Love and Treasure

by Waldman, Ayelet

  “Of course,” I said. “I will have to adjust my calendar, but I shall send word first thing in the morning.” Though my afternoon clients, women of leisure, would not object overmuch to being shuffled around, I would refrain from telling them that it was for the sake of a busy young girl studying for her final exams. That they might not have tolerated so willingly.

  Miss S. extended her hand, and I kissed it.

  “Thank you, Herr Dr. Zobel,” she said. “This was not as miserable an experience as I had expected it would be.”

  “My dear, Nina …” I waited for a moment to gauge whether she would take insult at the familiar use of her given name. As she appeared unoffended, I continued, “If we accomplish nothing more than alleviating such unpleasant expectations, then I will consider our time together to be well spent.”

  • 33 •

  NINA ARRIVED AT OUR second session dressed for an outing. In contrast to the dull gown she’d worn the day before, today she looked beautiful, had even adopted the tight lacing that she had claimed to find so objectionable. I am the son of a dry-goods merchant and the grandson of a simple tailor—a not-uncommon heritage for a Jewish physician of comfortable means in those halcyon days of Israelite assimilation into Magyar society—and so I know women’s clothing well, and this gown of Nina’s cost at least five hundred kronen. Her trim figure was shown off to great advantage by the white accordion crêpe de chine of her blouse waist, and there was an amusing bit of suspended spangle ornamentation hanging from the girdle of gilt soutache and black braid that cinched her waist in the wedding-ring style. I could not help but think of my own darlings Erzsébet and Lili, desperately strapping themselves into their corsets, lacing the wretched things so tightly I feared permanent constriction of their bowels, and achieving nothing close to even twice Nina’s tiny waist. Nor was this the only reason that I hoped that Erzsébet and Lili had not caught sight of my young patient as she passed through the apartment to my consulting room. My daughters had for weeks now been engaged in a no-holds-barred millinery campaign on behalf of a poke bonnet decorated with Numidi feathers, and I, their cruel and vicious opponent in this battle, had refused to accede to anything beyond vulture aigrettes. Nina’s hat, an adorable and daringly small tam-o’-shanter of sky-blue taffeta silk, was trimmed with an ostentatious quantity of Numidi plumes. Were my daughters to see it, I feared they’d be fortified in their energies for months of warfare.

  Sadly, Nina’s mood failed to match her gay attire. She was, if anything, more gloomy and dark tempered than she had been at the beginning of our interview the day before, and I feared all the good work I’d done ingratiating myself had been for naught.

  “Something troubles you,” I said, once she settled herself in the chair, eschewing again the analysand’s couch. “Do you regret your decision to continue our conversation?”

  “No,” she said. She opened her reticule, a tiny silk thing festooned with azure beading, and removed from it a silver case, from which, to my astonishment, she took out a cigarillo. She screwed the cigarillo into an ivory holder and placed it between her lovely lips. Leaning forward, she asked, “Have you a match?”

  “Nina!” I said. “Surely you don’t smoke.” She was not, of course, the first lady I’d seen smoking, though I doubted that any who took up the habit deserved the honorific.

  Abashed, she returned the cigarette to its case. “Many women smoke.”

  “Many? Indeed?”

  “Some.”

  “Is this a new fad in your feminist circles?”

  “It’s hardly new. And anyway, Doctor. It’s not like I’m in public, on the street or in a coffeehouse. No one can see me.”

  “And do you frequent coffeehouses, Nina?” My doubts about her father were fast disappearing. What yesterday appeared to be overreaction to a young woman’s normal small rebellions seemed suddenly to be a reasonable assessment of her state of mind. Smoking! In coffeehouses!

  “I certainly don’t usually frequent the Café Lloyd, though I was there today, forcing down a disgusting dobos torte.” Disdain for the Lloyd dripped from her lips like chocolate buttercream from between the layers of the dessert.

  “You are not fond of that coffeehouse?”

  “It’s just so predictable. A lawyer at the Lloyd. It’s about as original as a sculptor at the Japan.”

  “Where would you have preferred to have gone?”

  She hesitated, then laughed. At herself, it turned out. “The Japan Coffee House. With the artists and writers. Or the New York!”

  “But you went instead to the Lloyd. With whom?”

  “This afternoon I was in the company of Mr. Ignác E. Chaperoned by my mother, of course, because she would hardly have let me eat cake alone with a man. Who knows what might happen?”

  “I thought Mr. E. lived in Nagyvárad?”

  “His parents are originally from that city. But they have lived in Budapest for some time. Probably to take advantage of the family connection to the baron.”

  “That doesn’t seem to be very generous a presumption. Surely there are other reasons to remain in the capital.”

  “I suppose,” she said, crossing and recrossing her pretty ankles in their patent strapped shoes. Her heel was higher than any I would have allowed my daughters.

  “Would you like to lie down on the couch?” I asked. “It’s very comfortable. My own dear wife embroidered the pillow slip, and the Turkish rug is very soft.”

  “No,” Nina said, though she sounded a bit less sure than the last time she’d refused my offer.

  “So you met Mr. E. for cake,” I said. “Did you enjoy yourself?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Then why did you go?”

  “Because my father said that if I didn’t, he would not allow me to take my exams.”

  For the purposes of this case history, I will do my best to recount Nina’s assignation with the young E. as she told it to me and ask the reader to forgive me any small embellishments. These are based on what I know of the people involved, of the location of the rendezvous, and of the history of the families. Any indulgences I permit myself are designed only to enhance the literary merit of this case history, which, to be useful, must provide more than a mechanical transcription of my patient’s utterances. I realize that there are analysts who would take issue with these statements, who would insist that the sole point of a case history is to note the analysand’s own words as a stenographer might, but I am of the school that views truth as the goal of our communal project, and though it seems counterintuitive, truth sometimes demands license in the presentation of fact.

  The invitation to join Mr. Ignác E. for coffee and cakes at the Café Lloyd was delivered not to Miss Nina S. but rather to her mother, with the understanding that the younger woman would be present. This was not the first assignation suggested by the young man, but it was the first to which Nina had acquiesced, and that only because her father had demanded it as a condition of her sitting both her matura and the medical school entrance examinations for which she had been preparing for upward of six months, indeed for all the years of her enrollment in Veres Pálné’s esteemed Girls’ Gymnasium of the Hungarian Women Training Association.

  Nina had spent many hours over the years in the stultifying (her word, not mine) company of the young Mr. E., but only at family parties, dinners, and balls, the purposes of which were not exclusively the social interaction of the two young people. At a ball, Nina could escape her suitor. Even at a dinner, she could turn her head and address the gentleman on her left without being considered too terribly rude. But with their knees all but touching beneath the small marble circle of a café table, the edges of their saucers snug alongside each other, and the crumbs of hazelnut cake from the fork of one drifting onto the plate of the other, Nina had no choice but to converse directly with the young man whom she had come to consider not her suitor but her nemesis.

  The unfortunate boy viewed their rendezvous as an opportunity for lovemaking, somethi
ng he made clear by presenting her with a delicate nosegay of violets, not, I imagine, unlike the one that I had asked my wife to prepare for the little table alongside my office couch. Violets, it seems, are the chosen springtime flower both of makers of love and of physicians of the psyche. To Nina’s mother Ignác gave a gaudy quantity of red tulips and yellow daffodils.

  “I kiss your hand,” the young man said, lowering his lips to Nina’s narrow kid-covered fingers.

  “It’s good to see you, Cousin,” she said. “How are my aunt and uncle?”

  “Oh, Nina,” her mother said. “Our families are hardly as closely related as that. Berta is my second cousin, not your aunt, and that makes Ignác nothing more than, what, your third cousin? Your second cousin once removed? Barely related at all.” Mrs. S. settled herself in her seat, removed her needlework from her large reticule, and began poking the needle through the fabric. “Now, children,” she said, “you mustn’t distract me. I’m working on a particularly intricate bit, and this is meant to be a Holy Evening gift for your father. Talk quietly amongst yourselves, and when the waiter comes, order me a cup of coffee with plenty of cream and a zserbó.”

  “We’re not at the Café Gerbaud, Mama. They won’t have zserbó,” Nina said.

  “They have something similar,” Ignác said, waving over the waiter. He placed Mrs. S.’s order and then turned to Nina. “For you, Nina? I can recommend the dobos torte. I remember that it’s your favorite.”

  “No, thank you,” Nina said. “I’ll just have a coffee. No cream.”

  “Don’t be silly, Nina,” her mother said without lifting her head from her needlework. “You love dobos torte.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You girls and your fashions.” She leaned toward Ignác conspiratorially. “Perhaps you can explain it to me, dear Ignác. Why are girls today so obsessed with their figures? They object to eating sugar, have you ever heard such a thing? Nina won’t even join her father and me in the evening anymore for sweet liqueur and cakes. Ridiculous, isn’t it?”

  “Mama, I thought your needlework was unusually demanding?”

  The waiter cleared his throat, and Nina snapped her menu closed. “Fine. Dobos torte.”

  “The same for me,” Ignác said.

  Once the waiter was gone, and Mrs. S. had returned to the needlework that needed, it seemed, far less of her attention than she insisted, Ignác presented Nina with a package tied up in crisp paper and a bit of string.

  “You didn’t need to bring me a gift.”

  “But I know how fond you are of poetry, and this is the very latest thing, according to the clerk at Kellner’s.”

  Nina opened the paper to reveal a fat book bound in dark leather. “The Inferno?” she said.

  “Dante!” Ignác said, pleased that she’d recognized it and obviously quite happy with his choice.

  “You’ve given me a copy of Dante’s Inferno?”

  “Translated by Mihály Babits. He’s very good.”

  “Have you read much Babits?” Nina asked, all innocence. “You’ve enjoyed his poems and stories in Nyugat, perhaps?”

  “Er, yes.”

  “Hmm.” Nina glanced around the handsome room. “And do they take Nyugat here, at the Café Lloyd?”

  Most of the men crowded around the tables in the dark-paneled room had a newspaper or periodical spread out before them, and dozens more were draped over the wooden newspaper racks, like towels hanging in a bathhouse. The majority of these were daily papers ranging from conservative to radically conservative, though Nina spied the distinctive blue-and-yellow cover of the Budapesti Szemle, the oldest and most respectable literary journal. Some men even appeared to be daringly immersed in the day’s A Hét. The urbane and cosmopolitan Nyugat, with its eponymous westward-looking literary focus, was, however, nowhere to be seen on the tables of the economic and legal titans of Budapest as they indulged their sweet tooths and caffeine addictions in the crowded room of the Café Lloyd.

  “Is there other poetry you prefer?” Ignác asked.

  Nina reached into her bag and pulled out a slim volume. “Have you read any Charlotte Perkins Gilman?”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure.”

  “She’s American,” Nina said. “This is the first of her books of poetry to be translated into Hungarian.”

  He accepted the proffered volume doubtfully.

  “Her best book is a novel called The Yellow Wall-Paper. Do you read English?”

  “Not well.”

  “Well, I imagine it’s been translated into German.” Nina knew this for a fact, because, despite the implication, she read very poorly in English and had herself been forced to explore Gilman’s terrifying world in translation.

  “Perhaps I’ll pick it up,” Ignác said.

  “You really ought to. It’s all about a woman driven mad by the restrictions imposed on her by her husband.”

  At this moment in her narrative, Nina turned to me and said, “And you, Dr. Zobel? Have you read Gilman’s book?”

  “The Yellow Wall-Paper? I cannot say I’ve had the pleasure.”

  “Well, you ought to. It might afford you insight into what happens to a woman when she is forced into an unasked-for ‘rest cure’ instead of being allowed to pursue her passion for work.”

  The rest of Nina and Ignác’s assignation, I fear, proceeded with no improvement. By the end Nina had worked herself up into the state in which she had walked into my consulting room, though she acknowledged that it was likely that Mr. E. noticed little of her agitation. Indeed he suggested that Nina and her mother join him and his own mother at the light opera on Saturday evening, to see Perfect Woman, featuring the preeminent vaudevillians Fedák Zsuzsa and Király Ernő. Before Nina could insist on her lack of interest in either the tango or operas about the tango, her mother had agreed.

  Now, perched on the edge of her chair in my consulting room, Nina peeled off her kid gloves and tossed them aside. She placed her hands on either side of her waist and, groaning softly, pressed at her corset. I recognized the motion from my own wife and daughters, who often waited barely a second after the doors closed behind company before poking and prodding at the bones of their corsets to try to alleviate the pain caused by the garments.

  “Please, Nina,” I said. “Do lie down. You’ll be so much more comfortable.”

  “Oh, all right!” she said, as though I had been doing nothing for the past half hour but importuning her to put her feet up.

  She stretched out on the couch, crossed her feet at the ankle, and, reaching around behind her neck, even unbuttoned the top few buttons of her shirtwaist.

  “Better?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she admitted grudgingly.

  “Tell me, my dear. What is it about Ignác E. that troubles you so? Does he remind you of someone or something?”

  “He reminds me only of his tiresome self.”

  “I wonder if there is not someone or something deeper in the recesses of your mind, some experience or person poor Mr. E. reminds you of. Are you adamant in your refusal to consider hypnosis?”

  “Yes.”

  “In that case, perhaps we can attempt an alternative analytic technique. I will say a word, and you simply say the first thing that comes into your mind. Are you ready?”

  In lieu of reply, she sighed.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Fine, yes. We can try it.”

  “No. I mean that was the word. ‘Yes.’ ”

  “ ‘Yes’?”

  “Yes. I mean, rather, is your response ‘yes’ to the word ‘yes’?”

  “No. My response to the word ‘yes’ is ‘no.’ ”

  “All right then. The next word is ‘no.’ ”

  “Yes.”

  “Happy.”

  “Sad.”

  “Mother.”

  “Father.”

  “Father.”

  “Angry.” She hesitated. “Oh dear.”

  “Don’t be concerned. It’s a simple ex
ercise. There is no wrong answer. We’ll continue. Bourse.”

  “Father.” She seemed relieved at the benign nature of this response.

  “Love.”

  “Ridiculous.”

  “Is that your response?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll continue. Marriage.”

  “Bill of sale.”

  “Nina, the point is not to be shocking or to try to convince me of anything. It’s simply to say the first thing that comes to mind.”

  “That is the first thing that comes to mind. How could it be otherwise? I just spent the afternoon with a purchaser who all but lifted my lip to examine the state of my teeth. I am being sold like a broodmare, Herr Dr. Zobel. Auctioned off to the highest bidder.”

  “Ignác E. is not so very wealthy as all that, is he?”

  “All right then. I am being sold but not even to the highest bidder. I am discounted goods, though of course my father doesn’t think so, given how much he complains about the size of my dowry. How absurd is that, Dr. Zobel? My father insists that I marry and at the same time complains that my dowry will bankrupt him.”

  “Why do you think your father is so eager for you to marry Mr. E.?”

  “Because Ignác’s father is a principal in a banking concern of similar size to my father’s, and my father believes that if they join forces they will rival the larger firms. My father cannot afford to buy the E. firm, but conveniently, he and Jenő E. not only have wives who are cousins, but they have opposite-sex children of marriageable age.”

  “Perhaps the motives you attribute to your father are unduly venal. Perhaps he simply feels that given how much the two families share in common, given the closeness of your ties, the marriage is likely to be a success.”

  I knew, even as I said this, that I was being disingenuous in not acknowledging the accuracy of Nina’s assessment of her father’s motives. Of course the man must consider the financial implications of his selection of a husband for his daughter. Not to do so would be irresponsible.