DECEMBER 1934
A Christmas tree now stood in Doctor Zilboorg’s office, and in the spirit of the holiday he offered Kay an eggnog. “Rum, brandy, or bourbon,” he asked.
“Brandy,” said Kay with a laugh. She was surprised that a psychoanalyst would stock such libations, and said so.
“Libations?” he chuckled. “On the contrary, it is of utmost importance that you shed your inhibitions, your defense mechanisms. If alcohol helps, well…” He completed his sentence with a whirl of his hand. His mood seemed buoyant, perhaps an effect of the season. After handing her the drink he sank back into his easy chair, sipping. “Let’s start where we left off, shall we?” He looked over his notes. “The important thing is to dissociate yourself, at least in this room, from both George and Jimmy.”
“But I love George.”
“There is nothing wrong with love. But let us try to dismantle whatever is weak in the scaffolding of your emotions. We are seeking the solid underlying foundation. You must avoid a repeat of your failed marriage. You will agree with that, I hope.”
She tasted her eggnog, which was stronger than expected, with a bitter aftertaste. “That all sounds perfectly reasonable, Doctor Zilboorg, in theory. And every piece of music looks beautiful on paper. It’s when the fingers hit the keys that the trouble starts.”
He sipped his own drink, nodding. “No one claimed this work was easy. One has to tease apart the role of the libido, driven by the id, and the desire for self-aggrandizement, driven by the ego.”
At his instigation they rowed their canoe toward the deepest part of the psychodynamic lake, where she peered into the water beyond her reflection. The forms that writhed in the depths aroused and frightened her. Nor was Doctor Zilboorg interested only in the “oneiric” portion of this activity—by which he meant, the dreamlike images that filtered through her consciousness. He asked which fantasies stimulated her most. “Feel free to close your eyes… Even to caress your thighs, if necessary, while visualizing.”
To relax her defenses, he plied her with more eggnog. Kay hesitated, confused. Her mind raced as she tried to understand. The drink was causing her head to spin. What kind of brandy did this fellow use? A part of her felt flattered that Zilboorg was growing more relaxed with her. In addition to the patient-doctor relationship, perhaps a friendship was cracking out of the psychic egg. After all, Zilboorg knew her more intimately than almost anyone.
Even so, another part of her felt uneasy. She sipped again, listening to him drone on about the id and the ego. “These are the two dominant forces that power the emotion we call love.”
Kay viewed herself as a modern woman, free of her ancestors’ squeamishness. She questioned her discomfort. Zilboorg was trying to help. True, the idea of discussing her sexual fantasies with a slovenly, mustachioed Ukrainian in a tweed jacket and yellow shirt did not hold much appeal. But this specialist’s reputation was sterling. She drained her glass and he refilled it.
She had never devoted much thought to her sexual fantasies. Nor had she broached the subject with anyone. She had hidden them even from herself. Now she confronted those secrets. Mysteries that had tainted her feelings about Jimmy since their first encounter, and earlier. What she had mistaken for a jigsaw of libertinism, jealousy, revenge, half-hearted reconciliation, and resignation revealed itself to be more complex and nuanced. She entertained the possibility that Jimmy’s infidelities had not stemmed from a blend of egotism and sensuality but had been an unconscious response to something he had perceived in her, or a reaction to the emotional satisfaction that had eluded them. She had always thought him handsome and clever but despite his wooing and her best intentions, she had never truly desired him. Somehow he knew. Paradoxically her sexual distance, however much she had tried to compensate, kept her interesting and desirable to him, a perpetual conquest-to-be-achieved, an unerfüllter Wunsch as Freud might put it, rather than an acquired possession, ein Besitz.
For the first time in years she pitied her husband. Not usually given to tears, she broke down weeping in Doctor Zilboorg’s office.
Kay learned that her libido, which should fly unfettered, had been trapped like an insect in amber. Doctor Zilboorg asked her to participate in an exercise that would liberate it. After her imagination and sensuality were freed, if she was still attracted to George Gershwin, she would discover that her love was purer and larger than she had suspected.
“Exercise?”
He smiled. “You need to set aside your defenses now. For this next step to be effective, you must trust me entirely. Your therapy has proved helpful so far, has it not? And yet, we have traveled only a short distance together.”
He stood, pulled off his jacket, threw his tie over a chair, and unbuttoned his shirt. She watched him, confused. He is accredited. Acclaimed. He has written books and addressed the American Society of Psychoanalysts. Other patients, including Jimmy and George, sing his praises. “Any residue of Puritanism is pernicious,” he explained, “and must be eliminated.”
Distressed, she averted her eyes from his belly and the black curlicues on his chest and groin as he stepped closer. He forcefully guided her to the divan. She tried to squirm out of his hold. He pinned her on the sofa and lifted her dress. This cannot be happening. She heard a cry, the shriek of an injured bird. It burst out from a deep inner place and flew from her mouth. He shoved and grunted. She had lost control of her arms and legs. She lay in his hands like a rag doll, passive and numb.
Then something broke inside her. She pushed away his torso, slapped his adipose shoulder once, twice, three times, and somehow recovered her voice. She screamed. He jumped off. She pulled up her panties, pulled down her skirt, grabbed her handbag and heels, and buzzed out low like a soiled, greasy horsefly burdened with fecal repast.
“Wait,” Zilboorg called after her. “Let us talk this through.”
Not a chance. Kay winged home barefoot and disheveled, bumping into passersby, dashing between cars. A honk here, an angry “lady, watch out!” there. Buildings around her seemed to waver, bow, and undulate. That damned eggnog! She had never before felt so disoriented, so vulnerable. Nor had she ever reacted to alcohol this way. And God knew she had imbibed quite a few exotic concoctions at wild parties.
Finally she turned the corner to her street. Did her building just move? Whatever had happened, now she was inside. She ran upstairs two steps at a time.
She plunged into a hot bath. She scrubbed her arms, her breasts, her belly, her face, everything Zilboorg had touched. When the water cooled she stepped out and sprayed perfume all over herself but she could still smell him. She still felt his grasping hands. She closed her eyes and sat on the edge of the tub to exhale.
She stayed home for days, burying her head in her pillow, wandering downstairs only for booze, tea, or toast, trying to make sense of the Zilboorg nightmare, trying to put it behind her. She asked herself over and over what, precisely, had happened. How to define the event. It could not have been rape since she had acted as a willing partner, to a point. Nevertheless, she felt violated. She relived the repulsion, the powerlessness, the inability to act. She did not tell a soul. Who would believe her? Who would understand?
Doctor Zilboorg neither phoned to apologize nor attempted to confirm previously set appointments. He surely understood that he had alienated a patient and jettisoned any hope of future work with anyone related to her. And to think he cloaked himself, and his behavior, in the holy mantle of science and rationality. Just like the Nazis, with their shoddy scientific race studies.
She slept. She dreamed dark dreams. She came to think about her older dreams—the one about being lost in a train station, or about boarding a ship to nowhere—in a pre-psychoanalytical way, not as a message from her id but as a warning about the shape of her life. The forces of chaos, abstraction, and atonality warping a universe ordered by principles of classical harmony.
Months of psychoanalytic probing, capped with the trauma she had experienced at Doctor Zilboorg’s hands, had left her rattled, drained, and isolated. She considered inviting Dottie Parker for lunch but while her friend might empathize, depending on her mood, how could anyone as chronically lovesick and notoriously libidinous as Dottie be capable of offering sound advice? She thought of meeting with Adele Astaire, even if it meant sailing to England. But Adele, in her zeal to help, would probably drag her into some frivolous adventure, and Kay was in no mood for trivialities.
She put a phone call in to St. Ignatius of Antioch. The receptionist, a weary-sounding lady with a Bronx accent, seemed not to recognize the Swift family name. She informed Kay that Father Ganter had retired three years earlier and asked whether she would like to consult with the new reverend.
“No, no, that’s perfectly fine,” said Kay. “Thank you.”
“Are you sure? He’s a very nice man.”
“No, thank you.”
A knock at her bedroom door. She ignored it. Another knock, insistent. She reached for her father’s pocket watch on the nightstand and accidentally brushed it to the floor.
Another knock. “Yes?”
It was George.
He noticed her disheveled appearance: her uncombed hair; the fact that she was lying in bed after noon, staring at the ceiling; her tired eyes. He sat on the bed, took her hand, and apologized as if he were responsible for her condition. “I know. I’m a louse. I should have called you. It’s these headaches. They’ve been beating me up. I need to see Zilboorg again, and soon.”
She studied his face. Finally she began, “I have something to tell you.”
He waited for more but she hesitated. How could she explain this? How would George react? Would he assume she had encouraged Zilboorg? That she had not fought hard enough to stop him? Would he lose confidence in her? In a deliberate, uninflected tone, avoiding his eyes, she described her ordeal. All of it. She still was not sure how to label the event but whatever it was, she remembered every detail. She had relived it every day. When she brushed her teeth. When she ate. When she went to bed. First thing in the morning. She tried to avoid it but it stalked her, a memory that spattered sadness and shame everywhere.
He listened. He studied her face as she spoke. His response was unequivocal. His voice, emphatic. “The animal raped you, Kay. That’s what it was. A rape.” His voice softened “I’m so sorry.”
For the first time since her ordeal, she let her sobs overtake her. He wiped her tears, kissed her wet cheeks, and caressed her head. He embraced her, tightening his grip long after her tears dissolved.
“Kay,” said George after a time, as if remembering a business commitment, “you mind if I use your phone for a transatlantic call?”
Although transatlantic calls were a new phenomenon, and costly, she shook her head. George dialed the international operator. “I’d like to place an overseas call. The Ritz Hotel in Paris.”
“What’s this about?” asked Kay.
He shook his head. “Jimmy Walker, please,” he said into the phone. Covering the mouthpiece, he told Kay, “Would you mind fetching me a cup of tea?”
Mystified, she went downstairs to the kitchen.
Jimmy Walker was no longer mayor of New York, having resigned in a haze of scandal. Rumor had it he was living in Paris with a Ziegfeld girl. But everyone knew he was still one of the most well-connected, powerful men in America.
When she brought George the tea, he was finishing up the phone call. “Thank you, Jimmy. Knew I could count on you.”
“What was that about?” she asked after he hung up.
“Just some business,” said George. “Let’s grab lunch.”
Three days later Kay noticed a small article in the New York World-Telegram. Doctor Gregory Zilboorg, the noted psychoanalyst, had tripped in a freak accident in his office, injuring himself badly, bleeding from his head, and losing consciousness. No one understood what had happened. His secretary had stepped out on lunch break. A neighbor had seen a male patient enter the building but was uncertain of the time. Zilboorg was discovered alone and was recovering in Lenox Hill Hospital. He was expected to survive. “Gruesome,” Kay winced, handing the paper to George.
George perused the article. “Serves the bastard right.”
Kay understood George would not consult Doctor Zilboorg again. Which dashed his hopes of finding a remedy for his migraines. Which darkened his mood further. She tried to reassure him. “There are other noggin twisters.”
He shook his head, despondent. She wrapped her arms around his neck, bracing herself yet again for the unknown.