The Alienist - Caleb Carr [35]
“Afternoon, Cyrus,” I said with a difficult smile as I climbed the stairs, vainly hoping that I didn’t sound as uneasy as I always felt when caught in his shark’s stare. “Is Dr. Kreizler here?”
“That’s his carriage, Mr. Moore,” Cyrus answered, in a pleasant enough voice that still managed to make me sound like one of the bigger idiots in the city. But I just grinned resolutely on.
“I expect you’ve heard that the doctor and I will be working together for a while?”
Cyrus nodded with what, if I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn was a wry smile. “I’ve heard, sir.”
“Well!” I brushed my jacket back and slapped at my vest. “I guess I’ll go find him. Afternoon, Cyrus!”
I got no answer from the man as I entered, not that I deserved one; there was no reason for both of us to behave like morons.
The Institute’s small vestibule and front hall—white with dark wood wainscoting—were full of the usual fathers, mothers, and children, all crowded onto two long, low benches and waiting to see Kreizler. Almost every morning in the late winter and early spring, Laszlo personally conducted interviews to determine who would be admitted to the Institute the following fall. The applicants ranged from the wealthiest northeastern families to the poorest of immigrants and rural laborers, but they all had one thing in common: a troubled or troublesome child whose behavior was in some way extreme and inexplicable. This was all very serious, of course, but that didn’t change the fact that the Institute was, on such mornings, a bit of a zoo. As you walked down the hallway you were likely to be tripped, spat at, cursed, and otherwise maltreated, particularly by those children whose only mental deficiency was that they’d been overindulged, and whose parents clearly could and should have saved themselves the trip to Kreizler’s office.
As I moved to the door of Kreizler’s consulting room, I locked gazes with one such prospective troublemaker, a fat little boy with malevolent eyes. A dark, heavily lined woman of about fifty, wrapped in a shawl and mumbling something that I suspected was Hungarian, was pacing back and forth in front of the consulting room door; I had to dodge both her and the fat boy’s kicking legs in order to get close enough to knock. Having done so I heard Kreizler shout “Yes!” and then I entered, the pacing woman watching me with apparent concern.
After the fairly innocuous vestibule, Laszlo’s consulting room was the first place that his prospective patients (whom he always referred to as “students,” insisting that his staff do the same in order to avoid making the children conscious of their situations and conditions) saw on entering the space and experience that were the Kreizler Institute. He had therefore taken care that its furnishings were not intimidating. There were paintings of animals that, while reflecting Laszlo’s good taste, nonetheless amused and reassured the children, as did the presence of toys—ball-and-cup, simple building blocks, dolls, and lead soldiers—which Laszlo actually used in making preliminary tests of agility, reaction time, and emotional disposition. The presence of medical instruments was minimal, most being kept in the examination room beyond. It was there that Kreizler would perform his first series of physical investigations, should a given case interest him. These tests were designed to determine whether the child’s difficulties stemmed from secondary causes (that is, bodily malfunctions that affected mood and behavior) or primary abnormalities, meaning mental or emotional disorders. If a child showed no evidence of secondary distress, and Kreizler thought he could do some good in the case (in other words, if there were no signs of hopeless brain disease or damage), the child would be “enrolled”: he or she would live at the Institute