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 after 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
