Freud's Mistress Read online

  “Hello, Eduard,” he said in an unquestionably cool voice. He stood there, his chest out, his back straight, as though held up by a string.

  “Sigmund,” Eduard said, nodding politely in his direction. The two men appraised each other for a moment in silence. Since he arrived home, Sigmund’s affect toward her had been so distant, his tone so flat and brusque, as to be almost disorienting. And now here he was, protecting his turf, like a dog with a ruff of fur raised at the neck.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  “Not at all,” Eduard said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. He took out a silver engraved case from his jacket, plucked out a cigarette, and lit it. It smelled aromatic and expensive.

  “That’s good. I have an appointment . . . but perhaps I’ll visit for a few minutes. . . .” Freud said, dropping onto the sofa next to Minna.

  He rummaged through his pocket, pulled out his watch, glanced at the time, and then settled back on the sofa, tapping out a rhythm on the floor with his heavy black shoe. It was obvious he meant to stay.

  The tension made the air feel close and stifling. Minna rose to her feet, yanked back the thick damask curtains, and opened the window. The afternoon light was fading, the streets were getting busier, and she could hear passing omnibuses, pedestrians, and horses and carriages clattering across the cobblestones. The children would be home soon. Why was he doing this? The nerve. Watching Sigmund stick a cigar between his lips and suck on it, she made a spur-of-the-moment decision.

  “Eduard, I thought we might go to the café. I’d love a cup of coffee or . . . a beer, perhaps,” Minna said as she walked to the door and pulled her coat off the rack.

  Eduard looked at her quizzically, and then nodded agreeably.

  “Of course, I’d be delighted.”

  Freud stood, a flash of surprise crossing his face.

  “A pleasure, Sigmund,” Eduard said, his hand lightly resting on Minna’s back. And with that, the two of them walked out the door, leaving Sigmund standing alone, feet planted firmly on the carpet, a captain abandoned by a mutinous crew. He watched them hail a cab, as he clipped the end of another cigar and threw it into the fire.

  • • •

  Perhaps it was the wine, but on the ride back from the café with Eduard, Minna couldn’t stop thinking about Sigmund. Why did she look at this eligible man sitting next to her and feel nothing? When he talked, she imagined his words dissolving into puffs of smoke—filaments of gray vapor floating up to the ceiling. Nothing he said was even slightly worth repeating, much less remembering. Obviously, many women would hang on his every word. He had good breeding and good manners, but she was suffocated by his courtliness.

  And yet there was another reason she was loath to admit. Sometimes the heart is drawn to not only the light. Sometimes it’s drawn to dark ambiguities of character and brooding silences. And an acute understanding of some shared concept or secret. The issue of appropriateness is beside the point.

  Minna flushed as the circumstances of her situation became clear.

  “Are you unwell?” Eduard asked, looking at her with concern. “Driver, slow down.”

  “I’m quite well.”

  “I’m glad,” he said, taking her gloved hand in his.

  Sadly, she was not even remotely moved by his advances. She thought back to how grateful she had been when she first moved in with her sister. But now what had seemed a godsend—Vienna, the house, the children—had suddenly become the opposite.

  She must leave this house. There was nothing to recommend staying but the perversity of desire, which did not subside with time. Initially, she had wrestled with the possibility that the desire didn’t exist, or if it did, her sense of common decency would help her resist. But the heat of unreason burned in her brain.

  Her behavior went against everything she had been taught, everything she had learned. The conventions of the day would not protect her. To the outsider, she was the helpful sister, the caring aunt, but behind the facade lay the undeniable truth. Desire. How was it possible to find such a thing floating beneath this space?

  And what of the actual circumstances of her relationship with Sigmund? He was clear in his intentions, of that she was certain. So the decision was hers. And anything but leaving would be disastrous. This was not a harmless flirtation.

  She climbed the stairs to her room. Thank goodness no one was around. How could she possibly pretend that everything was normal when the fact was, she wanted her sister’s husband.

  She tried to sleep but her conscience kept her awake. She deserved to toss and sweat and suffer. She deserved her building migraine. Her stiff neck. The shooting pains radiating down her arm and across her heart.

  She could hear Martha through the walls, sleeping peacefully, snoring away. A clear conscience. The sleep of the righteous. Minna got up, wrapped her shawl around her shoulders, and sat down at her writing desk.

  Vienna, January 1896

  My Dearest Sister,

  It is now three in the morning and I’m trembling as I write this letter. I believe you must know what I’m about to say, but if by chance you don’t, I beg your forgiveness.

  I’ve decided to leave this household. I pray you will in time allow me back into your heart.

  It has come to this. We are both in love with the same man. I don’t know how I could have allowed myself this irretrievable moral lapse, and all I can do is tell you that I never meant to cause you pain.

  Can you, my dear sister, ever forgive me?

  Minna couldn’t bear to sign it. She placed the letter by her bedside, intending to give it to Martha the next morning, but when she awoke, she crumpled it in a ball and threw it in the fire. Perhaps, she wondered, even as she was writing it, she never intended to deliver it.

  17

  I’d like to visit Mother for a few days.”

  Martha was sitting at her dressing table, arranging her hair clips and combs in stacked wooden cigar boxes that she had covered with velvet and brocade. But even Martha’s handiwork couldn’t disguise the strong smell of tobacco.

  She regarded Minna with suspicion. Her sister would not voluntarily visit their mother. Their relationship was fraught with “little miseries,” as she liked to describe her life with Emmeline. As a teenager, Minna had often told Martha that once she left Hamburg, she was never coming back, a youthful exaggeration, but one Martha believed was heartfelt.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing’s wrong. I’d simply like to go home. I haven’t seen Mother since last summer.”

  Martha looked at her skeptically, and then launched into a litany of blame.

  This was all her husband’s fault for behaving as if they were headed for the poorhouse, and continually complaining about their money woes in front of Minna and the children.

  “That isn’t the reason,” Minna said. “I’d just like a few days away.”

  “Is it the children? I know Mathilde’s a bit difficult . . . and Sophie clinging to you night and day. Has Martin been acting up again?”

  “It’s not the children. I adore them. If you really want to know, I haven’t been feeling well. I’m afraid I’m getting a cold . . . or the flu. Or maybe something worse. I just need the rest.”

  “Oh, dear, I thought you looked a bit feverish yesterday. I hope you didn’t act sickly around Eduard. You didn’t complain about your health, did you? Men don’t like that.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Martha. I did not complain about my health. And if I did, he probably would have been quite sympathetic.”

  “Well, perhaps a few days away would be good. We don’t need another disease spreading through the house.”

  “I’d like to leave this evening,” Minna said, knowing that Sigmund would be with patients until nine.

  “Very well,” Martha said. “There’s a night train to Hamburg. I’
ll see if it’s still on the schedule.”

  How peculiar, Minna thought. Escape for her had never been to Hamburg but away from there. Hamburg had barely entered her thoughts the last time she had a crisis in her life, and it wouldn’t now if she had anywhere else to go. But a person has to be somewhere, and her options seemed to be shrinking down to a succession of impossible choices.

  • • •

  Later that evening, she heard the clattering of a carriage roll up as the clock on the marble mantelpiece struck six. The past few hours had been an endless whirl of packing and preparing. Martha had given Minna more than enough kronen to cover her expenses, and now the deed was done. The children tumbled obediently out of their rooms and bid their farewells. Ernst and Oliver gave her exuberant hugs, almost knocking her down. Martin, at first pretending that he didn’t care, pressed a small folded note into her hand.

  “Read it later,” he said, blushing in front of his brothers.

  “Why, thank you, my dear,” Minna said, kissing his forehead and putting the message into her satchel.

  It was then that Minna noticed Sophie standing alone near the stairway.

  “When are you coming back, Tante Minna?” Sophie asked softly.

  “I’m not sure, my little sunshine.”

  “But who will put me to sthweep?” Sophie shyly lisped, averting Minna’s gaze, studying the wax on the floorboards. Minna leaned down, feeling the warmth of the child’s arms around her neck.

  “You can go to sleep by yourself now. You’re a big girl. And if you wake up in the middle of the night, light your candle and write me a letter,” Minna said, weighed down by a decision that she now found heartbreaking.

  As soon as Minna walked out the door, she felt an air of dreary melancholy. Hamburg. She could not stay there long. But what then? Another home to settle in. Another mistress to serve. She climbed into the carriage, leaned against the seat, fighting back despair. As the cabman flicked the whip across the rump of the reluctant horse, she opened Martin’s note and read the words. Dear Tante Minna, I hope you feel better. Love, Martin. Another wave of sadness as she reckoned with her personal loss of the children—and of Sigmund. Things happen to people when they’re not where they belong. And she didn’t belong here. They weren’t her children. And, Lord knows, he wasn’t her husband. And that was the point.

  • • •

  Minna arrived at Vienna’s Westbahnhof at seven in the evening, and briefly sat down on a wooden bench in the waiting area. She was in her traveling outfit, a dark blue dress trimmed with bands of pale cream. She studied the timetable and noticed her train was delayed. She watched the flow of people on the way to the platform—harried mothers and their fidgety children, shopgirls, clerks, merchants, a wizened street vendor with a sack over his shoulder. Off to the side, near an officer of the guard, was a bridal party with aristocratic young women dressed all in white—velvet capes and ermine-trimmed skirts. They were seeing off a smiling, sweet-faced bride and her groom, who were proceeding slowly through the crush to their waiting train.

  She listened as the stationmaster’s whistle barely penetrated the noise of the crowd and then asked the porter when the train would arrive. He shrugged his shoulders. She should have known. This station had a reputation for never running any of its trains on time. Botched connections were a fact of life. So she settled in, pulling a book from her satchel and feeling strange, even slightly indecent, as if she were running away from home and had no business being here. But where else would she wish to be? Perhaps on a guided European tour, of which she’d blithely blathered on to Eduard. A side trip to Venice with its black canals. Excursions to trattorias, churches, villas, and the beach. She wanted a change, she had said to him. But it wasn’t a change of scenery or pace—she wanted a change of heart.

  The wait was intolerably long and boring, and the people who had been crowding the platforms slowly disappeared as trains arrived and departed. In the soft evening light, the building looked like a cathedral with its marble floors, huge arched windows, and wooden benches. Indeed, it felt like a spiritual no-man’s-land for the lost and wayward.

  She could hear the muted sounds of bells and train horns giving signals as she pictured the details of her departure: Sophie’s warm hands, the children’s good-byes, Martha’s chatter. She didn’t want to think about the gravity of the situation she had escaped.

  By ten, there was still no train, and a porter told her that it had been canceled altogether and there wasn’t another one to Hamburg until the next morning. He directed her to a pension across the street where, he said, passengers usually stayed when their trains did not appear.

  By the time Minna walked down the street to the small pension, a blanket of dark clouds had raced across the sky from the north, and the oncoming storm was beginning to break. Flashes of lightning illuminated the front of the small rooming house, and there was a glow of flickering lights behind the heavy curtains of the entry that faced the train station.

  A beggar approached Minna from the shadows, his hand out. “Please, Fräulein, help an old man in need.” The rain, a slight drizzle at first, had now become a full-fledged downpour. She put down her valise, reached into her pocket, and gave the man a krone, then climbed the stairs and entered the modest foyer.

  Minna registered in the worn leather book and took the last bedchamber available. It had a slanted, beamed ceiling, green wainscoting, and a small fireplace in the corner across from the high bay window that overlooked the street.

  She entered the room and flung her coat and hat on the oak chair near the simple brass bed, which took up most of the room. She noticed it was covered with crisp white sheets and layers of blankets. Unusually clean, she thought, for this type of pension, but still she pulled back the covers to make sure there were no bugs. Then she lit the candle on the mantel, took her nightclothes and dressing gown out of her valise, and undressed. She retrieved a small silver flask from her pocketbook, put the bottle to her lips, and sipped the cool liquid.

  She fell into bed, but sleep eluded her. All she could think of was that she was going back to Wandsbek, the litttle town near Hamburg where her mother lived. She pictured herself in her childhood bedroom, closed off from the world of Vienna, doing her mother’s bidding. The thought of it, the dread of it, worked through her brain like a slow bullet. She tried to read something, anything to divert her attention, when she heard someone knocking on the door. She put on her dressing gown and opened the door a crack. Sigmund was standing there in his dark woolen overcoat, soaked and dripping.

  18

  When he first approached her, she backed against the wall, as if he were an intruder.

  “Sigmund . . .” Minna said. Her mind was racing and she pulled her dressing gown tighter around her. “How did you find me?”

  “It wasn’t hard. This is the only inn near the station.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “I’m not interested in playing games,” he said, cutting her off. “What do you want, Minna?”

  “It’s perfectly obvious what I want. I want to go home.”

  “I highly doubt that. Say what you mean.”

  “I’m not one of your patients.”

  “And I’m not your doctor,” he said, moving closer to her. “Do you want me to leave?”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “Good,” he said, taking off his wet coat and then his waistcoat as she stood there watching him. The floorboards creaked under his feet as he turned away from her and stood at the window, removing his sopping shoes and socks. She was still in her robe, her arms bare below the elbow, and she nervously rubbed her hands together, then bolted the door and slid the chain. A fine film of sweat covered her chest.

  “Come here by the window, I want to look at you,” he said.

  She didn’t answer, didn’t move, so he went to her, smoothed a lock of hair behind her ears, and ran
his hand down her face and neck. Then he carefully slipped off her robe and put his arms around her waist.

  It felt as if they had decided to do this from the moment they met, even though neither of them would have arranged it. She couldn’t get away with calling it fate. That would be too easy.

  The first kiss was extravagant—the sudden luxury of it all frightening and unexpected. She was giving in so quickly it was astounding. She paused for a moment and struggled to remember who she was . . . but the outside world was falling away.

  “Lie down,” he whispered, and pushed her toward the bed.

  He took her face in his hands and she couldn’t think. She felt a little mad.

  “Sigmund,” she said. Her voice sounded thin to her and unrecognizable.

  There was tobacco taste on his mouth as he seemed to inhale her, pulling off his tie and pushing his shirt aside. He pressed his mouth on her neck and then caressed her shoulder with his lips, starting off gently and with such tenderness that she was taken aback. He pushed their bodies together with a slow, deliberate rhythm. The desire started low down and then spread through her limbs at a frightening pace.

  They made their way through the carnal hours, breathing in and out. She never wanted him to stop. It was as if she were suspended in time with no history, morally weightless.

  Afterward, it was strange. He lay on his back with his hands behind his head, studying her. They hardly talked. Maybe because nothing they could say would make it right. She didn’t weep as most women do when it’s their first time. And they made no declarations. Still, she was in love with him. Of that, there was no doubt. And now, look what they’d done.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  She turned her head away from him, ready to get up.

  “Come on now, don’t be like that. After all this, don’t push me away.”