“Do you see Mother sometimes? Are you in contact with her at least?” he asks worriedly.
“She came to see the children on Thanksgiving. She is fine.”
He is reassured and does not pursue the subject further.
On their evening walks he speaks about his experiences as a soldier. She listens enviously. It’s the only period of his life he really likes to talk about.
“You had a great time in the war,” she points out to him.
“It’s true,” he admits, “but I did not kill.”
He condemns violence. Once more he raises the old question, “Is war necessary? Will mankind find other ways for their aggressions? Unlikely,” he muses aloud, and entertains the possible destruction of mankind with a certain satisfaction. “The Lord made a great mistake; he should have stopped after he created plants...” Evangelical, and with compassion for God whose grief over the bungled experiment must infinitely exceed his own, he praises the trees.
Sitting in his consulting room later in the evening, they look through old photographs he keeps in a silver box. There are over a hundred, some taken on the Serbian front, some in the Budapest baths, on the street, in restaurants, rooms and gardens in Budapest, Vienna, Paris, New York; family pictures, the oldest taken ca. 1860, shows Simon of Nyitra, regal in his fur kaftan and collar, his fine, forked beard, seated in the pose of a Renaissance prince, his hand rests on the large tome in his lap, the face with its haughty slanted brows and cheekbones emerges absolute, unconditioned, from the dark background. Another, taken fifty years later, shows Moses Landsmann sitting at his desk in his Budapest apartment in a gray suit and tie, his fair beard trimmed short, blond, blue-eyed, blandly handsome, the benign expression on his face, with a suggestion of a pained smile, conveys official serenity. Pictures of her father as a moustached, swaggering provincial, young soldier, cynical analyst, happy grandfather; her mother in a variety of seductive poses; beautiful Rachel, regal in high lace collar with her two daughters, who perished in Auschwitz. Uncle Joske (the bum) in Vienna, standing stiffly in a striped suit, looks like a Chicago gangster. More pictures of dreamy young girls in the romantic manner.
“Is that Mother?” she asks with surprise; the picture with her mother’s name written on the back shows a shy young girl with long hair, seated in a pensive pose.
“Yes, she looked like that,” her father affirms with unexpected feeling, “That’s what she looked like when I married her,” he sighs, and puts the photograph back in the box hastily; she is disappointed that he refuses to reminisce about her mother when he loved her, before she turned into the would-be femme fatale of the later photographs.
“And what happened?” she asks.
“She became totally different,” he says, in a tone of incomprehension. “She changed—” and decides not to pursue this painful subject.
It’s ten-thirty, he notes; time for his nightcap.
She watches him check the icebox, make up the grocery list for tomorrow. “Will you stay downstairs?” he asks. He would like to put out all the lights before retiring. “What will you do?” he asks. “If you use the kitchen—”
“You’re a tyrant,” she says. “Do you know that?”
“I know,” he smiles, “I’m pleased you realize at last...” he adds, leaving.
If he had had a son, it would have made him into a different man; the fathers of daughters, not of sons, turn into petulant Lears, and Prosperos. If he had had a son...she reflects.
The house oppresses, its ghost surrounds her, settles on her with increasing weight; she dissolves into the ghost. Herself, as a young girl in her father’s house? But she doesn’t feel like a young girl at all. The phantom is her absent mother, whose place she must fill. The absent mother whose absence was never discussed.
It’s her mother’s ghost that haunts this house: the young woman her mother was before Sophie was born, whose life she was reliving, put in the same circumstance, a young woman living with a man who had no time for her, who did not take her seriously, who joked about sex and insulted her with his indifference. The phantom presence of the woman of whom her father disapproved, the wife who failed and lost her place, was more potent than anything the young girl could remember of her mother or imagine as her mother’s present reality; the phantom was more powerful than the young girl. It was her mother’s phantom, not she, who lived in her father’s house in Garfield, oppressed and fearful and in secret, concealed behind the mask of the young girl.
They walk along Clinton Avenue. She is leaving this afternoon; he is gloomy, complains about her lack of interest in psychoanalysis, and of how little he sees her. “I have lost a daughter,” he says to himself.
“As an analyst you should understand,” she tries to argue; he shakes his head. His look says everything.
“I’m here; I came,” she tries again; the feebleness of her protest dismays her. They walk in silence back to the house. She has decided to abandon her chronicle. Reb Simon of Nyitra watching the birds, young Moses Landsmann on the train to Pazdics to tell his parents, couples strolling down the corso before she was born, Rosa and Rudolf, Kamilla and Count Csaba-Csaba, they are story people from a lost book of which only a few random pages remain. And father and daughter walking side by side, their words and silences caught in some
