the heat. She made to scream again, but no sound came out, as if she had expended all her voice.
Mrs Biggs came to her senses first and ordered her husband out of the room, telling him to fetch the doctor and a policeman. Gingerly she went to the girl, trying to calm her, unwinding the tie. When her mouth was freed, the girl made all the motions that normally accompany speech, but still no sound came out, no words at all, not even a whisper. When the police arrived, they were dismayed to learn that she could not speak. A still greater surprise lay in store for them as well. Paper and pencil were brought to the girl; the police asked her to tell them in writing what happened. I can't, she wrote. Why not? they asked. Her reply: I can't remember.
Chapter Four
It was almost seven on Monday evening when Freud,
Ferenczi, and I returned to the hotel. Brill had gone home, tired and happy. I believe Coney Island is Brill's favorite place in America. He once told me that when he first arrived in this country at the age of fifteen, penniless and alone, he used to spend entire days on the boardwalk and sometimes nights beneath it. All the same, it wasn't obvious to me that Freud's first taste of New York should have included the Live Premature Incubator Babies show or Jolly Trixie, the 685-pound lady, advertised under the rapturous slogan holy smoke — she's fat! she's awful fat.
But Freud seemed delighted, comparing it to Vienna's Prater — 'only on a gigantic scale,' he said. Brill even persuaded him to rent a bathing costume and join us in the enormous saltwater swimming pool inside Steeplechase Park. Freud proved a stronger swimmer than either Brill or Ferenczi, but in the afternoon he had an attack of prostatic discomfort. We sat down, therefore, at a boardwalk cafe, where, punctuated by the clattering roar of the roller coasters and the steadier pounding of surf, we had a conversation I will never forget.
Brill had been ridiculing the treatment of hysterical women practiced by American physicians: massage cures, vibrating cures, water cures. 'It is half quackery and half sex industry,' he said. He described an enormous vibrating machine recently purchased — for four hundred dollars — by a doctor he knew, a professor at Columbia no less. 'Do you know what these doctors are actually doing? No one admits it, but they are inducing climax in their women patients.'
'You sound surprised,' replied Freud. 'Avicenna practiced the same treatment in Persia nine hundred years ago.'
'Did he make himself rich from it?' asked Brill, with a note of bitterness. 'Thousands a month, some of them. But the worst of it is their hypocrisy. I once pointed out to this august physician, who just happens to be my superior at work, that if his treatment worked it was a proof of psychoanalysis, establishing the link between sexuality and hysteria. You should have seen the look on his face. There was nothing sexual in his treatment, he said, nothing at all. He was simply allowing patients to discharge their excess neural stimulation. If I thought otherwise, what it proved was the corrupting effect of Freud's theories. I'm lucky he didn't fire me.'
Freud merely smiled. He had none of Brill's bitter edge, none of his defensiveness. One could not blame the ignorant, he said. In addition to the inherent difficulty of uncovering the truth about hysteria, there were powerful repressions, accumulated over millennia, which we could not expect to vanquish in a day. 'It is the same with every disease,' said Freud. 'Only when we understand the cause can we claim to understand the sickness, and only then can we treat it. For now the cause remains hidden from them, so they remain in the Dark Ages, bleeding their patients and calling it medicine.'
It was then that the conversation took its remarkable turn. Freud asked if we would like to hear one of his recent cases, about a patient obsessed with rats. Naturally we said yes.
I had never heard a man speak as Freud did. He recounted the case with such fluency, erudition, and insight that he held us rapt for over three straight hours. Brill, Ferenczi, and I would periodically interrupt, challenging his inferences with objections or questions. Freud would answer the challenge before the questioner had even got the words out of his mouth. I felt more alive in those three hours than at any other moment in my life. Amid the barkers, screaming children, and thrill seekers of Coney Island, the four of us, I felt, were tracing the very edge of man's self- knowledge, breaking ground in undiscovered country, forging uncharted paths the world would some day follow. Everything man thought he knew about himself — his dreams, his consciousness, his most secret desires — would be changed forever.
Back at the hotel, Freud and Ferenczi were preparing to go to Brill's for dinner. Unfortunately, I was committed to dine elsewhere. Jung was meant to go with them but was nowhere to be found. Freud had me knock on Jung's door, to no avail. They waited until eight, then set off for Brill's without him. I changed hurriedly but irritably into evening dress. Under any circumstances, I would have been annoyed by the prospect of a ball, but to miss dinner with Freud as a result was vexing beyond description.
New York society in the Gilded Age was essentially the creation of two very rich women, Mrs William B. Astor and Mrs William K. Vanderbilt, and of the titanic clash between them in the 1880s.
Mrs Astor, nee Schermerhorn, was highborn; Mrs Vanderbilt, nee Smith, was not. The Astors could trace their wealth and lineage to New York's Dutch aristocracy of the eighteenth century. To be sure, the term aristocracy in this usage is a bit of a stretch, since Netherlandish fur traders in the New World were not exactly princes in the Old. European ladies and gentlemen may not have read their Tocqueville, but the one difference between the United States and Europe on which they all agreed was that America, to its misfortune, lacked an aristocracy. Nevertheless, by the late nineteenth century, the fabulously monied Astors would be received at the Court of St. James and would soon have their aristocratic claims confirmed by English titles of nobility, which were far superior to Dutch ones, had there been any Dutch ones.
By contrast, a Vanderbilt was a nobody. Cornelius 'Commodore' Vanderbilt was merely the richest man in America — indeed, the richest man in the world. Being worth a million dollars made one a man of fortune in the mid- nineteenth century; Cornelius Vanderbilt was worth a hundred million when he died in 1877, and his son was worth twice that a decade later. But the Commodore was still a vulgar steamship and rail magnate who owed his wealth to industry, and Mrs Astor would call on neither him nor his relations.
In particular, Mrs Astor would not set foot in the home of the young Mrs William K. Vanderbilt, wife to the Commodore's grandson. She would not even leave her card. It was thus established that the Vanderbilts were not to be received in the best Manhattan houses. Mrs Astor let it be known that there were only four hundred men and women in all New York City fit to enter a ballroom — that number being, as it happened, the quantity of guests who fit comfortably into Mrs Astor's own ballroom. The Vanderbilts were not among the Four Hundred.
Mrs Vanderbilt was not vindictive, but she was intelligent and indomitable. No penny would be spared to break the Astor ban. Her first measure, achieved with a liberal dose of her husband's largesse, was to procure an invitation to the Patriarchs' Ball, a significant event in New York's social calendar, attended by the city's most influential citizens. But she was still excluded from Mrs Astor's more rarefied circle.
Her second step was to have her husband build a new house. It would be located on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street and like no house yet seen in New York City. Designed by Richard Morris Hunt — not only the most famous American architect of the time but a welcome guest of the Astors — 660 Fifth Avenue became a white limestone French chateau in the style of the Loire Valley. Its stone entry foyer was sixty feet long, with a double-height vaulted ceiling, at the end of which rose a magnificent carved Caen stairwell. Among its thirty-seven rooms were a soaring dining hall lit by stained-glass windows, an enormous third-and-fourth-floor gymnasium for her children, and a ballroom capable of holding eight hundred guests. Throughout the house were Rembrandts, Gainsboroughs, Reynoldses, Gobelin tapestries, and furniture that once belonged to Marie Antoinette.
As the mansion neared completion in 1883, Mrs Vanderbilt announced a housewarming party, on which she would eventually spend some $250,000. The cleverest use of her wealth, by far, lay in securing in advance the attendance of a few notable but purchasable guests not beholden to Mrs Astor s rules, including several English ladies, a smattering of Teutonic barons, a coterie of Italian counts, and one former United States president. Dropping hints of these advance bookings, as well as of sumptuous and unheard-of entertainments, Mrs Vanderbilt issued a total of twelve hundred invitations. Her anticipated ball became the talk of the town.
One especially eager little partygoer happened to be Carrie Astor, Mrs Astor's favorite daughter, who all summer long had been preparing with her friends a Star Quadrille for Mrs Vanderbilt's ball. But of those twelve
