Dear André Part 2

On the natural history of an event

The composer Karel Szymanowski, who was also a patient of André Glaz

This is the second part of a piece I posted several days ago about André Glaz, the psychoanalyst who, in the 1960s, treated various members of my family, including me. He had sex or tried to have sex with many of his female patients, including young children and including me. By sharing the narrative, I took you into my trust, and you earned it. Readers so far have been generous and curious, and I’m delighted. I’m looking back at a time that made me, in so far as any one thing makes any of us. To read PART ONE, please click here: lauriestone.substack.com/p/dear-andre

Part Two

A few years ago, I received an email from a psychologist who’d read a piece about André I’d published in a literary magazine. The psychologist is the person André began having sex with when she was four. In the subject line of her email was the word, “Glaz.” She wrote, “I came upon the essay where you wrote about having been abused by Glaz. Would you ever want to discuss it with someone who has a similar family and personal history?” I was interested in her use of the word abused. Child sexual abuse became a crime in the US in 1974, four years after André died. I don’t use the word abuse to describe what happened to me, partly because the word abuse ends a story the way murder ends a life. The psychologist wrote, “There were lots of us. At one point my mother knew a handful of women who had been abused by Glaz—they were in a group together I think.”

I had one conversation with this woman on the phone. I think I disappointed her. Maybe because I wanted to learn about André’s life. I asked if I could speak to her father, who, at the time, was in his nineties. She didn’t want me to speak to her father because mention of André’s name in her parents’ house caused her mother great pain. She said André had promised to transfer his practice to her father. He was supposed to inherit André’s patients and continue André’s mission, which was to separate patients from mothers who controlled them. There was also no other kind of mother.

My sister says André helped her stand up to our mother, Toby. He also convinced Toby to sever ties with her own mother, saying our grandmother was conniving. My mother didn’t speak to her mother for the last years of my grandmother’s life. My grandmother would call me, pleading with me to give her Toby’s phone number. I’d urge my mother to call my grandmother, and my mother would curse me in Yiddish. She came to regret not seeing or speaking to her mother. She regretted it until the day she, herself, died at age ninety-three. The psychologist André touched when she was four told me that her father still displays André’s picture in his office. 

To enter André’s world, all I had to do was ask. Before I met him, I imagined him as someone kind and generous, who would teach me about life. Do you know how, when you meet certain people, you feel an immediate desire to be close to them and speak to them? I felt the opposite as soon as I met André, and I didn’t know what to do with my disappointment. He was aloof and bored in my sessions. I had nothing to say that could have interested such a person. I pretended to like him.

It was not my first lie to myself, and as I write this sentence, I’m not sure what I’m saying. I’m trying to enter the feeling state of this young girl. I’d ride the train by myself from Long Beach to New York. Did I then take a bus up Madison Avenue to his office on 96^th Street? I’d wait for my appointments in a burger joint on his block. This part I liked, the traveling and watching adults eat hamburgers. The smell of charred meat, all this made me feel grown up, alone with a purpose, watching people exchange meaningful looks across small tables, hearing the chirping hum of life. I had slipped the knot of connection. No one knew where I was. Try to imagine the freedom of a world without cell phones. There was a dividend of wildness and independence in maintaining the lie of liking André. It was not my first calculation. As I float along, I’m playing the voiceover of a movie in my head.

My father Murray and sister Ellen at her wedding in 1962.

My sister lived seven years longer than André lived. I remember my mother calling me to tell me he’d died. She was crying and smoking. During her treatment, he’d encouraged her to travel to Europe and take classes at the New School. She began to read books, and her life dramatically improved. She lost weight and bought the kind of stylish clothes from Bergdorf’s my aunt wore. The woman André had touched when she was four, the woman who is now a psychologist, said that after André died her father went to his office to report the news to André’s patients. The practice must have dissolved. André died in 1969 at the age of seventy.

On her bed, my sister says, “Mom had gotten full of herself with all the books she was reading and the classes she was taking. One day we were in Macy’s. I got on an up escalator, and I thought she was behind me, but she was at the bottom, and we were shouting as we moved away from each other in different directions. She said, ‘I want to sit on a park bench talking to Sartre’. I said, ‘Why would Sartre want to talk to you? You can’t make a decision. Should I buy a sock? Should I sell a stock?’” Mom said, ‘That’s a good question’.” I say to my sister, “When I’m out walking, I think of calling Mom. It’s like a phantom limb. If I called her, she’d say, ‘Do you think I’m smart’? I’d say, ‘Yes’. She’d say, ‘But do you don’t really think so’?” When my sister dies, this conversation dies. My family dies.

André published two essays about Shakespeare in the psychoanalytic journal American Imago. The journal continues to promote him on Google. I wonder if they know about his life. How many psychoanalysts have had sex with children? It is currently a crime in a number of US states for analysts to sleep with patients of any age. I’m not in favor of criminalizing sexual behavior between consenting adults in any context.

One of the essays André wrote is called “Hamlet, Or the Tragedy of Shakespeare” (1961). The other essay is called “Iago or Moral Sadism” (1962). In this essay, André contends at length that Desdemona is really a “whore.” One time he misspells it “wore.” Do you understand how this fucks with Shakespeare’s understanding of what he’s writing in the play? Do you see it makes Iago right in his reports to Othello, instead of a force of spite without a knowable cause?

André quotes Goethe in German, Dante in Italian, Dostoevsky in Russian. He makes references in French. Recently, I reread the essay, and a sentence about Iago jumped out at me: “He sees in his victims their motives and acts on them.” André seems to be describing himself. He gave me copies of his essays at the time they were published, and I have kept them. He gave me books, among them The Frog Pond, an autobiographical novel by Joyce MacIver, a pseudonym. The novel is about a woman who’s attracted to violent, sadistic men. Some of the men are her analysts. I remember reading the book as a child and becoming turned on. It was amazing. It was fabulous that words, alone, could have their way with your body. I’m still amazed.

My cousin says that André earned his medical degree in France. His first name is Abraham. He signed his work A. André Glaz. Over the years, I’ve learned a few other facts about him, including two encounters he had with celebrated figures. These anecdotes reflect what? That André had ambition and a great capacity to seduce people into trusting him? Before coming to the States, he hastened the death from TB of the throat of the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski when they both lived in Paris and Szymanowski consulted André in 1936 and 1937.

Accounts of André’s malpractice in this case are readily available. According to Michal Kondracki and Stephen Downes, the composer came to André wracked with fever and able only painfully to sip small amounts of liquid food. Nonetheless, André “assured him of the good state of his health.” Writing in The Szymanowski Companion (Routledge 2016), Downes reports André convinced Szymanowski that “a climate change would cure him, installed him in a hotel in Grasse in southern France instead of in a sanatorium (where he would have received hands-on care), and isolated him from other specialists. Szymanowski suffered alone for months, finally dying on March 29, 1937.”

Today I listened to recordings of Szymanowski’s “Metopes, Op 29,” a trio of brilliantly modernist piano pieces played by Sviatoslav Richter. It must have flattered André to gain the trust of someone so talented and important. Did André imagine that TB was an issue of mind over matter? Why did Szymanowski listen to him? I can hear the confidence in André’s voice: Ah, Karol, there is nothing to worry about, you will be fine, go to Grasse and relax. Just breathe.

The other day I received an email from a man named Sergey Durasov, a Russian man living in Moscow, who is translating some works of Simone Weil. He came upon a memoir story of mine that mentions André, and he wondered if I knew the year of André’s death. He wrote: “In one of her Notebooks of 1942, Simone twice mentions Dr. André Glaz, with whom you had a rather dramatic acquaintance many years later. As far as I could understand, her father, Dr. Bernard Weil, might have known him in Paris.” Sergey could not find any biographical notes on André and thought he might have had “some importance for Simone.” I forwarded this email to my cousin, who wrote back to Sergey, “André Glaz always said that he was born in and came from Alsace-Lorraine. Otherwise my gut tells me that there was some kind of relationship between Glaz and the Weil family.” Sergey wrote to my cousin and to me: “Certainly, Dr. Glaz or his parents might have lived in Alsace-Lorraine, and then moved to Paris, but originally Glaz is a name known in Bielorussia and belongs to some families of Bielorussian and Polish Jews. In addition, I know that in New York the Weils lived down the street from Dr. Glaz, that is Riverside Drive. The Weils resided at 549 and Dr. Glaz at 310.”  

Richard has asked me several times why, at seventeen, I returned to André. I don’t remember how the first treatment ended. Did I quit him after the weekend at his country house, or did he send me away? Would he have sacrificed the money? Doubtful. The other day I had this thought: I went back to André because I wanted him to see what I was becoming. By then, my parents had moved from Long Beach to Manhattan, and I would walk to the Village from our apartment in Murray Hill. I would slip into movie theaters and art galleries. I was becoming the girl in the movie voiceover I wanted to be, and I looked good. I’d met an older woman who gave me beautiful clothes she could no longer wear. I wore them in New York. No one had clothes like these.

When I returned to treatment with André, we didn’t speak about what happened on his bed. Not a word about it ever. I’m saying that the thing that determined my life was erased in a way. The thing that determined my life and also didn’t determine my life because my life is not the kind of life one thing can determine. Maybe nobody’s life is. The erasure of the time I spent with André on his bed is the same erasure in society of all real limits on the freedom of female humans.

During my sessions, André could not sit still. He was up and back to the kitchen, carrying plates of diet food: hearts of palm and celery, crunching away. I didn’t want to talk to him. Every time I thought about it, I felt a knot of no, and I thought, that’s where the party is. This is not a metaphor. It is also a metaphor. He gave parties for his patients. One night at home with my parents, I was in bed with a boy, and my parents woke up and knocked on the door. They told the boy to leave, and I followed him onto the street. The boy and I walked up to André’s place from 34^th Street, where I lived. I didn’t call André to say I was coming. I wanted him to help me the way he’d helped my sister. He opened the door, wearing a silk bathrobe. The belt was hanging by his sides. There were tassels at the end. His hair was messy. He said, “Don’t ever do this again, come here unannounced.” This was the last time I saw him.

Before my sister died, she wrote letters to the people she loved. They were neatly stacked in a drawer beside her bed. She said, “I became obsessed with writing the letters. It was focusing to think about my relationship with each person.” She looked off at a small statue of a horse that had sat in the living room of our parents. She said, “When you read your letter, promise me you won’t correct the spelling and grammar.” I said, “I’m a lousy speller.” She said, “The grammar. An ‘ly’ will be missing.” I said, “I promise.” I said, “I would like the horse.” She said, “Tell my daughter. She will take everything that’s not nailed down.” I said, “I would appreciate it if you would let her know.”

My sister was nearly six when I was born. She would drink my bottles, and I would cry for food. She says, “I can only be my real self with you.” I said, “Keep talking. You’re still here.” She said, “Except I can’t move.” She asked me not to leave her. I fed her. I cleaned her. I gave her her medications.

After she died, I met my cousin at a restaurant on the Upper East Side, near where she lives. She has her mother’s shiny, thick hair. We hold each other. I sit across from her and look at her face. She wears a ring with a diamond on her right hand and a series of thin gold bands on her left hand. I want to think they belonged to her mother and sister. We are the last members of our families, and neither of us had a child.

We talk about the night I spent in André’s house. She says, “There was another bed in the screened porch. That’s where he slept after he left you. I can see it.” I remember the damp, cold smell of the cotton throw on his bed. We laugh about the meaty smell of his cigars and the way it lingered in his hair and clothes. Her laugh is throaty. She orders beer. I have a cocktail. We spread whipped butter on crusty rolls.

We spend four hours together, and afterward, walking from the restaurant, she says, “How come we have been apart all this time?” We have not seen each other in fifty-five years. I say, “When your father died, my father stepped in to help your mother with the fur business, but she didn’t want his help, and it hurt him.” My cousin says, “That sounds like my mother.” She remembers my father walking her down the aisle when she got married. She remembers loving him. My sister wanted to hug my cousin when she thought they might meet. I wanted to find out about André, but now I only want to hug her, too. I want to hug her as I write this.

In the restaurant, she says our grandfather had nine children. Only five grew to adulthood, including our fathers. She says her mother was in love with André and wanted to marry him. That beautiful woman was in love with André! Well, for fuck’s sake. My cousin says, “He would never have married her. She didn’t have any money.”

She says, “André hated my father and armed us against him.” When she was eleven, her mother sent her to school in Switzerland, where she was unhappy. After that, her mother sent her to Paris to be with André. She remembers walking with him along the Champs Elysee from L’Etoile to the Eiffel Tower. She was so frightened, she peeled off the polish on her nails. André looked down at her and said, “I guess you’ll need a manicure.” She sips her beer and says, “He never came inside me. He didn’t want pregnancies or evidence.” She leans back. “He would come in my mouth.”

Here are other some other things she told me about André. He came to the US from Europe in 1942, with financial aid from American Jews or American psychoanalysts. He arranged marriages and divorces. He died of prostate cancer he would not have treated because he feared losing his erections.

I say, “Your mother pimped you out to gain favor with André. She pimped out your sister, and she pimped out me.” My cousin nods. I say, “As a kid, I couldn’t understand why she let it happen.” My cousin takes a deep breath and says, “You were strong.” I say, “I didn’t stand up to him directly.” She says, “You got him to stop. No one got him to stop.” I say, “He aroused me.” She says, “He aroused everyone.” I say, “How did he convince so many people?” She says, “He made you feel you had been singled out for the honor of being with him.”

When my sister traveled with André, he gave her a pin made of gold and jade. When she was dying, she remembered the little box but not what had happened to the pin. On the last morning of her life, she says, “When I wrote the letters, maybe I was trying to prove I was as smart as you.” I say, “You are.” She closes her eyes and shakes her head no. “Everyone could see it. All my life.” It’s the last thing she says. We hold hands. I smooth her brows. I love her body as it grows mottled from lack of circulation and her face becomes gray. I miss her all the time. Who knew?

I like seeing her through the scrim of childhood infatuation, looking up to her, wanting to be her, wanting to know the everything she knows. I like seeing André through the scrim of childhood incomprehension. These are times of hope. After my sister died, for a while all other people looked the same to me, the way a traveler from outer space would see human beings.

Today I brushed the cats I am minding and formed a gray fur mouse out of their hair. I took a picture of the mouse and wanted to send it to my sister. Then I remembered she was dead.

Biz

To paid subscribers, I send you a huge thanks! You are transforming my writing life and making sure I never have a paywall.

But honestly, to keep going, more loving readers need to upgrade to a paid subscription. Writing the stack is a full time job. If you’ve been enjoying the writing for a while, maybe this is a time you can make a contribution.

Paid subscribers are invited at no additional cost to monthly Zoom conversations on writing craft. For example, the way today’s piece has been written and rewritten over the course of 64 years. Why are some pieces always there and always changing? Paid subscribers are welcome to send ahead questions about their own projects, and paid subscribers gain access to the full archive of 160 literary pieces.

You can subscribe for as little as a month. Once you begin a paid subscription, you can unsubscribe at any time, and I will understand and thank you. I set the prices very low with the hope that a collective of readers, paying small amounts, is more encouraging to us all than seeking donors. Anyway, I don't have donors.

Right now, new subscribers can upgrade to a paid subscription at a monthly rate that's less than a cup of coffee, and I will keep you caffeinated every day of the month. With a subscription-based business, you have to get new people to step in because there is always a churn of supporters leaving. If you can, please upgrade to a paid subscription here. xxL

Zoom conversations.

The next Zoom conversation on writing craft and on the subject matter of the stack posts is on SATURDAY May 25 from 3 to 4pm EST. 

The Zooms are joyous gatherings FOR ALL PAID SUBSCRIBERS, where you can interact with other writers and readers, and where, ahead of time, you are invited to send questions about your own writing projects. Very tender and smart people show up. I can't believe the number of smarty-pants people who come. To RSVP and receive a link close to the event, please send me an email at: lauriestone@substack.com. Some emails go astray, so please be sure I have confirmed you on the list. If not, I haven’t received your RSVP, so please send me a message here or on FB messenger.

Working together one-on-one.

To work with me on a one-to-one basis, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com. The first conversation IS FREE to establish whether we are a good fit and I can be of use to your work.

Prompty People

A relationship that represents a shadow life.

I don’t know how to get there.

The dream had a taste.

A mustache you recall.

The prompts are for your pleasure and to use for your writes. Please don't post your experiments in the comments section below, but feel free to post them in your own "Notes" feed on Substack, where people can read them and leave comments. Enjoy!

Baby owls because why not.

There are three links at the bottom of every post: “like,” “share,” and “comment.” Your responses attract new readers, and I love your comments about the form and content of the posts. Please tell a friend to check out the stack. Huge thanks and happy spring. xxL