Love and Treasure

by Waldman, Ayelet

  “Mrs. Schwimmer is indeed a very great lady,” Miss Weisz reproached me.

  “Yes, of course she is. Forgive me. I meant no disrespect.”

  “What are you doing here, Dr. Zobel?” Nina interrupted. I flattered myself that she desired to distract her two intimates from the possibility of altercation.

  “I came to see what it was all about,” I said.

  “And what do you think?” said Miss Weisz, still stern.

  In a voice as serious as the small woman obviously believed the occasion demanded, I said, “It’s wonderful. Inspiring. So many gathered to further one exceptional cause.”

  “And you are a supporter of woman suffrage?” she said.

  “There are women of my acquaintance who are far better suited to cast a ballot than many of the men who are currently at liberty to impose their ignorance on the nation.” I was indulging in a moment of self-admiration for my adroit nonresponse before I noticed that neither Miss Weisz nor Nina had been fooled.

  At that moment, a gentleman in a long duster coat approached. He was carrying a camera, the legs of its tripod clearing a swath in the crowd before him. “A photograph, sir?” he asked. “Of you and your”—he hesitated a moment—“your daughter? And the midget?”

  I roused myself to my full, admittedly unimpressive, height and said, “Sir, this ‘midget,’ as you call her, is none other than the private secretary of Mrs. Rózsa Schwimmer.”

  He gratified me with a look of surprise and mollified me with a tip of his hat. “Very sorry, sir. And ladies. Might I offer you a photograph at a discounted rate?”

  The girls protested, but I could tell that despite the manners of the photographer they were eager to immortalize their participation in the glorious event. The photographer urged Nina to remove her sash in order to look “harmonious” with her friend, so she handed me the sash and her sign to hold. They posed, Gizella on an overturned apple box the photographer’s assistant provided for the purpose. Though they tried to maintain expressions suited to the seriousness of the occasion, their joy could not be suppressed. Their smiles were wide, their eyes bright, and their faces aglow.

  I gave the photographer a portion of the cost up front, took his card, and made arrangements to pick up the pictures at the end of the month. The girls were then whisked away by Nina’s fellow pages. Apparently their services were needed at the far end of the square, where the morning meeting of the executive session of the congress was coming to a close.

  • 35 •

  WHEN SHE RETURNED TO my consulting room on Monday, June 23, Nina was exhilarated. She recounted to me in great detail the rest of the goings-on at the congress, most particularly the opening speech by Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, the American president of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. Had Nina told me of her reaction to this speech when we met that day at the square, I would have encouraged her to refrain from further participation in the congress. Roused to a neurotic frenzy by the exhortations of the American woman that all women of education, refinement, and achievement should take to the streets not to beg for but to demand their right to vote, Nina and Gizella, clutching copies of their feminist newspaper, rushed through the streets of the city, ignoring the solicitous concern of the Boy Scout guides. They needed no one to walk them home, the girls insisted. They did not need a hansom cab or directions to the trolley car or the electric subway that ran beneath Andrássy Avenue. In fact, they would not go home at all.

  Their scheme, harebrained and thoughtless, the product of overheated imaginations and overstimulated nervous systems, was to storm the opulent New York Café, to stride manfully between the gilded pilasters and demand to be seated on their own, without chaperones. As rebellious as she was, I am confident that Nina would not have alone made such a spectacle of herself. It was Miss Weisz who encouraged her, who claimed that she had often taken coffee with Mrs. Schwimmer unescorted by a man and that there was no more reason for two young women to need a chaperone than for two young men.

  I can only imagine the scene of the girls sweeping into the coffeehouse: Nina a bridal vision in white lawn and lace, Gizella similarly clad, but looking by virtue of her size more like an infant at her christening than a bride. Ignoring the disapproving sniffs of the older male denizens of the café, the two girls sat themselves at a table in the very center of the room.

  Nina sat stiffly, her shoulders back, her chin raised. She busied herself gazing at the opulent drapery, the clock above the doorway, the friezes on the walls, anything to avoid catching the eye of someone she might know or, worse, someone who might report her presence to her parents. Nina and Gizella were by no means the only women in the café. There were tables along the galleries of the New York that were habitually occupied by “actresses” and other young women of a type who seek employment of a kind that would have shocked my determinedly sophisticated patient had she but known of its existence. What Nina and Gizella did horrified me. Even in cosmopolitan Budapest, even among the enlightened bourgeoisie, even as unmarried young women and girls gained hitherto unimagined freedoms of education and association, it was unheard of for a girl of good family to be out in so public a place with only another young lady for company.

  Within a few moments of their arrival, a young man approached their table. He wore a crumpled and shabby jacket and had an ink stain on his cardboard collar, as if to advertise his status as a writer, one of the young talents for whom the headwaiter kept a ready supply of “dogs’ tongues,” long sheaves of paper on which they could jot their caffeine- and alcohol-fueled thoughts.

  “Miss Weisz!” he said. “How delightful to see you.” He reached for her small hand, bent over it with a flourish. “I kiss your hand.”

  “Good evening, Endre,” Gizella said. Gizella Weisz, though of typical achondroplastic somatotype—oversize head with prominent forehead, normal-sized trunk, shortened limbs, broad hands in trident configuration, with short metacarpals and phalanges—was quite beautiful. Or, rather, she managed despite her deformity to project a certain magnetism. She wore her luxurious dark hair coiled high on her head. She outlined her thickly lashed eyes with kohl and rouged her lips, a dramatic style that would have been cause for consternation in a young lady of average stature. But for all her feminist and radical ideals, her face paint, her reform dress, and her cigarettes in their silver case, Miss Weisz was, like Nina, a properly brought-up young Jewish woman, of good, if not wealthy, family. Later on, I was to learn that she hailed from a village in northern Transylvania, her father, though also a dwarf, a rabbinic scholar of some renown. She should have known better.

  The young man asked Gizella, “Won’t you introduce me to your lovely friend?”

  “I absolutely will not. You’re a menace and the last person she should know,” Gizella said.

  “Please do come to join us at our table.” He pointed to one of the alcoves along the wall of the café, where a few tables had been pushed together and a group of resolutely literary types sat smoking cigarettes and gossiping. As if in response to the young women’s gaze, one of them leaped to his feet, took up a scrap of newsprint from the heap of journals and books littering the table, and began to recite a poem at full volume.

  “Shall we?” Gizella asked Nina. “They’re a very entertaining claque, though I can’t promise they won’t ravish us. Endre is a complete cad.”

  The young man flung his hand over his heart and shouted, “I will defend your honor to the death!”

  “Foolish boy,” Gizella said.

  “No, look!” He pointed to a white line pleating the dark hair of his left eyebrow. “A dueling scar! Honor is everything to me.”

  “Last week you told me that poetry was everything to you. Which is it?”

  “Both!” he said. “Honor and poetry. Come!” He swept Gizella’s chair back and lifted her lightly to her feet. Nina stood up on her own but took his proffered arm and allowed him to escort her to the alcove, where the crowd of young men happily made room for them.

>   For the rest of the evening and late into the night Nina and Gizella were entertained by the young men. Endre in particular attached himself to Nina, sitting close to her and at one point leaping up onto his chair to recite a section of János Arany’s poem “Dante.”

  At this point in Nina’s account of the events of the evening, I interjected, “ ‘Dante’? A strange coincidence, no?”

  A pretty flush stained Nina’s cheeks. “How do you mean?” she asked.

  “That this young man should recite Arany’s ‘Dante’ only a month or so after another young man gave you a copy of The Inferno.”

  Nina bit her lip. I waited. Finally she said, “It wasn’t a coincidence.”

  “No?” I asked, hiding from her how thrilled I was that she trusted me with what was obviously a significant and even embarrassing confidence.

  “I told Endre—er, Mr. Bauer—about Mr. E.’s gift.”

  “Why did you tell Mr. Bauer about a gift you received from another young man?”

  She shrugged. “I thought he would find it amusing.”

  “ ‘Amusing’?”

  She fumbled with her reticule, pulling out a silver compact, snapping it open and shut a few times before blurting, “It was such an absurd present! Dante’s Inferno! Of all things.”

  “You don’t care for Dante?”

  “I haven’t read him. I’m not interested in him. I’m interested in contemporary poets!”

  “Like Arany?” János Arany, as we both well knew, died more than thirty years ago.

  “Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Like Anna Akhmatova!”

  “Did you enjoy the young Mr. Bauer’s recitation of Arany’s ‘Dante’?”

  “It was amusing.”

  “How so?”

  “He did it very dramatically. Sarcastically, I suppose.”

  “Your young Endre does not approve of Arany?”

  “Endre is not mine, and I don’t know what he approves of or doesn’t approve of. It was a game. Nothing more. He recited his own poetry as well.”

  “And was that to your liking?”

  She again opened her compact and snapped it closed. “Yes. Yes, it was. Certainly more than Dante’s Inferno.”

  Nina and Gizella remained at the café until after 1:00 a.m., at which point their young suitors attempted to walk them home. The girls wisely resisted, however, consenting only to allow the young men to hail them a cab.

  “Weren’t your parents very concerned about you? Surely it’s not usual for you to be out so late.”

  “ ‘Concerned’?” she said. “Perhaps. My father was certainly angry.”

  I did not need Nina to tell me this. I had, by coincidence, seen her father on Saturday morning, at the Dohány Street Synagogue. I do not regularly attend services—I’m afraid I am one of those three-holiday Jews our Israelite leaders spend so much time bemoaning—but every year on my father’s Yahrzeit, I escort my mother and sisters to synagogue so that we might all say Kaddish for the man to whom religion was so much more important than it is to any of us. Even my sister Sarolta joined us on this occasion, though the poor woman was forced to hide her face beneath a heavy veil to keep from being recognized and having her crime reported back to her priest or, worse, to her unpleasantly striving children.

  My mother and sisters went up to the lower of the two women’s galleries, and I attempted to take an inconspicuous seat about three-quarters of the way back in the palatial nave, more basilica than shul. Unfortunately, an usher took my arm and propelled me forward. On an ordinary Saturday morning in June, even this, the largest synagogue in Europe, home of a great and wealthy Jewish community, could not muster more than a meager congregation. Not even a rumored forty-four kilograms of twenty-four-karat gilding could persuade the unobservant to sit beneath those soaring arches.

  I closed my eyes while I waited for the organ and choir to signal the beginning of the service, but was immediately interrupted by an angry whisper.

  “Dr. Zobel! Imré!”

  I peeled back a reluctant eyelid to find Nina’s father standing before me, cloaked in a capacious tallith and an air of righteous indignation. I began to struggle inelegantly to my feet—a man of my girth is not well accommodated by a wooden pew, no matter how spacious and beautifully carved—but Mr. S. put a restraining hand on my shoulder. Instead, he sat down next to me and bent his head to mine. As he pressed his mouth close to my ear, I repressed a shudder. The generous lips that were on the daughter so sumptuous were on the father fleshy and glutinous.

  “You call this progress, Dr. Zobel?” he whispered furiously. “My brother promised that your talking cure would end my daughter’s rebellions, and instead she is worse even than before.”

  “Has something happened, Mr. S.?”

  “ ‘Has something happened?’ ” His mimicry of my tone and accent was cruel. That I grew up speaking Yiddish is something I refuse to be ashamed of. My family is of Galicianer origin, but none can question our loyalty to our Magyar home. I am a patriotic Hungarian, whatever traces might remain in my accent.

  “Yes, something has happened,” Mr. S. whispered, spraying saliva into my poor ear. “All this week she has been gallivanting around the city. Instead of being home, asleep, as she should be, she has been seen in the company of artists and radicals! Radicals, Dr. Zobel!”

  I tried as best I could to remind my patient’s father that I had assumed the responsibility of treating his daughter’s ailments, physical and psychical, and while I might as a father of daughters agree that Nina’s behavior was unacceptable, as a physician I had been forthright from the beginning in informing him that psychoanalysis was not designed as a cure for youthful rebellion.

  “This is far more than youthful rebellion,” Mr. S. insisted. “Nina has become irrational. Erratic. She has been behaving like a …” He shuddered. It is only women of ill repute who frequent coffeehouses without chaperones. What had poor Nina done to her reputation?

  The outraged father continued, “My brother assures me that her behavior is a sign of deep psychical distress. Dementia praecox, Dr. Zobel! That’s what we’re dealing with.”

  I resisted the urge to offer Mr. S. a wager that his brother, a urologist, had less experience with my organ of expertise than I with his, and instead promised that I would discuss the matter with Nina.

  “We have made great progress in our dream analysis,” I told Mr. S., perhaps less than candidly, as I was quite frustrated by Nina’s refusal to see her dream of missing the train in its true light. “I am confident that as her treatment progresses you will see more and more tangible results.”

  “Marriage, Dr. Zobel,” he said as he lumbered to his feet. “That is the goal. The result of your treatment must be that Nina abandons her neurotic ambitions and accepts her role as a modest Jewish wife and mother.”

  Should I have been more firm with Mr. S.? While it is indeed true that ambitions out of proportion to ability are often a sign of neurotic grandiosity, I had yet to see any indication that Nina fit that description. On the contrary. The girl earned top marks at her gymnasium. She was diligently and by all accounts successfully preparing for her matura and her medical school admissions examinations. Even her uncle, who disapproved of her desire to study medicine, admitted that her tutors felt her to be eminently qualified. Indeed it was he who described her to me as possessing a “rare and admirable intelligence.”

  It was understandable that her father would prefer that she lead a more conventional life. I, too, would object to my daughters pursuing any career, especially one so demanding. I would certainly have been as horrified as he had my daughter been out at night unaccompanied. The question remained, however, whether a girl’s rebellion and eagerness to thwart her parents’ desires were in and of themselves evidence of neurosis. I was as yet unable to affirm either way. True, most young women have little difficulty in acceding to the knowledge and experience of their elders and betters. And yet, with each passing day of my acquaintanceship with this particular
young woman, I had become more impressed by her intellectual acumen, by her wit, by her verve. Far from being outsize, her ambitions struck me as entirely realistic, not evidence of neurosis but a genuine and well-considered assessment of potential.

  Nonetheless, neurotic or not, staying out until all hours with young men of vague repute was hardly acceptable, and I admonished Nina strongly to resist such temptations in the future. “If for no other reason,” I told her, “than that it is bad for your health. You need your rest to continue our work together.”

  Nina snapped her compact a final time, tucked it into her reticule, and said, “You bring up a good point.”

  “I do?”

  “I have grown fond of you, Dr. Zobel. Very fond. You’re a kind man, and I’ve enjoyed our time together. But I am no closer to understanding the point of our work together than I was a month ago.”

  You will forgive my immodesty at saying that my services as a physician are highly sought after in Budapest and beyond. Never before had I felt myself to be in the position of forcing treatment on both patient and patient’s family. This goes a small way to explain the impatience with which I responded, “Must we do this again, Nina?”

  At my vehemence, her confidence seemed to waver, and she bit her lip.

  I continued, “Do you have no desire to recover from the crippling menstrual cramps that have had such a deleterious effect on your life?”

  “I do. I just …”

  “What?”

  “I’m just not sure the talking cure can help.”

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “You know I’m not.”

  “Am I a doctor?”