The Hotel New Hampshire (45 page)

“What
could
they do?” Freud asked. “What can those people
ever
do? They couldn’t do anything to stop the sex, so they fucked around with a few fountains.”

Even the Vienna of Freud—the
other
Freud—was notorious for being unable to do anything to stop the sex, though this didn’t stop the Victorian counterparts of Maria Theresa’s Chastity Commission from trying. “In those days,” Freud pointed out, admiringly, “whores were allowed to make arrangements in the aisles of the Opera.”

“At intermissions,” Frank added, in case we didn’t know.

Frank’s favorite tour with Freud was the Imperial Vault—the
Kaisergruft
in the catacombs of the Kapuzinerkirche. The Hapsburgs have been buried there since 1633. Maria Theresa is there, the old prude. But not her heart. The corpses in the catacombs are heartless—their hearts are kept in another church; their hearts are to be found on another tour. “History separates everything, eventually,” Freud would intone in the heartless tombs.

Good-bye, Maria Theresa—and Franz Josef, and Elizabeth, and the unfortunate Maximilian of Mexico. And, of course, Frank’s prize lies with them: the Hapsburg heir, poor Rudolf the suicide—he’s also there. Frank always got especially gloomy in the catacombs.

Franny and I got gloomiest when Freud directed us along Wipplingerstrasse to Füttergasse.

“Turn!” he’d cry, the baseball bat trembling.

We were in the Judenplatz, the old Jewish quarter of the city. It had been a kind of ghetto as long ago as the thirteenth century; the first expulsion of the Jews, there, had been in 1421. We knew only slightly more about the recent expulsion.

What was hard about being there with Freud was that this tour was not so visibly historical. Freud would call out to apartments that were no longer apartments. He would identify whole buildings that were no longer there. And the
people
he used to know there—they weren’t there, either. It was a tour of things we couldn’t see, but Freud saw them still; he saw 1939, and before, when he’d last been in the Judenplatz with a working pair of eyes.

The day the New Hampshire couple and their child arrived, Freud had taken Lilly to the Judenplatz. I could tell because she was depressed when she came back. I had just taken the bags and the Americans to their rooms on the third floor, and I was depressed, too. I had been thinking all the way upstairs about Ernst describing the “cow position” to Franny. The bags weren’t especially heavy because I was imagining that they were Ernst, and I was carrying
him
up to the top of the Hotel New Hampshire, where I was going to drop him out a window on the fifth floor.

The woman from New Hampshire ran her hand briefly up the banister and said, “Dust.”

Schraubenschlüssel passed us on the landing of the second floor. He was smeared with grease from his fingertips to his bicepses; he had a coil of copper wire around his neck like a hangman’s noose and in his arms he lugged an obviously heavy box-shaped thing that resembled a giant battery—a battery too big for a Mercedes, I would recall, much later.

“Hi, Wrench,” I said, and he grunted past us; in his teeth he held, quite delicately—for him—some kind of glass-wrapped little fuse.

“The hotel’s mechanic,” I explained, because it was the easiest thing to say.

“Not very clean,” said the woman from New Hampshire.

“Is there an automobile on the top floor?” her husband asked.

As we turned down the third-floor corridor, searching in the half-dark for the correct rooms, a door opened up on the fifth floor, the clamor of a kind of eleventh-hour typing reached us—Fehlgeburt, perhaps, either bringing a manifesto to a close or writing her thesis on the romance that is at the heart of American literature—and Arbeiter screamed down the stairwell.

“Compromise!” Arbeiter shrieked. “You represent nothing so strongly as you represent
compromise
!”

“Each time is its
own
time!” Old Billig hollered back. Old Billig the radical was leaving for the day; he crossed the third-floor landing while I was still fumbling with the luggage and keys.

“You blow the way the wind blows, old man!” Arbeiter yelled. This was in German, of course, and I suppose—for the Americans, who didn’t understand German—it might have seemed more ominous in that language than it was. I thought it was pretty ominous, and
I
understood it. “One day, old man,” Arbeiter concluded, “the wind’s going to blow you away!”

Old Billig the radical stopped on the landing and yelled back up to Arbeiter. “You’re crazy!” he screamed. “You’ll kill us all! You have no
patience
!” he shouted.

And somewhere between the third and fifth floors, moving softly, her gentle figure generous with
Schlagobers
, the good Schwanger tried to soothe them both, trotting downstairs a few steps toward Old Billig, and talking in a whisper, trotting upstairs a few steps toward Arbeiter—with whom she had to speak up a little.

“Shut up!” Arbeiter snapped at her. “Go get pregnant again,” he said to her. “Go get another abortion. Go get some
Schlagobers
,” he abused her.

“Animal!” Old Billig cried; he started back upstairs. “It is possible to remain a gentleman, but not
you
!” he screamed up at Arbeiter. “You are not even a
humanist
!”

“Please,” Schwanger was soothing.
“Bitte, bitte
. ...”

“You want
Schlagobers
?” Arbeiter roared at her. “
I
want
Schlagobers
running all over the Kärntnerstrasse,” he said, crazily. “I want
Schlagobers
stopping the traffic on the Ring.
Schlagobers
and blood,” he said. “That’s what you’ll see: over everything. Oozing over the streets!” said Arbeiter. “
Schlagobers
and blood.”

And I let the timid Americans from New Hampshire into their dusty rooms. Soon it would be dark, I knew, and the shouting matches upstairs would cease. And downstairs the groaning would start, the bed-rocking, the constant flushing of the bidets, the pacing of the bear—policing the second floor—and the baseball bat of Freud, whumping steadily, room to room.

Would the Americans go to the Opera? Would they return to see Jolanta muscling a brave drunk upstairs—or rolling him down? Would someone be kneading Babette, like dough, in the lobby, where I played cards with Dark Inge and told her about the heroics of Junior Jones? The Black Arm of the Law made her happy. When she was “old enough,” she said, she was going to make a bundle, then go visit her father and see for herself how bad it was for blacks in America.

And at what hour of the night would Screaming Annie’s first fake orgasm send the daughter from New Hampshire scurrying into her parents’ room through the adjoining door? Would they three huddle in one bed until morning—overhearing the tired bargains made with Old Billig, the mean thudding of Jolanta wrecking someone?

Screaming Annie had told me what she would do to me if I ever touched Dark Inge.

“I keep Inge away from the men in the street,” she confided. “But I don’t want her thinking she’s
in love
, or something. I mean, in a way, that’s worse—
I
know. That really fucks you up. I mean, I’m not letting anyone
pay
her for it—not ever—and I’m not letting you sneak in for free.”

“She’s only my sister Lilly’s age,” I said. “To me.”

“Who cares how old
she
is?” Screaming Annie said. “I’m watching
you
.”

“You’re old enough to get a rod, occasionally,” Jolanta told me. “I’ve seen it. I got an eye for seeing
rods
.”

“If you get a hard-on, you might use it,” Screaming Annie said. “And I’m just telling you, if you want to use it, don’t use it on Dark Inge. Use it on her and you lose it,” Screaming Annie told me.

“That’s right,” Jolanta said. “Use it with us, never with the kid. Use it with the kid and we’ll finish you. Lift all the weights you want, sometime you got to fall asleep.”

“And when you wake up,” said Screaming Annie, “your rod will be gone.”

“Got it?” Jolanta asked.

“Sure,” I said. And Jolanta leaned close to me and kissed me on the mouth. It was a kiss as threatening with lifelessness as the New Year’s Eve kiss, tinged with vomit, that I had received from Doris Wales. But when Jolanta finished this kiss, she pulled away suddenly with my lower lip trapped in her teeth—just until I screamed. Then her mouth released me. I felt my arms lift up all by themselves—the way they do when I’ve been curling the one-arm dumbbells, for half an hour or so. But Jolanta was backing away from me very watchfully, her hands in her purse. I looked at the hands and the purse until she was out of my room. Screaming Annie was still there.

“Sorry about the bite,” she said. “I really didn’t tell her to do it. She’s just mean, all by herself. You know what she’s got in the purse?” I didn’t want to know.

Screaming Annie would know. She lived with Jolanta—Dark Inge had told me. In fact, Dark Inge told me, not only were her mother and Jolanta girl friends of the lesbian kind, but Babette also lived with a woman (a whore who worked the Mariahilfer Strasse). Only Old Billig actually preferred men; and, Dark Inge told me, Old Billig was so old she preferred nothing at all—most of the time.

So I stayed strictly nonsexual with Dark Inge; in fact, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to even
think
of her sexually if her mother hadn’t brought it up. I stayed strictly to my imagination: of Franny, of Jolanta. And of course my shy, stumbling courtship of Fehlgeburt, the reader. The girls at the American School all knew I lived in “
that
hotel on the Krugerstrasse”; I was not in the same class of Americans that they were in. People say that in America most Americans are not at all class-conscious, but I know about the Americans who live abroad, and they are wildly conscious about what
kind
of Americans they are.

Franny had her bear, and, I suppose, she had her imagination as much as I had mine. She had Junior Jones and his football scores; she must have had to work hard to imagine him past the ends of the games. And she had her correspondence with Chipper Dove, she had her rather one-sided imagination concerning him.

Susie had a theory about Franny’s letters to Chipper Dove. “She’s afraid of him,” Susie said. “She’s actually terrified of ever seeing him again. It’s
fear
that makes her do it—write to him all the time. Because if she can address him, in a normal voice—if she can
pretend
that she’s having a normal relationship with him—well ... then he’s no rapist, then he never did actually
do it
to her, and she doesn’t want to
deal
with the fact that he
did
. Because,” Susie said, “she’s afraid that Dove or someone like him will rape her
again
.”

I thought about that. Susie the bear might not have been the smart bear Freud had in mind, but she was a smart bear on her own terms.

What Lilly once said about her has stayed with me. “You can make fun of Susie because she’s afraid to simply be a human being and have to
deal
—as she would say—with other human beings. But how many human beings feel that way and don’t have the imagination to do anything about it? It may be stupid to go through life as a bear,” Lilly would say, “but you’ll have to admit it takes imagination.”

And we were all familiar with living with imagination, of course. Father thrived there; imagination was his own hotel. Freud could see only there. Franny, composed in the present, was also looking ahead—and I was always, for the most part, looking at Franny (for signals, for some vital signs, for directions). Of us all, Frank was perhaps the most successfully imaginative; he made up his own world and kept to himself there. And Lilly, in Vienna, had a mission—which was to keep her safe, for a while. Lilly had decided to grow. It had to be with her imagination that she would do this, because we noted few physical changes.

What Lilly did in Vienna was
write
. Fehlgeburt’s reading had gotten to her. Lilly wanted to be a writer, of all things, and we were embarrassed enough for her that we never accused her of it—although we knew she was doing it, all the time. And she was embarrassed enough by it so that she never admitted it, either. But each of us knew that Lilly was
writing
something. For nearly seven years, she wrote and wrote. We knew the sound of her typewriter; it was different from the radicals’. Lilly wrote very slowly.

“What are you doing, Lilly?” someone would ask her, knocking on her ever-locked door.

“Trying to grow,” Lilly would say.

And that was our euphemism for it, too. If Franny managed to say she was beaten up, when she’d been raped—if Franny could get away with
that
, I thought—then Lilly ought to be allowed to say she was “trying to grow” when she was (we all knew) “trying to write.”

And so when I told Lilly that the New Hampshire family included a little girl just her age, Lilly said, “So what? I’ve got some growing to do. Maybe I’ll introduce myself, after supper.”

One of the curses of timid people—in bad hotels—is that they’re often too timid to
leave
. They’re so timid they don’t even dare to complain. And with their timidity comes a certain politeness; if they check out because a Schraubenschlüssel has frightened them on the stairs, because a Jolanta has bitten someone in the face in the lobby, because a Screaming Annie has inched them closer to death with her howls—even if they find bear hair in the bidet, they still apologize.

Not the woman from New Hampshire, however. She was more feisty than your average timid guest. She lasted through the early evening pickups of the whores (the family must have been dining out). The family lasted past midnight without a complaint; not even an inquiring phone call to the front desk. Frank was studying with the dressmaker’s dummy. Lilly was trying to grow. Franny was at the desk in the lobby, and Susie the bear was cruising there—her presence made the whores’ customers their usual peaceful selves. I was restless. (I was restless for seven years, but this night I was especially restless.) I had been playing darts at the Kaffee Mowatt with Dark Inge and Old Billig. It was another slow night for Old Billig. Screaming Annie found a customer crossing the Kärntnerstrasse and turning down Krugerstrasse a little past midnight. I was waiting my turn at the darts when Screaming Annie and her furtive male companion peeked into the Mowatt; Screaming Annie saw Dark Inge with me and Old Billig.