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Issue 7: December 2006.
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Home > Issue 7: December 2006 > Non-Fiction

Late Afternoon Sun: A Memoir
by Karen Wunsch

Whenever I walk by the Museum of Natural History I think about Ellen Stern, a painter, and her psychoanalyst husband Herbert, who for maybe a year when I was eleven or twelve were friendly with my parents. My father was an analyst, too, and he and Herbert belonged to the prestigious New York Psychoanalytic, whose members were both Freudian therapists and MDs. This was in 1950s Manhattan. The Sterns seemed very different from my parents. Herbert was exuberantly handsome; my father remote and not handsome. Pretty in a slender, faded-redhead kind of way, Ellen wore stretched-out looking cashmere sweaters and amber jewelry that looked like it came from a museum gift shop. My overweight mother, on the other hand, was all heavy make-up, décolletage and polyester. Whereas she and my father didn’t get along, Herbert and his wife—whom he called Elena—were affectionate; indeed, he treated her as if (although I never would have put it this way) her crotch hair were a flaming red bush. And whereas my father was one of those doctrinaire Freudians who couldn’t turn off their analytic manner even at home (“Did something happen at school today that upset you?” he’d ask—upsetting me—when I’d complain about something like a stomachache), Herbert was so warm and charming that when I overheard that one of his patients was a beautiful movie star, it seemed only fitting.

Not that I was especially interested in my parents’ friends: my way of dealing with my mother, who clearly wished that I were more of a prom-queen type, and my detached father, was to be in a perpetual fog. When I wasn’t walking around in a daze, I was burying my head in a novel, beginning a new one as soon as I’d finished the old. So when the Sterns came up for a drink one night before some analytic dinner dance and Herbert presented me with a gardenia corsage, I wasn’t particularly flattered, or intrigued, and probably just absent-mindedly pinned it to my robe while I watched my Saturday night TV shows or went back to my book. And when a few weeks later Ellen asked me to model for her, I wasn’t particularly flattered, either. (Thin, with big dark eyes, I must have looked sad all the time because people were always telling me to Smile!) However, I welcomed any opportunity to get away from our apartment where we were all—I more vaguely and dazedly than my parents—so unhappy.

***

Several Friday afternoons a month I’d take the bus up Riverside Drive to the Sterns’ apartment. In contrast to our heavy drapes, wall-to-wall carpeting, and bookcases full of psychoanalytic treatises, there seemed to be a lot of wood, sunlight, and bookcases overflowing with poetry collections and novels. Their small daughter, Tamara, had bright red hair and was one of those children who are not only very attractive—rosebud mouth, long long lashes—but also look sexy. Even though she had a sitter she always seemed to be running around smeared with finger paint, laughing uproariously or screaming her head off. My mother would have gone crazy, but Ellen was pretty relaxed. I remember being a little surprised each week that the steady drip from the bathroom sink still hadn’t been fixed.

Ellen’s studio faced the drive. It was winter, and while she sketched I’d be by the huge window where I’d look out at the cars, busses and the river, the tiny people who all seemed to be bent over from the wind. We didn’t talk much. She mentioned she came from some place—like Santa Monica or Carmel or Sacramento—that I’d never heard of. Once she casually said something that showed she assumed I spent time in Greenwich Village, which I didn’t; she sparked my interest, but I didn’t start going to the Village for a couple of years. When our session was over, she’d occasionally offer me dried-out-looking herbal tea from some faded box. I tried it—once.

One day Herbert came home early. He picked up “Elena” and spun her around and around, nuzzled Tamara’s stomach, called me something like doll face. Maybe he put on a record—jazz, or something else my parents never played. Then he brought out an ice bucket, martini shaker, two fancy glasses, and I gathered that when Ellen and I were through, they’d have cocktails. Although I didn’t particularly want to stay, I dreaded going out into the fierce wind, and then there’d be the weekend when my parents, thrown together more than usual, wouldn’t get along.

One night when the Stern’s regular sitter couldn’t come, I babysat. Ellen was dressed up and looked pretty. It was raining or snowing, but Herbert didn’t want her to take off her high heels and wear boots. “I’ll carry you,” he kept begging, and although she hesitated, in the end she wouldn’t do it. When Herbert took me home a few hours later, our cab ride was the only time I ever spent alone with him. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I do remember that unlike my father’s other analyst friends who tended to make me feel that I was disturbed or, at best, neurotic, Herbert treated me like a normal girl who with any luck would one day find satisfying work, and love.

I may have modeled a few times after that, but then Ellen stopped calling me and I noticed that my parents stopped mentioning the Sterns. Somehow I knew that whatever problem there was, it wasn’t mine, but my parents evaded my tentative questions. A few months later, in a drugstore, I saw Ellen sitting alone at the lunch counter. Her back was to me and I didn’t go over. When I left I walked quickly past the window where I could see her out of the corner of my eye, holding a coffee cup as if warming her hands, and staring into space; maybe she had a cigarette in the ashtray and was in a smoky haze. I doubt my mother ever went out for lunch by herself, and although I would have been appalled by the idea that I was in any way influenced by my mother, seeing Ellen sitting there alone and looking dreamy was almost as shocking as if she’d been with another man.

***

To get away from our apartment, sometimes I’d go to the Museum of Natural History, where it always seemed to be late afternoon. I especially liked the dioramas, the gravely dignified animals posed in forests full of faded autumn leaves. And sometimes when one of the rooms would be briefly lit up by a few rays of sunshine, the amber light would make me think of Ellen Stern. And

Herbert. A few months after I’d stopped modeling I found out that he’d been having an affair with his beautiful actress patient. Of course he’d immediately referred her to another analyst, and had gone right back into therapy himself. But he didn’t give her up. Eventually he and Ellen divorced, he married his actress, Ellen went back to California, and then after a few years, Herbert and the beautiful actress divorced.

What interested me was the moment their affair began. I pictured the actress—one of those delicate-looking women who always seem to be wearing filmy dresses with spaghetti straps, and open-toed high heels. On the analytic couch that fateful day, she murmurs that she’s not feeling very well. And clearly she’s flushed, trembling. Struggling to maintain his analytic detachment, Herbert desperately thinks about Elena, Tamara, his analyst, his training analyst, his other patients, horrified colleagues, his parents; and, of course the beautiful actress—an affair with her analyst is the last thing she needs. But even though he’s an atheist, he prays for self-control and then practically sits on his hands. The dam bursts; he touches her hot forehead with his cool fingers, and then it’s all over. As I tried to imagine that moment when their passion smashed all the taboos, something woke up in me, too, and life began to seem more interesting. Indeed, by the time my parents divorced a few years later, I couldn’t wait to fall in love.