By the time I reached the café’s door, I was in a state of nervous collapse. I knew what I would find inside: kindly oculists, five to a table, each man looking at me in the same way I’d be looking at him, wondering, What the deuce is he doing here?
But of course, I found only Fräulein Eckstein, seated at a corner table, her elaborate hat peeking out from behind the front page of the Neue Freie Presse.
“Dr. Sammelsohn?” she called, lowering the paper and squinting at me. “Is that you?”
“Ah, Fräulein, good afternoon,” I said, approaching her table, relieved to be the only oculist in sight. “May I join you?”
Oddly, this request seemed to have momentarily flustered her. “Oh!” she said, before saying, “No, of course. Certainly. Please, do. By all means.”
“You’re not waiting for someone, are you?”
“No, I don’t think so,” she said, smiling oddly.
I took the seat across from hers and thought to immediately make my amends. “You must forgive me, Fräulein. I’ve been irresponsible and I’ve come to apologize for my abstruseness and to make good any expense you’ve gone to on my account.”
“Expense?” she said, tilting her head to the side.
“For the advertisements,” I said.
“The advertisements?”
“In the newspaper.”
The Fräulein laughed nervously. She shrugged, as though embarrassed, and smiled sweetly. “Forgive me, Dr. Sammelsohn, but I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
I leaned back and gave her a hard look. We seemed to have switched roles in the scene we’d played out the night before at the Freuds’. Perhaps this was all part of the velvety game of Viennese lovemaking, I told myself. Having arranged our assignation anonymously, we were required, I gathered, to continue the charade, pretending to have run into each other accidentally in order that it might appear so to the rest of the world.
“Ah. Never mind,” I said, with a knowing air. “I’m obviously mistaken.”
At this, the Fräulein seemed to relax. “In any case,” she said, “it’s nothing short of a miracle, running into you like this.”
“A miracle, Fräulein?”
“Yes, as there’s something I’ve very much wanted to ask you.”
“A question, Fräulein?”
“No, a favor, really.” She lowered her gaze. “Only I hope you won’t think it too forward of me, if …”
“If what, Fräulein?”
“No, I can’t,” she said, blushing. “You’ll think ill of me, I know.”
“But I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”
“You won’t!” She playfully took my hands. “Do you really mean that, Dr. Sammelsohn?”
“I do, Fräulein.” The touch of her fingers, even through the calfskin of her gloves, stirred me to my core.
She took a deep breath. Her chin trembled. “May I make a confession to you, Dr. Sammelsohn?”
I swallowed nervously. “A confession, Fräulein?” Things seem to be proceeding more quickly than I’d anticipated. “That’s a bold word,” I said.
“Yes, it is, isn’t it? It is a bold word.”
I was unnerved to find her staring so avidly into my eyes. May a woman stare so brazenly at a man and he not interpret it as a sexual provocation? However, drunk on her own liberated impulses, or mad with desire, or perhaps simply mad (what had Dr. Freud told me about her diagnosis? I struggled in vain to recall it), the Fräulein showed no sign of relenting, and it was I who finally looked away. Holding my hand and unwilling to surrender my attention, she lightly traced the lines of my palm with her finger.
“Emma,” I whispered, although too quietly, I hoped, for her to have heard me.
“Dr. Sammelsohn,” she said, “permit me to ask you a question?”
“A question, Fräulein?”
“A personal question.”
“Well, all right.”
She smiled shyly. “Do you love anyone?”
“I … I beg your pardon, Fräulein. Do I …”
“Love anyone?” she repeated.
I opened my mouth to answer her, but no words sprang forth.
“Ah, so you must!” She laughed, covering her mouth with her hands.
“Well,” I murmured, “there has been someone of late, I suppose …”
“And who is she, if I may be so bold to inquire?”
“Oh, but I haven’t the courage to tell you that, my dear Fräulein.”
“No, now don’t be shy,” she said, leaning forward on her elbows. “We can share our secrets like girlfriends.” Vexed, perhaps, at hearing herself describe me as a girlfriend, she corrected herself: “Or like a brother and sister. Oh, but you know what I mean. Sometimes a person loves another but doesn’t feel free to declare that love. Isn’t that so, Doktor?”
My stomach dropped, my vision narrowed. What had Dr. Freud told her? How much did she know about this last month, the month I’d spent pining for her?
“That’s true,” I said cautiously.
“Myself, for example.”
“Yourself, Fräulein?”
She sighed and, crossing her arms, sat back in her chair. “There’s no reason for you to know this” — her eyes followed someone walking across the room behind me and she lowered her voice — “but in the past …”
“Yes, Fräulein?”
“… I’ve always been attracted to older men.”
“To … to … to older men, Fräulein? But … but this was in the past, you say?”
“Oh,” she said, “you know, with their dignified beards and their …” She brought her fingers softly to her lips. “How it must chafe to receive a kiss from a man with a beard …” She blushed again and giggled. “Although I must say … your little beard, Dr. Sammelsohn …”
“My little beard, Fräulein?”
“… it seems so soft and silky, yes … Kissing you would be …”
“Yes, Fräulein?”
“… a lovely experience, I imagine.”
The conversation was getting away from us. An untamed horse whose reins we had dropped, it had broken free from the high road and was pulling us, exhilarated, into a forest of brackens and brambles. We must return to the high road immediately, I counseled myself, lest we be torn to shreds by this wild tangle of thorns! And yet, at the same time, no woman had ever spoken to me in so open a way, and the agony her voice occasioned in my person was not entirely unpleasant: an electrical storm sowed its turmoil in my breast, a siege of lightning lay claim to my undefended heart, a quiver of pangs shot, like flaming arrows, through my central nervous system, spiraling down to the core of my lowest self, where its havoc aroused my concupiscence from its long wintry slumbers.
“Fräulein Eckstein,” I managed to say at last, “may I be frank with you?”
The time had come to bare my breast, to confess my feelings, to reveal the whole complicated mess I’d made of everything. Yes, it was time to throw myself upon her mercy, to declare my intentions, to risk all, like a gambler, on one fatal spin of the wheel — although how much of a gamble was it when she had all but declared her love for me — for me and my kissable little beard?
“I was hoping we might both be frank,” she said, breathlessly, “and honest. Completely. Oh, how we allow our lives to become so poisoned with untruth! Dr. Sammelsohn, don’t you find that’s so?”
“I know. I know it,” I said. “I lie. I do. All the time. Why, I lie to everyone. No, only the other day, I lied to the milkman. I did. ‘Did you order butter?’ he asked me, having failed to deliver it, and I said, ‘No,’ although, in fact, I had. I had ordered it.”
“Then let us agree to speak only the truth to each other, Dr. Sammelsohn, shall we?”
“Fräulein, from now on, yes: the truth. Absolutely, agreed!”
“And let us bare our breasts together.”
“Metaphorically speaking, you mean, of course.”
“Shall I go first?”
“Or I. It doe
sn’t matter.”
“Let me then.”
“As you wish.”
“In that case” — she filled the bellows of her lungs with a fortifying breath, and her bosom lifted magnificently — “I must tell you, Dr. Sammelsohn, that I’m in love!”
“Ah! I knew it!” I couldn’t help laughing.
“With …” As she said this, the color in her cheeks rose.
“With? Yes?” I said.
“Oh! But can’t you guess it?”
“I can, but I must hear it from your own mouth.”
“Very well then. Let me declare it openly and honestly. I’m in love, Dr. Sammelsohn — ”
I clapped my hands. “Oh, Fräulein!”
“ — with Sigmund Freud.”
“With?”
“Sigmund Freud,” she said. “As you, in your wisdom, have clearly intuited.”
“You’re … ?”
She nodded, her face bright with happiness. “I’m in love with Sigmund Freud.” Leaning across the table, she took my hand again. She lowered her voice, scouring the room as though for eavesdroppers. “Oh my God, Dr. Sammelsohn! That man! But I don’t have to tell you. He’s just so handsome, and his theories are so brilliant and so bold!”
“You’re in love with Dr. Freud?” I said.
She blushed now for a different reason. “But of course, you must really think me awful.”
“Well, he is a married man, I suppose, and by all accounts quite happily.”
“I know, I know!” She closed her eyes. “I’m just… it’s just …”
I don’t know why I was surprised. If one doesn’t count Josef Breuer, Dr. Freud was the first psychoanalyst; and if one doesn’t count Anna O., Dr. Breuer’s patient, Fräulein Eckstein was the first psychoanalytic patient, and like so many who would follow her, she had fallen in love with her analyst. The blackness of her crime was far worse than if she’d simply placed herself between a wife and her lawful happiness, however: Martha Bernays Freud was a family friend; the Ecksteins and the Bernays were longtime members of the same circle. For all I knew, they might even have been cousins (as everyone else seemed to be).
“Well, one can’t help one’s passions, Fräulein,” I told her as kindly as I could. “And certainly we don’t choose with whom we fall in love.”
Her face brightened at the prospect of this moral reprieve, and she wiped away a tear. “Do you really think that’s true, Dr. Sammelsohn?”
“I do.”
We were silent for a moment, and then she said, “And that’s why I thought perhaps you could speak to him.”
“Speak to whom?”
“To Dr. Freud?”
“Me, you mean?”
“Anything, yes, the slightest thing that you could say on my behalf, I’m sure, would be helpful. He’s your friend, after all. Perhaps you could mention to him that you’d noticed my attraction, and then you’d be able to see in his eyes if there’s any chance for me. And if there is …”
“Fräulein…” I said. Is this why she had invited me here? Is this what these weeks of newspaper ads had been about?
“No, of course, you’re right. It was ridiculous for me to have asked you.” She took a bite of her dumpling and chewed unhappily. Wiping a dab of jelly from the corner of her mouth, she smiled bravely and pushed her plate away. It was terrible to see the look of self-reproach pass over her. She glanced down at her watch and, biting back tears, said, “In any case, I’ve got two tickets for a quintet at the Urania this afternoon, and I’d very much like it, if you’d care to join me.”
CHAPTER 9
We met every day for over a month. Fräulein Eckstein seemed to have two tickets to everything and no one to go with. And it wasn’t hard for her to entice me out of my apartment with the promise of a concert or a lecture or a play. Perhaps, I thought, this was what Dr. Freud had wanted all along: for me to distract the Fräulein, to get her out of his hair. Nevertheless, I found these enticements impossible to resist. Also, the Fräulein was so heartbroken and lonely, it seemed cruel to refuse her. We spent hours in each other’s company, and during those hours though we conversed upon a broad array of topics, every word, I knew, anticipated only one thing: the moment when our conversation touched upon Sigmund Freud, as it invariably did, and we could begin discussing him in full.
I listened as attentively as I could, aware that my willingness to speak to the Fräulein about my rival was all that kept me at her side. In addition, my lack of censure won for me her complete confidence, and the intimacy of her company assuaged whatever conscience might have otherwise nagged at me as I indulged in the questionable pleasure of plotting to destroy Dr. Freud’s marriage, even though doing so meant, in theory at least, surrendering to him the only thing I wanted, which was Fräulein Eckstein’s love, her mineral, emotional, carnal, and spiritual love. Every evening and twice a day when there was a matinee, we’d scheme together, dreaming up remedies for her unhappiness, sometimes walking arm in arm, our heads pressed together in delicious conspiracy.
A typical conversation:
“Oh, Dr. Sammelsohn, if only Aunt Marty could feel my heart beating at the thought of him, she’d understand me, wouldn’t she?”
“Certainly she would, Fräulein.”
“And she wouldn’t judge me too harshly, would she?”
“No! How could she?”
“She couldn’t. No, you’re right, because we’re the same, aren’t we?”
“Of course you are, Fräulein.”
“We love the same man, don’t we?”
“And that’s what makes all this so damnably difficult: your kindness in not wanting to hurt her.”
“Oh, I know! The thought of hurting her is just … so awful! I could never do it. And yet how could he not choose me over her, Dr. Sammelsohn?”
“He couldn’t.”
“Just thinking of it — oh, just feel what it’s done to my heart!”
We were strolling in the ringing white sunlight on a bright winter’s day when Fräulein Eckstein removed her hand from her muff and used it to place my hand over her heart. I tried to keep glued to my face the mask I wore with my patients, that of a concerned medical man, as we looked deeply into each other’s eyes, our breaths steaming forth in clouds of condensation, my hand on the curve of her breast.
“Yes, Fräulein, it seems to be beating … quite beautifully.”
It was all very confusing, I must say, and there were many times when I couldn’t help feeling that the Fräulein was communicating to me a powerful desire to be kissed. I wasn’t certain, however, as not two moments earlier, she’d been breathlessly describing her desire for a man who was clearly not myself. If I overcame my fear and kissed her and she didn’t wish me to, I would lose her forever, I knew. On the other hand, nothing in the mores of the era would have allowed her, had she in fact wished to be kissed, to do anything other than what she was doing now, which was staring at me with a look of stupefied admiration, her eyelids lowered as though the sight of me had weakened her occipital muscles.
Invariably, of course, she’d turn away from me and say something along the lines of: “Oh, but he’s just so very handsome, isn’t he?”
“Dr. Freud, you mean?”
“With that beard and those eyes that pierce right through you!” She shook her head, as though she’d lost her train of thought. “Although you’re rather good-looking yourself, Dr. Sammelsohn. Oh, not in a virile way, of course, like Dr. Freud, but still.”
“Still.” I offered her a weak smile. I could still feel the curve of her breast inside my palm, and these impoverishing compliments were, I knew, the price I paid for the hours I spent in her company.
“Oh, it’s poor form, I know, to praise the looks of one man to another, and no woman ever would put up with such treatment! But you don’t mind my speaking to you so forthrightly, do you?”
“Of course not, Fräulein. I find your candor refreshing.”
“Because you’re the only one I can talk t
o about any of this. You know that, don’t you?” She placed her hand on her head, as though she had a headache. “It’s odd, Dr. Sammelsohn, but sometimes I feel as though I’ve known you my entire life — do you feel that also? — as though we’d been children together.”
IN THIS WAY, I learned the Fräulein’s medical history. She’d been seeing Dr. Freud on and off for several years, she told me, though only at the insistence of her mother. In regard to what malady, she preferred not to say. “It’s complicated.” Dr. Freud was a family friend, and this inhibited her when he asked her, at the beginning of their daily hour, to tell him everything that passed through her mind. (Indeed, no psychologist today would treat a person from his own social set, but in the Vienna we shared with Dr. Freud, especially among its Jewish middle classes, finding a doctor one didn’t know personally was a near impossibility.) At times, she suspected — correctly, I might add — that Dr. Freud’s fledgling practice was struggling to take flight, and she worried that he’d taken her on only because he needed the money. “Not that Maman sent me to him as a charity case. God forbid!” It’s just that sometimes — quite often — she felt that nothing was the matter with her. “Oh, I have my vacant moments, I suppose, when I lose track and I can’t account for where I’ve been or what I’ve been thinking, but then aren’t all women susceptible to daydreaming? It’s all the needlework, Dr. Freud says, that makes us particularly vulnerable.” Her mother, for example. “It’s she who should be seeing a nerve specialist, and not I. But then you’ve met her yourself, haven’t you?” No, it was her mother who had invented the canard of her ill health, “this so-called hysteria or dream psychosis or whatever it is,” as a means of diverting attention away from her own psychopathologies. “Or whatever Dr. Freud calls them!” And the measure of her success had been that she was able to fool a man as formidable as Dr. Freud. “Although how formidable is he, really? Ask yourself: who published this account of Dr. Freud’s brilliance, if not Dr. Freud himself? Have you ever heard another human being make a similar claim?”
A Curable Romantic Page 10
