Mrs. Freud by Nicolle Rosen

Author:Nicolle Rosen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61145-556-4
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sigmund’s imperious need for order caused our life to be arranged with utter precision, regulated like a sheet of music. After lunch, Sigmund would go for a walk through the city for a good hour. With an almost Germanic sense of hygiene, of which I approved, he strongly believed in daily exercise. In the course of his walks, Sigmund would buy his stock of cigars. He smoked roughly a pack a day. We later learned that that was one of the worst things he could ever have done. But he simply could not imagine life, and his work in particular, without smoking. Our whole house smelled of tobacco, especially his office. I often wondered how his patients could tolerate that smell for an entire hour. For us family, it was part and parcel of our life, as was Sigmund’s beard, or the way he looked at you. None of us ever dared make a remark to him about it. He only stopped smoking at the urging of his friend Wilhelm when he was thought to have developed a heart problem. But that lasted only a short while. For Sigmund, smoking was a veritable drug.

As soon as Sigmund returned to his office after lunch, Minna and I would go out for our walk, weather permitting. Or we would immerse ourselves in some manual work in the living room. It was as if we had gone back to our early days in Wandsbeck, when we both would sit under our linden tree, busily preparing our respective trousseaus. There was a great deal of delicate embroidering of tablecloths, hemming of thick linen kitchen towels and heavy percale sheets. As often when women work together on some project, we always spoke in whispers.

In the evening, the youngest of our children ate before we did and were promptly ushered to bed before we sat down for our own supper. Lost in his thoughts, Sigmund often remained silent at the table while Minna, the older children, and I carried on a conversation. And more often than not, after dinner Sigmund would retire to his office, often working late into the night.

Another of our unshakable habits had to do with Sigmund’s family. In our early married days, we used to have regular Sunday lunches at the Freuds’ on Kaiser-Josefstrasse, giving me a chance to visit with his sisters, something I always enjoyed. After Sigmund’s father died, Sigmund made it a ritual to pay a visit to his mother on Sunday morning, with a bouquet of flowers, accompanied by one or several children. Each Sunday evening she would come to our home for dinner, with Dolfi, who never left her mother for a moment. Poor dear, all her sisters had married and flown the coop. The unwritten rule in families in those days dictated that the remaining unmarried child be the care-giver to the widowed mother — a job no one envied.

I will now confess to you, Mary, something I have never told anyone else: I hated my mother-in-law.

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