'Just tell me.'
Reluctantly, she confessed that there was one inexplicable piece of the episode. Her vantage point, as she saw the awful event unfold, was not from her own eye level but from a place above both herself and the intruder. She actually saw herself lying on the bed as if she were an observer of the scene, not the victim. 'How is that possible, Doctor?' she cried softly. 'It's not possible, is it?'
I wanted to console her, but what I had to say was not likely to be comforting. 'What you are describing is how we see things sometimes in dreams.'
'But if I dreamt it, how did I get burned?' she whispered. 'I didn't burn myself, did I? Did I?'
I could not answer. I was picturing an even worse scenario. Could she also have inflicted those terrible wounds — the first set of wounds — on herself? I tried to imagine her drawing a knife or razor along her own soft skin, making it bleed. It was impossible for me to believe.
From far downtown, a roar of human voices suddenly erupted in a great distant cheer. Nora asked what it could be. I said it was probably the strikers. A march had been promised by union leaders in the aftermath of some labor trouble downtown yesterday. A notorious firebrand called Gompers vowed a strike that would bring the city's industry to a halt.
'They have every right to strike,' said Nora, clearly eager to be distracted. 'The capitalists should be ashamed of themselves, employing those people without paying them enough to feed their families. Have you seen the homes in which they live?'
She described to me how, all last spring, Clara Banwell and she had visited families in the tenements of the Lower East Side. It had been Clara's idea. That was how, said Nora, she had met Elsie Sigel with the Chinaman whom Detective Littlemore had been asking about.
'Elsie Sigel?' I repeated. Aunt Mamie had mentioned Miss Sigel to me at her gala. 'Who has run off to Washington?'
'Yes,' said Nora. 'I thought her very foolish to be doing missionary work when people are dying for want of food and shelter. And Elsie was working only with men, when it is the women and children who are really suffering.' Clara, Nora explained to me, had made a special point of calling on those families where the men had run off or been killed in work accidents. Clara and Nora got to know many such families on their visits, spending hours in their homes. Nora would care for the little ones while Clara befriended the women and the more grown-up children. They started visiting these families once a week, bringing them food and necessaries. Twice they had taken babies to the hospital, saving them from serious disease or even death. Once, Nora told me more darkly, a girl had gone missing; Clara and she visited every police station and hospital downtown, finally finding the girl in the morgue. The medical examiner said the girl had been raped. The girl's mother had no one to comfort or support her; Clara did both. Nora had seen unthinkable squalor that summer, but also — or so I guessed — a warmth of familial love previously unknown to her.
When she concluded, Nora and I sat looking at each other. Without warning, she said, 'Would you kiss me if I asked you?'
'Don't ask me, Miss Acton,' I said.
She took my hand and drew it toward her, touching the back of my fingers to her cheek.
'No,' I said sharply. She let go at once. Everything was my fault. I had given her every reason to believe she could take the liberty she had just taken. Now I had pulled the rug out from under her. 'You must believe me,' I told her. 'There is nothing I would like more. But I can't. I would be taking advantage of you.'
'I want you to take advantage of me,' she said.
'No.'
'Because I am seventeen?'
'Because you are my patient. Listen to me. The feelings you may think you have for me — you must not believe in them. They aren't real. They are an artifact of your analysis. It happens to every single patient who is psychoanalyzed.'
She looked at me as if I must be joking. 'You think your stupid questions have made me favor you?'
'Think of it. One moment you feel indifference toward me. Then rage. Then jealousy. Then — something else. But it's not me. It's nothing I have done. It's nothing I am. How could it be? You don't know me. You don't know the first thing about me. All these feelings come from elsewhere in your life. They surface because of these stupid questions I ask you. But they belong elsewhere. They are feelings you have for someone else, not me.'
'You think I am in love with someone else? Who? Not George Banwell?'
'You might have been.'
'Never.' She made a genuinely disgusted face. 'I detest him.'
I took the plunge. I hated taking it — because I expected she would henceforth regard me with revulsion — and my timing was all wrong, but it was still my obligation. 'Dr Freud has a theory, Miss Acton. It may apply to you.'
'What theory?' She was growing increasingly vexed.
'I warn you, it is distasteful in the extreme. He believes that all of us, from a very early age, harbor — that we secretly wish — well, in your case, he believes that when you saw Mrs Banwell with your father, when you saw her kneeling before your father and — a — engaging with him in — '
'You don't have to say it,' she broke in.
'He believes you felt jealous.'
She stared at me blankly.
I was having trouble making myself clear. 'Directly, physically jealous. What I mean is, Dr Freud believes that when you saw what Mrs Banwell was doing to your father, you wished you were the one who — that you had fantasies of being the one who — '
'Stop!' she cried out. She put her hands over her ears.
'I'm sorry.'
'How can he know that?' She was aghast. Her hands now covered her mouth.
I registered this reaction. I heard her words. But I tried to believe I hadn't. I wanted to say, I must be hearing things; I actually thought for a moment you asked how Freud knew.
'I never told anyone that,' she whispered, turning scarlet all over. 'Not anyone. How could he possibly know?'
I could only stare at her blankly, as she had stared at me a moment before.
'Oh, I am vile! ' she cried. She ran away, back toward her house.
After leaving Child's, Littlemore hoofed it over to the Forty-seventh Street police station, to see if either Chong Sing or William Leon had been collared. Both men had indeed been arrested — a hundred times, Captain Post told the detective irritably. Within hours of the perpetrators' descriptions going out, dozens of calls had come in, from all over the city and even from Jersey, from people claiming to have spotted Chong. With Leon it was even worse. Every Chinaman in a suit and tie was William Leon.
'Jack Reardon's been running around town all day like his head was chopped off,' said Captain Post, referring to the officer who, having been present with Littlemore when Miss Sigel's body was discovered, was the only man Post had who had actually seen the elusive Chong Sing. Reardon had been dispatched to police stations all over town, wherever another 'Mr Chong' had been picked up, and everywhere he went, Reardon discovered another false arrest. 'It's no good. We locked up half of Chinatown, and we still didn't get 'em. I had to tell the boys to lay off any more arrests. Here. You want to run any of these down?'
Post threw Littlemore a record of reported but not yet acted-upon Chong Sing and William Leon sightings. The detective perused the list, running his finger down the handwritten notes. He stopped halfway down the page, where a one-line description caught his eye. It read: Canal at River. Chinaman seen working docks. Said to meet description of suspect Chong Sing.
'Got a car?' asked Littlemore. 'I want to have a look at this one.'
'Why?'
'Because there's red clay at those docks,' answered the detective.
Littlemore drove Captain Post's one and only police car downtown, accompanied by a uniformed man. They turned on Canal Street and followed it all the way to the eastern edge of the city, where the immense, newly erected Manhattan Bridge rose up over the East River. Littlemore stopped at the entry to the construction site and cast his eyes over the laborers.
