the piano every afternoon and have piano lessons twice a week. We often go to concerts and operas. Father took us to see
Die Fledermaus
at the Hofoper and also
The Geisha
recently, which
I liked so much. I even managed to persuade Father to let me attend night classes for women, but they don’t teach the same things. It is a losing battle.”
He makes no comments on her efforts to become cultured, to shine in some intellectual way, which is so important to her. He does not even make any sympathetic noises, nor does he proffer any words of advice or encouragement, as her brother, at least, does. This is not the story he wants her to tell, she understands.
Probably he thinks women’s education a waste of time, as most men his age do. Probably he thinks women belong in the home with their children. Only the young engineer she has met—such an elegant young man, in his gray cloak and butterfly-shaped tie, with his long fine fingers, has been sympathetic to her complaints, has even met her at the museum, and has listened with interest to her comments on the paintings.
So she returns to the subject of her illness, which is, after all, why she is here and which does seem to interest the doctor.
“I don’t remember when it all began. Otto, my brother, always got the illnesses first.”
“How much older is he than you?” the doctor now asks.
“Eighteen months older,” she replies and tells him her brother always had a more mild case, the lucky thing, and then, of course, he would pass the disease on to her. “I would always be much more severely ill than he was,” she says, aware of the bitterness in her voice.
She thinks how everyone in her family gets things from each other. The men, if she has understood rightly, mostly passing on their illnesses to the women. No wonder women prefer not to give men what they demand in the dark; no wonder her mother prefers to polish the furniture, to wash, to dust, to clean. Her father has passed on his shameful illness to her mother, she knows. And what of her own body’s leaking, which it does so embarrassingly, staining her undergarments so that she scrubs them at night herself to keep the maids from seeing the shameful yellow stain? But how could she speak of that?
Instead, at his urging, she says it was when she was eight that things changed for her. She started getting the cough then, and somewhat later, around twelve, the awful migraines and the constipation, the pains in the stomach and legs a little later. The migraines went away, but she still gets the cough, which frightens her and makes her feel she might suffocate.
“The doctors all did such ghastly things to me to get rid of it, giving me electric shocks all over, even in the most embarrassing places, and thrusting things down my throat, so that I felt I would choke. Sometimes I passed out with the pain and the fear, or I vomited. They wrapped me in cold sheets, sprayed my body with hard, cold showers, and almost drowned me in cold baths. They tortured me! Really they did!” she says and sits up and waves her hands around, her bracelets chinking, exaggerating a bit for effect.
Some of these remedies were not quite as unpleasant as she has made out. Sometimes the warm baths and the massages had been quite pleasant and relaxing and made her feel a bit better.
“But really, in my opinion,” she says grandly, feeling quite clever and grown up to have thought of it, “Modern doctors are not much better than the fake one I read about in Molière.” She says the title, showing off her good French accent,
Le Malade imaginaire.
“You read that?” the doctor says, sounding quite shocked.
“Yes, I did, with the French fräulein, and we laughed a lot. She introduced me to all sorts of things,” she tells him with a certain pride, giggling a little, thinking of the girl in the play, who like her has lost her voice, and of the pretend doctor who says he needs to give an enema to the wet nurse, whom he thinks of as
Die Fledermaus
at the Hofoper and also
The Geisha
recently, which
I liked so much. I even managed to persuade Father to let me attend night classes for women, but they don’t teach the same things. It is a losing battle.”
He makes no comments on her efforts to become cultured, to shine in some intellectual way, which is so important to her. He does not even make any sympathetic noises, nor does he proffer any words of advice or encouragement, as her brother, at least, does. This is not the story he wants her to tell, she understands.
Probably he thinks women’s education a waste of time, as most men his age do. Probably he thinks women belong in the home with their children. Only the young engineer she has met—such an elegant young man, in his gray cloak and butterfly-shaped tie, with his long fine fingers, has been sympathetic to her complaints, has even met her at the museum, and has listened with interest to her comments on the paintings.
So she returns to the subject of her illness, which is, after all, why she is here and which does seem to interest the doctor.
“I don’t remember when it all began. Otto, my brother, always got the illnesses first.”
“How much older is he than you?” the doctor now asks.
“Eighteen months older,” she replies and tells him her brother always had a more mild case, the lucky thing, and then, of course, he would pass the disease on to her. “I would always be much more severely ill than he was,” she says, aware of the bitterness in her voice.
She thinks how everyone in her family gets things from each other. The men, if she has understood rightly, mostly passing on their illnesses to the women. No wonder women prefer not to give men what they demand in the dark; no wonder her mother prefers to polish the furniture, to wash, to dust, to clean. Her father has passed on his shameful illness to her mother, she knows. And what of her own body’s leaking, which it does so embarrassingly, staining her undergarments so that she scrubs them at night herself to keep the maids from seeing the shameful yellow stain? But how could she speak of that?
Instead, at his urging, she says it was when she was eight that things changed for her. She started getting the cough then, and somewhat later, around twelve, the awful migraines and the constipation, the pains in the stomach and legs a little later. The migraines went away, but she still gets the cough, which frightens her and makes her feel she might suffocate.
“The doctors all did such ghastly things to me to get rid of it, giving me electric shocks all over, even in the most embarrassing places, and thrusting things down my throat, so that I felt I would choke. Sometimes I passed out with the pain and the fear, or I vomited. They wrapped me in cold sheets, sprayed my body with hard, cold showers, and almost drowned me in cold baths. They tortured me! Really they did!” she says and sits up and waves her hands around, her bracelets chinking, exaggerating a bit for effect.
Some of these remedies were not quite as unpleasant as she has made out. Sometimes the warm baths and the massages had been quite pleasant and relaxing and made her feel a bit better.
“But really, in my opinion,” she says grandly, feeling quite clever and grown up to have thought of it, “Modern doctors are not much better than the fake one I read about in Molière.” She says the title, showing off her good French accent,
Le Malade imaginaire.
“You read that?” the doctor says, sounding quite shocked.
“Yes, I did, with the French fräulein, and we laughed a lot. She introduced me to all sorts of things,” she tells him with a certain pride, giggling a little, thinking of the girl in the play, who like her has lost her voice, and of the pretend doctor who says he needs to give an enema to the wet nurse, whom he thinks of as
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