The Hotel New Hampshire (37 page)

“No, no,” said Freud, “not German. Susie don’t like German. She speaks
your
language,” Freud said in Frank’s general direction.

Frank, oafishly, bent down to the bear, tugging its fur again. “Do you shake hands, Susie?” Frank asked, bending down, but the bear turned to face him; the bear stood up.

“She’s not being rude, is she?” Freud cried. “Susie, be nice! Don’t be rude.” Standing up, the bear wasn’t as tall as any of us—except she was taller than Lilly, and she was taller than Freud. The bear’s snout came to Frank’s chin. They stood face to face, for a moment, the bear shifting its weight on its hind legs, shuffling like a boxer.

“I’m Frank,” Frank said nervously to the bear, holding out his hand; then, with both hands, he tried to grasp the bear’s right paw and shake it.

“Keep your hands to yourself, kid,” the bear said to Frank, cuffing Frank’s arms apart with a swift, short blow. Frank, reeling backwards, stumbled on the reception bell—which made a quick
ping
!

“How’d you do that?” Franny asked Freud. “How’d you make it talk?”

“Nobody makes me talk, honey,” Susie the bear said, nuzzling Franny’s hip.

Lilly screamed again. “The bear talks, the bear talks!” she cried.

“She’s a
smart
bear!” Freud shouted. “Didn’t I tell you?”

“The bear talks!” Lilly screamed, hysterically.

“At least I don’t scream,” Susie the bear said. Then she dropped all semblance of bear-like mannerisms; she walked upright, and sullenly, back to the couch—where Lilly’s first scream had disturbed her. She sat down and crossed her legs and put her feet on the chair. It was
Time
magazine that she was reading, a rather out-of-date issue.

“Susie’s from Michigan,” Freud said, as if this explained everything. “But she went to college in New York. She’s very smart.”

“I went to Sarah Lawrence,” the bear said, “but I dropped out. What an elitist crock of shit,” she said—of Sarah Lawrence—the world of
Time
magazine passing impatiently through her paws.

“She’s a
girl
!” Father said. “It’s a girl in a bear suit!”

“A
woman
,” Susie said. “Watch it.” It was only 1957; Susie was a bear ahead of her time.

“A woman in a bear suit,” Frank said, with Lilly sliding against me and clutching my leg.

“There are no smart bears,” Freud said, ominously. “Except this kind.”

Upstairs, the typewriters were quarreling over our stunned silence. We regarded Susie the bear—a smart bear, indeed; and a Seeing Eye bear, too. Knowing she was not a real bear suddenly made her appear larger; she took on new power before us. She was more than Freud’s eyes, we thought; she might be his heart and mind, too.

Father viewed the lobby, while his old, blind mentor leaned on him for support. And what was Father seeing
this
time? I wondered. What castle, what palace, what deluxe-class possibility looming larger and larger—as he passed over the sagging couch where the she-bear sat, passed over the imitation Impressionists: the pink, bovine nudes fallen in flowers of light (on the clashing floral wallpaper)? And the easy chair with its stuffing exploding (like the bombs to be imagined under all the debris in the outer districts); and the one reading lamp too dim to dream by.

“Too bad about the candy store,” Father said to Freud.

“Too bad?” Freud cried. “
Nein, nein, nicht
too bad! It’s
good
. The place is gone, and they had no insurance. We can buy them up—cheap! Give ourselves a lobby people will
notice
—from the street!” Freud cried, though of course there was nothing his own eyes would notice, or could. “A very fortunate fire,” Freud said, “a fire perfectly timed for your arrival,” Freud said, squeezing my father’s arm. “A brilliant fire!” Freud said.

“A smart bear’s sort of fire,” said Susie the bear, cynically tearing her way through the old issue of
Time
.

“Did you set it?” Franny asked Susie the bear.

“You bet your sweet ass, honey,” Susie said.

Oh, there once was a woman who had also been raped, but when I told her Franny’s story, and how it seemed to me that Franny had handled it—by
not
handling it, perhaps, or by denying the worst of it—this woman told me that Franny and I were wrong.

“Wrong?” I said.

“You bet your ass,” this woman said. “Franny was raped, not beaten up. And those bastards
did
get the ‘her in her’—as your bullshit black friend calls it. What’s
he
know? A rape expert because he’s got a sister?
Your
sister robbed herself of the only weapon she had against those punks—their semen. And nobody stopped her from washing herself, nobody made her
deal
with it—so she’s going to be dealing with it all her life. In fact, she sacrificed her own integrity by not fighting her attackers in the first place—and
you
,” this woman said to me, “you conveniently diffused the rape of your sister and robbed the rape of
its
integrity by running off to find the hero instead of staying on the scene and
dealing
with it yourself.”

“A rape has integrity?” Frank asked.

“I went to get help,” I said. “They just would have beaten the shit out of me and raped her, anyway.”

“I’ve got to talk to your sister, honey,” this woman said. “She’s into her own amateurish psychology and it won’t work, believe me: I know rape.”

“Whoa!” Iowa Bob said, once. “
All
psychology is amateurish. Fuck Freud, and all that!”

“
That
Freud, anyway,” my father had added. And I would think, later: Maybe
our
Freud, too.

Anyway, this rape-expert woman said that Franny’s apparent reaction to her own rape was bullshit; and knowing that Franny still wrote letters to Chipper Dove made me wonder. The rape-expert woman said that rape simply wasn’t like that, that it didn’t have that effect—at all. She knew, she said. It had happened to her. And in college she’d joined a kind of club of women who’d all been raped, and they had agreed among themselves
exactly
what it was like, and what were the
exactly
correct responses to have to it. Even before she started talking to Franny, I could see how desperately important this woman’s private unhappiness was to her, and how—in her mind—the only credible reaction to the event of rape was
hers
. That someone else might have responded differently to a similar abuse only meant to her that the abuse couldn’t possibly have been the same.

“People are like that,” Iowa Bob would have said. “They need to make their own worst experiences universal. It gives them a kind of support.”

And who can blame them? It is just infuriating to argue with someone like that; because of an experience that has denied them their humanity, they go around denying another kind of humanity in others, which is the truth of human variety—it stands alongside our sameness. Too bad for her.

“She probably has had a most unhappy life,” Iowa Bob would have said.

Indeed: this woman
had
had a most unhappy life. This rape-expert woman was Susie the bear.

“What’s this ‘little event among so many’ bullshit?” Susie the bear asked Franny. “What’s this ‘luckiest day of my life’ bullshit?” Susie asked her. “Those thugs didn’t just want to
fuck
you, honey, they wanted to take your strength away, and you let them. Any woman who accepts a violation of herself so
passively
... how you can actually say that you knew, somehow, Chip Dove would be ‘the first.’ Sweetheart! You have
minimized the enormity
of what has happened to you—just to make it a little easier to take.”

“Whose rape is it?” Franny asked Susie the bear. “I mean, you’ve got yours, I’ve got mine. If I say nobody got the me in me, then nobody got it. You think they get it every time?”

“You bet your sweet ass, honey,” Susie said. “A rapist is using his prick as a weapon. Nobody uses a weapon on you without
getting
you. For example,” said Susie the bear, “how’s your sex life these days?”

“She’s only sixteen,” I said. “She’s not supposed to have such a great sex life—at sixteen.”

“I’m not confused,” Franny said. “There’s sex and then there’s rape,” she said. “Day and night.”

“Then how come you keep saying Chipper Dove was ‘the first,’ Franny?” I asked her quietly.

“You bet your ass—that’s the point,” said Susie the bear.

“Look,” Franny said to us—with Frank uncomfortably playing solitaire and pretending not to listen; with Lilly following our conversation like a championship tennis match that demanded reverence for every stroke. “Look,” Franny said, “the point is I own my own rape. It’s mine. I
own
it. I’ll deal with it my way.”

“But you’re
not
dealing with it,” Susie said. “You never got angry enough. You’ve got to get angry. You’ve got to get savage about all the facts.”

“You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed,” said Frank, rolling his eyes and quoting old Iowa Bob.

“I’m serious,” said Susie the bear. She was
too
serious, of course—but more likable than she at first appeared. Susie the bear would finally get rape right, after a while. She would run a very fine rape crisis center, later in her life, and she would write in the very first line of advice in the rape-counseling literature that the matter of “Who Owns the Rape,” is the most important matter. She would finally understand that although her anger was essentially healthy for her, it might not have been the healthiest thing for Franny, at the time. “Allow the Victim to Ventilate,” she would wisely write in her counseling newsletter—and: “Keep Your Own Problems Separate from the Problems of the Victim.” Later, Susie the bear would really become a rape-expert woman—she of the famous line “Watch Out: the real issue of each rape may not be
your
real issue; kindly consider there might be more than one.” And to all her rape counselors she would impart this advice: “It is essential to understand that there is no one way that victims respond and adjust to this crisis. Any one victim might exhibit all, none, or any combination of the usual symptoms: guilt, denial, anger, confusion, fear, or something quite different. And problems might occur within a week, a year, ten years, or never.”

Very true; Iowa Bob would have liked this bear as much as he liked Earl. But in her first days with us, Susie was a bear on the rape issue—and on a lot of other issues, too.

And we were forced into an intimacy with her that was unnatural because we would suddenly turn to her as we would turn to a mother (in the absence of our own mother); after a while, we would turn to Susie for other things. Almost immediately this smart (though harsh) bear seemed more all-seeing than the blind Freud, and from our first day and night in our new hotel we turned to Susie the bear for
all
our information.

“Who are the people with the typewriters?” I asked her.

“How much do the prostitutes charge?” Lilly asked her.

“Where can I buy a good map?” Frank asked her. “Prefer ably, one that indicates walking tours.”

“Walking tours, Frank?” Franny said.

“Show the children their rooms, Susie,” Freud instructed his smart bear.

Somehow, we all went first to Egg’s room, which was the worst room—a room with two doors and no windows, a cube with a door connecting it to Lilly’s room (which was only one window better) and a door entering the ground-floor lobby.

“Egg won’t like it,” Lilly said, but Lilly was predicting that Egg wouldn’t like any of it: the move, the whole thing. I suspect she was right, and whenever I think of Egg, now, I tend to see him in his room in the Gasthaus Freud that he never saw. Egg in an airless,. windowless box, a tiny trapped space in the heart of a foreign hotel—a room unfit for guests.

The typical tyranny of families: the youngest child always gets the worst room. Egg would not have been happy in the Gasthaus Freud, and I wonder now if any of us could have been. Of course, we didn’t have a fair start. We had only a day and a night before the news of Mother and Egg would settle over us, before Susie became
our
Seeing Eye bear, too, and Father and Freud began their duet in the direction of a grand hotel—a successful hotel, at the very least, they hoped; if not a great hotel, at least a good one.

On the day of arrival, Father and Freud were already making plans. Father wanted to move the prostitutes to the fifth floor, and move the Symposium on East-West Relations to the fourth floor, thereby clearing floors two and three for guests.

“Why should the paying guests have to climb to the fourth and filth floors?” Father asked Freud.

“The prostitutes,” Freud reminded my father, “are also paying guests.” He didn’t need to add that they also made a number of trips every night. “And some of their clients are too old for all those stairs,” Freud added.

“If they’re too old for the stairs,” Susie the bear said, “they’re too old for the dirty action, too. Better to have one croak on the stairs than to have one give up the ship in bed—on top of one of the smaller girls.”

“Jesus God,” said Father. “Maybe give the prostitutes the second floor, then. And make the damn radicals move to the top.”

“Intellectuals,” Freud said, “are in notorious bad shape.”

“Not all these radicals are intellectuals,” Susie said. “And we should have an elevator, eventually,” she added. “I’m for keeping the whores close to the ground and letting the thinkers do the climbing.”

“Yes, and put the guests in between,” Father said.

“
What
guests?” Franny asked. She and Frank had checked the registration; the Gasthaus Freud had no guests.

“It’s just the candy fire,” Freud said. “It smoked out the guests. Once we get the lobby right, the guests will pour in!”

“And the fucking will keep them awake all night, and the typewriters will wake them up in the morning,” said Susie the bear.