Divorcing

by Susan Taubes

  From her father’s rambling discourse she picked out a fairy tale: it was beautiful and mysterious, the story of the young girl married to a man chosen for her by her father, a stranger from another town; the marriage arranged on the basis of a sermon.

  “It was not how he imagined it.” Her father tells once more the story of how her grandfather became the chief rabbi of Budapest. “He never intended to become a rabbi. He came from a well-to-do family whose other members went into trade, finance, administration of land; he had received a secular education. It was not unusual for a young man from an orthodox Jewish family to distinguish himself in Talmudic learning and then afterward settle down in some profession.”

  “Why did he become a rabbi if he didn’t want to?” she asks. Her father replies with a sigh and a gesture of helplessness, perhaps repeating the answer he received from his father.

  Of the life his father imagined before his fateful encounter with Simon of Nyitra, and his decision to marry Simon’s daughter, her father does not speak. What he imagined on the train to Galanta, or what he imagined on the train back to his home town in Pazdics to take leave of his parents, no one shall ever know; only his disappointment. “It was not the life that he imagined,” her father repeats.

  •

  Back in the house she looks through the small pile of papers her father brought down from the attic. The family tree. Yellowed newspaper clippings of Moses Landsmann’s obituaries. Popular psychoanalytic articles her father wrote for Budapest newspapers on thumb-sucking, Jewish rituals, frigidity, potency. Things of no value to anyone that he had brought over the ocean, kept all these years. “For you? For my grandchildren?” he asked before going to bed. “Please decide if there is anything you want.”

  The story is about a marriage, she thinks, sitting in her father’s consulting room. It’s the story of the true marriage, as told by the son of that marriage to his adolescent daughter who always heard it with a mixture of nostalgia, resentment and indifference, thinking it had nothing to do with her, and would never happen to her and still wishing she had been born into that other world where a girl was given into marriage simply by her father, like her grandmother was; knowing she could never be that kind of woman, and angry that it was denied to her because of the way the world had changed, changed already in her father’s youth before she was born, so that she was the product of that change: of a father who broke away from his parents’ traditional home, to whom his own marriage was a problem or a joke; who took her to America where she could dissociate herself from her childhood in Budapest, where she would not be tied by roots to land or people, because America was just this hard pavement given to push oneself away from and create one’s own truth, which was for the best, the young girl wanted to believe, since this was in fact her destiny; but still at odds with herself and always wondering as she listened to her father, what was this change, trying to grasp the awfulness that whatever her grandparents and all the generations before them experienced in their youth, giving their lives sanctity, mystery and meaning, had been irrevocably outruled and superseded in the name of Progress, Reason and Enlightenment. But what was it in fact? The reality always reduced to the streets of Garfield and her psychoanalyst father telling her about his religious childhood in Galanta and her inability to experience the world he was describing, to be touched by it, its irrelevance to her to whom he had not given such a childhood and the pointlessness of his telling her about it on Clinton Avenue.

  She looks at the family tree before her now: it begins with a certain Jokab born in the village of Szered, 1730. Drawn up by various members of the Landsmann clan before the two brothers left for America in 1939, the document was recopied recently by her cousin Tibor, escaped freedom fighter, who drew the now eight generations in different colors. How strange to see the names Joshua, Toby, Jonathan, children of Sophie and Ezra, on that tree.

  Counting from herself only to the seventh generation, the lives of two hundred and fifty-two individual men and women had to cross and a hundred and seventy-six nuptials had to be consummated in order for Sophie to exist. Of these hundred and seventy-six nuptials, all but one were hallowed. Whatever the individual failings of the persons involved, the stupidity or outright selfishness of the fathers who arranged these marriages, whatever the unhappiness of the couples, it was the objective validity of these marriages that impressed Sophie. As for her parents’ marriage, she had never been able to think of it as a true marriage.

  The story is about a marriage, she thinks, sitting in her father’s consulting room: the false marriage of Rudolf Landsmann to Kamilla Ripper, as felt by the daughter, and her own marriage a few years after the end of the Second World War in New York City, which was to have been the true marriage. The marriage of Sophie Landsmann to Ezra Blind, the young rabbi and visiting scholar from Vienna, who had singled her out at a lecture, in its way as mysterious as her grandmother’s: two people, practically strangers entering upon a life commitment without any romance and the usual preliminaries of courtship, without so much as a dinner, a movie date, without a word of endearment having been spoken, or any kind of intimacy between them; oddly impersonal, formal, totally unsentimental and yet curiously free and comfortable with each other; a marriage that happened on the basis of a sermon he delivered to her alone on the evening they met and the next evening when she answered his marriage proposal by asking him to deflower her, the sermon and the proposal repeated for the next six weeks, always the same sermon delivered by the young rabbi from Vienna to the psychoanalyst’s daughter who argued against God and marriage, till the night she could not answer him: she wanted only to feel simple and comfortable like the night he deflowered her, she wanted all her life to be simple like that; and they became engaged. It’s the story of her marriage to a man to whom it mattered that she was the granddaughter of the former chief rabbi of Budapest, she thinks, still trying to understand what that marriage was all about, looking at the telephone beside her father’s chair to which he shuffled from his bed when she called at three a.m. (she didn’t know what time it was), Ezra at her side urging her to make the call to Garfield after he had cabled his parents, Ezra taking the receiver from her as soon as she had stated the fact, her father brokenly gasping, “What do you mean—getting married? Who is this Ezra? You can’t do this to me!...” Then Ezra’s voice, equal to the occasion, “Father, if I may call you Father...” speaking now in English then in Hebrew, already the son-in-law, proud and festive, prolonging the conversation in a tone of gentle irony, soon on joking terms with his father-in-law, while she watched amazed, perhaps just awakening from a state of total amazement at what had happened to her, to the growing sense of its reality.

  It was not a mistake, she thinks, contemplating the family tree on which her name, Ezra’s, their children’s names are registered. Ezra belongs there. And at this late hour, her father snoring deeply in the next room, she can smile over Sophie Landsmann’s attempt to find decency through her marriage to Ezra Blind.

  •

  The toasts and speeches in honor of her father, in the Regency Penthouse of the Sheraton Plaza, confer meaning on what was hitherto a dreary, incoherent limbo of her years of growing up in Garfield. It had this purpose, sense and direction, culminating in the creation of faculties and buildings in the presence of these people from Ohio, Connecticut, Maryland, Wisconsin, Canada and Australia who, as they stress in their speeches, would not be here if Rudolf Landsmann had not made up his mind to settle in Garfield, N.Y., at a time when there was no analyst in the state of New York outside of New York City; if Rudolf Landsmann had not fought single-handed and against opposition...She remembers the morning they arrived in Garfield; her father joked, “We must have got off at the wrong stop.”

  “A Godforsaken place,” he kept repeating the first time they walked down the main street, and when their walk brought them before a tavern displaying a picture of DER FUEHRER between two Nazi flags (which wasn’t removed till the day aft
er America declared war on Germany), by then everything wrong seemed right; they laughed hardest at the inevitable climax. Later, passing the frame house of the county insane asylum on her way to school, what always struck her was that the people sitting on the porch were weird in the same way as the people sitting on every other porch in Garfield; it was the same stark look of isolation frozen on all the faces that had stunned them both on their first walk through the town. Her father’s decision to settle in Garfield was something she could never understand, never accept. She listens to her father conclude his speech thanking his colleagues, dignified, humorous, at ease, a few sardonic remarks to clear the air of any trace of hypocrisy; she is proud of him; she just wasn’t cut out to be the daughter of an apostle to Garfield.

  Her presence at the banquet is one of those felicitous deceptions of a few days. “When I arrived twenty years ago with my daughter, who sits at my right...,” he had begun his speech; she had materialized to please her father.

  “Well, it’s something,” he says when they’re alone in the taxi. “Even if you see me as an old fuddy-duddy and consider Freud rubbish, it’s something. It doesn’t really make a difference to you whether your father is a distinguished psychiatrist or a grocer, does it? And why should it? You’re absolutely right. Still, I’m happy you came.”

  They have made most of their duty calls. “People want to see you,” he had said apologetically. “They always ask, ‘Dr. Landsmann, how is your beautiful daughter?’ Are you beautiful?” he had asked with mock severity.

  “Of course I’m beautiful,” she told him. Now it’s a relief to be back in the house. People tire him, he complains to his daughter.

  “Is it true that you are writing a novel,” he asks, frowning, his tone troubled as he touches on the old issue.

  “What sort of book are you writing? And do you know why you are writing it? We analysts...”

  “We,” he used to say when they first walked together in Garfield. “We are different. We don’t like foolish chatter, frills, extravagance, display of feelings. We are thinkers.” Both he and she were different from her mother in Budapest, who lived on flatteries, who dressed extravagantly, who was always preoccupied with her emotions. They were different from his family, different from anybody he could think of because practically all other people were vain, foolish, hypocritical. “We are different,” he said. His daughter detected a tinge of sadness and irritation—as if he were questioning why this was so, troubled by the fact that they were different—which offended her pride and created a distance between them. She wanted to remain apart, to be left alone. Paternal approval gave her certain liberties: an aloof man, an aloof daughter. But he was also a father: he worried why she didn’t care for her appearance, spent all her time alone, why didn’t she have a boyfriend? Why wasn’t she like other girls?—like the grocer’s red-haired daughter showing off her breasts, she would catch a man for sure before she was seventeen; or like the reform rabbi’s daughter who was high-minded, a brilliant student—but all in the service of femininity. He cited others, sometimes he was joking; he wouldn’t seriously want her to be like the receptionist at the hospital, with her perfect manicure, hair set and doll smile, sitting there just to attract a man. And certainly not like one of his patients he was describing. He didn’t want her to be like his mother and sisters. The world had changed. He didn’t know. He really didn’t know himself what was demanded of a woman in this new and changing world; what a woman should be, and his daughter in particular. It was a question on his mind he was asking himself and his daughter. Perhaps because she took too long to answer, he went on citing cases; or perhaps it was to relieve her, or simply because he was accustomed to her silence and accustomed to answering the questions addressed to her. Occasionally she spoke, and she startled him by her answers; so perhaps to spare himself her answers he went on thinking out loud about what a woman’s life used to be and what it could be under the present circumstances—a question that he could not bring to either theoretical or practical resolution. He always concluded by returning to his daughter approvingly, praising her seriousness, her kind of beauty which was not cheap or worldly. “We are different,” he always concluded, sometimes with a touch of theatricality, fusing pathos and irony in the sweep of a gesture, putting his arm around her shoulder as they walked.

  They were different in different ways. Sophie still hadn’t found any way to disagree with her father openly, except to blurt out her feelings like a child. This did not work. In her father’s universe, emotion, tears, rage discredited you. She retreated into silence. There was only one course left to her, refusal to enter into argument. His premises may be fine for his patients. She had others. No, she was not interested in what motivated people. She didn’t “reject” Freud. She just did not find it as interesting as works of literature. No, she was not interested in explaining people or anything. He persisted in questioning her about her interests, aims, ambitions. She answered evasively.

  It was as painful for him to disavow her as for her to be disavowed. He tried to cover up; but he couldn’t yield his position.

  For the next years they had to live with this: she was different from him.

  He presented her with options of the ways she might be different, supported by data he had on her as a child. He offered her several ways of being different; he wanted her to be different in a way he could accept, understand; he even pulled out a sympathetic portrait of her mother. She saw in his eyes veiled condescension, disavowal. She didn’t trust him. She wanted to be different her own way, which he couldn’t understand or accept. “We...” Rudolf Landsmann would say, speaking to his daughter on their evening walks in Garfield during the war.

  “We analysts...” he began to say after a while. And she walked beside him thinking her own thoughts, not listening. Every so often she would hear his phrase, “...we analysts,” reassuring her that they lived in different worlds.

  Occasionally he might ask a question that startled her. On their evening walks during the war her father would ask, “Do you sometimes think of your mother?”

  The picture of her mother Sophie carried with her to the New World was lost. She did not have it when she arrived in Pittsburgh with her father. The locket did not close well; her mother observed the fact when she showed it to her, and Sophie recalled that they had stopped by a jeweler to fix it the last afternoon she and her mother spent together. Her mother spoke sharply to the jeweler who as a matter of courtesy was profusely apologetic, but between ritual apologies and promises stated more than once that it was an old locket—the two sides didn’t fit. Perhaps it was just as well that the picture fell out. It hadn’t helped her to remember her mother. She couldn’t conjure up her mother’s face. Perhaps she had never had a clear image of her mother’s face, even in Budapest; but it was only some time after the train pulled out of the station that this had struck her, perhaps because she knew she would not see her mother for a long time, perhaps never again. She was bound for another continent, an ocean would separate them. In the train to Paris and at various points of the journey she would suddenly realize that she couldn’t recall her mother’s face, then open the locket to study the photograph and close it with the feeling that her mother was just one of those beautiful faces one saw in magazines. She didn’t ask herself if this was a new feeling, or the way she had always felt about her mother. She had no memory of her. It was as a picture she thought of her, therefore it was just as well the photograph was lost. She did not need it. She remembered the face in a grave pose, the wide mouth and faultless arc of penciled brows.

  Her father’s periodic question, “Do you sometimes think of your mother?” found her unprepared, at a loss. It was impossible to remember her mother. An image, simplified and idealized, had replaced all memories, yet she had a more real sense of her mother than before: a woman who still walked through the streets of Budapest where Sophie couldn’t go, an elegantly dressed woman in a beautiful city; a
lady married to a tall blond man, kind and well-mannered, very different from her father; a woman who had been married to a true nobleman before Sophie was born; a strange, beautiful, mysterious woman who had never really seemed like her mother. She was pained by her father’s question, which may not have been addressed to her at all.

  There was no picture of her mother in the house. It was strange to Sophie that her father should be concerned about the woman who was now another man’s wife, should reminisce to his daughter about her little habits, her problems; worry about what she was doing at present, whether she had all that she needed; then return to speaking about her talents, her mistakes. Perhaps his daughter’s silence prompted him after a while to make some concluding remark like, “She is your mother, after all.”

  “Do you sometimes think of your mother?” Rudolf Landsmann began his ruminations on his former wife. Perhaps she didn’t. Perhaps she did, but the fact that he did not allow her time to answer made her believe that she didn’t. And after 1941 when communication was broken by America’s entry into the war—and now when her father asked the question he expressed his fear that she might be dead or in a concentration camp, or hiding, starving, one didn’t know, it was terrible, terrible—perhaps Sophie still saw her mother as a beautiful woman walking through a city whose charm was enhanced by bombings, made more beautiful by disaster.

  In 1951 her mother came to settle in America, perhaps hoping for a reconciliation with her former husband. Nothing of the sort materialized. Her father, while solicitous for her welfare, could not tolerate her manner, and she in turn could not take his chronic annoyance and picking her apart. He did not permit her to visit him in Garfield. Ritual meetings, and then only long-distance calls once or twice a year, were still maintained. But he was pained by the estrangement between mother and daughter. He was anxious that Sophie be on at least civil terms with her mother.