The Hotel New Hampshire (30 page)

“Home?” I suggested, but the man waved his hand above his head.

He was thinking. I looked at the mail. The usual bills, the usual absence of letters from unknowns requesting rooms. And one letter that stood out from the rest. It had pretty foreign stamps;
Österreich
said the stamps—and a few other exotic things. The letter was from Vienna, and it was addressed to my father in a most curious way:

Win Berry

Graduate of Harvard

Class of 194?

U.S.A.

The letter had taken a long time to reach my father, but the postal authorities had found one among them who knew where Harvard was. My father would say later that getting that letter was the most concrete thing going to Harvard ever did for him; if he’d gone to some less-famous school, the letter would never have been delivered. “That’s a good reason,” Franny would say, later, “to wish he’d gone to a less-famous school.”

But, of course, the alumni network at Harvard is efficient and vast. My father’s name and “Class of 194?” was all they needed to discover the right class, ’46, and the correct address.

“What’s going on?” I heard my father calling; he had come out of our family’s second-floor rooms and was on the landing, calling down the stairwell to me.

“Nothing!” I said, kicking the drunk on the steps in front of me, because he was falling asleep again.

“Why’s the front light on?” Father called.

“Get going!” I said to the man in the white dinner jacket.

“I’m happy to meet you!” the man said, cordially. “I’ll just be trotting along now!”

“Good, good,” I whispered.

But the man walked only to the bottom step before he seemed overcome with
thought
again.

“Who are you talking to?” Father called.

“No one! Just a drunk!” I said.

“Jesus God,” said Father. “A drunk isn’t no one!”

“I can handle it!” I called.

“Wait till I get dressed,” Father said. “Jesus God.”

“Get going!” I yelled at the man in the white dinner jacket.

“Good-bye! Good-bye!” the man called, happily waving to me from the bottom step of the Hotel New Hampshire. “I had a wonderful time!”

The letter, of course, was from Freud. I knew that, and I wanted to see what it said before I let my father see it. I wanted to talk with Franny about it, for hours—and even with Mother—before I let Father see it. But there wasn’t time. The letter was brief and to the point.

IF YOU GOT THIS, THEN YOU WENT TO HARVARD LIKE YOU PROMISED ME [Freud wrote]. YOU GOOD BOY, YOU!

“Good night! God bless you!” cried the man in the white dinner jacket. But he would walk no farther than the perimeter of light; where the darkness of Elliot Park began, he stopped and waved.

I flicked off the light so that if Father came, Father couldn’t spot the apparition in formal attire.

“I can’t see!” the drunk wailed, and I turned the light on again.

“Get out of here or I’ll beat the shit out of you!” I screamed at him.

“That’s no way to handle it!” I heard Father yelling.

“Good night, bless you all!” cried the man; he was still in the circle of light when I cut the light off him, again, and he made no protest. I kept the light off. I finished Freud’s letter.

I FINALLY GOT A SMART BEAR [Freud wrote]. IT MADE ALL THE DIFFERENCE. I HAD A GOOD HOTEL GOING, BUT I GOT OLD. IT COULD STILL BE A GREAT HOTEL [Freud added], IF YOU AND MARY COME HELP ME RUN IT. I GOT A SMART BEAR, BUT I NEED A SMART HARVARD BOY LIKE YOU, TOO!

Father stormed into the wretched lobby of the Hotel New Hampshire; in his slippers he stumbled over a beer bottle, which he kicked, and his bathrobe flapped in the wind from the open door.

“He’s gone,” I said to Father. “Just some drunk.” But Father snapped on the outside light—and there, waving, on the rim of the light, was the man in the white dinner jacket. “Good-bye!” he called, hopefully. “Good-bye! Good luck! Good-bye!” The effect was stunning: the man in the white dinner jacket stepped out of the light and was gone—as gone as if he were gone to sea—and my father gaped into the darkness after him.

“Hello!” Father screamed. “Hello?
Come back
! Hello?”

“Good-bye! Good luck! Good-bye!” called the voice of the man in the white dinner jacket, and my father stood staring into the darkness until the wind chilled him and he shivered in his bathrobe and slippers; he let me pull him inside.

Like any storyteller, I had the power to end the story, and I could have. But I didn’t destroy Freud’s letter; I gave it to Father, while the vision of the man in the white dinner jacket was still upon him. I handed over Freud’s letter—like any storyteller, knowing (more or less) where we would all be going.

7

Sorrow Strikes Again

Sabrina Jones, who taught me how to kiss—whose deep and mobile mouth will have a hold on me, always—found the man who could fathom her teeth-in-or-out mystery; she married a lawyer from the same firm in which she was a secretary and had three healthy children (“Bang, Bang, Bang,” as Franny would say).

Bitty Tuck, who fainted while diaphragming herself—whose wondrous breasts and modern ways would, one day, seem not nearly as unique as they seemed to me in 1956—survived her encounter with Sorrow; in fact, I heard (not long ago) that she is still unmarried, and still a party girl.

And a man named Frederick Worter, who was only a hair over four feet tall, and forty-one years old, and who was better known to our family as “Fritz”—whose circus, called Fritz’s Act, was an advance booking for a summer that we looked forward to with curiosity and dread—
bought
the first Hotel New Hampshire from my father in the winter of 1957.

“For a song, I’ll bet,” Franny said. But we children never knew how much Father sold the Hotel New Hampshire for; since Fritz’s Act was the only advance booking for the summer of 1957, my father had written to Fritz first warning the diminutive circus king of our family’s move to Vienna.

“Vienna?” Mother kept muttering, and shaking her head at my father. “What do you know about
Vienna
?”

“What did I know about motorcycles?” Father asked. “Or bears? Or hotels?”

“And what have you
learned
?” Mother asked him, but my father had no doubt. Freud had said that a smart bear made all the difference.

“I know that Vienna isn’t Dairy, New Hampshire,” Father said to Mother; and he apologized to Fritz of Fritz’s Act—saying that he was putting the Hotel New Hampshire up for sale, and that the circus might need to seek other lodgings. I don’t know if the circus called Fritz’s Act made my father a good offer, but it was the first offer, and Father took it.

“Vienna?” said Junior Jones. “Holy cow.”

Franny might have protested the move, for fear that she would miss Junior, but Franny had discovered Junior’s infidelity (with Ronda Ray on New Year’s Eve), and she was being cool to him.

“Tell her I was just horny, man,” Junior told me.

“He was just horny, Franny,” I said.

“Clearly,” Franny said. “And you surely know all about what
that’s
like.”

“Vienna,” said Ronda Ray, sighing under me—probably from boredom. “
I’d
like to go to Vienna,” she said. “But I suppose I have to stay here—where I might be out of a job. Or else work for that bald midget.”

Frederick “Fritz” Worter was the bald midget, a runt figure who visited us one snowy weekend; he was especially impressed with the size of the fourth-floor bathroom facilities—and with Ronda Ray. Lilly, of course, was most impressed with Fritz. He was only a little bigger than Lilly, although we tried to assure Lilly (and, mainly, ourselves) that she would continue to grow—a little—and that her features (we hoped) would not ever appear so out of proportion. Lilly was pretty: tiny but nice. But Fritz had a head several sizes too large for his body; his forearms sagged like slack calf muscles obscenely grafted to the wrong limbs; his fingers were sawed-off salamis; his ankles were swollen over his little doll’s feet—like socks with wrecked elastic.

“What kind of circus do you have?” Lilly asked him, boldly.

“Weird acts, weird animals,” Franny whispered in my ear, and I shivered.

“
Little
acts,
little
animals,” Frank mumbled.

“We’re just a small circus,” Fritz told Lilly, meaningfully.

“Meaning,” said Max Urick—after Fritz was gone—“that they’ll all fit just fine on the fucking fourth floor.”

“If they’re all like him,” said Mrs. Urick, “they won’t eat very much.”

“If they’re all like
him
,” said Ronda Ray, and rolled her eyes—but she didn’t continue; she decided to let it pass.

“I think he’s cute,” said Lilly.

But Fritz of Fritz’s Act gave Egg nightmares—great shrieks that stiffened my back and tore muscles in my neck; Egg’s arm lashed out and bashed the bedside lamp, his legs thrashed under the sheets, as if the bedclothes were drowning him.

“Egg!” I cried. “It’s just a dream! You’re having a dream!”

“A
what
?” he screamed.

“A dream!” I yelled.

“Midgets!” Egg shouted. “They’re under the bed! They’re crawling all around! They’re all over, everywhere!” he howled.

“Jesus God,” Father said. “If they’re just midgets, why does he get so upset?”

“Hush,” Mother said, ever fearful of hurting Lilly’s little feelings.

And I lay under the barbell in the morning, sneaking a look at Franny getting out of bed—or getting dressed—and thinking of Iowa Bob. What would
he
have said about going to Vienna? About Freud’s hotel that somehow
needed
a smart Harvard boy? About the differences a smart bear might make—to
anyone’s
prospects for success? I lifted and thought. “It doesn’t matter,” Iowa Bob would have said. “Whether we go to Vienna or stay here, it won’t matter.” Under all that weight, that’s what I thought Coach Bob would have said. “Here or there,” Bob would have said, “we’re screwed down for life.” It would be
Father’s
hotel—whether in Dairy or in Vienna. Would nothing, ever, make us more or less exotic than we were? I wondered, with the weight wonderfully taut and rising, and Franny in the corner of my eye.

“I wish you’d take those weights to another room,” Franny said. “So I can get dressed by myself, sometimes—for Christ’s sake.”

“What do you think about going to Vienna, Franny?” I asked her.

“I think it will be more sophisticated than staying here,” Franny said. Completely dressed now, and always so sure of herself, she looked down at me where I struggled to let my last bench press down slowly and levelly. “I might even get a room without barbells in it,” she added. “Even one without a weight lifter in it,” Franny said, blowing lightly into the armpit of my left (and weaker) arm—and getting out of the way when the weights slid first to the left, then to the right, off the bar.

“Jesus God!” Father shouted upstairs to me, and I thought that if Iowa Bob had still been with us, he would have said that Franny was wrong. Whether Vienna was more sophisticated, or less—whether Franny had a room with barbells or a room with lace—we were inhabitants of one Hotel New Hampshire after another.

Freud’s hotel—or our imperfect picture of Freud’s hotel, via air mail—was called the Gasthaus Freud; it was unclear, from Freud’s correspondence, whether or not the
other
Freud had ever stayed there. We only knew it was “centrally located,” according to Freud—“in the First District!”—but in the all-gray black-and-white photograph that Freud sent, we could barely make out the iron double door, sandwiched between the display cases of a kind of candy store. KONDITOREI, said one sign; ZUCKERWAREN, said another; SCHOKOLADEN, promised a third; and over it all—bigger than the faded letters saying, GASTHAUS FREUD—was the word BONBONS.

“What?” said Egg.

“
Bonbons
,” said Franny. “Oh boy.”

“Which is the door to the candy store, and which is the door to the hotel?” Frank asked; Frank would always think like a doorman.

“I think you have to live there to know,” Franny said.

Lilly got a magnifying glass and deciphered the name of the street, in funny script, under the street number on the hotel’s double door.

“Krugerstrasse,” she decided, which at least matched the name of the street in Freud’s address. Father bought a map of Vienna from a travel agency and we located Krugerstrasse—in the First District, as Freud had promised; it appeared very central.

“It’s only a block or two from the opera!” Frank cried, enthusiastically.

“Oh boy,” Franny said.

The map had little green areas for parks, thin red and blue lines where the streetcars ran, and ornate buildings—grossly out of proportion to the street—to indicate the places of interest.

“It looks like a kind of Monopoly board,” Lilly said.

We noted cathedrals, museums, the town hall, the university, the Parliament.

“I wonder where the gangs hang out,” said Junior Jones, looking over the streets with us.

“The
gangs
?” said Egg. “The
who
?”

“The tough guys,” said Junior Jones. “The guys with guns and blades, man.”

“The gangs,” Lilly repeated, and we stared at the map as if the streets would indicate their darkest alleys to us.

“This is
Europe
,” Frank said, with disgust. “Maybe there
aren’t
gangs.”

“It’s a city, isn’t it?” Junior Jones said.

But on the map it looked like a toy city, to me—with pretty places of interest, and all the green spots where nature had been arranged for pleasure.

“Probably in the parks,” said Franny, biting her lower lip. “The gangs hang out in the parks.”

“Shit,” I said.

“There won’t be any gangs!” Frank cried. “There will be music! And pastry! And the people do a lot of bowing, and they dress differently!” We stared at him, but we knew he’d been reading up on Vienna; he’d gotten a head start on the books Father kept bringing home.