I managed to squeeze in a few hours’ sleep when we got home, though it wasn’t of a quality what could really be called restful. I was up at eight sharp—realizing, as I launched out of bed, that it was the first official day of summer—and found that the last of the rain clouds had disappeared and a fresh breeze was blowing in from the northwest. I got into some clothes and managed to comb my long hair into something that resembled order, then headed down to the Doctor’s narrow little carriage house next door to give Frederick, our always reliable black gelding, a few oats and a morning brushdown in preparation for his day’s labors. Heading back into the house, I concluded from the clanging of pots and pans in the kitchen that our latest housekeeper, Mrs. Leshko—a woman who couldn’t boil water quietly—had arrived. I contented myself with a quick cup of her bitter coffee, then got onto the calash and under way.
I took my usual route—Second Avenue downtown to Forsyth Street, then left onto East Broadway—but I didn’t push Frederick, knowing he’d worked hard the night before. It was a route that took me past many of the dance halls, dives, gambling hells, and saloons of the Lower East Side, the sight of which only made it harder to understand how in the world things had so fallen out as to make this trip necessary in the first place. Oh, the specific reason was apparent enough: a twelve-year-old boy at Dr. Kreizler’s Institute, Paulie McPherson, had woken up in the middle of the night a couple of weeks back, wandered out of his dormitory and into a washroom, and there hung himself from an old gas fixture with a length of drapery cord. The boy was a small-time thief with a record so short none of my old pals in Crazy Butch’s gang would have owned up to it; he’d been nailed, if you can believe it, trying to pick a fly (that is, plainclothed) cop’s pocket. Because of his inexperience, the judge had given him the option of spending a few years in the Kreizler Institute, after the Doctor’d examined the kid and made the offer. Now, Paulie was small time, but he was no chump—he knew what the alternatives were, and he’d accepted right away.
There wasn’t anything unusual in all this: several of the Doctor’s students had come to the Institute by similar routes. And there hadn’t been any outward signs of trouble with Paulie since his arrival on East Broadway, either. He was a little moody and uncommunicative, sure, but nothing more than that, certainly nothing that hinted he was getting ready to string himself up. Anyway, word of the suicide had made its way through the city government and the parlors of New York society like, if you’ll pardon my being plain, shit through a sewer. The incident was offered by many armchair experts as proof positive that Dr. Kreizler was incompetent and his theories were dangerous. As for the Doctor himself, he’d never lost a kid before; that, combined with the unexpected and unexplained nature of the suicide, tore the hole in his spirit that’d been ripped open by Mary Palmer’s death even wider.
And out that hole had drained much of what had always seemed a bottomless well of energy with which the Doctor’d been able, for so many years, to meet the almost daily attacks of the hostile colleagues, social thinkers, judges, lawyers, and average run-of-the-mill skeptics that he ran into during the operation of his Institute and his work as an expert witness in criminal trials. Not that he ever quit; quitting wasn’t in him. But he lost some of his fire and confidence, a portion of the mental belligerency that’d always kept his enemies at bay. To understand the change, I suppose you’d have had to’ve seen him in action before it took place—as I had, firsthand, some two years earlier. Brother, had I seen it….
The encounter had taken place in Jefferson Market, that imitation of a Bohemian prince’s castle what always struck me as entirely too beautiful to be a police court. Like I’ve said, I’d been mostly on my own since I was three, and fully so since I was eight, having at that time gotten fed up with breaking and entering to support my mother and her various men friends. The final straw’d come when my old lady’s taste ran beyond booze to opium and she started frequenting a den in Chinatown run by a dealer everybody called You Fat (his real Chinese name was unpronounceable, and he never seemed to get the insult contained in the very appropriate nickname). I told her I wasn’t running into a lot of other eight-year-olds what stole to support their mothers’ alcohol and drug cravings—the kind of statement that’s pretty well guaranteed to get a kid a good beating around the head. As she flailed away at me, she screamed that if I was going to be such an ungrateful little wretch I could just fend for myself; I pointed out that I already was, mostly, then left for the last time to take up with a bunch of street arabs in the neighborhood. My mother, meantime, moved in with You Fat, using her body instead of my larceny to secure an endless supply of her drug.
Anyway, my gang and me, we looked out pretty good for each other, huddling together over steam vents on winter nights and making sure we didn’t drown when we cooled down in the city’s rivers during the summer. By the time I was ten I’d made a pretty good name for myself as a banco feeler, pickpocket, and general criminal handyman; and though I wasn’t big, I’d gotten to be fairly expert at defending myself with a short section of lead pipe, which was where I got my nickname, “the Stevepipe.” A lot of kids carried guns or knives, but I found that the cops went easier on you if they didn’t find you armed to the teeth; and God knows I was getting into enough trouble with the law by then for that to be a real consideration.
In fact, my record and my reputation eventually reached the point where I was approached by Crazy Butch, who, like I’ve also mentioned, was in charge of the kids who worked for Monk Eastman’s gang. I’d always liked Monk, with his flashy derbies and his rooms full of cats and birds (or, as he said it, “kits ‘n’ boids”); and though Crazy Butch was a little too deserving of his title for my taste, I jumped at the chance to move up in the underworld. Instead of picking pockets on my own, I was soon stripping whole crowds of citizens with my gangmates, along with waylaying delivery vans and lifting whatever we could from stores and warehouses. Sure, I’d get caught sometimes, but generally I’d get released, too; because we were such a big team, it was generally pretty hard for a prosecutor to make a charge stick to just one of us. On top of that, I was only eleven, and I could usually play the innocent orphan when I needed to.
But the judge I got that one day at Jefferson Market, he wasn’t buying any acts or any excuses. The cops’d nailed me for breaking a store dick’s leg over at B. Altman’s joint on Nineteenth Street while me and the gang were picking shoppers’ pockets. I could usually control my trademark weapon better than that—I generally tried to leave a nasty bruise instead of a break—but the store detective had me by the throat and I was that close to choking. So, quick as spit, there I found myself: in the main courtroom at Jefferson Market, getting one hell of a lecture as I sat under the tall turret of the courthouse’s fine clock tower.
The old windbag on the bench called me everything from a nicotine fiend (I’d been smoking since I was five) to a drunkard (which showed how much he knew—I never touched the stuff) to a “congenitally destructive menace,” a phrase which, at the time, meant a whole lot of nothing to me—but which was, it turned out, destined to be the key to my salvation. You see, it happened that a certain crusading mental specialist with a particular interest in children was just outside the courtroom that day, waiting to testify in another case; and when the judge let out with that “congenital” phrase and then went on to sentence me to two years on Randalls Island, I suddenly heard a voice rise from somewhere behind me. I’d never heard anything quite like it—certainly not in a courtroom, anyway. Tinged with a combination of German and Hungarian accents, it rolled with all the thunder and righteousness of an old-time preacher.
“And precisely what,” the voice demanded, “are your honor’s qualifications for coming to so precise a psychological conclusion concerning this boy?”
At that point all eyes, including mine, turned to the back of the courtroom to get a glimpse of what was, for most of them, a familiar sight: the renowned alienist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, one of the most hated ye
t respected men in the city, charging in, his long hair and cloak floating behind him and his eyes burning with coal-black fire. I had no way of knowing that one day I’d become accustomed to that sight, too; all I knew then was that he was the damndest person, with the damndest nerve, that I ever saw.
The judge, for his part, put his forehead into his hand wearily for a moment, like the good Lord had just sent a rain of toads down on his little patch of earth in particular. “Dr. Kreizler—” he started.
But the Doctor already had an accusing finger up. “Has an assessment been done? Has one of my esteemed colleagues given you any reason for using such language? Or have you, like most other magistrates in this city, simply decided that you are qualified to speak expertly on such matters?”
“Dr. Kreizler—” the judge tried again.
But with no better luck: “Do you have even the slightest idea of what the symptoms of what you call ‘congenital destructiveness’ are? Do you even know if such a pathology exists? This insufferable, unqualified, inflammatory rhetoric—”
“Dr. Kreizler!” the judge bellowed, slamming a fist down. “This is my courtroom! You have nothing to do with this case, and I demand—”
“No, sir!” the Doctor shot back. “I demand! You have made me a part of this case—myself and any other self-respecting psychologist who is within earshot of your irresponsible declarations! This boy—” At that he pointed in my direction and, for the first time, actually looked at me—and I’m not sure I’m up to describing all that was in the look:
His eyes sparkled with a message of hope, and the smallest, quickest smile told me to have courage. All in a rush and for the first time in my life, I felt like someone over the age of fifteen truly gave a good goddamn about my existence. You don’t really know that you’ve been living without that commodity until someone makes you aware of the possibility of it; and when they do, it’s a very peculiar sensation.
The Doctor’s face went straight and stern again as he snapped back around to the judge: “You have said that this boy is a ‘congenitally destructive menace.’ I demand that you prove that assertion! I demand that he be given a new hearing, conditional upon the findings of at least one qualified alienist or psychologist!”
“You can demand anything you like, sir!” the judge responded. “But this is my court, and my ruling stands! Now kindly await the call of the case for which you have been retained, or I’ll hold you in contempt!”
A bang of the gavel, and I was on my way to Randalls Island. But as I left the courtroom, I looked again to the mysterious man who had appeared—put of thin air, it seemed to me at the time—to take up my cause. He returned the look with an expression what said the matter was far from settled.
And so it was. Three months later, inside my leaky brick cell in the main block of the Boys’ House of Refuge, I had that “encounter” with a guard what I’ve mentioned. Now, the simple truth is that you can find a bit of lead pipe almost anywhere if you look hard enough, and I’d found one pretty quick after my arrival on the Island. I kept it hidden inside my mattress, figuring the day would eventually come when one of either the boys or the guards might force me to use it—and the particular bull that finally did will be forever sorry for it. While he was busy trying to hold me down and undo his pants I laid hold of my pipe, and inside of two minutes he had three fractures in one arm, two in the other, a busted ankle, and a mass of bone chips where his nose used to be. I was still going at him, to the encouraging shrieks of the other boys, when a couple more guards finally pulled me off. The superintendent of the place asked for a hearing to decide whether or not I should be transferred to an insane asylum, and word of the incident got out to the press. Dr. Kreizler caught wind of it and showed up at the hearing, once again demanding that no sentence be pronounced without a proper psychological assessment being done first. The judge this time around was a lot more reasonable, and the Doctor got his way.
For two days, he and I sat in an office on the Island, doing little more than talking—and for most of the first day we didn’t even talk about the specific facts of my case. He asked me questions about my childhood and, even more important, told me a lot about his, which went a long way toward easing my discomfort at being in the presence of a man what I was grateful to but who nonetheless filled me with a kind of nervous awe. During those first hours, in fact, I learned many grim facts about the Doctor’s life that almost nobody knew or knows—and I can see now that he was using his own past as a way to coax mine out of me.
It was peculiar: as we talked, I began to comprehend—to the extent that an uneducated young boy could—that I might not just be doing things at random, that maybe I’d decided on a life of crime and mayhem as much out of anger as out of necessity. This wasn’t an idea that the Doctor planted in me; he let me come to it myself by showing sympathy for all I’d been through and even a kind of admiration for my attitude. In fact, he seemed to find the fact that I’d survived what I had and was doing what I was doing not only remarkable but in a way amusing; and I quickly got the feeling that I was providing him with something more than statistics—the man was enjoying himself.
That was the real secret of his success with kids: it wasn’t charity work to him, it wasn’t the kind of wooden-nickel generosity you’d get from mission types. What made troubled children, rich and poor, trust the Doctor so much was the fact that he was getting something out of helping them. He loved it all, really loved spending time and effort on his young charges, in a way that was at least partly selfish. It was like they made the miserable parts of the adult world what he inhabited so much of the time—the prisons, madhouses, hospitals, and courtrooms—easier to take: gave him hope for the future, on the one hand, and pure and simple amusement, on the other. And when you’re a kid, you look for that, for the kind of adult who isn’t giving you a hand just to get in good with Jesus Christ but is doing it because he enjoys it. Everybody’s got an angle, is all I’m saying, and the fact that the Doctor’s was so obvious and uncomplicated made it all the easier to trust him.
At my sanity hearing the Doctor used all the things that we’d talked about to make short work of the idea that I was crazy, backing his claims up with a little theory he’d worked out over the years, one he called “context.” It was the core idea behind all the rest of his work, and the basic gist of the thing was that a person’s actions and motives can never be truly understood until the full circumstances of his or her early years and growing up are brought to bear on the discussion. Straightforward and harmless enough, you might think; but in fact it was no small job to defend this notion against the charge that it ran counter to traditional American beliefs by providing excuses for criminal behavior. But the Doctor always maintained that there was a big difference between an explanation and an excuse, and that what he was trying to do was understand people’s behavior, not make life easier for criminals.
Luckily for me, on that particular day his statements found a receptive audience: the members of the hearing board bought the Doctor’s analysis of my life and behavior. But when he went on to propose that I be enrolled at his Institute, they balked, apparently still feeling that so notorious a young hellion as “the Stevepipe” needed to go someplace where he’d be kept on a shorter leash. They asked Dr. Kreizler if he had any other ideas; he thought about the matter for some two minutes, never looking at me, and then announced that he’d be willing to take me into his employ and his home and assume personal responsibility for my actions. The members of the board grew a little wide-eyed at that, and one of them asked the Doctor if he was serious. He told them that he was, and after some more consultation the deal was set.
For the first time, I felt a little unsure; not because I’d seen anything in the Doctor to distrust but because the two days I’d spent with him had set me to thinking about myself and wondering if I’d ever really be able to change my ways. These doubts nagged at me as I cleared my few belongings out of my cell and headed off through the grim old courtyard o
f the House of Refuge to meet the Doctor at his carriage (he had his burgundy barouche out that day). My confusion wasn’t eased by the sight of an enormous black man sitting in the barouche’s driver’s seat; but the man had a kindly face, and as the Doctor stepped out of the carriage, he smiled and held a hand up toward his companion.
“Stevie,” he said. “This is Cyrus Montrose. It may interest you to know that he was on his way to the penitentiary—and a fate far worse than yours might’ve been—before we crossed paths and he came to work for me.” (I later learned that Cyrus had, as a younger man, killed a crooked Irish cop who’d been beating the life out of a young colored whore in a brothel where Cyrus played piano. Cyrus’s parents had been killed by an Irish mob during the Draft Riots of ’63, and at his trial the Doctor’d successfully argued that, such being the context of his life, Cyrus had been mentally incapable of any other reaction to the situation in the brothel.)