He never attended a performance of Rheingold again. And six months after the accident, he married Helene Goertel-Eisen.
Whether my Great-uncle Max and my Great-aunt Helene were happily married I cannot say, for it was a question which, in the Vienna of my childhood, no one asked, let alone answered. In those days (when the infant Freud, I daresay, was still bowling his hoop along the Pfeffer Gasse) one wasn’t happily married. One wasn’t unhappily married either. One was married.
Certainly my Uncle Max was very good to her. To the end, he called her his ‘Rheinmaderl’ and denied her nothing. As for my Aunt Helene, she gave up her career and settled down contentedly in the big yellow villa in the suburb of Hitzing which Max bought for her, furnishing it in the Makart style which was just sweeping Vienna: peacock feathers, shell ornaments and large numbers of small stuffed animals under glass. Freed from even the minimal restraints of her career, she was able to indulge her passion for Karlsbad plums and Linger Torte and became, even by current standards, not just very, but extraordinarily fat.
After a year or two, being of a rather indolent nature, she brought her Cousin Lily to live in Hitzing, to take over the housekeeping.
Cousin Lily belonged to that now extinct band of faintly-etched and unassuming spinsters whose own lives never quite break into flame and who live at the periphery of others — often indispensable, as often ignored. She was pale, long-nosed and ageless and wore round her neck a necklace of the milk teeth of all the children in the family. It was a disquieting necklace: brownly mottled in places, never quite free of the suggestion of dental caries and tiny flecks of dried blood.
Milk teeth or no, Cousin Lily was an excellent and unobtrusive housekeeper, keeping Uncle Max’s clothes in order, supervising the maids. And my Uncle Max, now a vigorous man in his early forties, thus had a beautifully run home, a prosperous business, an undemanding wife…
Had, in short, everything.
Well, nearly everything. For to tell the truth, Aunt Helene was a trifle too undemanding. Probably it was quite simply a matter of her bulk. One imagines her, in the matter of sex, prepared in every way to do her duty but feeling, perhaps, that it was all happening a long way off; possibly even to someone else.
If Freud had by now stopped bowling his hoop along the Pfeffer Gasse, he could not have got much further than examining his incipient moustache in the bedroom of his parents’ house. It was therefore in the conventions of his own day that Uncle Max solved this most conventional of problems.
He took a mistress.
In the old Habsburg Empire there was a precedent for everything. From Bohemia one got the best cooks, the finest glass. From Hungary one imported horses and violin players for the Philharmonic.
But for a mistress… somehow, for a mistress you couldn’t do better than a real, a proper ‘eclit’ Viennese.
My Uncle Max, searching the chorus at the Folk Opera, the little dressmakers scuttling by with cardboard boxes, found what he was looking for at last, in a glove shop in the Karntner Strasse.
Susie Siebermann was everything a mistress should be: golden-haired, blue-eyed and not too young. Uncle Max, detecting an unexpected rip in his grey kid gloves, had been despatched by Tante Helene to replace them before an important dinner. Susie did nothing except sell him another pair, but it was enough.
He offered her a villa in the Vienna Woods, but she was modest and sensible and took instead a small apartment in the unfashionable district beside the Danube Canal. This she furnished simply, in the old Biedemeyer style, with painted furniture, white-looped curtains and geraniums in pots — for there was nothing of the courtesan in Susie, who recalled a simpler, more pastoral kind of mistress: Giselle in her forest hut waiting for Prince Albrecht: Gretchen at her spinning-wheel… Only one object linked Susie’s love nest with the grand villa in Hitzing: a large, mildly malodorous stuffed squirrel (a present from an anonymous admirer) on which Uncle Max, when he came to visit, hung his hat.
The apartment faced inwards, towards a cobbled courtyard with an old pear tree in the centre, and when the shutters were closed (and of course they always were closed when Uncle Max was there) the call of the street sellers, the carpet-beating, the sound of tug-boats hooting up the Danube, came as the gentlest, the most undisturbing counterpoint to their secret and illicit love.
And indeed their love was secret. Very secret. It had to be. Let no one imagine that the Vienna of those days was a permissive ‘oh-la-la’ sort of place. In the Imperial Hofburg, sixty-seven or so moribund Archduchesses tottered about on Spanish heels, sniffing out imperceptible breaches of etiquette. Vast armies of monumentally incompetent civil servants nevertheless managed to keep tabs on the bourgeoisie. No, in the Vienna of my Uncle Max’s youth, a prosperous solicitor who wanted to stay that way did not exhibit his mistress in public.
And then, of course, there was Helene. Helene who, in one doom-filled moment, had been thrown so tragically from her steel cable above the underwater bottom of the Rhine and who must never, never be hurt again.
And she was not. My Uncle Max and his Susie were incredibly careful. He never took a. fiacre to the apartment but walked, his hat over his eyes, or took a horse-bus two stops further before doubling most cunningly back. To the concierge he was Herr Finkelstein from Linz, and it was as Herr Finkelstein that Susie addressed him when she opened the door, even if the corridor was entirely empty. Nor did he ever, however much he might be tempted, visit Susie more than twice a week: on Tuesday evening when Helene held a card party, and on Saturday afternoon when she visited her relations.
So much is fact. What happened next — how the change in their relationship came about — no one will ever know for certain.
For my part, I think it happened very slowly. I think for days and weeks and months my Uncle Max came and hung his hat on the stuffed squirrel and sat politely, first in Susie’s kitchen drinking coffee, because after all it was a business arrangement and neither of them was all that young. And then one day, perhaps, he put down his coffee cup too quickly, staining the cloth, and when Susie rose to dab at it he caught her and held her and began then and there to pull the hairpins from her piled-up golden hair. I think the day came when, returning to his office after lunch, he took a long and pointless detour past the glove shop in the Karntner Strasse — not to see her, of course, or wave to her through the glass — just to know that she was there.
He was not a very imaginative man. Susie was even a little stupid. There cannot, on the surface, have been much spiritual content in their love. He called her his ‘Putzchen’’, his ‘Mauslein’, she, no doubt, giggled and squealed during moments when exaltation would have been more proper.
And yet, as he walked through the dusk towards his abode of shame and found the May-green lime trees limned in lamplight almost too beautiful to be endured, he must have begun to suspect that he was getting more than he was paying for. Until one day, lying behind closed shutters in his Susie’s arms, listening to the soft cooing of the pigeons on the roof, it must have dawned on my modest, unassuming Uncle Max that he had found what half the world was looking for in vain: a Great Love.
With this realisation came sudden black despair. What was he doing to her, his Susie, his treasure? Hiding her away behind closed shutters and barred doors! What was he doing to himself? Tearing himself from her for days at a time, confining his passion to the inhuman restraints of the calendar! How bitter it all was, how cruel!