The Hotel New Hampshire

by John Irving

  '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. 'Preferably, 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 fifth 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.

  'A kind of bohemian hotel,' Frank said, optimistically.

  'What do you know about bohemians, Frank?' Franny asked.

  In Frank's room was a dressmaker's dummy, formerly the property of a prostitute who had kept a permanent room in the hotel. It was a stoutish dummy, upon which perched the chipped head of a mannequin Freud claimed had been stolen from one of the big department stores on the Karntnerstrasse. A pretty but pitted face with her wig askew.

  'Perfect for all your costume changes, Frank,' Franny said. Frank sullenly hung his coat on it.

  'Very funny,' he said.

  Franny's room adjoined mine. We shared a bath with an ancient bathtub in it; the tub was deep enough to stew an ox in. The W.C. was down the hall and directly off the lobby. Only Father's room had its own bath and its own W.C. It appeared that Susie shared the bath Franny and I shared, although she could enter it
only through one of our rooms.

  'Don't sweat it,' Susie said. 'I don't wash a whole lot.'

  We could tell. The odor was not exactly bear, but it was acrid, salty, rich, and strong, and when she took her bear's head off, and we saw her dark, damp hair -- her pale, pockmarked face, and her haggard, nervous eyes -- we felt more comfortable with her appearance as a bear.

  'What you see,' Susie said, 'are the ravishments of acne -- my teen-age misery. I am the original not-bad-if-you-put-a-bag-over-her-head girl.'

  'Don't feel bad,' said Frank. 'I'm a homosexual. I'm not in for such a hot time as a teen-ager, either.'

  'Well, at least you're attractive,' said Susie the bear. 'Your whole family is attractive,' she said, darting a mean look at us all. 'You may get discriminated against, but let me tell you: there's no discrimination quite like the Ugly Treatment. I was an ugly kid and I just get uglier, every fucking day.'

  We couldn't help staring at her in the bear costume without the head; we wondered, of course, if Susie's own body was as burly as a bear's. And when we saw her later in the afternoon, sweating in her T-shirt and gym shorts, doing squats and knee bends against the wall of Freud's office -- warming up for her role when the radicals checked out for the day and the prostitutes came on at night -- we could see she was physically suited to her particular form of animal imitation.

  'Pretty chunky, huh?' she said to me. Too many bananas, Iowa Bob might have said; and not enough road work.

  But -- to be fair -- it was hard for Susie to go anywhere not dressed, and performing, as a bear. Exercise is difficult when dressed as a bear.

  'I can't blow my cover or we're in trouble,' she said.

  Because how could Freud ever keep order without her? Susie the bear was the enforcer. When the radicals were bothered by troublemakers from the Right, when there were violent shouting matches in the hall and on the staircase, when some new-wave fascist started screaming, 'Nothing is free!' -- when a small mob came to protest in the lobby, carrying the banner that said the Symposium on East-West Relations should move ... farther East -- it was at these times that Freud needed her, Susie said.

  'Get out, you're making the bear hostile!' Freud would shout.

  Sometimes it took a low growl and a short charge.

  'It's funny,' Susie said. 'I'm not really so tough, but no one tries to fight a bear. All I have to do is grab someone and they roll into a ball and start moaning. I just sort of breathe on the bastards, I just kind of lay a little weight on them. No one fights back if you're a bear.'

  Because of the radicals' gratitude for this bearish protection, there was really no problem telling the radicals to move upstairs. My father and Freud explained their case in midafternoon. Father offered me as a typewriter mover, and I began carrying the machines up to the empty fifth-floor rooms. There were a half-dozen typewriters and a mimeograph machine; the usual office supplies; a seeming excess of telephones. I got a little tired with the third or fourth desk, but I hadn't been doing my usual weight lifting -- while we were traveling -- and so I appreciated the exercise. I asked a couple of the younger radicals if they knew where I could get a set of barbells, but they seemed very suspicious -- that we were Americans -- and either they didn't understand English or they chose to speak their own language. There was a brief protest from an older radical, who struck up what appeared to be quite a lively argument with Freud, but Susie the bear started whining and rolling her head around the old man's ankles -- as if she were trying to blow her nose on the cuffs of his pants -- and he calmed down and climbed the stairs, even though he knew Susie wasn't a real bear.

  'What are they writing?' Franny asked Susie. 'I mean, is it one of those newsletter kind of things, is it propaganda?'

  'Why do they have so many phones?' I asked, because we hadn't heard the phones ringing, not once -- not all day.

  'They make a lot of outgoing calls,' Susie said. 'I think they're into threatening phone calls. And I don't read their newsletters. I'm not into their politics.'

  'But what are their politics?' Frank asked.

  'To change fucking everything,' Susie said. 'To start again. They want to wipe the slate clean. They want a whole new ball game.'

  'So do I,' said Frank. 'That sounds like a good idea.'

  'They're scary,' said Lilly. 'They look right over you, and they don't see you when they're looking right at you.'

  'Well, you're pretty short,' said Susie the bear. 'They sure look at me, a lot.'

  'And one of them looks at Franny, a lot,' I said.

  'That's not what I mean,' said Lilly. 'I mean they don't see people when they look at you.'

  'That's because they're thinking about how everything could be different,' Frank said.

  'People, too, Frank?' Franny asked. 'Do they think people could be different? Do you?'

  'Yeah,' said Susie the bear. 'Like we could all be dead.'

  Grief makes everything intimate; in our grieving for Mother and Egg, we got to know the radicals and whores as if we had always known them. We were the bereft children, motherless (to the whores), our golden brother slain (to the radicals). And so -- to compensate for our gloom, and the added gloom of the conditions in the Gasthaus Freud -- the radicals and whores treated us pretty well. And despite their day-and-night differences, they bore more similarities to each other than they might have supposed.

  They both believed in the commercial possibilities of a simple ideal: they both believed they could, one day, be 'free.' They both thought that their own bodies were objects easily sacrificed for a cause (and easily restored, or replaced, after the hardship of the sacrifice). Even their names were similar -- if for different reasons. They had only code names, or nicknames, or if they used their real names, they used only their first names.

  Two of them actually shared the same name, but there was no confusion, since the radical was male, the whore was female, and they were never at the Gasthaus Freud at the same time. The name was Old Billig -- billig, in German, means 'cheap.' The oldest whore was called this because her prices were substandard for the district of the city she strolled; the Krugerstrasse whores, although Krugerstrasse was in the First District, were themselves a sort of subdistrict to the Karntnerstrasse whores (around the corner). If you turned off the Karntnerstrasse onto our tiny street, it was as if you were lowering yourself (by comparison) into a world without light; one street off the Karntnerstrasse you lost the glow of the Hotel Sacher, and the grand gleam of the State Opera, and you noticed how the whores wore more eyeshadow, how their knees buckled, slightly, or their ankles appeared to cave in (from standing too long), or how they appeared to be thicker in the waist -- like the dressmaker's dummy in Frank's room. Old Billig was the captain of the Krugerstrasse whores.

  Her namesake, among the radicals, was the old gentleman who had argued most ferociously with Freud about moving to the fifth floor. This Old Billig had earned his 'cheap' designation for his reputation of leading a hand-to-mouth existence -- and his history of being what the other radicals called 'a radical's radical.' When there were Bolsheviks, he was one; when the names changed, he changed his name. He was at the forefront of every movement, but -- somehow -- when the movement ran amok or into terminal trouble, Old Billig took up the rear position and discreetly trailed away out of sight, waiting for the next forefront. The idealists among the younger radicals were both suspicious of Old Billig and admiring of his endurance -- his survival. This was not unlike the view held of Old Billig, the whore, by her colleagues.

  Seniority is an institution that is revered and resented in and out of society.

  Like Old Billig the radical, Old Billig the whore was the most argumentative with Freud about changing floors.

  'But you're going down,' Freud said, 'you'll have to climb one less flight of stairs. In a hotel with no elevator, the second floor is an improvement over the third.'

  I could follow Freud's German, but not Old Billig's answer. Frank told me that she protested on the grounds of having too many 'me
mentos' to move.

  'Look at this boy!' Freud said, groping around for me. 'Look at his muscles!' Freud, of course, 'looked' at my muscles by feeling them; squeezing and punching me, he shoved me in the general direction of the old whore. 'Feel him!' Freud cried. 'He can move every memento you got. If we gave him a day, he could move the whole hotel!'

  And Frank told me what Old Billig said. 'I don't need to feel any more muscles,' Old Billig told Freud, declining the offer to squeeze me. 'I feel muscles in my frigging sleep,' she said. 'Sure he can move the mementos,' she said. 'But I don't want nothing broken.'

  And so I moved Old Billig's 'mementos' with the greatest of care. A collection of china bears that rivaled Mother's collection (and after Mother's death, Old Billig would invite me to visit her room in the daylight hours -- when she was off duty, and gone from the Gasthaus Freud -- and I could spend a quiet time alone with her bears, remembering Mother's collection, which perished with her). Old Billig also liked plants -- plants that leaped out of those pots designed to resemble animals and birds: flowers springing from the backs of frogs, ferns sprawling over a grove of flamingos, an orange tree sprouting from the head of an alligator. The other whores mostly had changes of clothes and cosmetics and medicines to move. It was strange to think of them as having only 'night rooms' at the Gasthaus Freud -- as opposed to Ronda Ray having her 'dayroom'; it struck me how dayrooms and night rooms were used for similar purposes.

  We met the whores that first night we helped them move from the third to the second floor. There were four whores on the Krugerstrasse, plus Old Billig. Their names were Babette, Jolanta, Dark Inge, and Screaming Annie. Babette was called Babette because she was the only one who spoke French; she tended to get most of the French customers (the French being most sensitive about speaking any language but French). Babette was small -- and therefore Lilly's favorite -- with a pixie face that the somber light in the lobby of the Gasthaus Freud could cause to look (at certain angles) unpleasantly rodent-like. In later years I would think of Babette as probably anoretic, without knowing it -- none of us knew what anorexia was, in 1957. She wore flowery prints, very summer-like dresses -- even when it wasn't summer -- and she had a funny kind of over-powdered sense about her (as if, if you touched her, a small puff of powder would blast through her pores); at other times, her skin had a waxiness about it (as if, if you touched her, your finger might leave a dent). Lilly told me once that Babette's smallness was an important part of her (Lilly's) growing up, because Babette helped Lilly realize that small people could actually have sex with large people and not be altogether destroyed. That's how Lilly liked to put it: 'Not altogether destroyed.'