A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing

by T Cooper

  She loved her chair. The tight feel, to be so close to something physical. Its smell. The relief, the perfect lamp, the smell of the rain, and the sight of it out her window. She loved the wooden table next to the chair. The reliable presence of her reading glasses, the opened book. An article waiting to be seen. The gorgeous presence of new ideas being created, offered. There was room on that table for a book, glasses, a cup of coffee, and the lamp. It was perfect. The reach was perfect. The relationship between chair and table, perfect. To both see and hear the rain. The radio. To hear the radio and the rain, the inner life and the outer world. To know and see.

  Anna prepared.

  When the doorbell rang, the tea kettle was on the hot plate and slices of mohnkuchen were laid out on an old china serving plate, two matching saucers and cups. Two forks and linen napkins. There is intention behind that kind of gesture. It took an effort, a prethought. Anna had had to go to the bakery and choose the right thing, poppy seeds something clearly not American. She tried to be acknowledging in that way. It should be associative to Larry, the taste of his parents’ house. That was kindness, thinking about the other person and what they would like. Mendelssohn was on the radio. She loved this recording. Mendelssohn used this sonata form for his “Hebrides Overture” because it has a fairly strict pattern to follow in terms of form, key, and temperament. The combination of passion and discipline. Freedom with responsibility. Another thing of beauty not destroyed. She loved that. It moved her. Anna cried, inside. The doorbell rang again.

  Larry walked in, and they habitually smiled without speaking because the music was so wonderful and she had turned it up. Why speak? He sat in his chair while they listened together for three full minutes. Then the kettle whistled. Anna lifted it off the hot plate, poised, until the piece resolved, poured the water into the teapot, and turned off the radio. There was the sound of the steam of moving water, the shifting of the tea leaves, and a damp, living city purposefully turning from below. They were safe.

  “Today is your last day.”

  “And tomorrow will be my first. As ‘Graduate of New York Psychoanalytic.’ That is, if you passed my final paper.”

  “You pass, of course you know that.”

  This is what Anna Fuchs could give to others. She could teach them, and then acknowledge their achievements. This was that moment when success was realized only because they had both succeeded. She at teaching and the other at learning. He had received constructively, and she had given individually. The consequence was a new person equipped to do for others what she had done for him. A triumph of human negotiation. This was what her teachers had left behind in her hands, before their humiliations and deaths. It was a successful realization of the passing down of human gift. A successful realization of the potential of human intelligence and compassion. Another defiance of the Nazis. Another reason to live and do. Another good day.

  “Great. I mean, I knew you would like it.” He was lank, dark, the kind of young beard that can never disappear. Thirty years old and frantic, alive. The old-world Jewish panic of Eastern European peasants combined with the enthusiastic curiosity of Americans. Jewish brains, American entitlement. Germany had been Jewish minds and German rigor, producing great structural theories of explanation and forward-motion Marxism, Psychoanalysis, the Theory of Relativity. Here in America another combination was at play. Strategic intelligence in combination with opportunity. Would it be used for good or for gain? To cure schizophrenia or to create movie stars? Depth or surface? Both require management and similar degrees of effort. It was in Larry’s hands.

  “I don’t know why I worried, but … I just didn’t want you to be disappointed … at all. In my final paper. That it wasn’t good enough, not that you’d punish me, but that you wouldn’t hold me in the highest possible regard.”

  “And then what would happen?”

  “I can’t think about that. It doesn’t matter now.”

  Good. He didn’t need her anymore and it was important for them both to acknowledge it. She had taught him without taking away his self. Without creating ego worship or competition. Just simply expanding his heart.

  “Let’s celebrate. Some kuchen?” Anna took the carefully prepared plate casually from its spot on the bookshelf and placed it on the table where her book and glasses usually sat. It was small, this apartment. The same chairs and tables had to serve multiple functions.

  “Did you make this?”

  She had to laugh. “No.” Did he think she had the secret life of a baking hausfrau? Americans were always surprised by professional women. Which still surprised her.

  Larry stuffed a piece of cake into his mouth and spoke without swallowing it first. “Dr. Fuchs …” He was still young.

  “I think you can call me Anna finally. Unless you want me to call you Doctor as well. That’s what happens when you graduate and become colleagues. Of course, there is always a parental kind of caring between supervisor and trainee, but graduating you means welcoming you, sharing the practice with you. The practice of healing.”

  She poured the tea. Took a forkful of cake. Larry picked his up and dunked it in his drink. Tea dripped on the napkin and crumbs floated in the cup. This was their final supervision. After today he would be an authority. Suddenly she flashed on her husband, making his rounds at the Tegel clinic. Dr. Rabinowich. She was already Dr. Fuchs. No reason to give up a beautiful German name for an ugly Polish one. Why did she think of him? Larry Proshansky. That’s why. Her student’s last name and her son’s last name. Proshansky and Rabinowich. Sounded like an accounting firm.

  “Thank you, doctor.”

  “You’re welcome. Well, let’s begin our final supervision. How are your patients this week?”

  “Can we talk about my paper?”

  Anna was surprised and a bit annoyed. It was her job to organize the session, not his, and he knew that. But she spoke kindly to allay anxiety. “We’ll get to that.”

  “I’m so excited, I feel so happy.” He was smiling. Proud.

  “Good. Let’s start with your Thursday 2 o’clock, Larraine.”

  He drained the cup and sat back in his chair, then on its edge, then back again. “Larraine. I … I do … I … I do have some over-identification there because of the similarity of our names—Larry and Larraine. And in some ways I also identify with her childish impulse to blame her first husband for her failings. I too—I mean, I know I suffer from a weak ego, don’t you think so, doctor? We’ve discussed that. And I still often find myself projecting my inadequacies onto my wife and our daughter. Which troubles me. I don’t want to do that.” His foot was wagging. That would be a distraction for any patient. Too revealing. They need to be thinking about themselves, not the doctor’s anxiety.

  “But you’re working on this in your own analysis?”

  “Of course.”

  All right then, thought Anna. As long as Larry is facing and dealing with problems, he will improve.

  “That’s the main thing I talk to Dr. Rechtschaffen about. He says that I am so afraid of treating my wife and daughter the same way that my father treated me that I want to push them out of my life forever, to avoid the tragic repetition that I feel is inevitable.”

  “That makes sense.” Rechtschaffen was a good referral. He had always been a good doctor. He was the only person Anna still knew who had been at the ball where she waltzed with Jung and made Freud jealous.

  “I know. It does.”

  Probably an unresolved childhood fear, Anna thought.

  “He says that I have fear that is unresolved from my childhood. And that when I am filled with love for Ruth and our daughter, I suddenly become terrified. But this terror is rooted in the love I felt for my father, and how he abused it. The love. Because I feel a deep familial love for Ruth and Franny, I am afraid that they will violate me the way my father did, and then I act out in the moment, blaming them for my fear. I feel afraid, I see them, and I make them be the cause of my fear. But Dr. Rechtschaffen says that
by fully facing and understanding the real source of that fear, I can stop punishing my wife and daughter. And I feel that the same is true for Larraine, my Thursday 2 o’clock.”

  Her tea was finally cooled and Anna raised the cup to her lips. She knew that Larry could become a good doctor. But he would have to stop narcissistically projecting onto his patients. Identifying with them was inevitable. But he also needed to be separate from them. Just as he must from his daughter.

  “Are you able to enact this understanding in your daily life? Really make change?”

  “Not yet. But I want to.”

  She believed him. “Good. If you want to, you will.” All her life Anna had believed that people could tell each other the truth. And in her profession she had found the handful of others with the same wish. They would sit together and carry out their dreams of confessing their simple mortality. It was a safety. The knowledge that one is not alone.

  “Like last Monday night,” Larry said, pouring more tea. Two sugars. “Last Monday night I came home late, hoping to be alone with Ruth, but Franny was still awake.”

  “Were you disappointed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you jealous?”

  “Yes.”

  She waited. He had more truth to tell.

  “I felt like the baby was in the way,” he said, looking down and then back at her. “And then I felt angrier because Ruth wanted me to look in on Franny. I hate doing that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not good at it. I’m not good with infants.”

  When Anna was a girl her mother read to her every night. She read Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare. Her father came home from the university where he taught philosophy. He came home late due to romances with young female students, wives of students, daughters of colleagues. He’d come in to say goodnight, anything to avoid her mother’s accusations. Her father would sit in the chair at the foot of the bed and say over and over, “Schatzi, meine leibling. Meine tochter. Anna.” All her first life, in Berlin, Anna was somebody. She was Leo Fuchs’s tochter. Here, in New York, she was a refugee with an imagined past. Only Dr. Rechtschaffen had seen her father’s face. Only Dr. Rechtschaffen knew that she had broken with Freud. That he had denounced her. The American colleagues at New York Psychoanalytic had no idea of these details. Only that she had trained with the great man. Touched his sleeve.

  “I’m not good at it … infants. I hesitated in Franny’s doorway, then took one step into her room. Suddenly, then, it was as if … I was terrified. I reached out one arm stiffly to touch the child, and put my hand on her head. She started to cry. I said, There, there honey. There, there Franny. It’s Daddy. Daddy. RUTH! She wouldn’t stop crying. RUTH!”

  Anna felt sick. She realized that her son was mentally ill because she never loved her husband.

  “So Ruth comes running in. And she said what she always says—Just pick her up when she cries. You have to jiggle her a little. You know, like you really mean it. Didn’t your mother jiggle you?”

  “Did she?”

  “She patted me on the back. That’s the whole problem, you know. We’ve discussed this. My parents. I mean, they were, you know, grubayink. You know. Grub.”

  “I don’t speak Yiddish.”

  Then Anna remembered that this was not the reason why her son was mentally ill. It was because he was traumatized, either by his father or by Hitler or by both. He could still recover.

  Larry was sweating. He was nervous, starting to feel insecure, and his foot was bopping up and down, up and down. “It means common. That’s it, doctor, you know that’s it. That’s what I’m worried about.” His speech was rapid now, the speed of discovery and the desire to get it out. “You and Dr. Lublin, Dr. Rechtschaffen, all of you German Jews. You’re all so well educated, you speak languages, you play instruments. You studied with Freud! With Freud! I mean, look at me. Your father was a professor. My father … my father …”

  “Yes?”

  “My father took a hundred pounds of butter and added a hundred pounds of water and made two hundred pounds of butter.”

  “Are you ashamed?”

  “Yes.” Of course he was ashamed. His father was a greedy Jew. Taking the money of people as poor as himself and giving them water to spread on their hard-earned bread. “Yes,” Larry said. “I am. And you, your husband was killed in the camps. And your little girl.”

  He was retaliating now. Projecting his shame by trying to hurt her. Anna was disappointed. Larry should be beyond this by now.

  “Your child died and mine lived. Mine lived. And now I don’t want to jiggle her. Is that right? What do you think about that? What do you think? Died. Lived. Died. Lived. Died. Lived.”

  “Do you wish your child had died?”

  “Why do I feel that way?” he asked, open-hearted. His hands were open, his eyes. “I don’t deserve to have a child.”

  “What do you deserve?”

  He stared up at her, from his slouch. “I’m drawing a blank. I’m just drawing a blank.” He needed her help.

  “If you were my patient,” she said, reminding him that he was not her patient, while instructing him about how to relate to patients. “If you were my patient and not my student, I would tell you to just free associate. But because you are my student, I am telling you to free associate so that you can discover where your responsibilities lie. So that you can be proud of yourself, for being self-knowing.” This was Anna’s generosity, to be clear. She didn’t trick people by withholding information, and she didn’t try to make them guess what she thought or felt. She took the chance, she told the truth. “I am being explicit with the technique,” she said. “Because you are my student. Just free associate.”

  “Let’s see.” He was relieved. He didn’t have to guess, just relax into being himself. “Medical school on the G.I. Bill. I applied to ninety graduate schools and got into one. Blah, blah. I repeated my first year three times and got the highest score in the country when I took my first year anatomy comprehensives for the third time. Now I can carve turkey at anybody’s Thanksgiving and win praise.”

  “What else?”

  “Tuesday morning I stopped off at Romanoff’s Coffee Shop for an American cheese on white bread with some mustard and coffee …” Larry was comfortable now. It’s a kind of trance, free association—for the speaker and the listener. A trance of comfort. Anna looked out the window. They say that gray covers a city like a shroud, alert in its sadness, like a cello. The tones of a cello mimic exactly the range of the human voice, which is why it speaks to us with such conviction. These are the kinds of afternoons when New York City is in gray and white, like a television show. She had a small television. “I see Mr. Kelly, the counter guy. How is your son doing? I ask him.

  “I don’t know, doc, he says. We’re like strangers.

  “Try jiggling, I tell him. Try patting him on the back and you’ll feel that father/son bond.”

  Larry was theatrical. This was part of his charisma and part of his mask.

  “How did that feel?”

  “It felt good,” Larry said, smiling. Enjoying how excellently he free associated. He had learned this technique, submitted to it out of a desire to get better. “I felt like a doctor. I helped him. Sometimes you can help yourself and sometimes you can’t. But a psychiatrist can help someone else, even if they can’t help themselves. Just pass on the good advice. The compassion. It could help someone else. It could help them.”

  “You brought up medical school, your training.”

  “Yes, I did. Let’s see.”

  Anna had learned and come to believe that all human beings, by virtue of being born, deserve acknowledgement, recognition, negotiation. To love is to listen. The more precise the listening, the more love. Then people will listen to themselves more, take more responsibility for what they promise others. What they themselves say, if they know you are listening.

  “Uh.” Larry was confused, then he remembered. “One of the requirements in
our third year of medical school was to take a course in psychosomatics. I was hooked. During that course I realized something very important about myself—I realized that the cause of my lifelong fear of dogs had nothing to do with dogs. But actually, I was afraid of my father. Once I understood the projection, I lost my fear of dogs and developed a healthier relationship to my late father. Uh …” he was confused again. “I’m having a lot of trouble with Dr. Lublin.”

  “You mentioned your late father, coming to be able to feel love for him, the satisfaction of that achievement, and then you started speaking about Dr. Lublin.”

  “How am I going to be able to work with him at the Institute?” Larry was an impulsive person. He burst out with distressing feelings, didn’t mitigate them. Many Eastern European Jews living in New York had this same tendency. It was somewhat vulgar. But they couldn’t control it. It was a combination of lacking education and feeling constant panic. “As a colleague? Dr. Lublin despises me. He does not respect me.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Why doesn’t he respect me? Or why do I think he doesn’t respect me?”

  Good. He was trying to be precise. To tell the truth.

  “You choose.”

  “Well,” he settled back again. Anna knew this would be a theatrical storytelling. Another cultural artifact from his peasant roots. “Well, Ruth and I had him over for drinks Tuesday night. Ruth looked great. She wore a red cocktail dress and served Velveeta cheese on crackers, olives, and gin and tonics. She really had it under control and I felt very proud. Dr. Lublin and I were playing chess. I was telling him about Larraine …”