The Alienist - Caleb Carr [190]
“But Sara has no interest in marriage,” Kreizler answered, finally getting himself under control. “She’s little enough interest in men at all—she’s constructed her entire life around the idea that a woman can live an independent, fulfilling existence. You ought to know that.”
“Well, it did cross my mind,” I lied, trying to salvage some vestige of dignity. “But the way that you were acting, it seemed as though—well, I don’t know how it seemed!”
“That was one of the first conversations I had with her,” Kreizler explained further. “There were to be no complications, she said—everything would be strictly professional.” Laszlo studied me as I pouted. “It must have been very trying for you,” he said, with another chuckle.
“It was,” I answered petulantly.
“You might’ve simply asked.”
“Well, Sara wasn’t the only one trying to be professional!” I protested, stamping a foot. “Though I can see now that I shouldn’t have bothered with any—” I suddenly stopped, my volume falling again. “Wait a minute. Just one minute. If it’s not Sara, then who in hell—” I turned slowly to Laszlo, and then he turned equally slowly to the ground: the explanation was all over his face. “Oh, my God,” I breathed. “It’s Mary, isn’t it?”
Kreizler looked toward the station, and then into the distance in the direction from which the train would approach us, as if searching for salvation from this inquisition. None came. “It’s a complicated situation, John,” he finally said. “I must ask you to understand and respect that.”
Too shocked to offer any commentary, I proceeded to sit mutely through Laszlo’s subsequent explanation of this “complicated situation.” Clearly there were aspects of the thing that disturbed him deeply: Mary had originally been a patient of his, after all, and there was always the danger that what she believed was affection for him was in reality a kind of gratitude and, worse still, respect. For this reason, Laszlo explained to me carefully, he’d tried very hard not to encourage her or to permit himself any reciprocal emotions when it had first become clear to him, almost a year earlier, how she felt. At the same time, he was anxious that I should understand how very much his and Mary’s mutual attraction had grown from beginnings that in many ways were perfectly natural.
When Kreizler first started to work with the illiterate and supposedly uncomprehending Mary, he quickly realized that he would not be able to communicate with her until he could establish a bond of trust. And he forged that bond by revealing to her what he now referred to ambiguously as his own “personal history.” Unaware that I currently knew more about his personal history than he’d ever told me, Kreizler didn’t realize how fully I understood his words. Mary had probably been, I speculated, the first person who ever heard the tale of Laszlo’s apparently violent relationship with his own father, and such a difficult disclosure would indeed have bred trust, and more: while Laszlo had only intended to encourage Mary to tell her own tale by telling his, he had, in fact, planted the seeds of an unusual sort of intimacy. That intimacy had survived into the period when Mary came to work for him, making life on Seventeenth Street far more interesting, not to mention perplexing, than it had ever been before. When it eventually became impossible for Kreizler to deny first that Mary’s feelings for him went beyond mere gratitude, and, second, that he was experiencing a similar attraction to her, he entered on a long period of self-examination, trying to determine if what he felt was not at heart a kind of pity for the unfortunate, lonely creature whom he’d taken under his roof. He only fully satisfied himself that it was not several days before our investigation burst in on his life. The case forced him to put off a resolution of his personal predicament; yet it also helped him clarify what form that resolution might take. For when it became clear that not only were the members of our team in physical danger, but his servants, as well,