A Curable Romantic (31 page)

I’m certain this is what also baffled Dr. Freud and forced him to reconsider the social banishment to which he had consigned me. He’d called me in as a consultant, much in the way that he had, days before, made use of Dr. Rosanes and Dr. Gersuny. If I could determine that the personality presenting itself to him as “Ita,” claiming to be my spurned second wife, was no such being, but was instead a fabrication of Fräulein Eckstein’s mind, constructed out of odd remarks about my former life she’d chanced to overhear, he could rule out the far-fetched but seemingly inescapable diagnosis of demonical possession and treat her for the hysteria with which he was medically as well as philosophically more at home.

Unfortunately, I had no doubt that the figure I’d been addressing, the figure hiding inside Fräulein Eckstein like a fox inside a rotting log, was Ita, an Ita, it was true, in all outward manifestations different from the one I’d known — this Ita could speak; she could reason; she could add and subtract, I wagered, if I had need to put her to the test — and yet it was clearly the same girl.

However, Dr. Freud would hear none of it. “I think you’ll find that Fräulein Eckstein’s symptoms,
including
her secondary personality, will immediately and permanently disappear as soon as we succeed in bringing to light the memories of the events by which these symptoms have been provoked.”

“And to do that?” I asked.

Exhausted, I pushed my hair back with both hands.

“We must simply allow the patient to describe whatever she wishes in the greatest detail possible, letting her put all her affect into words.”

“But it’s
not
Fräulein Eckstein we’re speaking to.”

Dr. Freud pinned me with a look of indulgent condescension. “Dear boy, my dearest boy, do you really expect me to believe that we’re dealing with a dybbuk? You might as well suggest that Moses parted the Red Sea!”

“Do you really believe Fräulein Eckstein capable of concocting such atrocious verse and in Yiddish besides? But that’s the very least of it. Why, everything she says — ”

“Dr. Sammelsohn, Dr. Sammelsohn, let’s be honest. Is that really a portrait of the father you knew? Think, man!”

He let a moment pass.

“No,” I conceded.

“Well?”

“But I can’t claim to have known the man completely.”

“You’re unaccustomed to the ingenuity of this disease. Don’t lose your scientific objectivity! No matter what this Ita tells you, no matter how realistic or truthful she seems, no matter how much Fräulein Eckstein’s knowledge defies logical explanation, no matter how close to the raw bone her sharp points might probe, I’m counting on you to keep a part of yourself in reserve, by which I mean the finest part: the physician. Whatever Fräulein Eckstein is feeling towards you is simply a manifestation of a symptom lying deep in her unconscious mind. One must remain intellectually aloof in order to provide relief for this poor suffering woman. I brought you in only because Fräulein Eckstein, or Ita as she fashions herself in her condition seconde, was demanding your presence here. I understand you’re not trained in the art of our young science. Perhaps it’s foolish of me to trust this part of her analysis to a novice, and yet, under the circumstances, what else could I do?”

Dr. Freud searched my face to see if I understood all he had told me.

“And this portrait she painted of my father?” I’d already willed myself to believe in its authenticity. It was pleasing to me to imagine my father
as a lovestruck poet reciting verse in praise of Blume, the wife of Motkhe the Shochet, while wandering in the deep forests of Szibotya.

“A complete fantasy,” Dr. Freud said, “and I’ll prove it to you. May I ask you — who among the circle of your acquaintances does this image of your father most resemble?”

I thought for a moment. “Why, myself, of course.”

I felt myself scowling at the obvious truth of what Dr. Freud was telling me.

“Precisely,” he said. “Hysterics and neurotics are extremely sensitive people, Dr. Sammelsohn, not the dégénérés and the déséquilibrés Professor Charcot would have us believe. Why, you’d be surprised how much they can divine about the person to whom they are speaking. And don’t forget, Fräulein Eckstein has spent more than an hour or two in your company, sometimes intimately.”

Blushing, I recognized that what Dr. Freud was saying was in all probability true. The hated image of my saturnine father, graven for so long upon my heart, once more bled through, like a graffito on a whitewashed wall.

“Why, as a student in Paris, at the Moulin Rouge, I upon several occasions witnessed so-called mind readers performing these very same sorts of tricks. We’re always giving away clues to ourselves, Dr. Sammelsohn. We have only to open our eyes to read them in others.”

“I suppose you’re right,” I agreed.

“Come along now,” he said, and together, we reentered Fräulein Eckstein’s room.

We found her on her back in the same horrifying posture as before: her eyes opened wide; her mouth a horrible gash; her tongue extended towards the ceiling; her arms and legs stiff; her toes and fingers splayed.

Dr. Freud went to her side and, as I had seen him do before, he gently laid his hand upon her brow. “Under the pressure of my hand,” he commanded, “you shall come back to yourself, my child.”

At this, Fräulein Eckstein’s posture relaxed and the patient turned onto her side. Bringing her knees to her chest, she hugged her pillow against herself. “I don’t feel well,” she murmured, gazing at Dr. Freud through a squint.

“No,” he said simply. “I wouldn’t think so.”

“But it’s so sweet that you’re here with me, Dr. Freud. Are you finding my case very interesting?”

“Can you see and hear me, Fräulein Eckstein?”

“Silly … man …” She spoke with the weariness of someone who, having been awake for ages, might drop into a dream at any moment. “Silly, beautiful man. Of course, I can see and hear you … only, why are you standing so very … very far from me?”

“How far do I seem?”

“It’s a long … long tunnel. You’re so distant … but your voice is so sweet and so manly … I’d recognize it anywhere.”

“Fräulein Eckstein!” Dr. Freud raised his voice, but the patient had already drifted back into her trance. “Fräulein Eckstein!” he called again.

“Fräulein Eckstein, Fräulein Eckstein!” the Fräulein’s other voice cried out, seeming to emanate once again from inside her throat. The creature before us opened a single truculent eye. Dr. Freud’s back stiffened.

“There’s little you’ll be able to do for her as long as I’m here,” Ita said. “You know that, don’t you?”

Dr. Freud exhaled heavily. “Yes, madam, I know that. And how long do you imagine that will be, if I may inquire?” He sounded as though he were almost speaking to a taxing house guest.

“How long?” Ita laughed.

“Yes, madam?”

“Why, forever, I suppose.”

“Oh, I’m afraid I cannot permit that.”

“But I have no intention of leaving.”

“None whatsoever?”

Ita shook Fräulein Eckstein’s head, rising upon one elbow in her bed. “Why, just look at these tiny ankles and this graceful neck! She’s not the most refined of beauties, admittedly, but compared to the stubby, flat-chested drab in which I was formerly imprisoned, Eckstein is a playground of wonders. Oh God, I feel so … womanly!”

Dr. Freud raised a well-barbered eyebrow and sighed.

Ignoring him, Ita turned her attention to me. “Yankl,” she said, “why don’t you kiss me?”

Until that moment, I’d been happily overlooked, like an actor who, having played his scene, now watches the drama from the wings, in costume still, it’s true, but no longer in character. Indeed, I was shocked to hear myself addressed and, like an actor, by a name no one in my daily life ever called me. “Kiss you?” I said, all out of breath, as though I’d been forced to rush back onstage to deliver my lines.

Ita pouted fetchingly. “You know you’ve been wanting to ever since you saw me at the Carl.”

“That was
you
, Ita?”

“Why, of course it was me, silly boy. Now come over here and kiss me, my darling.”

This feminine command produced in me something of a dither; and the truth is: had Dr. Freud not been present, I might have succumbed. Fräulein Eckstein’s dulcet body, combined with Ita’s vulgar sensuality, stirred me to the core. My practice confined me, most days, to my clinic, and I had rare occasion, either professionally or otherwise, to visit women in their nightclothes. Ita had saucily untied the laces of Fräulein Eckstein’s gown, and inside her blouse front, the gentle chiaroscuro of her emancipated bust nearly robbed me of coherent speech. Also, the sweetness of being addressed by my childhood name in my native tongue by someone who knew me, indeed, who
loved
me, as a child was more than I could bear. Had the Sirens sung not a high wild sexual keening to the sailor Ulysses, but a lullaby in his native Greek, I’m certain no deck-hands with their ears stuffed with swab could have prevented him from tearing loose the ropes that bound him to the mast and plunging into the perishing oblivion of his own orgiastic desires. Though my childhood had ended bitterly, Ita’s purling Yankls and her Galician vowels returned it to me as though it were a cherished parcel I’d dropped in my haste to flee from home. Now I wanted nothing more than to erase the distance I’d placed between me and my former self, to collapse the intervening years, to enfold myself inside Ita’s arms, finding in her bosom the lost caresses of my mother and my sisters and my wives. I flashed an angry look at Dr. Freud; the thought pounded in my brain: Why shouldn’t I kiss her? By the laws of God and man, she’s my wife, after all!

“No! Don’t!” Dr. Freud said, grabbing me by my arm.

Had I actually taken a step towards her? Or had he read my mind?

“She’s not your wife,” he insisted. “In addition to everything we’ve discussed, and even if all the impossible things you believe to be true
were
true, still, the dead have no such claims upon the living.”

“Let him go!” Ita shrieked, turning Fräulein Eckstein’s hands into dainty fists, which she shook angrily in the air.

“Madam, I won’t!”

“But he wants me!”

“No, madam, he does not want
you
, but the whole lost world of his youth!”

CHAPTER 15

Naturally, in the cold light of day, everything seemed different. Though at first I could barely drag myself out of bed and had to force myself into the clinic, as the hours wore on, I realized that Dr. Freud was almost certainly correct. Clearly I couldn’t trust my own impressions. Guilt had kept Ita’s memory alive for too long in my conscience. Lying like a poisonous snake in the deepest coils of my mind was the guilty expectation that one day I would have to face her again, that one day I would have to stand trial before her for the harm that I, in my role as my father’s victim, had caused her. Certainly, my aggrieved conscience made me a less than objective witness in evaluating Fräulein Eckstein’s medical situation. Equally deluding was the unresolved business with my father. With the extraordinarily refined sensitivities granted to her by her disease, Fräulein Eckstein had divined my most vulnerable secrets and had told me everything she imagined I wanted to hear. Had she been a con artist or a spiritualist, and not an invalid, she no doubt would have already emptied my bank account.

No one, I had to remind myself, was denying the reality of the demonical possessions of yesteryear. Those poor sufferers
had
ranted and raved, they
had
taken on different identities, they
had
spoken in foreign languages and in different voices, exactly as the testimonies we have of them describe. Drs. Freud and Breuer’s great contribution to the enlightenment of the human race was not to deny these sufferers their symptoms, but to see more deeply, and less naïvely, into their medical causes.

Dr. Freud insisted I join him the next evening at Fräulein Eckstein’s bedside, and having persuaded myself that we were dealing with nothing more extraordinary than a complex symptom of an acute hysteria, I entered the sanatorium, my heart lighter than it had been when I’d left it the evening before. If these symptoms occasioned guilt and embarrassment in me, I told myself, it was not because I was facing the wife I’d abandoned,
but because I was working without the rigorous psychological training Dr. Freud had imposed upon himself. I marveled at his ability to keep his head in the choppy waters of Fräulein Eckstein’s delusions.

When I arrived, he was carefully massaging the patient’s body, and so I entered her room and took a seat as far from her bed as I could, watching as Dr. Freud placed a faradic brush on Fräulein Eckstein’s constricted arm.

“That hurts a little bit,” she told him.

“I can stop it, if you wish.”

“The massage is better, I think.”

“Whichever you prefer.”

“The massage,” she said, and he began to softly stroke her epigastrium. “Ah, ah, yes, that’s … that’s so very nice.”

“Here?” Dr. Freud murmured. “A little lower.”

“Now?”

“Lower still, I think.”

“Good?”

“Ah, quite good, yes.” She gave out a luxurious sigh and gently stroked Dr. Freud’s hand as it caressed her. “May I ask you a question, Herr Doktor?”

“Of course, my Fräulein.”

“Is my case enlightening to you?”

“Enlightening?”

“Psychoanalytically speaking, I mean.”

“Quite.”

“More enlightening than Dr. Breuer’s famous case?”

“Oh, considerably so.”

“And you’ll publish it?”

“I hope to, yes.”

“And it will make your name?”

“Who can say, Fräulein?”

“No, I’m sure that it will.”

Dr. Freud drew in a deep breath. “But perhaps, in order for that to happen, you will tell me a bit more about the wedding.”

“Ita’s wedding?” Fräulein Eckstein asked.

“Who else’s?”

It was only then that I realized Dr. Freud had been hypnotizing Fräulein Eckstein. As he continued to stroke her lower abdomen, she looked dreamily at me. She was in a partial trance, it seemed, and finally she pointed towards me with her chin. “Do you know how much I’ve suffered for that one?” Squinting, she looked me in the eye.