Without Reservations (20 page)

A man unintentionally fell into step beside me. I glanced at him. He resembled Harry, I thought, the man who’d been at the War Museum with Helen. Tall, sweet Harry, whom I would always think of as a young man standing outside on a clear night gazing at the stars; a sight that could have been, but wasn’t, the last thing he’d ever see. Thinking this, I stole another look at the man still walking beside me. This time, however, I couldn’t see the resemblance. It was as though I had imagined, not remembered, what Harry looked like.

I thought of the letters I’d read at the War Museum. Love letters.
Betty—my darling … my last thoughts were of you … I will love you while there is breath in my body.
I thought of how I’d imagined Betty, her face ashen, reading and rereading the words, trying to grasp the awful reality that lay beneath them, trying to break through her numbness.

I understood that. How many times I’ve tried to recast that day the officers came to our house with the news of my father’s death; to put some feeling into it, to cry or be angry, or tell God I hated him. To feel anything but the thick numbness turning me into stone.

I have a theory that women like me, women who had fathers for only a short time, never give up the search to have back what was lost too soon. We look for some trace of the lost father in the faces of our brothers, our sons, our husbands, our lovers. Sometimes even in the forward tilt of a tall man’s head.

Lately, however, I thought I detected a change in my attitude. There were signals coming up from some deep-down place that made me think I might be ready to start letting go of the imaginary father I’d been searching for. That meant, of course, I’d now have to start looking for the real one. But where? To my surprise, it was Dostoyevsky who answered my question. One good memory, he’d
written somewhere, especially one from childhood, could give even the hopeless something to hang on to.

Okay, I thought, I’ll start with one good memory of my father. I let my mind go blank and soon enough, just as though I were back on the analyst’s couch instead of sitting on a lawn chair in a London park, I saw us together, my father and me.

We’re in the family Plymouth, just the two of us, taking a ride down a country road, looking at the scenery. It’s a hot day and the windows are down, blowing the smell of fresh-cut hay into the car. We pass some black-and-white cows in a field and my dad leans out the window and goes moo … mooo … moooo. I crack up and lean out my window, imitating my dad imitating the cows. On the way home we stop at an ice-cream stand and have chocolate shakes. I spill most of mine down the front of my sundress. But my dad doesn’t care. He just lifts me up and carries me to the car. I fall asleep.

As I was thinking about this, I saw a man sitting on the grass in the park, next to the lake. I seemed to recognize his face: the brown eyes, the cleft in the chin, the high cheekbones.

I know who he looks like
, I thought, standing alone on a summer’s day in a park far from home, and even farther from my childhood:
he looks like my dad.

T
he woman behind the information counter at the Finchley Road Underground was visibly perplexed. “So you’re looking for Maresfield Gardens, are you?” she said, answering my question with a question.

“Yes. The exact number is twenty Maresfield Gardens. I was told to get off at Finchley Road.”

“Twenty
Maresfield Gardens, is it? I’ve not heard of it. Is it in Hampstead?” She consulted a map tacked up on the wall. “Wait here, dear. I’ll just go have a talk with someone else and see if he knows of its whereabouts.” She disappeared around the corner of the tiny desk.

I stood waiting, my right foot tapping out my impatience. The trip had taken longer than expected and I was not pleased to find myself lost and, possibly, nowhere near my destination.

“Well, here we are, dear,” said the station attendant, returning with a uniformed man. He proceeded to ask me the same questions.
Maresfield Gardens? … Are you sure it’s in Hampstead?
As he was talking to me, a light bulb seemed to go on over the woman’s head.

“Are you going to Freud’s?” she asked in a cheery voice.

I told her I was. “Well, then you just go up the street outside to Trinity Walk and take a left. Then at the top of the hill, take another left. And that’s Maresfield Gardens.”

The directions sounded quite simple, but I wrote them down anyway. After thanking her I made my way out to Finchley Road, a
commercial street lined with shops and offices. Of course, it being Sunday, everything was closed, giving the area a deserted, melancholy feel. As I walked along Finchley Road, the only pedestrian on the abandoned street, I felt like a character in an Edward Hopper painting.
The Sunday Blues
, I called it, this sad feeling that sometimes came over me on the seventh day of the week. It could hit particularly hard if I was on the road, traveling alone.

In Paris I’d handled the problem by buying the London
Sunday Times
and reading it at the Flore over a long, hearty breakfast. I found that once I got through the morning the rest of the day seemed to fall into place. I hadn’t been able to find a London antidote to my Sunday Blues. Certainly there was nothing around here, I thought, looking along the deserted street.

But maybe that was appropriate. After all, I was on my way to pay my respects to Sigmund Freud who, were he alive and waiting for me, would expect me to examine such feelings from the depths of his famous couch. Freud was right, I thought, when he compared analysis to archaeology, implying that the task of both was to unearth a hidden past. I knew my Sunday Blues went back pretty far; as far back, actually, as I could remember.

The problem is that the past is never past; it lives on, directing us like an undercover traffic cop. Freud, of course, said it a little differently. But that’s what he meant.

I loved interpreting Freud. Turnabout is fair play, after all. And besides, it took my mind off the Sunday Blues.

After climbing the perilously steep Trinity Walk, I emerged on a quiet, leafy street. I walked a short distance, reading the house numbers until I came to number twenty. The house where Freud lived turned out to be quite elegant, a three-story brick dwelling surrounded by well-kept gardens and hedges. What struck me most, however, were its many windows. A fitting touch, I thought,
for a man who spent his life looking through the windows of other people’s minds.

I walked inside, bought my ticket, and signed the guest book. Then, bypassing Freud’s re-created study, I headed right for the video room to see the films I’d been told about. They were said to include intimate scenes of Freud with his family, friends, and beloved dogs.

When I arrived in the darkened upstairs viewing room, the films were already flickering across the faces of the dozen or so viewers who’d gathered there. I took the first seat I could find, nodding to the woman who looked up as I sat down next to her.

At first I couldn’t make sense of what I saw on the screen. Freud was sitting in a beautiful garden, the center of attention at what seemed to be a party. As people looked on, a parade of dogs marched by the psychoanalyst. The dogs—chows, I thought, with perhaps one jumbo Pekingese thrown in—were dressed in collars with bows. Then a sweet, disembodied narrator’s voice explained this was a film of Freud’s birthday party, and that attached to the dogs’ collars were congratulatory messages.

“That’s Anna Freud’s voice,” whispered the woman next to me. “Freud’s daughter.” I nodded, remembering how it was my ex-husband’s desire to train with Anna Freud that had brought my family to London twenty-five years earlier.

The film continued with fascinating glimpses of Freud and his family in Paris and at their villa outside Vienna. Always the psychoanalyst was accompanied by his dogs, saying of one chow, “My Jofi is a delightful creature; recuperation after most of the human visitors.” Upon hearing this the woman next to me snickered loudly.

When the film was over, I turned to the woman and asked if I’d missed much by coming in late.

“Not much at all,” she said. Then in an amusing way she summed up the five minutes or so I’d hadn’t seen. Her rapid-fire delivery of the material was punctuated by sharp, funny observations, more like that of a stand-up comic than a sit-down analyst:
dog comes in, dog goes out … Freud relaxes in Paris with famous analyst Marie Bonaparte, who is sans Napoleon … Dogs on parade offer congratulations to doting Dr. Freud …

Between laughs, I listened, trying to place her accent. South African? Australian? I couldn’t tell. I took a chance and asked if she was Australian. She was.

Jean Gillespie was a psychoanalyst from Sydney. In almost one breath she told me she had studied years ago at the Hampstead Clinic founded by Anna Freud, but that she now practiced in Australia and was thinking of moving to New York although she’d heard it was tough to crack the New York Psychoanalytic Society and anyway she might possibly give up private practice. At the end of her soliloquy, she asked, “Are you an analyst?”

I was tempted to say yes. After all, I had raised two children—a task Freud himself compared to the “impossible” profession of analysis—along with playing housemother to countless narcissistic cats. But I told her the truth instead. “No, but my ex-husband applied to study at the Hampstead Clinic. We actually moved to London, but his plans fell through.”

She asked me what I did. I told her I worked as a newspaper reporter, which in my opinion also qualified me to declare myself, at the very least, a lay analyst. She laughed. It was a loud, booming sound, one that came without warning. It must have alarmed her patients, I thought, when it came at them from behind the couch. Indeed, there was a raw quality about her whole person that ran
counter to the image of the analyst as quiet cipher. I found it refreshing. But I wasn’t sure I’d want her to be my therapist.

We spent the next hour or so walking together through the house, paying special attention to Freud’s study and library. The large room was a replica of his consulting room in Vienna, furnished with belongings transplanted from 19 Berggasse, his home for forty-seven years. For the last year of his life he worked here, surrounded by the familiar past. I was reminded of the way my friend Susan had managed to re-create her Washington apartment on a hill in Montmartre, bringing along a bit of the past with her into a new life.

In the study, Jean and I paused to contemplate the famous couch. It was roped off from the rest of the room.

“Probably to discourage any homesick patients from taking a lie-down on it,” Jean said.

“It looks pretty uncomfortable to me,” I said, eyeing the short, heavy-looking couch that roller-coastered down from the head end and was covered with a scratchy-looking Oriental rug. I told Jean of my observation that the decor of an analyst’s office seemed always to be one of two styles: either sleek, leather-and-chrome minimalist with the obligatory Miro print, or a mismatched, just-hauled-up-from-the-beach-cottage look accessorized with a Käthe Kollwitz print.

Jean laughed. “Well, I’m afraid I fall into the second category. What about your analyst?”

“Definitely beach cottage,” I said. “On humid days his office even had a musty seaside smell. Actually, I don’t think I’d feel comfortable with an analyst who had a leather Mies van der Rohe couch.”

“I hear the Mies couch is popular with New York analysts. Which is another good reason not to move to New York.”

Before leaving, Jean and I stopped at the gift shop. “I wonder what Freud would think of being merchandised this way,” I said, browsing through the notecards, posters, mugs, commemorative stamps, and replicas of the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquities he so famously collected. Some of them weren’t cheap.