“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 society,” Mr. Moore said, “but Lydia Sherman was no nurse-she was a lying fortune hunter.”
“Yes, John,” Miss Howard said, “but a living demonstration that the simple accident of being born a woman doesn’t necessarily bring with it a talent for nurturing-or even an inclination toward it.”
“And by using her case, along with similar examples,” the Doctor added, “we can dispense with Professor James’s sentimental drivel about the parental instinct being stronger in women than in men and the nobility of the mother caring for the sick child. Lydia Sherman had sick children, to be sure, but she’d made them sick by poisoning them with arsenic-and her noble ministrations consisted of further doses of the same poison. No, I am increasingly brought back to a single brief statement that I encountered several days ago-”
Miss Howard guessed what he was referring to: “Herr Schneider’s remark about maternal egotism.”
The Doctor nodded. “For the benefit of the rest of you, Schneider noted that the mother, once her baby is delivered, transfers-and I quote-‘her entire egotism to the child.’ ”
“How’s that supposed to help us?” Mr. Moore asked. “The children at the Lying-in Hospital weren’t the Hunter woman’s, and neither is the Linares kid.”
“But the way in which she took Ana,” Lucius said, “indicates that she may have felt-how did you put it, Marcus? That she felt entitled to the child?”
“Correct.” I heard the Doctor snap his cigarette case closed. “And never forget her behavior on the train-caring for the child as if it were her own. Then, too, such psychological bonding often occurs between nurses and patients in general-especially where children are concerned. This is unquestionably not a woman to let something like what Sara refers to as the ‘accident of birth’ prevent her from feeling maternal in an intensely proprietary fashion about other people’s children. That much is obvious, John.”
“Oh,” Mr. Moore said, lighting up a stick of his own. “Sorry I missed it, then.” I could hear him letting out some smoke, and then he spoke more pointedly to the Doctor. “But you’re mixing something up, Kreizler. Let’s say all this is true, and she has these feelings about any kid she takes a shine to-for whatever reason, she ‘transfers her egotism to them.’ Fine-but unlike your very considerate example of my personal habits, she starts from a nurturing attitude and moves toward a destructive one. None of the kids are sick when she gets hold of them-but they end up dead. What happens? They can’t be ‘in the way,’ like Lydia Sherman’s children were-these are kids she’s picked out and chosen to put herself close to. So what happens?”
“Excellent, Moore,” the Doctor said. “That is the true mystery of this case. The woman invests her entire self-worth in these infants; yet she destroys them. What, indeed, happens?”
“Could it be a form of indirect suicide?” Lucius asked.
“No-too easy,” Miss Howard said. “If you’ll pardon my saying so, Lucius. How many times can you kill yourself, even by proxy? I think-I think we need to stay with the ideas we were discussing at the museum, Doctor. The duality-woman as creator alongside woman as destroyer.”
A general sort of “Wha-?” sound came out of the others all at once, to which Miss Howard and the Doctor gave out with a brief summary of their thoughts outside the Metropolitan.
“Then you’re saying that some part of this woman identifies with the notion of a woman having destructive power?” Marcus asked.
“Why not?” Miss Howard said simply. “Haven’t you ever in your life identified with a destructive male figure, Marcus?”
“Well, of course, but-”
I didn’t turn, but I could tell that Miss Howard was probably shaking her head in disappointment; I hoped she wasn’t going for the derringer. “But you were a boy,” she said, fairly bitterly. Marcus didn’t answer-he didn’t have to. “Which means that girls don’t have destructive or angry thoughts,” Miss Howard went on, “and so never dream of having the power to embody them. Correct?”
“Well,” Marcus answered, a bit sheepishly, “when you say it like that, it sounds fairly stupid.”
“Yes,” Miss Howard answered, “it does.”
“And it is,” the Doctor added. “My apologies, Detective Sergeant. But, as Sara said to me, look at the paradoxical examples young girls are offered when growing up-they are taught, on the one hand, that theirs is the pacific, nurturing sex. No outlet is provided for their feelings of anger and aggression. Yet they are human-it is, as Sara says, no more than stupidity to believe that they don’t experience anger, hatred, feelings of hostility. And as they do, they also hear different sorts of stories, from oblique sources-mythology, history, legend-of cruel goddesses and wanton queens, whose very creative or supreme power permits them to indulge in rage, revenge, and destruction. What lesson would you take from it all?”
There was a break in the talk, and then Lucius said, very softly, “The iron fist in the velvet glove…”
“Detective Sergeant,” the Doctor said good-naturedly. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you come so close to poetry. An excellent image, truly-is it your own?”
“Oh. No, I”-Lucius squirmed a bit-“I think I heard it somewhere.”
“Well, it fits admirably,” the Doctor said. “Deadly anger, hidden behind a veil that approximates as closely as possible our society’s notion of ideal, or at least acceptable, feminine behavior.”
“That’s very neat,” Mr. Moore said impatiently. “But it still doesn’t answer the question: Why, if you’re feeling all this shrouded anger, do you decide to go out and be a mother, or a natal nurse, or kidnap somebody else’s kid to take care of it like it’s your own? Doesn’t sound very angry to me.”
“We’re not suggesting that it is, John,” Miss Howard said. “Not at that stage. Taking care of the child is the manifestation of the first half of the character-the one that’s acceptable, the one that’s responding to the constant statement that women are supposed to be nurturing, and aren’t fulfilling their basic role if they’re not. That’s when the transference of ego occurs.”
“Okay,” Mr. Moore said, now pounding one foot on the step of the carriage so that the whole thing shook. “So where the hell does all this ‘evil goddess’ garbage come in?!”
“Let me put a case to you, John,” the Doctor said. “You are such a woman. You have perhaps had your own children, but lost them-through disease, mishap, any number of misfortunes that may or may not have been your fault, but have certainly left you feeling that your own most basic role in life and in society has been taken away. You’ve been left to feel utterly worthless, even to yourself. So you find other ways to care for children. You become a nurse. But something happens-something that threatens your renewed ability to fulfill your primeval function. Something that enrages you so that you feel-to use Marcus’s term-entitled to become the wrathful, primitive goddess, the taker as well as the giver of life.”