A Curable Romantic (30 page)

“Best not,” Dr. Freud cautioned.

Fräulein Eckstein turned to him, as though surprised to find him still in the room. Hadn’t she dismissed him? For a moment, it seemed as though she were considering screaming at him but had decided, in my presence at least, to forego all unseemly behavior.

“As you wish,” she said sweetly, so sweetly, in fact, I could think of nothing but the poisoned sugar people leave out for rats. I folded my arms and sat back in the chair with my ankles crossed, letting a forelock of my hair fall charmingly across my brow. I hoped to look as sympathetic and bemused as I could, as though I were a bachelor uncle whose precocious niece had run away to join him in the city. There was no question but that such an uncle would send the girl back home, but he would do so without reprimands or censure, so as not to impair the child’s affection for him.

“Ita, Ita, Ita,” I sighed, attempting to credit Fräulein Eckstein’s delusions as much as possible, as Dr. Freud had instructed me to do. “I’m afraid my relations with my family have been … well, shall we say,
strained
since the night of our … can we really call it a wedding? I think
not. Communication hasn’t been as constant as familial affection might otherwise allow, and I’m afraid I hadn’t, until now, been apprised of your death.”

It felt an odd thing to say to a person.

“So no one told you about it then?” she asked.

I raised my palms in a gesture of helpless sorrow. “No, but permit me to extend my condolences now.”

Her features contracted behind the mask of Fräulein Eckstein’s face until she resembled a badgered dog.

“Oh, Yankl, Yankl!” she cried, sobbing into Fräulein Eckstein’s hands. “I know you didn’t love me. I may have been an idiot, but I wasn’t a fool!”

I handed her my handkerchief.

“Thank you,” she said.

“No, no, please,” I said.

She daubed at her tears.

“You’re very kind.”

“It’s nothing.”

She drew a shawl about her shoulders and attempted to gain control of her weeping. I looked at Dr. Freud. I have to say: the mise-en-scène was disconcerting. Though the body belonged to Fräulein Eckstein, the voice wasn’t hers at all; and this confusion of identities was maddening. To whom was I speaking? To Fräulein Eckstein or — but no, it wasn’t possible! — to Ita Sammelsohn? A poisoned headache stirred up behind my eyes, and I understood no man at that moment better than I did Josef Breuer. Like Dr. Breuer, all I wanted was to flee. Who wouldn’t prefer a trip to Italy to this stuffy bedchamber and these difficult psycho-pathologies? However, as I’d been deputized by Dr. Freud, I felt duty-bound to carry on as competently as I could. It was my job to test the weave of Fräulein Eckstein’s impersonation and reveal whatever holes I could find in the fabric.

“When you say you knew I didn’t love you, Ita, what exactly do you mean?”

She laughed. “Oh, you’d be surprised at the things I understood, Yankl.”

“For instance?” I probed as delicately as I could.

“Of course, no one imagined I understood anything at all.”

“That was Szibotya,” I said, as though this explained everything. “They treated me the same way.”

“And so no one feared speaking in front of me.”

“Ah, yes, I remember. That’s true.” I said this as much to Dr. Freud as to Fräulein Eckstein.

“Or even committing the most horrible sins in my presence.”

“Really?”

She shrugged a single shoulder. “Even if I knew what I was seeing, what did it matter? Who could I tell? God in His Infinite Wisdom had denied me the power of speech, and I was little more than a parrot. But then you know all this.”

I listened grimly, aware that Dr. Freud had seated himself behind her bed with a sheaf of paper on his knee and a pen in his hand. I didn’t understand by what psychic mechanism Fräulein Eckstein could appear to know so much about Ita’s childhood, and I suddenly found myself worrying lest some youthful indiscretion of my own might next be laid upon the table for inspection. As though reading my thoughts, Fräulein Eckstein shook her head and said, “No, you were kind to me, Yankl. You didn’t make fun of me. Not like the other boys, who were so cruel! And your mother was always very sweet.”

“You remember my mother?”

Fräulein Eckstein nodded. “Your sisters treated me with compassion as well, as did your father, whenever he noticed me, which wasn’t often.”

“My father,” I said softly, shaking my head.

“Now there was a man consumed with his own affairs!”

“Oh, yes.” I nodded.

“Chief among them” — and here, Fräulein Eckstein cut me a sly, sideways glance.

“Chief among them, Ita?”

“Chief among them” — she paused again, it seemed, for dramatic effect — ”an unrequited passion for Blume Levanthal.”

Dr. Freud, who had hitherto written nothing, began scribbling madly.

“Blume Levanthal?” I laughed hollowly, the way a man in a duel laughs, thinking the bullet has missed him before realizing it has pierced his heart.

“Or didn’t you know this?”

“No, Ita. I didn’t.”

“Oh, yes.” She eyed me sharply. “How your father used to pine for that woman! A woman forbidden to him in every way: by law, by custom, by his own sense of decency; and yet he couldn’t banish her from his heart. How do I know this, you’re wondering? I can read the question in your face, and it’s a good question, Yankl. The answer is: I used to see him in the forests.”

“You used to see my father in the forests?”

“My grandfather, may his name be blotted out, used to leave me there, in the hopes that a wild animal would devour me, or a Russian use me and slit my throat. I was a stain on the family honor, after all. Ha! The family honor! Can you imagine a greater absurdity! But God creates the cure before the disease. Weren’t we taught that, Yankl? And invariably, in the woods, there would be Reb Alter Nosn, reciting his reams of poetry, all dedicated to an appreciation of the breasts and the hair and the neck and the ankles and the matronhood of Blume Levanthal, Motkhe the Shochet’s wife.”

This was a picture of my father I had never seen, a page in the family album no one had ever shown me, and to my relief, I found the depiction hard to credit. And yet, as Fräulein Eckstein prattled on, she somehow caught my father’s likeness perfectly. The narrow chest, the little pouch of his stomach sutured up inside his vest, the scholar’s stooped shoulders, the rabbit’s foot of white in the middle of his otherwise sable beard, the glittering pince-nez, his habit of wetting his lips with his tongue before speaking, signaling to all that he was on the verge of some important pronouncement. I could see him as though he were standing before me, but never never
never!
had I imagined him, secreted in the woods, declaiming songs like a Persian poet drunk on the corporeal splendors of an unremarkable little woman called Blume Levanthal.

“Oh, yes” — Fräulein Eckstein must have noticed the twin veils of disbelief and confusion dropping across my face — “he could get quite
rapturous at times, waving his arms about, fashioning a laurel of fallen leaves and wearing it as a crown. ‘Ah, Ita,’ he once told me, ‘I’m an autumnal poet, don’t you know — not yet dead, but old enough to know better, and still a fool.’

“ ‘Steeh uh foo?’ I repeated in my idiotic way.”

A line of cold electricity shot down my spine as she spoke in the dirge-like singsong so familiar to me from my childhood.

“ ‘But what are you doing out here in the woods alone, child?’ he’d say. ‘It isn’t safe.’ ‘Nin’t sa-af!’ I’d say. ‘Oh, no, it’s not, Ita,’ he’d reprimand me as though I’d not repeated, but had actually contradicted, what he’d said. ‘Sit here’ — he’d place me on a log — ‘and I’ll take you back into town with me when I return. Your grandfather must be worried sick. There’s no minding a child like you, is there? First, however, you’ll make a splendid audience for my verses.’

“Who else could he recite them to? And so I sat on my log, and I watched him rummage through his pockets for the little scraps of paper on which he’d composed those secret odes.

“ ‘Ah, yes, here’s one. Now tell me what you think?’ ‘Wah
e-i-oo
t’enk?’ I’d struggled to ask. ‘What
I
think, Ita? Why, you’re such a delightful child.
I
think it’s a masterpiece.’ ‘Eee-tah dee-liii-t-fuh?’ ‘Yes, but don’t let that go to your head, like with that rascally son of mine, mollycoddled by his seven sisters and his mother. I do what I can to toughen him up, don’t you know, but they’re spoiling him.’

“And afterward, Yankl, he’d escort me back into town. My grandfather always pretended to be surprised — in the bustle of the business day, he failed to notice my absence — and grateful for my safe return. It was all a sham, of course, acted out for the benefit of Reb Alter Nosn, the town’s wealthiest and, outside of the rebbe, most knowledgeable man.”

“Concerning my father?” I couldn’t help asking.

“Yes, my darling?”

“Did he ever act upon these … ?”

“Passions of his?”

I shrugged as casually as I could. “I’m only wondering, is all.”

“Not that I’m aware of, except, of course, in the writing of his verses.”

“Which he never showed to Blume?”

Fräulein Eckstein’s face took on a sweetness that had lately become foreign to it. “I have no firsthand knowledge of this, but I think it unlikely,” she said. “He was as powerless to act upon his feelings as he was to not feel them. In any case, I found him a kind man.”

“Did you?”

“Yes, and that’s why on the day he came to ask for my hand, I felt I could trust him.” She looked at me coyly. “Because the thing is,” she hesitated, all blushes and palpitations, “or perhaps you didn’t know this, Yankl, but … I always loved you.” She lowered her eyes. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”

I was silent for a moment. “No, Ita. I didn’t.”

“Right,” she said, tart and business-like again. “How could you? There was only one way I could ever make my love known to you and that was if you’d said you loved me first. Then I could repeat the words to you.”

She threw herself back onto her pillows.

“Oh! I don’t really want to tell you how many hours I spent dreaming of just such a thing. I was a foolish girl, really, but a girl nonetheless, though one with a face as flat as a skillet and a glazed eye and a nose that never ceased running. Who could ever love such a creature? Certainly not the great Ya’akov Yosef, the rich and spoiled son of Reb Alter Nosn, pampered by one sister after the next, each more beautiful than the last!”

“Well,” I said, “I suppose you have every right to be bitter.”

“Oh, you have no idea!”

“Still, I think this has gone on far enough — ”

“Let me finish, Yankl!”

Dr. Freud stood abruptly. “Dr. Sammelsohn, is there any reason we should hear nothing more of this?” he said.

“None,” I admitted, looking down at my hands. “None, but my own sense of personal embarrassment.”

“The truth is the truth whether it’s spoken aloud or not,” he lectured me.

“Well said,” Fräulein Eckstein concurred.

Dr. Freud cut her a dismissive look. “Frau Sammelsohn, I think you’ll find that your flatteries benefit either of us but little.”

“Ha!” she sneered “The beard speaks! Remind me again, Yankl: who is this hatless rabbi?”

“He isn’t a rabbi, Ita.”

“No?” She laughed. “How can he not be? Why, just look at him: he’s got fanatical piety written all over his ugly face!”

“He’s a doctor, Ita, and a very good one, and one whom I think can cure you.”

Dr. Freud cleared his throat. “A moment with you, Dr. Sammelsohn.”

“Forgive us, Ita,” I said, backing away from her bed.

“We’ll return shortly,” Dr. Freud said. “Is there anything we can bring you? Tea perhaps? Or a toddy?”

Fräulein Eckstein looked at him as though he had gone mad. “And what would a disembodied soul need with such refreshments?” she exclaimed.

“An excellent point, madam.” Dr. Freud bowed. “In that case: excuse us. We’ll see ourselves out.”

WE STOOD OUTSIDE
her door and, for the first time, the thought struck me like a thunderbolt: Ita is dead. The shock of learning of her demise had been lessened, I suppose, by her presence in the room. By the end of our interview, I’d banished the hope that Fräulein Eckstein’s condition represented some sort of psychic splitting into two distinct persons, à la Bertha Pappenheim, a phenomenon that, as Dr. Freud kept insisting, was absolutely common in cases of hysteria. Indeed, in years to come, this would be the strategy apologists, citing Dr. Freud himself, would employ to make sense of all dybbuk possessions, blurring the distinctions between the hundred or so documented cases, until each one fit a nice, tidy pattern: weren’t they all women, silenced by a masculine cabal, who in sickness had found the voice they could never claim in health — a hectoring, sneering, scorning, accusing, threatening, ridiculing, blaming voice? Was it any different from hysteria, which also allowed its victims to leave off caring for their fathers in their sickbeds, or for their husbands in their marriage beds, or for their children in their cribs, to cease their running and fetching and consoling and feeding and comforting and suckling and coddling and copulating with, on, and for the men who
denied them free use of their wills, harnessing their bodies, as though they were mules, to their own vile needs instead?

One thing baffled me only, and it was this: although this last description might be applied in some degree to Fräulein Eckstein, who bowed to her mother’s will and lived in the shadow of her brilliant brother, and who additionally allowed herself to be passed between Dr. Freud and Dr. Fliess as though she were the key to an apartment the two men shared, it applied even more to Ita, bartered away by her hateful grandfather to my unloving father as a convenient albatross to hang about my penitent’s neck. If the Ita in Fräulein Eckstein’s bed — sharp-tongued, well spoken, no longer docile — represented a Fury released from the dark wells of repression, why would Fräulein Eckstein’s hysteria choose Ita as its un-repressed agent when, in life, Ita was far more oppressed than Fräulein Eckstein had ever been?