The Little Book (33 page)

We know that the great doctor formed strong attachments to great men around him, some say with a kind of filial adoration. First, in his medical student days there was Ernst Brucke, one of Europe’s finest and best-known physiologists, who influenced him to insist that every last detail be confirmed by empirical scientific evidence, an attentiveness to which he became a stickler throughout his professional life. Then in 1885 he went to Paris and studied under Jean Martin Charcot, the greatest neurologist of the time, who introduced him to hypnosis. Then returning to Vienna he studied with Josef Breuer, twenty years his senior but the colleague who helped him focus his attention on sex as the root cause of hysteria, and who through the compelling case of Bertha Pappenheim, called Anna O, gave him his most significant and most famous study and the development of “the talking cure.” And recently, he had formed an affectionate alliance with Wilhelm Fleiss, the Berlin nose and throat specialist, and an unlikely subject of his respect. Fleiss was unlikely because of his mediocre researches and his devotion to the idea that hysteria originated in the nose.

In spite of these intense friendships, the young Freud had developed a style that no one would consider collegial, isolating himself with an independent bearing and controversial subject matter. In 1896, at forty, he had delivered a speech to the Viennese Academy that had painted him in a corner. “All your life,” Wheeler reflected back to the doctor in his journal writings, from what he knew of the doctor’s personal history, “you have shown a remarkable ability to choose a direction and stick with it. You grab hold of a subject with a bulldog grip and don’t let go. You are always searching for the universal truths beneath the surface few others can see.

“In that 1896 speech,” Wheeler wrote, “Dr. Freud had announced to the academy, and to any of the rest of the world willing to listen, that the cause of hysteria was childhood sexual trauma, most likely perpetrated by the father. It was a brilliant conclusion based on the evidence of his patients, but one that brought him derision and isolation. The formal and traditional all-male establishment was simply unwilling to accept the fact that the parents of hysteric patients, mostly women, were child abusers and that the abuse had been sexual. The derision and isolation did not shake Freud’s resolve; in fact, they strengthened it.”

The great doctor would have listened intently to the journal entry, then responded. “You make it sound as if my ideas are shaped by controversy. ”

“Isn’t it true that your famous resolve has been shaken with regard to your seduction theory,” Wheeler said, “by troubling conclusions about your own father?” It was true. Through self-analysis Freud had concluded that he too was obsessive and neurotic, a hysteric, and since both he and his brother were hysterics, the cause had to be their own father. So in early 1897, shortly after that father’s death, the great doctor concluded that

Jacob Freud must have molested his children. Jacob Freud had been a decent but somewhat hapless man, unable to find a job, unable to stand up for himself. Considering him a child molester required a stretch of the imagination too great for his son. Sigmund Freud moved to another conclusion. And in the fall of that same year, the very moment Wheeler Burden entered his Berggasse 19 apartment, Freud was on the brink of a stunning new discovery.

Along with the complete details of his daily life in Vienna, Wheeler always added a paragraph or two about his personal background and his sessions at Berggasse 19, his
feuilletons
of insight, which Freud particularly enjoyed. We can imagine the scene as Wheeler read a journal entry that included this: “I imagine Dr. Freud the hero of an ancient Greek classic, Odysseus in search of home, Jason after the golden fleece, Perseus tracking down Medusa, indelibly positive, certain of his goal, searching for the truth, unflinching in his pursuit of universal truth.”

“How are you so certain that I am on the right track?” Freud said. “Perhaps I am Don Quixote, tilting with imaginary giants.”

“Perhaps. It is your determination that sets you apart. I just know you are not going to relent in your quest.”

“But at the same time you believe that the sexual abuses are real?”

“Caustic child rearing abounds in Vienna,” Wheeler said. “That is a known fact. Children are raised with religious austerity and harshness at best, and actual physical abuse at worst. You know this, and you are willing to overlook it.” Wheeler became animated, gesturing with his hands. “When you addressed your medical colleagues with your observation that hysteria came from actual incidents, you had justification. Your new Oedipus theory discounts the evidence of real abuse and blames the child.”

“But surely not every hysteric could possibly be the child of sexual trauma. That would make incestuous monsters of half the men in Vienna. ” For a moment, Freud would stop treating Wheeler as a patient and view him as a colleague of astonishing if delusional insights.

“But some cases are legitimate abuse. You must account for those.”

Freud looked troubled. “In some cases, yes,” he said. “But it cannot be the universal I once thought.”

“And for you it is no good if it is not the universal, the absolute? Can’t it be both?”

Freud thought for a long painful moment, knocking the ash off the stubby end of his cigar. “If it is not universal, how can it be of any use?”

Aha
, wrote Wheeler in his journal,
if it is not universal, it is of no use. That is the problem: all-or-nothing black-and-white thinking
.

“It is a matter of degrees, Dr. Freud,” Wheeler said. “In the Anna O case, you argued that Bertha Pappenheim’s neurosis came from the actual fact that she had been sexually abused as a child, and you attributed that to all victims of hysteria. That assertion is what brought to you so much attention and disdain of your 1896 speech. P. T. Barnum, by the way, said that there is no bad publicity. For almost two years you pursued doggedly the notion that sexual abuse, ‘seduction,’ you called it, was the root cause of all hysteria, a brilliant piece of deductive science.”

“You are being facetious, Herr Burden.”

“No, not at all. You examined the evidence in ways no one else was willing to do. Brilliant. Then you went to the next logical step in analyzing yourself, and you concluded that you had hysteric symptoms and that your own father must have abused his children. Science led you there. Logic. But then the absurdity of that logic hit you. If not carefully checked, pure science can lead to ridiculous and harmful conclusions, you deduced. Suddenly the story of Oedipus caught your attention, and the literal cause of abuse evolved into the metaphoric one. Children secretly wish sex and violence, you concluded. Again brilliant, but again the stuff of castigation and controversy.”

“It is not an easy message for the average Viennese to hear.”

“And so here you are now,” Wheeler continued, “upending all that you deduced before: the conclusion that the sexual assault actually happened gave way to the symbolic or metaphoric act—the assault happened only in the patient’s mind. That is going to be even harder for the proper bourgeoisie to accept.”

“It
has
to be symbolic,” Freud said, protesting too much. “The imagined assaults cannot be real. I am now certain of that. It has to be a sexual impulse in the child, what I have found in the Oedipus myth, not the real act of father on child.”

“But your Oedipus theory says that every child wants to have sex and commit murder. It lays the blame on the child.”

“It is metaphoric,” Freud said, now purely defensive. “And accurate. The guilt felt by the child over wanting no rival for the parent’s attentions, and the fear of being punished for it are powerful forces, long into adulthood. ”

Wheeler looked at him with a wildness in his eyes. “That is your flaw,” he said, pulling back from his exasperation, then going quiet for a moment, looking into the great doctor’s eyes. “That is the brilliance of your next move,” he said. “Seeing in a few patients the general human condition, moving from the local and finding the universal. But this new Oedipus view is too extreme. It is just too narrow.”

“My conclusions are already dismissible, preposterous to the medical establishment of this city.”

“You got their attention,” Wheeler said.

“And you think that I seek attention?”

“That’s a starting point. You need notoriety to get where you wish to go.”

“And you think I will now shift the focus to the Oedipus myth to get that notoriety.”

“Your express train is heading down that track,” Wheeler said coolly.

“I don’t think you have any choice.”

35

Rouge Gorge Ne Chantait Pas

Wheeler did not share with Dilly any of his great devastation: the double blow of losing the woman to whom he had become viscerally attached and the discovery that that Emily James was in fact his own grandmother. His own grandmother! He kept it to himself and suffered in silence, convincing himself after the initial shock that no grave harm had been done and that Eleanor Putnam’s return to Boston was how it was supposed to be. He had just sped the eventuality along, or perhaps even supplied the catalyst for what was inevitable.
This too will pass,
he had learned to say about debilitating loss. But how, how? How had he not seen what was happening? How had he missed the clues? He knew that his grandmother had been the one who brought Arnauld Esterhazy to St. Gregory’s in the first place. Of course, she had met him in Vienna: how else? She should have been the first person he looked for when he arrived. How could he not have recognized her? Had she changed so very much in sixty years? However it was, he had dodged a disaster, and she was gone from Vienna now and headed home. No damage done. The unspeakable averted. And yet, he had this awful aching in his heart.

He knew Dilly was working up to something of his own and would surely not notice any despondency in someone else. But Dilly had little practice at beating around the bush. “You look awful,” Dilly said to him when they met.

“A sense of loss,” Wheeler said. “Sometimes it creeps up.”

“It is difficult to adjust to the fact that our former life seems to be over,” Dilly said, reflective for a moment.

“That’s it. You alone can understand.”

But Dilly’s mind was elsewhere. “There are certain nagging questions,” he said finally. He needed to take advantage of Wheeler’s knowledge of what was for him the future. He was hiding something.

“Go ahead and ask,” Wheeler said openly, aware that telling what happened between 1944 and 1988 to Dilly, who had life behind him, was a whole different matter than telling Sigmund Freud, who still had life out in front of him.

“My run-in with the Gestapo was, I gather—” He paused awkwardly, searching for the word: “—decisive,” he said.

“It was terminal,” Wheeler said sadly, adding the word his father was stumbling over. Wheeler had forgotten that his father would not know about his own heroic end. “You died just about the time of the invasion. ”

Dilly did not seem shocked by the news, but Wheeler could see disappointment in his eyes. “I gathered,” he said. “Things weren’t going too well. I guess anyone could see that. Still—” He paused again and looked up at Wheeler. “One always hopes.”

“They wanted your information,” Wheeler took over. “And they were people with powerful means. I guess they pulled out all the stops, tried to wear you down till you talked, but you never did, and that’s what made Rouge Gorge such a big hero to the French, and for a couple of generations of St. Gregory’s boys. When I was a boy I went back to Paris with Mother to the dedication of the plaque on Rue des Americains. It has your name on it and then it says ‘
Rouge Gorge ne chantait pas,’
which I guess became sort of a code phrase, sort of a rallying cry in the last days of the Resistance.”

Dilly shifted his weight uncomfortably in his chair. “You know about the last days,” he said.

“The war with Germany ended in May of 1945, after the invasion in June 1944.”

“That’s ‘present time’ for me, you forget.”

“Right. I did forget. The Allies pushed into Germany from the west, General Patton leading the charge, and the Russians came in from the east. Hitler shot himself in his bunker with his girlfriend, Eva Braun, and that was that, except it took a long time to rebuild the mess. Berlin and all of Germany were pretty much devastated. Democratic Germany grew up from the ashes to be one of the modern industrial powers, along with Japan. Sort of ironic.”

Dilly was still fishing for more. “How about the invasion? How did things work out?”

“It wasn’t easy, I guess, but it worked. It started in early June and the Allies had captured Paris by August, although I guess it was pretty hard fought. There were lots of deaths.”

Still Dilly circled around for something more specific. “Did the Germans know?” he said painfully. “I mean did they seem to know?” Then he came right out with it. “With the invasion, I mean. Did they know where and when?”

Wheeler gave it some thought. “I’m not much of a military historian. I’m not the greatest authority. It was a long time ago.” Then he added, “I’m sure they could guess. I mean there was only so much coastline, and the Allies weren’t going to wait forever to make their move. But I think the Germans were caught pretty much by surprise.”

Dilly looked off in the distance, struggling to dig down into painful memories. “I did know time and place,” he said seriously. “When I met with Winston Churchill just before I went back into occupied France that last time, the Admiralty high command briefed me on the whole plan, Operation Overlord they called it. It was sort of a huge deal. I was one of only a few men who was to know the details. It was my job to coordinate the Resistance in the northern area, to take out some key communications installations, destroy railroads, stymie troop movements and the like. I had worked over there behind the lines before. Churchill knew I would handle the information properly, and that—”