Dreaming for Freud (2 page)

S
HE HESITATES AT THE TOP
of the stairs, looking down at her father. She can hear the early afternoon sounds: the vague hum of the servants in the kitchen washing dishes, the whistling of a sad Viennese song as the swing door into the kitchen swishes open and closed; the clip-clop of a horse’s hooves on the slippery, wet street. The smell of schnitzel hangs in the air.

Her father preens himself like a peacock before the gold-framed mirror in the dark hall. Covering his mouth, he yawns sleepily after his copious luncheon, while she has eaten nothing at all, unable to touch the heavy food in the dark dining room despite his encouragement. He has his gray silk hat in one kid-gloved hand and smooths his thick hair back with the other. She considers him an elegant man, with something soft, almost feminine about his face, as though the thin mustache were an afterthought. She recognizes the slightly prominent ears she has inherited and wonders what else she might have inherited from him.

He is a vain man, too. He knows everyone finds him handsome, particularly the ladies, except, ironically, his wife, who seems more interested in cleaning the house. All the other ladies like the thick, auburn, slightly curly hair, the wide-spaced dark blue eyes, the svelte, boyish form. Everyone remarks on his charm, intelligence, and considerable business acumen. She is a very fortunate girl, who should be happy and not sad, or so everyone tells her, which only makes her feel worse.

Despite all her advantages, she does not feel fortunate as she stands with her hand on the highly polished banister at the top of the green carpeted stairs in her expensive white dress. She knows she should feel grateful for the education she has received: the foreign languages, French, English, a little Italian, the Czech her parents speak; the petit point; the piano, the drawing, the dancing lessons, the horseback riding. Instead, at seventeen, she feels old. Her youth and vitality have already vanished. Her young body has betrayed her. She feels it is leaking bitterness from all its orifices. Her body is weeping, and it is the fault of this man who stands before the mirror: her false, false father! She cannot bear his falseness. He lies to her. Everyone knows he does. Yet he tells her
she
lies. But no one says anything. This silence in the household is driving her mad.

She will always love him—how could she not? she thinks, watching him admire himself, turning his big, handsome head sideways to the mirror, tilting his dimpled chin at an advantageous angle. Yet she is in a rage with him. She feels at this moment if she could let something heavy drop directly onto his head—which, from her viewpoint, seems slightly too large for his slender body—and shatter his skull into a million pieces, she would.
She would!

He has insisted she return to see his doctor. As if it will do any good! At breakfast a few days ago, sitting at the table alone with him—her brother had already left for the university, and her mother had not put in an appearance—she was overcome with a fit of coughing. He lay down
Die Fackel—
the newspaper he reads from cover to cover, with all the headlines about the Hilsner case. He said, “We have to get to the bottom of all of this.” For a moment she thought he was referring to the poor murdered Catholic girl or even the poor simple-minded Jew, Hilsner, who had been accused of killing the girl to obtain blood to make
matzo
, but of course he was not talking about the hatred of the Jews at all.

Despite her irregular education she knows all about this, as one does about a fire that runs beneath the surface of things at all times, half-hidden but erupting dangerously and surprisingly at moments such as the burning of her father’s textile factory a few years ago in Bohemia, or the accession of Lueger, that crafty man who has used Jew-baiting to become mayor of Vienna finally, despite the old emperor’s efforts, or even her brother’s stories of the way Jewish students are treated at the university. It is such an integral part of her—like her own shadow—that it is not necessary to speak of it. She has always lived with it, part of the city, the Prater, the cafés. But what her father was speaking about, of course, was not that but his own daughter’s cough and all her other ailments.

“I don’t understand what’s the matter with you. You have everything in the world: all this hard-won security I have worked for all my life,” he said, making a sweeping gesture toward the laden table, the polished sideboard with all its shining silver, the mirror with the invitations stuck into the sides, the blue silk curtains tied back with gold ropes, the broad servant’s back as she retreated into the kitchens with the silver coffeepot. “You have never lacked for anything, and though we don’t live extravagantly, we have always given you everything you wanted. You had a fancy French governess to teach you whatever you wished to learn, a woman you professed to love, whom we dismissed when you asked us to. What more could you possibly want? Why so much unhappiness? What is it that is missing in your young life?”

She said nothing, just went on coughing helplessly.

“I want you to go back and see my doctor,” he said firmly, fixing her with his deep blue stare.

She could only shake her head and continue coughing, that awful, dry cough that shakes her whole body and takes her breath away.

“What have you got to lose?” her father had said.

“I won’t go! I won’t! Why would I? None of them have any idea what they are doing. Doctors! Humbugs!” she said scornfully, finding her voice in her anger at the thought of the pack of them. “They know nothing! They all say something different. They just torture me!” She put her hand to her throat, recalling the dreadful electric brush thrust into it, the electric shocks all through her body, the blast of the cold hose, the dunkings in cold baths.

“My dearest girl, you really cannot go on like this,” her father said, looking at her with concern across the jars of golden honey, homemade strawberry jam and marmalade, the big pat of yellow butter, the scrambled eggs, the bright bowl of fruit, the loaves of half-cut dark bread, while he drummed his fingers on the starched white tablecloth impatiently. She sipped some ice water, which sometimes helped a little with the cough.

Many years later, having left Austria and escaped to Brooklyn, she will remember those Viennese breakfasts and miss that delicious dark bread, but that day she was not thinking of food.

She said, “I won’t have anyone else sticking electric rods down my throat as if I were a cow and making me vomit, or showering me with freezing water. What good has that done!”

“He’s not going to use electricity on you, I assure you, my dearest girl. He doesn’t use it, or even hypnosis anymore,” her father said, waving his fine hands in the air and adding, “He has an entirely new method for curing illness.”

“None of it does any good,” she said, pushing away her plate of scrambled eggs, the sight of which made her feel ill. This conversation made her feel ill. Her father made her feel ill.

He said, “You are a highly intelligent girl, dearest. For goodness sake, be reasonable and take advantage of the advances of modern medicine and an excellent opportunity to get well.” Looking down at his hands with the gold signet ring on his pinkie, he added, “This doctor has helped me, as you well know, when I was so . . .” he looks at her and hesitates before going on, “. . . so ill.” Surely he does not need to remind her of the time his mind was disordered and his body paralyzed.

“I won’t go! I won’t!” she replied, getting up and rushing to quit the room, her silk skirt, her favorite—she has elegant clothes, her father has been generous with her there—catching against her chair and turning it over with a clatter onto the highly polished parquet floor. She left her father sitting there alone with all the food. Sometimes, leaving people or places of danger is all you can do, she knows even then.

But in the end, she had had no choice. Her only recourse is to dally, to take her time, at the top of the stairs.

Her mother is usually the one who takes her to the doctor, or the doctor comes to the house. Despite the many servants, her mother spends her days in the house, cleaning. Her father complains she is obsessed with housecleaning and leaves her daughter’s education up to the fräulein. The French fräulein, whom she once liked so much, used to bring the doctor into the nursery in Meran. Since they moved back to Vienna two years ago, and now that she is almost eighteen—her birthday is next month—she is allowed to sleep alone in her narrow bed, where she can hear the sound of the trains in the night. She occupies the room at the top of the stairs, a pale bedroom with pale-pink walls and a pale-pink, chintz-covered armchair, a pink lamp with little tassels, her small, light marquetry desk by the window with its secret drawer where she keeps her diary.

Her brilliant brother, Otto, whom she loves so much, and who will one day be famous as a successful Socialist politician and minister of foreign affairs, now sleeps meekly in a room down the corridor that is only accessible through the dining room, which their mother, who is the only one with keys, locks at night.

Her father rarely came into the nursery when she was a child. It was she who went into his sickroom, where he lay in partial darkness. But she remembers him entering once, summoned by the nanny or perhaps even by her mother. She was quite small and had done something bad.

In those days, she was a wild child, full of herself and free, running through the Vienna Woods barefoot in summer in a gauzy, smocked dress with her nanny in tow, looking for wild herbs, especially the
Tausendgüldenkraut
,
a tiny pink blossom, so difficult to find. That day in the nursery, her father had thought only he could adequately punish such a crime. She was only four or five and does not recall what the punishment or the crime was, but she does remember her father coming out of the nursery holding her in his arms. She was weeping or laughing hysterically, perhaps both, but she knows he lifted her firmly aloft in his arms, and set her on his shoulders.

Today it is October and already cool and damp, with hints of winter in the air. She has pinned a little black shawl around her shoulders, and is obliged to accompany her father to the doctor’s house on Berggasse, a few minutes away. It is the street where she was born. Her father waits for her impatiently, opening up his gold fob watch.

He must feel her watching him, for he looks up and sees her at the top of the stairs and smiles his lopsided, slightly ironic smile. He pulls at his gray gloves. He says, “Ah, there you are, my dear. Come along now, will you. We are already late.” But she takes her time on the stairs, beating out a rhythm on the shiny banister with her slim wrist:
one-two-three, one-two-three
. She drags her right leg. She is not certain whether she is exaggerating the limp or whether she really cannot walk properly. She feels like the little mermaid in Grimm’s fairy story who lost her tail and whose every step is agony. Her stomach hurts. Her legs ache, particularly the right one. Her body is full of pain. She would do almost anything to be rid of the constant pain. Is it possible this doctor could help her? She watches the tips of her black lace-up boots peeping out from beneath the hem of her white dress. She clutches her reticule.

She has taken the trouble to dress up for this doctor, though she has no desire to see him again. When she saw him briefly the first time, it was just before the dreadful visit to the lake (
she will not think about that!
) when she was fifteen. She has a vague memory of a rather small man, not as tall as her father and quite thin, with intense, dark eyes, blue-black hair, a beard, and a mustache. She remembers him saying something about calling
un
chat un chat
,
which he said in French, which she has learned with her French fräulein but which she had considered, even at fifteen, to belie the message.

It has just stopped raining, and the street is wet. She hangs back, dragging her right leg, taking her time, then getting into the carriage, where she sits as far as possible from her father, her gaze averted, looking out the window, in sullen silence.

The sky is dark and the cobblestones wet and slippery as the carriage moves forward, going downhill toward the Danube Canal. The doctor’s office is just around the corner and only a few minutes from their house on Lichtensteinstrasse, but she cannot walk even that far without terrible pain. She has lost her voice again, too, and in the damp air, she is afraid she may have an attack of coughing, which makes her lose her breath and terrifies her. There is nothing more terrifying than not being able to breathe. She is afraid she will die asphyxiated, gasping for breath on the street where she was born. If she has consented to see this doctor, it is because she does not want to die in that way. She concentrates on her breathing. When she swallows her throat feels tight and sore. The whole world looks dark to her, seen through a fog of pain. After a while nothing else matters much except for the pain. She wonders if life is worth living like this.

Her father is sitting next to her in the shadows and watching her with his soft, deep blue, caressing gaze. He still cannot see out of his left eye, which has a slightly milky appearance. The miraculous thing is that, on the point of losing his sight in his good eye, he regained his sight in the eye that was blind. She thinks of the expression “
in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king
.” He has clotted, dark lashes. There is something innocent about his gaze, though she knows he is not innocent at all.
Not at all.

He goes on talking about the doctor. “You’ll find out, if you give him a chance, that he is a most unusual man. It takes some time to get used to him. He’s a little shy and stiff. Not one of those superficial charmers who seduce you with a glance,” he says, raising his eyebrows and glancing at her laughingly. “But I’m sure you will come to appreciate his brilliance, my dear. He has written many learned books and recently one about dreams, which you may read one day, perhaps, when you are a little older. He sees things so clearly and speaks so well, so persuasively. You must try to listen to what he has to say and follow his advice.” He reaches across the carriage for her hand, squeezes her fingers. She disengages her gloved hand and gives him as sullen a look as she dares. She would like to say, “fat lot of good talking does!
”
She can imagine the lies he must already have told the doctor. She imagines him saying, “My daughter has a wild imagination. She has been making things up. She must be made to see reason.”