Mr. Brown Dr. Reiter

One of the terms my mother negotiated for the divorce from her first husband, my father, was that he pay for psychotherapy for my sister and me. My sister's doctor, Dr. Reiter had colorful toys in his office and waiting room in Hartsdale NY. He was an affable man with big hands and had a welcoming gap between his teeth. He wore thick brown corduroys and Wallabies. 

My mother and I would drop her off and visit Mrs Knopf a lady upstairs in the nearby apartment house. Mrs Knopf  was tall and looked like Virginia Wolff. She had a basket outside her pantry kitchen window full of birdseed and a zillion sparrows would fly over and feed at her window. If I remained still behind the glass I could be up close and watch the feeding sparrows. This fascinated me.

My Doctor was located in an apartment in White Plains NY He did not have toys in his office. He had New Yorker magazine and two chairs in front of a wooden folding screen that masked his living room. This was where he lived. There was a narrow hallway leading to the bathroom with a bookcase full of psychoanalytic books. Off the hallway was a bedroom and an office and a galley kitchen with swinging half doors like in an old Western. 

His name was Mr. Brown. He looked like Freud drawn by a New Yorker Cartoonist. He was very tall or maybe I was very short. I was 7 years old. He smoked cigars during the sessions. He had three clocks in this tiny room. I asked him why? He said so he wouldn't have to turn his head to see the time while his client was speaking.

 My sessions were weekly and often twice weekly and I was pulled out of school every Wednesday afternoon to go starting in 2nd grade. I had to go Saturday mornings when we missed a session. This went on for over 8 years until I was 15. 

My sister was dismissed from her Dr. after a year! She's fine he said. Mr. Brown would have kept me for life. He listened to my dreams. I told him which books he moved in his office bookcases from the previous week. He had an interesting specimen on his hands. 

Meanwhile my mother was in the waiting room taking his private books off  his hallways shelf and reading his pencil notes in the margins. She would confront him about what he had notated arguing with him.

 I dreamed I was in the back seat while my mother drove controlling the car by leaning. I dreamed my mother had a rubber smile and it was disembodied from her face lift and found by me in the jungle.

Mr. Brown asked me to wait while he began having sessions with her. He had finally located the source of the problems in my life. My mother would be in there for 40 minutes and come out fuming. On the way home she'd blare the car radio WQXR classical music so I could not speak to her. 

She'd cross double yellow lines to pass cars in front of her. She was a tyrant in a rage driving through Westchester in a speeding Volvo. 

Then she began having gallbladder attacks. Let's get out of here, he just wants our money she said and we never went back.