A Curable Romantic (6 page)

That was Freud: quixotically blind to his own quixotic nature, just as I was blind to my own Sancho Panzaish abilities to overlook his madness, explaining away his sudden surrender of professionalism and good sense until it resembled its very opposite, simply because I was getting what I wanted.

CHAPTER 4

I spent the week in a delirious cloud; and when Sunday morning arrived, pulling Sunday afternoon in its train, I was almost too nervous to alight from my chair. Only after the sky had blackened did I make my way beneath it to Berggasse 19. Crossing the threshold, I knocked upon the door of Dr. Freud’s consultancy, and when no answer came, I knocked again. I checked my watch. Was it possible I’d gotten the date wrong? Or come too early? Could the party have been canceled? Knocking again, I succeeded in summoning no one to the door. I patted my gloves against the sides of my coat and considered leaving. Of the two prospects — never meeting Fräulein Eckstein and finally meeting her — I didn’t know which was the more terrifying, and for a moment, I considered dashing out the door. Instead, I tramped up the yellow staircase to the Freuds’ apartment, where, on the other side of the double doors, I could hear the sounds of festive company: blurred voices, spoons tinkling, decanters ringing against raised glasses, the periodic explosion of laughter.

Wiping my feet on the woven mat, I forced out a nervous breath. Either my life will change, I told myself, or it won’t, although I very much hoped that it would.

Was it Dr. Freud or Frau Freud or the maid who answered the door? Memory has left no trace of the figure who met me there. I recall only the apartment light spilling across the threshold and jangling my already jangled nerves. Whoever it was took me by the arm and ushered me into the salon where two or three dozen people were already gathered around the Freuds’ Christmas tree.

(Yes, the Freuds had a Christmas tree, the first I’d ever seen inside a Jewish home.)

The room glittered with the usual accoutrements of late-century masquerade: monocles, lorgnettes, pince-nez, stickpins, watch fobs gleamed
in the candle light. The women wore their usual assortment of impractical hats, the men beards of every chop and curl and color.

Sipping from the drink Frau Freud’s sister Minna had given me, I peered over its rim into the room, scanning the crowd like a scholar skimming a text, searching for that rare word, waiting for its familiar shape to leap out against the intentionally blurred page, when, quite suddenly, she was there — Fräulein Eckstein! — standing between Drs. Rosenberg and Rie.

“Ah, little Königstein!” Dr. Rosenberg called out, and the two men gestured me towards their little trio. Before I could take a step in their direction, however, Dr. Freud placed his hand upon my shoulder and bellowed to the assembled crowd: “Mesdames et mesdemoiselles et messieurs, permettez-moi de présenter mon collègue — ”

“And our indispensable fourth in Tarock,” Dr. Rie piped in.

“Le jeune docteur Jacques Sammelsohn.”

The introduction, barked out in this way, elicited a smattering of applause and not a little laughter. Caught out in the white-hot spotlight of the room’s attention, I performed my usual dance of nervous ticks: laughing through my nose, shrugging repeatedly, I coughed and dropped my gaze, like a penitent’s, to the floor, horrified by the sight of my antigropelos (which I’d neglected to remove upon entering the apartment). Thus blinded to the room, I felt Dr. Freud push me into a cloud of extravagant perfumes.

“Docteur Jacques,” I heard him say, “Madame Amalia Eckstein et sa fille, l’Emma incomparable!”

Now, as anyone with any experience of the world might have told me, at the moment of capturing the long-sought object of my desire, I felt nothing but a wounding sense of disappointment. The girl standing before me was not the belle femme I remembered from the Carl. No, here was a delicate child, an invalid, lovely perhaps, but obviously unwell. She moved with a convalescent’s gracelessness, her clothing seemingly irritating her skin. The blush dappling her cheeks, I judged, was more a consequence of fevers than of the womanly arts. She looked as though she’d only just risen from her sickbed. Her hair, which I recalled as a glorious crown, lay flat, and her bosom, which in memory had defied the
principles of Newtonian gravity, rested upon her chest like two apples fallen from a tree. Even worse: in her eyes, I saw no mirrored flash of recognition, no summoning flare of interest when she looked at me or heard my name. Although Dr. Freud claimed he’d mentioned me to her, and that she’d inquired after me, obviously she had not. Instead, she greeted me with a polite indifference, perhaps even a sense of irritation: she was here only to please Dr. Freud or her mother and had no interest in me.

“What a beautifully thick head of hair the young doctor possesses!” her mother cried.

“Maman!” The Fräulein dropped her gaze to the floor. “I’m certain Dr. Sonnenfeld has better things to do than listen to compliments about his hair.”

Involuntarily I raised my hand and stroked my head as though calming an agitated cat. “Sammelsohn,” I said, though no one seemed to be listening.

“Nonsense,” Dr. Freud boomed. “Women are not the only vain sex, you know!”

He himself made a daily visit to his barber, keeping his appointment even on the morning of his father’s funeral a few years hence. And in truth, I
was
vain about my hair and preferred to wear it, as I’ve said, in the unkempt Bohemian style that gave me, I imagined, the tousled, late-out-of-bed look of a man so preoccupied with his thoughts that pushing him back into bed and distracting him from those thoughts would be the only thing a woman might consider doing at the sight of him. I regret to say that the effect had so far worked upon no woman more brilliantly than it had upon Madame Eckstein.

(Perhaps because Dr. Freud had introduced us in French, I continued to think of her as
Madame
Eckstein. As with many of our Jewish women, there was nothing Germanic about her, not her face, which she rouged heavily, nor her shock of orange hair, nor her diamond-shaped eyes, nor her extravagant bosom from which emanated a soporific of lavender and organdie, the scent so pervasive it preceded her appearance into any room and remained long after her departure, serving as a kind of olfactory calling card.)

I blushed against her matronly advances, while Fräulein Eckstein, mortified by these same advances, blushed also.

“Stop it, Maman! You’re embarrassing him!”

“But I’m not, ma fille. Use your eyes.”

Fräulein Eckstein gave Dr. Freud a desperate look, which he ignored.

“He’s so young to be a doctor!” Madame Eckstein whispered to him.

“Nearly thirty,” Dr. Freud murmured in return.

“Doesn’t look it.”

“We’ll talk, Amalia. We’ll talk.”

“Was I embarrassing you, young man?”

“Of course not, madame,” I said. What else could I tell her?

“There, Emma, you see.”

“Well, you’re embarrassing
me
!” the Fräulein cried. “You all are!”

Madame Eckstein straightened her spine, and her bosom, that fragrant sultan’s pillow, became a hard, imperial bust. “You shall not be rude to me, young lady!”

Bending at the waist, Fräulein Eckstein placed her hands upon her abdomen. “Oh! My stomach is in
knots
!”

“Are you all right, my darling?”

“No, Mother, I am
not
all right! It was madness to bring me here.”

“I didn’t insist, you know,” Madame Eckstein told Dr. Freud.

“Didn’t you?” the Fräulein cried.

“Emma, stop this wicked behavior!”

“Excuse me,” said Fräulein Eckstein. “But I really must lie down.”

“Dr. Freud, Dr. Sammelsohn,” Madame Eckstein said, following her daughter from the room.

“Sigmund!”
someone else cried.

Dr. Freud and I turned in the direction of this summons to see Frau Freud standing beside her sister Minna, both of the Bernays women with their black hair pulled back into a severe bun, each with her arms crossed, both tapping an irritated foot, both obviously annoyed about something.

CHAPTER 5

Enter Wilhelm Fliess, the handsome ear, nose, and throat specialist from cosmopolitan Berlin and the presumptive villain of our story. He was standing between the Freuds’ green ceramic stove and their glittering Christmas tree, a yuletide drink in his hand. A gifted monologist, he had succeeded in luring the majority of Dr. Freud’s guests to his corner.

He was a marvelously attractive fellow. Even I will admit that. His coal-black eyes and his jet-black beard glistened in the candlelight. Though his pate shone through his tonsure like a knee through a worn trouser leg, the receding hairline only made him appear more virile. I was especially struck by the audacity of his plum cravat. Here was a man, I told myself, who had fallen deeply, madly, and passionately in love with himself, and this was perhaps the only love he’d ever fully reciprocated.

Josef Breuer, Dr. Freud’s mentor, had introduced the two men a few years earlier, and they had hit it off immediately. Roughly the same age, each newly married, both beginning their families and their careers, they even resembled each other: bearded Jews with penetrating eyes and straight, handsome noses. But there was another, even more striking congruity: in his theoretical work, each man was stepping outside the bounds of accepted medical practice, and to the late-nineteenth-century mind, Dr. Freud’s mad-brained theories on dreams, on the unconscious, on sexuality, seemed no less far-fetched (if, indeed, far less fetching) than did Dr. Fliess’s odd notions.

Scorned by a blinkered medical establishment, the two men sheltered inside each other’s admiration, offering a sympathetic ear and an approving bosom upon which to lay, figuratively at least, their heads. Meeting as frequently as their schedules permitted — in Germany, in Austria, in the little towns dotting the Italian border — for what Dr. Freud had
christened their “private congresses,” they shared their thoughts and gave each other counsel and encouragement.

And what were Dr. Fliess’s radical new ideas? Well, principally, he had two. The first of these, the theory of periodicity, held that all life was determined by two powerful biorhythmic cycles. The more familiar of these, consisting of twenty-eight days, was feminine in nature, whereas the less familiar cycle of twenty-three days was masculine. By multiplying one of these integers against the other, or each by the difference between the two, and adding or subtracting the results, Dr. Fliess was able to find these numbers hidden, as a unifying pattern, in virtually all of creation.

Dr. Fliess’s other theory, and the one that more concerns us here, pertained to that triangular mound of bifurcated flesh located in the center of the human face, by which I mean the nose. The nose for Wilhelm Fliess was what the psyche was for Sigmund Freud: the source of all human unhappiness as well as the locus of its cure. He’d discovered an ailment that he christened the nasal reflex neurosis, and in a seventy-nine-page booklet entitled
New Contributions to the Theory and Therapy of the Nasal Reflex Neurosis
, he’d reported on over 130 cases of it. Not content to have merely discovered the malady, he also devised its cure: heavy cocaine swathes, normal cauterizations, and if these failed, galvanic cauterizations.

“Now, when this treatment is followed,” he told us that evening, sipping at his drink, “the nasal reflex neurosis will become the principal means of earning his daily bread for the general practitioner, and as a consequence, the immense multitude of neurasthenics will disappear. By that, I mean, of course, those unfortunates who, rushing from doctor to doctor and from spa to spa, make a
mockery
of our healing arts as they fall into the hands of all sorts of disreputable quacks!”

“But surely it’s more complicated than you’re making out,” Dr. Rie suggested.

Dr. Fliess granted him a condescending smile. “We live in an age of miracles and wonders, Dr. Rie, miracles and wonders, as you well know, and as the frontiers of knowledge advance rapidly before us, we must
hurry if we are to keep up. We must hurry. No, we mustn’t blind ourselves to any new discoveries. Now, I’m well aware that the astonishing newness of my ideas too easily makes skeptics of otherwise fair and impartial men, and accordingly, I’ve taken the precaution of documenting my researches with absolute meticulousness. With absolute meticulousness. For example, when the observation of blood in my infant son’s urine led to my discovery of male menstruation — ”

“Male menstruation?” Dr. Rosenberg nearly spat out his drink.

Dr. Fliess nodded. “ — occurring every twenty-three days in both men
and
women, I took great pains to preserve the sheet and shirt with those precious traces of blood on them. Not merely as a means of silencing my detractors, mind you, but for the sake of posterity as well. For the sake of posterity as well. However, as a doctor committed to my patients, I’m willing to try anything if it means restoring an invalid to her health. Why, only recently, I cured a slight case of strabismus in a two-year-old by scraping his tonsil with my bare fingernail. How did I know the diseased tonsils were inhibiting the maturation of the child’s eye muscles? Genius? Intuition? Call it what you will! It worked, ladies and gentlemen, it worked.”

His ring twinkled against the lights of the Freuds’ Christmas tree as he puffed on his cigar.

“Today, of course, everyone is crying ‘Neurasthenia! Neurasthenia!’ ” Dr. Fliess cried, raising his hands and shaking them in the air, as though he were mimicking a man shrieking the word. “But I’ll tell you this: most neurasthenics are simply poorly misdiagnosed wretches suffering not from neurasthenia” — again he raised his hands and shook them — “but from nasal reflex neurosis!”

“And the proof of this?” Dr. Rie countered.

Dr. Fliess smiled handsomely. “The proof of this is my testimony before you tonight. Oh, I know, it’s tedious to hear a man singing his own praises, but since you asked me and since I’m talking anyway, let me say only this. However, let me say it clearly: with my nasal therapies, I’ve succeeded where master physicians have striven in vain to cure. Reviewing my cases at the end of a long week, I often astonish myself. No, I do.”