The Alienist - Caleb Carr [85]
CHAPTER 16
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An altogether unpleasant mood took hold of me during my sleep, and I woke at noon to find that my temper had shortened to a lamentable extent. This black outlook deepened when a messenger boy appeared with a note from Laszlo, written that morning. Apparently a Mrs. Edward Hulse of Long Island had been arrested during the night after trying to kill her own children with a carving knife. Though the woman had been released into her husband’s custody, Kreizler had been asked to assess her mental condition, and had invited Sara along. There was no thought of establishing a connection between Mrs. Hulse and our case, Laszlo explained; rather, Sara’s interest (which, sure enough, had been revitalized by several hours’ sleep) was in assembling details of character for the imaginary women that Laszlo had asked her to create as a way of further understanding our imaginary man. None of this was cause for annoyance on my part; it was more the way Kreizler phrased it all, as if he and Sara were off for a pleasant, stimulating day in the country together. As I crumpled the note up, I acidly wished them a lovely time; and I believe I spat in a sink afterwards.
A telephone call from Marcus Isaacson set our meeting for five o’clock, at the El station at Third Avenue and Fourth Street. I then dressed and surveyed the possibilities for my own afternoon—they appeared few and bleak. Emerging from my room, I discovered that my grandmother was giving a luncheon; the party consisted of one of her dim-witted nieces, the niece’s equally engaging husband (who was a partner in my father’s investment firm), and one of my second cousins. All three guests were full of questions about my father, questions that I, having been out of touch with him for many months, had no way of answering. They also made a few polite inquiries about my mother (who I did know was at that moment traveling in Europe with a companion), and politely dodged the subject of my former fiancée, Julia Pratt, whom they were acquainted with socially. The entire conversation was punctuated by insincere smiles and chuckles, and its general effect was to make me thoroughly morose.
The truth is, it had been many years since I’d been able to speak pleasantly with most members of my family, for reasons that, while powerful, were not difficult to explain. Right after I got out of Harvard, my younger brother—whose passage into adulthood had been even more troubled than my own—had fallen off a Boston boat and drowned. A lengthy autopsy revealed what I could have told anyone if they’d asked: that my brother had been a habitual user of alcohol and morphine. (During his last years he’d become a regular drinking companion of Roosevelt’s younger brother, Elliot, whose life was also ended by dipsomania some years later.) The funeral that followed was full of respectful but perfectly nonsensical tributes, all of which avoided the subject of my brother’s adult battle with terrible bouts of melancholy. There were many causes of his unhappiness, but at heart I believe now, as I believed then, that it was essentially the result of growing up in a household, and a world, where emotional expression of any kind was at best frowned on and at worst strangled. Unfortunately, I stated this opinion during the funeral, and was nearly forced into an asylum as a result. Relations between myself and my family had never quite recovered. Only my grandmother, who had doted on my brother, displayed any understanding of my behavior or any willingness to allow me into her home and her life. The rest of