

I rode the Third Avenue El up to 116th Street and walked the last five blocks to the Harlem Police Court. This was a fortresslike structure with a grim corner tower and thick bars over the windows of the attached jail. I followed two men carrying document cases past the jail's vehicular entrance and through the door into the courthouse. An iron staircase spiraled upward from the entry hall. Following the signs, I climbed the polished terrazzo steps to the magistrate's courtroom.

Pushing through the heavy doors, I found myself inside a spacious room with a vaulted, coffered ceiling and carved wainscoting on the walls. A dozen wide benches in the back half of the room were filled end-to-end with all manner of humanity, from women holding squalling infants to elderly gentlemen in fastidious business attire. The magistrate sat across from them with his back to a two-story window. Between the benches and the magistrate's platform sat the lawyers and court personnel, boxed off by wooden railings.

I edged through the odiferous crowd at the door, craning my neck for a glimpse of Eliza. A long line of prisoners and their arresting officers stretched to the clerk's desk from a door at the side of the room, but I didn't see her among them. The steam pipes were going full tilt, spewing unchecked heat into the crammed courtroom. As more people pushed in behind me, I moved to a spot farther up along the wall, fanning myself with a section of the professor's notes as I waited for Eliza to arrive.

I still wasn't sure how I would feel or what I was going to say when I finally spoke with her—or, for that matter, what she might be feeling or might say to me. For all I knew, she might be blaming me for whatever had transpired. I listened with half an ear as the parade of prisoners took their turns before the magistrate: a grocer accused of selling skimmed milk, a shabbily dressed young woman charged with prostitution, and a rotund man accused of stealing three pairs of trousers by concealing them under his waistband. By the time the magistrate had named four reporters in the front row an “investigative committee” and charged them with determining whether the latter's waistband was capable of such a feat, sweat was trickling steadily down my ribs, and I was feeling faint from the heat. When the reporters rose to follow the man into the magistrate's private chamber, I scurried over to claim a spot on the vacated bench.

I had just sat down when the side door opened and Eliza stepped into the room, accompanied by the officer who'd driven her away in the van. She looked terrible—her face deathly pale, her hair falling from its pins, her skirt stiff with dried blood. She cowered behind the officer as they joined the line and shuffled toward the clerk's desk. I tried to observe her with a detached eye, searching for the unhinged woman I had failed to detect before. But no matter how hard I stared, I saw only a more frightened, confused version of the docile young woman I remembered.

As they approached the clerk's desk, she glanced out toward the gallery and drew up short. At first, I thought she was looking at me, but then realized it was at something behind me. I turned to see a stoop-shouldered woman in a threadbare coat laboring up the center aisle, leaning heavily on a bamboo walking stick. She had thinning gray hair pulled back under a shapeless felt hat, and pale blue eyes that were trained on Eliza. She reached the gate and stopped, her shoulders drooping.

The roundsman started toward her from the other side of the rail. Before he had taken two steps, she crumpled forward, whacking the gate with her stick as she grabbed for it with both hands. I jumped up to catch her from behind at the same instant the roundsman lunged for her over the rail.

“Whoa there, easy does it,” he said, securing her in a beefy grip.

I wrapped my arm around the woman's shoulders to steady her while he came around through the gate, and together we lowered her onto the front bench.

“What are they going to do to her?” she whimpered, clutching her stick in both hands.

“To who?” the roundsman asked.

She looked past him toward Eliza. “My daughter.”

My arm dropped reflexively from her shoulders. “You're Eliza's mother? Mrs. Braun?”

She turned to me in a daze. “A man called me from the police station. He said I should get her a lawyer. But I don't have any money for a lawyer.”

“Are you going to be all right, ma'am?” asked the roundsman, peering into her face.

“She's in shock,” I told him. “I think she'll be all right if she just rests for a minute. You can leave her with me. I'll keep an eye on her.”

Looking relieved, he returned to his post on the other side of the rail.

I eased off Mrs. Braun's coat and fanned her with the professor's notes. At close range, I realized she wasn't as old as I'd first supposed—not much older than my own mother, most likely. It was the heaviness of her movements, her air of long-suffering resignation, that had misled me. I could see now a clear resemblance to her daughter in the long, oval shape of her face, and the pale blue of her eyes.

I looked back toward Eliza, who had reached the clerk's desk and was listening meekly as the arresting officer gave his statement. She turned her head at the same moment, and our eyes met. I felt a brief flash of anger toward her for putting us in this position, mixed with guilt over my own incompetence. Her own soft eyes held no accusation, however. Again, I discerned only helpless fear and confusion. Sympathy rose up in me, uninvited. Of its own accord, my hand lifted in a small wave of encouragement.

Her mother turned and blinked at me, as if really seeing me for the first time. “You know my daughter?”

“Yes, I met her just yesterday, at the church.” I held out my hand. “I'm Genevieve Summerford.”

She frowned at me for a moment as though trying to place my name. Suddenly, her eyes widened as her mouth fell open in recognition. “You!” she gasped, drawing back from me. “You're the one!”

I lowered my hand. “I beg your pardon?”

Her gnarled finger pointed at me from the top of her walking stick. “You're the woman doctor she told me about who put all those crazy ideas in her head!”

I licked my suddenly dry lips. “Mrs. Braun, I'm not sure what Eliza told you, but all I did was—”

“I know exactly what you did!” she interrupted. “You got her all excited and talking foolishness! You should have known better; you're a doctor! Couldn't you see she isn't right in the head?”

The courtroom seemed to have suddenly tilted and slid off-center. “What do you mean, she isn't right in the head?”

She pushed herself to her feet. “It's all your fault,” she fumed, leaning over me with her eyes ablaze. “Everything that's happened, it's all your fault!” She backed into the aisle, her cane bumping against the bench legs, then staggered to an empty spot three rows back and sat down, her concave chest heaving with indignation. I swiveled back toward the front of the room. My heart was racing, and my eyes refused to focus. Eliza, the clerk, and the magistrate all merged into a blur until I could see nothing but accusing eyes glaring down at me. Not Mrs. Braun's eyes—Papa's eyes, cold and empty as the darkest reaches of space. I gripped the edge of the bench, helpless to resist, as I was swept back to that day long ago…

• • •

I lay on my stomach on the cool parquet floor, at eye level with the huge blue porcelain urns that had been magically transported from the distant Orient to house the giant palms in each corner of our drawing room. The fronds of one of these palms curved luxuriously over my head, creating a perfect hideaway. In the summer, when the rug was rolled up and the blinds were half-drawn to keep out the heat, this was my favorite place to draw.

My brother Conrad lay propped on his elbows beside me, watching the horse on my drawing tablet come slowly to life. His own drawing lay beside him—large messy strokes of blue broken by stepped, horizontal lines that I knew from experience were rooftops.

“Can I help?” he asked me.

“No. It's a present, for Mama. It has to be just from me.”

Feet scurried around our heads as the maids rushed about, setting tall vases and crystal decanters and shining brass spittoons in place. From time to time, I glanced up at the commotion through the fingers of the palm frond. I'd never seen the chandelier glow so brightly or the piano reflect it with such a perfect shine. The entire household had been put to work preparing for Mama's thirty-fifth birthday party. Even Eleanor, our new governess, had been pressed into service repairing a tear in one of the pillow covers. I could see her sitting in the tête-à-tête across the room, her small brown head bent over the velvet cover as her inexperienced fingers fumbled with the needle.

In the hallway, I heard Mama ask for the hundredth time, “Have the flowers arrived?” For weeks, we'd been hearing about the special flowers that she'd ordered for the event, the mere mention of which brought a sparkle to her eye. They were coming all the way from France, or Italy, or some other such inconceivable place, raced over land and water to arrive fresh and dewy at our door on this, her special day. Except that the deliverymen seemed to be cutting it awfully close, and as the time before the main event grew shorter and shorter, so did Mama's temper.

Conrad leaned over to watch me draw the horse's rear leg. “Golly!” he exclaimed,
golly
being his word of the week. “That's a good horse.”

I bumped over so he could see the whole thing. “This is the hardest part,” I explained. He watched in respectful silence as I drew the knee, hock, and splaying hoof, so close to me I could smell the Pears soap that Eleanor used to wash his hair. I paused to examine the hoof and, deciding it was too small, drew a second line wider than the first. I pushed myself up on my hands to judge the result and heard Conrad's soft grunt of approval.

“All right,” I relented. “You can fill in some of the sky. But only this part, right here.”

He scuttled on elbows and knees to the box of wax coloring sticks Mama had brought back from France and returned with a blunted blue. We set to work, and were just applying the finishing touches when a flurry of gasps and cries from the hallway informed us that the flowers had finally arrived. A moment later, Mama burst into the drawing room, trailed by Katie and two of the maids, each carrying an enormous arrangement. I pulled my drawing from beneath Conrad's hand and flipped it over as she bustled past, her hair flying in untidy wisps around her shirtwaist collar.

She turned and scanned the room like a general surveying his battlefield. “Let's see…that one right there, I think”—she directed the parlor maid, pointing to the round table—“and that one on the piano. No, wait: that one should go in front of the window. This one,” she said to Katie, who was straining under the weight of an enormous jardiniere, “should go on the piano.” She watched, fists on hips, as Katie slid the urn-shaped vase on top of the case. “Yes, perfect!”

I eyed this last arrangement with interest. It was nearly as tall as my brother, an elaborate construction of twining greens and extraordinarily long-stemmed roses that curved languidly over the edge of the vase. So these were the flowers that had put my mother in such a dither of anticipation. My blood quickened as an idea began to take shape in my mind.

“Where do you want these little ones, ma'am?” asked the chambermaid from the doorway, holding three vases in her arms.

Mama strode over to relieve her of one of the vases. “One on the hall console, I think, and two on the dining room sideboard. Here, I'll show you. Eleanor, could you give us a hand?”

Eleanor put down her needle with relief and followed them out.

Conrad and I were alone in the drawing room. I got up and walked over to the piano for a closer inspection of the roses. They were as soft as velvet and perfectly shaped, as flawless as the special rosette trim in Mrs. Cunningham's hat shop. I lifted one of the plump heads to my nose and breathed its intoxicating perfume as my idea burst into full form.

I released the rose and dashed out of the room. Returning a few moments later with a pair of scissors, I approached the piano and examined the roses with a critical, artist's eye. The differences were slight, but some of the blossoms looked plumper to me and a tiny bit more symmetrical. I snipped one of these off with several inches of stem and set it aside. Working slowly to avoid the thorns, I continued to cut one after another of the best heads until there was a good-sized pile on the piano top. I carried these back to my drawing place and set to work.

I was lost in the requirements of color and composition when, some time later, my concentration was broken by my mother's startled cry. “Genna! What have you done?”

I looked up to see her standing beside the piano, staring at a trail of petals that led from the bench to my little hideaway. I was vexed that I'd been found out before my masterwork was complete, but disappointment quickly gave way to delicious anticipation. I jumped to my feet, holding up my drawing with both hands. I had punched the rose stems through the heavy paper and twisted them together underneath so that the precious flowers now formed a nearly full wreath around the horse's neck. “Happy birthday, Mama!”

“Oh, Genna.” Her eyes were dark with disappointment.

I lowered the drawing uncertainly to my side. “It's not finished yet. It will look better when it's done…”

“What is it?” Father stood in the doorway, having chosen this moment to look in on the preparations. “What's happened?” he asked, striding to my mother's side.

“It's all right,” my mother said quickly. “She was just trying to make me a present.”

Father's gaze moved from Mother's face to the rose garland. “No, it is not all right,” he fumed. “Not all right at all! Genevieve, how many times have we told you that you must think before you act?”

I stared down at my shoes.