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By Root 2830 0

’t tolerate the gap between what she wanted and what she thought society expected of a woman. Headstrong and absorbed with her own needs and desires as she was, Libby couldn’t let even children stand in the way of her plans; but she also felt a desperate need to have people perceive her as a good woman, a caring mother, a loving wife. Looked at from this angle, the strange story about the phantom Negro on the Charlton road really wasn’t so odd: only a tale so fantastic could make her look like a hero to the people in her town, instead of a woman who’d murdered three kids what were in her way. But there was nothing, the Doctor emphasized, insane in any of this: members of the male sex very often went to the gallows for similar crimes, without anybody ever suggesting that they were crazy.

But weren’t there differences, Mr. Picton asked, between women and men, so far as these things went? Only in the eyes of society, the Doctor answered. The world at large didn’t want to accept the idea that what most people considered the only truly reliable blood relationship in the world—that between a mother and her children—was in fact anything but sacred. Not done giving voice to the questions he was sure were in the jury’s minds, Mr. Picton proceeded to ask why Libby hadn’t just abandoned the kids and disappeared to start a new existence somewhere else, the way other women often did. Was it just the money that she expected to get from her husband’s estate when they died that’d driven her to bloodshed? These questions were designed to let the Doctor repeat the main theme of his testimony, to hammer it into the jury’s thinking—and the Doctor took the opportunity to pound away. Stronger even than Libby’s desire for wealth, he said, was the desire to be accepted by the world as a good mother. Every human being, he explained, wants to believe—and wants the rest of the world to believe—that he (or she) can perform life’s most primitive functions. For women trained by American society, this was especially true—the message to young girls (and here the Doctor borrowed from Miss Howard, who had, after all, been responsible for his own realization of the fact) was that if you couldn’t attend to the propagation of the species, nothing else you did would really make up for the failure. Libby Hatch had been especially “indoctrinated” with this belief, probably by her own family. She just could not tolerate being seen as the sort of person who wouldn’t or couldn’t care for her children adequately; in her mind, it was better that they die than that she be tarred with that particular brush. But, said Mr. Picton, such thinking might be interpreted by some people as insanity—and wasn’t it insanity, really, of some kind? No, answered the Doctor, it was intolerance. Of a raging, vengeful variety, true; but intolerance had not yet—and, to his way of thinking, never would be—classified as a mental disorder.

Those of us in the first two rows had, of course, heard all this many times, in recent weeks; but the Doctor and Mr. Picton managed to pump enough new blood into the discussion so that even we became wrapped up in the talk. The effect that it had on the jury was even stronger, from the look of them—and that, I guess, is why Mr. Darrow went straight for the throat once Mr. Picton sat down.

“Dr. Kreizler,” he said, moving toward the witness box with a hard look on his face, “isn’t it true that you and your associates have recently been trying to prove that the defendant is responsible for the unexplained deaths of a number of children in New York City?”

Mr. Picton didn’t even need to get up: before he could register an objection, Judge Brown slammed down his gavel, silencing the loud chatter that the question had sparked in both the galleries and the jury box. “Mr. Darrow!” he hollered. “I’ve had just about enough of this kind of irresponsible questioning, from both sides! I want to see you and Mr. Picton in my chambers—now!” As he got up, the judge turned to the jury box. “And you gentlemen will ignore that last question, which will be stricken from the