A Curable Romantic (18 page)

“As you wish.”

“In that case” — she filled the bellows of her lungs with a fortifying breath, and her bosom lifted magnificently — “I must tell you, Dr. Sammelsohn, that I’m in love!”

“Ah! I knew it!” I couldn’t help laughing.

“With …” As she said this, the color in her cheeks rose.

“With? Yes?” I said.

“Oh! But can’t you guess it?”

“I can, but I must hear it from your own mouth.”

“Very well then. Let me declare it openly and honestly. I’m in love, Dr. Sammelsohn — ”

I clapped my hands. “Oh, Fräulein!”

“ — with Sigmund Freud.”

“With?”

“Sigmund Freud,” she said. “As you, in your wisdom, have clearly intuited.”

“You’re … ?”

She nodded, her face bright with happiness. “I’m in love with Sigmund Freud.” Leaning across the table, she took my hand again. She lowered her voice, scouring the room as though for eavesdroppers. “Oh my God, Dr. Sammelsohn! That man! But I don’t have to tell you. He’s just so handsome, and his theories are so brilliant and so bold!”

“You’re in love with Dr. Freud?” I said.

She blushed now for a different reason. “But of course, you must really think me awful.”

“Well, he
is
a married man, I suppose, and by all accounts quite happily.”

“I know, I know!” She closed her eyes. “I’m just… it’s just …”

I don’t know why I was surprised. If one doesn’t count Josef Breuer, Dr. Freud was the first psychoanalyst; and if one doesn’t count Anna O., Dr. Breuer’s patient, Fräulein Eckstein was the first psychoanalytic patient, and like so many who would follow her, she had fallen in love with her analyst. The blackness of her crime was far worse than if she’d simply placed herself between a wife and her lawful happiness, however: Martha Bernays Freud was a family friend; the Ecksteins and the Bernays were longtime members of the same circle. For all I knew, they might even have been cousins (as everyone else seemed to be).

“Well, one can’t help one’s passions, Fräulein,” I told her as kindly as I could. “And certainly we don’t choose with whom we fall in love.”

Her face brightened at the prospect of this moral reprieve, and she wiped away a tear. “Do you really think that’s true, Dr. Sammelsohn?”

“I do.”

We were silent for a moment, and then she said, “And that’s why I thought perhaps you could speak to him.”

“Speak to whom?”

“To Dr. Freud?”

“Me, you mean?”

“Anything, yes, the slightest thing that you could say on my behalf, I’m sure, would be helpful. He’s your friend, after all. Perhaps you could
mention to him that you’d noticed my attraction, and then you’d be able to see in his eyes if there’s any chance for me. And if there is …”

“Fräulein…” I said. Is this why she had invited me here? Is this what these weeks of newspaper ads had been about?

“No, of course, you’re right. It was ridiculous for me to have asked you.” She took a bite of her dumpling and chewed unhappily. Wiping a dab of jelly from the corner of her mouth, she smiled bravely and pushed her plate away. It was terrible to see the look of self-reproach pass over her. She glanced down at her watch and, biting back tears, said, “In any case, I’ve got two tickets for a quintet at the Urania this afternoon, and I’d very much like it, if you’d care to join me.”

CHAPTER 9

We met every day for over a month. Fräulein Eckstein seemed to have two tickets to everything and no one to go with. And it wasn’t hard for her to entice me out of my apartment with the promise of a concert or a lecture or a play. Perhaps, I thought, this was what Dr. Freud had wanted all along: for me to distract the Fräulein, to get her out of his hair. Nevertheless, I found these enticements impossible to resist. Also, the Fräulein was so heartbroken and lonely, it seemed cruel to refuse her. We spent hours in each other’s company, and during those hours though we conversed upon a broad array of topics, every word, I knew, anticipated only one thing: the moment when our conversation touched upon Sigmund Freud, as it invariably did, and we could begin discussing him in full.

I listened as attentively as I could, aware that my willingness to speak to the Fräulein about my rival was all that kept me at her side. In addition, my lack of censure won for me her complete confidence, and the intimacy of her company assuaged whatever conscience might have otherwise nagged at me as I indulged in the questionable pleasure of plotting to destroy Dr. Freud’s marriage, even though doing so meant, in theory at least, surrendering to him the only thing I wanted, which was Fräulein Eckstein’s love, her mineral, emotional, carnal, and spiritual love. Every evening and twice a day when there was a matinee, we’d scheme together, dreaming up remedies for her unhappiness, sometimes walking arm in arm, our heads pressed together in delicious conspiracy.

A typical conversation:

“Oh, Dr. Sammelsohn, if only Aunt Marty could feel my heart beating at the thought of him, she’d understand me, wouldn’t she?”

“Certainly she would, Fräulein.”

“And she wouldn’t judge me too harshly, would she?”

“No! How could she?”

“She couldn’t. No, you’re right, because we’re the same, aren’t we?”

“Of course you are, Fräulein.”

“We love the same man, don’t we?”

“And that’s what makes all this so damnably difficult: your kindness in not wanting to hurt her.”

“Oh, I know! The thought of hurting her is just … so awful! I could never do it. And yet how could he not choose me over her, Dr. Sammelsohn?”

“He couldn’t.”

“Just thinking of it — oh, just feel what it’s done to my heart!”

We were strolling in the ringing white sunlight on a bright winter’s day when Fräulein Eckstein removed her hand from her muff and used it to place my hand over her heart. I tried to keep glued to my face the mask I wore with my patients, that of a concerned medical man, as we looked deeply into each other’s eyes, our breaths steaming forth in clouds of condensation, my hand on the curve of her breast.

“Yes, Fräulein, it seems to be beating … quite beautifully.”

It was all very confusing, I must say, and there were many times when I couldn’t help feeling that the Fräulein was communicating to me a powerful desire to be kissed. I wasn’t certain, however, as not two moments earlier, she’d been breathlessly describing her desire for a man who was clearly not myself. If I overcame my fear and kissed her and she didn’t wish me to, I would lose her forever, I knew. On the other hand, nothing in the mores of the era would have allowed her, had she in fact wished to be kissed, to do anything other than what she was doing now, which was staring at me with a look of stupefied admiration, her eyelids lowered as though the sight of me had weakened her occipital muscles.

Invariably, of course, she’d turn away from me and say something along the lines of: “Oh, but he’s just so very handsome, isn’t he?”

“Dr. Freud, you mean?”

“With that beard and those eyes that pierce right through you!” She shook her head, as though she’d lost her train of thought. “Although you’re rather good-looking yourself, Dr. Sammelsohn. Oh, not in a virile way, of course, like Dr. Freud, but still.”

“Still.” I offered her a weak smile. I could still feel the curve of her
breast inside my palm, and these impoverishing compliments were, I knew, the price I paid for the hours I spent in her company.

“Oh, it’s poor form, I know, to praise the looks of one man to another, and no woman ever would put up with such treatment! But you don’t mind my speaking to you so forthrightly, do you?”

“Of course not, Fräulein. I find your candor refreshing.”

“Because you’re the only one I can talk to about any of this. You know that, don’t you?” She placed her hand on her head, as though she had a headache. “It’s odd, Dr. Sammelsohn, but sometimes I feel as though I’ve known you my entire life — do you feel that also? — as though we’d been children together.”

IN THIS WAY
, I learned the Fräulein’s medical history. She’d been seeing Dr. Freud on and off for several years, she told me, though only at the insistence of her mother. In regard to what malady, she preferred not to say. “It’s complicated.” Dr. Freud was a family friend, and this inhibited her when he asked her, at the beginning of their daily hour, to tell him everything that passed through her mind. (Indeed, no psychologist today would treat a person from his own social set, but in the Vienna we shared with Dr. Freud, especially among its Jewish middle classes, finding a doctor one didn’t know personally was a near impossibility.) At times, she suspected — correctly, I might add — that Dr. Freud’s fledgling practice was struggling to take flight, and she worried that he’d taken her on only because he needed the money. “Not that Maman sent me to him as a charity case. God forbid!” It’s just that sometimes — quite often — she felt that nothing was the matter with her. “Oh, I have my vacant moments, I suppose, when I lose track and I can’t account for where I’ve been or what I’ve been thinking, but then aren’t all women susceptible to daydreaming? It’s all the needlework, Dr. Freud says, that makes us particularly vulnerable.” Her mother, for example. “It’s she who should be seeing a nerve specialist, and not I. But then you’ve met her yourself, haven’t you?” No, it was her mother who had invented the canard of her ill health, “this so-called hysteria or dream psychosis or whatever it is,” as a means of diverting attention away from her own psychopathologies. “Or whatever Dr. Freud calls them!” And the measure
of her success had been that she was able to fool a man as formidable as Dr. Freud. “Although how formidable is he, really? Ask yourself: who published this account of Dr. Freud’s brilliance, if not Dr. Freud himself? Have you ever heard another human being make a similar claim?”

Still, she couldn’t help loving him. “He’s a dear man, a true man, a beautiful man.” Which didn’t mean that she couldn’t see through him. She could. “All those hours of psychoanalysis, Dr. Sammelsohn! You learn about a person — no, you do! — even if he
is
hiding behind a sofa.” And in this respect, Dr. Freud was no different from any other man, “present company excluded”: vain, posing, preening. “You could turn his head with a well-phrased compliment,” something she’d done on numerous occasions, whenever she grew tired of his psychoanalytic probing. Oh, my, what a handsome tie, Dr. Freud, was all she had to say, and he was out from behind the analytic couch in a flash, sitting where she could see him, jabbering away about gabardines and silks, this weave versus that, and how normally expensive it all was but how he’d gotten it on the cheap thanks to the enormous esteem in which his tailor held him. “Only imagine!” At the end of such an hour, he’d gleam,
Why, Fräulein Emma, we’ve made wonderful progress today, haven’t we?

“His interest in my health is secondary to his interest in his theories (and everything comes third to his interest in clothes). If you appear better, he’s glad, but only because it means he’s been right. And if you dare to come to him cured of your symptoms by any other means — oh my, but he pouts for days! Every day — and he insists you see him on all five! — there he’d be, glum as a goose on Christmas Eve, in the vilest of moods! And everything’s worse now, since he’s given up tobacco. You can barely induce him to speak civilly! After a week of such treatment, whatever composure, whatever health, whatever happiness you’ve managed to win by this tonic or at the hands of that masseur is shredded and you’re hysterical all over again! I don’t know why I put up with it, but of course, I do. It’s because I’m not well, you see?” She began to cry, and through tears, she told me that this was why she’d begun to put so much hope in Dr. Fliess’s revolutionary new cures. “If my problems are nasal in origin, as he maintains, he’ll be able to cure me with one quick surgery.”

Still, she worried that by clinging to Dr. Fliess, she was betraying Dr. Freud and his superior, if at the moment less effective, methodologies. And yet it was Dr. Freud himself who was pushing her towards Dr. Fliess. “Am I such a hopeless case? Has he washed his hands of me?” Or was he beginning to chafe against her love for him, a love of which he couldn’t be ignorant. “Perhaps Aunt Marty insisted he drop me! But that’s impossible because he’s promised to work with me even after Dr. Fliess removes the organic causes of my malady, although according to Dr. Fliess, such work would then be unnecessary.” At times, she couldn’t tell which would please Dr. Freud more: if she submitted to his friend or declared her allegiance to him, and all she really wanted was to be loved by him! “Is that so evil, Dr. Sammelsohn? I mean haven’t I the same right to happiness as Martha Freud?”

CHAPTER 10

These conversations typically exhausted me, and I was happy to have finally reached our destination: the opera house. I surrendered our coats and scarves and the Fräulein’s muff to the girl inside the cloakroom. A strong country type, she was an uncomplicated beauty, blonde and blue-eyed, with a peasant’s firm bust. As she forced the wooden hangers into the shoulders of our coats, I couldn’t help thinking that, were I Otto Meissenblichler, I might already have arranged a rendezvous with her for later in the week, perhaps for as early as the first intermission. Oh, how I longed to cast off this accursed virginity as though it were a pair of knickers I’d outgrown, but this was a feat, as far as I knew, impossible to accomplish on one’s own, and I had little idea how one went about enlisting an accomplice in such a selfish pursuit.

When the cloakroom girl laid the chit for our possessions into my hand, her fingers grazed my upturned palm, and I ached against my shyness, against my inability to speak to her, indeed to say anything to her other than “Danke.”

“Bitte,” she said in return, laughing a little bit as though she knew what I was thinking.

“Ah, there you are.” I found Fräulein Eckstein at the foot of the green-carpeted staircase, gloves in one hand, our tickets in the other. The last of the afternoon sun slanted through the transoms above the opera’s many doors.

“Let’s hurry,” she said. “The curtain will be rising soon.”