Jewish Mothers Never Die: A Novel (22 page)

Rebecca recalled that Freud spent his holidays with his sister-in-law Minna Bernays, while Martha stayed at home with the children. He claimed he needed these vacations for his health. His intimacy with Minna was a source of speculation, and there exist ample descriptions of the places where they vacationed and the hotels where they stayed. Biographies of Freud usually mention that she lived with the Freuds and slept in a bedroom that adjoined the couple’s own, a fact that displeased their daughter Anna.

“Their relationship has been quite thoroughly dissected,” Rebecca said. “But were they or were they not lovers?”

Her question upset Amalia.

“Those rumors were spread by Jung after he had a falling out with my son. Sigi was faithful to his wife; he had six children with her, and I can assure you that he had nothing to reproach himself for. He had lunch with me every Sunday; I would have known.”

“He stopped having sexual relations with Martha when he was forty,” Rebecca reminded her.

“What of it? He was depressed, and sex no longer interested him.”

At the opposite end of the garden, Amalia Freud made herself comfortable on a rocking chair. She felt weary and alone. Rebecca and Jeanne soon joined her. They hoped Amalia would be able to tell them more about the complicated relationships Freud had had with his family; they weren’t about to let drop such a fascinating subject. Jeanne in particular wanted to know everything there was to know about Sigmund’s friendships.

“Freud maintained very close relationships with his friends. Could this be why he stopped paying attention to his wife? He wrote two hundred and ninety-five letters to Wilhelm Fleiss over seventeen years.”

“And to think we’ll never know if Marie Bonaparte purchased those letters,” Amalia replied, avoiding the matter of his abundant correspondence.

“All of his friendships were intense,” Jeanne continued. “Breuer, Jung, Adler, Rank, Ferenczi: they traveled together regularly and wrote to each other daily.”

“His letter writing began during his four-year-long engagement to Martha. After they married, he looked for other people to write to. He liked to confide his thoughts and feelings to friends in letter form; he claimed it helped him think and see his theories more clearly,” Amalia argued in his defense.

“Martha was extremely jealous of Wilhem Fliess, with whom Sigmund had the same close relationship that he had with you. You only have to read his letters to understand the intensity of his feelings for Fliess: ‘People like you must never go away,’ he writes at one point. Another time, he thanked him for his consoling, his understanding, his encouragement at a time when he felt alone. He added: ‘You helped me grasp the meaning of life.’ That’s a declaration of love if I ever heard one, especially coming from a psychoanalyst! He is completely honest about it, admitting that his friends are more important to him than anything, calling it ‘a need I have in me, something in the feminine part of me.’ With Fliess, he shared a bisexual fantasy and argued so much on the subject that they broke off.”

“He broke ties with all of his friends, in fact,” Rebecca remarked. “Breuer didn’t share his opinion on the importance of sexual factors, Brücke refused to accept his theories on the sexual origins of neuroses, Adler rejected the Oedipus Complex, Jung, in whom Freud saw his successor, had an affair with a patient, something Freud could not accept.”

Amalia lost her temper:

“Does it make you happy to discuss my golden Sigi’s latent homosexuality?”

Their line of questioning was much too aggressive for her liking. Why must they remind her that her son was inflexible and could not tolerate the slightest difference of opinion? Why did they insist on digging up his homosexual tendencies? Ferenczi had criticized him for being too rigid during a trip to Sicily in 1910, to which Freud replied: “Part of my homosexual investment in our relationship I removed and used to develop my own ego.”

“Martha stayed with him until she died,” Amalia added. “The only thing she ever reproached him for was for his practicing psychoanalysis, which she considered immoral. For someone as puritanical as Martha, it was worse than parading about naked.”

“I can understand her point of view,” Jeanne said.

Silent now, they gazed up at the sky. Had they reached a truce? None of them wished risking a falling out.

“I think that the end of a friendship is as painful as a romantic breakup,” Jeanne observed.

“Oh no! You aren’t going to start criticizing my son again, are you?” Amalia cried.

“I was thinking of Marcel, who disparaged all forms of friendship. He thought they were a waste of time that took him away from his novel. Nevertheless, he needed the company of others, a weakness he detested because, as he said, friendship ‘is directed towards making us sacrifice the one real and . . . incommunicable part of ourself to a superficial self which finds—not like the other, any joy in itself, but rather a vague, sentimental attraction.’”

“It’s true that his homosexuality complicates the matter,” Amalia added. “None of his friends are above suspicion on that score.”

“That’s ridiculous! Everyone adored him. Some of his friends even visited him in the middle of the night. It was an honor for them.”

And so the conversation went . . . Who would have the last word? They shot quotations from their respective sons as if they were poisoned arrows. Jeanne was the one who concluded at last:

“A true friend never judges and is always there for you. In fact, he’s like a mother.”

12

Cutting Ties

Very few people survive their mother.

Woody Allen

Yet, he loved her like a mother, and he hated her like a mother.

Albert Cohen

Coming into the world is not the same as being born.

Romain Gary

It was so dark in the living room that, at first, Rebecca hesitated. The blinds had been lowered and the curtains drawn as before a lengthy absence. She took a step in and discerned in the gloom the prostrate, immobile, seemingly overwhelmed figures of Amalia Freud and Jeanne Proust. Jeanne’s hands were crossed on her lap. Amalia Freud was staring at the wall in front
of her. They sat in silence, a glacial air lingering between them. What had happened? What would happen next? Rebecca observed them, torn between her curiosity and the fear that this microcosm of women where she had finally begun to feel at ease might be under threat. She felt like someone who has just learned she has a terminal illness: on the one hand, she wanted to know everything—the recommended course of action and treatment, its length and side-effects, chances of survival, statistics and whatever information she could get her hands on. On the other hand, she wanted to remain oblivious and still believe, hoping against hope, that the diagnosis was false.

Not knowing what to do to ease the anxious knot in her stomach, she wandered in the direction of what appeared to be a formal vestibule. There she found Pauline Einstein seated at a grand piano, playing the
Aria in C minor
from Bach’s
Italian Concerto
. The energy and enthusiasm she put into her playing was out of keeping with the melancholy tone of the piece. Deeply moved, Rebecca stood listening a long while, until Pauline noticed her.

“I still can’t manage to play it with the right tempo, after all this time,” she said when she finished the last measure and stood up.

Rebecca begged her to continue.

“Would you like me to teach you how to play?” came Pauline’s reply.

“Unfortunately, I have no talent for music.”

“My son said the same about his skills as a cellist, yet he was a fine musician. Of course, I kept at him; I made him practice every day. I can’t stop feeling that music is essential. For Albert, it was vital that he have a distraction from his work.”

“Could you be persuaded to play something light and gay for the others? They’re in a somber mood.”

“I think you have something to do with that.”

“What?”

“Your questions made them realize that their behavior with their sons was excessive.”

“They only realized that now?” Rebecca burst out laughing with relief. Pauline, however, didn’t share her comic view of the situation, and scolded her instead:

“What do you find so amusing? No one ridiculed you when you arrived here with a heap of insecurities of your own.”

“You’re right; it’s terribly difficult to be a mother.”

“I’m glad you agree. You have to indulge them a little. You’ve rattled these poor women.”

“But the difference between us is that they never doubted themselves, whereas I always considered myself to be a horrible mother. With Nathan, I felt guilty about everything I did. I was bad-tempered, demanding and impatient. Like every single mother, I had too much to do and I criticized myself for not being available enough for him. I only had time to put out all the little fires that blazed around us: Why was there never any milk in the refrigerator on Sunday nights? Why did Nathan wait until after dinner when everything was closed to tell me he needed to photocopy a paper for school? Why did he lose his new winter coat in February, just when the stores were starting to carry summer clothes? How did his feet grow so quickly? I had to check on him in bed at least fourteen times every night if I ever hoped to get a minute of sleep. Whether I told him yes or no, I was sure he was going to wind up in the therapist’s office. Just thinking about his future traumatized me. In fact, I’m rather happy I can finally rest here.”

“You do seem different from when you first arrived: More self-confident.”

“It’s thanks to these mothers; I feel better just seeing their determination and their optimism. I realize now that they aren’t as tough as I thought at first. I never imagined they could be hurt by anything I had to say.”

Rebecca turned suddenly on her heels and rushed back to the living room. She wanted to open wide the curtains and the windows and talk to Jeanne Proust and Amalia Freud. She found them just as they had been before.

“I have to apologize,” she began. “I’m sorry I riddled you with questions, but it was only to reassure myself. I was anguished over Nathan: he seemed to me too young to survive without his mother, as if age mattered. Thanks to you, I know now that I have already given him what he needs to succeed in life, whatever profession he chooses. Nathan is generous, happy, curious and considerate: I don’t need to worry about him. My questions weren’t meant to be indiscreet; I was only trying to understand your relationships with your children. I admired your sons so much when I was alive; it was exciting to go behind the scenes. I never intended to be critical of you or upset you; it was the furthest thing from my mind.”

Amalia Freud stirred.

“I’m not angry with you, Rebecca, but you reminded us of things we’d rather forget. It’s not your fault; you couldn’t have known. Suddenly, I thought how ashamed I was on Sigi’s seventieth birthday.”

“What happened?”

“Well, my son had gone to great lengths to dissuade me from attending the party he was throwing at home. He was at the height of his fame and he had invited all his friends, colleagues, children and grandchildren. I assumed he thought I would find it too tiring to come; I never thought he wanted to exclude me. I was so proud of his fame that I wouldn’t hear of missing the occasion, and I was the first person to arrive. That’s when I understood that he wasn’t being polite when he told me not to come. When he finished his speech, I said to everyone, ‘I’m his mother!’ So pleased. In a fury, Sigi publicly repudiated me, and I still can’t bear to think of it.”

Amalia had gone ashen with the memory, which frightened Rebecca. She blamed herself and wanted to shake Amalia out of her mood, but how could she help such a strong-headed, intimidating, smart woman?

“Sigmund feared you as much as he admired you,” she began. “Hatred and love are complicated emotions, especially for two people who were so close.”

“You’re right! Think of how he describes the mother figure in some of his texts: she’s archaic, terrifying, castrating, sexual. She’s a Gorgon who threatens to swallow him up, devour him, possess him. He must have derived his theories from me; what other explanation is there?”

“But he also says that a mother’s love is ‘the most perfect, the least ambivalent there is in all human relations,’ and he idealizes the relationship between mothers and sons,” Rebecca reminded her.

“My interpretation, unfortunately, is that Sigi’s idealization of the mother was a way to compensate for his hatred of me. He opposed me in everything! I’m not stupid, you know. He even wrote this about me: ‘As long as my mother is alive, she stands in the way of the rest I need.’ As if I prevented him from doing anything! He couldn’t wait for me to die; that’s all there is to it.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to make you suffer by dying before you.”

“I’ve heard that before and I don’t believe a word of it. He was afraid of me, of my power over him and I was the Oedipal mother: seductive, dangerous, jealous, possessive . . . Did you know that Sigmund had almost the same dream that Leonardo da Vinci had? He describes it in
Leonardo da Vinci
and A Memory of His Childhood.
He dreamed that a beaked figure stole into his bedroom when he was a baby in his crib and that the bird ‘opened his mouth with its tail.’ He associated this with Egyptian hieroglyphs that depict the mother as a vulture. He’s clearly describing his fear of a sexually menacing mother. Oh! I’m tired of all this.”

Amalia collapsed back onto the couch and closed her eyes. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

“I was just rereading
The
Problem of Anxiety
. I don’t know what to make of this sentence. I’ll read it to you: ‘If writing—which consists in allowing a fluid to flow out from a tube upon a piece of white paper—has acquired the symbolic meaning of coitus, or if walking has become a symbolic substitute for stamping upon the body of Mother Earth, then both writing and walking will be abstained from, because it is as though forbidden sexual behavior were thereby being indulged in.’”