Freud's Mistress Read online

  “I have no choice.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning you can’t rewrite history.”

  “We don’t need to,” he said.

  “You’ll have to go now,” she said, standing up abruptly and retrieving her robe. She felt something inside her snap.

  “Are you coming home, then?”

  “No, I’m leaving. Tomorrow.”

  “You’ll come back to me,” he said, with confidence.

  “Impossible,” she replied. But he kissed her and smiled knowingly as she responded to his touch.

  • • •

  In the morning she attempted to be casual when checking out of the inn. She just wanted to look like an ordinary woman, walking to the station to meet her train. But it was no use. It was as if she was wearing an evening costume when everyone else was in day clothes. From the moment she stepped out of the room, she refused to indulge her emotions, managing to hide her feelings of transgression. She would be on that train no matter what.

  She walked through the main concourse to the platform where the train was waiting, its black, brutish hulk shooting off plumes of steam in the frosty air. No more, she thought. Not ever. The whole thing was unforgivable. But at the same time, she knew she would die if she never saw him again.

  In the distant tunnel, she could see the rail workers, dressed in heavy woolen jackets and battered leather work boots, navigating the crisscrossed tracks. She tried to keep her balance as the platform began to tremble and another steam engine rolled past, the movement of the coupling rods on the wheels rhythmically rotating and straightening like the flying shuttle of a mammoth loom. A hunched-over porter passed her, heaving a large luggage van burdened with leather trunks, valises, and boxes tied with rope as the passengers streamed onto the platform.

  She felt thoroughly drained as she settled down and eyed the anemic young woman seated across from her. The train hissed and shuddered and rolled into motion.

  Minna stared out the smeared, dirty windowpanes as she watched the city retreat behind her. She closed her eyes and rested her head against the wooden seat. What was he doing right now? Was he thinking about her thinking about him?

  She went through the details over and over again. What he did to her and what he said. What she did to him. She could hear horns from the trains signaling as they streaked through the gray fields of snow.

  The monotonous motion of the train and the lack of rest the night before were slowly lulling her to sleep. After a long, drawn-out whistle she noticed the woman across from her snoring softly.

  Like a death in the family, everything in her life was now divided into before and after. She never decided in any conventional way that this would be the day or that would be the day of such an impossible entanglement, but, indeed, that day had arrived and there was an irreversible blotch on her moral fiber. Life before felt fleeting and unimportant. And life after, a looming catastrophe that consumed her with dread.

  Not just an affair with a married man. It was an unseemly, unpalatable betrayal. The black sheep of the family was blacker than black. The very image of destruction and decay. How could her feelings for him be wildly passionate one moment and then, in an instant, switch to the dark, barbarous world of sin and remorse? She thought of those demented women she had seen on street corners, dressed in rags and babbling in demonic tongues—a bit morbid, but still, was this her justified fate? Try as she might, she couldn’t excuse her own perceived abnormalities. No mere mortal could express her mounting emotional distress as she made her way home to her mother.

  And yet rationalizations crept in to halo a sinner’s head. She had tried to escape, but he had appeared last night in a storm. And she couldn’t resist him. Something was shifting profoundly in the way she thought about herself. It was foul and an outrage, her complete undoing, but still she wanted him.

  The moment she let him in the door, she was thrillingly lost, shedding her innocence and inhibitions in a rush of erotic fury. The sedate sister-in-law, sinfully luscious as forbidden fruit. The sex was vivid, demanding, deranged, and endlessly self-indulgent. She should shoot herself, throw herself over a bridge, be branded, flogged, or stoned.

  Outwardly, she thought, if nothing ever happens to me again, I will accept my life, which will pass calmly and uneventfully. Like a novice, passing though the convent doors for the first time, she would willingly give up everything because she had tasted it all. But inwardly, she would forever live with a memory that constantly mortified her, an incestuous assault on her family that must never be exposed.

  19

  As the train approached Hamburg, Minna could see the river Elbe, now covered with ice, and the sweeping skyline marked by the familiar spires of St. Nicholas, St. Michaelis, and St. Peter’s. But she wasn’t inclined to admire the view. After all, despite the thousands of bridges and canals crisscrossing the city, this certainly wasn’t Venice. And this time of year was particularly harsh and forbidding. The temperatures were close to freezing and the winds, blowing from the North Sea to the west and the Baltic to the east, cut right through to the bone, no matter how many layers of clothing one wore.

  She gathered her belongings, put on her coat, and stepped off the train. The platform was lined with a thin sheet of ice and she could already smell the smoke from the factories that lined the southern shores of the river. A few years before, the city had been gripped with the worst cholera epidemic in Europe. Luckily, her mother had been traveling at the time, but the death toll was staggering.

  She took a cab from the train station to the rural outskirts of the city, where the roads were increasingly treacherous and difficult to pass. At one point, the driver got stuck in a patch of cracked black ice and had to dig them out of a deep rut.

  “This will cost you extra,” he said in his Low German dialect.

  “Just carry on,” she replied, her breath trailing visible puffs of steam. Normally she would have argued with him but now it seemed hardly worth the effort.

  They arrived at her mother’s house, Hamburger Strasse 38, in the late afternoon. It was a modest, two-story redbrick with a gabled roof and a large yard. Minna climbed the steps and knocked lightly on the front door, but there was no answer, so she walked around the house past some overgrown shrubbery to the service door and let herself in. Her mother never locked that door, one of her lifelong peculiarities. At one point, Minna had asked why she insisted on leaving it open.

  “Then, if I’m locked out, I can always get in the back door,” her mother had replied matter-of-factly.

  Minna entered through a narrow corridor that led to the kitchen. The hearth was cold, and there was a single plate on the unpainted wooden table with a half-eaten piece of streusel and a pot of tea that had gone cold. Her mother was probably out shopping. There had been no time to get word to her that she had decided to come home.

  Everything about this place seemed austere to Minna, drab and frugal except the smell of pine, which she always associated with home. She walked up the stairs in silence, demoralized, and entered her old bedroom. There was the carpet she had always hated, a threadbare mess of indeterminate color with stains still there from her childhood. It seemed her mother had taken over the room. Well-worn shawls and sweaters hung from pegs by the door, and a sewing kit was open on the small table near the bed, with swatches of fabric lined up in a row. All Minna’s childhood things had vanished, even her books, stored in the attic, probably. Feeling suddenly fatigued with a slight sense of panic, Minna sat down on the neatly made iron bed and glanced around the room, dazed, as if she had just awakened from a dream.

  She leaned back, closed her eyes, and tried not to think about what her body felt like when he was holding her. She wanted his arms around her, his legs wrapped around hers. She felt empty and ashamed.

  It was the strangest thing. It didn’t occur to her at the time, but he seemed not to care about th
e consequences or anything else but their desire. It was reckless and wrong . . . and it must never happen again.

  Minna thought back to the days when she was fourteen and just beginning to be noticed by men. In her mother’s eyes, there were two kinds of women: prostitutes, who reveled in obscene pleasures of the flesh, or chaste, passive wives and daughters unencumbered by sexual feelings of any kind. It was a common sensibility, one that blithely categorized sensual women as mistresses or whores. As opposed to loyal wives who dutifully engaged in sex in order to procreate or satisfy their men. Wives like Martha.

  It was getting dark now and Minna dreaded hearing her mother’s footsteps. She should have been home by now. She pulled the blankets around her and started to doze off. She didn’t notice her mother standing in the shadows by the door.

  “Martha? Is that you?” she asked.

  “No, Mother, it’s Minna,” she said, as she looked up with a weary smile. Minna felt like an intruder, not a child who had grown up here.

  Emmeline took off her heavy woolen coat and hat and stood in the doorway, peering at her daughter. She was dressed all in black, as usual. Ever since Minna’s father had died, her mother preferred the black of mourning, even though she was years past the required time for bereavement. The color did not suit her. The severity of it made her skin look sallow and the sharp angles of her face more pronounced. She had also accepted the Orthodox Jewish tradition of shaving her head upon marriage and had worn wigs ever since . . . even after being widowed. Minna thought that the moment her father died, Emmeline had aged twenty years and stayed there. And now, with her coarse gray hairpiece pulled back in a bun and her skin hanging loosely on her once-pleasing profile, one might guess she was over seventy when, in fact, she was in her mid-fifties. She had become what she previously emulated—an old lady.

  “Minna! My goodness, this is a surprise. How long have you been here?” she asked.

  “A few hours . . . I came for a visit.”

  “Nonsense. You never visit.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “When was the last time?”

  “Mother, surely you don’t want to argue when I’ve just arrived.”

  “And you never write, either,” Emmeline added petulantly.

  “Is it warm in here? I’m so warm . . .” Minna said. Lack of sleep and tension from the night before were taking their toll.

  “What’s the matter? Is something wrong?” Emmeline asked, putting her ice-cold hand on Minna’s forehead. “You look pale.”

  “It’s nothing. I’m feeling fatigued, that’s all, and Martha suggested I visit you.”

  “That’s odd, you’re never fatigued, but I shouldn’t doubt it in that household. So much for Martha to do. I wish you would have let me know, though. I’m expecting Uncle Elias and Aunt Mary for supper, and now I don’t believe I have enough.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Minna lied. Her stomach had been growling since she arrived in Hamburg, and she sorely regretted refusing breakfast on the train.

  “Well, certainly, you don’t have to eat, but I don’t want it to appear as if I haven’t enough.”

  Good God, Minna thought, looking outside at the dismal darkness. She actually wants me to go to the market.

  “And you know your uncle. He has such a huge appetite. Eats enough for the two of them.”

  “Would you like me to go out and get something?” Minna offered weakly.

  “Heavens, no. I wouldn’t ask you that, don’t give it another thought. Although the table might look sparse . . .”

  Minna collected herself, sat up, and smoothed her hair. A thick, impotent feeling swept over her. She knew that one of her mother’s biggest fears, even in front of her own brother, was looking as though they couldn’t afford an ordinary meal.

  “What would you like, Mother?” she asked, pulling her boots out from under the bed.

  “Just another challah . . .” Emmeline answered immediately. “And as long as you’re there . . . you might as well stop at the cheese shop and get some Gouda . . . go to the cheese monger on Hasselbrook.”

  “It’s so much farther. . . .”

  “He’s single. Do you need money?”

  “No, I have enough,” Minna said. She’d rather die than ask her mother for one krone. She leaned over and hooked the long row of buttons on her boots, left foot, right foot. And then put on her coat and hat. Her mother was being unreasonable and Minna knew it. But she would go anyway. No one could accuse her of not being accommodating. She followed her mother downstairs, grabbing an apple from a bowl as she walked through the kitchen.

  “Hurry, dear. The shopkeepers are closing. I’ll make you a nice dinner,” Emmeline called out warmly.

  This was Emmeline’s signal to her daughter that she should now be grateful. Minna couldn’t bear it. Martha, on the other hand, would have been dutiful and appreciative. “Oh, thank you, Mother,” she would have said. I’ll be damned, Minna thought, remembering her stormy adolescence.

  The realization that she would be here for a while was disheartening. She’d been a governess and lady’s companion for the past ten years, and what did she have to show for it? There was a moment of panic that her life was no longer under her control. But she must try not to be resentful. Whatever their past relationship had been, Minna’s fall from grace had nothing to do with her mother.

  20

  The table was set and the Sabbath candles ready to be lit when Minna returned home. She was out of breath from rushing to the baker before he closed, and then to the cheese shop, and the sense of urgency about it all made her head ache. She was about to sit down and take off her muddy boots when she realized her aunt and uncle had already arrived and were sitting in the parlor.

  “Put the parcels in the kitchen and come join us,” Emmeline said in a silvery tone.

  Minna obeyed, scuffing off her boots on a mat near the door and hastily shoving the last bit of a puff pastry into her mouth. She hadn’t eaten since the night before and couldn’t resist. She licked the cream off her fingers and entered the parlor.

  “Isn’t it wonderful, Elias—my Minna has come home to visit,” Emmeline said, stretching out her arms, leaning over, and drawing up a chair near her own.

  While Minna was out, it seemed as if the considerate, sweet Emmeline had suddenly appeared. This was the public face of her mother. Only the very immediate family members, including Sigmund, who made no secret of his intense dislike for his mother-in-law, had to deal with the other Emmeline—the exacting, aggressive one.

  “Minna, my dear,” said Uncle Elias. “What a surprise! You look so beautiful. I wish I’d known. Elsa would have loved to see you. Did you know she’s expecting? Hard to believe. Her little terrier is so jealous, all he does is whine and jump in my lap. Dogs seem to have a sixth sense about this, don’t you think?”

  “You know Minna’s been caring for Martha’s children, don’t you?” Emmeline broke in.

  “Oh, yes. And how are Martha and the Kinder? What a lot of grandchildren our Emmy ended up with, in spite of herself. Eh, Emmy?” he asked, smiling broadly at Minna and leaning back in his chair.

  “Time to eat,” Emmeline said, taking Minna’s hand and motioning them to follow. The smell of roast chicken with liver stuffing permeated the dining room. There were also colossal slabs of bright red beets, and sweet-and-sour green beans drenched in butter nestled next to chunky sour-cream potatoes. Minna covered the challah with a white linen cloth. As they gathered around the dining table, Uncle Elias put on his yarmulke, while Emmeline placed a small black lace veil over her head and lit the Sabbath candles.

  “Barukh atah Adonai Elohaynu melekh ha-olam, asher kidishanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Shabbat.”

  Minna listened to the familiar words and began to recite the prayer with her mother, as she and Martha had done every Friday night of their childhood
. Sigmund, of course, had put an end to all that. He considered all religions “patently infantile and foreign to reality,” and she had heard him often refer to Emmeline’s Orthodox beliefs as a “crazy piety.” Especially since he felt she offered up only petitionary prayers, asking God for this or that, rather than prayers of gratitude. Emmeline in turn resented him because he refused to allow her daughter to observe the Sabbath at all or even recite prayers at the dinner table.

  But the animosity between them went far deeper than that. He blamed Emmeline for “abducting” Martha to Hamburg when they were first courting, believing it was a deliberate scheme to separate them. In her eyes, he was an impoverished student with an uncertain future, a poor match for her precious Martha. It was no secret that Emmeline had declared war on Sigmund, and indeed she may have won the initial battle, but he proved a tough opponent, and in the end, victory was his.

  The blessing over the bread had just finished, and now Minna’s uncle was looking at her with interest.

  “And when are you going back, my dear?” he asked kindly.

  “I haven’t decided, I might stay awhile,” Minna answered, noticing her mother examining her face from across the table.

  “What are your plans, then?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. I was thinking of seeking employment in Hamburg.”

  “Oh. This could be quite fortuitous,” chimed in Aunt Mary. “Perhaps you’d like to help Elsa with the new baby. They were just about to interview for the post.”

  Minna felt like saying, Not as long as I’ve a breath left in my body, but restrained herself. The thought of working for her young cousin, whom she used to care for, was far too humiliating.

  “I’ve actually been offered a post in the city, but if it doesn’t work out, I’ll certainly let you know,” Minna lied easily, avoiding eye contact with her mother.

  “I just thought of something,” continued Aunt Mary. “Remember that man someone introduced to Elsa, the one she didn’t like? Why don’t we find out if he’s still available for Minna?”