'As a matter of fact,' she replied airily, 'I am thinking of a concentration in Elizabethan drama and psychology. Oh — and also detection.'
'An absurd combination of interests. No one will take it seriously.'
There was another pause.
'I guess,' I said, 'we ought to say good-bye then.'
'I've been happy once,' she answered.
'Once?'
'Last night,' she said. 'Good-bye, Doctor. Thank you.'
I didn't answer. It was a good thing. Had I not given her the extra instant, she might not have said the words I longed to hear:
'Are you going to kiss me good-bye at least?' she asked.
'Kiss you?' I replied. 'You are underage, Miss Acton. I wouldn't dream of it.'
'I'm like Cinderella,' she said, 'only in reverse. At midnight I turn eighteen.'
Midnight came. And so it fell out that I could not bring myself to leave New York City even once all the rest of that young month.
Epilogue
In July of 1910, George Banwell was found not guilty of murdering Seamus Malley, the judge dismissing the charge for want of evidence. Banwell was convicted, however, of the attempted murder of Nora Acton. He spent the rest of his life in prison.
Charles Hugel served eighteen months for accepting a bribe and falsifying evidence. He slept badly in prison, on some nights not at all, contracting nervous illnesses from which he never recovered.
One fine summer day in 1913, Harry Thaw walked out the front door of the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, stepped into a waiting car, and rode off to Canada. He was captured there and extradited back to New York, where he stood trial for escape. The prosecution was unwise. To convict Thaw, the prosecutor had to convince the jury that he was sane at the time of the escape, but if the jury found him sane, he had a legal right to escape, because a sane man cannot lawfully be confined in a lunatic asylum. By the end of the proceedings, Thaw had obtained a complete and unconditional release. Nine years later, he horsewhipped a young man and was incarcerated again.
Chong Sing was released from custody on September 9, 1909, his earlier confession deemed to have been the product of coercion. No charges were brought against him. Despite an international manhunt, William Leon was never found.
George McClellan did not run in the mayoral election of 1909 and never held elected office again. But he made good on his pledge to complete the Manhattan Bridge if it was the last thing he did in office. In those days, a mayor's term ended on the last day of the calendar year. On December 31, 1909, McClellan cut the ribbon on the Manhattan Bridge, opening it to traffic.
Jimmy Littlemore was officially promoted to lieutenant on September 15, 1909. He and Betty were married just before Christmas. Greta was one of the guests, accompanied by her baby.
Ernest Jones never learned of Freud's involvement in the investigation of the crimes of George and Clara Banwell. Freud did not want his role, such as it was, made public, and he did not trust Jones to keep the secret. Jones did, however, hear all about the Charaka society. He was especially taken with their signet ring. He resolved to have such a ring made for Freud's genuinely loyal followers, to identify themselves to one another wherever they should go. Jung, needless to say, did not get one.
In the decades after Freud's lectures at Clark, it became clear that 1909 marked a watershed in American psychiatry and culture. Freud's appearance at the university was a signal success. Brill's translation of Freud's papers on hysteria came out — a little behind schedule — after the proceedings came to a close. Psychoanalysis took root in American soil and quickly rose to stunning prominence. Freud's sexual theories triumphed, and the psychotherapeutic culture began to spread its roots.
Jung's Fordham lectures, in which he openly broke with Freud, finally took place in 1912. That same year, the Times published both its admiring full-page story on Jung and Moses Allen Starr's allegations about Freud's 'peculiar' life in Vienna. But it was too late. Jung's star never rose anywhere near as high as Freud's. His rupture with Freud precipitated in him a bout of deep depression, marked by several psychotic or quasi-psychotic episodes. He would later deride Freud's ideas as 'Jewish psychology.'
Psychoanalysis sundered the connection between neurology and nervous disease. Indeed, it made the term nervous disease obsolete, replacing it with a whole new vocabulary of repressed desire, unconscious fantasy, id, ego, superego, and of course sexuality. Psychology was reborn, and the somatic neurological treatment of mental illness would for almost a century be spurned as obsolete, backward, unenlightened.
Freud himself never took the satisfaction one would have expected from the success of psychoanalysis in this country. Mystifying his colleagues, he called Smith Ely Jelliffe a criminal. His ideas might be famous in America, he said, but they were not understood. 'My suspicion of America,' Freud confided to a friend toward the end of his fife, 'is unconquerable.'
Author's Note
The Interpretation of Murder is a work of fiction from beginning to end, but much is based on actual fact. Sigmund Freud did of course visit the United States in 1909, arriving aboard the steamship George Washington with Carl Jung and Sandor Ferenczi on the evening of August 29 (notwithstanding the fact that Ernest Jones's classic biography originally gave the date as September 27, 'corrected' in later editions to the still-erroneous August 27). Freud did stay at the Hotel Manhattan in New York City for a week before traveling to Clark University to deliver his famous lectures, and he did contract a kind of horror of America. While in the United States, Freud was indeed asked to render impromptu psychoanalyses, although never, so far as we know, by the mayor of New York City.
The Manhattan of 1909 described in this book was painstakingly researched. The architecture, the city streets, high society — almost every detail, down to the color of the paneling on the taxis, is based on fact. Errors undoubtedly remain; readers who find any are encouraged to tell me about them at www.interpretationofmurder.com.
I could not, however, stick to fact on every New York detail. To begin with, a few locations had to be changed. The main city morgue, for example, was at that time in Bellevue Hospital, on Twenty-sixth Street, whereas I have located Coroner Hugel — a fictional character — and his morgue downtown in an invented building. Similarly, I had to invent the Balmoral, where Elizabeth Riverford's body is found, but knowledgeable readers will recognize at once the real building — the Ansonia — on which the Balmoral, including its fountain with seals cavorting within, is based. Or again, while the Manhattan Bridge caisson is factual in most respects, it would have been filled with concrete by September 1909, and it did not have the pressurized debris- elimination chambers, opening onto the river, described as 'windows' in this book. In reality, there would have been a longer pressurized debris chute, but I needed the 'windows' for reasons I need not explain to those who have already read the book.
I have also moved certain historical events backward or forward in time. A small example involves Abraham Brill's reference to Theodore Roosevelt's 'hyphenated Americans.' History buffs will point out that Roosevelt did not give his well-known 'hyphenated Americans' speech until 1915. (The disparaging term was, however, already in widespread use by 1909, and the press would have reported Roosevelt's views before 1915. Interested readers may, for example, consult the New York Times of February 17, 1912, page 3, which tells us that Ropsevelt 'excoriate[e] hyphenated Americans' in an article he had just published in Germany.
Brill, conscious of his German accent throughout his life, would have been highly sensitive to this issue.) Or again, the texts Dr Younger consults to discover the cause of Nora Acton's vision of herself lying in her own bed are
