An Inconvenient Wife (47 page)

“So if one day someone’s behavior changed dramatically, that could be seen as insanity?”

Victor nodded. His eyes were so dark it was hard to read his expression. “Possibly.”

“Would you say that, oh, a carpenter, for example, who one day was calmly making cabinets, and who had always been of an even
temperament, and then the next day violently decapitated his wife with an ax might be insane?”

Victor allowed a small smile. “That could be one possibility. I would need to know more about the circumstances of the particular
case.”

“But you do believe that someone might be so overtaken by some emotion, some irresistible impulse, that he might temporarily
lose control of his actions?”

“Certainly. I’ve seen it for myself.”

“What generally triggers such a thing?”

“Great distress,” Victor said. “Physical or emotional.”

“I see. Where is your practice, Dr. Seth?”

“Here in the city.”

“And what is your specialty?”

“I specialize in nervous disorders—hysteria, neurasthenia, morbid fears, and the like—especially in women.”

“Is that how you came to know Mrs. Carelton?”

Victor glanced at me. He steepled his fingers beneath his chin. “Yes. She came to me in January of this year. She desired
treatment for hysteria. At the time her husband said they were quite desperate. Apparently she’d seen many doctors throughout
the years. None had been able to help her. Mr. Carelton intimated that I was their last hope.”

“Other doctors diagnosed her with uterine monomania.”

“They were wrong,” Victor said flatly. “There was no irregularity with her uterus, nothing to indicate monomania at all.”

“How did you ascertain this?”

“With a simple examination,” Victor said. He exhaled in disgust. “This is the problem with most physicians today. They’re
too quick to find fault with the reproductive system. Mrs. Carelton was quite normal, although she had been unable to conceive.”

“Wouldn’t one assume that this was because she was not normal?”

Victor’s smile grew faintly patronizing. “One could assume this, but one would be wrong. Mrs. Carelton had no abnormality
in her uterus or her ovaries. She did indeed suffer from hysteria and sexual neurasthenia, but I attributed those things not
to her womb but to her husband.”

“Her husband?”

“Yes. Mr. Carelton declined to do his part to relieve his wife’s systems. He said he was afraid of defiling her. What he meant
was that he didn’t want to be of the class of man who might have a passionate woman as a wife. In her desire to please him,
she followed his instruction in everything. Because of that, her own desires were thwarted, and she took refuge in hysteria.”

Howe nodded. “Did you believe you could cure her of this hysteria and—what else did you call it?”

“Sexual neurasthenia,” Victor said. “Yes. I did believe I could cure her.”

“How long did your treatment of Mrs. Carelton last?”

Victor looked pained. “Until her husband committed her to an asylum.”

“Because she was insane?”

“No, Mr. Howe. Because she was well.”

There was a stirring in the audience. Judge Hammond looked up sternly.

Howe’s thick brows rose in surprise. “She was
well,
and he had her committed? Why was that?”

“In my conversations with him, I discovered that Mr. Carelton preferred his wife to be helpless and dependent upon him. He
preferred her ill. When she began to deny him, he was angry.”

“What did she deny him, Dr. Seth?”

“The opportunity to dictate her every action.”

“But isn’t that what husbands are supposed to do? To lead their wives gently in the proper direction?”

Victor said firmly, “It is certainly a husband’s prerogative to direct his wife in proper behavior, but I believe Mr. Carelton’s
ambition made him unduly harsh. I ask you, Mr. Howe, who would have been the most cognizant of proper behavior: Mrs. Carelton,
who is descended from the Knickerbockers, or Mr. Carelton, who was not?”

“A good question, Dr. Seth,” Howe said, looking pointedly at the jury. “A very good question indeed. Now, Doctor, you are
of the opinion that Mrs. Carelton was well when her husband had her committed to Beechwood Grove. Why do you say that?”

“I was directing her treatment. She was making great strides.”

“Would you say your relationship with Mrs. Carelton was intimate, Doctor?”

“I would say any doctor-patient relationship is.”

“Yes, of course. However, Mrs. Breckenwood claimed earlier that Mrs. Carelton was having an affair with you. Is this true?”

Victor didn’t look at me. “No. It is not true.” His lie was so smooth and confident even I nearly believed it.

“You were not having a personal relationship with Mrs. Carelton?”

Again Victor sighed with exasperation. “Part of Mrs. Carelton’s treatment required some exploration of her physical symptoms,
yes. This is a usual medical procedure. Mr. Carelton knew this. We discussed it. He did not seem to find it unreasonable.”

“What else did her treatment consist of?”

“Electrotherapy, to treat the sexual neurasthenia. Hypnosis for the hysteria.”

“Hypnosis?” Howe turned his gaze to the jury as if he might find understanding there. “What exactly is hypnosis? A kind of
mesmerism?”

“No. Mesmerism is a parlor trick. Hypnosis is a medical procedure that uses suggestion to change behavior.”

“Suggestion? How does that work?”

“A person is put into a trance state,” Victor explained patiently. “During the trance, the conscious mind is inactive—asleep,
if you will—and the unconscious mind is then receptive to suggestion.”

“Objection,” Scott called. “What relevance does any of this have?”

“We have a right to raise a defense,” Howe said. “And the state has already mentioned Dr. Seth’s unique ability—”

“Yes, yes,” said the judge. “Continue, please, Doctor.”

Howe smiled and turned back to Victor. “Now, Mrs. Breckenwood testified earlier that you performed this ‘hypnotism’ at parties.”

“Yes.”

“She said that you could make anyone do anything. Is this true?”

Victor shook his head and smiled slightly. “Hardly. Not everyone can be put in a trance state, nor does everyone respond to
suggestion to the same degree.”

“So there are some for whom hypnotism doesn’t work?”

“Yes.”

“And what about Mrs. Carelton? How did she respond to hypnotism?”

“I found during my first examination of Mrs. Carelton that she was extraordinarily suggestible.”

“What exactly do you mean by that?”

“She responded quite well to suggestion,” Victor said. “To a degree I’d never seen. For example, if I told her she would be
numb, she became so.”

“I see.” Howe turned from Victor and faced the jury. He seemed about to deliver a cautionary tale. I found myself leaning
forward, waiting to hear.

“You said earlier that you could not
make
anyone do anything, as Mrs. Breckenwood testified. But in fact you did have the skill to put everyone into a trance when
you were entertaining at Newport, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Victor said. “But that was only because I chose my subjects well. Experience has taught me who will go into a trance
and who will not. There is a certain indolence about the eye, a willingness to be led.” He shrugged. “It was not so difficult
to choose those who could be hypnotized.”

“And you say that Mrs. Carelton was especially susceptible to hypnotism?”

Victor’s voice deepened as he said, “Yes. Yes.”

“How often did she follow the suggestions you planted during a trance state?”

“Every time,” Victor said, and his vanity over it was obvious. “She followed every suggestion I made. As I said, it was extraordinary.”

“Is it possible to make a suggestion that the subject acts upon at some later point in time?”

“Yes. Posthypnotically.”

“So you could, for example, make a man bark at the moon after the party is over and everyone has gone to bed?”

“Yes.”

“Would he still be in a trance state?”

“No. The suggestion has been planted in his unconscious. It lingers there until it receives a signal. Perhaps I’ve made the
suggestion that he bark at the moon at midnight. At midnight he will wake and do so.”

“Remarkable,” Howe said. “That’s hard to believe, Doctor.”

Again that confidence, that shining vanity. “Ask anyone who was at Newport last summer. They saw it quite clearly.”

“Did Mrs. Carelton also respond to— What did you call it? Posthypnosis?”

“Posthypnotic suggestion,” Victor said. He leaned back in the witness chair, self-possessed. “Yes. That is exactly what reduced
her distress and her hysteria.”

“You said that Mrs. Carelton followed every suggestion you made to her. Could you make her do something that she wouldn’t
normally do?”

“Yes.”

“Even if it was morally abhorrent to her?”

I gasped softly. The jury glanced at me. Victor glanced at me.

“What are you suggesting?” he asked quietly.

“Answer the question, Dr. Seth,” Judge Hammond said.

I saw Victor struggle. I saw when his vanity seemingly won the battle. “Yes,” he said. “Even that. I can make Lucy do anything.”

This time Judge Hammond did not attempt to quiet the courtroom. It was Howe, my own lawyer, who held up his hand for silence
and turned to Victor.

“You were aware, weren’t you, of the position Mrs. Carelton occupied in New York City society?”

“Of course,” Victor said.

“And you were aware, Doctor, of Mrs. Carelton’s considerable fortune? A fortune of her own that was controlled by her husband,
as well as the fortune that would come to her upon her father’s death—and also be controlled by her husband, if he were still
alive?”

Victor’s expression became stony. “I understood she was wealthy, yes,” he said. “I was unaware of the details.”

“Were you?” Howe asked, and then he turned away and smiled at the jury. “Were you indeed?”

New York, Tuesday, December 15, 1885

Yesterday testimony was heard from Mrs. Carelton’s physician Victor Seth, who defined his controversial new specialization—the
science of neurology—and described his personal expertise in hypnosis, a scientific procedure much like mesmerism, wherein
Dr. Seth put Mrs. Carelton into a trance and controlled her “unconscious” mind. Dr. Seth admitted under oath that he could
dictate Mrs. Carelton’s behavior even when she was no longer in a trance, and that he could make her perform acts that might
normally be reprehensible to her.

During this testimony, Mrs. Carelton sat mute, obviously still under the influence of her doctor, who had a spellbound control
not just of her but of the courtroom. Her mind was clearly not her own while Dr. Seth spun his tale of control and foreknowledge
of Mrs. Carelton’s vast wealth. Only when he was gone from the stand did she become herself again. Her spine seemed to droop,
and she was quite beside herself, so that Mr. Howe, her attorney, had to remove her from the courtroom during the lunch break.

When court resumed, Mrs. Carelton herself testified. When Mr. Howe asked her if she had been under the doctor’s control, she
said, “I don’t know. I was aware I relied on him. I felt I needed him, and I didn’t know why. Later, I began to understand
that he had done things to ensure I would not leave his treatment. I don’t know what he may have had in mind, but I do know
that when I killed my husband, I was in the grip of something irresistible. It confused me, but it was an urge I could not
control.”

Mrs. Carelton told the jury that she loved her husband and wanted to please him, and that she had done everything in her power
to be well. She had been innocent of her husband’s past, had never met his parents, and believed, in the trusting manner of
all gently bred women, that he loved her and desired to protect her. She said the news that her husband had used her to gain
social position was “a terrible shock.”

In closing arguments, the district attorney, Mr. Scott, argued feebly that Mrs. Carelton was a scheming woman who desired
control of her fortune and conspired with her lover, the doctor, to kill her husband. This despite the fact that several witnesses,
including Mr. DeLancey Van Berckel, Mrs. Carelton’s father, declared she was faithful to her husband.

Mr. Howe argued the extremely compelling evidence that Mrs. Carelton was a woman in the grip of forces she could not control.
Given the dishonesty of her husband in both character and mien, her forced commitment to an asylum, and the oft-repeated testimony
that William Carelton was a social climber who married his wife to gain access to society circles and denied his own parents
in order to achieve his ambitions, Mrs. Carelton easily could have been the victim of an “irresistible urge,” or emotional
insanity. Howe also told the jury that it seemed likely Mrs. Carelton was also the unwitting victim of a doctor who was willing
to use her “extraordinary suggestibility” to achieve his own ends. “Mrs. Carelton has said repeatedly that she does not know
why she killed her husband. Perhaps she didn’t, but her ‘unconscious’ did. Her unconscious knew just what to do, because Dr.
Seth told it what to do.”

In either case, said Mr. Howe, with tears in his own eyes, Mrs. Carelton was not responsible for her actions and was in fact
a terrible victim of injustice who should be acquitted.