The Alienist (4 page)

Before Kreizler could answer, a woman’s face suddenly appeared in the first door to our right. Her hair, though pinned up, was unkempt, and the expression on her worn, broad features was one of violent outrage. That expression changed in an instant, however, when she saw who the visitor was. “Dr. Kreizler!” she said in a hoarse but passionate gasp.

At that the train of reaction was propelled into high speed: Kreizler’s name spread down the corridor from cell to cell, inmate to inmate, through the walls and iron doors of the women’s ward and on into the men’s. I’d seen this happen several times before, in different institutions, but it was no less remarkable on each occasion: the words were like the flow of water over coals, taking away crackling heat and leaving only a steaming whisper, a perhaps momentary but nonetheless effective remission from deep-burning fire.

The cause of this singular phenomenon was simple. Kreizler was known throughout the patient, as well as the criminal, medical, and legal, communities in New York to be the man whose testimony in court or at a sanity hearing could determine, more than that of any other alienist of the day, whether a given person was sent to prison, to the somewhat less horrifying confines of a mental institution, or back out onto the streets. The moment he was spotted in a place such as the Pavilion, therefore, the usual sounds of madness gave way to an eerie attempt at coherent communication on the part of most of the inmates. Only the uninitiated or the hopelessly distressed would continue their ravings; and yet the effect of this sudden reduction in noise was not at all reassuring. Indeed, it was in some ways worse on the nerves, for one knew that the attempt at order was a strained one, and that the sounds of anguish would soon return—again, like burning coals roasting away the transitory suppression of a splash of water.

Kreizler’s reaction to the inmates’ behavior was no less disconcerting, for one was left only to imagine what experiences in his life and career could have implanted in him the ability to walk through such a place and witness such desperate performances (all peppered by measured yet passionate pleas of “Dr. Kreizler, I must talk with you!” “Dr. Kreizler, please, I am not like these others!”) without submitting to fear, revulsion, or despair. As he moved in measured strides down the long corridor, his brows drew together over his gleaming eyes, which shot quickly from side to side, cell to cell, with a look of sympathetic admonishment: as if these people were errant children. At no point did he allow himself to address any of the inmates, but this refusal was not cruel; quite the contrary, for to speak to any one would only have raised that unfortunate person’s hopes, perhaps unrealistically, while dashing those of the other supplicants. Any patients present who had been in madhouses or prisons before, or who had been under observation for an extended period at Bellevue, knew that this was Kreizler’s practice; and they made their most emphatic pleas with their eyes, aware that it was only with the organ of sight that Kreizler would acknowledge them.

We passed through the sliding iron doors and into the men’s ward, and followed the attendant Fuller to the last cell on the left. He stood to the side and opened the small observation window in the heavily banded door. “Wolff!” he called. “Visitors for you. Official business, so behave.”

Kreizler stood before the window looking inward, and I watched over his shoulder. Inside the small, bare-walled cell a man sat on a rough cot, under which lay a dented steel chamber pot. Heavy bars covered the one small window, and ivy obscured the little external light that tried to enter. A metal pitcher of water and a tray bearing a bit of bread and an oatmeal-encrusted bowl lay on the floor near the man, whose head was in his hands. He wore only an undershirt and woolen pants without a belt or suspenders (suicide being the worry). Heavy shackles were clamped around his wrists and ankles. When he lifted his face, a few seconds after Fuller’s call, he revealed a pair of red eyes that reminded me of some of my worst mornings; and his deeply lined, whiskered face bore an expression of detached resignation.

“Mr. Wolff,” Kreizler said, watching the man carefully. “Are you sober?”

“Who wouldn’t be?” the man answered slowly, his words indistinct, “after a night in this place?”

Kreizler closed the small iron gate that covered the window and turned to Fuller. “Has he been drugged?”

Fuller shrugged uncomfortably. “He was raving when they brought him in, Dr. Kreizler. Seemed more than just drunk, the superintendent said, so they jabbed him full of chloral.”

Kreizler sighed in deep irritation. Chloral hydrate was one of the banes of his existence, a bitter-tasting, neutrally colored, somewhat caustic compound that slowed the rate of the heart and thus made the subject singularly calm—or, if used as it was in many saloons, almost comatose and an easy target for robbery or kidnapping. The body of the medical community, however, insisted that chloral did not cause addiction (Kreizler violently disagreed); and at twenty-five cents a dose, it was a cheap and convenient alternative to wrestling a patient into chains or a leather harness. It was therefore used with abandon, especially on mentally disturbed or simply violent subjects; but in the twenty-five years since its introduction, its use had spread to the general public, who were free, in those days, to buy not only chloral, but morphine, opium, cannabis indica, or any other such substance at any drugstore. Many thousands of people had destroyed their lives by freely surrendering to chloral’s power to “release one from worry and care, and bring on healthful sleep” (as one manufacturer put it). Death by overdose had become common; more and more suicides were connected to chloral use; and yet the doctors of the day continued blithely to insist on its safety and utility.

“How many grains?” Kreizler asked, exchanging weariness for annoyance—he was aware that administration of the drug was neither Fuller’s job nor his fault.

“They began with twenty,” the attendant answered sheepishly. “I told them, sir, I told them you were scheduled for the evaluation and that you’d be angry, but—well, you know, sir.”

“Yes,” Kreizler answered quietly, “I know.” Which made three of us—and what we knew was that on hearing of Kreizler’s slated appearance and probable objections, the Pavilion’s superintendent had almost certainly doubled the dose of chloral and significantly decreased Wolff’s ability to participate in the kind of assessment Kreizler liked to make, which involved many probing questions and was ideally conducted on a subject free of the effects of drugs or alcohol. Such was the general feeling among his colleagues, particularly those of the older generation, toward Kreizler.

“Well,” Laszlo announced, after pondering the question for a few moments. “There’s nothing to do—we are here, Moore, and time presses.” I thought immediately about the strange reference to “a timetable” in Kreizler’s note to Roosevelt the night before; but I said nothing as he unbolted the door and pulled at its considerable weight. “Mr. Wolff,” Kreizler announced, “we must talk.”

For the next hour I sat through Kreizler’s examination of this vague, disoriented man, who held as firmly as the chloral hydrate would allow to the notion that if he had truly erased most of young Louisa Rudesheimer’s head with his pistol—and we assured him that he had—then he must be insane, and should of course be sent to an asylum (or at most to the facility for insane convicts at Mattewan) rather than to prison or the gallows. Kreizler took careful note of this attitude but for the moment did not discuss the case itself. Instead he ran through a long list of seemingly unconnected questions about Wolff’s past, his family, friends, and childhood. The questions were deeply personal and in any normal setting would have seemed presumptuous and even offensive; and the fact that Wolff’s reactions to Kreizler’s inquiries were less violent than most men’s was almost certainly due to his being drugged. But the absence of anger also indicated a lack of precision and forthrightness in the responses, and the interview seemed destined for a premature end.

But not even Wolff’s chemically induced calm could be maintained when Kreizler finally began to ask him about Louisa Rudesheimer. Had Wolff harbored any sexual feelings toward the girl? Laszlo inquired, with a bluntness not often heard in discussions of such subjects. Were there other children in his building or in his neighborhood toward whom he did harbor such feelings? Did he have a lady friend? Did he visit disorderly houses? Did he find himself sexually drawn to young boys? Why had he shot the girl and not stabbed her? Wolff was at first bewildered by all this, and appealed to the attendant, Fuller, asking whether or not he must answer. Fuller, with somewhat lascivious glee, made it plain that he must, and Wolff complied, for a time. But after half an hour of it he staggered to his feet, rattled his manacles, and swore that no man could force him to participate in such an obscene inquisition. He declared defiantly that he would rather face the hangman; at which point Kreizler stood and stared straight into Wolff’s eyes.

“I fear that in New York State, the electrical chair is increasingly usurping the gallows, Mr. Wolff,” he said evenly. “Although I suspect that, based on your answers to my questions, you will find that out for yourself. God have mercy on you, sir.”

As Kreizler strode toward the door, Fuller quickly pulled it open. I took a last look at Wolff before following Laszlo out: the man’s aspect had suddenly shifted from indignant to deeply fearful, but he was too weak now to do more than mumble pathetic protests as to what he was certain was his insanity and then fall back onto his cot.

Kreizler and I walked back down the Pavilion’s main corridor as Fuller rebolted the door to Wolff’s cell. The quiet pleas of the other patients began again, but we were soon through them. Once we were out and in the vestibule, the shouts and howls behind us gained in volume once more.

“I believe we can dismiss him, Moore,” Kreizler said, quietly and wearily, as he pulled on a pair of gloves that Cyrus handed him. “Drugged though he may be, Wolff has revealed himself—violent, certainly, and resentful of children. A drunkard, as well. But he is not mad, nor do I think he is connected to our current business.”

“Ah,” I said, seizing the opportunity, “now, about that—”

“They’ll
want
him to be mad, of course,” Laszlo mused, not hearing me. “The doctors here, the newspapers, the judges, they’d like to think that only a madman would shoot a five-year-old girl in the head. It creates certain…
difficulties,
if we are forced to accept that our society can produce sane men who commit such acts.” He sighed once and took an umbrella from Cyrus. “Yes, that will be a long day or two in court, I should think…”

We exited the Pavilion, myself seeking refuge with Kreizler under his umbrella, and then climbed into the now-covered calash. I knew what was coming: a monologue that was a kind of catharsis for Kreizler, a restatement of some of his most basic professional principles, designed to relieve the enormous responsibility of helping send a man to his death. Kreizler was a confirmed opponent of the practice of executing criminals, even vicious murderers such as Wolff; but he did not allow this opposition to affect his judgment or his definition of true insanity, which was, by comparison with that of many of his colleagues, relatively narrow. As Cyrus jumped into the driver’s seat of the calash and the carriage pulled away from Bellevue, Kreizler’s diatribe began to cover subjects I’d heard him discuss many times before: how a broad definition of insanity might make society as a whole feel better but did nothing for mental science, and only lessened the chance that the truly mentally diseased would receive proper care and treatment. It was an insistent sort of speech—Kreizler seemed to be trying to push the image of Wolff in the electrical chair further and further away—and as it wound on, I realized that there was no hope of my gaining any hard information concerning just what in hell was going on and why I’d been called into whatever it was.

Glancing about at the passing buildings in some frustration, I let my eyes come to rest on Cyrus, momentarily thinking that, since he had to listen to this sort of thing more than anyone, I might get some sympathy out of the man. I should have known better. Like Stevie Taggert, Cyrus had had a hard life before coming to work for Laszlo and was now quite devoted to my friend. As a boy in New York Cyrus had seen his parents literally torn to pieces during the draft riots of 1863, when angry hordes of white men and women, many of them recently arrived immigrants, expressed their unwillingness to fight for the causes of the Union and slave emancipation by laying hold of any blacks they could find—including young children—and dismembering them, burning them alive, tarring them, whatever medieval tortures their Old World minds could conceive. A talented musician with a splendid bass-baritone voice, Cyrus had been taken in by a pandering uncle after his parents’ death, and trained to be a “professor,” a piano player in a brothel that proferred young black women to white men of means. But his youthful nightmare had left him rather reluctant to tolerate bigoted abuse from the house’s customers. One night in 1887 he had come upon a drunken policeman taking his graft in trade, which the cop apparently thought included brutal blows from the back of his hand and taunts of “nigger bitch.” Cyrus had calmly gone to the kitchen, fetched a large butcher knife, and dispatched the cop to that special Valhalla reserved for fallen members of the New York City Police Department.

Enter Kreizler once again. Expounding a theory he called “explosive association,” he had revealed the genesis of Cyrus’s actions to the judge in the case: during the few minutes involved in the killing, Laszlo said, Cyrus had returned in his mind to the night of his parents’ death, and the well of anger that had been left untapped since that incident came gushing forth and engulfed the offending policeman. Cyrus was not insane, Kreizler announced; he had responded to the situation in the only way possible for a man with his background. The judge had been impressed by Kreizler’s arguments, but given the public mood he could hardly release Cyrus. Internment in the New York City Lunatic Asylum on Blackwells Island was suggested; but Kreizler stated that employment at his Institute would be far more likely to effect rehabilitation. The judge, anxious to be rid of the case, agreed. The affair didn’t do anything to mitigate Kreizler’s public and professional reputation as a maverick, and it certainly didn’t make the average visitor to Laszlo’s home anxious to be alone in the kitchen with Cyrus. But it did ensure the man’s loyalty.