They were different in different ways. Sophie still hadn’t found any way to disagree with her father openly, except to blurt out her feelings like a child. This did not work. In her father’s universe, emotion, tears, rage discredited you. She retreated into silence. There was only one course left to her, refusal to enter into argument. His premises may be fine for his patients. She had others. No, she was not interested in what motivated people. She didn’t “reject” Freud. She just did not find it as interesting as works of literature. No, she was not interested in explaining people or anything. He persisted in questioning her about her interests, aims, ambitions. She answered evasively.
It was as painful for him to disavow her as for her to be disavowed. He tried to cover up; but he couldn’t yield his position.
For the next years they had to live with this: she was different from him.
He presented her with options of the ways she might be different, supported by data he had on her as a child. He offered her several ways of being different; he wanted her to be different in a way he could accept, understand; he even pulled out a sympathetic portrait of her mother. She saw in his eyes veiled condescension, disavowal. She didn’t trust him. She wanted to be different her own way, which he couldn’t understand or accept. “We...” Rudolf Landsmann would say, speaking to his daughter on their evening walks in Garfield during the war.
“We analysts...” he began to say after a while. And she walked beside him thinking her own thoughts, not listening. Every so often she would hear his phrase, “...we analysts,” reassuring her that they lived in different worlds.
Occasionally he might ask a question that startled her. On their evening walks during the war her father would ask, “Do you sometimes think of your mother?”
The picture of her mother Sophie carried with her to the New World was lost. She did not have it when she arrived in Pittsburgh with her father. The locket did not close well; her mother observed the fact when she showed it to her, and Sophie recalled that they had stopped by a jeweler to fix it the last afternoon she and her mother spent together. Her mother spoke sharply to the jeweler who as a matter of courtesy was profusely apologetic, but between ritual apologies and promises stated more than once that it was an old locket—the two sides didn’t fit. Perhaps it was just as well that the picture fell out. It hadn’t helped her to remember her mother. She couldn’t conjure up her mother’s face. Perhaps she had never had a clear image of her mother’s face, even in Budapest; but it was only some time after the train pulled out of the station that this had struck her, perhaps because she knew she would not see her mother for a long time, perhaps never again. She was bound for another continent, an ocean would separate them. In the train to Paris and at various points of the journey she would suddenly realize that she couldn’t recall her mother’s face, then open the locket to study the photograph and close it with the feeling that her mother was just one of those beautiful faces one saw in magazines. She didn’t ask herself if this was a new feeling, or the way she had always felt about her mother. She had no memory of her. It was as a picture she thought of her, therefore it was just as well the photograph was lost. She did not need it. She remembered the face in a grave pose, the wide mouth and faultless arc of penciled brows.
Her father’s periodic question, “Do you sometimes think of your mother?” found her unprepared, at a loss. It was impossible to remember her mother. An image, simplified and idealized, had replaced all memories, yet she had a more real sense of her mother than before: a woman who still walked through the streets of Budapest where Sophie couldn’t go, an elegantly dressed woman in a beautiful city; a lady married to a tall blond man, kind and well-mannered, very different from her father; a woman who had been married to a true nobleman before Sophie was born; a strange, beautiful, mysterious woman who had never really seemed like her mother. She was pained by her father’s question, which may not have been addressed to her at all.
There was no picture of her mother in the house. It was strange to Sophie that her father should be concerned about the woman who was now another man’s wife, should reminisce to his daughter about her little habits, her problems; worry about what she was doing at present, whether she had all that she needed; then return to speaking about her talents, her mistakes. Perhaps his daughter’s silence prompted him after a while to make some concluding remark like, “She is your mother, after all.”
“Do you sometimes think of your mother?” Rudolf Landsmann began his ruminations on his former wife. Perhaps she didn’t. Perhaps she did, but the fact that he did not allow her time to answer made her believe that she didn’t. And after 1941 when communication was broken by America’s entry into the war—and now when her father asked the question he expressed his fear that she might be dead or in a concentration camp, or hiding, starving, one didn’t know, it was terrible, terrible—perhaps Sophie still saw her mother as a beautiful woman walking through a city whose charm was enhanced by bombings, made more beautiful by disaster.
In 1951 her mother came to settle in America, perhaps hoping for a
