The Hotel New Hampshire (40 page)

And we all started in on her, at once. Frank said, “Lilly, don’t let that ‘orgiastic future’ stuff get you down. It’s not exactly what Iowa Bob meant when he was always saying how Father
lives
in the future.”

“It’s a rather different future, Lilly,” I said.

“Lilly,” Franny said. “What’s ‘the green light,’ Lilly? I mean, for
Father
: what’s
his
green light, Lilly?”

“You see, Lilly,” Frank said, as if he were bored, “Gatsby was in love with the
idea
of being in love with Daisy; it wasn’t even Daisy he was in love with, not anymore. And Father hasn’t got a
Daisy
, Lilly,” Frank said, choking up just a little—because it had probably just occurred to him that Father didn’t have a
wife
anymore, either.

But Lilly said, “It’s the man in the white dinner jacket, it’s Father, he’s a Gatsby. ‘It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—’ ” Lilly quoted to us. “Don’t you
see
?” she shrieked. “There’s always going to be an
It
—and
It
is going to elude us, every time. It’s going to
always
get away,” Lilly said. “And Father’s not going to stop,” she said. “He’s going to keep going after it, and it’s always going to get away. Oh, damn it!” she howled, stamping her little foot. “Damn it! Damn it!” Lilly wailed, and she was off again, unstoppable—a match for Screaming Annie, who could only fake an orgasm; Lilly, we suddenly understood, could fake death itself. Her grief was so real that I thought Susie the bear was going to take the bear’s head off and pay a little human reverence, but Susie prowled through Frank’s room in her strictly bearish fashion; she bumped out the door, leaving us to deal with Lilly’s anguish.

Lilly’s
Weltschmerz
, as Frank would come to call it. “The rest of us have anguish,” Frank would say. “The rest of us have grief, the rest of us merely
suffer
. But
Lilly
,” Frank would say, “Lilly has true
Weltschmerz
. It shouldn’t be translated as ‘world-weariness,’ ” Frank would lecture us, “that’s much too mild for what Lilly’s got. Lilly’s
Weltschmerz
is like ‘world-
hurt
,’ ” Frank would say. “Literally ‘World’—that’s the
Welt
part—and ‘hurt,’ because that’s what the
Schmerz
part really is: pain, real ache. Lilly’s got a case of
world-hurt
, “ Frank concluded, proudly.

“Kind of like
sorrow
, huh, Frank?” Franny asked.

“Kind of,” Frank said, stonily. Sorrow was no friend of Frank’s: not anymore.

In fact, the death of Mother and Egg—with Sorrow in Egg’s lap, and rising from the deep to mark the grave—convinced Frank to give up trying to properly pose the dead; Frank would give up taxidermy in all its forms. All manifestations of resurrection were to be abandoned by him. “Including religion,” Frank said. According to Frank, religion is just another kind of taxidermy.

As a result of Sorrow’s tricking him, Frank would come down very hard on
belief
of any kind. He would become a greater fatalist than Iowa Bob, he would become a greater nonbeliever than Franny or me. A near-violent atheist, Frank would turn to believing only in Fate—in random fortune or random doom, in arbitrary slapstick and arbitrary sorrow. He would become a preacher
against
every bill of goods anyone ever sold: from politics to morality, Frank was always for the opposition. By which Frank meant “the opposing forces.”

“But what exactly do these forces oppose, Frank?” Franny asked him, once.

“Just oppose every prediction,” Frank advised. “Anything anybody’s for, be against it. Anything anybody’s against, be for it. You get on a plane and it doesn’t crash, that means you got on the right plane,” Frank said. “And that’s
all
it means.”

Frank, in other words, went “off.” After Mother and Egg went away, Frank went ever farther away—somewhere—he went into a religion more vastly lacking in seriousness than even the established religions; he joined a kind of anti-everything sect.

“Or maybe Frank
founded
it,” Lilly said, once. Meaning nihilism, meaning anarchy, meaning trivial silliness and happiness in the face of gloom, meaning depression descending as regularly as night over the most mindless and joyful of days. Frank believed in
zap
! He believed in surprises. He was in constant attack and retreat, and he was equally, constantly, wide-eyed and goofily stumbling about in the sudden sunlight—tripping across the wasteland littered with bodies from the darkness of just a moment ago.

“He just went crazy,” Lilly said. And Lilly should know.

Lilly went crazy, too. She seemed to take Mother’s and Egg’s deaths as a personal punishment for some failure deep within herself, and so she resolved she would change. She resolved, among other things, to
grow
.

“At least a little,” she said, grimly determined. Franny and I were worried about her. Growth seemed unlikely for Lilly, and her strenuousness with which we imagined Lilly pursuing her own “growth” was frightening to Franny and me.

“I want to change, too,” I said to Franny. “But
Lilly
—I don’t know. Lilly is just Lilly.”

“Everyone knows that,” Franny said.

“Everyone except Lilly,” I said.

“Precisely,” Franny said. “So how are
you
going to change? You know something better than growing?”

“No. Not better,” I said. I was just a realist in a family of dreamers, large and small. I knew I
couldn’t
grow. I knew I would never really grow up; I knew my childhood would never leave me, and I would never be quite adult enough—quite responsible enough—for the world. The goddamn
Welt
, as Frank would say. I couldn’t change enough, and I knew it. All I could do was something that would have pleased Mother. I could give up swearing. I could clean up my language—which had upset Mother so. And so I did.

“You mean you’re not going to say ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’ or ‘cock-sucker’ or even ‘up yours’ or ‘in the ear’ or
anything
, anymore?” Franny asked me.

“That’s right,” I said.

“Not even ‘asshole’?” Franny asked.

“Right,” I said.

“You asshole,” Franny said.

“It makes as much sense as anything else,” Frank reasoned.

“You dumb prick,” Franny baited me.

“I think it’s rather noble,” Lilly said. “Small, but noble.”

“He lives in a second-rate whorehouse with people who want to start the world over and he wants to clean up his
language
,” Franny said. “Cunthead,” she told me. “You wretched fart,” Franny said. “Beat your meat all night and dream of tits, but you want to sound
nice
, is that it?” she asked.

“Come on, Franny,” Lilly said.

“You little turd, Lilly,” Franny said. Lilly started to cry.

“We’ve got to stick together, Franny,” Frank said. “This sort of abuse is not helpful.”

“You’re as queer as a cat fart, Frank,” she told him.

“And what are
you
, honey?” Susie the bear asked Franny. “What makes you think you’re so tough?”

“I’m not so tough,” Franny said. “You dumb bear. You’re just an unattractive girl, with zits—with zit
scars
: you’re scarred by zits—and you’d rather be a dumb bear than a human being. You think that’s tough? It’s fucking
easier
to be a bear, isn’t it?” Franny asked Susie. “And to work for an old blind man who thinks you’re smart—and beautiful, too, probably,” Franny said. “I’m
not
so tough,” Franny said. “But I
am
smart. I can get by. I can
more
than get by,” she said. “I can get what I want—when I know what it is,” she added. “I can see how things
are
,” Franny said. “And
you
,” she said, speaking to us all—even poor Miss Miscarriage—“you keep waiting for things to become something else. You think
Father
doesn’t?” Franny asked me, suddenly.

“He lives in the future,” Lilly said, still sniffling.

“He’s as blind as Freud,” Franny said, “or he soon will be. So you know what I’m going to do?” she asked us. “I’m
not
going to clean up my language. I’m going to aim my language wherever I want,” she told me. “It’s the one weapon I’ve got. And I’m only going to grow when I’m ready to, or when it’s time,” she told Lilly. “And I’m not
ever
going to be like
you
, Frank. No one else will ever be like you,” she added, affectionately. “And I’m not going to be a bear,” she told Susie. “You sweat like a pig in that stupid costume, you get your rocks off making people uneasy, but that’s because you’re
uneasy
just being
you
. Well, I’m easy being me,” Franny said.

“Lucky you,” Frank said.

“Yes, lucky you, Franny,” Lilly said.

“So what if you’re beautiful?” said Susie. “You’re also a bitch.”

“From now on, I’m mainly a
mother
,” Franny said. “I’m going to take care of you fuckers—you, you, and you,” Franny said, pointing to Frank and Lilly and me. “Because Mother’s not here to do it—and Iowa Bob is gone. The shit detectors are gone,” Franny said, “so I’m left to detect it. I point out the shit that’s my role.
Father doesn’t know what’s going on
,” Franny said, and we nodded—Frank, Lilly, and I; even Susie the bear nodded. We knew this was true: Father was blind, or he soon would be.

“Even so, I don’t need
you
to mother
me
,” Frank said to Franny, but he didn’t look so sure.

Lilly went and put her head in Franny’s lap; she cried there—comfortably, I thought. Franny, of course, knew that I loved her—hopelessly, and too much—and so I didn’t have to make a gesture or say anything to her.

“Well, I don’t need a sixteen-year-old straightening me out,” said Susie the bear, but her bear’s head was off; she held it in her big paws. Her ravaged complexion, her hurt eyes, her too-small mouth betrayed her. She put her bear’s head back on; that was her only authority.

The student, Miss Miscarriage, serious and well intentioned, seemed at a loss for words. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”

“Say it in German,” Frank encouraged her.

“Just spit it out any way you can,” Franny said.

“Well,” Fehlgeburt said. “That passage. That lovely passage, that
ending
—to
The Great Gatsby
—that’s what I mean,” she said.

“Get to it, Fehlgeburt,” Franny said. “Spit it out.”

“Well,” Fehlgeburt said. “I don’t know, but—somehow—it makes me want to go to the United States. I mean, it’s against my politics—your country—I know that. But that
ending
, all of it—somehow—is just so
beautiful
. It makes me want to
be
there. I mean, there’s no
sense
to it, but I would just like to be in the United States.”

“So you think
you’d
like to be there?” Franny said. “Well, I wish we’d never left.”

“Can we go back, Franny?” Lilly asked.

“We’ll have to ask Father,” Frank said.

“Oh boy,” Franny said. And I could see her imagining that moment, waltzing a little reality into Father’s dreams.

“Your country, if you’ll forgive me,” said one of the other radicals-the one they called simply Arbeiter (
Arbeiter
means “worker” in German), “your country is really a
criminal
place,” Arbeiter said. “If you’ll forgive me,” he added, “your country is the ultimate triumph of corporate creativity, which means it is a country controlled by the
group
-thinking of corporations. These corporations are without humanity because there is no one personally responsible for their use of power; a corporation is like a computer with profit as its source of energy—and profit as its necessary fuel. The United States is—you’ll forgive me—quite the worst country in the world for a humanist to live in, I think.”

“Fuck what you think,” Franny said. “You raving asshole,” she said. “You
sound
like a computer.”

“You think like a transmission,” Frank told Arbeiter. “Four forward gears—at predetermined speeds. One speed for reverse.”

Arbeiter stared. His English was a little plodding—his mind, it would occur to me, later, was about as versatile as a lawn mower.

“And about as poetic,” Susie the bear would say. No one liked Arbeiter—not even the impressionable Miss Miscarriage. Her weakness—among the radicals—was her fondness for literature, especially for the romance that is American literature. (“Your silly
major
, dear,” Schwanger always chided her.) But Fehlgeburt’s fondness for literature was her strength—to us children. It was the romantic part of her that wasn’t quite dead; at least, not yet. In time, God forgive me, I would help to kill it.

“Literature is for dreamers,” Old Billig would tell poor Fehlgeburt. Old Billig the radical, I mean. Old Billig the whore
liked
dreams; she told Frank once that dreams were
all
she liked—her dreams and her “mementos.”

“Study economics, dear,” Schwanger told Fehlgeburt—that’s what Miss Pregnant told Miss Miscarriage.

“Human usefulness,” Arbeiter lectured to us, “is directly related to the proportion of the whole population involved in decisions.”

“In the
power
,” Old Billig corrected him.

“In the powerful decisions,” Arbeiter said—the two men stabbing like hummingbirds at a single small blossom.

“Bullfuck,” Franny said. Arbeiter’s and Old Billig’s English was so bad, it was easy to say things like “Take it in the ear” to them all the time—they didn’t get it. And despite my vow to clean up my language, I was sorely tempted to say these things to them; I had to content myself, vicariously, by listening to Franny speak to them.

“The eventual race war, in America,” Arbeiter told us, “will be misunderstood. It will actually be a war of class stratification.”