Dreaming for Freud (8 page)

She pulls up her white skirt and petticoats and slips her fingers down beneath her long underwear and between her legs and holds herself tight, holding on to herself as though she might otherwise disappear. At the same time she conjures up images:

A boy child sits alone in the sunlight in a bay window. He hears the sound of his fräulein’s long skirts rustle as she comes into his big empty room in her brown dress. The fräulein looks around the room disapprovingly and says as she always does: “What is going on here?” which already makes the boy feel guilty though the bare room is very clean and tidy, not a toy out of place.

“Have you been a good boy?” the fräulein asks in her accented German.

“Oh, yes, very good,” he says, as always.

Then she smiles at him sweetly with her large glistening mouth, her lips very red, and undoes her bodice and then her tight low-cut blouse letting her heavy breasts swing free. “Come, let me see,” she says, and she gathers him up in her arms and holds him close against her soft body. She thrusts her thick brown nipple into his mouth and tells him to suck.

“No! No!” he says, trying to turn his face away, with disgust, but she holds him too tightly and then he does suck as he always does with more and more pleasure. When his body responds to this, she says disapprovingly, touching him in his private place, making him swell and swell, “Well, well, look at you! I don’t call that a good boy, do you? No! No! Not a good boy at all,” and she turns him over on her knees and beats him on his buttocks and tells him he is a naughty, naughty boy.

Then the man who is usually young and fair haired and beardless like her engineering student changes in the picture into an older, dark-haired man with intense eyes, emerging from the shadows of the room. At first she thinks it might be Herr Z., but then she recognizes him with a little shiver. It is the doctor himself, looking grim and cross, piercing her with his deep disapproving gaze, grunting and straining and sweating a little in his starched white shirt and mournful bow tie as he bends over her to gather her up and hold her hard, asking her if she has been a good girl, then he is turning her over his knees, and beating her hard, while he presses his legs against her sex and runs his hands all over her to make her keep still. She gasps a little, her fingers damp, and lets her head lean back against the hard chair.

She wonders if the doctor touches himself sometimes even now. Surely not. She cannot imagine it! And perhaps all he has to suck on are his terrible, foul-smelling cigars. Perhaps that is his problem. He seems a very controlled and diligent person and probably did not dare touch himself anymore, even as a child, once his nursemaid or his mother had told him it was dangerous, that it would make his penis drop off, or would make his brains rot. Perhaps he is not even able to make love to his wife anymore. Does the doctor have sexual intercourse with his wife, she wonders, and thinks that probably he does not and that is why he wants his patients to talk so much about their secret desires.

T
O HIS SURPRISE SHE DOES
come back the very next day, and on time, sweeping into his office, looking flushed and a little disheveled. On such a cold day, her head is uncovered, her long, glossy hair whipped by the wind, in unruly curls on her shoulders, her cheeks pink. She lies on his couch, fidgeting distractedly, pulling at her gloves, and coughing from time to time as she goes on talking monotonously about her father’s lies.
That
is what is making her ill, she insists.

“Which ones this time?” he asks, stifling a yawn.

She says she will tell him if he really wants to know. She might just as well get it over with.

“Start away,” he says.

She tells him about what she calls the “subterfuge.” She explains how she and her family had met the Z.’s in the spa town south of Innsbruck. Actually, it was thanks to her that they all met.

He notices with some satisfaction that she seems for the first time willing to answer him, to talk of the Z.’s, speaking more easily without coughing as much. He is finally getting somewhere, he thinks, despite her bad temper, and relaxes a little in his chair, listening to her tale with interest.

“It was their little girl I noticed first, actually,” she says. She was having tea on the terrace of a hotel in Meran one afternoon with her parents. They had gone there for a treat—perhaps it was even her mother’s birthday—she doesn’t remember exactly, she says, or perhaps it was simply because of the splendid view over the valley. She was sitting on the terrace, feeling bored, when she first noticed the family. She was eating creamy chocolate cake and drinking cool lemonade. Her brother was not there, and she missed him particularly as there were no other children. She looked up and saw the couple enter with their two children: the little boy, fair headed and rosy cheeked like his mother, in whose arms he wriggled, and the pale, dark-haired girl, who held her father’s hand and looked so old-fashioned as she gazed at them with her large eyes.

From the start the child intrigued her. There was something so serious and contained about the small girl, and she had felt from that moment that something might happen to her, though she wasn’t sure what it might be.

Besides, she has always liked playing with younger children, teaching them, playing school, and this little girl had such a strange and grave expression.

The Z.’s were led to a less favorable table than theirs, she remembers, one with limited shade that hot summer afternoon. She watched the little girl with her old-fashioned face, her dark hair tied back from her high forehead, whom she caught staring at her with her light blue eyes. She looked like a child in an old painting, sitting there so quietly, unnaturally still for someone that age. Hardly moving, she seemed pinioned by the white mountain light, her skin almost transparent. Her stillness contrasted with her wriggling brother, who was making a terrible fuss, kicking his red boots against the table leg and spreading strawberry jam all over his smart sailor suit. A little boy who couldn’t keep still, she says.

“The little girl smiled at me and slipped suddenly from her wicker chair in her smocked sundress with its little wing-like sleeves—I can see it all so clearly—and came running over to our table. She stood beside me and stared up at me as I ate my chocolate cake. I looked over at the child’s mother, who was trying to cope with the naughty boy. I asked if I could share my cake with her little girl. Frau Z., for it was she, the mother, smiled graciously, nodded her head in assent, and laughed a little at her daughter. Frau Z. is, I will admit, very lovely when she laughs, perhaps you know, her mouth very red and her teeth unusually white and even,” she says.

“How old were you?” the doctor asks.

“I was twelve years old—almost thirteen that summer, I think, and the little girl, Clara, must have been around three or four.

“After that we often met in the town where the Z.’s lived. Herr Z. had a shop there, which you probably know, and Frau Z. made hats. She is very gifted with her hands. She makes wonderful, extravagant hats with wide brims, feathers, and ribbons, and once even with a fake bluebird, although she, too, was often ill and had to go away one summer to a sanatorium. Mother bought several hats in their shop, for her and also for me. Together Father and Frau Z.—Pippina, she told me to call her—took the ‘grape cure,’ the curative grapes, which grow in the area, and sometimes they took the ‘whey cure’ in the summers, and the waters and the baths for all their ailments. Or we just met on the Wassermauer, the promenade, in the old town,” she tells him.

“Both Herr Z. and his wife were exceptionally kind to me,” she admits. “At first I wasn’t sure which one I liked better. At first, in my ignorance, I thought they were so kind because I was precocious and well read, so clever and amusing. They made me feel I was an especially gifted child. What an idiot I was!” she says bitterly. They both made her feel so pretty and bright. They invited her to quote the poetry she knew by heart and marveled at her memory. Or they asked her to play the piano, which she did gladly for them.

Much of the time, though, she had sat beside her father in the dark room when he had trouble with his eyes and recited poetry for
him
.

“Then Frau Z. began nursing Father, too—‘You go outside and play with the children. They would love that. They are so fond of you, and you are too young to have to sit for such long hours in a dark sickroom,’ she would say to me when Father was very sick and when Mother felt incapable of helping, and Father refused to have a nurse,” she says. “I thought her so kind and thoughtful! And I was so happy to play outside with her children. I’ve always loved both of them but particularly the little girl, who would follow me around like a shadow. I taught her how to say some things in French and play simple pieces on the piano.”

One summer they had all left Meran and gone on holiday together to a hotel on beautiful Lago di Garda in Italy. “Frau Z., Pippina, comes from northern Italy, perhaps you know, from the lake country,” she says. “And I think it was she who chose the luxurious hotel at the lake where we all spent that summer. I had not quite turned thirteen.”

She will never forget the place, she says: the laughter at the tables on the terrace; the sparkling white wine she was allowed to sip for the first time; the dark-haired, hard-working Italian waiters who huddled in a corner by the bar in the shadows, waiting for the first guests to arrive when the restaurant doors swung open in the evening. “They would watch me as I entered, staring as I walked across the terrace to our table, and making me blush to the roots of my hair.”

She remembers the large balcony off their room with its round wicker table and chairs, where Pippina had patiently taught her to play endless games of honeymoon bridge, the game that would one day save her life. From the start she took to bridge where she starred and was able to exercise her excellent memory, and she had a feel for cards, which Frau Z. would praise profusely. “You remember every card played, don’t you?” she would say, watching her with admiration. “And I do,” she tells the doctor proudly. “‘This child is amazing! What a memory! She’s quite brilliant!’ Frau Z. would exclaim, which made me so happy.”

“Yes, and what happened there that summer? You spoke of subterfuge,” the doctor says, hoping she will not be sidetracked again by accounts of her intellectual prowess. What a show off! But she takes her sweet time, showing off her descriptive powers, her vocabulary in various languages.

“I don’t know why,” she says, “but I remember that place so clearly, perhaps it was because I got my period there for the first time—not that anyone said much about that! Except to explain at length the hygiene involved and to make me feel I was much too young for this to have occurred.

“‘I was sixteen,’ Mother kept saying disapprovingly, as though this visible sign of being a woman were somehow a fault or at any rate a weakness.”

She remembers the hotel’s shadowy pine forest on one side and its lawns that run down to the scintillant water, the elegant guests with their parasols sauntering indolently across the smooth green grass in the glare of white light.

They all took the train together from Meran, she says. He thinks of his early train journeys and remembers the glimmerings of the lamps, the overnight train trip, and the glimpse of his mother’s white body in the dark of the compartment as they voyaged to Vienna for the first time, this city which he both hates and loves.

But the girl is lovingly describing her arrival at the lake hotel. They were ushered through the high-ceilinged halls and up the stairs to the bedrooms and along a white corridor, with the bellhops carrying all their many suitcases—they were there for a month, she says. Little Clara and Otto—“Their little boy has the same name as my brother, which made him all the more dear to me,” she says—who had been cooped up during the long train ride, skipped joyously ahead, hand in hand, the silent corridor now ringing with their laughter and cries. She remembers the slight smell of disinfectant soap and, when the bellhop opened the doors on the rooms, the puffy white counterpanes on all the beds, the flowers fanned in silver vases, the large windows with the silky green curtains caught back with golden ropes, the balconies on each of the big sunny rooms, and the view of the sparkling lake below.

“It was a little like a dream—or perhaps even paradise at first. It seemed the loveliest place in the world,” she says. She recalls how the children went running from one room to the next, taking off their shoes and bouncing on the beds and then joining hands and singing the Italian song they had learned from their mother, something like ‘Giro giro tondo, Casca il mondo, they all fall down!’ And then lying flat on their backs on the beds and laughing.”

“So, you were happy there?” he asks, imagining the lovely place and wishing that it were summertime and that he were free and could leave this small room and his chair to go walking in the mountains, which he loves, looking for mushrooms with his own children. What if he had the means to take his own family to that lake that he knows well and admires?

He thinks, too, of the freedom of his own early childhood in Freiberg, the clucking of the poultry, the blue-gray hills in the distance, the sweet fragrance of the fields, the river, the throbbing song of the larks, his mother’s youthful form bending over him adoringly. He has never escaped his longing for this lost paradise, the beautiful woods of his early home. He thinks of how all of that came to an abrupt end when he was hardly four years old. But the girl is going on about the light on the Lago di Garda.

“I was
so, so
happy to be there in that lovely place with the Z.’s, who had been so kind to me! I was happy to be with their children, particularly the delicate little girl, who loved me so much and whom I loved, still love so much.” Her father had reserved suites for both the families and also several smaller rooms at the end of the corridor for her fräulein and her own beloved Otto whom she was hoping would arrive in a few days.

At first, each family occupied its own sunny suite: a large bedroom and sitting room for the parents adjoining a smaller one for the children. The nights were deliciously cool; the beds soft and comfortable, with puffy white eiderdowns; the breakfasts of café-au-lait, fresh rolls and brioches, and baskets of fruit were brought to their rooms; the long walks along the edge of the lake with the little children running ahead were joyful. She told them stories, and they played imaginary games: she was Marie Antoinette escaping the revolutionary soldiers, or she was Persephone collecting flowers when Hades comes to kidnap her and carry her off to the underworld, to Hades. How they laughed!

In the evenings after dinner, she was allowed to walk with the grown-ups into the small town for the
passegiatta
,
as Italians do, carried along by the flow of people down the main street, everyone chatting and flirting. She would often walk a little behind with Herr Z., who would talk to her about books—she was reading von Hofmannsthal, who had begun publishing his poetry at such a young age, and she felt very grown up and important. He knew some lines by heart and would quote to her, she remembers:

“You are the garden locked / Your childlike hands are waiting / Your lips are without violence”—while her mother would walk ahead with Frau Z. in one of her elegant hats, and her father and sometimes other friends. Frau Z., of course, spoke Italian as well as German and sometimes Italians joined them after dinner, simple people who laughed loudly and had a good time.

“I suspected that it was Father who was paying for both families because the Z.’s, I knew, were not as wealthy. I was so pleased by what I thought of as Father’s generosity to these people whom I liked, and who said they liked me so much. Everyone seemed in such high spirits. What a fool I was!” she exclaims.

“Then, one evening, suddenly everything changed. Father announced something that upset me terribly. The evening had started out so well. Mother had, unusually, allowed me to stay up for dinner and eat with the grown-ups. We were all sitting outside on the terrace at a round table in the splendid restaurant that looked over the lake, the sky lit up by all the stars shimmering in the blue night sky.

“Frau Z. was looking more beautiful than ever, with the perfect oval of her face and her mysterious smile. She is a beautiful woman, I know, and she seemed to me particularly lovely that night. It was warm, and her white, smooth shoulders and arms were bare, and she had a new sickle-shaped pin which glittered in her fair hair. Probably Father had bought it. I remember it all so clearly,” she says.

The fräulein had helped her dress, pulling in her waist tight, and even putting her hair up, and her mother had allowed her to wear her best white dress, with the décolleté—“I was starting to have something to show off at that point,” she says, putting her hands to her chest and her string of pearls. Her father had even placed her at the table in the best position—or what he probably considered as such, between himself and Herr Z. and with a good view of the lake.