Secrets

Laurie
Secrets
Starbucks, December 13, 2008

Growing up, the secrets that come to mind involve André, the psychoanalyst who treated my mother, my sister, and me, as well as my uncle Zev, aunt Kate, and their two daughters, Phoebe and Lila. André was educated, cultivated, and he’d escaped the war. A Jew who’d survived, he knew what the world was made of from the perspective of the American Jews he treated, mingled with, used, taught. He spoke with a European accent that was guttural and meaty like the smell of his cigars. He was fat and pig-faced. He ate all the time.

Ellen told me our father loaned him money, which he invested in the stock market and lost. Murray didn’t ask for it back. He looked up to André, a doctor, a survivor. My father hadn’t gone past the ninth grade but had worked his way up through the garment business and become a coat manufacturer.

Ellen knows that André maneuvered me into his bed during a weekend at his country house. I was fourteen. He put his hands on my breasts and down my panties. He told me to touch him, and I said no. I said no eventually. At first I was stunned and hurt and afraid to step out of line, and I couldn’t think of anything to say.

Ellen is still grateful to André for protecting her from Toby. He paid for her abortion when she got pregnant with Pierre. He took her on a trip around the world. I asked if he had ever tried anything with her, and she, “He wouldn’t have dared.” I was impressed with her bravado. She is six years older than me. Maybe André knew she would have raised hell in the same way he knew I wouldn’t. She would have raised bloody hell because she felt secure she would have been believed.

In my thirties I told my father what André had done. He turned red and called him a bastard, but André was long dead by then. My mother was of the opinion that I encouraged sex, and I shared her view generally, but I didn’t encourage André to fetch me from the back garden where I was watching birds at a stone fountain and steer me to his bed.

My mother asked André to pay the money back to Murray. At the end of her session, he rose from the desk where he usually sat—between trips to the kitchen for dietetic snacks, such as hearts of palm—and wrote a check to Murray he gave to her.

Ellen was the first to see André after returning from college under mysterious circumstances she later revealed: She stole a wallet from a girl in her dorm and left it on her dresser in order to be caught and sent home. The next to visit André was Toby, and for several years my mother and sister commuted from Long Beach to Manhattan two or three times a week and whispered conspiratorially about the shrewd, wise council André dispensed. It was often epigrammatic. For example he might advise, “If someone insists that one and one equals three, then say, ‘Okay, one and one equals three.’ What’s the skin off your nose?” I wasn’t supposed to know he existed, although a lower primate could have pieced together the secret that grew in the air.

Finally, it was my turn to go, but the reality was bewildering. I had nothing to say, and he seemed aloof and impenetrable—not friendly and kind, as he was purported to be. I told myself I would grow to like him and he me. What I really enjoyed was taking the train to the city and navigating alone to 96th street and Madison Avenue, feeling Manhattan’s thrum as I rode the bus. I would wait for my appointment in the little café across from his office, drinking coffee at the counter and pretending I belonged in this sophisticated world. It made me feel special, although my mother instructed me to keep the visits secret.

On the train to Cold Spring, I imagined that André would suggest books for me to read, describe, as we walked on wooded trails, the life he’d lived in Europe before the war. He took me to his bed, first in the afternoon before my aunt and uncle arrived. It was so unbelievable, I left my body and from the ceiling looked down at the girl on her back with her arms at her sides and the corpulent man with thick white hair circling her nipples and asking if it felt good. I had to lie with him again at night after everyone went to sleep and my aunt and uncle acted as if nothing was strange. Did I see a muscle twitch in my uncle’s cheek when André announced where I would sleep? Zev didn’t protest, and neither did I.

Not then. What was happening was impossible, and I was disappointed as I would be later in life when a sexual advance was an insult instead of a caress. The second time André was bolder. He aroused my clitoris and spread the cheeks of my ass. He was skillful and I was stimulated, but I didn’t want to be touched by an old man. I said “Stop,” softly, in a child’s voice, in the voice of a sleepy child, because I was in a play and I couldn’t name what was happening. “I’m tired,” I said, “I want to go to sleep.” He got out of bed and left the room. He left the room and didn’t return.

Everything changed after that. He seemed angry the next day. I thought I had done something wrong. I thought I was the kind of person who spoiled things and that’s why I couldn’t be included. I was the kind of person who would point out that one and one equals two. Before I returned home, he whispered not to tell my mother, his head bent at an angle. He wasn’t looking at me but rather at a girl in the empty space beside me. He became small in that moment and I big, but I didn’t like the shift in size. I wondered if Long Beach would still be there when I got off the train, and when it was I thought, well now, you see life goes on. Life goes on as you remember it. You have a family and parents, and this is the world they have placed you in, this is the world you are part of, and you really have nowhere else to go.

I continued seeing André for a while longer, then I stopped for several years, and then I resumed when I was seventeen, for the glamour he represented, the knowledge, in order to get him to like me, to revisit the feeling of being soiled. We never spoke about what happened.