Gramercy Park, at the foot of Lexington Avenue, was Manhattan's sole private park. Only the owners of the houses opposite the park's delicate wrought-iron fence had the right to enter. Each house came with a key to the park gates, offering access to the small paradise of flower and greenery within.
To the girl emerging from one of those houses early Monday evening, August 30, that key had always been a magical object, gold and black, delicate yet unbreakable. When she was a little girl, old Mrs Biggs, their servant, used to let her carry the key in her tiny white purse on their way across the street. She was too small to turn the key by herself, but Mrs Biggs would guide her hand and help her do it. When the iron gate released, it was as if the world itself were opening up before her.
The park had grown much smaller as she grew up. Now, at seventeen, she could of course turn the key without assistance — and did so this evening, letting herself in and walking slowly to her bench, the one she always sat on. She was carrying an armload of textbooks and her secret copy of The House of Mirth. She still loved her bench, even though the park had somehow become, as she got older, more an attachment to her parents' house than a refuge from it. Her mother and father were away. They had repaired to the country five weeks earlier, leaving the girl behind with Mrs Biggs and her husband. She had been delighted to see them go.
The day was still oppressively hot, but her bench lay in the cool shade of a willow and chestnut canopy. The books sat unopened beside her. The day after tomorrow, it would be September, a month she had been looking forward to for what seemed an eternity. Next weekend, she would turn eighteen. Three weeks after that, she would matriculate at Barnard College. She was one of those girls who, despite a fervent wish to be living another life, had staved off womanhood as long as she could, through the ages of thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, clinging to her stuffed animals even while school friends were already discussing stockings, lipstick, and invitations. At sixteen, the stuffed animals had finally been relegated to the upper reaches of a closet. At seventeen, she was lithe, blue-eyed, and heart-stoppingly beautiful. She wore her long blond hair tied with a ribbon in the back.
When the bells of Calvary Church struck six, she saw Mr and Mrs Biggs hurrying down the front stoop, rushing off to the shops before they closed. They waved to the girl, and she to them. A few minutes later, brushing tears from her eyes, she set off slowly toward home, clutching her textbooks to her chest, looking at the grass and the clover and the hovering bees. Had she turned to her left, she might have seen, on the far side of the park, a man watching her from outside the wrought-iron fence.
This man had been watching her a long time. He carried a black case in his right hand and was dressed in black — overdressed, in fact, given the heat. He never took his eyes from the girl as she crossed the street and climbed the stairs to her townhouse, a handsome limestone affair with two miniature stone lions mounting an ineffectual guard on either side of the front door. He saw the girl open the door without having to unlock it.
The man had observed the two old servants leaving the house. Glancing left, right, and over his shoulder, he started off. Quickly he approached the house, ascended the steps, tried the door, and found it still unlocked.
A half hour later, the summer-evening silence of Gramercy Park was ruptured by a scream, a girl's scream. It carried from one end of the street to the other, hanging in the air, persisting longer than one would have thought physically possible. Shortly thereafter, the man burst out the back door of the girl's house. A metal object no larger than a small coin flew from his hands as he stumbled down the rear steps. It hit a slate flagstone and bounced surprisingly high into the air. The man nearly fell to the ground himself, but he recovered, fled past the garden potting shed, and escaped from the garden down the back alley.
Mr and Mrs Biggs heard the scream. They were just returning, laden with bags of groceries and flowers. Horrified, they trundled into the house and up the stairs as quickly as they were able. On the second floor, the master bedroom door was open, which it should not have been. Inside that room, they found her. The shopping bags fell from Mr Biggs's hands. A pound of flour spread out around his old black shoes, raising a little cloud of white dust, and a yellow onion rolled all the way to the girl's bare feet.
She stood in the center of her parents' bedroom, clad only in a slip and other undergarments not meant for servants' eyes. Her legs were naked. Her long slender arms were outstretched above her head, the wrists bound by a thick rope, which was secured in turn to a ceiling fixture from which a small chandelier depended. The girl's fingers nearly touched its crystal prisms. Her slip was torn, both front and back, as if rent by the lashes of a whip or cane. A man's long white tie or scarf was wound tightly around her neck and between her lips.
She was not, however, dead. Her eyes were wild, staring, unseeing. She looked on the familiar old servants not with relief but with a kind of terror, as if they might be murderers or demons. Her whole frame shivered, despite 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.'