The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [84]
“And who,” Mr. Moore asked indignantly, “very often accompanies me?”
“You miss my point,” the Doctor answered. “Sometimes, after these bouts of marginal self-destruction, you must spend hours caring for yourself, nurturing yourself, as if you were a child. Where is the consistency in that?”
“All right, all right,” Mr. Moore said in annoyance. “But it’s a long jump from mocking my bad habits to showing how a woman can be nurturing—can be a nurse in natal care, for Christ’s sake—and harbor a desire to kill infants, and be sane, all at the same time.”
“Has your research helped you at all, Doctor?” Lucius asked.
“I fear not,” he answered with the same gloominess he’d shown on the subject for days. “As I’ve told Sara, there is precious little in the current psychological literature that touches on the subject. Both Krafft-Ebing and Freud are willing to discuss the sexual dimension of a mother’s relationship to her children, particularly in the context of male children. And such men will even discuss the desire of children to destroy their parents, either literally or figuratively, again emphasizing boys. In addition, there are some explorations of violence by men against children, although these usually occur within broader discussions of the secondary effects of alcoholism and drug addiction. But I have searched in vain for truly meaningful discussions of women attacking children that are in their care, whether the children are their own or someone else’s. The general consensus is that such cases are either extreme or delayed manifestations of postpartum psychosis or, where that cannot be made to apply, mental disease of unknown etiology. I’m afraid that legal records and explorations have been far more helpful than psychological ones, in this respect.”
“Really?” Marcus said with some surprise: he’d had a fair degree of legal training before joining the force. “Progressive thinking from lawyers—that’s a switch.”
“Indeed,” the Doctor replied. “And I don’t mean to imply that there’s been anything like a systematic study of the phenomenon in legal or judicial circles. But the courts are forced to acknowledge the realities that are placed before them—and those realities, all too often, include cases of mothers, governesses, and other adult women committing violence against children. Very often infants.”
“But if I’m not wrong,” Marcus commented, “the act of infanticide is usually laid at one of two doors in the legal system: poverty or illegitimacy.”
“True, Marcus—but there have been cases, even a few celebrated ones, that could not be explained by either the mother’s being too poor to support the child or her being unmarried. Nor could they be hidden under the rug with a sweeping pronouncement of some unknown kind of insanity. You will recall the case of Lydia Sherman?”
At the drop of that infamous name, which occurred just as we were making our way across Forty-second Street on Eighth Avenue, both of the Isaacsons and Miss Howard went into a kind of rapture.
“Lydia Sherman,” Lucius said wistfully. “‘Queen Poisoner.’ Now, there was a case …”
“We’ll never know how many people she actually murdered,” Marcus said in the same tone. “It could’ve been dozens”
“And,” Miss Howard added, bringing things a bit more to the point, “some of them were children—including her own children. And she was neither poor nor unmarried when she poisoned them.”
“Exactly, Sara,” the Doctor said. “She had killed the children’s father, desired to marry again, and found her children to be simply, as she put it, ‘in the way.’ The newspaper accounts were quite abundant. But as far as the alienists of the day, as well as those of subsequent years, were concerned, the case might as well have never existed—even though many of them judged her to be perfectly sane at her trial, and that was a good twenty-five years ago.”
“I hate to break up this little admiration