The Hotel New Hampshire (65 page)

But our little Lilly wrote her first book almost by accident; that book was only a euphemism for trying to grow, yet it insisted to her that she
was
a writer, when perhaps she was only a sensitive and loving reader, a lover of literature who thought she
wanted
to write. I think it was the writing that killed Lilly, because writing can do that. It just burned her up; she wasn’t big enough to take the self-abuse of it, to take the constant chipping away—of herself. After the movie version of
Trying to Grow
made Franny famous, and after the TV series of “The First Hotel New Hampshire” made Lilly Berry a household word, I suppose that Lilly wanted to “just write,” as one is always hearing writers say. I suppose she just wanted to be free to write
her
book, now. The problem was, it wasn’t a very good book—the second one. It was called
The Evening of the Mind
, from a line she stole from her guru, Donald Justice.

Now comes the evening of the mind.

Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood;

and so on. She might have been wiser to take her title and make her book from another Donald Justice line:

Time a bow bent with his certain failure.

She might have called her book
Certain Failure
, because it was just that. It was more than she could handle; it was over her head. It was about the death of dreams, it was about how hard the dreams die. It was a brave book, in that it departed from anything directly relatable to Lilly’s little autobiography, but it departed to a country too foreign for her to grasp; she wrote a
vague
book that reflected how foreign the language she was only visiting was to her. When you write vaguely, you are always vulnerable. She was easily wounded when the critics—when the damn reviewers, with their dull, plodding cunning—jumped on her.

According to Frank, who was usually right about Lilly, she suffered the further embarrassment of writing a bad book that was adopted as
heroic
by a rather influential group of bad readers. A certain illiterate kind of college student was
attracted
to the vagueness of
The Evening of the Mind
; this kind of college student was relieved to discover that absolute obscurity was not only publishable but seemingly identified with seriousness. What some of the students liked best in her book, Frank pointed out, was. what Lilly hated most about it—its self-examinations that led nowhere, its plotlessness, its people fading in and out of character, its absence of story. Somehow, among a certain university population, the obvious failure to be clear confirms that what any fool knows is a vice can be rearranged, by art, to resemble a virtue.

“Where in hell do these college kids
get
such an idea!” Franny would complain.

“Not
all
of them have this idea,” Frank would point out. “They think what’s forced and strained and
difficult
with a fucking capital D is
better
than what’s straightforward, fluent, and comprehensible!” Franny shouted. “What the fuck’s
wrong
with these people?”

“Only some of them are like that, Franny,” Frank would say.

“Just the ones who’ve made a cult out of Lilly’s failure?” Franny asked.

“Just the ones who listen to their teachers,” Frank said, smugly—happily at home in one of his anti-everything moods. “I mean, where do you think the college students
learn
to think that way, Franny?” Frank asked her. “From their teachers.”

“Jesus God,” Franny would say.

She would not ask for a part in
The Evening of the Mind
; there was no way to make that book into a movie, anyway. Franny became a star with so much more ease than Lilly became a writer. “Being a star is easier,” Franny would say. “You don’t have to do anything but be relaxed about who you are and trust that people will like you; you just trust that they’ll get the
you in you
, Franny said. “You just be relaxed and hope that the
you in you
comes across.”

For a writer, I guess, the
you in you
needs more nourishment to emerge. I always wanted to write Donald Justice a letter about that, but I think that seeing him—only once, and from a distance—should suffice. If what’s best and clearest in him
isn’t
in his poems, he wouldn’t be a very good writer. And since something good and strong in him
emerges
in his poems, it would probably be disappointing to meet him. Oh, I don’t mean that he’d be a bum. He’s probably a wonderful man. But he couldn’t be as precise as his poems; his poems are so stately, he’d have to be a letdown. In Lilly’s case, of course, her work was a letdown—and she knew it. She knew her work wasn’t as lovable as she was, and Lilly would have preferred it the other way around.

What saved Franny was not just that being a star is easier than being a writer. What saved Franny, too, was that she didn’t have to be a star alone. What Donald Justice knows is that you have to be a writer all alone, whether you
live
alone or not.

You would not recognize me.

Mine is the face which blooms in

The dank mirrors of washrooms

As you grope for the light switch.

My eyes have the expression

Of the cold eyes of statues

Watching their pigeons return

From the feed you have scattered.

“Jesus God,” as Franny has said. “Who’d want to meet
him
?”

But Lilly was lovely to know—except, perhaps, to herself. Lilly wanted her words to be lovely, but her words let her down.

It’s remarkable how Franny and I once thought of Frank as the King of Mice; we had Frank figured all wrong. We underestimated Frank, from the beginning. He was a hero, but he needed to get to that point in time when he would be signing all our checks, and telling us how much we could spend on this or that, in order for us to recognize the hero that Frank had always been.

No, Lilly was our King of Mice. “We should have known!” Franny would wail, and wail. “She was just too small!”

And so Lilly is lost to us, now. She was the sorrow we never quite understood; we never saw through her disguises. Perhaps Lilly never grew quite large enough for us to see.

She authored one masterpiece, which she never gave herself enough credit for. She wrote the screenplay for the movie starring Chipper Dove; she was the writer and director of that opera, in the grand tradition of
Schlagobers
and blood. She knew just how far to go with that story. It was
The Evening of the Mind
that didn’t live up to her own expectations, and the difficulty she had trying to begin again—trying to write the book that would have been called, ambitiously,
Everything After Childhood
. That isn’t even a Donald Justice line; that was Lilly’s own idea, but she couldn’t live up to it, either.

When Franny drinks too much, she gets pissed off at the power Donald Justice had over Lilly; Franny sometimes gets drunk enough to blame poor Donald Justice for what happened to Lilly. But Frank and I are always the first to assure Franny that it was
quality
that killed Lilly; it was the end of
The Great Gatsby
, which was not her ending, which was not an ending within her grasp. And once Lilly said, “
Damn
that Donald Justice, anyway! He’s written all the good lines!”

He may have written the last line my sister Lilly read. Frank found Lilly’s copy of Donald Justice’s
Night Light
, opened to page 20, the page dog-eared many times, and the one line at the top of the page was circled and circled—in lipstick, once, and in several different tones of ink from several different ballpoint pens; even in lowly pencil.

I do not think the ending can be right.

That might have been the line that drove Lilly to it.

It was a February night. Franny was out on the West Coast; Franny couldn’t have saved her. Father and I were in Maine; Lilly knew we went to bed early. Father was on his third Seeing Eye dog at the time. Sacher was gone, a victim of overeating. The little blond dog with the perky, yapping bark, the one that was hit by a car—its vice was chasing cars, fortunately
not
when Father was attached—that one was gone too; Father called her Schlagobers because she had a disposition like whipped cream. The third one was a farter, but only in this way did he bear an unpleasant resemblance to Sorrow; it was another German shepherd, but a male this time, and Father insisted that his name be Fred. That was also the name of the handyman at the third Hotel New Hampshire—a deaf retired lobsterman named Fred. Whenever Father called
any
dog—when he called Sacher, when he called Schlagobers—Fred the handyman would cry, “What?” from whatever part of the hotel he was working in. The whole thing irritated Father so much (and so much, unspokenly, reminded us both of Egg) that Father always threatened to name the
next
dog Fred.

“Since that old fool Fred will answer whenever I call the dog, anyway, no matter
what
name I’m calling!” Father shouted. “Jesus God, if he’s going to be calling out ‘What?’ all the time, we might as well get the name right.”

So Seeing Eye Dog Number Three was Fred. His only bad habit was that he tried to hump the cleaning woman’s daughter whenever the little girl strayed from her mother’s side. Fred would goofily pin the little girl to the ground, and start humping her, and the little girl would scream, “No, Fred!” And the cleaning woman would holler, “Cut it out, Fred!” and whack Fred with a mop or a broom, or with whatever was handy. And Father would hear the fracas and know what was going on, and he’d yell, “Goddamn it, Fred, you horny bastard! Get your ass over here, Fred!” And the deaf handyman, the retired lobsterman, our
other
Fred, would cry out, “What? What?” And I’d have to go find him (because Father refused) and tell him, “NOT
YOU
, FRED! NOTHING, FRED!”

“Oh,” he’d say, going back to work. “Thought somebody called.”

So it would have been hopeless for Lilly to call us in Maine. We wouldn’t have been able to do much more for her than yell “Fred!” a few times.

What Lilly tried to do was call Frank. Frank wasn’t that far from her; he might have helped. We tell him, now, that he might have helped her
that
time, but in the long run, we know, doom floats. Lilly got Frank’s answering service, anyway. Frank had replaced his live answering service with one of those mechanical services, with one of those infuriating recordings of himself.

HI! FRANK HERE—BUT ACTUALLY I’M NOT HERE (HA HA). ACTUALLY, I’M OUT. WANT TO LEAVE A MESSAGE? WAIT FOR THE LITTLE SIGNAL AND TALK YOUR HEART OUT.

Franny left many messages that made Frank cross. “Go fuck a doughnut, Frank!” Franny would scream into the infuriating machine. “It costs me
money
every time that fucking device answers me—I’m in fucking
Los Angeles
, Frank, you moron, you dip-shit, you turd in a birdbath!” And then she’d make all sorts of farting sounds, and very liquid kisses, and Frank would call me, disgusted, as usual.

“Honestly,” he’d say. “I don’t understand Franny at all. She just left the most disgusting message on my tape recorder! I mean, I
know
she thinks she’s being funny, but doesn’t she know that we’ve all heard quite enough of her vulgarity? At her age, it hardly becomes her any longer—if it ever did. You’ve cleaned up
your
language, I wish you’d make an effort to clean up
hers
.”

And on and on.

Lilly’s message must have scared Frank. And he probably didn’t come in from his evening date very long after she had called; he put the machine on and listened to his messages as he was brushing his teeth, getting ready to go to bed.

They were mostly business things. The tennis player he represents had gotten in some difficulty over a deodorant commercial. A screenwriter called to say that a director was “manipulating” him, and Frank made a fast mental note—to the effect that this writer
needed
lots of “manipulation.” A famous choreographer had bogged down in her autobiography; she was blocked in her childhood, she confided to Frank, who just kept brushing his teeth. He rinsed his mouth, turned off the bathroom light, and then heard Lilly.

“Hi, it’s me,” she said, apologetically—to the machine. Lilly was always apologizing. Frank smiled and untucked his bedcovers; he always put his dressmaker’s dummy in bed before he crawled in. There was a long pause on the machine and Frank thought the thing was broken; it often was. But then Lilly added, “It’s just me.” Something about the tiredness in her voice made Frank check the time of night, and made him listen with some anxiety. In the pause that followed, Frank remembers whispering her name. “Go on, Lilly,” he whispered.

And Lilly sang her little song, just a little snatch of a song; it was one of the
Heurigen
songs—a silly, sad song, a King of Mice song. Frank knew the song by heart, of course.

Yerkauft’s mei G’wand, I Fahr in Himmel.

Sell my old clothes, I’m off to heaven.

“Holy cow, Lilly,” Frank whispered to the recorder; he started getting dressed, fast.

“
Auf Wiedersehen
, Frank,” Lilly said, when her little song was over.

Frank didn’t answer her. He ran down to Columbus Circle and caught an uptown cab. And even though Frank was no runner, I’m sure he made good time; I couldn’t have done any better. Even if he’d been home when Lilly called, I always told him that it would take
anyone
longer to cover twenty blocks and a zoo than it takes to fall fourteen stories—the distance from the window of the corner suite on the Stanhope’s fourteenth floor to the pavement at Eighty-first and Fifth Avenue. Lilly had a shorter trip to take than Frank’s, and she would have beaten him to her destination—regardless; there was nothing he could have done. Even so, Frank said, he didn’t say (or even think to himself), “
Auf Wiedersehen
, Lilly,” until after they’d shown him her little body.