The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [211]
I turned to give Miss Howard an uncertain little smile. “You want to watch it—you’re starting to sound like you look up to her a little bit.”
Miss Howard started to smile back, but stopped quickly. “Sometimes it seems that way, even to me,” she admitted. “And then I remember that picture of Ana Linares, and realize how desperately unaware of her own true motives—and therefore dangerous—Libby really is.”
“Okay,” I answered, trying to get Miss Howard perked back up by continuing our discussion. “So what about somebody like Goo Goo Knox? He knows Libby’s married to Micah Hunter and is playing the good wife to him, nurturing him—but he still wants to carry on with her.”
Miss Howard nodded vigorously. “It’s the same thing. Knox may be a gang boss, but he’s still a man—he still wants to slip women into convenient categories, to keep them from causing any problems. He doesn’t believe that Libby actually cares about Hunter. He assumes that in the deepest part of her soul she’s a libertine, a whore, and that when she performs for him, and with him, he’s seeing the real Libby. Yet what have we found out? That she’s persuaded Knox to place her home under his gang’s protection. His thugs are keeping watch over the very house where she’s constructed some sort of hiding place for the babies she’s still trying desperately to prove that she can care for. So for all we know, she loathes spending time at the Dusters’, but does it to facilitate her attempts to nurture.”
My hand went to my forehead, as if rubbing it would make my mind work harder. “So—then—she’s not the whore that Knox thinks she is?”
“She might be,” Miss Howard answered, confusing me again.
“But you just said she was doing it to take care of the kids—”
“She’s doing that, too.”
“So which one is the actual her?” I almost yelled, starting to feel a little dim and not much liking it.
“None of them, Stevie,” Miss Howard explained, slowing down a bit for me. “The actual her was broken to pieces a long time ago. And that’s what the different characters she assumes are—the broken pieces, separate from each other, no longer coherent. We don’t yet know the specific childhood context that made Libby into the killer she is. But we do know this much, especially given what we’ve seen and been through since we got up here: ever since she was just a girl, she was almost certainly told that there was only one way for her to be a full, complete woman.”
“To be a mother,” I said with a nod. “Which she wasn’t any good at.”
“Or which she may not, deep down, have even wanted to be,” Miss Howard said. “We don’t know. Again, all we do know is that the message girls get when they’re growing up—especially in corners of the world like this one—is that if you want to do something with your life other than raise children, not only will your road be difficult, but you’ll never really be a woman. You’ll just be a female, of some indefinite and not very appealing type. A harlot, maybe. Or perhaps a servant. Or, if you join a profession, a detached functionary. Whatever the case, underneath it all you’ll be a cold, unfeeling aberration.” With an angry flick of her finger, Miss Howard showered the road below us with sparks from the burning tip of her cigarette. “Unless you want to be a nun, of course—and even they don’t always get away with it…. A man can be a bachelor, and still be a man—because of his mind, his character, his work. But a woman without children? She’s a spinster, Stevie—and a spinster is always something