Jed Rubenfeld - The Interpretation of Murder

The lunch at Jelliffe's club was most gratifying. Nine or ten men sat at the oval table. Intermixed with knowledgeable scientific conversation and an excellent claret was a goodly dose of ribald humor, which Jung always enjoyed. The women's suffragette movement bore the brunt of the raillery. One of the men asked whether anyone had ever met a suffragette he could imagine bedding. The unanimous answer was no. Someone ought to notify these ladies, another gentleman said, that even if they got the vote it didn't mean anyone would sleep with them. All agreed that the best cure for a woman demanding the suffrage was a good healthy servicing; that treatment, however, was so unappetizing one might as well give them the vote instead.

Jung was in his element. For once, there was no need to pretend to be less wealthy than one was. There was no obligation to deny one's ancestry. After the meal, the members repaired to a smoking room, where the conversation continued over cognac. Their ranks gradually thinned until Jung was left with only Jelliffe and three older men. One of these gentlemen now made a subtle signal; Jelliffe instantly rose to leave. Jung stood as well, assuming that Jelliffe s departure indicated his own. But Jelliffe informed him that the three gentlemen wanted the briefest of words with him alone and that a carriage would be waiting when they had done.

In actual fact, Jelliffe was not a member of this club at all. He yearned to belong to it. The men with authority over the society and its membership were those now remaining with him. It was they who had told Jelliffe to bring Jung to them today.

'Do sit down, Dr Jung,' said the man who had dismissed Jelliffe, gesturing toward a comfortable armchair with one of his elegant hands.

Jung tried to remember the gentleman's name, but he had met so many, and was so unused to wine at lunch, he could not.

'It's Dana,' the man said helpfully, his dark eyebrows setting off his silver hair. 'Charles Dana. I was just speaking of you, Jung, with my good friend Ochs over at the Times. He wants to do a story about you.'

'A story?' asked Jung. 'I don't understand.'

'In connection with the lectures we've arranged for you at Fordham next week. He wants an interview with you. He proposes a short biography — two full broadsheet pages.

You'll be quite famous. I didn't know if you'd agree. I told him I'd ask.'

'Why,' answered Jung, 'I–I don't — '

'There is just one obstacle. Ochs' — Dana pronounced it Oaks — 'is afraid you are a Freudian. Doesn't want his paper associated with a — with a- Well, you know what they say about Freud.'

'A sex-crazed degenerate,' said the portly man to the right, smoothing his muttonchop whiskers.

'Does Freud actually believe what he writes?' asked the third gentleman, a balding fellow. 'That every girl he treats attempts to seduce him? Or what he says about feces — feces, for God's sake. Or about fastidious men wanting sex through the anus?'

'What about boys wanting to penetrate their own mothers?' rejoined the portly man, with an expression of utmost disgust.

'What about God?' asked Dana, tamping the tobacco from his pipe. 'Must be hard on you, Jung.'

Jung was uncertain exactly what was being referred to. He didn't answer.

'I know you, Jung,' said Dana. 'I know what you are. A Swiss. A Christian. A man of science, like us. And a man of passion. One who acts on his desires. A man who needs more than one woman to thrive. There is no need to hide such things here. These so-called men who don't act, who let their desires fester like sores, whose fathers were peddlers, who have always felt inferior to us — only they could dream up such vile, bestial fantasies, theorizing God and man into the sewer. It must be hard on you to be associated with that.'

Jung was finding it increasingly difficult to absorb the flow of words. The alcohol must have gone to his head. This gentleman did seem to know him, but how? 'Sometimes it is,' Jung answered slowly.

'I am not in the least anti-Semitic. You need only ask Sachs here.' He indicated the balding man on his left. 'On the contrary, I admire the Jews. Their secret is racial purity, a principle they have understood far better than we. It is what has made them the great race they are.' The man referred to as Sachs gave away nothing; the portly man merely pursed his fleshy lips. Dana continued: 'But last Sunday, when I looked up at our bleeding Savior and imagined this Viennese Jew saying our passion for Him is sexual, I found it difficult to pray. Very. I should think you might have encountered similar difficulties. Or are Freud's disciples required to give up the church?'

'I go to church' was Jung's awkward reply.

'For myself,' said Dana, 'I can't say I see it: this rage for psychotherapeutics. The Emmanuels, the New Thought, mesmerism, Dr Quackenbos — '

'Quackenbos,' harrumphed the muttonchops.

'Eddyism,' Dana went on, 'psychoanalysis — they are all cults, to my thinking. But half the women in America are running around demanding it, and it's best they don't drink from the wrong well. They'll be drinking from yours, believe me, after they read about you in the Times. Well, the long and short of it is this: we can make you the most famous psychiatrist in America, but Ochs can't write you up unless you make clear in your lectures at Fordham — unmistakably clear — that you don't go in for the Freudian obscenities. Good afternoon, Dr Jung.'

The rapping on the door of Miss Acton's hotel room continued as the doorknob turned this way and that. At last the door flew open, and in rushed five persons, three of whom I recognized: Mayor McClellan, Detective Littlemore, and George Banwell. The other two were a gentleman and lady of evident wealth.

The man looked to be in his late forties, fair in complexion but sunburned and peeling, with a pointy chin, deeply receding hairline, and a white gauze bandage over most of his left eye. It was instantly clear that he was Miss Acton's father, although the long limbs that were so graceful on her frame looked effete on him, and the features so softly feminine in her case conveyed diffidence in his. The woman, whom I took to be Miss Acton's mother, was at most five feet tall. She was of greater girth than her husband, had a deal of jewelry and paint on her face, and wore shoes with dangerously high heels, presumably to add a few inches to her height. Possibly she had been attractive once. It was she who spoke first, crying out, 'Nora, you piteous, unlucky girl! I have been in agony since I heard the monstrous news. We have been riding for hours. Harcourt, are you just going to stand there?'

Nora's father apologized to the stout woman, extended his arm to her, and conducted her safely to a chair, into which she dropped with a great cry of exhaustion. The mayor introduced me to Acton and his wife, Mildred. It turned out their party had just arrived in the lobby when someone called down to the front desk complaining about noises in Miss Acton's room. I assured them we were quite safe, rather wishing the teacup was not lying in pieces against the far wall. Their backs were to it; I think they didn't see.

'Everything's going to be all right now, Nora,' said Mr Acton. 'The mayor tells me there has been nothing in the press, thank goodness.'

'Why did I listen to you?' Mildred Acton asked her daughter. 'I said we should never have left you behind in New York. Didn't I say so, Harcourt? Do you see what has happened? I thought I would die when I heard. Biggs! Where is that Biggs? She will pack for you. We must get you out of here, Nora, at once. I do believe the rapist is here in this hotel. I have a sense for these things. The moment I walked in, I felt his eyes on me.'

'On you, my dear?' asked Acton.

I cannot say I observed in Miss Acton the warm affection or the sense of protection you might wish to see in a girl greeting her parents after a prolonged and eventful separation. Nor could I blame her, given the tenor of the remarks made to her so far. The odd thing was that Miss Acton had not yet said a word. She had made several starts at speaking, but none of these efforts had eventuated in speech. A furious influx of blood now came to her cheeks. Then I realized: the girl had lost her voice again. Or so I thought, until Miss Acton said, quietly and evenly, 'I have not been raped, Mama.'