Back Then

by Anne Bernays

  For all the tacit openness of our relationship on both sides, she put up with a great deal of faithless and self-serving behavior along with my reluctance, even under pressure, to make any commitment. I kept my apartment, and she kept hers. As a couple we had no future, as much as we genuinely liked each other: whatever spark there had been between us had gone out. One day, crossing Fifty-third Street on the west side of Fifth Avenue, Lucy and I passed Anne Bernays crossing in the other direction. Annie and I barely knew each other then. She wore a little gray suede hat and a rosy red wool coat, and she had a rosy aura. We smiled, exchanged quick hellos and no more, and then went on our ways. I must have blushed. Lucy said, “I think that is someone very important to you.”

  CHAPTER 5

  You know you’re near or at the end of therapy when you can’t stand to say the word I any longer. This may take years.

  In the early 1950s entering psychoanalysis—for those of us with money to blithely spend on books, records, theater tickets, lipstick, hosiery, and assorted knickknacks—was as much an initiation rite as pledging a sorority was to another kind of girl. In order to qualify for analysis you didn’t have to be mad, unable to get out of bed in the morning, or self-mutilating—simple malaise or anomie would do it.

  Nor was analysis as concerned with helping the female patient find herself (how about looking behind the couch in the study?) as with her forming a lasting relationship with a man. In this it was behind feminism by half a century. For years I had been dating men about as wholesome as deviled eggs left out beneath a midday sun. Only when the men with whom I went to movies and hockey games, Village bars and fancy Midtown restaurants, Fifty-second Street jazz clubs, Fire Island weekends, and boat rides on Long Island Sound, only when they had a nasty streak or an unchecked urge to squeeze me into a skin designed for someone else was I drawn to them. Otherwise I found them far too nice; niceness meant erotic voltage so low as to not give off any appreciable heat or light. I couldn’t be bothered with them, was rude over the phone, sent them packing with the dispatch of a train conductor slightly behind schedule. All my female friends, intellectual, artistic and/or professionally ambitious, were also looking for mates. That’s what you were expected to do and that’s what you did. You got educated, you married, you had children. To reach your late twenties without being at least engaged was to face a future as “spinster.” Not much had changed in the nature of the man-hunt since Jane Austen dramatized it in her novels.

  Aged twenty-one, a senior at Barnard, and watching one classmate after another tie the knot, I was sufficiently aware of my tropism for pain to appreciate it but not strong enough to stop it. Psychoanalysis? Why not? Everyone else was doing it. I assumed—correctly, as it turned out—that my father had a direct line to the American psychoanalytic Vatican, and so it seemed logical to ask his help in finding someone to straighten me out, to get rid of the kinks and convert conflict into resolution. He seemed pleased to be consulted about something so private and profound as another person’s psyche. Within a week he had produced a list of names. This man had done such and such, that one was one of his uncle’s favorite pupils, a third was president of the New York Psychoanalytical Society; all were M.D.s, all were credentialed up to the ears. I shut my eyes and touched the piece of paper with my index finger. “I’ll try him—Edward Kronold.” On what other basis could I possibly have made a decision? “I’ll let him know that you’re going to phone him,” my father said. I realized that one of my problems was the very act of applying to my father for help with my problems. He, at least, liked it that way.

  My father offered to make the telephone call; I politely declined and made the initial call myself. A man with a soft voice and fluid Viennese accent told me to come to his office on Ninety-sixth Street and Madison Avenue on Wednesday at two o’clock. He didn’t ask me how old I was or what kind of time I had at my disposal, assuming, I suppose, that if I was in turmoil I would stop whatever I was doing when summoned by a healer. I wrote down his address, although it was immediately inscribed into my memory.

  Other than that one peculiar visit to the office of Dr. Kubie, I had no clue to how to behave in a shrink’s office, and this made me extremely nervous. Dr. Kronold’s office was in the sort of kempt apartment building I was accustomed to visiting. A uniformed doorman stood beneath a canopy stretching across the sidewalk. He touched his cap to me as I entered the building. (Did he know where I was headed? Of course he did.) An elevator man took me silently up to the ninth floor, a well-lit, odorless hallway, no peeling paint or tiny creatures scurrying into cracks. No cracks. I pushed the buzzer and a medium-tall, mostly bald man with sincere eyes and a slight stoop opened the door. This was the healer. He showed me into a tiny waiting room—two Scandinavian-type chairs, a table with a few magazines, a bathroom, a box of Kleenex—and said he would be with me in a minute and disappeared through another door. I sat down, picked up a current issue of Holiday magazine, and tried to focus, but I was too agitated and put it back on the table. The gears had started to grind in the deliberate and planned mystique of this arcane branch of medicine, the process of entering one quiet chamber after another, of—willingly or otherwise—relinquishing the deepest secrets of the heart, of being entirely in the emotional hands of someone you will never know as a flesh-and-blood person but only as a vague presence. I was an instant postulant.

  Dr. K was back. “Come this way, please,” he said and led me into his office, which, after a brief inspection, I decided was the family living room. It had two windows that gave out over Ninety-sixth Street, a large desk and desk chair, and The Couch, with several pillows piled at one end. Over the pillows lay a soft paper napkin, the kind dentists pin around your neck before they start in on you. Two low armchairs forming a V with a table between them were upholstered in light gray, the same pale, nonthreatening shade on the walls. Directly above the couch in this inmost sanctum, from inside a frame and behind glass, my father’s uncle Sigmund’s dour countenance looked out, or rather down, the Moses of the religion I was about to become a dues-paying member of.

  “Please sit down,” Dr. Kronold said, indicating one of the two armchairs. I was so relieved not to have to lie down on the dread couch that I almost, but not quite, smiled. He sat in the other side of the V and asked me why I was there, what had gone on during the previous twenty-one years of my life, what I expected to get from the treatment. None of his questions was sharp enough to disturb the crust over my unconscious. But that was the whole idea—a gradual and benign introduction into the maze that was at once both the contents of my head and the course of the therapy.

  Soon enough I was on the couch. Dr. K was of the old school, the one whose driver’s manual insists that the doctor never initiate a conversation. Three times a week, then twice, I showed up at Ninety-sixth Street, sat for three or four minutes in the decompression chamber—the waiting room—entered the inner sanctum, walked over to the couch, lay down on my back, and stared at the ceiling. No one who hasn’t gone through it can imagine the strength of two purple currents—boredom and rage—that meet inside you as you lie on the couch trying desperately to find something to say. There were entire blocks of fifty minutes—time I was paying twenty-five dollars for, each block draining a trust fund my father had set up for me—when not a single word emerged from either my mouth or Dr. K’s. “Your time is up,” he would say, not recognizing the ambiguity.

  During one “session” I told Dr. K that I would like to move into my own apartment, get out from under my parents. No big life changes during treatment, he said, nixing the relocation, the idea being that you had first to work through whatever it was that made living at home so aggravating; after you stopped minding the arrangement so much, then you could move out. No-big-lifechanges-during-treatmentithstanding, there came a day when Dr.chang K told me that I had a choice: either stop seeing Anatole, or stop treatment. Basically it was one of those him or me situations—without the jealousy. When I asked him why, Dr. K said my sick,
dependent relationship with this man kept me from doing the hard work that analysis demands. That afternoon I called Anatole from a pay phone at Barnard. “Dr. K says I can’t see you anymore,” I told him. Anatole—who was in analysis himself—said, “I had a feeling this would happen.”

  This was very hard. Within twenty-four hours I went from total dependence to total solitude. Surprised that I possessed the muscle to make the right choice—Dr. K over Anatole—I was also surprised that I didn’t feel at all good about it. In fact, it pretty much robbed me of any feeling at all for half a year while I went through the process of surrendering a heavy drug habit. Numbly, I sat in front of the television set watching Ernie Kovacs in the morning and Mr. Peepers in the evening. Sometimes my mother would watch with me; Mr. Peepers was her favorite program. She never asked me what was the matter.

  I finished my senior year at Barnard, even managing to ace the final, seven-hour exam in English literature, starting in the Middle Ages, and ending in the twentieth century.

  All through this dead time I kept my appointments with Dr. K, telling him my dreams as if they were short stories. They often featured a beach with a tidal wave and a blue-black sky. Each telling was followed by a sincere attempt to uncover buried meaning in the people and objects that filled the dream narrative. Nothing was what it felt or looked like. A baby wasn’t a baby, it was an idea; a car, wasn’t a car, it was a weapon, and so on. I had a hard time coming up with interpretations Dr. K wasn’t skeptical of. How did I know this? From the sound of his breathing or of his lighting up yet another cigarette and securing it in its holder, or of his recrossing his legs behind my head. I was certain that, one day, he would kick me with one of them.

  It went on and on. Sometimes I talked, sometimes I didn’t. Where were we going with this expensive journey into the maze? At last impatience found my father. “How much longer are you going to see that man?” I had no idea; the twists and turns seemed to be moving no nearer the exit. Maybe he saw no change in me, at least nothing sufficient to justify the time and money it was using up. “I’m going to write the fellow a letter,” he said.

  A few days later Dr. K reported that he had received a letter from my father asking for a report on my progress. “You know,” Dr. K said, making me feel good, “that I can’t write back to him without your permission.” His driver’s manual said so. What would happen if he talked to my father without asking my permission? Would the whole edifice—the silences, the enforced neutrality, the insidious transference—come tumbling down, and would trust then fly out the window? Would the analysand, betrayed, curse the analyst and leave in a huff? But I gave my permission, figuring that during this meeting I too might find out how I was doing.

  Dr. K wrote to my father, inviting him to come to one of my sessions. He read me the letter. “It is impossible to discuss your daughter’s progress over the telephone. And, in any case, I cannot speak with you without Anne’s being present.”

  This lit my father’s fire. He thought he was going to get the word over the telephone, short and sweet, like a report of “benign,” from pathology. “I’m not going there. I don’t have the time,” he said. Then, to my mother, “Doris, you go.”

  Later I asked my mother why my father wouldn’t go himself. “Is he scared?” She wouldn’t answer directly, which made me think he was; the idea that my father could be intimidated by Dr. K would have struck me as funny if it hadn’t raised questions about my father I didn’t feel like dealing with. You don’t want to think your father isn’t up to dealing with a little unpleasantness. This was not a new idea, but each time there was new evidence it stung me again.

  Like a lot of women who, whenever they find themselves on uncharted waters, resort to a nervous flirtatiousness to keep themselves from being swamped, my mother did this now as she sat down in Dr. K’s office and lit a Parliament cigarette. The three of us sat in a semicircle, each within an arm’s length of the others. Dr. K asked my mother one frontal question after another while I remained largely silent. What did she think a mother’s role consisted of? Had she found genuine satisfaction in her work as my father’s professional partner? Had she ever considered having more children? Could she describe her emotional life with her husband? Her eyes were getting watery when he asked her if she might consider the notion that she had tried to do too many things at once and that had she focused on being a mother her daughter might not be so conflicted today. . . . The tears spilled out.

  Had he overstepped? After all, this meeting was supposed to be about me, not my mother. She pulled an embroidered handkerchief from her purse and began to sob into it, stunning me. I had seen her cry only three times before in my life. Once, before I was old enough to understand that people sometimes enjoy hurting each other, when I found her weeping on the porch of a summer house soon after my father had slammed the door and left. Another time was when I came home from school and found her sitting at the kitchen table with the cook, both of them crying over President Roosevelt, who had died of a stroke that afternoon. Dr. K looked at her benignly, a doctor who has lanced the boil and is interested in the pus that oozes out. He was blaming my mother for my troubles, and instead of defending herself she caved. First he had stuck it to my father and now he was sticking it to my mother. While I felt sorry for her as the target of his polite attack—he neither raised his voice nor used charged language—I was also experiencing my first spell of schadenfreude, that half-guilty state in which you find yourself enjoying someone else’s pain. Hard lines on her—she shouldn’t have gone out to work from the time I was an infant, leaving me and my older sister in the care of first nannies, then governesses, and finally “companions,” college girls recruited to take us for walks in Central Park and trips to the dentist. My mother never wore a housedress or apron, never plunged her fingers into a gob of dough, never wielded mop, dust rag, or broom. She worked on a typewriter in an office. Now my analyst was implying that she had made a fatal mistake. She was smart and didn’t have to have this spelled out letter by letter. Thus the tears—as well as my surprise. It hadn’t occurred to me that she was even partly to blame for my poor taste in men, my dead-end romances. I would have to think it over. My mother wiped away the last of her tears as we rode down in the elevator. “He’s mean,” she said. “I never heard him talk that way,” I said. “So opinionated.”

  “Am I such a terrible mother?”

  “Of course not,” I said, using the same words and tone I did whenever she asked me if she looked fat. Truth was, I had no one to compare her with.

  My analysis seemed to borrow one of my great uncle’s deathless phrases: “Analysis, Terminable and Interminable.” Somewhere along about the third year I said—I thought casually—”Generals should have sons.” Dr. K pounced on this as if waiting a long time for it, a pig smelling truffles in the forest. I meant that men seem to like having their male offspring go into their father’s line of work. Dr. K then nudged me toward the ultimate confession: I wanted a penis. I told him I had never found the penis all that attractive, that it was as if a man’s insides were hanging outside, making him both vulnerable and droll. I preferred a woman’s body, its smoothness and symmetry. He didn’t believe me.

  Nor did he believe me when I assured him I had never seen my parents making love. These impasses prolonged the therapy while we danced around each other, Dr. K quietly trying to get me to spill the Freudian beans and I resisting because what he wanted me to say—I wanted to be a man, I wanted to sleep with my father, I was jealous of my mother—seemed far more ludicrous than plausible.

  Dr. K bristled one day when, for lack of something better to say, I speculated aloud that I might try to write a story. Instead of the silence with which most of my remarks were greeted, he landed on me with both feet: “You didn’t come here in order to learn how to write.” At that moment I realized that yes, this desire was one of my secrets, but up until then, it had been so deeply buried I hadn’t detected it myself. I construed Dr. K’s response to be a t
aboo: “Do not write; it will interfere with your life as a woman.” The bud was firmly nipped. It would be three years before I brushed away my misgivings.

  CHAPTER 6

  For better or worse, Sigmund Freud was the Pied Piper of my generation. We believed in him. He promised us self-knowledge, self-realization, forgiveness, freedom from the shocks and chimeras of our past, and if not a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage, at least a clearer view of our prospects. We fell into line behind him, like the children of Hamelin. Along with the grave cadences of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Freud’s gospel shaped our thinking and feeling. He had become, as Auden wrote in his great memorial poem, “a whole climate of opinion.”

  In my circle of friends, most of them graduate students at Harvard, one of the effects of this ambient psychic weather was to make neurosis almost fashionable. It was a mark of distinction, not a stigma or impediment. In Boston in the late 1940s, before many of us left for New York to look for work in the real world, we often got together evenings in the cat-infested apartment on the wrong side of Beacon Hill that I shared with two other students. Several more lived upstairs. During World War II the building, near Scollay Square, the city’s combat zone, had been a brothel. Now the only live vestige of the old flesh trade was a blowzy professional, Sally, on the top storey. Nailed to the outside of her door was a wooden sign painted pink, cut out in the shape of a teakettle, and bearing an invitation: come on in, it’s always boiling. One night after she moved away three juiced-up sailors came looking for action. In their rage at not finding it they ripped out four flights of banisters and threw them down the dark stairwell. A few days later, the landlady, Mrs. Annie Cohen, put the whole thing together again with baling wire, giving the sagging staircase a hallucinatory, expressionist look, like a set for Robert Wiene’s film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.