The Alienist - Caleb Carr [131]
Sara was waiting at a table in the main dining room, one that looked out onto the park across Fifth Avenue and was as far from the other parties in the restaurant as possible. She expressed both concern for our safety—the wire had made her anxious—and then, once she saw that we were unharmed, great curiosity about our trip. Her manner with Kreizler, even before he offered her the promised set of apologies, was quite pleasant, and therefore odd: I wouldn’t say that Sara was the sort of person to hold a grudge, exactly, but once stung she was usually very wary of the guilty party. I tried hard, however, to ignore the strange chemistry between them, and kept my attention on the business before us.
Sara said that given what we’d learned from the Pomeroy visit we could now safely assume that our man was, like Jesse, extremely sensitive about his physical appearance. Such sensitivity, she said, more than explained the profundity of the anger toward children: being perpetually mocked and cast out during one’s early years would, obviously, produce a fury that time alone would not necessarily extinguish. Kreizler also tended toward the theory that our man was in some way physically deformed. I, however, having several weeks earlier been the first to advance such a theory, now warned both of them to be very careful about accepting it. We already knew that the man we were pursuing stood over six feet tall and could get up and down the sides of buildings by way of a simple rope while carrying an adolescent boy: if he was deformed, it could not be in his arms or his legs, or anywhere, really, save his face—and that would narrow our search down quite a bit. Kreizler said that, given this consideration, he was prepared to narrow things down still further by declaring that it was the killer’s eyes that were the location of his deformity. The man was concentrating on his victims’ ocular organs more carefully and consistently than even Pomeroy had done, a fact that Kreizler considered more than significant: it was, he said, decisive.
Throughout our meal Kreizler encouraged Sara to at last fully explain what sort of a woman she thought might have played the kind of sinister role in our killer’s life that she’d postulated a week earlier. Jumping right in, Sara said she believed that only a mother could have had the kind of profound impact that was evident in this case. An abusive governess or female relative might be harrowing for a child, but if that child had recourse to his natural mother for protection and consolation the effect would have been dramatically reduced. It was apparent to Sara that the man we were after had never known such recourse, a circumstance that could be explained in a number of ways; but Sara’s preferred theory was that the woman had not wished to bear children in the first place. She’d only done so, Sara speculated, because she’d either become pregnant or had been offered no other socially acceptable role to play by the particular world in which she lived. The end result of all this was that the woman had deeply resented the children she did bear, and for this reason Sara thought there was an excellent chance that the killer was either an only child or had very few siblings: childbearing was not an experience that the mother would have wanted to repeat many times. Any physical deformity in one of the children she did have would, of course, have heightened the mother’s already negative feelings toward that child, but Sara did not believe that deformity alone was enough to explain such a relationship. Kreizler agreed with her on this point, saying that while Jesse Pomeroy attributed all his difficulties with his mother to his appearance, there were certainly additional and deeper factors involved as well.
One conclusion was becoming increasingly clear from all this: it was unlikely that we were dealing with people who enjoyed the advantages of wealth. In the first place, wealthy parents are seldom obliged to cope with their children if they find them