Free Epilogue by Anne Roiphe Page A

are as likely as good ones. In my imagination I had already begun a time when this stranger and I would go to the movies together and more. But in this case my imagination misled me. Little harm was done, little grief will be spent on the matter. It was not meant to be. Nevertheless for the next month I worried the matter. Was it my age, my conversation, my manner? Had my f lirtation skills grown rusty? Was I so used to being loved that I assumed the whole world would love me if I wished? And then that was that. Some weeks later I tell the story of the meeting with Dr. B. to an analyst friend of mine. She tells me that he had been brought up on charges before the medical society because he slept with a patient. This is not exactly akin to being an ax murderer but it repels and disgusts nevertheless. What luck he never called me back.

    • • •

    If I could keep my children from ever finding out that I had lifted my hand against myself, I would. They stand in my way.

    • • •

    H. believed what he believed. He did for his patients what he could. He knew that Freud, error-filled or not, had been among the first, artists aside, to explore the underground river of the human mind, where the unacceptable thought f loated and the less lovely, more feral creatures lurked on slimy rocks. Freud was the one who told us that we were far more than our conscious minds, our sweetest selves are but a sham.
    Which is how it happened that one morning I woke thinking of the ways that H. was less than perfect. We say only good things about the dead. A eulogy is a mud pie of compliments, of perhaps exaggerated compliments. A good eulogy makes the mourners feel uplifted. But eulogies do not serve as portraits of the dead. I need to be accurate.
    H. always frightened me while driving and we drove the highways almost every weekend out to the beach and back; a trip that would take a normal driver close to three hours was often for us less than two and that’s because H. liked to be the front car in the pack. That’s because he drove fast and moved incessantly from lane to lane and nothing I could say would stop him. I had long ago decided that I would die in a car accident with him one day and accepted wordlessly all the swooping and the veering and the close calls. Still it made me angry sitting next to him that he indulged his racing-car fantasy, his World War One pilot fantasy, in the car with me, with the innocent cat in the backseat in his box, and some time on this earth still ahead of us. Yes, he was right, he did not die in a car accident and he did not harm me. He had driven over sixty years and no

    one was ever injured (a few cars were scratched or bent). But as a driver, behind the wheel, he was unkind.
    He was not good at psychoanalytic politics and did not dodge and weave among the psychoanalytic entities that made careers for psychoanalysts. He did not follow any orthodox line altogether. He worked with infants, observing them with their mothers; he had original ideas and published original papers but he could not befriend those he did not like and he could not pretend to be accommo-dating. He was not. This is a virtue and a fault. He knew that about himself. He understood himself. It would have been better had he been a more worldly man. He would have enjoyed more of the honors his profession dispensed.
    He did not believe in interfering in his children’s lives. They have to make their own decisions, he would say again and again, which sounds virtuous but sometimes made him seem an absence when he should have been a presence and sometimes stemmed from a desire to avoid controversy. He slept soundly on nights that I tossed and turned waiting for a child to return home, waiting for news of one sort or another.
    Sometimes he was too silent. Sometimes when he was angry or upset he pulled into himself like a turtle and the shell was impenetrable. I had to wait, to coax him out, beg him to return. He would get angry while paying