A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  (Her interest in Dr. Fliess, it turned out, was completely counterfeit. As I would learn the next day, she was merely flattering him as a way of pleasing Dr. Freud.)

  “Dr. Sammelsohn!” I heard my name called as though from a great distance. “Are you still with us, then?” I refocused my eyes, and the white and blue blotches before them unblurred into the person of Fräulein Rosa Freud, sitting beside me in a shimmering blue dress.

  “Ah, Fräulein Freud,” I said, “pardon me. I must have been daydreaming.”

  “I was only asking you whether you agreed that what Herr Graf just said was wickedly funny.”

  I looked at her fiancé, Graf. He smiled at me ludicrously, his watery eyes brimming behind his pince-nez. “Oh, well, no,” he said with modest good humor, “it’s nothing really.” He smiled tenderly at Fräulein Rosa. “I was just saying that it’s apparently not enough for Dr. Fliess to cure gynecological concerns, but he must stick his nose into Dr. Freud’s neurosis as well.”

  Although this was the second time in as many minutes that she had heard the witticism, appreciative laughter fell from Fräulein Rosa’s painted mouth. She reached across me to caress Herr Graf’s hand, and the two retreated into the privacy of each other’s gaze.

  I’d never felt lonelier in my life.

  What further disaster could befall me that evening?

  “AH, DR. SAMMELSOHN, may I touch it?” Amalia Eckstein had sneaked up behind me when I’d stopped in the hallway to admire the Freuds’ new telephone. A wooden box with a phallic-looking tube above two silver bells that resembled naked breasts — or so, in my current state of mind, the apparatus appeared to me — it was the first I’d seen in a private home.

  “What in Heaven’s name are you talking about?” I cried, turning in alarm. I had thought, of course, she had meant my nose.

  “Why, your hair, you silly-billy,” she said. “Because it’s so extraordinarily thick and marvelous!” She lifted her hand and let it hover in the now-electric air between us. What could I say to her? That I’d prefer she didn’t touch me? Of course, I did the only thing a gentleman could, which was to bow my head and offer it to her. “Oh! But oh — oh my! It’s so much softer than it looks! So soft and so curly and so full! Oh — but it’s an absolute delight!”

  I felt as though I were being examined by a careless phrenologist. Her nails nicked the skin behind my ears. As strands of my hair became entangled in her rings, she simply plucked them out. Worse: she’d pushed the shelf of her bosom so near my face that my breath had steamed up my glasses, and when I heard Fräulein Eckstein’s strangled cry — alas, the Fräulein had stumbled upon our unfortunate tableau — I had no choice but to read through the steamy lenses the horror etching itself upon her face.

  “Mother!” she cried.

  “Darling, you must come here and caress this young man’s hair immediately! It’s une expérience sensuelle.”

  “I will do no such thing! My God, Mother” — Fräulein Eckstein dropped her voice — “there are people in the other room!” Unable to force herself from the passageway, she covered her face with her hands, blocking out the image, and I feared she might at any moment faint.

  “Madame, if you will excuse me,” I said, stepping away from the mother. “Fräulein.” I nodded to the daughter. As I approached her, however, she jumped away from me, as though I were a moral leper, and for the final time that evening, I gave up all hope of wooing her.

  Dr. Freud beckoned me from the open doorway of his apartment. “Dr. Sammelsohn!” he cried, with Drs. Rie and Rosenberg standing on either side of him, like two thieves flanking the savior whose birthday they, in their strange way, had been honoring that night.

  “I’ve invited the men and the women to separate,” he explained to the Ecksteins and to me, “the women to remain above, nearer the Heavens, the men to descend into the nether regions, where each may partake of the activities biology has assigned them: the women to their chattering; the men to their brandy and cigars!”

  Happy for an opportunity to escape, I offered Fräulein Eckstein an embarrassed bow and attempted to edge past her. However, she pulled me to her and held me so closely that when she spoke, I could feel her breath palpating my lips.

  “Help me!” she whispered, as though it were a request I had too often refused her.

  “Help you, Fräulein? Of course, I will, but how?”

  “Lower you voice,” she commanded me. “The others mustn’t hear us.”

  I looked at her mother and at Dr. Freud.

  “I’ve been trying to speak to you all evening.”

  I peered into her face. “Frankly I’m astonished to hear this, Fräulein.”

  “You’re the only one who can help me.”

  I didn’t know what to say to her.

  “Will you?” she demanded.

  “Of course, I will, Fräulein.”

  “Then why haven’t you responded to me?”

  I searched her face, understanding nothing of what she was saying to me. “Responded to you, Fräulein?”

  “To my ads. In the newspaper,” she explained. “In the personal advertisement section. I’ve been leaving you ads in the Neue Freie Presse for well over a month now!”

  I continued to stare at her as though I were a village idiot who had never dreamt that men might communicate with each other by printing words in a newspaper.

  “Of course,” I said, shaking my head in an attempt to uncloud it. “I’ll look for your notice there.”

  “The next one’s scheduled for tomorrow morning.”

  “So soon, Fräulein?”

  “And you’ll read it?”

  “Certainly.”

  “And if I’ve asked you to meet me somewhere, you’ll meet me?”

  I hesitated.

  “I must speak with you,” she insisted. “It’s absolutely urgent. Not here.” She glanced at her mother. “But in private.”

  Before I could respond, Dr. Freud called for me again. The Fräulein released my hand, and my fingers ached where she had gripped them. I saw that the other men had already left the apartment and were presumably descending the stairs to Dr. Freud’s consulting rooms. I glanced again at Fräulein Eckstein. She seemed to have disappeared inside herself. It was as though the light of her face had darkened its flame. Dr. Freud and Madame Eckstein witnessed this strange phenomenon as well, and their eyes met in an unspoken moment of concern. A naïf, I imagined that they were congratulating themselves on the match they’d arranged between us. (With equal naïveté, I’d interpreted Madame Eckstein’s flirtatiousness as nothing more sinister than motherly affection. Didn’t all women fall in love with their daughter’s suitors and, later on, with their husbands?) But I might as well have been blind. Indeed, of all that was occurring about me, I saw little; and of the little I saw, I understood even less.

  With a bow to the women, I hurried down the yellow staircase after Dr. Freud.

  “Come on, come on then!” he called up, seconds ahead of me but already at the bottom of the stairs. “The time until you meet again will pass slowly, so you might as well fill it with cigars and good company. Dr. Königstein has returned, as you know, and there’s no telling when we’ll next spend a sociable hour together. With your losses at cards tonight, you will handsomely repay me for whatever services I, in my capacity as Cupid, have rendered you. Although how could it be otherwise? Where there is Psyche, Eros must naturally appear!”

  He addressed me from the doorway of his consulting rooms, a hard, mad glint in his eye. It was a look I recalled receiving before only from my father, a glance so lacerating I feared neither of us would avoid being cut to shreds by it.

  CHAPTER 7

  That night, I couldn’t sleep. I was too nervous about what I’d find in tomorrow’s paper. Abandoning my bed, I fished the Neue Freie Presse from the trash bin, where it lay beneath a moist hash of coffee grounds and apple cores. I’d never concerned myself with these sorts of things, these personal advertisements, but I u
nderstood the city was mad for them, and now I saw why: who could resist the most private of correspondences carried out in this most public of places, clandestine meetings arranged before the entire world, the particulars of one’s secret assignations announced via the public press?

  To the exquisite lady sipping coffee in the Café Griensteidl yesterday with a young child I took to be her niece; she so sympathetically shared her cream pitcher with a gentleman at the neighboring table and would do this gentleman an even greater kindness by indicating to Box 721, this newspaper, when and at what café he might return the favor.

  Things were not yet as notorious in Vienna as they would later become, with everyone and his sister crawling into bed (sometimes with each other), but an air of promiscuity had already descended upon the city, sending its inhabitants scurrying for warmth; and where better to find that warmth than in the arms of a similarly invigorated other?

  The woman who, Wednesday last, during the Mozart at the Lichtentaler Pfarrkirche, caught the eye of the gentleman behind her, enraptured by the obbligati, is hereby begged for a longer interlude at a suitable hour to be agreed upon, he prays, through Box 456, this newspaper, at the convenience of her delight.

  At the convenience of her delight? Is this what Fräulein Eckstein wanted? To declaim her love for me from behind a mask of serifed prose? If so, I suspected it had everything to do with her mother. Indeed, how intoxicating to conduct an illicit affair right beneath the nose of one’s dueña. (Ah! the nose! the nose! I couldn’t get Dr. Fliess’s damned noses out of my brain!) I turned the pages of the paper and glanced through the ads once again. I was shocked to see that even the bite of an agonized conscience was inked in printer’s black for all the world to see:

  My darling S., I live in terror over what my sister may or may not suspect. Leave no more letters at our home, nor will I meet you this afternoon in your laboratory. Communicate with me only through Box 621, this newspaper, and may God grant us the strength to stop, your loving M.

  I cinched the belt of my robe tighter. How had I gotten myself into this mess? A day before, I might have been entranced by the naughtiness of it all. Now I only felt intimidated by the game. I was in over my head, and I knew it. True, I’d been ogling women for years, but nothing like this had ever happened to me as a consequence. And the truth of the matter is it had very little to do with me. Coincidence alone had placed Dr. Freud beside me at the Carl; happenstance had allowed him to read my mind — I didn’t even possess courage enough to ask him for the Fräulein’s name — and it was the Fräulein herself who had approached me at the Freuds’ Christmas party. Left to my own devices, I’m certain I’d still be daydreaming about a nameless girl I would never see again. And wouldn’t that be preferable? I had no head for this sort of thing! I could barely navigate the circles of the city. With a map Otto had given me when I’d first moved in, I’d plotted out my essential routes — from my apartment to the hospital, from the hospital to the opera, and lately from the hospital, my apartment, or the opera to Dr. Freud’s. Despite my stalking of him, I had little idea where the rest of the city was kept, including, or rather especially, the offices of the Neue Freie Presse. Nor did I understand how one went about procuring for himself a “numbered box.” Certainly the clerk who handled these transactions understood their licentious purposes. How brazen was the Fräulein, one had to wonder, that she could meet the wink of this fellow while filling out the requisite forms?

  (Glancing through the advertisements, I soon discovered that there were many purposes, not all of them immoral, to which one might employ one’s box: professors giving piano lessons advertised for students in this way, as did merchants searching for employees and tradesmen for customers. The libertines and demimondaines who flaunted their epistolary concupiscence in the broad daylight of newsprint did so under the protective banner of these more respectable burghers.)

  It was nearly three in the morning when I threw the paper down. I lay on the sofa, and once again, I saw that hard, mad glint in Dr. Freud’s eye. Looking deeper into it, I was repulsed by the homunculur portrait of myself reflected in its vacuum. Beneath his captious leer, I appeared not as I knew myself — a lovelorn chap searching myopically through the circular maze of Vienna for a woman who might love him with an ardor equaling his own — but as Dr. Freud saw me: a wild, slobbering satyr whose membrum virile, rising like a gnarled branch from the delta of his crotch, had become so inflamed, he’d stick it anywhere to extinguish its fire. My desire for love had somehow transformed me into a rascal who couldn’t be trusted with the girls! Nor was this the first time I’d been exiled to rascaldom by the all-too-knowing gaze of another. My father’s glance used to pierce my side in the same crucifying way. Hadn’t I continually disgraced him, a boy with straw instead of thoughts inside his head, a balk of a son, compelled through life by no force greater than his own tomfoolery? As I crawled onto the sofa and stared at the ceiling, I knew a large part of the disgust I felt for myself belonged properly to my father.

  He had failed to prepare me for life in every way.

  ONLY TAKE, FOR example, the day he asked me into his study so that he might explain the mysteries of sexual union to me. This was a day I’d prefer to forget, though not one painful hour of it has escaped my memory. We sat opposite each other, my father and I, he behind a large desk piled high with bills and invoices, and I on a low, small chair before it. I was barely twelve.

  he said, addressing me, as was his custom, in Hebrew: Ya’akov (Genesis 44:34). Listen to everything I tell you, if you know what’s good for you (Deuteronomy 12:28).

  His short beard had turned greyer and his face thinner since the discovery of my crime. Unable to eat or sleep, he’d become an emaciated version of himself. When he folded his thin arms against his chest, the sleeves of his kapote scissored against each other, producing sharp whistling noises. He opened his mouth to speak but could apparently find nothing to say. He walked to the window and peered through it. The wind nudged a few leaves an inch or two across the meadow outside. With his arms behind his back and his spine held straight and his blue-black shadow falling behind him, he resembled the gnomon of a sundial.

  Neither of us had touched the tea my sister Reyzl had brought in to us. Our cups sat on their saucers, growing cold. When I lifted mine, my hand trembled so violently and the cup rattled so noisily, I had to put it down. Turning towards the sound, Father glowered, and my cheeks burned beneath his gaze. I knew what he was thinking: How is it possible that this creature, so alien to me in every way, this miscreant who’s made a mockery of everything I know to be true, this reproduction that resembles the original not in the least, sprung from my inner being? And now to have to school this botch of a son in the lessons of manhood so that he might plant his own seeds and produce his own children who, God forbid, will resemble me even less!

  The bitterness of my apostasy aside, it was a torment for my father to have to speak of these unseemly matters. And yet — he sighed — one is commanded to teach one’s children; and no man is exempt from the directives of the Lord.

  He picked up his tea and peered into the cup. His mouth an ugly gash, he sniffed at the drink, as though at the scent of curdling milk, before returning it to its place. He cleared his throat and rubbed his papery hands together, clapping once.

  he said. Don’t worry, for I won’t embarrass you (Isaiah 54:4). Come closer (Genesis 27:21). Now, my son, listen to me (Genesis 27:8). I’ve called you for a righteous purpose and have taken hold of your hand (Isaiah 42:6).

  He seemed to be listening to his own words — they seemed to hover in the air between us — scrutinizing them as a jeweler might a string of diamonds, searching for a secret flaw. Finding none, he proceeded. Only be strong and courageous (Joshua 1:7) and listen to me without interruption (Isaiah 41:1) for a son will show honor to his father (Malachi 1:6).

  How may I explain these linguistic peculiarities of my father’s?

  By the time I was born, he refused to speak
in any but the holy tongue. What were his choices? Yiddish was a mongrel pidgin, suitable only for women and illiterates. German — a barking, braggart’s tongue — belonged to the children of Esau, and Father would have never dreamt of sullying the holy vessel of his mouth with its guttural frothings. As for Russian, it wasn’t even a human language. Rather, it had been taught to the ancient Varangians by bears (hence the Russian proclivity for laziness and violence). French, something Father had picked up in his youth, my grandmother Sammelsohn having harbored unrealistic dreams of a diplomatic career for him, was, on the other hand, an all-too-human patois: curling the tongue, it trained it for duplicity. Why else did everything in it — taunts, curses, even the blackest of threats — sound like the sweetest of psalms?

  For all his fanciful glossologies, Father might have languished in silence, had it not been for the holy tongue, although Hebrew presented its own problems: the language in which the angels beseech one another for permission to chant their unceasing praises, as well as the language in which these praises are unceasingly chanted, Hebrew was the language with which the Holy One had spoken the Heavens and the Earth into being. This troubled my father. How could he, mere ashes and dust (Job 42:6), speak the language of the Lord? Fearing the Holy One’s sacred places (Exodus 19:30), he would have preferred the distant dove of silence (Psalm 56:1) to defiling the sacred tongue by straying from its words (Proverbs 4:5).

  Fortunately, God Himself had commanded us to speak it, viz.: My words, which I’ve placed in your mouth, shall not be removed from your mouth or from the mouth of your children or from the mouth of your children’s children, thus saith the Lord, from now until forever (Isaiah 59:21). Still, painfully aware of his dismal humanity, Father leavened this celestial vocabulary with the earthier Aramaic of the Oral Law, hoping in this way to keep his feet rooted to the ground.