Strange, what little things can change your mood faster than spit: a sound, maybe, or even just a smell can sometimes twist your thoughts and feelings worse than hours of conversation or days of experience. For me, that morning, it was a sight—just a glimpse, really—of the person I least wanted to see in the world:
Ding Dong. He was sitting about thirty yards away, atop a big pile of freight on the wharf—but his eyes were honed right in on me. His vicious features were twisted by the same evil, idiot grin that was generally in evidence; and as soon as he knew I’d caught sight of him, he jumped to the ground, grinned even wider, and made a vigorous, obscene movement with his hands and his pelvis.
I got the message, all right: Kat had gone back to him.
It hit me hard, forcing my eyes to the ground and my jaw to fall open. Then a voice sounded from somewhere inside my own head: Of course she went back to him, it said. She didn’t have anywhere else to go, thanks to you …
By the time I looked back up, Ding Dong had vanished into the crowd. Most likely he’d trailed us from the Doctor’s house and, satisfied to see us leaving town, just wanted to send me off with a personal message that’d make my heart as sore as I’d made his face. He’d succeeded, all right. I dropped the suitcase I had in my hand and just kind of collapsed onto it, so dazed that I barely heard a familiar voice—this one definitely outside me—calling.
“Stevie!” It was Mr. Moore, moving my way with a suitcase of his own in hand. A porter carrying a trunk was trailing behind him. “Stevie,” he said again as he reached me. Then he crouched down. “What is it, kid, what’s going on? Where’s the Doctor?”
“They—” I shook myself hard, trying to get rid of the shock. “They—went aboard already. I’m bringin’ our stuff—with the porters.”
Mr. Moore put a firm hand on my shoulder. “Stevie, has something happened? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Not a ghost.” I couldn’t go into a full explanation, but a piece of one was called for. “Dusters. Must’ve followed us here.”
Spinning to search the wharf, Mr. Moore squinted. “They didn’t get on the boat, did they?”
“Nah,” I said. “They’re gone. Just letting me—us—know they’re still watching.”
“Unh-hunh,” Mr. Moore answered. “Well, come on. With any luck, we’ll be out of town long enough for the Dusters to forget all about us.” I got back up and moved with him toward the gangplank of the Mary Powell, our porters following close behind. “It’s not like you to let them rattle you this way, Stevie,” Mr. Moore said, punching my shoulder lightly. “Though after that brawl, I guess I can understand it.”
I didn’t answer, just nodded and tried to get my breathing back to some kind of regular pace. By the time we got on board, I’d almost managed that much, too; but the burning rock of guilt in the pit of my gut wasn’t going anywhere.
Once on the ship, Mr. Moore and I let our porters lead the way to our private parlors. Located amidships on the portside upper deck, they were handsome rooms indeed, with trimmed wood paneling, rich furnishings, and windows that would offer us views not only of the Palisades cliffs soon after our departure but the Catskills and other handsome mountains along the way. For the moment, though, all such pleasures and advantages were lost on me. Once I’d seen the bags safely into the rooms, where the Doctor, Cyrus, Miss Howard, and the detective sergeants were already lounging and exploring happily, I mumbled something about wanting to get a look around the ship and left quickly.
Down on the main deck, just forward of the large dining rooms, I found a public men’s room and entered it, getting a bit of a skeptical glance from the old attendant as I did. Locking myself into one of the toilet stalls, I leaned against the tiled wall on one side and lit up a smoke, trying to drive away the devilish thoughts and feelings what were tearing at my insides. I hadn’t made much progress before I heard the attendant outside the stall:
He cleared his voice with purpose and said, “This washroom is for gentlemen.”
Which was not the kind of attitude to take with somebody in my condition. “This toilet is for passengers, mug,” I snapped back. “So go chase yourself, unless you wanna finish this trip with a busted arm.” I heard the man take a deep, angry, and insulted breath, but he didn’t say anything; and as I took another deep drag off my smoke, I remembered that he was just doing his job. “Don’t worry, pal,” I said, quietly now. “I’ll be gone in a second.” I allowed myself another minute or two’s smoking, then dropped my butt into the toilet and headed out without looking at the attendant.
As I headed back up the wooden steps to the upper deck, a huge bellow came out of the ship’s main whistle: we were getting under way. Not yet ready to return to the others, I went on up to the promenade deck and got as far forward as I could, cramming myself into the narrow little corner of space between the outer railing and the steering house. I was on the starboard side of the ship, away from the pier so that I couldn’t see the crowd ashore. Then the Mary Powell started to slowly move out and away from the waterfront. Before long we’d eased out to the middle of the river, where the big side paddles engaged with a loud rumble and rush; not loud enough, though, to quiet that same voice in my head.
She ain’t like you, it said. She didn’t grow up in this town; she’s never understood it, really, no matter what she says; and you stood there and let her wander right back off into what you knew was trouble, just because she embarrassed you—
Lost in all this bitter thinking, I pretty near jumped clear of the deck when I heard the Doctor’s voice behind me:
“You won’t see very much from this side,” he said, joining me at the rail. “Or did you want to watch the city fade behind us?”
I turned back to look at the waterfront of Hell’s Kitchen as we moved steadily past it. “Something like that” was all I could say.
The Doctor nodded, and for a few more silent moments, we just stood there. “We’ll be coming up on the Palisades soon,” he finally said. “Shall we go to the other side?”
“Sure.” I peeled myself off the rail and followed him round the back of the wheelhouse.
On the ship’s port side the distant view before us changed as dramatically as if we’d stepped into another world. On our left were the small, quaint houses of Weehawken, New Jersey, while in front of us the sparse outskirts of other towns formed a picture what was similarly humble and peaceful. Soon greenery closed in completely on the river, not to be interrupted again until we reached those giant brown-and-grey slabs of rock that rise hundreds of feet into the air for miles on end and are known as the Palisades. The cliffs were the first of many remarkable natural wonders what the Hudson had to offer the day traveler, and their effect—like the river’s itself—was to reassuringly remove a person from the immediate cares of the human world.
As we stared at those rocks, the Doctor took in a deep breath, then let it out in what seemed to me a peculiar combination of relief and consternation. “This is a strange case, Stevie,” he murmured. “Strange and disorienting. The human mind does not readily accept such events and possibilities.” Continuing to look out at the Palisades, he held up a hand. “And do you know, I cannot help but think of my own mother, when considering it. Is that odd, do you think?”
“I—don’t really know,” I answered. “Depends on what brings her to mind, I guess.”
‘“A simple realization, really. I have always been unable to understand why, when things between my father and myself were at their worst, my mother never intervened. Even when I was only three or four years old, and utterly unable to defend myself, she never involved herself.” His eyes seemed to be questioning the water, forest, and rocks before us, as if they might offer him some clue to the matter he was contemplating. There wasn’t any sense of self-pity in the look, for the Doctor despised and avoided such tendencies. It was just a kind of honest, sad questioning—and he was entitled to wonder.
From the time Dr. Kreizler’d arrived on this earth,
it seemed, the people closest to him had been either a vexation or a heartache, and sometimes both. His father, a rich German publisher who’d come to America after the European revolutions of 1848 went bust, had had it in for his son right from the start. Though in society circles the old man was a popular and admired character, at home he was a boozy tyrant, who treated his Hungarian wife and his two kids (for the Doctor had a sister who currently lived in England) to the backs as well as the fronts of his hands—fists, too. I didn’t know just what had made the Doctor bring the subject up that day, but I was grateful to think and talk about anything other than Kat.
“Maybe she didn’t know what was happening,” I said with a shrug. “Or maybe she was afraid he’d lay into her even worse than usual if she did anything.”
The Doctor’s face filled with a look that said he’d considered such suggestions many times. “As to her not knowing,” he said, “that seems unlikely, if not impossible, given her own violent relationship with the man. And as to her not wishing to incur his wrath—she did so deliberately far too often for me to accept that proposition. I have always known that his violence toward her gratified some perverse part of her psyche. But the violence toward my sister and myself? I don’t think she relished that.” He squinted a bit, and seemed to be struggling with an idea. “No, since we began this case, another possibility has presented itself to me—the thought that, although my mother cared for her children, their welfare was simply not her first priority. And the real question is not why that should have been so, but why it should have been such a difficult theory to either formulate or accept—why, indeed, it should have taken a murder case to make me think of it. After all, a man who makes his children of secondary or even minor importance, though he may be criticized by some, is hardly held to be unusual. Why should we believe any differently of a woman?”
“Well,” I found myself saying, simply and automatically, “because … she’s your mother. It’s only natural.”
The Doctor chuckled. “That answer from you, Stevie?”
I realized the stupidity of what I’d said, and tried to cheat my way out of it: “Well—it’s not like we’re talking about my mother—”
“No. In such discussions we never seem to be talking about anyone’s mother. We seem to be talking about what Sara would call an abstract—a myth.” The Doctor took out his cigarette case. “Have I ever told you about Frances Blake?”
“The woman you almost married when you were at Harvard?” I asked.
“The very same. She would have surprised you. Wealthy, a gadabout—fairly intelligent, but too personally ambitious to take the time to develop her insights. Just ask Moore. He quite disliked her.” Lighting his cigarette, the Doctor chuckled. “As I grew to, eventually.” He blew out some smoke, and his face took on a puzzled look. “She was not unlike my mother, in many ways …”
“So what was the attraction?” I asked.
“Well—in addition to some more obvious factors, she had a rather vulnerable side, one that seemed to allow her to understand the destructive foolishness of much of what she did. In my youthful naïveté, I believed I could nurture that side of her until it became dominant.”
“So—you wanted to change her?”
“Do I detect censure in your voice, Stevie?” the Doctor asked, laughing quietly again. “Well, you’re right to put it there. I behaved idiotically…. Imagine, contemplating marriage to a woman simply because you perceive her as vulnerable to change. She wasn’t, of course. As pigheaded as … well. Set in her ways, shall we say.”
I looked down at the waters of the Hudson as they churned away from the bow of the steamer. “Unh-hunh,” I said, jabbing a finger on the rail in front of me and thinking about my own life as much as about the story I was listening to.
A big gust of cool wind hit the ship, and the Doctor drew his jacket tighter. “It was all unconscious, of course,” he said. “But then, one can be as foolish unconsciously as consciously, eh?” He took another drag off his stick and turned his back to the wind. “And then, as I grew older, I realized that my actions had embodied something more sinister than a simple desire to change Frances. I had actually believed that if she failed to change and continued on to the life for which her own silly desires had destined her, it would somehow be my fault.”
“Yours?” I said, looking up at him. “How did you figure that?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t ‘figure’ it. I felt it. I was an inexperienced young man, Stevie, one whose relationship to his own mother had failed in some central way. I couldn’t help but take the responsibility for that failure on myself—precisely because of all the things we’ve talked about. It’s ‘unnatural’ to hold your own mother accountable for terrible wrongs. So I buried such feelings, and looked for some other woman whose behavior I could alter. The only blessing is that another, equally primitive part of my mind told me I couldn’t sacrifice my entire life to such an endeavor. And so I said farewell to Frances.” He shook once in the wind. “Still, it’s an interesting technique—leaving one person behind in order to find her or him somewhere else. And in someone else.”
“Yeah,” I said, quietly amazed that—as usual—he’d been able to speak to exactly what was troubling me without ever mentioning my life at all.
Then I had a constructive thought of my own: “It’s kinda like what we’re doing on this job.”
“Indeed?”
I nodded. “We’re leaving Nurse Hunter in New York to go and find Libby Hatch upstate. Only difference is, they’re not like each other—they are each other. So maybe this time, that kind of technique can actually work—since it’s aimed at the right target.”
The Doctor considered that as he finished off his cigarette. “You know—you may have a talent for this sort of work, Stevie.” He glanced around, then stuck the butt of his cigarette into a nearby bucket of sand. “Well, this wind is stiffening. We’ve ordered breakfast. Steak and eggs for you. Come down when you’re ready.”
He gave me the quickest of glances, along with that fast but reassuring smile of his. Then, clapping his hands together, he walked back to the stairs—a bit unsteadily in that swelling, tidal portion of the lower Hudson—and vanished below.
I turned and looked back at the Palisades, feeling for the packet of cigarettes in my pocket; but then I decided against having another one. The horizon before me was beautiful, but it would be beautiful from our parlor, too, and I suddenly realized that my mood was changing, and I didn’t want to be alone anymore.
“Well, Libby Hatch,” I said, looking ahead at the long, wide stretch of the Hudson and then drumming my fingers on the rail as I turned away from it. “You got no place left to hide …”
I bounded down the stairs that the Doctor’d taken without ever glancing at the waters behind us.
If I had taken a peek in that direction, I would’ve seen a small steam launch what was trailing behind the Mary Powell as fast as its small engine would permit. And if, having caught sight of said vessel, I’d squinted and looked hard, it’s possible I would’ve made out a small figure standing in its prow: a figure whose dark features, bushy hair, and suit of baggy clothes I would’ve recognized. But no matter how hard I’d looked, I wouldn’t have seen the arsenal of strange weapons from the Orient what the mysterious little character was carrying—for those he kept hidden from view, until he was ready to strike.
CHAPTER 28
When I’d first come to live with the Doctor and undertaken to study, among many other things, the history of my own country, he’d figured that the best place for me to start was close to home. And so my earliest voyages into what was, for me, a great darkness—the story of the world before my arrival in it—had been made up of books about the history of New York City and New York State. I’d also been on a few trips up north with the Doctor, when he’d had calls to pay on the penitentiaries and lunatic asylums what were located throughout the Hudson Valley, or when he went to Albany to give testimony to some commission or other
about how the state should handle its mentally deranged citizens. So I was no stranger to the beautiful—if slightly spooky—landscape that surrounded us on our very pleasant voyage aboard the Mary Powell that day; all the same, a queer sort of feeling crept into me as we headed upriver, one that I’d never experienced on any of those earlier trips. I found that I was much more aware, not just of the misty mountains and green fields that lay beyond the river-banks (the usual objects of study for the sightseer), but of the towns that were cut into the countryside, and the many factory works what had been built over the years (and were still being built) along the river itself. In other words, the growing presence of people—in what I knew had been, just a hundred years earlier, a wild wilderness—was for some reason weighing heavy on my mind.
All through breakfast I wondered what could be making me see things so differently than I ever had before; and I got worried as to whether the change might not be permanent. It wasn’t until I went up onto the promenade deck with Miss Howard after breakfast to have a smoke that I started to comprehend my own feelings a little better: it was our recent discovery that Libby Hatch had been born and raised in similar surroundings that was changing my view of the country we were passing through, and the people in it, so much. This wasn’t some quiet, simple region where people lived close to nature and far from the ugliness and violence of cities like New York, I began to see; this was just a string of smaller New Yorks, where certain people engaged in the same kind of disheartening, and in some cases sickening, behavior that so many folks in the big city did. As this grim realization started to really sink in, I was surprised to find myself making a kind of wish: a wish that the great wilderness what still dominated up on mountains like the purple Catskills—standing in the distance to my left that afternoon—would spread back down over the earth and swallow up the ugly little nests of human beings what’d sprung up in the river valley. It was a wish that, true to my original fear, has never really gone away in all the years since.