A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  I’m not by nature a sneak, and trailing Dr. Freud was anything but easy. Despite his constant smoking and what I then considered his advanced age (he was thirty-nine; I, merely twenty-one), he was a vigorous walker. Small in stature, he nevertheless carried himself with a martial stride, his chest thrust out, his shoulders back, using his stick, as a punter might an oar, to thrash through the milling crowds — the women in their complicated hats, the men in their fur coats, the students walking five abreast. He reminded me of a locomotive engine, with great puffs of cigar smoke steaming out from beneath the brim of his felt hat, and my inclination to drop back to avoid being seen by him gave way to a very real need to keep up. I struggled to hold him in my sights, as the clusters of people that broke apart for him made no such scattering concessions for me.

  There are no corners on the Ringstrasse, of course, and yet each day I managed somehow to lose him. What did I imagine anyway? That I could follow him to the Ecksteins and simply barge in behind him and force him to introduce me to their daughter? It was idiocy to think so, and at such moments I could only compare myself to him unfavorably. A man of impeccable habit, he arranged his daily labors with the precision of a military campaign: up at seven, with patients by eight, at table with his family at noon, followed by a walk and further patients and dinner at seven. Then cards with Minna and another walk (more locally, in the neighborhood, this time), and he was at his writing desk by ten, working into the small hours, whereas I was the sort of man who might leave his clinic for a coffee at noon and still be loose upon the streets two hours later, his patients wondering what has become of their doctor, the nurses uncertain where to look, and all because he’s allowed himself to become fascinated to the point of lunacy by a woman to whom he has yet to address a solitary word and whose face, despite the magnification of his opera glasses, he has gazed upon from a distance of no fewer than one hundred meters.

  Determined to return to my practice with as much dignity as I could, I strolled at a gentlemanly pace towards the cabstand until, after about five days of this nonsense, I caught sight of him entering Landtmann’s Coffee House.

  HE’D SEATED HIMSELF at a table away from the kitchens. I chose a seat in the adjoining room and ordered a Kaffee mit Schlag from an old waiter with a full mustache and the turned-out feet that mark a member of his trade. I pulled a newspaper from the rack and glanced up from it periodically, as a man will, without seeming to see anything, peering about the room and hoping in this way, were Dr. Freud to glance up at precisely the same instant, to meet his gaze. Dr. Freud, however, never lifted his eyes from his work, and so I said, “Ah-ha!” to no one in particular, as though delighted to have spotted a friend. I summoned a waiter and gave him my card and watched as he ferried it across the threshold into the adjoining room. Dr. Freud picked it up and read it and sighed exasperatedly through his nose. Peering around the waiter, he acknowledged me with a scowling nod.

  “Ah, Dr. Freud,” I said, approaching his table. “I trust I’m not disturbing your work.”

  “Dr. Sammelsohn.”

  I bowed timidly, the annoyed tones in his voice giving me pause.

  “Imagine running into you here,” he said.

  “A pleasant coincidence.”

  “Is it?”

  “Pleasant?”

  “A coincidence.”

  “But of course it is!”

  “Then why are you blushing?”

  “No, I don’t believe I am,” I said, although pronouncing this inanity only made me blush harder.

  Dr. Freud drew on his cigar. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Dr. Sammelsohn, but this isn’t your regular coffee house.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Nor is it near your apartments.”

  “That is correct.”

  “In fact, before today you’ve never been here.”

  “In this coffee house, you mean?”

  “And yet today of all days …”

  “Voilà!”

  “Suddenly you are here.”

  “Yes” — I made a great show of scrutinizing my watch — “and due back momentarily at the clinic. Seeing you from the other room, I merely wished to extend my hand to you in friendship and to wish you a pleasant afternoon. That’s all. Good day.”

  Dr. Freud blew an orchid of cigar smoke into the air above his head, where it bloomed and withered.

  “It’s far from here, isn’t it?”

  “Far, Dr. Freud?”

  “The Allgemeines Krankenhaus?”

  “Yes, quite far.” I had no choice but to confirm this fact: Dr. Freud knew the local geography better than I.

  “And so your being here makes no sense.”

  I pretended not to understand him.

  “As an alibi, an excuse, a story, a ruse!” he said.

  “No, as matter of fact, it doesn’t,” I admitted.

  Dr. Freud glanced about the room. He sighed. “Well, you might as well have a seat, then.”

  “No, no, I really must be getting back,” I said.

  Nevertheless, I pulled out a chair and joined him. Through the wide doorway, I could see the old waiter with the mustache and the turned-out feet arriving at my table and searching for the gentleman who, only a moment before, had ordered the Kaffee mit Schlag he was balancing on his tray. I attempted to draw his attention to me.

  “Ah … ah … a-ha!” I said, half-rising.

  “I shouldn’t worry about it,” Dr. Freud said as the fellow returned to the kitchen. “They’ve nothing but cups of coffee here.”

  As though proving his point, the old waiter was presently at our table, handing Dr. Freud his own cup and his mail, which, in those days, one could have delivered directly to one’s table.

  “Kaffee mit Schlag,” I said, “bitte.”

  The waiter’s eyes narrowed. He looked at me and then over his shoulder at my former table before snorting contemptuously and walking off.

  “Ah! At last!” Dr. Freud said, kissing a blue envelope and — it was an odd gesture — placing it against his forehead. “A word from Berlin!” He tore the letter open. “Ah, it’s better than I’d hoped,” he said, still reading. “He’s actually coming!”

  “Who?” I said, but Dr. Freud, rereading the letter, apparently didn’t hear me.

  “Well,” I said, “I have an appointment, and so I’m afraid …”

  Dr. Freud glanced up from his mail. “You do have a curious relationship to the truth,” he said.

  “Do I? Well, nevertheless, I must go.”

  I rose from the table, but Dr. Freud gripped me by my arm. “Listen to me, Dr. Sammelsohn,” he said. “Men of science, such as ourselves, cannot afford to lie. Even in our private lives, we must ally ourselves so completely with the truth that nothing will ever turn us from it. A man who fears what his neighbor thinks will achieve nothing in this life. Now promise me you’ll discipline yourself in this way.”

  I nodded but said, “I just happened to be on this side of town, and so, of course, I thought I’d drop in for a coffee, as I’d never been here before, and when I saw you, naturally, I thought …”

  Dr. Freud looked as though a consumptive had coughed in his face. “Very well then,” he said.

  I didn’t know what to say. I stood before him, my hat covering my crotch, an Adam on the point of being expelled from Eden (and he, I suppose, the addlepated deity who had neglected to supply me with an Eve!).

  “The truth?” I said, feeling suddenly invigorated by his admonition. “Very well then: here is the truth, Dr. Freud! Yes, I intentionally followed you here.”

  “Yes, I thought as much.”

  “I saw you on the street a few days ago, and I’ve been following you ever since. All week, in fact, if not longer.”

  “But why, Dr. Sammelsohn?”

  “It’s because of the Fräulein, naturally!”

  “The Fräulein?” Dr. Freud shook his head.

  “Fräulein Eckstein!” I reminded him.

  He scowled. “Oh, bu
t Dr. Sammelsohn, you know she isn’t well. In fact, her behavior at the moment is highly unpredictable, erratic even. The excitement of a suitor, even one as ineffectual as a Sammelsohn, could prove the worst thing for her, although one never knows with hysterics.” Hearing himself pronounce this diagnosis aloud, he said, “Although perhaps I’ve said too much.”

  “Nevertheless,” I couldn’t help pressing the matter, “I was hoping you would arrange a meeting with the young woman, as you promised me you would.”

  “What do you mean? I promised you no such thing.”

  “Well, then certainly you led me to believe that such a promise had been made.”

  “By whom?”

  “By you, of course!”

  “Then forgive me, Dr. Sammelsohn.”

  “I know, I know, you’re busy, and the Fräulein isn’t well.”

  “No, you needn’t forgive me for delaying but for promising something I have no power to deliver and no intention of ever delivering, if indeed I did.” Dr. Freud’s upper lip curled in an expression of disgust. “A woman is not an object one simply hands over to another man, like a girl in a harem! Besides, on your salary, you’d be mad to think of marrying. Wait until you’ve established your own practice and even then, believe me, it’ll be a stretch. I’m speaking from bitterest experience.”

  “But you mentioned to me that the Fräulein had expressed a desire to make my acquaintance as well.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes!”

  “And did she?”

  “Or so you told me. And on your word, I’ve been waiting all these weeks.”

  “But why didn’t you say something to me about this earlier?”

  “I was under the impression you were aware of the situation.”

  “I’m sure I have no idea what I might have said or done to have given you such an impression. Arranging these sorts of things is more in my wife’s line of interest. You should have spoken not to me, but to Marty, although of course, I would have forbidden you from doing so. The girl is ill, Dr. Sammelsohn. I have no choice in the matter.”

  And with that, the subject was closed. It was as though he’d slashed the word Finis! across the bottom of one of his manuscript pages.

  BUT THEN, OF course, he relented.

  “Oh, what the deuce!” he cried. “Weren’t we all young and in love once? Plus, and I tell you this in strictest confidence: the poor girl’s developed too strong a dependence upon me. A suitor might be a healthy distraction, although one never knows with this sort of thing. Also, you’ll get to meet Wilhelm, and that’s the important thing, isn’t it?”

  “Wilhelm?”

  “Wilhelm Fliess! He’s coming in from Berlin especially for the Christmas party. Oh, he’s an extraordinary fellow, Dr. Sammelsohn, a first-rate mind, and you really must meet him!”

  Clipping the nib off a fresh Reina Cubanas, Dr. Freud added, “On Sunday evening, we’re having a group of friends over, the Ecksteins among them. You’ll come as well, and we’ll put this whole messy business behind us once and for all, eh?”

  That was Freud: quixotically blind to his own quixotic nature, just as I was blind to my own Sancho Panzaish abilities to overlook his madness, explaining away his sudden surrender of professionalism and good sense until it resembled its very opposite, simply because I was getting what I wanted.

  CHAPTER 4

  I spent the week in a delirious cloud; and when Sunday morning arrived, pulling Sunday afternoon in its train, I was almost too nervous to alight from my chair. Only after the sky had blackened did I make my way beneath it to Berggasse 19. Crossing the threshold, I knocked upon the door of Dr. Freud’s consultancy, and when no answer came, I knocked again. I checked my watch. Was it possible I’d gotten the date wrong? Or come too early? Could the party have been canceled? Knocking again, I succeeded in summoning no one to the door. I patted my gloves against the sides of my coat and considered leaving. Of the two prospects — never meeting Fräulein Eckstein and finally meeting her — I didn’t know which was the more terrifying, and for a moment, I considered dashing out the door. Instead, I tramped up the yellow staircase to the Freuds’ apartment, where, on the other side of the double doors, I could hear the sounds of festive company: blurred voices, spoons tinkling, decanters ringing against raised glasses, the periodic explosion of laughter.

  Wiping my feet on the woven mat, I forced out a nervous breath. Either my life will change, I told myself, or it won’t, although I very much hoped that it would.

  Was it Dr. Freud or Frau Freud or the maid who answered the door? Memory has left no trace of the figure who met me there. I recall only the apartment light spilling across the threshold and jangling my already jangled nerves. Whoever it was took me by the arm and ushered me into the salon where two or three dozen people were already gathered around the Freuds’ Christmas tree.

  (Yes, the Freuds had a Christmas tree, the first I’d ever seen inside a Jewish home.)

  The room glittered with the usual accoutrements of late-century masquerade: monocles, lorgnettes, pince-nez, stickpins, watch fobs gleamed in the candle light. The women wore their usual assortment of impractical hats, the men beards of every chop and curl and color.

  Sipping from the drink Frau Freud’s sister Minna had given me, I peered over its rim into the room, scanning the crowd like a scholar skimming a text, searching for that rare word, waiting for its familiar shape to leap out against the intentionally blurred page, when, quite suddenly, she was there — Fräulein Eckstein! — standing between Drs. Rosenberg and Rie.

  “Ah, little Königstein!” Dr. Rosenberg called out, and the two men gestured me towards their little trio. Before I could take a step in their direction, however, Dr. Freud placed his hand upon my shoulder and bellowed to the assembled crowd: “Mesdames et mesdemoiselles et messieurs, permettez-moi de présenter mon collègue — ”

  “And our indispensable fourth in Tarock,” Dr. Rie piped in.

  “Le jeune docteur Jacques Sammelsohn.”

  The introduction, barked out in this way, elicited a smattering of applause and not a little laughter. Caught out in the white-hot spotlight of the room’s attention, I performed my usual dance of nervous ticks: laughing through my nose, shrugging repeatedly, I coughed and dropped my gaze, like a penitent’s, to the floor, horrified by the sight of my antigropelos (which I’d neglected to remove upon entering the apartment). Thus blinded to the room, I felt Dr. Freud push me into a cloud of extravagant perfumes.

  “Docteur Jacques,” I heard him say, “Madame Amalia Eckstein et sa fille, l’Emma incomparable!”

  Now, as anyone with any experience of the world might have told me, at the moment of capturing the long-sought object of my desire, I felt nothing but a wounding sense of disappointment. The girl standing before me was not the belle femme I remembered from the Carl. No, here was a delicate child, an invalid, lovely perhaps, but obviously unwell. She moved with a convalescent’s gracelessness, her clothing seemingly irritating her skin. The blush dappling her cheeks, I judged, was more a consequence of fevers than of the womanly arts. She looked as though she’d only just risen from her sickbed. Her hair, which I recalled as a glorious crown, lay flat, and her bosom, which in memory had defied the principles of Newtonian gravity, rested upon her chest like two apples fallen from a tree. Even worse: in her eyes, I saw no mirrored flash of recognition, no summoning flare of interest when she looked at me or heard my name. Although Dr. Freud claimed he’d mentioned me to her, and that she’d inquired after me, obviously she had not. Instead, she greeted me with a polite indifference, perhaps even a sense of irritation: she was here only to please Dr. Freud or her mother and had no interest in me.

  “What a beautifully thick head of hair the young doctor possesses!” her mother cried.

  “Maman!” The Fräulein dropped her gaze to the floor. “I’m certain Dr. Sonnenfeld has better things to do than listen to compliments about his hair.”

  Involuntarily I raised my hand and str
oked my head as though calming an agitated cat. “Sammelsohn,” I said, though no one seemed to be listening.

  “Nonsense,” Dr. Freud boomed. “Women are not the only vain sex, you know!”

  He himself made a daily visit to his barber, keeping his appointment even on the morning of his father’s funeral a few years hence. And in truth, I was vain about my hair and preferred to wear it, as I’ve said, in the unkempt Bohemian style that gave me, I imagined, the tousled, late-out-of-bed look of a man so preoccupied with his thoughts that pushing him back into bed and distracting him from those thoughts would be the only thing a woman might consider doing at the sight of him. I regret to say that the effect had so far worked upon no woman more brilliantly than it had upon Madame Eckstein.

  (Perhaps because Dr. Freud had introduced us in French, I continued to think of her as Madame Eckstein. As with many of our Jewish women, there was nothing Germanic about her, not her face, which she rouged heavily, nor her shock of orange hair, nor her diamond-shaped eyes, nor her extravagant bosom from which emanated a soporific of lavender and organdie, the scent so pervasive it preceded her appearance into any room and remained long after her departure, serving as a kind of olfactory calling card.)

  I blushed against her matronly advances, while Fräulein Eckstein, mortified by these same advances, blushed also.

  “Stop it, Maman! You’re embarrassing him!”

  “But I’m not, ma fille. Use your eyes.”

  Fräulein Eckstein gave Dr. Freud a desperate look, which he ignored.

  “He’s so young to be a doctor!” Madame Eckstein whispered to him.

  “Nearly thirty,” Dr. Freud murmured in return.