Freud's Mistress

by Karen Mack, Jennifer Kaufman

Genres: Biographical; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; General Fiction

Synopsis

Golden Globe–winning film and television producer Karen Mack and two-time Penney-Missouri Journalism Award winner Jennifer Kaufman have collaborated on two previous novels, both of which hit the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. Based on the true-life love affair between Sigmund Freud and his sister-in-law, Freud’s Mistress is a powerhouse novel fueled by psychological insight, gut-wrenching betrayal and irresistible passion.

Release date: July 9, 2013

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 384

Sample

1
VIENNA, 1895

 

The season for suicides had begun.

The young woman sat at the writing desk by the window and dipped her pen into black ink. It scratched across the paper like a raven’s claw. Outside, the sky was ashen gray. Since early November, the air had been bitter cold, and patches of ice had spread over the breadth of the Danube. Soon the river would be frozen solid until spring. Just the other week, she had read in the Salonblatt about a wealthy young aristocrat, dressed in bridal gown and veil, who jumped her steed off Kronprinz-Rudolf Bridge. The beautiful filly sank like a stone, and the woman’s body washed up on the shore, shrouded in white satin.

She never thought it would come to this, but now here she was, at her sister’s mercy, asking for help. She finished the letter at dawn, just as the bells of St. Stephen’s rang out across the city. She sealed the envelope and placed it in the letter box outside the front door. She would remember this day. It was the beginning.

TWO DAYS EARLIER

The sky was raining ice, but the woman hurrying down the boulevard wore no coat or hat. She was carrying a bundle wrapped in stiff, coarse blankets, and the heavy load hampered her gait, causing her to favor one leg, then the other. Strands of long, wet hair lashed across her mouth and eyelids, and every few minutes she would pause, shifting the weight of her bundle onto one arm and hip, and exposing her free hand to brush the sleet off her face.

She crossed the Ringstrasse—the broad, tree-lined avenue that circled Vienna—then passed a row of massive apartment buildings, their exteriors casting glazed shadows on the cobblestones. The storm was getting worse, a constant downpour. Blinded by the wet, she continued on, splashing through puddles in her good leather boots, crossing Schwarzenbergplatz, the invisible boundary between the aristocracy and everyone else. A few hundred yards away, a row of opulent homes blazed with lights.

Earlier, in her haste to leave, she couldn’t be bothered to run upstairs to get her woolen overcoat and gloves, and now she sorely regretted this rash decision. She was chilled to the bone. Idiot, she thought. My boots are ruined.

She slowed her pace and swept through the ornamental iron gates of the baroness’s residence, heading around back to the servants’ entrance. She rang the night bell and then knocked loudly, cursing softly and swaying with impatience. Open the damn door. There was a dull, aching pain in her side as a gust of icy wind drove her slightly off balance. She shifted the load over her shoulder, her fingers throbbing as she pounded on the door.

When the night maid finally appeared, Minna brushed past her in a fury. Took bloody long enough, she thought, but murmured a perfunctory “Good evening” and descended a dimly lit stairway to the basement kitchen. She carefully placed her bundle on a cot near “the Beast,” the enormous black furnace by the scullery. A frail, drowsy child emerged from the blankets and sat there silently as Minna pushed the cot closer to the furnace, slid the thin mattress back on its frame, and settled the child beneath a feeble candle flickering on a wooden shelf.

“Fräulein Bernays, you’re wanted upstairs. The mistress has been ringing for over an hour,” the night maid said, adjusting her starched white cap. “Everyone suffers when you run about . . .” she added, sighing heavily as she bent over and wiped a mud print from the stairs. “I told the mistress you went for a walk, but she wasn’t having any of it, said you must have gone somewhere . . .”

“If you must know, we’ve been out gargling gin. Haven’t we, Flora?”

“Yes, Fräulein,” Flora said, with a weak smile. “And then we went to the doctor.”

“The child’s delirious,” Minna said. “Cover up, dear, it’s freezing in here.”

There was a draft coming from somewhere that made her long for dry clothes, and her head was pounding. She put her hand in her skirt pocket and fingered the brown paper parcel of medicine. Thank God—still there.

Earlier that day Minna had discovered Flora in a terrible state, attempting to do her chores but coughing so hard it brought her to her knees. Several times, Minna had dunked the pathetic little thing, wailing and hiccupping, in a cold bath to break the fever, but nothing seemed to work. The child was doomed, her cheeks shining with fever, the sweating sickness getting worse and worse. Minna could stand it no longer. She bundled her up and, without a word to anyone, set out to take the child to the doctor.

“My throat hurts,” Flora whimpered, struggling for breath, as Minna rang the bell at the physician’s office.

“He’ll take care of you,” she answered with an air of conviction she did not feel. “You’re the baroness’s charge, and very important.”

An elderly gentleman appeared in the doorway, blotting his mustache with a linen napkin. Minna could see a woman sitting at the dining table across the room, and there was an aroma of boiled beef and wine.

“Herr Doctor, my employer, the Baroness Wolff, wishes immediate treatment for this child. She is most concerned.”

The doctor hesitated a moment as Minna pushed by him, launching into a litany of the child’s ailments: fever, coughing, nausea, loss of appetite. There was little reason to doubt her authority. Even without her overcoat, and despite the muck on her clothes, she was an elegant woman—willowy with a straight back, smooth skin, and perfect diction. In addition, she was a most convincing liar.

“Could she possibly have scarlet fever?” Minna asked, as the doctor led her to his offices in the back.

“Unspecified infection . . .” he concluded after an examination. “Bed rest for at least a month . . . linens changed twice a week . . . lozenges for the sore throat and Bayer’s Heroin for her cough . . .”

Minna listened, nodding her head in agreement, all the while knowing what the doctor advised would be impossible to carry out in this household. In any event, how in heaven’s name did Minna ever think she could get away with this? Her days, her evenings, even her Sundays belonged to the baroness. She was expected to serve at the pleasure of her employer, and tardiness often meant instant dismissal.

Minna thought of Herr Doctor’s orders as she laid her hand on Flora’s clammy forehead.

“Don’t leave me,” the child said, slightly bewildered, her voice hoarse and strained. She was ten, but looked six, and she clutched Minna’s skirt, sensing a departure. Minna gave Flora two spoonfuls of the sticky, sweet-smelling syrup and whispered something in her ear. The child lay back down and turned her head to the wall.

The night maid eyed Minna as she pinned a few damp wisps of hair into her small bun, pointedly wiped the heels of her boots with a rag, and left the kitchen with no comment. She climbed back up the narrow stairwell, making her way through the marble-floored entrance hall, and then hurried down a vaulted corridor lit by a series of imported electric lights. She stopped briefly just outside the crimson drawing room and caught her breath, then knocked softly.

“You may enter,” a voice called.

The baroness’s inner sanctum looked like the kind of room that no one ever visited. Rich, heavy damask chairs and sofas, stained-glass shades, Persian carpets, and a collection of porcelain that included pug dogs, poodles, and exotic birds. There was a bowl of lilies on an inlaid side table, and in the corner near the window, a writing desk with a silver tray filled with tea cakes and snow-white sandwiches. Outwardly, Minna was calm, but her face was flushed and her heart racing, as if she had just broken a valuable vase. Also, the smell of the baroness’s tea cakes reminded her that she had not eaten a morsel the entire day.

“Good evening, Baroness.”

“The others are talking about you,” the young woman replied abruptly, her voice pinched and refined. She was sitting in her perversely torturous corseted dress and examining Minna with a gaze that could sear the skin off a rabbit. “Would you like to hear what they’re saying? They talk about your peculiarities—your constant reading and your walking about and such. Things I put up with at great inconvenience to myself. Things I’ve managed to ignore. You’re late. Where have you been?”

“I went to the chemist. Flora is sick,” Minna said.

“You think I haven’t noticed,” the baroness responded, beckoning Minna to sit down across from her. Minna hesitated. Her skirt was still damp and would leave a mark on the sofa’s delicate fabric. She sat gingerly on the edge, extricating a silk pillow and pushing it aside.

“I’m not a monster, after all. I myself told Cook last week to give the little creature daily doses of camphor.”

That would have been the first decent thing the baroness had ever done for her, Minna thought. The unfortunate Flora had been hired from the country to work as one of the general servants in the large baroque residence. Even upon her arrival, the little girl was thin and pale, too fragile for this kind of employment. She had straw-colored hair, eyes the color of sherry, and spent the better part of her day in the basement kitchen, choking on thick black clouds of fumes and smoke. Her duties ran from cleaning the boiler and emptying the fireplaces to scraping pots and cleaning privies. At night, Minna had frequently seen her crying herself to sleep.

“The camphor’s been useless. She needed—”

The baroness held up her finger in warning, cutting Minna off. “I’ll decide when my staff needs medication. And, by the way, when I had my sore throat last week, I didn’t notice you running to the chemist for me.”

There was a tense pause as the baroness adjusted the fringed pillows on her Empire sofa. “I must say, I’ve never had much luck with you people. I rarely hire anyone from the Second District, but you came so highly recommended. . . .”

Minna did not contradict her. She had never lived in the Second District, Leopoldstadt, where most of Vienna’s middle-class Jews resided, but she had often felt the sting of anti-Semitism. When she was a child, she sometimes took revenge upon schoolchildren who taunted her with a barrage of bigoted slurs, one time hitting a boy so hard she bloodied his nose. But as she grew older, she found it was something best to ignore, although she still felt a chill at the nape of her neck every time she encountered it.

“Rest assured, my only concern is for the child,” Minna said in a low, firm voice.

“Your concern should be for your employment. You’re a lady’s companion. And as far as I can tell, you haven’t had any medical training.”

“But I have. I was employed by a doctor in Ingolstadt.”

“What’s his name?” the baroness asked, skeptically.

“Herr Dr. Frankenstein,” Minna shot back in a blithe tone.

The baroness stared at Minna for a moment in surprise and then smiled slyly as she registered the joke. She stood up and walked to the fireplace, gathering her basket of needlework. “Now, Minna,” she continued, in a conciliatory tone of voice, “you must apologize so we can carry on.”

“I apologize,” she said promptly, although the sentiment wasn’t there.

“I accept your apology,” she said. “In any event, the girl has never been quite right. Weak and consumptive.”

The baroness gazed into the mirror over the mantel and touched her elaborately upswept hair.

“What do you think of this hairstyle? It’s the same as Clara’s. She wore it to the Imperial Palace last week.”

“It suits you,” Minna replied, staring at the ridiculous bouffant pompadour and wondering if anyone on the face of the earth would be able to keep a straight face looking at it.

“Good, then, I’ll keep it for now,” she said with a dismissive wave, settling herself back on the sofa with her needlework on her lap.

The light was fading and shadows darkened the room. Faint sounds of horses’ hooves and carriage wheels on cobblestones drifted through the heavy, swagged draperies and an occasional servant’s voice echoed through the halls. The baroness’s smooth white hands moved quickly as she concentrated on the pastoral scene she was embroidering on linen. Pale verdant greens, lush lavender sky, and a shepherd tending his flock.

Afterward, Minna climbed the two sets of stairs to her room, immediately pulling off her wet muslin skirt, flannel petticoat, woolen stockings, and unbuttoning the twenty buttons of her white cotton shirt. Her bone-crushing corset was pressing on her rib cage, and she exhaled thankfully as she unlaced it, tossing it on the floor. She needed to dry off. She was beginning to smell like wet dog. The room was dark, matching her mood—the walls an unhealthy shade of arsenic green. She put on her nightdress and carried a candle to the dressing table, her shadow following her. Minna leaned her head back and began brushing her thick auburn hair, gathering it into combs. In her youth, she had been conscious of the wealth of her hair and her tall, slim figure. But over the years vanity had disappeared. The fine planes of her face and neck were still in evidence, but even in the candlelight she could see delicate lines around her eyes.

She never imagined that at this point in her life, at almost thirty years old, she would be standing by silently while a young woman, barely her age, scolded her and nearly let a poor child die like a dog. Minna would have been married by now, like her sister, Martha, if life had turned out differently, if her father hadn’t lost his money and dropped dead on the street, if her fiancé hadn’t died. If, if, if . . .

There was no sense going back over it. She had been on her own for years. No one else in the family could support her—Martha had a growing family; her brother, Eli, had married and moved away; so she fell back on the only options remaining to her—lady’s companion or governess. She had to make her own way in this world, and it looked as if she would be moving on again soon.

She wrapped her shawl around her shoulders, hugging her body and pressing her fingers into her upper arms. She was tired. And her neck hurt. She drifted over to the balcony and looked out the window to the north.

A shot of gin would be nice, she thought, but she’d settle for a cigarette. She lit one of the thin Turkish smokes she kept in her bottom dresser drawer. The downpour had subsided into a slate-colored gloom and she inhaled deeply.

Often, late at night, when her duties were done, Minna would read until the candle drowned in a pool of fat. A hefty chunk of her wages went for books, but not the silver fork novels about maids fornicating in the attic and randy masters with roaming eyes. And not the eternally boring memoirs, the “remember me” books that she’d save until after her eyesight was gone. No, she preferred the big books, wading through Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, which was better than Edward Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest, but not especially enlightening. She struggled with turgid passages from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and works by Heraclitus and Parmenides—the heart of which wrestled with questions of existence.

And then there was Aristotle, whom she threw aside after discovering that he considered women one of nature’s deformities—an unfinished man. She sold that volume with no regrets. Plato wasn’t much better on the subject, insisting that women were less competent than men. Then again, she couldn’t dismiss every philosopher simply because of his narrow-minded convictions. After all, Nietzsche, whom she adored, viewed women as merely possessions . . . a property predestined for service. And Rousseau believed a woman’s role was primarily to pleasure men. It was dispiriting, actually.

But there was nothing to aggravate her in literature. In fact, it was the perfect antidote for those feelings of boredom, dread, and loneliness. She chose Goethe’s epistolary The Sorrows of Young Werther and Shakespeare’s Henry VI (Part Two, not Part One, which was more of a historical treatise and one of Shakespeare’s weakest dramas, in her opinion). For sheer entertainment it was Mary Shelley’s Gothic thriller Frankenstein, which she’d consumed in one sitting. And then there was that avant-garde Viennese author named Schnitzler, who had given up his medical practice to write plays about aristocratic heroes and their adulterous affairs. No irony, no moralizing, just a frank, unemotional study of the phenomenon of passion. She’d never read anything quite like it. An acquired taste, this Schnitzler—like olives or caviar or Klimt. But this was not a night to lose oneself in gin, tobacco, and bibliomania.

She pulled on her boots under her nightclothes, not bothering to fasten the tedious number of buttons, and made her way back down to Flora’s claustrophobic little nook. The child was curled up on the cot, clutching her rag doll.

Normally Minna would sit with Flora and tell her stories, but at the moment, Flora was in no mood. She wanted what any child her age would want. She wanted her mother and she wanted to go home. Minna sat down next to her and held her in her arms as Flora snuggled in, laying her cheek against her chest. She gently stroked her hair and hummed softly until she saw Flora’s eyelids flutter and then close. Minna breathed a sigh of relief when the child finally fell asleep.

The next morning, the baroness received a note from her doctor inquiring as to the child’s health and explaining that “after-hours” calls were charged at a premium.

“You’re dismissed,” the baroness had said with a petulant frown, looking away as she informed Minna that all wages would be garnished. The usual nastiness associated with an infuriated employer and an unrepentant employee wasn’t there. Minna stood justly accused. No vehement protestations. There would be no point. Especially in light of what Minna intended to do next.

An hour or so later, after the baroness left for the day, Minna packed up her bags and left them by the servants’ entrance. Then she informed the staff that she and Flora had been “let go,” and took the bewildered child to the Wien Westbahnhof. She was sending Flora home.

Flora was from a small village outside Linz, where the winters were long and the people worked at hardscrabble jobs in iron foundries, mines, or factories. There was, in Flora’s life, privation and tragedy—a sister had died of diphtheria, a brother was imprisoned, and no one knew anything about the father, a general laborer who had disappeared long ago. But Flora clearly adored her mother. “She has golden hair,” she told Minna one night, “like a fairy.”

Minna wrapped her arms around the girl’s small body and they huddled on the platform, half frozen, watching travelers gather at the gate—women with embroidered fur-collared jackets and fancy traveling valises, children with curled hair and warm overcoats. The girl seemed calm now, relieved.

When the train pulled up, Minna and Flora walked past the uniformed porters who were standing by private first-class cars with elaborate sitting rooms and electric lights. She helped the child into the third-class cabin, settling her on a hard wooden bench between two matrons, one of whom had a sleeping baby on her lap.

“Don’t come back,” she had wanted to say, as she brushed Flora’s warm cheek with a kiss, and pressed a few kronen into the matron’s hand, getting her assurance that she would see the child home. But she knew Flora would be sent off somewhere else in a few months. That was her fate. Minna felt a visceral charge of longing and regret. She would have liked, at the very least, to have felt she was setting Flora free.

Minna watched the train lumber away and stood alone on the empty platform as the severity of her situation finally hit her. There would be no recommendation from the baroness, that was for certain. Her money was woefully depleted, and she had no hope for future employment. She hailed an omnibus and rode along the jumbled, cobblestoned streets, trying to ignore the panic building up inside her. She was beginning to think that finding the perfect position was never going to happen. It was exhausting trying to sustain the feeling that she was just one step away from happiness.

She checked into a modest pension near the Danube, but sleep did not come easily. The hours drifted by, she dozed, she read, she paced. The clock ticked loudly on the dresser as she sat down finally to write to her sister. There was no one else. Not even her mother, who barely got by on her widow’s pension. She was facing another failure.

She had been fired several times before and she had quit more times than that. With every setback, Minna would insist that she was fine, she liked her independence, her freedom, her time in the café reading and talking. And with every setback, her sister would turn to her in pity and pat her consolingly on the arm.

“Poor Minna. You know you never get a moment’s peace when you work for those people. . . .”

She wanted a bath and a change of clothes, but her bags were still at the baroness’s house—probably dumped in the alley by now. As soon as the day porter came on duty, she would send for them. She finished the letter to her sister and sealed it. For years, Martha had indicated that her husband, Sigmund, couldn’t afford another person in the house. Now, according to her sister, things had turned around. His medical practice had improved. He had more patients. There was a sixth child. Mathilde, Martin, Oliver, Ernst, Sophie, and now Anna. Maybe they needed her.

Minna hoped Sigmund would be in favor of the situation. Their relationship had always been cordial. No, more than cordial. During the past several years, they had shared a lively correspondence concerning subjects of interest to them both: politics, literature, and his scientific work.

Minna closed her eyes and imagined Martha opening the letter and sending for her immediately. She held that image in her mind. And she, who had never been dependent on relatives, felt the immense relief of the ignorant.

2

Minna stood on the frozen, grimy curb, shivering in her coat. Her fingertips burned with the cold as she hailed a hansom cab, her spirits buoyed by the thought of settling somewhere. “Come home at once, my dear Minna,” her sister had said in an entirely persuasive manner. “The children miss you terribly. We’ll expect you before dinner.”

The sky was overcast, the wind blowing off the river, another brutally cold November morning as Minna set out to join her sister. The spindly coachman was initially courteous when he first pulled over, but then glowered as she stepped aside to reveal her belongings lined up on the sidewalk, as if she’d been evicted. He grumbled as he hefted her bags into the luggage compartment of the carriage, and now, as she rode through the empty streets, the man’s clucking sounds were nearly as loud as the clopping of the stepper’s hooves.

Wie lange dauert’s? she had asked. How much longer? He seemed to be taking the “scenic route” around the Ring, passing every neoclassical, Renaissance, and baroque building and pointing out each one’s distinguishing features. “The Hofburgtheater was founded by the Emperor in 1874. . . . The Hofoper was inaugurated by His Highness not that long afterward, and the Hofmuseum. . . .” Perhaps he’s angling for a bigger tip, she thought, as she looked out at Vienna’s wedding-cake skyline, with its snow-capped, pointed turrets and Gothic flourishes.

Martha’s words had been reassuring, it was true, but Minna was coming around to the unfortunate fact that this was a rescue, not an invitation. It had not been her choice to impose on her sister, who could hardly say no. How demoralizing at this stage in her life to be in this position. On the other hand, for the moment, this home was a sanctum for her depleted spirits.

Minna nervously looked at the little gold watch dangling from her mother’s bow pin. She knew how her sister felt about tardiness. Dinner, the Mittagessen meal (soup, meat, vegetables, and a sweet), was always served precisely at one, and not a minute later. People did not drift in and out of Martha’s dining room. And all chores were performed with military precision. Martha’s rules. She would be living under Martha’s rules. As was fitting. This was Martha’s house, Martha’s husband, Martha’s children.

The Freuds lived in the Ninth District on a steep, unprepossessing street. One end bordered a respectable residential neighborhood, while the lower end swept down to the disheveled Tandelmarkt, huddled near a canal of the Danube.

The coachman reined in the horses, and his mouth. One more description of a Hof palace, a Hof theater, or a Hof anything, and Minna would have wrung his Hof neck. When the carriage finally pulled up to Berggasse 19, she paid him (including a decent tip—it was freezing up there) with the last of her savings. She arrived at her sister’s house without money and without a plan.

She always thought her sister’sapartment building had an ennobling facade—high ornamental windows, baroque and classical features, an air of grandeur to it if one didn’t look at the stores on the ground floor. On the left of the entrance leading into the apartment was Kornmehl’s kosher butcher shop and on the right, Wiener’s co-operative grocery. The Freud children were bundled in coats and crowded on the front stairs, waiting to greet her.

“How long are you going to sthay, Aunt Minna?” asked four-year-old Sophie, a pink-cheeked, curly-haired cherub with an impressive lisp, who couldn’t quite manage a smile. The rest of the children surrounded Minna as she climbed out of the carriage, a few of them sniffling and rubbing their eyes.

Before Minna could answer, she heard seven-year-old Oliver call back to his mother, “Mama, where is she going to sleep? I thought Papa said there was no room.”

Martha appeared in the doorway, shooing the children aside like pigeons.

“Darling Minna. Here you are,” Martha said, rising on tiptoes and kissing her sister on both cheeks.

“Martha, I can’t tell you how much . . .”

“Stop. Don’t say another word, my dear. We’re the lucky ones.”

Minna put her arms around her sister and then stepped back and looked at her. She hadn’t seen Martha since the birth of Anna and was somewhat unnerved by her appearance. Her lusterless hair was parted down the middle and pulled back in an uncompromising bun, her expression tense and edgy. She looked like someone who had just come out of hiding—her puffy, red-ringed eyes pouched with purple bags, her usual meticulous attire rumpled and slightly askew. Martha had always been “the pretty sister,” blessed with a gentle, oval face, pale complexion, and a Cupid’s bow upper lip that gave her demeanor just the right amount of allure. But now, after six pregnancies, she seemed blurred around the edges, and the only overall impression one got of her was fatigue.

“I’ve been so worried about you,” Martha said, as she clasped Minna’s hand and led her into the apartment. Sophie, Oliver, and yet more children herded behind them, loitering in the hallway and shoving one another aside, trying to lead the way.

They walked slowly through the stolid bourgeois apartment, past rosewood consoles, Biedermeier tables, fatigued Persian carpets, and draperies that trailed on the floor. There was a light smell of furniture oil and floor polish. The children followed behind, their sense of decorum gradually disintegrating. Oliver and Martin tore through the drawing room like little hellions, toppling a chair, while the girls yanked Minna’s sleeve, vying for her attention.

Minna’s bedroom was small and oddly shaped, the former dressing area of the master suite with a long, narrow window over the bed. A jug of water was placed beside the washbasin, a gas lamp was on the dresser, and fresh, laundered sheets were laid out on the bed. There was a small fireplace, bordered with decorative tiles, and an ornate wooden wardrobe was squeezed into the corn