Dreaming for Freud (15 page)

S
HE WALKS TH
E SHORT DISTANCE
to his consulting rooms on her own this time. She remembers the first time she went to the doctor’s office, that autumn day, dragged there by her father in the carriage, so full of rage and humiliation. She remembers the pain all through her body. The pain in her leg has gone, her bowels are regular, her voice clear, though she has a sharp pain down the left side of her face. Though all the pain has not disappeared, she feels it is possible that she may recover with the doctor’s help.

It is a warm spring day, and she looks at the smooth blue sky and listens to the raucous cries of the city birds. It occurs to her, as she passes a flower vendor in the street, that she could take a bunch of daffodils to the doctor—now the professor, to congratulate him on his professorship, but she is not certain how he would interpret such a gesture and decides against it.

Once again she wonders if he will take her back into treatment if she asks him. She knows she has a rebellious side to her nature, that she has fought with him and attempted to thwart his attempts to convince her. But this time she is the one who desires the treatment and not her father. She is going to see him because she thinks he might be of help. She would like to give him another chance to cure her completely. She feels that now, since her visit to the Z.’s, since their confrontation, she will be able to talk with him about other things. Perhaps she will even tell him the truth: that she had stolen from his book, that her dreams were made up for him.

She will definitely tell him about the neuralgia, and she wants to congratulate him on his professorship, which she has read about in the newspaper. She knows how happy he must be about that, and she is happy for him. She has to admit he has acquired added prestige in her eyes as well as society’s. Her father has told her how it will change the doctor’s life, make it easier now for him to find well-paying patients, to spread his novel ideas. Perhaps it will put him in a good mood with her and enable him to see things differently.

She knows, too, also from her father, that the doctor has finally visited Rome since she last saw him, a city he has always said he longed to reach though she does not quite understand why he never managed to before. Above all, she is eager to let him know what she has accomplished since she left him, fifteen months before. She feels she has used her three months of treatment, despite all her difficulties with him, to good effect.

Despite his grave face and cool reception at the door to his consulting rooms, she smiles warmly at him and walks across the familiar Persian rugs. She has dressed up for this occasion and tied a bright blue ribbon around her neck. She has put on her best blue dress.

Tall glass vases of spring flowers perfume the room sweetly today: long stems of lilac and jasmine spilling over. Perhaps the professor’s wife has arranged them, or perhaps some well-wisher has sent them to congratulate him. Through the open window a slight breeze lifts the curtain. She lies down without protest on the silky rug that covers his couch and runs her fingers over the smooth weave.

“It feels so strange to be back here,” she says, thinking the room seems larger though even more filled with mysterious objects. Are there new acquisitions among the little statues?

“And how have you been feeling since I last saw you?” he asks her politely enough when he has taken up his habitual pew, giving her the freedom to imagine him as she wishes.

She says, “I am feeling much better. For a while I felt all in a muddle when I first left here, but now I am better, though I have a sharp pain down the left side of my face,” and she touches her cheek where it aches.

He immediately interprets this ache in her cheek as a reminder of the slap she gave Herr Z. on
his
cheek at the lake when he had made his proposal. Certainly, he has not forgotten her story. She wonders if it is he who would like to slap
her
for breaking off the therapy, for treating him like a servant, a maid, as he had said, but she keeps that to herself. She does not want to quarrel with him today. She feels grateful to him and she would like him to take her back. So instead she tells him she has been to see the Z.’s, who have recently moved to Vienna.

“Ah! And what prompted your visit?” he asks with some interest.

“It was on a very sad occasion,” she says, and the tears come to her eyes as they do so easily at the thought of those near to her whom she has lost. She thinks of her beloved Aunt Malvine, who has died, as she had feared she would during her absence from Vienna.

“Indeed, and why sad?” he asks.

“The occasion of their daughter’s death,” she says. “Poor little Clara has died, perhaps you know?” she tells him. “She had always had a weak heart, as you probably know, but it was still such a shock to me. I felt so close to her, had spent so much time with her. I loved her so much. She was almost like my own child.”

He says it must have been a shock to her.

She was very sad to hear the news, naturally, as she was so fond of the bright little girl, and could hardly believe she was no more. It was through the little girl that they had come to know the couple, the professor—she is careful to call him that now—may remember. “Somehow her death seemed to be the end of an important part of my life. In some way little Clara was my link with her mother and father. When Mother suggested it would be polite to pay a visit to offer our condolences, after only a moment’s hesitation, I decided I would indeed go.”

“I see,” he says.

She had dressed herself up carefully, brushed her hair until it glowed, donned a smart black dress that emphasized her small waist, she admits, put on her best black hat with a little veil and gloves, and gone to see them with her mother at her side. She takes a certain pleasure in telling all of this to him so truthfully.

“And how were they?” he asks, so that she wonders if he has seen them recently himself. “And did you still feel so angry with them?” he asks.

“At first,” she says, “I felt nothing but sympathy for both of them. How could I not? I knew they had loved their little girl so much, and they seemed quite bowed down and overcome with grief,” she tells him. They huddled together in their silent and well-polished entrance hall, both in deep mourning.

“They looked smaller to me and older. They seemed suddenly a little elderly, harmless couple, bowed down literally with grief.”

Frau Z. was wearing a thin black veil, but she could still see that her face was all swollen with weeping. Her lovely, fresh white skin was reddened, and her full lips looked chapped.

“Poor woman! How she must have suffered. What could be more awful than the death of a child and such a sweet, lively one?” she asks him.

“Indeed,” he says with feeling.

Many years later she will hear that he, too, has suffered a similar loss. His Sophie, his Sunday child, the most beautiful of his three girls, will die young of the Spanish influenza after the First World War, as will her little Heinele, his favorite grandchild, dying of tuberculosis, only three years after his mother.

“And how did they greet you?” he asks now.

“Frau Z. asked us to come into the parlor and embraced both of us warmly and thanked us for coming,” she says.

“And Herr Z.?” the doctor asks.

“Herr Z. shook my hand a little stiffly and bowed over Mother’s. Pippina invited me to sit beside her on the red velvet sofa, took my hand, and wept. She could hardly speak she was sobbing so hard. Eventually, she asked us to forgive her—she was overcome, and said it was so good of us both to come and visit. She thanked me in particular for all my help with her little girl in her frequent illnesses. ‘She was so fond of you. You were like another mother to her,’ she told me and stroked my hand and continued to weep. Herr Z. just sat in silence in the winged leather armchair across the room, his head bowed. He seemed quite defeated,” she tells the professor.

A servant brought in the tea tray with the silver samovar and offered them tea and iced pastries from Demel’s, which she, who felt suddenly hungry, was the only one to eat. She remembered the first time she had met the Z.’s, that sun-filled moment on the terrace of the hotel in Meran, and how the child had slipped from her wicker chair and come running over to their table spontaneously in her sundress and stood there staring at her. She recalled how she had fed her some of her chocolate cake, so that the little girl had a small mustache of chocolate on her upper lip. She had seemed so lively and well. How could she be gone forever?

“There was the heavy scent of arum lilies in the air, which made my head spin. I still feel giddy sometimes,” she tells the professor, and is afraid of fainting. There were huge vases of flowers everywhere which people must have sent—rather like the flowers in the professor’s room today. “Yet, without the lively children, the room seemed empty and silent, all the windows firmly shut on the noises from the street,” she says, listening to the quiet in the professor’s room where she has not been for such a long time.

The little boy had apparently been sent to his grandparents for a while. His presence only reminded the parents of the missing child, and they found it quite unbearable, Frau Z. said.

For a while they all talked in subdued voices about the little girl and how sweet and good she had been. “Such a precious child,” Herr Z. said, almost the first words he had managed all afternoon, and as he said them he lifted his gaze and looked her in the face, and she looked directly back at him without shame.

“It was then that I found myself speaking, the words just coming to me despite myself, sitting there beside Pippina in the shadowy drawing room with the curtains drawn and all the mirrors veiled, the gas fire burning, the parquet floor creaking with the footsteps of the heavy servant who was retreating to the kitchen, and with Mother sitting opposite me in her black hat and feather, quite unaware of what I was about to say, smiling approvingly for once and sipping her tea,” she tells him.

“And what did you say?” he asks with what appears genuine interest, and she hears him shifting around in his chair.

“I said that I hoped that now they would acknowledge the truth, that it was very important to me that my parents know I was not making this up.”

“And how did they respond?” he asks in a severe voice, which surprises her.

They said nothing at first—there was a complete and shocked silence in the room, apart from the ticking of the gold clock on the mantelpiece and the chink of the china cups, which everyone put down at once. Then her mother mumbled something about this not being the moment perhaps to discuss all of this, that they should leave these poor people, who were sufficiently distressed as it was—people who had had enough unhappiness in their lives without her adding to it.

“And so you left?” he asks, and she has the impression he thinks that is what she should have done.

She shakes her head and waves her arm, smooths back her hair, and says firmly, “No, we did not. I remained sitting on the sofa, holding on to the velvet skirt to keep from rising to my feet, though Mother had risen and was hovering nervously over me, her hand on my shoulder. I was determined to say something. After all it was here, in this room, that I learned from you, dear professor, to speak my mind frankly,” she tells him with some satisfaction, though she receives no response to this. Perhaps this was not what he had meant?

“It is here that I learned the importance of speaking what comes to mind, and how that can change things,” she goes on, nevertheless.

She told the couple that surely now they would feel obliged to acknowledge what had happened.

“And did they?” he asks.

“No, they just sat there with their heads bowed and their gaze on the carpet, tears on their cheeks.” Her mother remained at her side with her hand warningly gripping her shoulder, saying, “You must understand how this mother and father feel, surely. Have you no pity?”

“I did feel sorry for them,” she admits, “but at the same time I felt that they should feel pity for me and admit how they had both betrayed me and used me for their own ends. They both just went on weeping, until eventually Herr Z. lifted his head and looked at me and Mother. He said in a low voice that such things indeed happened all too often in the best of families, and he had never intended to cause me distress: on the contrary. He looked at his wife and said firmly that neither of them had. He turned back to me and said that they had suffered more than anyone could have wished by losing what was most precious to them.”

“And you left then?” he asks in a low voice.

“Then Pippina stumbled to her feet, with a certain dignity, I will admit. She lifted her veil, kissed both of us, and asked us please to continue to come and see them, and that she did hope we could all remain friends. And she took my hand and added, ‘If there is anything I can ever do to thank you for all you did for our Clara, I assure you I will. You can count on my support, if you should ever need it.’”

And indeed, though she had not believed what Pippina said at that moment, she will need her support, when both her parents are dead, her mother at fifty of colon cancer, and her father, soon afterward. His money will be lost soon after the First World War with the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and with the Depression.

During the years between the wars, when bridge has become all the rage, she and Pippina will make a living by teaching the game to the society ladies of Vienna. Together they will be “bridge mistresses.” They will rent a “Bridgestube” and sit opposite each other for long, quiet afternoons among rich ladies in flowered hats and kid gloves in rooms filled with smoke and polished silver and flowers, while the servants bring in tea and the cakes from Demel’s. They will play endless games in the big rooms with only the sound of the buzzing of a fly, the ticking of the clock, the bidding, and the slap of cards on the table. She will remember instinctively each card that has been played. She will know how to chest her cards, how to send out subtle, almost invisible signs to her oldest and dearest friend: a slight widening of the eyes in disagreement, a sliver of a smile of consent, a lowered glance of warning, a frown of puzzlement. Without any men around them they are able to understand each other completely, using only the coded language of cards.