A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  “He only wishes to aid you, Ita. His motives are charitable, I assure you.”

  “But he’s an unbeliever!”

  “Rather a freethinker, madam,” Dr. Freud corrected her, “my thoughts free to go either way.”

  “Isn’t my presence here proof enough of the unseen world?”

  “I admit you’re highly convincing,” Dr. Freud said. He was a well-oiled flatterer when he wanted to be. Clasping his hands together, eager to be done with her, he next said, “However, the hour grows late, and if we’re of like minds, perhaps you’ll permit me to proceed with the cure.”

  “The cure! Your precious cure! That’s all you care about, isn’t it?”

  “But surely you have no wish to remain in your current state?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you, Doktor? I am not ill!”

  “Not ill, madam, no, but it’s abnormal for you to remain here, not only for Fräulein Eckstein, about whose welfare I’m certain you’re concerned, but for yourself as well.”

  “I’m happy where I am, thank you very much.”

  “And these paralyzing attacks from these so-called angels of destruction — they don’t concern you?”

  “There’s nothing you can do to alleviate them.”

  “Are you so certain?”

  “Is the doctor Moses that he speaks directly to God?”

  “Not Moses, no, but a humble neuropath, and yet I know a thing or two.”

  “Oh God, Yankl! Get rid of this horse’s ass! There are things I need to discuss with you in privacy.”

  I felt compelled to rise from my chair each time Ita addressed me, like a prisoner in the docks, a murderer finally caught and captured and tried. “There’s nothing you can’t tell me in the presence of Dr. Freud, Ita,” I said. “He’s here with no design other than the restoration of proportional health to everyone involved in the affair.”

  I sat.

  “What are you paying him?” she asked.

  I rose again. “The Ecksteins are seeing to his fees.”

  “Oh God, why do they waste their money! Can’t you see he’s a complete quack!”

  “Don’t insult him, Ita.”

  She pointed with both hands to her chest. “She may be ill, but there’s nothing wrong with me.”

  Dr. Freud seemed to laugh and sigh at the same time. He looked at me wryly as though to say, Why on earth did you marry such a shrew? But then, of course, he remembered why, and nothing less than complete sympathy showed upon his face. And then, of course, he remembered that the patient lying in bed before us was not, in fact, the shrew I had married, that I had, in fact, never married a shrew. I had been married to the village idiot, a docile, inarticulate unfortunate who had nothing in common with the impersonation of her Fräulein Eckstein had thought, in her illness, to contrive.

  “Madam,” Dr. Freud said, “though I am, as I say, a freethinker, I am not without an appreciation for the exigencies of the soul. It can’t be easy for you to resist the gravitational pull of Heaven.”

  “What do you even know about it?” Ita said glumly.

  “These myriads of destructive angels, though terrifying and grave, are nothing, I’d wager, compared to your own inner wish to relent, to surrender to divine justice, and to finally do what’s right according to divine will.”

  Ita laughed. She crossed her arms. “Never!” she said.

  “And why not?”

  “Let’s just say I want what’s owed me.”

  “And what is that, madam, exactly?”

  “And what is that, madam, exactly?” she sneered.

  I didn’t know how Dr. Freud withstood the hatred directed towards his person, projected, as it were, upon the screen of Fräulein Eckstein’s lovely face. Many times during these sessions, I was reminded of the high esteem, indeed the admiration and the amorous affection, Dr. Freud was accustomed to meeting in Fräulein Eckstein’s glance. How hard it must have been for him to see this same face pressed into the service of such hateful sneers.

  (“As you know only too well, Dr. Sammelsohn,” Dr. Freud explained to me when I mentioned these concerns to him later, “no Jew manages to reach the age of maturity without having hardened himself to the derision he meets with from all sides in this world. Such is my lowly state that I expect no better from the Jewish dead in the next.”)

  “And what exactly is owed you?” Dr. Freud reiterated, pressing forward. “You yourself have implied that the universe adheres to a strict form of justice, stricter than any that can be petitioned for on this side of the veil. Make plain your demands and if indeed something is owed you, I will not cease from my advocacy on your part until these just demands are met.”

  Ita raised an eyebrow and pinned Dr. Freud with a tart and saucy look. “You have a daughter, I believe,” she said.

  “Three,” Dr. Freud said, the proud paterfamilias, “the youngest not yet a year.”

  “And I’m certain you harbor, Dr. Freud, as any father would, great hopes for their futures.”

  “Great hopes, madam, indeed.”

  “Should one of them die young — and I regret to inform you that I have heard it whispered from behind the divine curtain that such is the fate of your … Sophie — ”

  Dr. Freud’s face lost all color.

  “ — wouldn’t you feel recompensed if, as I assure you will be the case, as an adult, your Sophele finds love and a husband, and through her husband, children, and through her children, a sort of immortality?”

  “Sophie?” Dr. Freud whispered, stricken. “But when?”

  I stood. “Dr. Freud, perhaps we should leave off pursuing this line of inquiry!”

  “Quiet, Dr. Sammelsohn!” he roared. “I will decide what it is I wish to know and what not!”

  “But I implore you!”

  “Nineteen hundred and twenty,” Ita stated flatly. “Influenza. Her death will be painless, or nearly so, at least for her, if not for you, and quick.”

  THIS WAS A side of Ita I’d never known.

  “How ugly you’ve become in your beautiful new body,” I whispered to her, appalled.

  “Excuse me for a moment, if you will.” Dr. Freud stood and bowed. He staggered from the room with all the grace of a broken toy.

  “Such cruelty, Ita! Such wanton cruelty!”

  “You’ve fallen in with bad company, Yankl.”

  “Who I choose to spend my time with is of no concern of yours,” I said, pacing the floor before her bed.

  “But I’m your wife.”

  “Were. You were my wife!”

  “Ha!”

  “You know as well as I you have no legal claims.”

  An ill-concealed smirk distorted Fräulein Eckstein’s face.

  “Don’t laugh,” I said. “It’s not amusing.”

  “A legal claim!” she trumpeted. “Why don’t you call a policeman if I’m bothering you.”

  “Perhaps I shall.”

  “Go ahead, Yankl. Have me arrested.”

  “Oh!” I turned away from her in disgust.

  I looked through the window. The sanatorium grounds were dark. The trees pressed against the black sky like shadows falling across a darkened body of water.

  “I’m not the only one here who has caused another unhappiness, you know.”

  “I know, I know, Yankl!” she said, leaning forward in her bed and speaking in an excited tone. “But that’s only because of the body in which I was imprisoned.”

  “Surely you don’t really believe that, Ita.”

  I turned to face her, and our eyes met, too intimately, I’m afraid.

  “I do,” she said deeply.

  “I was happily married,” I said to her as matter-of-factly as I could.

  “Yes, to that little — ”

  “Stop it!” I raised my hand. “I won’t have Hindele’s name besmirched! Not by you. Of all of us, she’s innocent of having ever caused you harm.”

  “Since when can’t a wife be jealous of her husband’s previous wife
?” she said with a trill of girlish laughter.

  I sat in the chair by her bed and looked at my shirt cuffs poking out from beneath my coat sleeves. Any other man, I was certain, upon learning that his hated wife had years before killed herself, might pause a moment in the course of his day and allow himself to feel a small self-inflicted stab of remorse. He might reflect upon the death that one day awaits us all, feeling, if only for a small moment, a mixture of pity and regret, before sighing with relief, Ah, at last, at last, that’s over and done with! Never for a moment would such a man imagine being called away from the busy happiness of his life, from the productive routines of his work, to converse and bargain with this dead wife, debating the merits of her claims against him and the others who had driven her, according to her word, to her unhappy death. Never in all my time in Vienna had I heard of anyone being hounded by a dead wife, called away from his cards or his dinner to answer a comparable summons from the spirit world. Why should I, who am remarkable in no other way, be thus honored? Certainly my crime is no blacker than many a rake’s. Surely Ita’s heart was not more broken than many a young maiden’s. Of all the spurned girls in Europe — left at the altar, impregnated, abandoned, trifled with, deflowered, lied to, seduced, defiled by an employer and dismissed from service by his wife — why was Ita the only one who, having destroyed herself, managed to return from the silent world of the dead to complain about the whole sad affair?

  It’s a peculiarity of us Jews that we tend to drag our history along behind us, clattering and clanking like tin cans tied to the tail of a frightened dog, and the more we attempt to outrun it, the louder and more frightening it becomes. Still, it’s nearly impossible for me to describe the shame of being haunted by a dybbuk at the dawn of the twentieth century, as though I were nothing but a benighted Ostjude!

  I looked about the sumptuous hospital room with its fine rugs and its warm, roaring fire. What was I doing here? It was madness to have accompanied Dr. Freud to Fräulein Eckstein’s bedside, madness to have remained here, and as soon as he returned, I intended to quit the case, leaving it entirely in his hands. My oath as a doctor, in fact, compelled me to excuse myself and hand Fräulein Eckstein’s treatment over to a physician with no personal stake in the matter.

  I glanced coldly at Ita. As though reading my thoughts, she glared back at me. We were for the first time behaving like a husband and wife! Having pummeled each other verbally, we next subjected each other to an icy, biting silence, at the frozen arctic of which, the knob of the door finally turned, and Dr. Freud reentered the room. Ita ignored him, preferring to glower at me, her arms crossed beneath Fräulein Eckstein’s bosom. I was troubled to see that Dr. Freud’s eyes were gleaming with an odd and incandescent light. His gestures were overenunciated, as though he were an orator addressing an audience seated in the high rows of an amphitheater. Cocaine: the word shot like a whining arrow through the din of my otherwise noisy brain. Stung to the quick by Ita’s prophecy, he’d no doubt availed himself of his favorite alkaloid balm.

  “Ah! Ah! Ah!” he called to us from the doorway, sniffing like a Frenchman in a cheese shop. “And how is our young couple getting along then?”

  The malicious tone in his voice unnerved me.

  “Oh, this is intolerable!” Ita shrieked. “This is who you bring to help me? This hophead in love with a charlatan!”

  “Wilhelm’s no charlatan,” Dr. Freud said, understanding Ita, I thought, a little too quickly.

  “How can you prefer that idiot to Breuer?”

  Dr. Freud shrugged loosely. “He’s a little unorthodox, perhaps.”

  “A little unorthodox!”

  “But everyone loves and respects him.”

  “Idiot!”

  “Dr. Freud, it’s late,” I said, appealing to his better self.

  “Right, right,” he said, sniffing as casually as he could. “I’m not completely ignorant of our traditions, you know. Unbeliever!” he muttered to himself. “I’ve read deeply into many of its more esoteric concerns, but you didn’t know that, did you? Yes, enough to know that a soul cleaving to another being — you see, I’m even conversant with the appropriate terminology — that such a soul, in a state of metempsychosis, often feels she’s left something undone on this side of the veil. Or isn’t that correct, madam?”

  For all their antagonism, Ita and Dr. Freud shared an odd, teasing rapport; and I remembered that, without Dr. Freud’s knowing it, it was Ita who had sat through those many long hours of psychoanalytic therapy with him, concealed, as she was, inside Fräulein Eckstein, his patient.

  “Shall I tell you what I want then?” she nearly spat at him.

  “Yes, madam, please do.” Dr. Freud nodded.

  “Just say it out plainly?”

  “Without censoring yourself. Absolutely.”

  Ita swallowed and moistened Fräulein Eckstein’s lips.

  “Come on, come on!”

  “You’re right, of course. It would be easier and more beautiful to accept the ways of our Lord, whose teachings are without flaw. Even now I can hear the angelic hosts singing His praises in their celestial choirs. Can you hear it, either of you? Yankl, Dr. Freud?”

  Dr. Freud and I listened, but I could hear nothing outside of the rapid fluttering of Fräulein Eckstein’s breathing and Dr. Freud’s dripping sinuses.

  “But you’re forgetting one thing.”

  “And what is that, madam?”

  “I am or at least I was a woman, and the heart I possessed and still possess is a woman’s heart.”

  “And a woman’s heart must know love,” Dr. Freud said, anticipating her meaning.

  “Surely, even an apostate like you cannot deny that God has decreed it thus.”

  The words, spoken so simply and with such honesty, pierced my heart. I couldn’t look Ita or Fräulein Eckstein in the face and instead turned my gaze towards my shoes, hiding like whipped dogs beneath the curtains of my trouser legs.

  “Madam,” Dr. Freud said softly, “may I take your hand?”

  No longer a wild mare spooked by every noise, Ita breathed deeply — Fräulein Eckstein’s chest bellowed out with air — and gently lay one of Fräulein Eckstein’s hands, palm upward, on the blanket. Dr. Freud took it and held it between both of his.

  “Put yourself in my place, Dr. Freud. My soul, like all souls, was perfect, but through no fault of my own, it was confined in a narrow, mangled body. You’ve heard the tale of my grandfather and the shoelace, thanks to which I was like a princess in a decrepit prison tower. Anyone who wanted to hurl insults at me could degrade me in any way they chose. I couldn’t answer them back. I had no protector. Then by chance, against all odds — only consider! — this horrid creature found herself married one day to the very boy she’d loved her entire life.”

  “Yes, madam, go on.”

  “However, when our wedding was at last performed, as I’d always hoped it would be, the groom chose not to consummate the union, but to flee. And who can blame him? Still, the heart is an obdurate little muscle, and it wants what it has been led to believe rightfully belongs to it.”

  “And what is that, madam? Let us be specific.”

  “If I tell you, will you aid me in securing it for myself?”

  Like a too-smug smuggler approaching his final border, Dr. Freud turned and gave me a triumphant look. “Frau Sammelsohn,” he said, “I will do so, if in turn you will promise me that upon receiving whatever you desire, you will peacefully depart from Fräulein Eckstein’s body without harming her in any wise, neither physically, mentally, psychologically, nor spiritually. You will further promise to forgo your life as a fugitive, sheltering no more in bodies that are foreign to you, but will remand yourself immediately to the Heavenly Courts, where you shall be tried and judged and sentenced in accordance with divine law.”

  I was struck dumb. Had Dr. Freud never bothered to read mythology? Did he have no idea what happened to people who make pledges and promises before understanding their implicatio
ns?

  “And you will say Kaddish on my behalf?” Ita negotiated her counter-terms.

  “I’m no shul-goer, madam,” Dr. Freud demurred. “In all honesty, my attendance at such a task, as honorable and noble as it might seem, would be spotty at best, but I will see to it that a mature boy of impeccable character, a scholar and a Hasid, is hired for the requisite period of eleven months to perform that which you ask.”

  “I do have a husband to mourn for me, you know.”

  Both Dr. Freud and Fräulein Eckstein looked at me, their gazes boring into my hands and feet, crucifying me to the cross of their examination.

  “I assure you he cannot be relied upon in this regard either,” Dr. Freud said simply.

  “That’s only too true, I suppose.” Ita sighed, rubbing her arms unhappily.

  “Madam, I will be frank with you. Under other circumstances, I would recommend a complete psychoanalysis. Only in this wise might we get to the bottom of your long unhappiness. However, the procedure is not only lengthy but expensive. You have no funds, and no way of procuring funds, and I’m afraid Fräulein Eckstein is equally poor in time. She cannot afford to linger in the twilight in which you’ve placed her for the duration a proper analysis requires. So in lieu of offering you my healing arts, make known to me your request and, if, as I say, it is within my power to obtain it for you, under the agreement we have set out, obtain it for you I shall.”

  “I have but one request.”

  Dr. Freud clapped his hands. “Then make it known and consider it yours!”

  “You’re a gracious man after all,” Ita said, unmanning us both with her charm.

  Dr. Freud bowed. “I thank you sincerely for the compliment.”

  “I underestimated the caliber of your character when I previously maligned you.”

  Ita seemed to be putting off making her request known. Was she fearful of the destructive angels waiting for her just outside the limits of our perceptions? Or was she too thoroughly enjoying our bedside attention to move on? Or did she, like all of us, have no wish to secure what she wanted if it meant ending her life?