Mr. Picton’s queries about Libby Hatch were all designed for one basic purpose: to show that the woman was calculating, not insane, and that she was very capable of using a variety of methods to get what she wanted. The Doctor told about the three different approaches she’d employed to try to gain his sympathy-playing the victim, the seductress, and finally the wrathful punisher-and he explained how none of them was what he called “pathological” by nature. They were, in fact, methods what were very commonly used by many different sorts of women when they were trying to get the upper hand in a given situation-especially a situation what involved men. Playing Devil’s advocate for a moment, Mr. Picton asked if a woman’s murdering her own kids could really be included as part of such efforts-if it could actually be looked at as her trying to gain greater control over her life and her world. Here the Doctor launched into a long recital of similar cases he’d seen and read about over the years, cases where women had indeed done away with their offspring when said kids stood in the way of what their mothers perceived as their own basic needs.
Part of this conversation was a long examination of a case we’d all come to know well: the life and killings of Lydia Sherman, “Queen Poisoner.” The Doctor noted some very interesting similarities between that murderess and Libby Hatch: Lydia Sherman had been what the Doctor referred to as “temperamentally as well as constitutionally unsuited to either marriage or motherhood,” but that hadn’t stopped her from going hunting for husbands and bearing children over and over. Whenever things’d gotten intolerable-as they were always bound to do, given her personality-she just killed each family off, instead of accepting that the problem might lie inside herself. The same sort of “dynamic,” the Doctor said, controlled Libby Hatch’s behavior: for whatever reason (and he made sure to mention the fact that Libby never would discuss her childhood with him) the defendant just couldn’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 record!” Turning again, the judge looked down at the Doctor. “The witness may feel free to move about-but you’ll still be under oath, Doctor, when we get back under way. Let’s go, gentlemen!”
Moving so fast that he didn’t look like much more than a black blur, Judge Brown disappeared through the back door of the courtroom, followed quickly by Mr. Darrow and Mr. Picton. As soon as they’d gone, the crowd came alive with animated conversation. The Doctor, not wanting to look shocked, slowly rose and drifted over to where we were all sitting.
“So, Doctor,” Lucius said. “I guess this is when the real trial begins.”
“He’s laying the groundwork for his experts,” Marcus added, looking across the room to Mrs. Cady Stanton, Dr. White, and “Dr.” Hamilton. “He knows he can’t come at you with incompetence, so he’ll go for the ulterior motive. But I didn’t think he’d do it so fast.”
“It was his only choice,” the Doctor answered. “If he’d gradually led up to the accusation, the judge never would have allowed him to reach it. This way, he at least makes sure that the jury hears his charge. It’s worth a lecture in chambers.”
“Speaking of his witnesses, it looks like there’s more bad doings over there,” Cyrus said, pointing to the defense table. Libby Hatch had gotten up to introduce herself to Mrs. Cady Stan ton, and as they shook hands I could make out the old girl saying, “Thank you, thank you,” in answer to what were almost certainly some very flattering comments from the defendant-the same sort of comments she’d made to the Doctor on first meeting him.
“Maybe I should try to break that up,” Miss Howard said, as she watched the pair continue to chat. “Now that the subject’s been broached, so to speak, I’m sure Mrs. Cady Stanton will understand-”