soul. The answer is that we were invited, but that I would never go to one of your balls in a thousand years.'
'Really?'
'Yes, really. They are sickening.'
'Why?'
'Because they are so — so tiresome.'
'They are sickeningly tiresome?'
'Do you know what a debutante is made to do, Doctor? First, together with her mother, she must call on all her mother's acquaintance — perhaps a hundred houses. I doubt you can imagine how excruciating that is. In every house, the women invariably comment on how 'grown up' you look, by which they mean something — quite disgusting. When the grand day arrives, you are exhibited like a talking animal on whom conversational open season has been declared. Then you are forced to endure a cotillion at which every man believes he has a right to make love to you, no matter who he is, no matter how old, no matter how bad his breath. And I haven't even gotten to having to dance with them. I'm starting college this month; I will never come out.'
I chose not to respond to this disquisition, which on the whole seemed quite persuasive. Instead I said, 'Tell me what happens when you try to remember.'
'What do you mean, 'what happens'?'
'I want you to tell me whatever thought or image or feeling comes to you when you try to remember what happened yesterday.'
She took a deep breath. 'Where the memory should be, there is a darkness instead. I don't know how else to describe it:
'Are you there, in the darkness?'
'Am I there?' Her voice quieted. 'I think so.'
'Is anything else there?'
'A presence.' She shuddered. 'A man.'
'What does the man make you think of?'
'I don't know. It makes my heart beat faster.'
'As if you had something to fear?'
She swallowed. 'To fear? Let me think. I have been attacked in my own house. The man who attacked me has not been caught. They do not even know who it was. They believe he may yet be watching my house, planning to kill me if I return. And your penetrating question is whether I have something to fear?'
I should have been more sympathetic, but I decided to loose the one arrow I had. 'This was not the first time you lost your voice, Miss Acton.'
She frowned. I noticed, for some reason, the graceful oblique lines of her chin and profile. 'Who told you that?'
'Mrs Biggs told the police yesterday.'
'That was three years ago,' she replied, coloring slightly. 'It is absolutely unconnected to anything.'
'You have nothing to be ashamed of, Miss Acton.'
'I have nothing to be ashamed of?'
I heard the emphasis on I but could not decipher it. 'We are not responsible for our feelings,' I replied. 'Therefore no feeling can cause us shame.'
'That is the least perceptive remark I have ever heard in my life.'
'Oh, really?' I answered. 'What about when I asked if you had something to fear?'
'Of course feelings can cause people shame. It happens all the time.'
'Are you ashamed of what happened when you lost your voice the first time?'
'You have no idea what happened,' she said. Although she didn't sound it, she seemed suddenly fragile.
'That is why I am asking.'
'Well, I am not going to tell you,' she replied, and rose from the sofa. 'This is not medicine. It is — it is prying. ' She raised her voice. 'Mrs Biggs? Mrs Biggs, are you there? 'The door flew open, and Mrs Biggs bustled in. She must have been in the corridor all along, no doubt with her ear to the keyhole. 'Dr Younger,' Miss Acton addressed me, 'I am going out to buy a few things, since no one seems to know how long I shall be staying here. I'm sure you can find your way back to your own room.'
The mayor made Coroner Hugel wait an hour in his anteroom. Impatient under ordinary conditions, Hugel looked irate now. 'It is obstruction in the first degree,' he cried out, when finally admitted into Mayor McClellan's office. 'I demand an investigation.'
George Brinton McClellan, Jr. — son of the famous Civil War general — was the most intellectually accomplished and forward-thinking man ever to have held the office of mayor of New York City. In 1909, only a handful of Americans were recognized as authorities on Italian history; McClellan was one of them. At forty-three, he had already been a newspaper editor, lawyer, author, congressman, lecturer on European history at Princeton University, honorary member of the American Society of Architects, and mayor of the nation's largest city. When the aldermen of New York City passed a measure in 1908 prohibiting women from smoking in public, McClellan vetoed it.
His hold on the mayoralty, however, was tenuous. The next election was less than nine weeks away, and although the candidates had not been officially named, McClellan still had no offer of nomination from any major party or syndicate. He had made two potentially fatal political mistakes! The first was having in 1905 narrowly defeated William Randolph Hearst, who ever since had filled his newspapers with sensational accounts of McClellan's shameless corruption. The second was having broken with Tammany Hall, which hated him for his incorruptibility. Tammany Hall ran the Democratic Party in New York City, and the Democrats ran the city. It was a rewarding arrangement: the Tammany leadership had unburdened the city of at least $500 million over the years. McClellan had originally been a Tammany nominee, but once elected he refused to make the brazen patronage appointments demanded of him. He ousted the most notoriously corrupt officials and brought charges against many others. He hoped to wrest control of the party from Tammany, but in this goal he had not yet succeeded.
On the mayor's walnut desk, in addition to a copy of all fifteen of the city's major newspapers, was a set of blueprints. These depicted a soaring suspension bridge, anchored by two gigantic but marvelously thin towers. Streetcars were shown traversing an upper deck, while below were six lanes of horse, automobile, and rail traffic. 'Do you know, Hugel,' said the mayor, 'you are the fifth person today who has demanded an investigation of one thing or another?'
'Where did the body go?' Hugel replied. 'Did it get up and walk away on its two feet?'
'Look at this,' the mayor replied, gazing at the blueprints. 'This is the Manhattan Bridge. It has cost thirty millions to build. I will open it this year, if it is the last thing I do in office. This arch on the New York side is a perfect replica of the St. Denis portal in Paris, only twice the size. A century from now, this bridge — '
'Mayor McClellan, the Riverford girl — ' 'I know about the Riverford girl,' McClellan said with sudden authority. He looked Hugel full in the face: 'What am I supposed to tell Banwell? What is he to tell the girl's wretched family? Answer me that. Of course there should have been an investigation; you should have completed it long ago.'
'I?' asked the coroner. 'Long ago?'
'How many bodies have we lost in the past six months, Hugel, including the two unaccounted for after we repaired the leak? Twenty? You know as well as I do where they are going.'
'You are not suggesting that I — '
'Of course not,' said the mayor. 'But someone on your staff is selling our cadavers to the medical schools. I am told they are worth five dollars a head.'
'Am I to blame,' responded Hugel, 'with the conditions I am given — no protection, no guards, the corpses piling up, no room for them all, sometimes rotting before they can be disposed of? Every month I have reported on the humiliating conditions at the morgue. But you leave me in that rabbit warren.'
'I am sorry for the state of the morgue,' said McClellan. 'No one could have managed half so well as you have, given the resources. But you have turned a blind eye to this stealing of cadavers, and I am about to pay the price for it. You will interrogate every member of your staff. You will contact every medical school in the city. I want that body found.'
'This body is not at a medical school,' the coroner objected. 'I had already performed the autopsy. I had ventilated the lungs, for God's sake, to confirm asphyxiation.'
'What of it?'
