The Alienist - Caleb Carr [201]
Sara didn’t crow excessively about the extent to which she’d been able to predict the character of that mother, though God knows she would’ve been justified in doing so. Her interviews in New Paltz had supplied her with only a general description of Mrs. Dury, but she’d read enough into those generalities to be very encouraged. Japheth’s mother was well remembered in the town, partly for her zealous advocacy of her husband’s missionary work, but even more vividly for her harsh, cold manner. Indeed, it was widely held among New Paltz’s other matrons that Japheth Dury’s facial spasms had been the result of his mother’s relentless badgering (thus demonstrating that folk wisdom can sometimes attain the status of psychological insight). Encouraging as all this was, it gave Sara only a fraction of the satisfaction offered by Adam Dury’s account. Almost every one of Sara’s hypotheses—from our killer’s mother having been an unwilling bride, to her dislike of childbearing, to her scatological harassment of her son from an early age—had been borne out by what Laszlo and I had heard in Dury’s barn; Adam had even told us that his mother often told Japheth he was a dirty red Indian. A woman had indeed played a “sinister role” in our killer’s life; and while the reverend’s may have been the hand that actually administered beatings in the Dury household, Mrs. Dury’s behavior appeared to have represented another sort of punishment to both her sons, one that was just as powerful. Indeed, Sara and I felt confident in saying that if one of Japheth’s parents had been the “primary” or “intended” victim of his murderous rage, it was almost certainly his mother.
In sum, it now seemed certain that we were dealing with a man whose fantastic bitterness toward the most influential woman in his life had led him to shun the company of women generally. This left us with the question of why he should have chosen to kill boys who dressed up and behaved like females, rather than de facto women. In coming up with an answer to this riddle, Sara and I were led back to our earlier theory that the victims all possessed character traits not unlike the killer’s own. The hateful relationship between Japheth Dury and his mother must, we reasoned, have spilled over into self-hatred, as well—for how could any boy despised by his mother fail to question his own worth? Thus Japheth’s anger had crossed sexual lines, becoming a sort of hybrid, or mongrel; and it had found its only release in destroying boys who embodied, in their behavior, similar ambiguity.
The final step in Sara’s and my process of assembling our recently collected clues was the fleshing out of our killer’s transformation from Japheth Dury into John Beecham. Sara had learned little about George Beecham in New Paltz—he’d lived in the town for just a year, and only appeared in local records because he’d voted in the 1874 congressional election—but we were fairly sure that we understood the selection of the name, nonetheless. Since the beginning of our investigation, it had been clear to all of us that we were dealing with a sadistic personality, one whose every action betrayed an obsessive desire to change his role in life from that of the victim to that of the tormentor. It was perversely logical