A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  “Doesn’t look it.”

  “We’ll talk, Amalia. We’ll talk.”

  “Was I embarrassing you, young man?”

  “Of course not, madame,” I said. What else could I tell her?

  “There, Emma, you see.”

  “Well, you’re embarrassing me!” the Fräulein cried. “You all are!”

  Madame Eckstein straightened her spine, and her bosom, that fragrant sultan’s pillow, became a hard, imperial bust. “You shall not be rude to me, young lady!”

  Bending at the waist, Fräulein Eckstein placed her hands upon her abdomen. “Oh! My stomach is in knots!”

  “Are you all right, my darling?”

  “No, Mother, I am not all right! It was madness to bring me here.”

  “I didn’t insist, you know,” Madame Eckstein told Dr. Freud.

  “Didn’t you?” the Fräulein cried.

  “Emma, stop this wicked behavior!”

  “Excuse me,” said Fräulein Eckstein. “But I really must lie down.”

  “Dr. Freud, Dr. Sammelsohn,” Madame Eckstein said, following her daughter from the room.

  “Sigmund!” someone else cried.

  Dr. Freud and I turned in the direction of this summons to see Frau Freud standing beside her sister Minna, both of the Bernays women with their black hair pulled back into a severe bun, each with her arms crossed, both tapping an irritated foot, both obviously annoyed about something.

  CHAPTER 5

  Enter Wilhelm Fliess, the handsome ear, nose, and throat specialist from cosmopolitan Berlin and the presumptive villain of our story. He was standing between the Freuds’ green ceramic stove and their glittering Christmas tree, a yuletide drink in his hand. A gifted monologist, he had succeeded in luring the majority of Dr. Freud’s guests to his corner.

  He was a marvelously attractive fellow. Even I will admit that. His coal-black eyes and his jet-black beard glistened in the candlelight. Though his pate shone through his tonsure like a knee through a worn trouser leg, the receding hairline only made him appear more virile. I was especially struck by the audacity of his plum cravat. Here was a man, I told myself, who had fallen deeply, madly, and passionately in love with himself, and this was perhaps the only love he’d ever fully reciprocated.

  Josef Breuer, Dr. Freud’s mentor, had introduced the two men a few years earlier, and they had hit it off immediately. Roughly the same age, each newly married, both beginning their families and their careers, they even resembled each other: bearded Jews with penetrating eyes and straight, handsome noses. But there was another, even more striking congruity: in his theoretical work, each man was stepping outside the bounds of accepted medical practice, and to the late-nineteenth-century mind, Dr. Freud’s mad-brained theories on dreams, on the unconscious, on sexuality, seemed no less far-fetched (if, indeed, far less fetching) than did Dr. Fliess’s odd notions.

  Scorned by a blinkered medical establishment, the two men sheltered inside each other’s admiration, offering a sympathetic ear and an approving bosom upon which to lay, figuratively at least, their heads. Meeting as frequently as their schedules permitted — in Germany, in Austria, in the little towns dotting the Italian border — for what Dr. Freud had christened their “private congresses,” they shared their thoughts and gave each other counsel and encouragement.

  And what were Dr. Fliess’s radical new ideas? Well, principally, he had two. The first of these, the theory of periodicity, held that all life was determined by two powerful biorhythmic cycles. The more familiar of these, consisting of twenty-eight days, was feminine in nature, whereas the less familiar cycle of twenty-three days was masculine. By multiplying one of these integers against the other, or each by the difference between the two, and adding or subtracting the results, Dr. Fliess was able to find these numbers hidden, as a unifying pattern, in virtually all of creation.

  Dr. Fliess’s other theory, and the one that more concerns us here, pertained to that triangular mound of bifurcated flesh located in the center of the human face, by which I mean the nose. The nose for Wilhelm Fliess was what the psyche was for Sigmund Freud: the source of all human unhappiness as well as the locus of its cure. He’d discovered an ailment that he christened the nasal reflex neurosis, and in a seventy-nine-page booklet entitled New Contributions to the Theory and Therapy of the Nasal Reflex Neurosis, he’d reported on over 130 cases of it. Not content to have merely discovered the malady, he also devised its cure: heavy cocaine swathes, normal cauterizations, and if these failed, galvanic cauterizations.

  “Now, when this treatment is followed,” he told us that evening, sipping at his drink, “the nasal reflex neurosis will become the principal means of earning his daily bread for the general practitioner, and as a consequence, the immense multitude of neurasthenics will disappear. By that, I mean, of course, those unfortunates who, rushing from doctor to doctor and from spa to spa, make a mockery of our healing arts as they fall into the hands of all sorts of disreputable quacks!”

  “But surely it’s more complicated than you’re making out,” Dr. Rie suggested.

  Dr. Fliess granted him a condescending smile. “We live in an age of miracles and wonders, Dr. Rie, miracles and wonders, as you well know, and as the frontiers of knowledge advance rapidly before us, we must hurry if we are to keep up. We must hurry. No, we mustn’t blind ourselves to any new discoveries. Now, I’m well aware that the astonishing newness of my ideas too easily makes skeptics of otherwise fair and impartial men, and accordingly, I’ve taken the precaution of documenting my researches with absolute meticulousness. With absolute meticulousness. For example, when the observation of blood in my infant son’s urine led to my discovery of male menstruation — ”

  “Male menstruation?” Dr. Rosenberg nearly spat out his drink.

  Dr. Fliess nodded. “ — occurring every twenty-three days in both men and women, I took great pains to preserve the sheet and shirt with those precious traces of blood on them. Not merely as a means of silencing my detractors, mind you, but for the sake of posterity as well. For the sake of posterity as well. However, as a doctor committed to my patients, I’m willing to try anything if it means restoring an invalid to her health. Why, only recently, I cured a slight case of strabismus in a two-year-old by scraping his tonsil with my bare fingernail. How did I know the diseased tonsils were inhibiting the maturation of the child’s eye muscles? Genius? Intuition? Call it what you will! It worked, ladies and gentlemen, it worked.”

  His ring twinkled against the lights of the Freuds’ Christmas tree as he puffed on his cigar.

  “Today, of course, everyone is crying ‘Neurasthenia! Neurasthenia!’ ” Dr. Fliess cried, raising his hands and shaking them in the air, as though he were mimicking a man shrieking the word. “But I’ll tell you this: most neurasthenics are simply poorly misdiagnosed wretches suffering not from neurasthenia” — again he raised his hands and shook them — “but from nasal reflex neurosis!”

  “And the proof of this?” Dr. Rie countered.

  Dr. Fliess smiled handsomely. “The proof of this is my testimony before you tonight. Oh, I know, it’s tedious to hear a man singing his own praises, but since you asked me and since I’m talking anyway, let me say only this. However, let me say it clearly: with my nasal therapies, I’ve succeeded where master physicians have striven in vain to cure. Reviewing my cases at the end of a long week, I often astonish myself. No, I do.”

  He glanced over at Dr. Freud. The two seemed to be sharing some stimulating secret. It’s well known now, of course, that in addition to aiding and abetting Dr. Fliess in his numerological preoccupations, supplying the data-hungry Berliner with all sorts of information — the birth dates and death dates of his family, the rhythm of Frau Freud’s menses, the ebb and flow of their children’s illnesses and of his own literary productivity — Dr. Freud twice allowed Dr. Fliess to operate upon his own nose as a cure for various cardiac complaints and that he recommended courses of nasal therapy to many of his own patients
as well. Dr. Fliess typically swathed the postoperative nasal passages of these patients with lavish doses of cocaine, and this might go some distance in explaining the extraordinary benefit to mood perceived by all of them, including Dr. Freud, who, we now know, conducted an ill-considered love affair with the narcotic. Indeed, cocaine might go some distance in explaining Dr. Fliess’s mesmerizing conversational style. His light-footed rhythms, his quicksilver connections, his inexhaustible fund of images all bear the cloven hoofprint of that old devil, although of course none of us realized this at the time.

  “And let me tell you something even more marvelous and originally profound!” he cried out. “As our host has heroically shown — and cheers all around for Dr. Sigmund Freud!” — he raised his glass in Dr. Freud’s direction — “neurasthenia in young people is caused by nothing less sinister than masturbation!”

  Though he pronounced the word with a practiced frankness, several of the women in the room gasped, and suddenly I understood the Bernays sisters’ consternated toe-tapping. Dr. Rie hemmed and hawed; Dr. Rosenberg threw his hands in the air; Dr. Breuer scowled behind his wispy beard; Dr. Rosanes laughed into his drink; but Dr. Fliess continued on as boldly as before.

  “Naturally enough, bad sex behaviors in both genders affect more than just the nose. The nervous system is harmed as well, of course, but it’s the nose that suffers most.”

  A woman moaned. “Good Lord, man!” Dr. Rie protested weakly.

  Misunderstanding the nature of their distress, Dr. Fliess hurried to defend his thesis: “Let me assure you that I’m speaking here strictly from experience with my own practice in Berlin. Immediately after masturbation, one may observe a very characteristic swelling and a heightened sensitivity to what I call the nasal-genital spots.” He tapped his nose twice with his forefinger.

  “Sigmund, may I speak to you this very instant?” Tight-lipped and white-knuckled, Frau Freud gestured her husband from the room.

  “That’s the problem, you see,” Dr. Fliess continued. “One may remove the painful spots — I’ve done it a million times: scrape, scrape, scrape! — but they simply return as long as abnormal sexual satisfaction is occurring. Now it’s a well-known scientific fact that unmarried women who masturbate suffer from painful menstruation, along with neuralgic stomachache and excessive nosebleed. Who among us does not know this? And so you’re correct, Dr. Rie: my nasal therapies are helpless, absolutely, in aiding these women until they surrender these vile practices.”

  He was losing his audience. This frank talk was costing him the attention of all but those of us in possession of a medical degree. Most of the women had already fled the room.

  “Preposterous,” Dr. Rie muttered.

  “Preposterous?” Dr. Fliess glanced over our shoulders at the defectors. “No, but I shall tell you what is preposterous. What is preposterous is the fact that this condition, prevalent for so long in our society, has gone undetected, and that those daring enough to attempt its cure are laughed at and scorned and mocked and driven from our professional societies until we are nearly insane with bitterness and rage!” Dr. Fliess clapped the back of one hand against the palm of the other. “And yet, despite the opposition I have personally received on this score, I have persevered in devising a cure. A cure, yes! By altering the left middle turbinate bone in the nose’s frontal third, precisely in ‘the nasal stomachache spot,’ as I have termed it, I have cured my patients not only of their abnormal sexual practices but of the neuroses these practices create as well.”

  “Nasal stomachache spot!” Dr. Rie harrumphed again.

  Dr. Fliess was bristling now. “Yes. Unfortunately, however, as I’ve discovered, there is more profit in addressing oneself to laymen who are grateful for one’s work than to professionals who, in their Latin-nomenclatured ignorance, betray that ignorance by scoffing!”

  “Wilhelm, my dearest friend.” Dr. Freud had at that moment reentered the room and was looking anxiously between the two men. “You’ve allowed us to detain you long enough. When you publish the rest of your beautiful novelties, as you must, you’ll astonish more than a small group of sympathetic friends. You’ll astonish the world. And although we can wait for that, our dinner, I’m afraid, cannot. May I invite everyone in to dine?”

  (As for Dr. Fliess’s presumptive villainy, I can say only this: In the coming months, a strange story was bruited about the cafés and whispered over in our little medical circles, to wit: that Dr. Freud, fearful that through his newly minted psychoanalytic bias, he may have overlooked a physical reason for Fräulein Eckstein’s suffering, invited Dr. Fliess in to consult, and that Dr. Fliess had suggested to him that the Fräulein’s hysteria was symptomatic of nasal reflex neurosis and had recommended, as a cure, the removal of the left middle turbinate bone of her nose. The story continues: having never performed this surgery, his own mad invention, before; indeed, having never performed major surgery at all; having previously confined his practice to simple cauterizations and cocainizations of the nose, Dr. Fliess botched the job and nearly killed the girl when he accidentally left a meter of surgical gauze inside her nasal cavity. This story, as my own narrative will demonstrate, is preposterous, of course, designed to blot out the true events, which I will now recount.)

  CHAPTER 6

  Nothing was as I imagined it only an hour before. I could barely concentrate on my dinner. Frau Freud had placed me between Dr. Freud’s sister Rosa and Heinrich Graf, her fiancé, and though they tried to include me in their conversation (something about the massacres at Aleppo), I could think of nothing but Dr. Fliess and his strange theories. Was it possible that masturbation actually disfigured the nose? And could the removal of the left middle turbinate bone truly relieve not only stomachache and uterine bleeding but also the psychic distress caused by masturbation? And did masturbation really cause psychic distress? (Or wasn’t it the other way around? Speaking for myself, abstinence seemed to create as much psychic distress as did autoeroticism; and normal sexual satisfaction, as Dr. Fliess had so blithely termed it, would, I feared, create only more.)

  Granted: there were similarities between the genitals and the nose. Both hung on the central column of the body without a complementing twin. In women, the nostrils resided above the mouth as did the oviducts above the nether labia; both were capable of bleeding. In men, the formal symmetry between the nostrils and the testicles, being external, was even more pronounced. I couldn’t help glancing about the table at the twenty or so noses ringed about me. Sharp, flat, hooked, pug, aquiline, Greek, snub, hawk, celestial; this one wagging his, that one caressing hers; how shamelessly we displayed them in public; how baldly we allowed them to protrude into the open air — quivering, vulnerable, receptive! I blushed as the scrolled nostrils of the woman across from me seemed suddenly as enticing as might the dimples of her rump! How was it possible, I wondered, that neither law nor custom forbade the display of nose hair in public? The way it sprouted from some of the older gentlemen’s nostrils in stifftufts seemed almost lewd, as did the blue veins that stood out on the reddened skin of some of the coarser specimens on display. Beards, mustaches, side whiskers, even eyebrows now brought to mind only one thing: the littler beards we kept hidden beneath our trousers and our skirts. I dropped my gaze when this one chortled through hers or that one brought a handkerchief to his, pulling on it with sharp brisk tugs until he’d emptied it of its contents.

  Frau Freud’s cherried veal tasted like wood pulp in my mouth, and I’m afraid I availed myself too eagerly of the wine. It was bad enough that everyone appeared to be wearing a pornographic postcard glued to the middle of his forehead; worse was the disillusionment I felt upon finally meeting the great and brilliant Dr. Fliess. The dashing young genius from Berlin, about whom I’d heard so much, struck me as little better than a Bedlamite. I was aghast to watch him, seated at Dr. Freud’s right, soliciting from those who’d been honored with chairs near his the dates of all the significant events of their lives, from which, like a fortunete
ller, he was busy calculating the hour of their demise.

  “Fifty-one months from your birthday,” he said, adding up his figures, “fifty-one being twenty-three plus twenty-eight, minus the difference between them, which is five, multiplied by twenty-three squared, divided by the square root of twenty-eight … ah, yes, here it is. According to my calculations, you can expect to expire at precisely thirty-six minutes past two on the morning of March 14, 1938.”

  His dining companions appeared eager for this information and, once it had been revealed to them, delighted to possess it. Indeed, I watched with my mouth agape as Amalia Eckstein inscribed the date of her death into a booklet she withdrew from her purse, penciling it in as though it were a dental appointment!

  (Proof of the prophet’s worthlessness, I told myself, was the fact that according to his calculations, a majority of the people at the table were to perish in March of 1938.)

  I could only shake my head. Dr. Freud had a weakness for gypsy-like parlor games, it’s true; but Dr. Fliess had gone him one better. If, like an Hasidic rebbe, Dr. Freud could read a man’s sins in the lines of his face, Dr. Fliess, like God Himself, knew the hour of his demise.

  What did it say about Sigmund Freud, I wondered, that he revered a man of such low caliber?

  STILL, ALL THIS was nothing compared to the heartbreak I had experienced upon seeing Fräulein Eckstein again. Never for a moment had I imagined that the woman whose picture I’d carried in my heart for over a month might feel only indifference towards me! It was madness to have come here, I told myself. I regretted pressuring Dr. Freud into inviting me to this odd Christmas soirée (in attendance at which there seemed to be only Jews; at a quick glance, I estimated that none of the guests had ever been within ten feet of a baptismal font!). Still, I couldn’t help watching Fräulein Eckstein. The way she laughed at Dr. Fliess’s calculations, hanging on to his every word, made me blind with rage. It pained me to see her eyes glistening with admiration for him while she sat with her fingers braided before her mouth and her nose laid out like a dainty for him upon the platter of her hands.