Abraham Rosenberg, Dr. Joan's father, was a Communist who lived and worked in Greenwich Village in the 1930s, during those exciting days of political idealism. He ran around with people from The New Republic and The New Masses. He knew Jack Reed, and a great number of other gifted intellectuals, writers, artists, and photographers.
But by profession he was a lawyer, as was his dear friend William Kunstler. Both were passionate political activists. Her mother, Isabella, was a violinist for The New York Philharmonic, which led to Joan's studying the cello when she was a girl. All her friends were Julliard students, and members of orchestras and chamber groups, but Joan always knew she and they were not alike. She had to force herself to do all that practice and study.
At Columbia University the department chairman told Joan she wouldn't be invited to pursue a Ph.D. in history. After reading her thesis he suggested she ought to abandon the field. It was poorly written, he said. Deficient in technique. Not the way history is written. She knew perfectly well how to write history that conformed to scholarly expectations, but at the time she didn't want to do it that way.
Perhaps she'd make a better psychotherapist than a historian, she thought, so she got her doctorate in Clinical Psychology from Temple. Five years ago she opened a private practice at her home in Villanova.
On the phone late one night Joan and I talked about "our ghosts." She said we both had plenty. Then she spoke of the importance of our creating a future that we're drawn to, rather than a past we're enslaved by. "We need to always do new things, things completely out of our experience," she said. "It's all about making changes. In that way we grow."
Later I left a message on her machine. "This is not Zen, as perhaps you'd prefer," I said, "but rather Emily Dickinson. Almost the same thing." I read aloud the short poem, "My River runs to thee." Nothing excessively romantic, just a sweet, slight little thing I thought might please her.
Surprise! She didn't like it.
"Why?" I asked.
"The reason is complicated," she replied.
"Tell me."
"OK. When I was a child my father often summoned me to his library and read me a poem he'd just composed. God, I felt terribly pressured. I knew I had to appear knowledgeable about metaphor, simile, rhyme scheme, structure, allusion, symbol, metaphysical implication, and all the rest. Because that's what he always expected of me. And so, yes, I developed a high degree of skill in this area. After a hell of a lot of effort I managed to appear to possess an interest that I simply did not have."
"That's sad."
"Isn't it? When my father presented me his poetry, I did exactly what he expected me to do. But what I actually felt was, Jesus Christ dad! Why don't you ever want to talk with me about ice skating or movies or something, you know? I want to be a ten-year-old little girl and talk to my daddy, I don't want to have to come up with convoluted literary exegesis to CONNECT with you!"
She paused.
"Yet at the same time I adored that my father was a poet, I loved that side of him."
She said all these emotionally charged thoughts came after she picked up my Emily Dickinson message "…in the middle of a day of a million things," and what immediately sprang to her mind was: My God, this man James is exactly like my father!
"So that's why I'm not sure I want poetry recited to me," she said. "I prefer to hear you tell me that you went running through the park, or had an interesting photo shoot, things like that."
Obviously I had erred still once again in a rather big way, and I felt the beginning of a major cold sweat. Christ, here we go again.
"So, should I continue my romantic pursuit of you, or desist?" I asked.
"I don't know," she said. "I'm just giving you information about me. Not to tell what you should or shouldn't do."
"Come on, Joan, tell me. What in hell do you want?"
A long silence.
"I've made a promise to myself to keep sharing information with you, putting it out, rather than going silent and not sharing it. Going silent means crawling into my hole, and I don't want to do that anymore."
"Then don't."
"You are not my father," she said.
"Of course I'm not."
"You obviously are whoever you are and I don't know who that is yet, so I need to find out. I mean, the 'you' that is separate from your past. Which by the way always floods right into the present. Like Elizabeth and God knows who else. So I can either share these things with you or not..."
And one more important thing that I should know about her, she said, is that she is not as intellectual as those magnificent framed diplomas on her office wall might suggest. She grew up having to appear to have the mental capacity and interests that were expected of her by her father and all the other gifted and talented people who drifted in and out of that family sphere. She became skilled at simulating interest in literature, philosophy, poetry, music.
"Yes, these things are of some interest to me, but not to the degree they imagined. Or as someone in the present might expect. Like, uh, you James."
Often she will appear to be interested during a conversation when in fact she is spacing out. She is so good at it. Just another way of distancing. She employs the tactic to mask who she really is.
"Why do you mask who you really are?" I asked.
"Because if anyone discovers the real truth about me," she replied softly, "they won't like me at all."
