A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

“Come, come, let us cease this endless handln, my dear Frau.”

  “A bride dreams only of one thing, of course.” Ita grew girlish beneath the mask of Fräulein Eckstein’s face. “The only thing I desire with all my heart is, of course, to lie with my husband as his wife.”

  Though I’d anticipated as much, I sputtered wordlessly in protest. Ita reached out to me from her bed. “Yankl, I don’t blame you, I don’t blame you, my darling, for turning away from me before! But look now! Look at the lovely body I’ve brought you!” She tossed aside the bedsheets. “You yourself were attracted to her at the Carl!”

  “Ita! Ita, it’s impossible,” I stammered. “Why, it … it would be … rape!”

  “Rape, between a man and his wife?”

  “Dr. Freud, for Heaven’s sake! Help me!” I pleaded, but Dr. Freud was strangely absent, staring at the nails of his hands.

  “I want you!” Ita cried. “Let me die happily and fulfilled! Yankl, look at what I’m offering you!” With nimble fingers, she began untying the laces of Fräulein Eckstein’s gown.

  “Stop!” I exclaimed, and in frustration, Ita dropped onto her stomach and pounded her fists against the mattress.

  “Why won’t you love me? Why won’t you love me?” she wailed into her pillows.

  I yanked Dr. Freud up from his chair where he’d been sitting glassy-eyed like a Chinaman in an opium den and pulled him into the hallway outside.

  CHAPTER 18

  Are you mad?” I nearly shouted.

  Dr. Freud grimaced. “What would you have me do?” he said. “Flee like Breuer at the first mention of gynecological matters? He held the key in his hand, Dr. Sammelsohn, he held the key in his hand! But unwilling, or perhaps constitutionally unable to use it, he dropped it!” Dr. Freud rubbed the underbridge of his nose. “For all his mental acuity, there’s nothing Faustian about poor Josef, I’m afraid.”

  I confess this reference to Dr. Faust unnerved me. In retrospect, one must really question the all-too-German enthusiasm for this work: an aging scholar trades his soul to the devil for vast knowledge and a wealth of depraved experiences, only to repent in the end and, through a loophole of Christian piety, be exonerated and forgiven. I’d only recently seen the play, Parts I and II, performed at Herr Franz’s Marvelous & Astonishing Puppet Theater, with puppets, as Goethe had first envisioned it. With this experience fresh in mind, Dr. Freud’s condemnation of Dr. Breuer rang differently in my ears than it did in his own, I’m certain. In his love of the play, seeing its protagonist as a paragon of Promethean daring, stealing fire by hook or crook from the Heavenly realms, Dr. Freud was typically German; I, on the other hand, preferred Dr. Breuer’s cooler head and calmer passions.

  “In these sorts of situations,” Dr. Freud said, “as indeed in all areas of my life, I have been no more courageous than most men; indeed, quite often less so. If I have tended to overcompensate for feelings of inferiority and cowardice, I’ve done it while quaking in my boots, so to speak. Until I met Wilhelm, that is.”

  “Until you met Dr. Fliess, you mean?” I begged for clarification.

  “Wilhelm cares nothing for the wisdom of pedants or the small, passionless victories of sober men working in somber laboratories, each afraid of his own shadow. For Wilhelm, it’s the grand gesture or nothing, the electric leap, riding along the clouds in no sturdier chariot than his own brilliance. Who else would have dared to place the nose so centrally in the sexual life of man? Not I, I can tell you that, nor you, Dr. Sammelsohn, nor Dr. Breuer, who is for me all I fear becoming. Why, he stood at the very gates of Hell and could not bring himself to enter its sacred precincts. And I believe we are now at a similar pass.”

  We? I thought. We? It was simple enough for Dr. Freud to say we. No one was asking him, for the sake of scientific inquiry, to drop his drawers and climb into bed with the soul of his dead wife and the body of a more or less perfect stranger. Granted, the more or less perfect body of a stranger, and one I had admired to the point of wishing for nothing more than this very invitation; and yet, though I might have wished to possess Fräulein Eckstein body and soul, it was not without the consent of their rightful owner.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Kobi.” Kobi? Dr. Freud never called me by this name, and I felt odd hearing it from his lips. “Your thoughts nearly float across your face. If I were being called upon to leap this moral barricade, I too would hesitate, and that is why I must tell you this: in similar situations — ”

  “Similar situations?” I barked incredulously.

  “I said similar, not identical,” he scolded me. “We were all young and virginal once. Even I, Kobi, though you might find that hard to believe. Of course, it’s true, my earliest sexual experiences were at the hands of a Christian nurse my parents employed, who used to take me with her to Mass when I was no more than eight. But no! When I say ‘in a situation like this,’ I mean one that gives a person pause and calls out of him all his reserves of courage to perform. In finding myself in such a situation, I now recite a simple formula: I ask myself a simple question.”

  “And that question is?”

  “What would Wilhelm do?”

  “ ‘What would Wilhelm do?’”

  “If ever I find myself hesitating before the herd mentality of our so-called peers or betters, that is the question I put to myself, ‘What would Wilhelm do?’ and arriving at an honest answer, I follow its exact course.”

  I was appalled to see him blushing like a schoolgirl.

  “Sigmund,” I said, assuming at first that in fair play I could call him by his first name as well, but feeling woefully uncomfortable doing so, I quickly corrected myself, “Dr. Freud.”

  “Perhaps I’ve given too much of myself away, and you will no longer credit me with authority. But certainly you’re no stranger to him. Though you’re not as intimate with him as I, you’ve seen his bold ways, his intellectual decisiveness. You’ve seen him raise the banner of his own brilliance atop intellectual and scientific peaks no one else has the courage to ascend. How many centuries have men stared at the nose of his neighbor before seeing it for the erogenous organ it truly is?”

  I collapsed into a chair. My head swimming, but barely, in confusion, I watched as my thoughts drowned one by one. If Dr. Freud could mistake that crazy-eight-ball Fliess for a paragon of intellectual attainment, what else was he mistaken about? Perhaps I’d grown too used to thinking of Dr. Freud as wise and all-knowing. The habit was so engrained in me, I wrote off his odd love of Dr. Fliess as a quirk having nothing at all to do with the rest of his character, rather than seeing it for what it perhaps was: the ill-placed foundation stone thanks to which the entire structure of his personal integrity might eventually collapse.

  “What in God’s name would you have me do, then?” I whispered hoarsely, scarcely able to speak.

  “Not run away, as Breuer did to Venice, forgetting everything he’d seen, letting his bourgeois concerns for his petty name cripple him at the threshold of a major discovery, like the little old lady that he is! No, Kobi, let neither of us turn away from this new continent, simply because it is as-yet unmapped; who knows what treasures, what spices, what new species of herbs and medicinals we might find inside its unwalked geographies! ‘What would Wilhelm do?’ That’s what you should be asking yourself!”

  I nodded unhappily, though in truth, this was hardly the question ringing in my ear, its tail raised in the interrogative, like a snake preparing to strike. The actual question piercing my flesh, like so many arrows into St. Sebastian’s, concerned only one thing: ESCAPE: avenues of; possibility vs. impossibility of; saving face while in the act of; near; narrow; rescue in the absence of; daring last-minute; see: DEUS EX MACHINA!

  “I’ll tell you what I imagine Dr. Fliess would do.” Dr. Freud drew my attention back to himself, though there was no need for him to say anything. I knew only too well what that unthinking psychopathic narcissist would be up to at this moment. As soon as it had entered my mind, I tried to banish the
picture of him, with his jacket off and his braces undone, his trousers in a puddle at his feet, his manhood protruding from beneath the tails of his shirtfront as though it were Pinocchio’s nose!

  “What you’re asking of me is impossible,” I said. “To begin with, it’s immoral.”

  “How is it immoral?”

  “It’s rape.”

  “But it’s not rape at all!”

  “Perhaps not in the name of some greedy pleasure, but still it’s rape.”

  “I’m surprised at you, Dr. Sammelsohn. You’re certainly not thinking very clearly.”

  “I’m not thinking clearly?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Very well then. Won’t you enlighten me, please?”

  Dr. Freud sat in the armchair opposite mine and looked at me with a weary condescension that belied the watery gleam in his eyes. “You are convinced, as I am not yet convinced, that the soul of your dead wife is inhabiting the body of this other. To believe this, you must a priori believe that souls are constant in ways that bodies are not. The body is no more than a garment the soul puts on and takes off. That is to say, if you can claim to recognize Ita without her body, then her body is in some essential way not her. Agreed? Neither then is Fräulein Eckstein’s body Fräulein Eckstein. Wherever Fräulein Eckstein is at the moment, she is not in her body, and if we can speak of her thus, then we can say that she is not her body, and therefore one cannot violate her by conjoining with a body that is not her, at least not at the moment, but is, rather, in some more essential sense, Ita. Why, you could no more kill me by stabbing a knife into my suit as it hangs in my wardrobe than you can violate Fräulein Eckstein by lying with Ita at this very moment.”

  “And yet,” I protested helplessly, “despite the confirmation from my sisters via their telegram, you yourself remain unconvinced that Ita is anything more than a symptom, a condition seconde, brought upon Fräulein Eckstein as a result of her hysteria.”

  “My mind is as yet unresolved on the matter, it’s true,” Dr. Freud grumbled.

  “And if your diagnostic suspicions prove correct, then you will have urged me onto a woman — ”

  “ — who in her condition seconde has herself requested that you make love to her.”

  “Which she does only because she’s ill, deluded, and not thinking as herself.”

  “I never claimed the matter was morally simple.”

  “But just look at me!” I cried.

  “I am,” he said. “Now tell me what it is you imagine I see.”

  “To begin with: I’m no Casanova.”

  “No, that’s plain and clear.”

  “And my experiences in these matters have been quite circumscribed.”

  “You’ve been married twice as well as divorced and widowed one time each.”

  “While remaining as virginal as a young maiden!”

  “You’re more naïve about the young maidens in Vienna than perhaps you ought to be.”

  “Nevertheless: I stand before you thus.”

  “Oh, Sammelsohn, Sammelsohn.” Dr. Freud shook his head. “How often does love call us by our proper names and summon us to its altar?”

  What was there to say in response to such a question? Nothing; and so I merely hung my thumbs in my vest pockets, curling my lower lip over the fringe of my mustache. Dr. Freud made everything sound so simple: “Give Ita what she wants, free Fräulein Eckstein from her possession, enjoy yourself with a clear conscience, and walk away free of guilt, not only from this encounter but from the wreckage of your second marriage as well.”

  “And if the being who addresses us is not in fact Ita, but some aspect of Fräulein Eckstein, what then?”

  “Listen, Chrobak once sent me a patient to whom he couldn’t give sufficient time. After eighteen years of marriage, the woman was still a virgin, her husband being impotent. Taking the man aside, Chrobak told him plainly: ‘The sole prescription for such a malady is familiar enough to us, but we cannot order it. It runs as follows: Rx Penis normalis; dosim repetatur.’ The entire thing, I wager, would be, in one way or the other, curative for her.”

  A squalling storm had broken out, its heavy drifts turning the black night outside the sanatorium windows a chilling bone white. I shivered. It was already quite late. Dr. Freud had secured permission to attend Fräulein Eckstein around the clock. Aside from a night nurse stationed at the front desk, the only staff abroad at this hour were one or two cleaning ladies, old drabs in babushkas, mopping the floors and gossiping to each other in their low country dialect.

  “A STOUT DRINK should do you good.”

  I didn’t see where Dr. Freud had suddenly produced a bottle of his favorite Hennessey from, but he seemed so certain of himself and I so filled with doubts, I greedily accepted the drink and threw down nearly a fourth of the bottle. “Take some in to Ita,” he advised, steering me towards Fräulein Eckstein’s door. His keen interest in the proceedings displeased me greatly. Certainly Fräulein Eckstein, and Ita by extension, remained Dr. Freud’s patient and not mine; but this encounter — so long dreamed of, so often deferred — belonged not to Dr. Freud, but to me, and though he’d facilitated it, I couldn’t help resenting his proprietary interest in its outcome.

  Nevertheless, I entered the room. Emma, Ita, whoever it was, lay in bed with no light on. Receiving no response from the sleeper, I went to the window and stood watching the snow fall in silent drifts. I could feel a chill on my cheeks through the thin window pane. Was Dr. Freud correct? Could I free Ita from her unnatural sorrow simply by offering myself to her as a husband? Could such lechery ever truly appear heroic? What would my father say? (Of course, wasn’t this, in some way, exactly what he’d wanted?) But how would Fräulein Eckstein, returned to herself as a consequence, view the act? What would her mother think? Or her father, for that matter? Or her brother, the famous Sanskritist? Perhaps he’d challenge me to a duel! Say what you will about Dr. Breuer, it was unlikely he would perish at dawn in a field facing down a bullet fired at his all-too-timid heart by a male member of the Pappenheim clan, while his seconds looked on helplessly. However, as I stood over Fräulein Eckstein’s body and gazed upon its perplexing convexities — she lay in her rumpled sheets with one arm flung over her head and the other across her belly, her hands grasping at nothing, her tousled hair freed from its public poses, her mouth open as though in a sigh — I admit that all thoughts of right and wrong left my head. Only a fool inquires into the morality of a rose, I told myself; a sensible man simply surrenders to its fragrance and its beauty.

  “Ita?” I called softly, shaking her gently. “Ita, my darling?” She stirred, but did not awaken. She moved her head, squinted her already closed eyes. Rubbing the back of her hand violently across her nose, she clacked her tongue twice against the roof of her mouth and uttered the words: “Soup, now, I suppose.” She exhaled and grew still. There was room on the bed next to her, and so I placed first one knee and then the next upon the mattress. I knelt beside her, trying to disturb her as little as possible. I leaned in to kiss her, balancing on one hand, my knuckles pressing against the bed. My jacket had a too-constricting effect on me and so, standing, I removed it as quietly as I could and hung it on a peg on the back of the door. As long as I was at it, I uncuffed and rolled up my shirtsleeves, tucking my cufflinks into my breast pocket.

  “Ita?” I said again, and again I received no response.

  A decision had at this point been made, I suppose. Unlike Dr. Breuer, I had committed myself to receiving the full force of love the patient held for me. At the time, however, I was thinking not of decisions and principles, but only of roses and perfumes. I convinced myself that I would kiss her only, cuddle her as a father or a brother might, profess my affection for her, and let her decide what our sexual destiny would be. I wanted merely to demonstrate to her my carnal availability should she truly, as she claimed, wish to avail herself of it. The door was locked. I’d checked it more than once. Dr. Freud, in any case, was on the other s
ide, serving as a sentinel with his Hennessey. I climbed again upon her bed, balancing on my knees as precariously as before. Again, with one hand on the mattress, I leaned in towards her, my lips on the delicate hinge joining her neck and her shoulder. I kissed her, inhaling all the scents of her soaps, her bran baths, her shampoos, her laundered clothes, the lingering musk of her anger. She breathed out hummingly and giggled. Emboldened, I kissed her cheek. With her eyes closed, she laughed against the pressure of my mouth upon her face. When I kissed her lips, they did not pucker against mine, but lay unpursed. The sensation was coldly unpleasant, not unlike, I imagined, kissing a corpse. She turned from me — I must have been disturbing her slumber — her shoulder angled against my check, her breast falling innocently into my open palm. Beneath the thin flannel of her night blouse, her nipple seemed to have shaken off its own slumbers, lifting its little head from the pillow of her flesh.

  “Ita?” I said, kissing her now behind her ear, untying her collar, cupping my hand around her warm breast. “I’m here — just as you’ve asked me to be.”

  Reader, how happy I would be to skip over this next part, but as I have committed myself to the whole bolt of truth, no inferior remnant will do. Still, it’s impossible to convey the horror of what next occurred. As I cupped my hand around Fräulein Eckstein’s breast, a masculine voice rang out, filling the room, like a sonorous gong, with its castigations: “Dr. Sammelsohn,” it cried, “what on earth are you doing? Are you out of your mind!”

  I removed my hand from the patient’s chest and peered over my shoulder towards the door where I imagined I might face my accuser. No one, however, was there. Assuming the voice belonged merely to my conscience, I sighed with relief until it addressed me a second time: “We’re not behind you.”

  “No?” I said into thin air.

  “Rather you hold us in your arms.”

  I looked at Fräulein Eckstein. She stared at me with an unnerving intensity. Her mouth was agape and the deep ringing voice emanated — I was horrified to realize this — from somewhere within her! I dropped her instantly — “I’m terribly sorry, my good sir!” — and jumped away from the bed, unrolling my cuffs and wrapping myself in my jacket. “Of course, I didn’t realize …” I began, but I could think of nothing further to say.