CHAPTER 22

For more than ten years, Hilda had been in psychoanalysis with an elderly woman who she believed to be the last of the émigré psychoanalysts of the 1930s and 1940s. Dr. Margarethe Stoller had been a protégée of Anna Freud, both in England and later in the States, even though she remained independent when the British Psychoanalytical Society split into two factions, Miss Freud’s and Melanie Klein’s. Hilda had chosen to be psychoanalyzed with Dr. Stoller because she wanted a rigid, classical Freudian of the clichéd type that still inspired New Yorker cartoons. They were hardly to be found anymore, but Hilda wanted none of this flexible, humanistic stuff.

Dr. Stoller’s appearance certainly suggested that she was just what Hilda was looking for. She clumped around her office in heavy brown leather shoes with thick leather soles and buckles (Hilda often wondered, admiringly, where she found them), wore her white hair in a long braid coiled at the nape of her neck, and still spoke with a strong German accent. Her office, however, was small, dark, and surprisingly messy, with newspapers, journals, and cups of stagnant dark liquids standing here and there instead of curios and mementos of world travels. In technique, she was old school in some respects, but not all, which Hilda found annoying. However, having long ago given up any hope of being “cured,” whatever that might mean, she enjoyed her daily conversations with Dr. Stoller and lived cheaply to support this expensive habit, and when Dr. Stoller’s improper techniques ruined the theater of the whole thing, she exhorted her to strive for better.

Dr. Stoller had tried to analyze Hilda’s wishes for an old-fashioned, silent, perhaps even harsh and uncomprehending analysis, as well as her decision to continue analysis indefinitely, or at least until such time as Dr. Stoller retired, but without good result.

“You like things the way they are,” she had said to Hilda last week. “You don’t wish to be different. You intentionally went seeking the silliest form of treatment you could find that would be intelligent enough for you to make a pretense of being serious.” Her voice was raspy and shaky now, but it hadn’t been ten years ago.

“Why would I like things the way they are?” Hilda had said, luxuriating on Dr. Stoller’s couch, crossing her ankles on the little cloth provided at the foot. “My life is a succession of pains, privations, and humiliations. I don’t enjoy them at all.”

“ ‘Enjoyment’ is not the right word for a masochist’s satisfaction in her sufferings. But, joking aside, Miss Hughes, masochism will get you Just so far.”

Hilda had heard something urgent in this speech, which had replayed in her mind a hundred times over the weekend, with appropriate diacritical markings, as usual: “Chknk asst, mssksm vllchüst ss fä.” After all these years of timeless discussion, why had Dr. Stoller begun to seem rushed, unwilling to wait for the psyche to move at its own pace—not that Hilda believed in that, but Dr. Stoller was supposed to. Was she responding to something Hilda had said or what?

On Tuesday, Hilda showed up early for her session. “What did you mean,” she began, “ ‘just so far’? Where does it get you to, and why isn’t that far enough?”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t far enough,” said Dr. Stoller. “That’s for you to judge, isn’t it? But let me try to answer your question . . .”

Hilda was shaken by Dr. Stoller’s willingness to answer. She should ask, instead, why Hilda wanted to know or . . . or . . . whatever clever counter questions psychoanalysts asked to frustrate you in the way they were supposed to. Offering gratification, in the form of answers to questions, was a terrible thing to do—downright dangerous to the patient. Dr. Stoller had done such things often in the last few sessions. Was she giving up on Hilda? It was a little provoking.

“. . . about masochism. It is a solution to a conflict, but a costly one. It deprives you of what you really want and bribes you with a sense of triumph in your own defeat. This, of course, inspires impatience in others, who naturally find the masochist’s sense of victory repugnant, especially when coupled, as it so often is, with a call for help and sympathy.”

Hilda flinched at the word repugnant and thought that now Dr. Stoller had forsaken neutrality and come close to offering a negative moral assessment of a neurotic position. “Even masochists deserve sympathy, I think,” she protested.

“The question is, sympathy for what?”

“If you’re going to give lectures, Dr. Stoller, you have to be more down-to-earth. This is too abstract for me.”

“This man Frankl you’ve been mentioning. When he told you all those interesting stories, you were tongue-tied. He sensed in you an intelligent listener, so you immediately behaved in such a way as to induce him to think you silly and unintelligent.”

“Yes, but I couldn’t help it.”

“You could, though. And now you have to decide whether you will continue to settle for so little, when you might have so much more.”

“Well, Dr. Stoller, after all these years, we’re exactly at the same point we started at. You’re still talking about choice, and I still think I behave the way I do because I was born with a lot of weird wiring. I have a dozen personality tics, and despite the fact that my crushes never go anywhere, I’m gay—although I give you credit for not pushing for nurture over nature on that one.”

“Crushes? I know of only one crush.”

“The number is irrelevant. My point is that we should both be worried about helping me live within my limits, which no doubt reflect a combination of screwed-up nature and unnatural nurture. I came to treatment because I hoped to get over enough of my inhibitions to have a relationship. I don’t say it’s your fault that it failed. But lately you’re pretending things are better when they’re not. You’ve never talked as though treatment were about to end before. What is this all about?”

“Your analysis is almost over, Miss Hughes. You have choices, you understand a great deal about yourself, although you pretend not to. You no longer need the sort of help I can offer. And, by the way, whatever biological endowments may dictate in the lives of others, I feel quite confident that in your case they are irrelevant.”

“I can’t believe it! All you have to do is look at me to know that’s not so.” Hilda laughed.

“You often derive pleasure from my holding what you regard as incorrect views. But that surprises neither of us anymore. Really, the only thing left to talk about is the choices you are going to make. I will accept them and do my best to analyze them with you until the very last minute of our time together.”

“I don’t get this, Dr. Stoller! Nothing’s changed. Why are you pretending there’s this big development when everything today is the same as it was last week and last year and the year before that?”

“Not at all! Obviously, something has changed. Just look at the invitation to lunch from the young woman last week.”

“Peter Frankl’s daughter?”

“Who else? And this second encounter with Peter Frankl. You said he backed off with his hands in the air and said—”

“What are you talking about? When he told me to sell my co-op? He regarded me as some sort of lunatic.”

“Not at all. That’s not at all what he did, as you well know. And what about this seminar you set up, with him as chair?”

Hilda grew calm. “Are the Frankls what’s got you all fired up? No, Dr. Stoller, you’re grasping at straws. Oh, I see. I’m terribly sorry, but there’s nothing in it. Oh, my goodness.” And Hilda laughed, quietly this time.

“What effect did the Frankls have on me?”

“You’re completely misinterpreting everything. Peter Frankl just wanted to talk to someone who didn’t matter at all.”

“A few days ago,” said Dr. Stoller with an odd air, “I saw a newspaper article that attacked Mr. Frankl. I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned that.”

“Oh, Dr. Stoller, what is happening? You’re not supposed to introduce the subject. That article was all lies. It got the poor man so upset, he resigned as chair of the seminar. He keeps saying that Miss Devereaux could lose control of the foundation and then I might be fired.”

“None of that worried you enough to mention it here?”

“Of course not. We’ve done nothing wrong. Mr. Frankl is a worrier.”

“Wasn’t it odd to put Mr. Frankl in charge of the seminar?”

“Yes. We do many odd things. That’s our modus operandi. You see, Dr. Stoller, he is really a remarkable man, even if he hasn’t the background some people think they want. We didn’t want background. We wanted a good, clever man, and he was the best and the cleverest we could find.”

“Such odd policies can be risky—throwing small fish in the tank with big ones.”

“Mr. Frankl a small fish? He is so strong-minded, so protective of others, and smart that we think of him as very big. But, of course, he has no name or public reputation, has he. He wouldn’t have been so vulnerable to newspaper lies if he had. I see what you mean—oh, dear. Well, he’s such a worrier that Miss Devereaux hasn’t told him that her nephew Edmond has been hounding her again, especially since that article came out. He’s positively demanding that she retire before something terrible happens, but it’s so obvious to me that Edmond just wants to take over himself and that he’s delighted with the whole mess that I don’t let what he says worry me a bit.”

Dr. Stoller was silent after this speech until it was time to announce that the session had ended. Hilda felt melancholy when she left, which was unusual. She returned to Morningside Heights and put in four hours with Miss Devereaux at the foundation office, during which she was uncharacteristically absentminded. She was going to lose Dr. Stoller, the stable center of her life, the only human being with whom she felt entirely comfortable and could speak openly. Dr. Stoller was going to pretend that Hilda was cured.

When Hilda returned home that evening, feeling weepy, she stopped for an ice-cream cone and was still licking it, swallowing tears with the cream, when she reached her stoop. Finding it hard to manage her briefcase and cone and fumble for keys at the same time, she sat on the stoop to finish the ice cream before going in. She licked her fingertips delicately, felt the evening breeze on her face, and watched the sun set beyond the treetops of Riverside Park, beyond the Hudson. The sky at the horizon showed golden through the leafage, blood red over the treetops, then higher up turned purple and shaded into a deep indigo. Hilda’s tears flowed. The sky blurred, and the pleasures of the ravishing sunset, the crying, and the ice cream merged poignantly in her consciousness.

No sooner had she made herself comfortable there, however, than she saw two figures turn the corner onto 114th Street from Riverside and knew, before she could see their faces, that they were Peter Frankl and his daughter, Susan. Hilda began to tremble and felt the blood roaring in her head. All right—this was just too peculiar, that there were now Frankls wherever she looked, whereas she had lived near them for decades and never seen them at all. Yet study the thing as she might, from all directions, her encounters with Peter and Susan Frankl appeared random, meaningless. Dr. Stoller shouldn’t put ideas in her head. She used to discourage Hilda from seeing significances that weren’t really there; now she was actually suggesting them herself. Hilda didn’t know what to do. Perhaps Dr. Stoller was, at last, growing . . . too old for this business.

While her thoughts ran this course, Hilda quickly arose, snuffling and hurriedly crunching the last bit of cone, and dug frantically for her keys in her large, crowded handbag. The tears overflowed and began to trickle down her cheek just as she opened the door, before the Frankls were close enough to see her face or speak. She trudged up the stairs to her fourth-floor studio, not trusting the elevator to come quickly enough. Two minutes later, someone rang her doorbell, and she heard voices, male and female, out in the hallway. Hilda stood inside her room, arms folded across her chest, staring at the door. A second later, a loud knocking followed, and then she heard Peter Frankl’s extraordinarily loud voice.

“This is pretty damned silly, Hilda. We saw you go in, you know, and there’s a lot to talk about. We’re going to 107 West. Meet us for dinner—at nine!” The last words were called out with impressive volume, very slowly, so that she had to understand them. She heard muttering and shuffling, and then a note slid under her door and there were fading sounds of steps and voices. Hilda strove to find the note terrifying, horrifying, but could dredge up no such interesting feelings about it. After standing there indecisively for several minutes, she picked it up and read:

107 West—Nine PM
Peter and Susan