Paula Cohen - What Alice Knew - A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper

Pizer seemed not to hear. “Can’t treat me like a dog. Can’t make me do that no more. Nobody gonna make me!”

William was staring with an expression of curiosity and disgust. “The person you killed…wanted to make you do something?”

Pizer began to twitch, and his speech grew rapid and wild. “Can’t make me! Can’t make me! Can’t shame me like that! Ain’t gonna be shamed no more!” His voice grew shrill with fury. “Ain’t shamed by you neither!” He fastened his eyes on William’s shoes and stared at them fixedly. “Even with yer nice shoes, you don’t shame me!”

“I’m a doctor!” William said sharply. “I’m here to get information about your condition, nothing more.”

Pizer was not listening. His eyes were again darting about the room. “All dressed up in good leather to do filthy things! You’re a stinking, bloody fraud with your fine shoes!”

“I’m Professor James from Boston,” William felt compelled to assert. He could sense that Pizer had lost track of where he was, if he had ever known.

His voice incensed Pizer further. “I can make ’em do as I say if I wants to,” he growled and flexed his fingers again. “I can make ’em, as they made me!” His eyes focused again on William’s shoes, and he stared at them for several seconds in a state of rapt attention. His face then contorted into a grimace.

It was then that William understood his shoes, bought before he left Boston from a very good boot maker at the insistence of his Alice (“A Harvard professor must have a good pair of shoes,” she had scolded), must put Pizer in mind of the men who had scorned and abused him. “Calm yourself!” he said sharply.

The sound of his voice seemed to be a trigger rather than a palliative. The man grimaced again, and William stood up in sudden awareness of the threat, but too late.

Pizer leaped from the cot and placed his hands around his visitor’s neck.

William felt a searing pain from the pressure on his throat, and a thought darted through his mind: This is how I will die, interviewing a madman, with a policeman standing outside the door , but the next moment, Abberline and Maudsley rushed into the cell. Abberline adeptly pried Pizer’s fingers from his neck, while Maudsley ran back into the corridor to call for help.

Within a few seconds, a guard twice the size of Pizer and with eyes even more snakelike entered the cell and, with a sweep of his arm, knocked the man onto the bed. “Don’t worry, sirs. I’ll have him in hand in a jiffy,” said the guard. “You best get yourselves out of the way.”

As Maudsley went off to get a compress for William’s neck, and Abberline helped him stagger out of the cell, they could hear the blows falling inside.

“So what did your visit do for you besides almost getting you killed?” asked Abberline, when they were once again seated on the train back to London.

William touched his neck and felt the dull ache of the bruise. He had fortified himself with a shot of whiskey in Maudsley’s office and had left Broadmoor with an improved feeling about his host. However much the two men differed in basic precepts, they shared an understanding of the horrors of mental illness. Perhaps more to the point, Maudsley’s guilt regarding the attack had softened him toward his visitors. It seemed that Pizer had never exhibited violent behavior before, despite his reputation for being violent in the East End. It was another case where salient information had been discounted. If the people of his neighborhood were convinced that he was Jack the Ripper, certainly there must be a reason for their conviction. William suspected that Pizer had not been violent at Broadmoor because no one had spoken to him long enough to elicit violence.

“What did the visit do for me?” he mused in response to Abberline’s question. “It taught me that shame is a powerful impetus for action, perhaps the most powerful. Pizer spent his childhood in a brothel, abused by women and men too. I reminded him of the men who frequented that place and used to demean him. His humanity was stolen from him as a child. It seems almost logical that he would become an animal himself, driven to abuse those who shamed and abused him.”

“You’re saying that Jack the Ripper kills out of rage for having been shamed?”

“I’d say killing of the sort he does must stem from extreme humiliation. It’s a frenzied kind of retribution. No knowing whether the initial trauma was even intended as such; it may have been accidental, a matter of circumstance, but I suspect there was shame involving a woman at its origin.”

“A prostitute?”

“Possibly, but not necessarily. Perhaps the women he kills remind him of someone in another sense. But like Pizer, I surmise it’s a pattern of substitution. We substitute in the present for people in the past. What happens with men like Pizer—and I suspect, Jack the Ripper—is that love and hope turn to resentment and hatred. Who knows what instigates this transformation, trauma or abuse or simple abandonment. Whatever it is, the emotions continue to haunt the victim and can be relieved only through violation of something that stands in place of the original source of pain.”

He paused a moment and then added, “There’s something else as well. Pizer’s attack was triggered by my shoes. He had worked as a boot maker, and his job became a conduit for his rage. Minor’s case is an example in reverse, of how gratifying work can relieve and rechannel destructive tendencies. Our vocation, in large part, makes us who we are. Pizer learned to use a knife as a boot maker, and it gave him his name, Leather Apron. One would want to know what this murderer did for a living and how it informs his crimes.”

Abberline considered this information. “There may be something to your ideas,” he acknowledged, “but I can’t say I’m convinced. Who among us hasn’t been shamed in some way? Or frustrated in work? I have, and I daresay you have too.”

“And both of us might have become murderers had our shame and frustration been great enough,” asserted William. “We were fortunate to have been loved enough to counteract our shame, and to have our work become a source of gratification and pride. Had that not been the case, who knows? Evil men are not born, but made.”

“You Americans think tolerance and justice can change things,” said Abberline with a touch of scorn in his voice. “It’s a pretty theory, but I’ve known plenty of evil men in my time, and it’s my opinion they came into the world that way.”

They had arrived at an impasse and, realizing that no amount of talk was going to make them budge in their views, retreated into silence for the remainder of the journey back to London.

No sooner did William walk in the door of Henry’s flat than his brother announced that a man had been by to report an arrest in the Whitechapel murders. William was half inclined to ignore the message. He was tired from his journey and had become familiar with false leads and the sort of mistakes the police were prone to make. He had just spent the day with Abberline, who had not mentioned that anyone was under investigation. And since when would a serious suspect be apprehended when the inspector was out of the office?

Henry insisted that the man had come directly from Abberline, though, who had made a point of requesting that William report to police headquarters at once to observe the interrogation.

When William arrived at Scotland Yard, he found that, indeed, an interesting scene was in progress. A swarthy young man with disheveled hair, hollow cheeks, and dark, flashing eyes stood flanked by two officers in one corner. He was wearing a long, shabby coat that suggested that he was a university student, a Jew, or an anarchist, and since the uniform of these groups overlapped, the young man could conceivably belong to all three.