'What do you say now?' asked Jung.
Freud said nothing. He had fainted and was slipping off the sofa.
Detective Littlemore, hustling up from the Canal Street docks, put it all together. It was the first murder he had ever uncovered. Mr Hugel was going to be in heaven.
It wasn't Harry Thaw at all; it was George Banwell, from beginning to end. It was Banwell who killed Miss Riverford and stole her body from the morgue. Littlemore imagined Banwell driving to the river's edge, dragging the dead body out onto the pier, and descending the elevator down to the caisson. Banwell would have had the key to unlock the elevator door. The caisson was the perfect place to dispose of a corpse.
But Banwell would have assumed he was alone in the caisson. How stunned he must have been to discover Malley. How could Banwell have explained coming down in the middle of the night with a dead body in tow? He couldn't have explained it, so he had to kill him.
The blockage in Window Five, and Banwell's reaction to it, sealed the proof. He wouldn't want anybody discovering what had jammed up Window Five, would he?
The detective saw it all as he raced breathlessly along Canal Street — all except for the big black and red car, a Stanley Steamer, slowly trading him half a block behind. In his mind's eye, as he crossed the street, Littlemore saw his promotion to lieutenant; he saw the mayor himself decorating him; he saw Betty admiring his new uniform; but he didn't see the Steamer's sudden lurch forward. He didn't see the vehicle swerving slightly in order to hit him dead on, and of course he couldn't see himself tumbling through the air, his legs taken out by the car's fender.
The body lay sprawled out on Canal Street as the car sped away down Second Avenue. Among the horrified onlookers, a number shouted imprecations at the fleeing hit- and-run driver. One called him a murderer. A patrolman happened to be on the corner. He rushed to the fallen Littlemore, who had enough strength to whisper something in the officer's ear. The patrolman frowned, then nodded. It took ten minutes, but a horse-drawn ambulance finally appeared. They did not bother with a hospital; rather, they took the detective's body directly to the morgue.
Jung grasped Freud under the shoulders and laid him down on the sofa. Freud looked to Jung suddenly old and powerless, his fearsome faculty of judgment now as limp as his dangling arms and legs. Freud came to within a few seconds. 'How sweet it must be,' he said, 'to die.'
'Are you ill?' Jung asked.
'How did you do that? That noise?'
Jung shrugged.
'I will reconsider parapsychology — you have my word,' said Freud. 'Brill's behavior. I'm deeply sorry. He doesn't speak for me.'
'I know.'
'For a year I have placed too great a demand on you to keep me informed of your doings,' said Freud. 'I know it.
I will withdraw the excess libido, that I promise you too. But I'm worried, Carl. Ferenczi saw your — village.'
'Yes, I have found a new way to rekindle the memories of childhood. Through play. I used to build whole towns when I was a boy.'
'I see.' Freud sat up, handkerchief to his forehead. He accepted a glass of water from Jung.
'Let me analyze you,' said Jung. 'I can help you.'
'Analyze me? Ah, my fainting just now. It was neurotic, you think?'
'Of course.'
'I agree,' said Freud. 'But I already know its cause.'
'Your ambition. It has made you blind, horribly blind. As I have been.'
Freud took a deep breath. 'Blind, you mean, to my fear of being dethroned, my resentment of your success, my unstinting efforts to keep you down?'
Jung started. 'You knew?'
'I knew what you would say,' said Freud. 'What have I done to warrant that charge? Have I not advanced you at every turn, referred my own patients to you, cited you, credited you? Have I not done everything in my power for you, even at the price of injuring old friends, conferring on you positions I could have retained for myself?'
'But you undervalue the most important thing: my discoveries. I have solved the incest problem. It is a revolution. Yet you belittle it.'
Freud rubbed his eyelids. 'I assure you I do not. I appreciate its enormity all too well. You told us a dream you had on board the George Washington. Do you remember? You are deep in a cellar or cave, many levels below ground. You see a skeleton. You said the bones belonged to your wife, Emma, and her sister.'
'I suppose,' said Jung. 'Why?'
'You suppose?'
'Yes, that's right. What of it?'
'Whose bones were they really?'
'What do you mean?' asked Jung.
'You were lying.'
Jung didn't reply.
'Come,' said Freud, 'after twenty years of seeing patients prevaricate, you think I can't tell?'
Still Jung made no answer.
'The skeleton was mine, wasn't it?' said Freud.
'What if it was?' said Jung. 'The dream told me I was surpassing you. I wished to spare your feelings.'
'You wished me dead, Carl. You have made me your father, and now you wish me dead.'
'I see,' said Jung. 'I see where you are going. My theoretical innovations are an attempt to overthrow you. That's what you always say, isn't it? If anyone disagrees with you, it can only be a neurotic symptom. A resistance, an Oedipal wish, a patricide — anything but objective truth. Forgive me, I must have been infected with a desire to be understood intellectually for once. Not diagnosed, just understood. But perhaps that is not possible with psychoanalysis. Perhaps the real function of psychoanalysis is to insult and cripple others through subtle whispering about their complexes — as if that were an explanation of anything. What an abysmal theory!'
'Listen to what you are saying, Jung. Hear your voice. I ask you only to consider the possibility, just the possibility, that your 'father complex' — your own words — is at work here. It would be a terrible pity for you to make a public pronouncement of views whose true motivations you saw only later.'
'You asked if we could speak honestly,' said Jung. 'I for one intend to. I see through you. I know your game. You ferret out everyone else's symptoms, every slip of their tongue, aiming continually at their weak spots, turning them all into children, while you stay on top, reveling in the authority of the father. No one dares tweak the Master's beard. Well, I am not in the least neurotic. I am not the one who fainted. I am not incontinent. You said one true thing today: your fainting was neurotic. Yes, I have suffered from a neurosis — yours, not mine. I think you hate neurotics; I think analysis is the outlet for it. You turn us all into your sons, lying in wait for some expression of aggression from us — which you have made certain will occur — and then you spring, shouting Oedipus or death wish. Well, I don't give a damn for your diagnoses.'
There was perfect silence in the room.
'Of course you will take all this as criticism,' said Jung, a note of diffidence creeping into his voice, 'but I speak out of friendship.'
Freud took out a cigar.
'It is for your own good,' said Jung. 'Not mine.'
Freud finished his glass of water. Without lighting his cigar, he stood and walked to the hotel room door. 'We have an understanding, we analysts, among ourselves,' he said. 'No one need feel any embarrassment about his own bit of neurosis. But to swear that one is the picture of health, while behaving abnormally, suggests a lack of insight into one's illness. Take your freedom. Spare me your friendship. Good-bye.'
Freud opened the door for Jung to pass through. As he did so, Jung had a final remark. 'You will see what this means to you. The rest is silence.'
Gramercy Park was unreasonably cool and peaceful. I remained on the bench a long time after she ran off, staring at her house, then at my Uncle Fish's old house around the corner, which I used to visit as a boy. Uncle Fish never let us use his key to the park. At first I had the confused idea that, since Nora went home with the key, I
