Back Then (15 page)

Lucy was by far the kindest and most intellectually sophisticated of the women I knew up to then. Recognizing that she was too accomplished to remain a researcher and fact checker, her employers at
Time
sent her to France to do a report on the worker-priest movement, the social reform program, anathema to the Vatican, that joined the ideals of primitive Christianity with those of Marxian socialism. I was beginning to get a few freelance writing assignments, and sentence by sentence Lucy tutored me in patience and clarity as I struggled at the typewriter. One of those assignments was to write the introduction to an anthology of antiwoman writings I had been commissioned to put together. Given the nature of the project, Lucy did not seem to mind the incongruity of her tutoring—as a reward for finishing this depressing piece of work she bought me a recording of
Rosenkavalier
. One Christmas, encouraging a direction I myself wasn't fully aware of, she gave me the three-volume Macmillan
Literary History of the United States
. I began a slow return to where I had left off in graduate school—nineteenth-century America and its writers.

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.