The Ninth Street Center Ninth Street Center Journal

The Bridge [1949]
by Paul Rosenfels

She had to fight the battle of the bridge four times a week, because the bridge lay across her path into town where she saw her psychoanalyst, and she was deathly afraid of it. The fear of losing the battle was always with her but the hope of victory, which is the right of any soldier going into battle, was denied her.

She had crossed the bridge many times now, but this fact spared her nothing for the next time. It was an entirely irrational fear, of course. It was a fear of fear itself, a protective anguish lest the mounting tension which was always there as she started out over the ribbon across the water should go rising without end; an eventuality which she must prevent with every resource at her command.

But it was not an enemy she could see, nor could she know what her resources were. It was strictly a matter of expediency. She clutched at anything which brought a second's peace. Anything else, which brought tension like the fluttering of a bird's wing just out of sight, she discarded instantly. On her walk across the bridge she was like a streamlined thing, the product of an engineer's drafting board, devoted to the single purpose. Her weapons were only little bits of things, fragments of thought, a tensing of a muscle here, the hurrying of the pace there, or a slowing down, or a looking in a different direction, or scores of other items of experience, summoned for the uses of the moment.

This fear was a kind of parasitic companion, a hated burden, but of her flesh and blood. She longed to see it as a separate thing with a name of its own against which she could act. Now there was new hope for the satisfaction of this longing. When she thought of it, her heart took great leaps, and a kind of singing joy, tinged with some feeling of its being too much to bear, took possession of her. Now she had an ally, a sort of specialist in naming things that defied materialization, her psychoanalyst, Dr. Melville Blake.

She would have had nothing to do with her enemy, the bridge, if it were not for Dr. Blake. "Mrs. Thomas," he would say -- it was understood he would not call her Mary, yet the formality was always strange -- "it's a matter of reality. You live on the west side of the river, and my office is on the east." A demand from him in the name of reality was a plucked string whose resonance entered her whole being and governed the movement of her feet.

Dr. Blake was ordinarily the soul of objectivity; at the same time, a generosity of feeling cast a haze of warmth over his youthful, attractive face, encircling her in an aura of its own. This warmth had a paradoxical existence, however, for if she came too close it faded, and if she drew away it blazed. This forced her to look on the warmth as an independent thing, with a life of its own, and then the handsome face seemed to draw her attention as if the rest of him were but a shadow, enslaved to the task of presenting his features to the world. Lying on the analytic couch where she could not see his face relieved this; she could not tell what it did for him.

On rare occasions, however, both objectivity and generosity of feeling were submerged by a moment of earnestness which carried all before it, arousing in her a glorious feeling of his genuineness. She learned that once passed such moments left no mark behind, but she did not forget them.

Of one thing she could be sure, that her relationship with him was entirely unique in her experience; on this fact rested her hopes for freedom from the fear. It was for this uniqueness that she paid such a big fee four times a week, money which left her and Jim, her husband, on the edge of insolvency.

Jim was very good about the money but some defect in his attitude toward the treatment had become apparent. He just didn't see it in the big way that she and Dr. Blake did. Take his attitude toward the bridge, for example. Jim didn't accept the necessity of the situation. He wanted her to have an early or late appointment so that he could take her across the bridge himself. When Jim was beside her, the fear was at a distance, and although it still followed along, it was banished to an orbit of its own.

Jim's offer had filled many hours on the analytic couch. Her eager wish to do as Jim suggested became a thing to be considered, weighed, and probed. At first Dr. Blake had only commented, in his most dispassionate way, that he had no early or late hours available. Then, as the weeks went by, and she struggled for this release with mounting insistence, he had, step by step, used every feeling and thought of hers to build a whole new picture of her personality, often without apparent relationship to the topic of discussion, almost miraculously, as if on one's path to the south there had suddenly emerged a tremendous view to the north, revealing the true destination.

She now knew that Jim was putting her in the position of a child, psychologically speaking, instead of a wife. This played into her deep unconscious longings to be taken care of -- oral desires, Dr. Blake called them. It all came of Jim's old striving to take his father's place as a boy, which had to fail, of course, and was replaced by an exaggerated loyalty and deference toward his parent. Jim really wanted his younger sister's place, so that he could be in the dependent and protected position. So now he treated her like the younger sister that he wanted to be himself. Of course, this was all unconscious and no one could ever get the whole story clear in one moment of thinking, no matter how inspired, because every trail in the forest of psychological interpretation led down some other trail without discernible end; interpretations had their own interpretations, so to speak.

When she explained to Jim, as best she could, the new insights she had into their relationship, he listened attentively enough and even asked intelligent questions about it; but it was like pouring water into a sieve as far as the next day was concerned. Instead of being proud of her courage at the bridge he would renew his suggestion of help, an attitude which set one part of her against the other and sent a cresting wave of anger spilling over between them, shocking them both and leaving her with an unwelcome vulnerable feeling.

Perhaps she made too much of little troubles with Jim these days. She tried to be more philosophical about the daily problems, striving to grasp and maintain a proper sense of proportion. Yet she had to keep her morale up, because she knew that if she lost her faith in the emergence of a new world for her and Jim she would never be able to cross the bridge again; without this vivid sense of a promised land, never yet inhabited or even imagined in any detail, she would find herself alone in a great level place, unmarked by anything.

She did what she had to, and pressed her insistence on the big viewpoint of their relationship. There were optimistic glowing moments when she was sure everything would be different now, and empty black ones when she could see that nothing had changed at all.

Her morale was already low the week Jim decided to go on a fishing trip, organized on the spur of the moment by three of them because all of the circumstances turned out to be just right.

"I'd really only be gone one full day," he explained. "We'd leave Wednesday early and be back Friday night. And it wouldn't cost much money."

To stay alone this length of time was a major task for her under the best circumstances; this week it seemed impossible. The problem of paying for the analysis had made one of its periodic appearances without yielding in any way to new efforts at solution. Her hourly fee was high, but no higher than among other men of Dr. Blake's eminence and training. But it did add up to a very large bill at the end of the month, considering that she had so many interviews. She felt she could not do with less, and Dr. Blake agreed with her. She wanted her fee reduced, but when he pointed out the psychological meanings of this request, as he always did, she was left with a humiliated and defeated feeling. There was no doubt of it, the fee would not be reduced. When you looked at it the right way, the fee was really a staunch protecting barrier against a large number of floating fragments of inappropriate self-indulgent impulses. It was a badge of objectivity to be worn with appreciation by all concerned. That night they had revised their budget downward again; making it work would be another thing.

Her tension had been rising ever since; and now Jim was to be away three whole days. She knew that if she insisted he would not go on the fishing trip; this was a step she could not take. Very well, then, she would see it through, step by step, as she had done so many times in so many situations. At first she tried to fortify herself by thinking of the new things she had learned about herself in the analysis. She remembered her jealousy of her older sister, especially in that scene in her mother's bedroom when she was ten years old, with her sister dressed in a beautiful party dress, ready to go out for the evening, a scene which she and Dr. Blake had recreated so many times from her dreams and thoughts. She tried to find again the richness of meaning, the promise of true understanding, which she had often won in the aura of Dr. Blake's presence, confined to meetings in his office of course. What she got instead was a frightening rush of insecurity; clearly, she was on the wrong path.

The path she found, the one that worked, was an ancient one, well worn with use. It drew her feet, but she scarcely recognized it as a path, and she certainly had no name for it.

There is a process of trial and error, implanted by nature, which enables living things to protect themselves from too long an exposure to the noxious. An animal may go into a dangerous place in order to seek a much desired reward; it goes with its body supercharged with energy for sudden responses, on an emergency basis. Too long an exposure can destroy the animal, by exhaustion. An animal which never exposes itself to danger must undergo a withering of its needs; if it exposes itself too much, the reward can never be enough. This inner tension is close to pain and flows over into pain, and without this pain, which is the warning of heightening danger, the animal becomes bold without reason and is destroyed; without courage to act for goals in spite of emerging pain, the animal becomes timid and pays the penalty in impoverishment, which also kills.

If a man is to find new satisfactions, he must endure tension, and if a man is to endure tension he must feel faith in his own goals. When the pain becomes too great, he must, in a sense, become physician to himself, which he does by turning his course. The way he takes this inevitable step is the measure of his manhood. A man's character rests on the purity of his ideals, and then -- at what time, in what place, and by what means does he lay them aside?

Mary Thomas forgot her goals; she became the welcome prisoner of the advancing day. She found her way, testing each step by the lightening of the burden that went with it; the clock on the mantle, the drawer full of clothes, the kitchen stove, the rustling leaves outside the window, and the pattern of the shining sun throughout the apartment came out to meet her as she advanced. The day and what belonged to it expanded till no space remained unfilled. Spontaneity returned to her, protected by an outer ring of iron discipline, excluding any experience that did not carry the promise of fulfillment, openly shown, guilelessly presented in both hands.

When the time for Jim's departure came she knew her battle was won; he was enthusiastically ready to start off, and she was actually happy, too.

She counted heavily on the companionship of her new neighbor, Agnes, to pass the three days before her. In fact, she and Agnes had planned so much to do together that she wondered if she had allowed enough time to catch up on certain long neglected housekeeping tasks at home. This morning she was going with Agnes and Bobby, Agnes' two year old son, to the zoo. They would have lunch there, and, this afternoon, she would help Agnes look for wallpaper for her living room. Agnes was a very energetic person, always ready to be on the move. She responded without reservation when Mary suggested any course of action. Of course, Mary sensed Agnes' needs with great discernment; it had not taken them long to learn they could trust each other.

Thursday noon she allowed herself the luxury of becoming aware that she was half way through her three day period; this quickly proved to be a mistake, for a sudden image of the bridge froze her where she stood. She went to her hour in the afternoon, and the crossing had never been worse; she arrived at Dr. Blake's office exhausted and beaten. She was distantly aware that Dr. Blake would describe her state as one of "resistance"; all she knew was that she had to get through the hour and back home with a minimum of feeling about anything at all.

She arrived home without much change in her exhausted state; it was about time for Bobby's nap to be over and she went toward the window to see if she could see Agnes in her apartment, at right angles to her own in a corner of the court. She always avoided getting close to the windows; they lived on the third floor. It had been such a desirable apartment -- an old building, but spacious and inexpensive -- they could not turn it down, but the height was hard on her. The window closest to Agnes' apartment was especially difficult, since there was a fire escape platform there which ran around to Agnes' place, too. Both Agnes and Jim had used it for quick passage; when this happened she would draw back still further from the window. Near the center of this platform was an ugly hole which gave opening to a ladder to the second floor.

She did not see Agnes but she did see Bobby, and she saw something else -- the window was open, a thing she heartily disapproved of, since Bobby was into everything at his age. She drew back; she did not want to draw Bobby's attention in the direction of the window. She went to the phone and called Agnes; after many rings it suddenly became a strong likelihood that Agnes was not in the apartment. That was like Agnes; she felt free to step out of the apartment when Bobby was asleep. Mary turned back to the window, and there, in her shocked gaze, was Bobby on the fire escape.

Her shaking hands flung the window up; an agonized shout, "Agnes!" bound every muscle of her body to its effort. From the moment she had raised the window she had ceased to count on help; and no help came. A great whimper of fear sounded in her ears; she was surprised to know it came from her. She knew she was going out on the fire escape. She had no confidence in Bobby's safety otherwise. He had so little feeling for danger; that was the way Agnes wanted it.

She made a sort of union with the iron bars. Her body was pressed against the hard resistant ribs of the platform and she inched along with a crawling motion. She felt each one as if to greet it as she reached it and to say goodbye as she relinquished it behind. It was a world of ordered iron; her whole being responded to each touch of its surface, conveying, of itself, its utter immutability -- iron, the chosen metal of man, the builder.

A little later she was back in her apartment, and she had Bobby with her. He had finally become frightened in response to her tense actions, and she set about to check his tears. Then they went out in front to wait for Agnes.

The rest of the day held no problems for her. She felt a deep contentment. Little things presented themselves to be enjoyed, but the outer ring of iron discipline was gone. She had no thought for tomorrow, because no such thoughts came to her.

She awoke Friday morning to the same state of feeling. She took care of Bobby while Agnes went to have her hair done and then set out for her psychoanalytic hour. Something she did not try to name had reached out from an unseen place and set a seal upon her mood. It was as if she were in a happy haze. As she turned a corner, she stopped short, suddenly immobile. She had forgotten the bridge! It was there, before her, now.

The cold rage that came rushing through her extinguished all fear, but she was not aware of this. All she knew was that she turned her back and walked away. And then it came to her, as to one who takes the obvious for granted, that she would never cross the bridge alone again; never, in any circumstances she could conceive; never, for any reason she could imagine.

She spent the hour walking; she did not question her decision. Dr. Blake will just have to understand it, she felt. When she thought of being in Dr. Blake's office under these altered circumstances, however, it did not fit; something was very wrong. So be it; she would quit the analysis. The brashness of this idea frightened her. She must talk it over with Jim first.

She was keyed up now to Jim's return, and she went home to wait for him, aimless in any other way. He came to her in the evening; she found out he'd had a wonderful time, and then she began to talk. Hours later, she was still talking. He had quickly appreciated her need and was listening, lounging on the bed.

She had never talked like this before. She felt in some way she couldn't stop. She was amazed at the flow of thoughts, each one seemingly complete, yet dragging the next into the open with an invisible connection, almost as if the process were out of control, yet with no control called for or needed. She did not realize it, but it was the first time in her adult life that she really sought to tell another person about herself without restraint of any kind. She was ignoring all principles and generalizations about her nature, attitudes which she had thought were the beating heart of her living self. This surge of freedom aroused a hunger with powers of its own; and so she talked without the possibility of doing otherwise.

She finished speaking in the small hours of the morning; and then Jim began to talk. He didn't hold anything back, either. Later on, she could not remember what she had talked about, and very little of what Jim said, but she did remember vividly when he told her how much he needed her, and she saw the tears in his eyes.

Thus they exposed themselves to each other with a daring they had forgotten was in them; and so it was, in this place, and at this time, that the kind of love they had promised each other at their wedding ceremony was born.

Jim had to go to work on Saturday because of his three day holiday, so Agnes went with Mary on her last trip to Dr. Blake's office. She asked to sit up for the interview. It felt so different with Agnes waiting downstairs to walk home with her. It was Dr. Blake's turn to feel anxiety now, but Mary was not really aware of this, so carefully did he pick a frigid path amidst the complexities around him. He told her that her decision was a "flight into health." Her first attempts to explore the meaning of this idea met a rush of formal and obscure language so inhospitable to her thinking that she wisely refrained from pursuing the matter. As they parted she longed to say something personal to him, to give recognition to all they had been through together, but she saw that he wanted each to play their assigned part true to the end, and she refrained out of deference for him.

The afternoon was filled with thoughts of her life with Jim. The daily substance of her marriage had faded out of focus during her analysis. Now her recurrent preoccupation with childhood events was gone, and, as she busied herself in the apartment, many objects brought memories of things they had experienced together.

It was later than she had realized and she went out to shop for Sunday. As she made her plans, the old dissatisfaction with her limited budget rose within her. Then she remembered, they had money now! Jim was a big breakfast eater, and especially Sunday morning. She would get a steak, the best quality, and a bottle of liqueur Scotch for Sunday afternoon. That was Jim's idea of real luxury.

She would not buy these valuable items in her local store. The steak must be government graded choice beef, and the Scotch must be the best, too. She turned her path; the store she wanted was across the bridge. She didn't pay too much attention to what she was doing; her warm anticipation of making her purchases was not destroyed by the hard moments of the crossing. When she entered the apartment bearing her packages Jim was already there.

-- reprinted from The Ninth Street Center Journal 4, Winter 1984