The Hotel New Hampshire (34 page)

“
Me
?” I said. “What should I say?”

“I wish you’d ask her why she won’t sleep with me,” Junior Jones said.

“Shit,” I said, but I asked her—later: when the Dairy School was empty, when Junior Jones had gone home for the summer (to whip himself into shape for playing football at Penn State), when the old campus, and especially the path through the woods that the football players always used, reminded Franny and me of what seemed like
years
ago (to us). “Why didn’t you ever sleep with Junior Jones?” I asked her.

“I’m only sixteen, John,” Franny said.

“Well, you’re an
old
sixteen, you know,” I said, not exactly sure what this might mean. Franny shrugged, of course. “Look at it this way,” she said. “I’ll see Junior again; we’re going to write letters, and all that. We’re staying friends. Now, someday—when I’m older, and if we
do
stay friends—it might be the perfect thing to do: to sleep with him. I wouldn’t want to have used it up.”

“Why couldn’t you sleep with him
twice
?” I asked her.

“You don’t get it,” she said.

I was thinking it had to do with her having been raped, but Franny could always read me like a book.

“No, kid,” she said. “It’s got nothing to do with being raped. Sleeping with someone is very different—providing it
means
something. I just don’t know what it would
mean
—with Junior. Not yet.
Also
,” she said, with a big sigh-and she paused. “Also,” she said, “I don’t have exactly a lot of experience, but it seems that once someone—or
some
people—get to have you, you don’t ever hear from them again.”

Now, it seemed to me, she
had
to be talking about her rape; I was confused. I said, “Who do you mean, Franny?” And she bit her lip a while.

Then she said, “It surprises me that I have not heard one word—not a single word—from Chipper Dove. Can you imagine that?” she asked. “All this time and not one word.”

Now I was
really
confused; it seemed amazing to me that she would have thought she’d
ever
hear from
him
. I couldn’t think of anything to say, except a stupid joke, so I said, “Well, Franny, I don’t suppose you’ve written to him, either.”

“Twice,” Franny said. “I think that’s enough.”

“
Enough
?” I cried. “Why the fuck did you write him at
all
?” I yelled.

She looked surprised. “Why, to tell him how I was, and what I was doing,” she said. I just stared at her, and she looked away. “I was in
love
with him, John,” she whispered to me.

“Chipper Dove raped you, Franny,” I said. “Dove and Chester Pulaski and Lenny Metz—they gang-banged you.”

“It’s not necessary to say that,” she snapped at me. “I’m talking about Chipper Dove,” she said. “Just him.”

“He raped you,” I said.

“I was in love with him,” she said, keeping her back to me. “You don’t understand. I was
in love
—and maybe I still am,” she said. “Now,” she added, brightly, “would you like to tell Junior
that
? Do you think
I
should tell Junior that?” she asked. “Wouldn’t Junior just love that?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“No, I thought not, too,” Franny said. “So I just thought that—under the circumstances—I wouldn’t sleep with him. Okay?” she asked.

“Okay,” I said, but I wanted to tell her that certainly Chipper Dove had not loved
her
.

“Don’t tell me,” Franny said. “Don’t tell me that he didn’t love
me
. I think I know. But do you know what?” she asked me. “One day,” Franny said, “Chipper Dove might fall in love with me. And you know what?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Maybe if that happens,
if
he falls in love with me,” Franny said, “maybe—by then—I won’t love him anymore. And then I’ll
really
get him, won’t I?” she asked me. I just stared at her; she was, as Junior Jones had observed, a very
old
sixteen indeed.

I felt suddenly that we all couldn’t get to Vienna soon enough—that we all needed time to grow older, and wiser (if that’s what really was involved in the process). I know that I wanted a chance to pull even with Franny, if not ever ahead of her, and I thought I needed a new hotel for that.

It suddenly occurred to me that Franny might have been thinking of Vienna in somewhat the same way: of
using
it—to make herself smarter and tougher and (somehow) grown-up
enough
for the world that neither of us understood.

“Keep passing the open windows,” was all I could say to her, at the moment. We looked at the stubbly grass on the practice field, and knew that in the fall it would be punctured everywhere with cleats, churned by knees striking the ground, and clawing fingers—and that,
this
fall, we would not be in Dairy to see it, or to look away from it. Somewhere else all that—or something like it—would be going on, and we would be watching, or taking part in, whatever it was.

I took Franny’s hand and we walked along the path the football players always used, pausing only briefly by the turn we remembered—the way into the woods, where the ferns were; we didn’t need to see them. “Bye-bye,” Franny whispered to that holy and unholy place; I squeezed her hand—she squeezed back, then she broke our grip—and we tried to speak only German to each other, all the way back to the Hotel New Hampshire. It would be our new language very soon, after all, and we weren’t very good at it. We both knew that we needed to get better in order to be free of Frank.

Frank was taking his hearse-driving tour through the trees when we returned to Elliot Park. “Want a lesson?” he asked Franny. She shrugged, and Mother sent them both on an errand—Franny driving, Frank praying and flinching beside her.

That night, when I went to bed, Egg had put Sorrow in my bed—and dressed him in my running clothes. Getting Sorrow out of my bed—and getting Sorrow’s
hair
out of my bed—I thoroughly woke myself up again. I went down to the restaurant and bar to read. Max Urick was having a drink, sitting in one of the screwed-down chairs.

“How many times did old Schnitzler give it to Jeanette What’s Her Name?” Max asked me.

“Four hundred and sixty-four,” I said.

“Isn’t that something!” he cried.

When Max stumbled upstairs to bed, I sat listening to Mrs. Urick putting away some pans. Ronda Ray was not around; she was out—or maybe she was in; it hardly mattered. It was too dark to take a run—and Franny was asleep, so I couldn’t lift weights. Sorrow had ruined my bed for a while, so I just tried to read. It was a book about the 1918 flu—about all the famous and the unfamous people who were wiped out by it. It seemed like one of the saddest times in Vienna. Gustav Klimt, who once called his own work “Pig shit,” died; he had been Schiele’s teacher. Schiele’s wife died—her name was Edith—and then Schiele himself died, when he was very young. I read a whole chapter in the book about what pictures Schiele
might
have painted if the flu hadn’t got him. I was beginning to get the rather fuzzy idea that the whole book was about what Vienna might have become if the flu hadn’t come to town, when Lilly woke me up.

“Why aren’t you sleeping in your room?” she asked. I explained about Sorrow.

“I can’t sleep because I can’t imagine what my room
over there
is going to be like,” Lilly explained. I told her about the 1918 flu, but she wasn’t interested. “I’m worried,” Lilly admitted. “I’m worried about the violence.”

“
What
violence?” I asked her.

“In Freud’s hotel,” Lilly said. “There’s going to be violence.”

“
Why
, Lilly?” I asked.

“Sex and violence,” Lilly said.

“You mean the whores?” I asked her.

“The
climate
of them,” Lilly said, sitting pretty in one of the screwed-down chairs, rocking slightly in her seat—her feet, of course, not reaching the floor.

“The climate of whores?” I said.

“The climate of sex and violence,” Lilly said. “That’s what it sounds like to me. That whole city,” she said. “Look at Rudolf—killing his girl friend, then killing himself.”

“That was in the last century, Lilly,” I reminded her.

“And that man who fucked that woman four hundred and sixty-four times,” Lilly said.

“Schnitzler,” I said. “Almost a century ago, Lilly.”

“It’s probably worse now,” Lilly said. “Most things are.”

That would have been Frank—who told her that—I knew. “And the flu,” said Lilly, “
and
the wars. And the Hungarians,” she said.

“The revolution?” I asked her. “That was last year, Lilly.”

“And all the rape in the Russian Sector,” Lilly said. “Franny will get raped again. Or I will,” she said, adding, “if someone
small
enough catches me.”

“The occupation is over,” I said.

“A violent climate,” Lilly repeated. “All the repressed sexuality.”

“That’s the
other
Freud, Lilly,” I said.

“And what will the bear do?” Lilly asked. “A hotel with whores and bears and spies.”

“Not
spies
, Lilly,” I said. I knew she meant the East-West relations people. “I think they’re just intellectuals,” I told her, but this didn’t appear to comfort her; she shook her head.

“I can’t stand violence,” Lilly said. “And Vienna
reeks
of it,” she said; it was as if she’d been studying the tourist map and had found all the corners where Junior Jones’s
gangs
hung out. “The whole place
shouts
of violence,” Lilly said. “It absolutely
broadcasts
it,” Lilly said; it was as if she had taken these words into her mouth to suck on them:
reeks, shouts, broadcasts
. “The whole idea of going over there just
shivers
with violence,” Lilly said, shivering. Her tiny knees gripped the seat of the screwed-down chair, her slender legs whipped back and forth, violently fanning the floor. She was only eleven, and I wondered where she’d found all the
words
she used, and why her imagination seemed much older than she was. Why were the women in our family either wise, like Mother, or an “
old
sixteen”—as Junior Jones said of Franny—or like Lilly: small and soft, but bright beyond her years? Why should
they
get all the brains? I wondered, thinking of Father; although Mother and Father were both thirty-seven, Father seemed ten years younger to me—”and ten years dumber,” Franny said. And what was
I
? I wondered, because Franny and even Lilly—made me feel I would be fifteen forever. And Egg was immature—a seven-year-old with five-year-old habits. And Frank was Frank, the King of Mice, able to bring back dogs from the dead, able to master a different language, and able to put the oddities of history to his personal use; but in spite of his obvious abilities, I felt that Frank—in many other categories—was operating with a mental age of four.

Lilly sat with her head down and her little legs swinging. “I
like
the Hotel New Hampshire,” Lilly said. “In fact, I
love
it; I don’t want to leave here,” she said, the predictable tears in her eyes. I gave her a hug and picked her up; I could have bench-pressed Lilly while the seasons changed. I carried her back to her room.

“Think of it this way,” I told her. “We’ll just be going to
another
Hotel New Hampshire, Lilly. The same thing, but another country.” But Lilly cried and cried.

“I’d rather stay with the circus called Fritz’s Act,” she bawled. “I’d rather stay with them, and I don’t even know what they
do
!”

Soon we
would
know what they did, of course. Too soon. It was summer, then, and before we were packed—before we’d even made the airplane reservations—the four-foot forty-one-year-old named Frederick “Fritz” Worter paid us a visit. There were some papers to sign, and some of the other members of Fritz’s Act wished to have a look at their future home.

One morning, when Egg was sleeping beside Sorrow, I looked out our window at Elliot Park. At first nothing seemed strange; some men and women were getting out of a Volkswagen bus. They were all, more or less, the same size. We were still a hotel, after all, and I thought they might be guests. Then I realized that there were
five
women and
eight
men—yet they quite comfortably spilled out of
one
Volkswagen bus—and when I recognized Frederick “Fritz” Worter as one of them, I realized that they were all the same size as
him
.

Max Urick, who’d been shaving while looking out his fourth-floor window, screamed and cut himself. “A fucking
busload
of midgets,” he told us later. “It’s not what you expect to see when you’re just getting up.”

It is impossible to say what Ronda Ray might have done, or said, if
she
had seen them; but Ronda was still in bed. Franny, and my barbells, were lying untouched in Franny’s room; Frank—whether he was dreaming, studying German, or reading about Vienna—was in a world of his own. Egg was sleeping with Sorrow, and Mother and Father—who would be embarrassed about it, later—were having fun in old 3E.

I ran into Lilly’s room, knowing she would want to see the arrival of at least the
human
part of Fritz’s Act, but Lilly was already awake and watching them through her window; she was wearing an old-fashioned nightgown that Mother had bought her in an antique store—it completely enveloped Lilly—and she was hugging her Raggedy Ann doll to her chest. “It’s a
small
circus, just like Mr. Worter said,” Lilly whispered, adoringly. In Elliot Park we watched the midgets gathering beside the Volkswagen bus; they were stretching and yawning; one of the men did a handstand; one of the women did a cartwheel. One of them started moving on all fours, like a chimpanzee, but Fritz clapped his hands, scolding such foolishness; they drew together, like a miniature football team having a huddle (with two extra players); then they started marching, in an orderly fashion, toward our lobby door.