Dreaming for Freud (17 page)

Like so many in her family, he was to die young, and, ironically, on Christmas day. Will her fate be the same? How desperately she had tried to find a doctor to help while her husband lay through the night in such pain, but by the time someone came it was too late. Then she had nothing left except for her boy.

All her dreams, her real dreams, were for this sensitive, high-strung, and gifted boy, her lucky Sunday child. She would lie under the duvet at night beside her husband and dream of his future. And she had not only dreamed! She did not rely on luck alone. She had made sure he would acquire the serious musical education she had never been given, as well as complete his rigorous studies at the gymnasium, which she had not been allowed to attend. She stood waiting for him at the bus stop when he came home from school in the afternoon, to make sure he would not slip out to play with the girls. She made sure he finished all his homework and would be
primus
in his class.

She would call him into her room as soon as she had his marks in hand, and if any of them were less than perfect, she would scold. She can see him in her bedroom, standing there awkwardly looking around at the sea-green counterpane, the sea-green curtains, the dressing table with its ruffle around the edge. He would draw himself up, scowling at her reproaches and saying, “I am doing my best, Mother.”

She would reply, “You have to do
better
than your best.”

And he did work so hard! So hard!

He slept little and was endlessly active. Later, he became opinionated, holding forth as though he knew all on various subjects, but at the same time he was a devious child, finding some way to slip out the door and escape her surveillance. He would come up with some trumped-up excuse, which she could see was false but was unable to disprove. Yet over the years he was always so loving, so charming, so endearing, elegant like his father, with his father’s good bone structure, the long narrow feet, the aristocratic profile, the sensuous lips, the deep blue eyes.

Though they have often fought, sometimes bitterly—they are far too similar and too headstrong, not to fight—she admires his determination, his perfectionism, and above all his musical ability.

And how she had plotted and planned his splendid future, making him speak nothing but French for a while—no German, and then English, and on to Italian, over all his protests. Yet all his languages have been useful to him, they have! She remembers his departure for Italy when the Germans would not renew his work permit, going back, coincidentally, to Meran, where she and the Z.’s had summered. Not to mention his facility with English, which she had taught him, and which allowed him to coach the singer in Chicago.

She had sent him to the best music teachers, beginning with the old one, who would wait at the door of his tiny studio at the top of his house, with his beard and his black cap on his head, to teach him harmony.

Music was a major part of their lives. They would walk for miles to the opera if necessary when the trolley was not running, after the war. She remembers her boy—he must have been six years old—sitting solemnly in his little black suit at Mahler’s funeral.

Her doctor, one of her boy’s oldest friends, is also a music lover. He, too, escaped to America at the last minute. He will give him the news about her illness. She has not wanted to complain about her deteriorating health. After all, her son is now the chorus master of the opera in San Francisco, able both to conduct and to spot new talent, the things her husband would have longed to do.

And how lucky she was to have found Pippina when her father’s money was running out. She remembers standing in a breadline during the Depression, when she noticed a woman who still had something proud about the carriage of her head, the stretch of the neck, the blond hair, threaded with gray but neatly plaited and twisted up on the top of her head, the mysterious smile. In her worn black dress, with a wicker basket on her arm, Pippina was unrecognizable at first. Gone were the ringlets, gone was the crescent-shaped diamond brooch in her hair, the bright stones on her busy, small fingers. Gone even the extravagant hats with their feathers and bows. It was Pippina who had recognized her.

“I would know that lovely face anywhere,” she had said, clasping her tightly, putting her hand to her hair to push it back from her brow. They had repaired joyfully to a coffeehouse, a dark place in the basement of a building nearby, but life seemed suddenly brighter, lit up by Pippina’s presence. There, over the small wooden table in the smoke-filled air, they had hatched their scheme. Pippina had spoken first of their financial difficulties, the move to a smaller shop, the refusal by the factories to provide the necessary supplies on credit, the orders trickling in and then drying up completely, the bankruptcy, and the sale of the shop with all its contents—all those lovely hats—for a song! She and her husband were nearly destitute.

She, too, had sighed and said times were so hard for all of them. Her father’s factories had been sold for very little, and her husband was unable to work at all.

Pippina reached across the table and took her hands and turned them over and looked at how red they had become, as she said, “I remember how good you were at bridge. Do you remember how we played endless games on the terrace in that beautiful hotel?”

It was then that she had the idea for the “Bridgestube.”

“
But who would come to learn bridge now? Who has the money?” Pippina had asked.

“There are always those who are able to take advantage of the despair of others, as I have learned so well!” she had said.

It was she who had rented the room where they taught together in the afternoons, and she who hired the maids to bring in the tea and cakes. They had become a successful team, teaching rich ladies without much skill. She had discovered her talents as an organizer, a diplomat, talents she had only used up until then with her son.

Now Pippina has perished like so many.

Now, so near her own death, she rarely listens to music, except to the radio in the afternoon in the tiny, spotlessly clean kitchen, while she knits sweaters for her little granddaughter. She has little energy or appetite today. How strange that she should have ended up in this unknown part of the world, eating this flavorless food, alone. She misses the fresh, dark bread of Vienna.

She remembers those rare, calm, sunny mornings in the mountains, picnicking with her boy, along with her dear friend Hannah, and Hannah’s boy: the sound of rushing water, the clear white mountain light filtering through the leaves, the thick pieces of dark bread and butter. Here the bread tastes rather like cardboard.

On bright days she sits in the leafy places in Prospect Park. She watches the trees, the sky, and the birds. Yesterday, she saw a bright, cheeky cardinal on a branch who fluttered there for a while by her side like life, staring at her with his black face and pointed red cap and seeming quite unafraid. Rather pompously, he gave her a little sermon before flying away with a bright flash of wings.

She tries not to think or to fantasize, but the thoughts of her past come unbidden. She remembers her boy as a defenseless baby, his fears, his insecurities, and the small cruelties which enabled him to become the man he is today. There are a few friends of the family nearby whom he has been able to help, and who call on her, bringing fruit or flowers and occasionally a bottle of white sparkling wine. It is thanks to her son that they have managed to get here.

Since the operation she has taken little nourishment. She wishes the doctors had left her alone; the pain is back in her abdomen anyway, and she knows the cancer is growing. At least she has left the hospital. She prefers to be in her own place, even alone. She moves quietly within the four walls of her room, finding her way by instinct, as though she were blind. She hears a loud buzzing in her ears. She is so accustomed to this continuous buzzing that she hardly notices it now, though the doctor—how many doctors she has seen in her life!—this one, surely the most disagreeable of men, whom she saw once or perhaps twice in Vienna, after the first war, said it might be caused by her constant listening for the return of her son, who would come home so late at night as an adolescent. She knew he was out with one pretty girl after another and worried so about him. Now, once again, she listens for the telephone to ring.

From the start, even in primary school, he was a great favorite with the girls. She remembers little Lotte, with her blond plaits, the first one, whom he fell asleep next to in kindergarten. A handsome boy, like her father, with his bright auburn locks that she could not bring herself to cut until he was almost three.

“Tell me the truth,” she had said to the doctor, looking into his eyes. “I’ve known you too long for you to deceive me.” After a moment of silence he had looked down at his desk and then said to her, “If there is anything you want to do, do it now.” She understood that not much time remained.

Perhaps her son will simply find a place on an airplane and come directly to her without bothering to telephone. Perhaps he will ring her doorbell and she will find him there with a bunch of flowers in his hands.

Is it possible to envisage one’s own death, she wonders, looking out the window? It has begun to snow, the snowflakes large and wet, melting before they reach the ground, the sky a strange gray. Or does one just keep hoping up until the end, until the last moment? How can the world go on without her there to record what is happening? How can she imagine that she might never get to tell her story, even to her son, that all that will be left of her eventful life will be the record the professor made of a brief period in her youth?

She has read that record. Some of it had amused her, particularly the importance given to the two dreams she had made up for him. But how will her boy continue without her? She feels he, too, is partly her invention, held aloft by her will, her hopes and dreams.

She thinks of her diary of imaginary events—is it still hidden away in the bottom drawer of her dresser, with its faded blue cover, an object light and small enough to bring with her on her voyage, with the funny drawings of her mother’s green hat and the golden
SS
snakes intertwined? What seems so surprising to her was her adolescent interest in what she called rather grandly matters of the mind, her desire to find the answers to all the unanswerable questions, her intellectual strivings, her search for truth, as though such a thing could be found. What was she thinking? How impractical and misguided she had been, with no one to show her the way. No wonder she had clung to women like the charming, fickle Pippina, whose openness had seemed so fascinating in comparison to her own mother’s constricted view of the world, someone who had betrayed her and yet whom she had turned to for support.

And what about the professor? What will history say about him?

She remembers his quiet room, his little statues, and the silky carpet that covered the couch where she lay. She remembers wondering what he wanted her to tell him. She certainly tried to oblige. She has never quite understood why he was so cross with her, why he felt she was dismissing him like an unruly servant, when she told him she was leaving. Why had he not understood that she was trying to get him to pay attention to her, indeed, to ask her to stay? She realizes now that he, too, was at the beginning of his career and still finding his way. He has used her words to describe their work together. She is glad if she has provided him with some of the material that has helped him to change the way the world sees itself.

She wonders if he was aware of the role of luck in his own life.

He seemed to think his words could change things, could make the lame walk, the deaf hear, and the blind see. Perhaps they have.

She has become famous, too, she thinks, smiling at the irony of it all. Her imaginings have been examined and interpreted again and again. How many people have already taken up her story and filled in the blank spaces, attempting to explicate what happened according to their own imaginative desires? At least her sufferings have served a purpose, and a good one, at that. The professor’s version of their interaction is so different from what she remembers, but does it matter in the end? Who will have the last word? Will anyone guess that the dreams she told him were invented? Perhaps it does not matter. Perhaps it makes no difference whether the world knows her version of what happened. Would the stars change? Would they cease to glitter so brightly? Would even her own life, what may be left of it, be any different?

Does it matter that her own story may never be told, even to her boy? Who could tell it?

T
HOUGH THIS BOOK IS A
novel and its characters fictive I remain indebted to the many writers, editors, and interviews which helped me to imagine Ida Bauer, Sigmund Freud, and Vienna at the turn of the century: Harry Abrams, Kurt Herbert Adler, Lisa Appignanesi, Didier Anzieu, Janine Burke, Charles Bernheimer, T. Bonyhady, C. Brandstatter, Peter Buckley, Helene Cixous, Hannah Decker, Felix Deutsch, Erik Erikson, John Forrester, Simon Goldhill, Johann von Goethe, Georges Didi-Huberman, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Alisa Hartz, Asti Hustvedt, Ernest Jones, Eric Kandel, Claire Kahane, Jacques Lacan, Patrick Mahoney, Janet Malcolm, Stephen Marcus, Jeffrey Masson, Guy de Maupassant, Howard Markel, J. Piaget, Joseph Roth, D. M. Thomas, Richard Webster, Edmund de Waal, Stefan Zweig, and particularly Peter Gay as well as Freud’s own early letters—especially those to Fliess—Freud and Breuer’s
Studies on Hysteria
and Freud’s
The Interpretation of Dreams
,
Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
, and
A Child Is Being Beaten
.

The two dreams quoted in the novel are from
Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
(translated by William Tucker).

I am very grateful to the American Academy in Rome for two summer stays which enabled me to research Freud in Rome.

I would like to thank Maxine Antel for reading my text in an early stage and particularly my eldest daughter, Sasha Troyan, for her generous and inestimable help with this manuscript.

And again, great thanks to my faithful agent of many years and many books, Robin Straus; to my publisher and editor at Penguin, Kathryn Court, for her vision and good judgment, and to Tara Singh.