Back Then (16 page)

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 taboo: “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
.

Over pink gin and Ritz crackers, disaffected graduate students like me weighed one another's need for “treatment.” We recited the traumas of childhood and adolescence, the roles—neglectful, villainous, or smothering—of our parents, and so forth, the whole psychic megillah, but, despite our shallow immersion in Freud, we never talked about sex. The homosexuals were silent on the subject—the closet door was only slightly ajar—and the rest of us were too demure or too repressed to bring it up, although no one's orientation or pattern of pairing off was a secret. Sex aside, an unspoken challenge—Can you top this?—drove our confessional marathons. We heard sad tales about heartless fathers, possessive mothers, the stigma of bastardy, the narrowness of adolescent life in a Nebraska parsonage. My best turn in these performances was to say that by the age of thirteen, having by then lost both parents, I was a double orphan. I felt guilty about the modest inheritance my parents had left me. “It's a goddam shame,” one of my friends said. “People like me have the brains, and people like you have the money.” I should have been angry, but I let this pass and went on to tell about how the still perceptible shock of being orphaned could be rendered in a cry of five words—“What's to become of me?”

We scarified our psychic topsoil and hoped someday to dig deeper. Meanwhile, just as the intellectual generation of the 1930s joined Marxist study groups and read
Das Kapital
, we read Freud's
General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
, his
Civilization and Its Discontents
, and other books with alluring titles like Karen Horney's
Self-Analysis
and
The Neurotic Personality of Our Time
. We assumed that neurosis was so bound up with creativity that it was virtually a prerequisite. If you weren't neurotic—that is, if you were “normal”—you were probably cut out to be a worker ant, moderately well adjusted but dull. On the other hand, if the goal of psychoanalysis was to help adjust patients to middle-class behavior norms, wouldn't it undermine “creativity” and turn a potential Dylan Thomas or Marc Chagall into a worker ant? There was a contradiction here that we weren't able to resolve. The adjective “sensitive” was a mild palliative—it fell considerably short of suggesting you needed “help,” while “normal” had even more dismissive voltage than “nice,” a euphemism for “harmless.” My friends called me both “normal” and “nice.” One, an editor at Little, Brown on Beacon and Joy Streets, a few blocks away from my apartment, gave me a copy of E. B. White's story about a mouse born to human parents,
Stuart Little
. She inscribed it, “Two delightful people: Justin, meet Stuart.” I bore the stigmas of alleged niceness and normality in a resigned way.

Nevertheless, once back in New York I went into psychoanalysis, driven by career anxiety and what romantic novelists used to call a broken heart. Beatrice and I had been going together for over a year. She wanted to be married, to someone, for stability and direction, she said, while I, an unformed ex-graduate student wandering around the edges of New York book publishing, wasn't remotely ready even to begin thinking about marriage. On her wedding night she phoned me from the bridal suite at the Plaza to say that she was thinking of me, a gesture that combined tenderness and cruelty. There was little comfort in the notion she meant to hold me in reserve against (what proved to be) an uncertain future with the man she married. I felt orphaned once again—“What's to become of me?”—and spent a terrible summer racked with dermatitis and flaying my skin practically down to the raw flesh. I read Proust for the first time, thought of moving to France, and even packed a trunk, although I had no idea of what I would do when I got there. One day Lena Levine, a psychiatrist I met at a weekend party on Long Island, took me aside and said, “I think you're letting yourself go to waste. You ought to get some help.” This was depressing but also reassuring: at least I had something worth saving and nurturing. My gratitude for her instant recognition of my deep-down misery swept away inhibitions. In the gentlest way possible Lena, who was more than twice my age, fended off my clumsy attempts to get her to go to bed with me—I had never before wanted to be so close to another person. My behavior was probably an extreme, and not to be anytime near equaled, case of instant “transference.”

Lena arranged for an eminence in the New York psychoanalytic and psychiatric establishment, Dr. Carl Binger, to have me “evaluated” with Rorschach, IQ, and other such tests. If it turned out that I needed and could make good use of “help,” he was to recommend a therapist who was compatible as well as affordable.
Personality aside, I wondered, could a European-born analyst recognize shades of idiom and American style, instances of non-Viennese “joke-work,” and those famous slips of the tongue—parapraxes, in the jargon of the profession—Freud found so revealing of turmoil in everyday life?

Dr. Gustav Bychowski, number one on Binger's referral list, instructed me, in heavily accented English, to take a position on whether Fyodor Dostoevsky had been a lunatic or an idiot as well as an epileptic and a compulsive gambler. I foresaw hundreds of hours of such idle gassing, on my nickel, to indulge his hobby, which was psychoanalyzing dead writers in order to reduce them to the obligatory one- or two-sentence abstract printed at the head of professional articles. Bychowski, as I learned a few years later, was the author of “Walt Whitman—A Study in Sublimation,” an article that disposed of
Leaves of Grass
as a product of narcissistic isolation, gnawing loneliness, and homoerotic libido. For clinical material Bychowski plumbed Whitman's “Song of Myself,” a masterpiece in world literature, as if it were a free-associational, artless monologue from the couch, raw meat for the analytic grinder. Poor Walt! Anyone following this line of interpretation could not have guessed he was a poet, only a remarkably voluble sort of wacko with sex on his mind.

My search took me to the consulting rooms of several other bigwigs on Binger's referral list. When I arrived a few minutes late to see one of them, Dr. William Silverberg, he decided not to lose time on preliminaries and plunged into Topic A. “Young man, to begin with, let me ask you this: When did you last have sex with a woman?” I answered, quite truthfully, “About half an hour ago—that's why I'm late. She lives around the corner from you.” He acted as if I had vomited on his shoes and practically threw me out of his office. His bill for this consultation—fifty dollars—arrived in the mail a few days later.

Finding
the right dermatologist, although there were hundreds of skin doctors in New York, was even harder than finding the right analyst. According to the standard joke, what passed for a diagnosis in the skin trades consisted of one question, “Have you had this before?” and one answer, “Well, you've got it again.” The “it,” variously called eczema, atopic dermatitis, and psoriasis, consisted of unremitting hostilities between my skin and its occupant. In early adolescence I had been under the care of a medical autocrat in the Squibb Building off Fifth Avenue. Several times a years Dr. Lapidus examined my flayed and abraded skin, the result of uncontrollable bouts of scratching, and invariably said, “I see you've been having a good time.” His remark had the instant effect of sending me into a fresh paroxysm of scratching. In addition to the pungent tar ointments and mineral oil preparations that constituted the entire armamentarium of the profession, Dr. Lapidus prescribed daily home treatments with a carbon-arc sunlamp. A medical equipment outfit delivered to our apartment an immense apparatus (when not in use it occupied its own closet) with a reflecting bowl the size of a locomotive headlight. Naked and goggled, I lay in the glare, splutter, and fumes of this satanic machine. Another skin guru dispensed a private brand of tar ointment that he formulated in a back room and gave me five minutes of his attention; his receptionist demanded payment in cash. Yet another put me on a diet of rice and canned peaches. A third sent me uptown to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital for sessions of X-ray therapy—he was concerned only with immediate but short-lived relief from itching and scaling: long-term radiation effects were not his department. Dr. Clarence Greenwood, a benign Harvard Medical School dermatologist—his distressing academic title was “Professor of Syphilology”—was honest enough to say that whatever it was I had, it was something I'd have to learn to live with, preferably in a gentler climate. We talked mostly about his cat, who ate coffee beans while the doctor had his breakfast. Finally, the same year I went into analysis, cortisone and topical steroid therapy came to the rescue. At a time when almost any ailment was construed as “psychosomatic” or “psychogenic,” dermatology and analysis were symbiotic.