My Heart Laid Bare (50 page)

She runs from him, she's not a woman to succumb to fantasies, hallucinations. She's an intelligent young woman! She's of the new generation of young women who have come of age in the early years of the twentieth century, she's attended college . . . until growing bored with books, lectures, routine . . . she isn't her mother and she certainly isn't her grandmother and yet . . . who is she, exactly?
Venus Aphrodite guides us in such mysteries, and Venus Aphrodite is never to be comprehended.
So Moses Liebknecht's voice assures her. She protests, “But—my father will object.” He says, dryly,
But “Father” will always object. It is the curse of being “Father.”

. . . Which day is this so strangely warm in the sun, biting-cold in shade, a fierce autumn sky and sepia light suffusing the tall juniper pines through which she runs like a dream gliding in and out of consciousness; in stealth making her way to the marshy edge of the pond, and into the pond, cold numbing water to her knees, to her thighs, she's wearing flannel trousers, rubber-soled boots, a suede jacket and no gloves, bareheaded, and now the water rises to the pit of her belly, how fresh how chill how clear the surface of the water after days of November rain washing away debris floating in the pond and now the water is to her waist . . . she's stumbling, her feet sinking in the mud,
I am not ill I am well, I am not ill I am well
, she is determined to escape her lover, she is determined to escape love, unworthy of love, a mutilated woman like all women seeing beneath her a half-woman cut in two at the waist, reflected in the pond's surface glaring as a black mirror, a woman with no face, a woman with no eyes, rippling and quivering reflected in the depths of the sky, and everywhere the blinding blaze of sunshine so powerful she must shut her eyes.
It is my Wish that has made me ill, now it is my Wish that has made me well, and made me free.

H
is head, his head!—jammed with broken glass, slivers of memory!—and his soul of which he'd been so absurdly proud in constant dan
ger now of dribbling down his elegantly tailored pants leg, an old man's shameful urine.

From which she will save him.

She
, who's young. A remarkable woman. His creation, you might say. As a god might fashion out of mud, sticks, pebbles, minerals a shapely figure and breathe life into it, and suddenly—It lives! And he'll suffuse her with strength, where there's been weakness. And he'll impregnate her with children, where there's been barrenness. Children to replace his lost children. Children to replace the children who've betrayed him. And the miracle will happen again.

“For Nature is never exhausted,” Abraham Licht thinks. “It is only we who wear out—some of us. Through a failure of imagination.”

BUT
HE
HASN'T
worn out. Despite the bitter shocks, disappointments and trials of recent years.

For only consider: he has boldly reentered The Game though on all sides of him, in these vertiginous 1920's, other, younger men are embarked upon The Game in their various uncharted—unconscionable—ways. On all sides there are fortunes to be reaped, and destinies to be claimed. Suddenly there are so many more Americans . . . so many more competitors . . . yet also customers, clients, patients. A vast seething sea of hungry souls. Ever more waves of immigrants from Europe and Asia; ever more waves of babies, from out of the inexhaustible void; and, wonder of wonders, older men and women living longer—and demanding to live longer, and ever longer. Mortality isn't a consumer product but health, beauty, longevity are.

The ultimate consumer product which affluent Americans (of whom there are more and more, with each passing month) will clamor to buy.

Like Abraham Licht himself who, a few years ago, unknown to even Katrina and Esther, traveled to Manhattan to the office of the renowned
urologist Victor Lespinasse and arranged for a sensitive, and very costly operation; an operation that has resulted, Abraham Licht thinks, in a rejuvenation of body and spirit; for as Dr. Lespinasse says gravely, “A man is as old—or as young—as his glands.”

It may even be, a man
is
his glands.

He's a follower of William James, America's home-nurtured philosopher. He'd have liked to meet James up at Harvard, and shake the man's hand. For to what purpose is it, he's always wondered, to inquire after origins? “original sin”? out of what unfathomable pit of Medusa-serpents an idea, a sentiment, a passion, a belief arises? We ask only
What are the results?
Our gaze is resolute,
Not backward but forward.
Not thought
but the fruits of action.

And once more he's succeeded in winning the love of a beautiful, desirable, mysterious woman; a woman who's his intellectual equal, or nearly; a woman with no brothers or sisters, the heiress daughter of a Manhattan millionaire. Once more, drawn to Venus Aphrodite in the flesh of a mortal woman. “This time, unmistakably, a woman deserving of my love and devotion. A woman of the New Era, yet a woman, still; wounded as a woman is invariably wounded, and seeking her fulfillment in a man.” The nervous hooded eyes moistly green, the thin, sensual mouth in a fixed smile.
No man can love me, I can love no man.
Yet from the first he'd known they were fated for each other, he's a man of romance, a man born to that terrible American decade the 1860's, he believes in fate even as he believes that we make our own fate, and call it what we will.

But no denying how his pulses, including the thick sinewy pulse in his groin, stirred, that morning in Bies's office.
Rosamund
he prays, not entirely jesting
O Rose of the World have mercy on an ardent lover in an aging man's body.

By autumn of 1926 it can be confirmed, as Abraham Licht confidently notes in his memoir, that he's well again; fully recovered; though at times,
admittedly, his head aches as if it's filled with broken glass which the slightest movement can unsettle.

But he's well. Himself again. In the person of Dr. Moses Liebknecht (of Vienna, Zurich, Paris, London) he carries himself both elegantly and forcefully; a man of mysteries, yet a man aligned with science; a psychotherapist, yet (it's sometimes hinted) a man who'd begun his career as a biologist, or perhaps a physicist, in Vienna in the 1880's. A man of mature years—in his early sixties. (In fact, Abraham Licht is sixty-five years old. A face he contemplates with perpetual disbelief, like a man gazing into a mirror and seeing two heads.) And the monkey-gland transplant has worked out very well . . . indeed.

Unfortunately, he and Dr. Bies have been quarreling often.

For though Moses Liebknecht owns only 37 percent of the Parris Clinic and isn't precisely a cofounder, he's certain that his ideas about running the establishment and about mental health in general are superior to Bies's.
He
would screen prospective patients far more scrupulously not only in terms of health and finances but in terms of family background: there's an obvious advantage to admitting primarily patients without immediate relatives. (For relatives invariably cause trouble. The more relatives, the more heirs; and the more heirs, the more trouble.) In principle, Bies agrees; in practice he's become careless and greedy. Business is all that absorbs him, making the most money in the shortest period of time; and unhealthy quantities of food and drink. (Now that Abraham can drink only sparingly, he's disapproving of his partner's excesses.) There's a rumor among the staff that Dr. Bies injects himself with morphine . . . but Abraham, that's to say the rather taciturn Moses Liebknecht, isn't the sort to bring up so private a subject.

Like most business partnerships, this one has had seasons of relative health, and decided unhealth. In early 1924, when Abraham Licht made the decision to invest $42,400 in the Parris Clinic, at that time in debt, Bies had been extremely eager to oblige him. Giving over to him the larg
est office in the former mansion, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a view of the English topiary garden; assuring him he wouldn't make any decisions without consulting him; flattering him by declaring that, with Licht's business sense, and his own medical-professional background, they couldn't fail to become millionaires within a few years. “It's only a matter of time, ‘Moses.' The right patients, and a good, reliable staff of therapists, masseurs, nurses, aides—the Clinic will practically run itself. For Autogenic Self-Mastery
is
the cure to most ills. Of that, I'm convinced.” Dr. Bies spoke with such smiling confidence and boyish idealism, Abraham found himself believing . . . wishing to believe. (Hadn't he read that most psychological ailments cure themselves, in time? So long as the Clinic didn't admit seriously ill patients like schizophrenics, manic-depressives, paranoids and the like; and as few patients as possible with organic, medical ailments.) Abraham had checked out the background of Felix Bies, M.D., and confirmed that the man had a medical degree from the Medical School of Rutgers University, in New Jersey; he'd been a resident at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center; he'd even studied psychiatry in Edinburgh. (At least, Abraham thought uneasily, a man named “Felix Bies” was so trained.)

Bies knew of Abraham Licht from the flamboyant era of the Society for the Reclamation & Restoration of E. Auguste Napoléon Bonaparte; one of Bies's in-laws had invested, and lost, a considerable amount of money in the scheme, to Bies's amusement. He'd much admired the mastermind behind the Society, he told Abraham when they first met, and knew that, one day, they must meet—“Our paths would cross, and we would know each other. Yes!”

So it was of the utmost importance, Abraham Licht insisted to Bies, in these later, more difficult days when they found themselves in frequent disagreement, that, as partners, but more importantly as friends, they speak the truth to each other at all times. And Bies vehemently agreed. “As if, ‘Moses,' one so clumsy as
I
should hope to deceive
you.
”

Yet it seems to be happening that Bies more and more often ignores Liebknecht's recommendations. Or doesn't consult him at all. His prescribed treatment for some patients is, in Liebknecht's judgment, negligent; he has admitted near-moribund men and women to the Clinic who clearly haven't any chance of recovery. A ninety-year-old blind man, dazed and sputtering, delivered over to the Clinic by a brusque son in his sixties, whose Rolls-Royce idled in the drive; an obese woman in a wheelchair, wheezing and gasping for breath, suffering from the delusion that she was awaiting a “train for home” in Pennsylvania Station, delivered over by a glamorous woman in mink and tinted glasses identified only, on the official admitting form in Bies's office, as “Daughter-in-Law”; a wizened, prematurely aged child of nine brought to the Clinic by a sullen nursemaid who claimed that the child's parents, wealthy residents of Tuxedo Park, had instructed her to “enroll” him here and to remain with him “for the duration”; a rail-thin woman in her thirties, wife of a prominent Manhattan attorney, so nervous her teeth chattered, and her eyes bulged in her skeletal head, under the delusion that she was at a clinic “to have my baby” . . . “Surely it's bad judgment and bad for the morale of all, to accept so many hopeless patients at the same time,” Moses Liebknecht said worriedly, but Bies, sighing expansively, shrugged and said, “Ah, they will outlive us, ‘Moses.' And if they don't, where's the harm? As the great Santayana, who was once my patient, has said, ‘There is tragedy in perfection, because the universe in which perfection arises in itself imperfect.'” “‘Perfection'! Where, hereabouts, do you see ‘perfection,' Felix?” (Between Liebknecht and Bies there was a feud of sorts, playful at the start but lately fairly hostile, for the former much admired William James, the very essence of native American philosophy, and the latter admired, or claimed to admire, the Spanish-born George Santayana, James's antithesis.) Bies smiled at the wincing expression on his partner's face, and offered him a drink—“The smoothest Scotch whiskey, lovely as death”—from his silver flask, unpleasantly warmed by the heat of his fleshy body. Liebknecht politely declined.

Am I being stricken by conscience, so late in The Game?

God help me, if it's so.

Lately the partners were inclined, too, to disagree on the composition of the “Parris elixir.” This was a secret medicine to be administered solely at the Clinic under the aegis of Felix Bies, M.D., who had patented it in his name in 1921; it was prescribed to patients in carefully modulated doses, for it was a powerful and potentially addictive formula consisting of blackstrap molasses, oil of coconut, finely ground thyme, almonds, dried seaweed and tincture of opium in varying degrees. (In truth, the precise nature of the elixir depended upon the whim of Dr. Bies's assistants, who created the elixir in large steaming pots on a kitchen stove.) Moses Liebknecht, sympathizing with the infirm who so unquestioningly and hopefully drank down the elixir, convinced of its magical powers, argued that the elixir should contain a fixed amount of nonaddictive matter and a minimum of opium; he'd had some experience (of which he spoke evasively, for Dr. Liebknecht wasn't one to share intimate secrets even with his partner and friend Dr. Bies) with opium addiction, and knew how malevolent it could be. “Above all, the elixir shouldn't smell and taste repellent, which is sometimes the case—it's a discouraging sight to see patients gagging on it even as, with tears in their eyes, they proclaim its magical powers.” It seemed inevitable that certain of the patients as they grew sicker and weaker and less certain of their surroundings begged for heavier dosages of the elixir even when, in the most literal sense, they couldn't stomach it. Dr. Liebknecht, that's to say Abraham Licht, recalling Katrina's herbal medicines, which had helped restore his health more than once, had been experimenting with a rival medicine: it would be called the Liebknecht Formula, consisting primarily of sweet, heavy cream into which cherries had been ground to create a smooth, blood-tinctured texture intended to stir in the patient's unconscious idyllic memories of nursing at his mother's breast; there was no practical way to avoid tincture of opium, but Dr. Liebknecht made sure that only delicious ingredients were ground into the
formula—cinnamon sticks, brown sugar, pistachio nuts, cocoa, Swiss chocolate, and so forth. In some patients the Liebknecht Formula acted as a gentle soporific, in others as a stimulant; in others, a powerful emetic; in one patient, Mrs. Deardon, the neurasthenic wife of the Manhattan attorney, it had an alarming aphrodisiac effect resulting in Mrs. Deardon's pregnancy after only five weeks at the Clinic. (As there were no provisions for pregnant patients at the Parris Clinic, Mrs. Deardon was obliged to hurriedly depart. The father, or fathers, of the unborn child were not named by Mrs. Dearborn, and did not come forward to identify themselves; but Mrs. Dearborn was reportedly very happy with the pregnancy, speaking of it as an autogenic conception involving no crude sexual “act” for which she might be blamed.) Bies, normally indifferent to the atmosphere of the Clinic, began to take exception to the fact that a number of patients were choosing the new medicine over the old; while others insisted upon having both, with sometimes unfortunate results. So, the Liebknecht Formula was causing division at the Clinic where tranquility of mind was necessary, if Autogenic Self-Mastery was to retain its potency.

Half in jest, yet half seriously, Moses Liebknecht observed to Felix Bies one day that the distinction between the new elixir and the old was that the new might well have curative powers—“I'm taking it myself in experimental doses. And I must say, Felix, I've never felt so—healthy, and happy.” Bies regarded him with searching eyes, and a sly spiteful smile, saying, “Yes? There is a sort of luminous glow about you. As there is about our patient Miss Grille. Is she, too, taking the Liebknecht Formula? Like Mrs. Deardon?” Liebknecht flushed at this remark with its lewd innuendo, and would have departed Bies's presence in dignity, except Bies added, quickly, as if to placate him, “Moses, do you think the Liebknecht Formula would work for me, too? I am in need of some sort of—restoration.”