Without Reservations

by Alice Steinbach

  She asked me what I did. I told her I worked as a newspaper reporter, which in my opinion also qualified me to declare myself, at the very least, a lay analyst. She laughed. It was a loud, booming sound, one that came without warning. It must have alarmed her patients, I thought, when it came at them from behind the couch. Indeed, there was a raw quality about her whole person that ran counter to the image of the analyst as quiet cipher. I found it refreshing. But I wasn’t sure I’d want her to be my therapist.

  We spent the next hour or so walking together through the house, paying special attention to Freud’s study and library. The large room was a replica of his consulting room in Vienna, furnished with belongings transplanted from 19 Berggasse, his home for forty-seven years. For the last year of his life he worked here, surrounded by the familiar past. I was reminded of the way my friend Susan had managed to re-create her Washington apartment on a hill in Montmartre, bringing along a bit of the past with her into a new life.

  In the study, Jean and I paused to contemplate the famous couch. It was roped off from the rest of the room.

  “Probably to discourage any homesick patients from taking a lie-down on it,” Jean said.

  “It looks pretty uncomfortable to me,” I said, eyeing the short, heavy-looking couch that roller-coastered down from the head end and was covered with a scratchy-looking Oriental rug. I told Jean of my observation that the decor of an analyst’s office seemed always to be one of two styles: either sleek, leather-and-chrome minimalist with the obligatory Miro print, or a mismatched, just-hauled-up-from-the-beach-cottage look accessorized with a Käthe Kollwitz print.

  Jean laughed. “Well, I’m afraid I fall into the second category. What about your analyst?”

  “Definitely beach cottage,” I said. “On humid days his office even had a musty seaside smell. Actually, I don’t think I’d feel comfortable with an analyst who had a leather Mies van der Rohe couch.”

  “I hear the Mies couch is popular with New York analysts. Which is another good reason not to move to New York.”

  Before leaving, Jean and I stopped at the gift shop. “I wonder what Freud would think of being merchandised this way,” I said, browsing through the notecards, posters, mugs, commemorative stamps, and replicas of the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquities he so famously collected. Some of them weren’t cheap.

  “I suspect he’d be amused and not at all surprised,” Jean said, handing over thirty pounds to the cashier for a pair of nondescript silver earrings. She explained to me the design of the earrings was taken from a doodle by Freud on one of his manuscripts.

  When the clerk handed Jean her change and the boxed earrings, she immediately unwrapped them. “The way I look at it,” Jean said, guiding the silver posts through her earlobes, “it’s like wearing a little piece of Freud’s unconscious.”

  Jean and I took the Tube back to Green Park together. She told me she was staying in Mayfair with some rich Australian friends who, several years earlier, had made their fortune in mining. “Tin, or something like that. In South America, I think. They’re out of town this weekend so I’ve the whole place to myself.”

  It was getting close to dinnertime and the thought of eating alone on a Sunday evening was bothering me in a big way. Without hesitating, I asked Jean if she had plans. I figured I’d had good luck so far in the friends I’d made on this trip and Jean, my instincts told me, was someone I’d enjoy having as a pal in London.

  Meeting people on this trip, I’d come to see, was not difficult. I was good at being thrown into situations with total strangers and finding a way to connect, at least temporarily. That’s what reporters do all the time. But developing a real relationship, even a temporary one, was far different from being shielded by a reporter’s notebook. Reporters, I’d come to think, were not unlike analysts: their anonymity—that is, their ability to not insert themselves into the interview—was an important element in drawing out the other person. Not that reporters shouldn’t be smart and charming and know more about the subject than the subject himself does; no, it is all a matter of not forgetting who exactly the subject of the interview is.

  But meeting people on this trip, I realized—although initially easy—required going beyond the one-sided reportorial encounter. It required revealing yourself. And it also required a willingness to not be offended when the object of your attention did not respond to you. I was getting better at both aspects of the travel relationship.

  Jean, however, did not reject me. She immediately said yes to my dinner offer, suggesting that we eat at a Chinese restaurant in Mayfair. We walked through Half Moon Street, ducking briefly into Shepherd Market for a quick look around, and then crossed Curzon onto Queen Street.

  The restaurant, which struck me as quite chic, overflowed with fashionably-got-up people waiting to be seated. I was about to suggest we go back to an Indian restaurant in Shepherd Market when the headwaiter motioned to Jean. We left the line and followed him to a table. I was impressed.

  “Did I miss something?” I asked her. “Are you some sort of celebrity or did you just slip the headwaiter a twenty-pound note?”

  “Oh, it’s probably just my undeniable glamour and conspicuous charm that accounts for it.” She laughed. “Either that or my fake Gucci handbag.” She then told me that her hosts in London—who lived nearby in the Chesterfield Hill area—frequently dined at the restaurant. “I’ve been their guest here several times, so I have status. It’s one of the perks of hanging around with rich people, you know.”

  Over dinner Jean and I talked about our lives; at least the Reader’s Digest versions. When she was growing up, Jean said, she dreamed of going into veterinary medicine. “I’m animal crazy and the idea of treating large animals—horses, cattle, sheep, that sort of thing—appealed to me.” She switched her focus to psychiatry after her father fell into a deep depression. She was in her teens at the time. “My father never fully recovered and somehow I was the one in the family best able to cope with him.” Her mother and sisters, she said, quickly allowed her to take over this role. She read a lot about the illness and by college was fixed in her decision to become a psychiatrist.

  “It’s worked out well except I seem to be attracted only to men who have depressive tendencies. Something I don’t seem to have worked out in my own analysis.” Jean said she’d been married and divorced twice, once to and from a fellow analyst. Her month-long stay in London, she said, was prompted by the breakup of her most recent relationship. “With another analyst,” she said, letting out a mock sigh.

  None of this seemed to have depressed Jean. She struck me as an outgoing, optimistic person with a keen interest in everything around her. An ardent horsewoman, scuba diver, and trekker, she’d been around the world several times and seemed to have a large capacity for adventure. Her appetite for food and wine, I noticed, was also large. Although I liked Jean and enjoyed her company, her loud unpredictable laugh, which sometimes drew attention to our table, made me uncomfortable. I decided to write it off as part of her raw, bigger-than-life personality.

  I noticed a second wave of diners—probably the after-theater crowd—was starting to arrive. When I looked at my watch I saw it was close to eleven. Jean and I paid the bill and, after a short stroll along Curzon Street, prepared to part company.

  Just before saying good-bye, Jean mentioned a party her hosts were giving the following weekend. She asked if I’d like to come.

  “Sounds like fun. I’d love to.”

  “I’ll call you.” She took down my number and handed me a card printed with the phone number of her London hosts.

  My trip to the Freud Museum had left me with a strong urge to visit our old house near Sloane Square, the place where I’d lived as a young wife and mother. So after breakfast the next morning, I set out on a pilgrimage. As I walked toward the row of houses on Sloane Gardens, I imagined my husband and elder son as they were twenty-five years ago: a studious-looking man, slender and blue-eyed, with the high forehead of an in
tellectual, and a blond, blue-eyed two-year-old, running from one end of the square to the other, chasing pigeons.

  If I looked hard enough I could see, off to the side, a dark-haired woman in a pink silk coat buying flowers—big bunches of pale apricot roses—from the vendor in front of the Underground stop. It was my mother. She’d made it a habit, while in London, to fill up her apartment and ours with fresh flowers.

  The neighborhood was so familiar to me that it was tempting to continue reconstructing the past. So I did.

  There is Bliss’s chemist shop, I thought, where we bought cold remedies and Band-Aids. And there’s the Peter Jones department store; we all bought raincoats there. And, oh, look! There’s W. H. Smith’s bookshop, where my husband bought books and I bought toy trucks for our son.

  But I knew enough to be parsimonious with such memories. They still had the power to ambush me. I knew that lurking in the dark corners of such memories was an unwanted thought: the possibility that the most important part of my life existed in the past. Most of the time I knew this was not so, but occasionally, when trapped by memories, I would mistake change for loss, and grieve over the marriage that dissolved, the mother who died, the boy who grew up, and the young woman I was when I lived on this street.

  But which house was it we lived in? Suddenly I couldn’t remember the exact number. Was it 15? Or 17? Looking at first one, then the other, I drew a complete blank. Then a door opened and a pleasant-looking woman of about forty, wearing a chador but with her face uncovered, stepped out.

  “Are you looking for someone?” she asked in a way that suggested a wish to be helpful.

  “Well, I was,” I said. “A family that used to live here. But they’ve moved away.”

  When the woman turned to walk back into the house, I saw a flash of high-heeled silver sandals from beneath her chador. Watching her close the door to Number 15 Sloane Gardens, I wondered if she ever got homesick for a garden in Persia, one with a fountain splashing in the courtyard. I wondered if she, too, might have returned there once, searching for the person she used to be.

  It was still early, so I decided to visit a museum I’d heard about: the quaintly named Museum of Garden History. One of my English friends had warned me not to miss the museum or its special exhibition celebrating the 150th anniversary of Gertrude Jekyll’s birth.

  “Gertrude Jekyll?” I had said, pronouncing the last name Jeckul, as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “The name sounds vaguely familiar but who exactly is she?”

  “First off, it’s JEE-kill, not JECK-ul.” She smiled. “The ladies at the museum get quite cross when you mispronounce the name of their gardening heroine.” She went on to explain that Gertrude Jekyll was probably the most important garden designer of the century, and that most of today’s gardens were influenced by her ideas.

  What my friend forgot to tell me, however, was that the museum was housed in a former church. After passing the Church of St. Mary-at-Lambeth several times, searching the almost empty streets for the right address, I was ready to give up. Then I spotted a woman who looked as though she might be a gardener: tweed suit, pleasantly weathered face, brisk stride. “Excuse me,” I said. “Do you know where the Museum of Garden History is?”

  She nodded. “It’s just over there,” she said, pointing to a small, lovely church directly behind me.

  It was cool and quiet inside the thick walls of the museum-church. Straight ahead I saw a gift shop, as cozy as a kitchen nook, where volunteers in plaid skirts and sweater sets gently presided over garden books, botanical watercolors, and assorted gifts. The museum’s collections of garden tools, historical exhibits, and fascinating photographs and sketches tracing the evolution of garden design were displayed in what was the nave of the church. There was also a space set aside for a tearoom.

  I felt completely at home in this combination church and museum. It was as though the great noise of the world gave way to the soft buzzing whirr of childhood memories: of Sundays spent in church dozing off, with the thick smell of lilies in the air; of visits to Mr. Moore’s hardware store with Grandmother to buy small packets of seed with names like poetry. Heavenly Blue Morning Glory. Sweet Pea. Golden Marguerite. Black-eyed Susan. It wouldn’t have surprised me to find Grandmother there in person, wearing her pith helmet and rubber boots.

  Instead I turned around and bumped into another extraordinary woman: Gertrude Jekyll. Right away I knew we were kindred spirits; knew it from the moment I heard her voice—her lucid, wry, thinking voice, that is—that was transcribed straight from her head into articles and notebooks:

  “Throughout my life I have found one of the things most worth doing was to cultivate the habit of close observation,” wrote Miss Jekyll.

  And: “Near my home is a little wild valley, whose planting, wholly done by nature, I have all my life regarded with the most reverent admiration.”

  And: “There is always in February some one day, at least, when one smells the yet distant, but surely coming summer.”

  But it was the voice of the woman, now sixty years dead, expressing her still-strong connection to the child inside her that sealed the deal:

  “Well do I remember the time when I thought there were two kinds of people in the world—children and grown-ups. And I think it is because I have been more or less a gardener all my life that I still feel like a child in many ways, although from the number of years I have lived I ought to know that I am quite an old woman.”

  By the time I left the exhibition I was in love with Gertrude Jekyll.

  But then, who would not fall under the spell of a woman who, herself well-to-do, designed for no fee the gardens and interiors of the Home of Rest for Ladies of Small Means. Set in the woods of Surrey, the home was open to working women, mainly nurses and teachers, in need of a holiday. She decorated the common room of the home with ladder-back chairs, an oak table, and country ornaments. Simple things were used, she said, to keep the interior harmonious with the “simple truth and honesty” of the house’s timbered construction.

  Her life struck me as reflecting the same qualities: simple truth and honesty.

  I trudged back to my flat, loaded down with books by and about this extraordinary woman. I was tired but excited. More and more I saw how complicated my own life had become; how overgrown it was with thickets of worries and regrets, unearned vanities and silly insecurities. Somehow Miss Jekyll had found a way to simplify, simplify. Perhaps I could, too.

  That night Jean Gillespie called to give me details about the party her friends were giving. “Saturday night. Drinks around eight-thirty. Dinner at ten. There’ll be wonderful food and great wine. So come hungry and thirsty.”

  My attempts to find out what I should wear proved futile. “Oh, dress any way you want,” Jean said. I asked what she was wearing. “I’m not sure yet. I’ll see what strikes me at seven-thirty on Saturday night. Ring the buzzer marked Robert and Olivia Morgan.”

  My English friends were more specific with their advice. Dress up. Arrive at least a half-hour late. Take a gift. The last two suggestions were easy. I would take flowers and arrive at nine—after eating a light supper, of course. There was no way I could hold out until ten to eat dinner.

  But their suggestion to “dress up” still didn’t solve the dilemma of what to wear. For some reason I wanted to look good. Really good. My guess was I had something to prove: that I could fit into this group of people described by Jean as “high rollers.” Fit in for one night, anyway.

  At precisely nine o’clock, wearing the black silk dress bought in Paris and carrying an armful of pale yellow roses, I rang the buzzer to the Morgans’ apartment. A butler opened the door. Inside, I could see the party was in full swing. “Allow me to take your flowers, madam,” said the butler, who then whisked them away, never to be seen again. So much for arriving late and bearing a gift, I thought.

  I stood there, surrounded by a roomful of strangers engaged in animated conversation, wondering what to do next. A waiter passed by with
a silver tray of tulip-shaped glasses filled with champagne. He seemed to have no intention of stopping, so I hailed him as I would a taxi, and took one. Then, just as I started to make my move toward a cluster of guests, I heard a booming laugh erupt behind me. I knew immediately it was Jean and turned around to say hello. Her appearance stunned me.

  Jean looked like a movie star; a large movie star but a movie star nonetheless. She looked the way I imagined Geena Davis might look if she put on twenty pounds. Slowly I took in Jean’s appearance. The woman who didn’t know what she was going to wear was dressed in a draped red chiffon gown held up by two ribbons of red silk. Her dark hair was swept back into a French braid and her lips rouged the exact red of her dress. The perfection of all this—and her pretense about throwing herself together at the last moment—would have put me off were it not for one thing: her earrings.

  “Remember these?” she asked, putting her hands up to the dopey-looking silver earrings she’d bought at the Freud Museum. They looked totally out of place with her getup. “These are to remind me that I don’t really belong here. That I’m just an analyst sponging off some very rich friends.” We both laughed, a conspiratorial laugh that suggested our awareness of being outsiders at this soiree.

  “C’mon, love, let me take you around,” Jean said, taking my hand and pulling me through the crowd. Each time she stopped to introduce me she would add on after my name, without pausing, “a reporter from America.” Her need to identify me by what I did didn’t bother me; everybody at the party had an identification added onto their names. Gerald, a commodities trader … Fiona, a theater producer … Russell, a land developer … James and Terry, the horse breeders.… I found myself thinking of Naohiro, of how pleasant it would be to have him sitting next to me. But would he even enjoy a party like this? I wondered.