• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I told her I was. “Well, then you just go up the street outside to Trinity Walk and take a left. Then at the top of the hill, take another left. And that’s Maresfield Gardens.”

The directions sounded quite simple, but I wrote them down anyway. After thanking her I made my way out to Finchley Road, a commercial street lined with shops and offices. Of course, it being Sunday, everything was closed, giving the area a deserted, melancholy feel. As I walked along Finchley Road, the only pedestrian on the abandoned street, I felt like a character in an Edward Hopper painting. The Sunday Blues, I called it, this sad feeling that sometimes came over me on the seventh day of the week. It could hit particularly hard if I was on the road, traveling alone.

In Paris I’d handled the problem by buying the London Sunday Times and reading it at the Flore over a long, hearty breakfast. I found that once I got through the morning the rest of the day seemed to fall into place. I hadn’t been able to find a London antidote to my Sunday Blues. Certainly there was nothing around here, I thought, looking along the deserted street.

But maybe that was appropriate. After all, I was on my way to pay my respects to Sigmund Freud who, were he alive and waiting for me, would expect me to examine such feelings from the depths of his famous couch. Freud was right, I thought, when he compared analysis to archaeology, implying that the task of both was to unearth a hidden past. I knew my Sunday Blues went back pretty far; as far back, actually, as I could remember.

The problem is that the past is never past; it lives on, directing us like an undercover traffic cop. Freud, of course, said it a little differently. But that’s what he meant.

I loved interpreting Freud. Turnabout is fair play, after all. And besides, it took my mind off the Sunday Blues.

After climbing the perilously steep Trinity Walk, I emerged on a quiet, leafy street. I walked a short distance, reading the house numbers until I came to number twenty. The house where Freud lived turned out to be quite elegant, a three-story brick dwelling surrounded by well-kept gardens and hedges. What struck me most, however, were its many windows. A fitting touch, I thought, for a man who spent his life looking through the windows of other people’s minds.

I walked inside, bought my ticket, and signed the guest book. Then, bypassing Freud’s re-created study, I headed right for the video room to see the films I’d been told about. They were said to include intimate scenes of Freud with his family, friends, and beloved dogs.

When I arrived in the darkened upstairs viewing room, the films were already flickering across the faces of the dozen or so viewers who’d gathered there. I took the first seat I could find, nodding to the woman who looked up as I sat down next to her.

At first I couldn’t make sense of what I saw on the screen. Freud was sitting in a beautiful garden, the center of attention at what seemed to be a party. As people looked on, a parade of dogs marched by the psychoanalyst. The dogs—chows, I thought, with perhaps one jumbo Pekingese thrown in—were dressed in collars with bows. Then a sweet, disembodied narrator’s voice explained this was a film of Freud’s birthday party, and that attached to the dogs’ collars were congratulatory messages.

“That’s Anna Freud’s voice,” whispered the woman next to me. “Freud’s daughter.” I nodded, remembering how it was my ex-husband’s desire to train with Anna Freud that had brought my family to London twenty-five years earlier.

The film continued with fascinating glimpses of Freud and his family in Paris and at their villa outside Vienna. Always the psychoanalyst was accompanied by his dogs, saying of one chow, “My Jofi is a delightful creature; recuperation after most of the human visitors.” Upon hearing this the woman next to me snickered loudly.

When the film was over, I turned to the woman and asked if I’d missed much by coming in late.

“Not much at all,” she said. Then in an amusing way she summed up the five