The Longest Way Home

by Andrew McCarthy

  “Come on, luv,” she said.

  “No, no. We don’t want to go up there,” I shouted after her, still looking for an exit. I could feel sweat under my heavy coat as I followed everyone up the marble steps.

  We emerged into a room with an evening gown on display, and then into another with a headless mannequin filling out a massive ball gown. The girls began to ooh and aah.

  We were in the imperial apartments, once the living quarters of Franz Josef the First and his wife, Empress Elisabeth—known to her loyal subjects as Sissi. Her story was full of intrigue. A free spirit and a modern woman before her time, Sissi struggled with her role in the monarchy and, much like Princess Diana a little more than a century later, was beloved by her people. Her death, by assassination, while walking along a promenade beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland, sealed her destiny as a tragic heroine.

  “This should interest you, Andrew,” Colm said, absorbed in reading about Sissi. “She was an avid traveler.”

  I chased our suddenly happy daughter through Sissi’s bedroom and into her private gym. We laughed at Sissi’s personal water closet. Eventually we descended the steps and reemerged into the hard bright day.

  “See, not so bad.” D shrugged, taking my arm.

  After lunch, I had a surprise for everyone—the one event I had booked before arriving in Vienna. The famed Lipizzaner stallions of the Spanish Riding School, a local institution and a hallmark of imperial Vienna, were practicing for their twice-weekly shows in a nearby section of the palace. The shows were sold out but I had arranged for us to see the daily practice session—which is open to the public—by finagling ringside seats reserved for special guests and dignitaries. These seats were rarely occupied during practice. My daughter would be thrilled to be so close to the action, and D’s parents would bask in the elegant surroundings and the tradition and pomp, to say nothing of the special treatment. D would be pleased with my family-focused initiative.

  I sought out my contact. Mrs. Drabanek was a prim woman with straight blond hair and a direct manner. She told us that the session had already begun, and entrance or exit to this special section of the hall was forbidden in midaction. D’s mother looked confused; her father sank his hands deeper into his pockets. D tried to console our daughter, who got the gist that there was a problem.

  I took Mrs. Drabanek aside.

  “Please,” I begged. “I’m so sorry we’re late, but my daughter has been dying to see the horses, it’s all she’s talked about since we came to Vienna. ” In truth, we had just told her about the stallions a few minutes earlier—but she was immediately very excited. “And my in-laws,” I said—not even choking on the words—“it’s been a dream of theirs for many years.” There was no truth in this either, but they were happy enough to go along.

  She looked into my pleading eyes and then over my shoulder, where the family was playing their part by looking suitably bereft.

  “Come,” she said, and marched toward the door.

  “Thank you,” I whispered as we slipped into the hushed hall. I may even have said, “Bless you,” I can’t remember for sure.

  We settled in beneath crystal chandeliers and Corinthian columns. Under the tutelage of erect riders in brown coats with hazelwood switches, six majestic white stallions were prancing and preening, accompanied by the sounds of Chopin.

  Silently we slid into the front row, just a few feet from the horses, alone in the VIP section. I gave Mrs. Drabanek a large grin; she nodded curtly and exited.

  Perhaps the shows themselves present a dazzling and dizzying exhibition of equine majesty, or perhaps to the educated eye, the minute steps we saw practiced over and over and over again would be a fascinating display of discipline and skill—but within minutes we were bored. My daughter began to fidget on my lap. Margot looked at her watch, while Colm folded his arms and his chin sank toward his chest. D refused to meet my eye; she struggled to keep the grin from her face. We still had forty-five minutes to go.

  Then my daughter began to talk. Loud. A few discreet glances came from the riders inside the ring. Margot leaned over and said she was going for a coffee. “You’re not allowed to leave,” I wanted to say. She nudged her husband awake and with D following, they slid out.

  “You and me will stay and watch the horses, huh, pumpkin?” I whispered to my daughter on my lap.

  “Yeah,” she whispered back, and snuggled closer. Twenty seconds later, “I want a hot chocolate, Daddy,” she said in her normal voice.

  “Shh. Soon, pumpkin, soon.”

  “Where’s Mommy?” she called out.

  When I raced past a shocked Mrs. Drabanek in the lobby, I couldn’t bring myself to meet her glare as I whispered a hurried, “My daughter’s sick,” and lunged for the exit.

  Outside, a white carriage hitched to a white horse was standing by the curb. D and her parents were already inside, waiting. She swung the door open wide for us.

  “I knew you wouldn’t last long, luv,” D said. My daughter climbed in, thrilled—this was her kind of horse action. She sat up tall on her granny’s lap, a blanket tucked high up under her chin. Her blue eyes were wide and both she and her granny looked out with pride as we rolled over cobblestone streets.

  I have no such rosy memories of my own grandparents. My mother’s father died before I was born, and her mother, a small, creased woman who insisted we call her Grandmom, lived in our town, a half dozen blocks away. She would occasionally come over to babysit in the evenings. She was constantly turning off lights around the house, and my memories of time spent with her are always dimly lit.

  One evening, while babysitting, she tripped over one of our dogs and fell. I heard the crash from the den and went running into the dining room. My grandmother was on the floor, disentangling herself from Duchess, our Airedale. I loved Duchess; she had an independent streak and a slightly disinterested manner that I appreciated.

  “I tripped over Duchess,” my grandmother said when I rushed in. Her wig was askew, and she was struggling to straighten it. From the sound of her voice I could tell that she was shaken. Duchess, who had been roused from sleep, was merely looking at her.

  “She’s okay, Grandmom,” I said without thinking, and began to stroke Duchess’s fur.

  “No, not the dog, me!” my grandmother shouted. “I fell and hurt myself.” On the floor in the dark of the dining room my allegiances had been exposed.

  And I was no closer to my father’s parents. I saw them only once a year, on Thanksgiving. They terrified me. My grandmother I remember as a hard, stout woman with a stern voice. I steered clear of her as much as I could in her cramped apartment on Thirty-fifth Street in Union City, New Jersey. She and my grandfather lived on the ground floor while my more welcoming aunt and uncle lived up the flight of stairs with their daughter and two great mastiffs—dogs far too large to be comfortable in the small apartment.

  I have only one distinct memory of my paternal grandfather, who was an intimidating and remote man with a thick head of white hair. It was shortly before he died, when I was around ten. It was nowhere near Thanksgiving, and we had made a special trip to Union City to see him. The end was near and he was bedridden. My father led me into the old man’s room, “to say good-bye,” I was told. It was very hot, and I remember my grandfather lying in a single bed under a heavy burgundy blanket. It was the middle of the day and the shade was pulled down; only a thin stream of light entered the room below it. My grandfather seemed barely conscious and was looking straight up at the ceiling. I could feel my father behind me.

  “Pop, you remember Andrew,” my dad said. “He wanted to say hello.” I don’t remember if I spoke or not, and I recall nothing of what my grandfather might have said. Even at the time I felt like there was some kind of protocol that we all needed to follow, yet none of us seemed to know what that protocol was or how we should follow it. My eyes stayed focused on the dust motes drifting across the thin beam of light that fell over the bed. After a few minutes I was led out of
the room and I asked my father if I had done all right.

  “You did just fine,” he said, but it didn’t feel fine. I felt like I had failed somehow. I walked upstairs to my aunt’s to pet one of her giant dogs.

  Our days in Vienna fell into a rhythm centered around late-morning coffee and afternoon tea. These were not ten-minute refueling stops but, rather, long sessions at some of Vienna’s more famous cafés—Demel with its elegant salons and dessert-filled trays, its glass-walled kitchen where my daughter and I watched chocolate bunnies being poured, filled, and sculpted by a dozen bakers in tall white hats; Café Sperl, where scores of newspapers in a dozen languages were strewn across the carambole billiards tables beneath crystal chandeliers; and even the smoky Café Alt Wien, with its protest posters lining the walls while students at small wooden tables hunched over loose paperbacks and nursed espressos. Everywhere we went, Colm ordered extravagant pastries and desserts. Plates and forks were passed around, judgments made and then reevaluated. More coffee was drunk. Often my daughter and I grew bored and would wander off together. One afternoon before walking into yet another café, Margot turned to me.

  “Andrew, my love, you don’t like all these desserts, why don’t you go take some time to yourself?”

  I knew exactly where I would go.

  Down a flight of dingy red-carpeted steps off Karlsplatz and into the Burg Kino, across a lobby heavy with the smell of burned popcorn, through a chipped burgundy door, and into a sparsely filled dark room late on that blustery Tuesday afternoon, I first heard the famous line—“I was a friend of Harry Lime.”

  “Everyone ought to be careful in a city like this,” and noir classics like “You were born to be murdered,” “Leave death to the professionals,” and a classic Graham Greene theme, “Humanity is a duty,” were uttered from the scratchy black and white print of the 1949 Carol Reed film.

  Few movies are so identified with a particular city as The Third Man is with Vienna. Shot while the city was still under the rubble of the Second World War and divided into four quadrants controlled by U.S., French, British, and Soviet forces, Graham Greene’s script is a classic cat-and-mouse tale of deception, a study of loneliness and duplicity. Anton Karas’s score, played on a zither, infiltrates the proceedings, adding to the discomfort, and has come to define the genre. I had never seen it before.

  As a child, I hadn’t gone to the movies often, and I had never seen a movie alone until I went off to college. But as a student in New York, I joined the last generation of moviegoers who frequented the half dozen revival houses that would soon disappear with the advent of home video and cable TV. At the Eighth Street Playhouse I first saw On the Waterfront and The Wild One in a Marlon Brando double bill. At the Hollywood on Eighth Avenue and Forty-seventh Street I watched Midnight Cowboy, and way uptown on Ninety-fifth Street at the Thalia I was introduced to James Dean and Buster Keaton, and the films of Antonioni and Godard. I would go to the movies in the afternoon, by myself, while the world I knew carried on in my absence outside. It was my first real experience of travel—solo excursions to places that were so alien. And as I would soon discover on the road, powers of observation were rewarded, my imagination was fired, and this encouraged still further exploration. I discovered the neorealistic films of De Sica and the playfully amoral world of Chabrol. The things I saw on-screen made sense in a way that felt deeply familiar, and as with the first time I acted, I innately understood my place in it. Alone in the dark, I located myself.

  In Vienna, sitting in that scrappy cinema, my two universes converged. When I walked back out into the early evening, onto the same streets where I had just seen Joseph Cotten pursue Orson Welles, I felt I understood something about Vienna and myself that I hadn’t before. I possessed a sense of belonging I had lacked just a few hours earlier. When I walked past number 5 Josefsplatz, across from the statue of Emperor Josef II on his horse, and saw the statue of four maidens supporting the portico of the building where Harry Lime was supposedly killed at the start of the film, I felt like a member of some kind of a secret society, in possession of a certain knowledge and its resulting confidence. But as I walked farther, a thought began to play in my mind: perhaps this feeling of confidence and comfort wasn’t just the result of having seen a movie.

  D’s family had accepted me from the moment she and her mother picked me up at the airport in Dublin for the first time seven years earlier. Driving back to their home to serve me a full Irish breakfast, Margo kept up a steady patter and began an active embracing of who I am that has not abated. That I have seen more of D’s family in the past seven years than I have of my own in the last thirty speaks to both the active closeness of D’s family and the casual distance of mine. Perhaps my mood of confidence and security that night on the Vienna streets was more reflective of my beginning to feel a part of something bigger, something I wasn’t yet ready to reconcile.

  Or perhaps, I thought, my feelings of familial inclusion and cinematic belonging were all of my own creation; perhaps it was just some neurotic need looking to be filled.

  So the next day, I headed to Vienna resident Sigmund Freud’s house on Berggasse. Perhaps a visit to the home of the great psychoanalyst would help clarify these conflicting impulses.

  Colm was eager to join me. We hopped the number 2 tram, which I thought would circle the Ringstrasse. Instead, it turned off on Alser Strasse and headed in the wrong direction. Colm was patient with yet another of my navigational mistakes and eventually we righted ourselves and saw the large red sign with FREUD in bold block letters.

  At the top of a flight of stairs, we were greeted by a small, trim man with a deliberate manner and precise movements, dressed entirely in black. With a watchful expression, he directed us toward a door across the hall. It was in these half-dozen rooms that Freud lived and worked for forty-seven years. His walking stick, suitcase, a few hats, and a personalized flask were behind Plexiglas in the cramped entryway lit by the filtered light of a single leaded glass window. To the right was the waiting room, still laid out as it was in Freud’s time. Glass cabinets contained many of his more than three thousand Greek, Roman, Chinese, and Egyptian objects—tiny statues and fragments. (The good doctor had a bit of an obsession.) A red damask couch lined one wall; above it were four copperplate engravings depicting the four elements, earth, water, fire, and air—love and strife, Eros and destruction, vying for dominance. Opposite was the entrance to the room where the doctor listened with “evenly poised attention” to the complaints of his patients. The famous couch was conspicuously absent, having gone with Freud to London when he fled the Nazis in 1938. Instead, the chamber was left nearly empty.

  Large black and white photos depicting how the room once looked covered the bottom half of the walls, while personal letters and photos adorned the top. I could only imagine what Freud might have thought, looking out the single window, beside which he used to listen and take notes (and according to his own reports, occasionally doze off during sessions). The room beyond was his inner sanctum, where Freud wrote and smoked his beloved cigars. Above a desk and between windows that looked out onto a courtyard hung a mirror where he often inspected the results of the thirty operations he underwent for jaw cancer. “Since I can no longer smoke freely,” he once lamented, “I no longer wish to write.” His books lined one wall. The rooms revealed a decidedly human man of great insight, large ego, prescience, vanity, clarity, and obsession.

  Despite rumors of an affair with his sister-in-law, Freud’s personal life was typically conservative, with a long and successful marriage that produced six children. And while his family life offered no insight into my own evolving notions on the subject, copious evidence of his obviously contradictory nature provided relief and encouraged some empathy in me for my own vacillating ways.

  Reassured in my conflicted humanity, I found Colm patiently waiting by the door. As we descended the marble stairs I tried to remember if I had ever done anything like this with my own father.

  The las
t time I had seen my dad was when D and I took the kids up to visit him and his wife a few summers earlier. My parents had divorced several years after I went to college; my father then met a woman, married her, and resettled in rural Maine, effectively vanishing from our lives, with only occasional phone calls and rumored visits to New York that rarely transpired.

  My kids mentioned they were eager to see their grandfather—my son had met him only once, our daughter never had. The last time I had seen my father was when D was heavily pregnant. We headed to Maine.

  We pulled into his driveway and my father and his wife were waiting on the stoop. They greeted us warmly, fawned over the kids, and showed us their home on a hill a few blocks from the water. “An old captain’s house,” my father called it. I recognized various furnishings from my childhood that I hadn’t seen in years, a coffee table, a bookcase, a few paintings. It was odd to see them there, these relics of my childhood that I hadn’t thought of since I left home as a teenager. I felt possessive of them; what were they doing here, in this strange house so far from home?

  My father and his wife had prepared lunch for us, but he was nervous and couldn’t eat. He kept up a steady patter with the kids. They adored him.

  That evening it poured. My father bragged that there was a place not far away that served the best ice cream in the world. I put the two kids in the back of my father’s Oldsmobile and drove as he sat beside me. The speedometer in the car didn’t work, and only one headlamp would light. The rain was lashing down. We drove along the two-lane highway for a long time. I squinted to see in the dark.

  “Maybe we passed it,” my father said.

  “Turn around, Dad,” my son called from the back.

  Then it appeared on the right, a purpose-built, Swiss chalet–like structure with two take-out windows. We huddled under the narrow eave of the roof out of the rain and ordered. On the way back to the house my father finished his ice cream sundae before either of the kids. I had no idea my father loved ice cream.