Saul Bennett
Sigmund Freud In America
The new owner of the Queens Boulevard movie was a ringer. Jesus.
for Sigmund Freud, a kid's father swore to my mother. The beard even!
As the year was '43, she knew, because we had the Times delivered.
Freud already a couple years dead. Nah g 'wan, this father piped -
J. Edgar Hoover, who knows, even Roosevelt himself maybe had escaped
Freud from the Nazis planting him in Sunnyside to dope out traitors
Asking people leaving, say, "Wake Island" or "Bataan" how
they thought
the war was going . God help you if Freud flinched - deported.
Once coming out of "Bombardier" we spotted Freud at the candy stand
writing up on a pad as small as a Goobers box secrets fed him
by one of those old lady matrons who spied on the kids' rows
with a shaky flashlight. Squished between them was a kid whining
Gimme back my mackinaw I din 't take nothin ' I swear it! An old guy,
big round head, bald, fat, a vest no less, out of newsreels showing
Churchill picking his way through bombed-out London, stood between
Freud and the matron with his big cigar, dying to learn from anyone
our plans for a Second Front in Europe (whatever that was),
a father figured later. Inside a year Freud was gone, who knew where
(of course, he could've died, this time really), and we never zeroed
on Churchill again. But that hag of a matron never let up. Behind her
torch she could've been Eleanor Roosevelt, or even her mother.