Jed Rubenfeld - The Interpretation of Murder

Copyright 2006 Jed Rubenfeld

The right of Jed Rubenfeld to be identified as the Authorof

the Work has been asserted by him in accordancewith

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain in 2006 by

HEADLINE REVIEW

An imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

First published in paperback in Great Britain in 2007 by

HEADLINE REVIEW

An imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

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The Interpretation of Murder is a work of fiction inspired by the lives

of the historical figures in this publication.

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ISBN 978 07553 3142 0 (B format)

ISBN 978 07553 3479 7 (A format)

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To Amy,

only , always

and to

Sophia and Louisa

Table of Contents

In1909, Sigmund Freud, accompanied by his then disciple Carl Jung, made his oneand only visit to the United States, to deliver a series of lectures onpsychoanalysis at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts. The honorary doctoraldegree that Clark awarded him was the first public recognition Freud had everreceived for his work. Despite the great success of this visit, Freud alwaysspoke, in later years, as if some trauma had befallen him in the United States.He called Americans 'savages' and blamed his sojourn there for physicalailments that afflicted him well before 1909. Freud's biographers have longpuzzled over this mystery, speculating whether some unknown event in Americacould have led to his otherwise inexplicable reaction.

There is no mystery to happiness.

Unhappy men are all alike. Some woundthey suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling sparkof love put out by scorn - or worse, indifference - cleaves to them, or they toit, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man doesnot look back. He doesn't look ahead. He lives in the present.

But there's the rub. The present cannever deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not thesame. To find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only livefor the moment. But if he wants meaning - the meaning of his dreams, hissecrets, his life - a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live forthe future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning beforeus all, insisting only that we choose between them.

For myself, I have always chosenmeaning. Which, I suppose, is how I came to be waiting in the swelter and mobof Hoboken harbor on Sunday evening, August 29, 1909, for the arrival of theNorddeutsche Lloyd steamship George Washington, bound from Bremen,carrying to our shores the one man in the world I wanted most to meet.

At 7 p.m. there was still no sign ofthe ship. Abraham Brill, my friend and fellow physician, was waiting at theharbor for the same reason as I. He could hardly contain himself, fidgeting andsmoking incessantly. The heat was murderous, the air thick with the reek offish. An unnatural fog rose from the water, as if the sea were steaming. Hornssounded heavily out in the deeper water, their sources invisible. Even thekeening gulls could be only heard, not seen. A ridiculous premonition came tome that the George Washington had run aground in the fog, hertwenty-five hundred European passengers drowning at the foot of the Statue ofLiberty. Twilight came, but the temperature did not abate. We waited.

All at once, the vast white shipappeared - not as a dot on the horizon, but mammoth, emerging from the mistfullblown before our eyes. The entire pier, with a collective gasp, drew backat the apparition. But the spell was broken by the outbreak of harbormen'scries, the flinging and catching of rope, the bustle and jostle that followed.Within minutes, a hundred stevedores were unloading freight.

Brill, yelling at me to follow,shouldered through to the gangway. His entreaties to board were rebuffed; noone was being let on or off the ship. It was another hour before Brill yankedat my sleeve and pointed to three passengers descending the bridge. The firstof the trio was a distinguished, immaculately groomed, gray-haired, andgray-bearded gentleman whom I knew at once to be the Viennese psychiatrist DrSigmund Freud.