by Anne Roiphe
Then he tells me he will come into New York City and spend the day with me. He sends me his train schedule. He will arrive early in the morning and I will meet him at the station. I am pleased. I am a little excited. I think of walking in the woods. I think of the steel mills by the river. I think it doesn’t matter that he is a Lutheran and I am Jewish. Those distinctions belong to another time of life. He promises to tell me about his divorce when he sees me. He says he will explain the mistakes of his life. I will have to explain my own mistakes as well. I am prepared.
But then he says that his life was changed by Dr. Phil. I don’t respond. The conversation ends. I think about Dr. Phil. He has changed many people for the better, I am sure.
But I am of a different sort. Dr. Phil is like a leech on a fevered brow. I know he is popular. I just don’t belong with a man whose life was changed by Dr. Phil. I call Pittsburgh and explain that I can’t meet him at the train station. I have had second thoughts. My fault, I say. I am not ready, I say. I am still grieving, I apologize. I don’t say anything about Dr. Phil.
Then I wonder: Am I being small-minded? Am I cutting off a possibility because I am afraid of the new and the different? Am I just playing with the idea of a new life with no intentions of really claiming one? Perhaps I should ask Dr. Phil.
I remember the night we went to hear Anna Freud speak. The event was at an auditorium at a city college. She was small and dressed in black, with white hair. There were no empty seats. Psychoanalysts of all kinds had come to hear her, to applaud and to feel themselves close to the source, to pay their respects. This was before all the attacks on Freud. This was before it became clear to everyone that psychoanalysis was too expensive, would aid, if it would aid, only a very selected few. Psychoanalysts were pushed off their pedestals. Nevertheless I was a member of that community. I knew what they were talking about, jargon and all.
A friend sends me an e-mail. It has a single name on it. I call her to ask why she sent me that name. “I heard from my sister-in-law, the divorced one—that this B. is a man to stay away from. If someone introduces you to him, stay away from him.” My friend tells me that he’s been widowed for about three years. He’s a psychoanalyst. Why had my friend sent me his name? To warn me, she said, she was afraid I would be introduced to him since we had so many connections in common. I am intrigued. I Google him. I find the address of his office. I write him a note. I introduce myself. I suggest that we might enjoy meeting each other. What am I doing? This is not the way women of my generation behave. It is unseemly. It is also absurd. I have just been warned the man is no good and so I go rush toward him as if I wanted nothing more in the world than a no-good man. I drop my letter off at the post office.
The very next morning the phone rings. This is Dr. B., the voice says on the phone. He has a low, calm, reassuring voice. He liked my note. He is intrigued. He wants me to meet him at the Harvard Club the following evening for dinner. He will meet me in the lobby. I agree. All day I walk around holding his name in my mind. I think, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. I remind myself not to anticipate more than a dinner. But all day the possibility of Dr. B. runs like a shiver down my spine.
It is raining the next night. I dress carefully. I put on shoes with heels and a gold buckle. I don’t care if my toes soak in puddles. I arrive at the Harvard Club and there he is sitting in a chair in the lobby reading a newspaper. He has a strong face, a head of silver hair, a warm handshake. We go into the club, the mahogany dark club, with its maleness everywhere and a certain sad look to the chandeliers as if time had passed it by. Its solemnity now hollow, like an inn in the mountains that has lost its clientele. We talk, Dr. B. and I. Perhaps I talk too much. He asks me how I heard about him. I tell him. Was this a mistake? I want to interest him. I ask him questions. I find out what there is to find out about a psychoanalyst, a doctor who is used to not answering. He went to Harvard. I know his kind. We talk about our children. Perhaps I talk too much. Perhaps not. Then he walks me to the door of the Harvard Club. He lives on the East Side. I live on the West. The rain is coming down in torrents. He says he is going away for a week on a trip with one of his granddaughters but will call me when he returns. I walk off in the rain, my umbrella over my head.
The next morning he calls before eight o’clock. “Who is the person your friend knew? Who is the source of the warning about me?” That name I had not told him. I didn’t want to tell him. I was embarrassed at my lack of tact. I had not been sworn to secrecy but still the entire conversation was indiscreet. But I gave him the name: a woman I didn’t know. He said to me again, “I will call you as soon as I return.”
But he didn’t call, not the next week or the week after. He didn’t break my heart. One dinner, a few hours’ conversation cannot do that. But I tasted disappointment. Yes, if I leave my house for encounters with strange men, rejection is a possibility, a likelihood, a certainty some of the time. This one I deserved. It does not startle me that I am not universally loved by all who have dinner with me. I am a writer and know that bad reviews are as likely as good ones. In my imagination I had already begun a time when this stranger and I would go to the movies together and more. But in this case my imagination misled me. Little harm was done, little grief will be spent on the matter. It was not meant to be. Nevertheless for the next month I worried the matter. Was it my age, my conversation, my manner? Had my flirtation skills grown rusty? Was I so used to being loved that I assumed the whole world would love me if I wished? And then that was that. Some weeks later I tell the story of the meeting with Dr. B. to an analyst friend of mine. She tells me that he had been brought up on charges before the medical society because he slept with a patient. This is not exactly akin to being an ax murderer but it repels and disgusts nevertheless. What luck he never called me back.
If I could keep my children from ever finding out that I had lifted my hand against myself, I would. They stand in my way.
H. believed what he believed. He did for his patients what he could. He knew that Freud, error-filled or not, had been among the first, artists aside, to explore the underground river of the human mind, where the unacceptable thought floated and the less lovely, more feral creatures lurked on slimy rocks. Freud was the one who told us that we were far more than our conscious minds, our sweetest selves are but a sham.
Which is how it happened that one morning I woke thinking of the ways that H. was less than perfect. We say only good things about the dead. A eulogy is a mud pie of compliments, of perhaps exaggerated compliments. A good eulogy makes the mourners feel uplifted. But eulogies do not serve as portraits of the dead. I need to be accurate.
H. always frightened me while driving and we drove the highways almost every weekend out to the beach and back; a trip that would take a normal driver close to three hours was often for us less than two and that’s because H. liked to be the front car in the pack. That’s because he drove fast and moved incessantly from lane to lane and nothing I could say would stop him. I had long ago decided that I would die in a car accident with him one day and accepted wordlessly all the swooping and the veering and the close calls. Still it made me angry sitting next to him that he indulged his racing-car fantasy, his World War One pilot fantasy, in the car with me, with the innocent cat in the backseat in his box, and some time on this earth still ahead of us. Yes, he was right, he did not die in a car accident and he did not harm me. He had driven over sixty years and no one was ever injured (a few cars were scratched or bent). But as a driver, behind the wheel, he was unkind.
He was not good at psychoanalytic politics and did not dodge and weave among the psychoanalytic entities that made careers for psychoanalysts. He did not follow any orthodox line altogether. He worked with infants, observing them with their mothers; he had original ideas and published original papers but he could not befriend those he did not like and he could not pretend to be accommodating. He was not. This is a virtue and a fault. He knew that about himself. He understood himself. It would have been better
had he been a more worldly man. He would have enjoyed more of the honors his profession dispensed.
He did not believe in interfering in his children’s lives. They have to make their own decisions, he would say again and again, which sounds virtuous but sometimes made him seem an absence when he should have been a presence and sometimes stemmed from a desire to avoid controversy. He slept soundly on nights that I tossed and turned waiting for a child to return home, waiting for news of one sort or another.
Sometimes he was too silent. Sometimes when he was angry or upset he pulled into himself like a turtle and the shell was impenetrable. I had to wait, to coax him out, beg him to return. He would get angry while paying the bills, including his lifelong alimony to the wife he married first but shouldn’t have. He would sit soundlessly for hours at our desk with the papers spread before him. A more perfect man might have left me a life insurance policy. He had a policy for his first wife, which he was legally obligated to keep for years, and after that he was older and the policy would have been costly and we never quite had the extra funds. I understand but the idea stays in my mind. He should have protected me. It comes to me that a more perfect man would not have left me to send out death certificates. He also protested when I wanted one more child. Just one more. I didn’t insist. We had enough. He was right, we couldn’t afford it. But still I wanted another baby. A trace of anger burns across my brain.
But the worst thing he ever did was to die.
H. always did our taxes. He pored over the statements from the bank, credit card bills, and would list all possible deductions. He had folders and papers and a system repeated year after year. When all was done I signed the returns and mailed them. I have held tax papers in my hands but never looked at them. My eyes are virginal. Now I try to imitate old notes. Now I try to find out what he was looking for in the credit card bills. Now I am the sole taxpayer, the citizen, the one who should remember and mark down expenses and charitable contributions. My mind rebels. It is not just. It is not right. I was not made for numerical matters. This is his job. But he is not here and now I will do it, badly, but I will do it. Resentfully I will do it.
Psychoanalysis is an art as well as a science. Everyone says that. H. knew that. Still he wanted to be a scientist. He wanted to see if the child did indeed develop as the textbooks say, in the real world. That’s why he spent years observing mothers and their babies in nurseries at major hospitals. He, with a colleague, directed the nursery. He advised the mothers. He held the babies. He was in love with both infant and mother, with the bond that rose between them. He wrote down the ways a child could separate from its mother, how it ran toward and away, how its body reacted in fear to the mother leaving the room. He was an expert on infant sleep troubles and eating troubles and slow speech and he ran a nursery for troubled infants who had no physical disability but were not speaking or walking, whose eyes wandered about aimlessly. He worked with a staff to restore the crucial human connections, to bring these fragile babies back to life. He talked about how children react to the differences between the sexes and how it made boys and girls behave differently. This was a dangerous conversation in the early feminist years. He didn’t care. He saw what he saw and published it in papers. When he talked to me about what happened in his nursery, when he explained to me his ideas on anger or shyness in small children, his voice would grow even deeper and I was held as in a spell by a great wizard, a wizard who was my spouse.
A friend, not the first to do so, suggests I dye my hair. She says, “It will make you look younger.” It would. I should. Maybe I will. I don’t want to. If I were to do it, the color of my choice would be purple, punk purple, magenta purple, or perhaps I could get black and white stripes like a skunk. If I have not met a man to cherish for the remaining years, it cannot be because of the color of my hair, or can it?
Through the glass windowpane I see a man eating dinner alone. He has gray hair and a book on the table beside him. Why are we both alone? I see a man walking past the greengrocer with a cane and a cap on his head like the cap H. used to wear. The man is alone. I walk a little faster so I can see if he is wearing a ring. He isn’t. But that is not conclusive. He might be married. He might not. You can’t stop strangers on the street and ask them if they are married and if not would they like to stop for a cup of coffee. Too bad.
I receive a notice from the cemetery. I need to order a headstone. I need to send them money to dig the foundation for the headstone. I need to approve the words put on the headstone. I had asked H. if he wanted to be buried or cremated, a long time ago. He said he didn’t care. It would be up to me. I asked him why he didn’t care. He shrugged. It would make no difference to him. He was not one to follow religious traditions. On the other hand he would be perfectly respectful of anyone’s desire to do so. Cremation saves space on this earth for the living, which highly recommends it. On the other hand Jews have been buried under the ground forever, believing—some of them—in the coming of the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead. I have no desire to visit a grave site. I have no illusions that I would be closer to him there than in front of my television or on my block, or standing on my subway platform. I do think that when I watch a Giants football game, I am nearer his spirit than when I lie limp on my couch, not thinking anything at all, but letting time wash over me, waiting for the day to end. But this kind of nearness is not literal, nor corporeal, nor in fact very convincing at all.
I decided to bury him in the ground because I thought it better for our family, because traditions are ignored at one’s peril, later they might seem important. This choice of mine is expensive. H. would hate the expense. I feel guilty. Is this wasted money? Of course it is, but done.
It is winter now. A mild winter but still no time for visiting headstones. We will go in the spring. I purchased two plots. One now used, the other for me. This will save my children anxiety. This will put my remains beside his—not that either of us will ever acknowledge the other.
I think of the ground that was dug by the employees of Mt. Eden cemetery—I see the small backhoe, the darkness of the earth. I am not afraid of death. I have no expectations of heaven or hell or judgment to come. But something chills me in the thought of him, no longer him, changing shape, losing tissue and sinew and becoming all skull, all bone, there below in the ground where I can’t touch him and he can’t touch me.
I see the decay. I see how little remains. I push the images away. They return. I see a hand, an eye socket, a bone. I don’t want to see this. I don’t have a choice. The images come now and then, prompted by what? I do not know. Is this a result of guilt? If it is guilt is it Eve’s guilt or some personal spasm of conscience? Is it the result of a lifelong bad habit of burrowing in the sore spots? I do not for a moment think it is H. I am seeing. I am expecting no rising, no bone rattling, no hauntings. Alas poor Yorick. I think it is Yorick I am seeing.
Perhaps I should have had him cremated after all and spread his ashes on the sea where he had gone fishing for blues summer after summer within sight of the Montauk lighthouse. But there seems something ridiculous about saying the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, over the huge dark sea, even near the harbor. The prayer for the dead is a list of praises for the Lord and H. would have protested, why didn’t God take an extra day or two to create the world? He might have done a better job, he would say. He would especially have protested at his own unasked-for death. But we did say the Kaddish at the grave site and he would not have minded. Do what suits you, he had said when I asked years ago. I find the words of the Kaddish comforting, the rhythm of the prayer comforting, because it is ancient, it links us together in time. It is a prayer against despair because it is said aloud with one’s fellow humans. I don’t fool myself. This grave site is not for H. The ceremony that accompanied the body down its hole was not for H. It and the bill were for me.
I finally go to a movie alone. I choose my movie carefully. I choose one that H. would have wanted to see: the new James Bond. H. coul
d watch James Bond movies over and over again. He was never bored by them, never found them silly, improbable, nonsense. All things I said at least to myself. Still I had enjoyed them, because H. was laughing, gasping, holding my hand. Now I go alone. The plot is not much, the beautiful girl beautiful, the exotic scenery exotic and the evil ones very evil. It seems strange to be sitting alone in the movie theater. I feel self-conscious. Of course no one is looking at me, not even when the lights were on, before the previews started. The ticket taker didn’t say, “What are you doing here alone, lady?” The young couple the row behind me didn’t whisper to each other, “Hope I don’t end up like that.” I recognize that the whisper is my own. Ten minutes into the movie I forget that I am sitting next to strangers on either side, and I am inside the film. James Bond is talking to me. That is the way with movies. I leave the theater with the throng of people arriving and departing all around me. I am glad I went to the movies. I can go alone whenever I want.