The Hotel New Hampshire

by John Irving

  Jolanta called herself Jolanta because she said it was a Polish name and she was fond of Polish jokes. She was square-faced, strong-looking, as big as Frank (and nearly as awkward); she gave off a heartiness that you suspected of being false -- as if, in the middle of a booming good joke, she might turn suddenly sour and produce a knife from her handbag or grind a wineglass into someone's face. She was broad-shouldered and heavy-breasted, solid in her legs but not fat -- Jolanta had the robust charm of a peasant who'd been strangely corrupted by a sneaky sort of city violence; she looked erotic, but dangerous. In my first days and nights at the Gasthaus Freud it was her image I most often masturbated to -- it was Jolanta I had the greatest trouble speaking to, not because she was the most coarse but because I was the most afraid of her.

  'How can you recognize a Polish prostitute?' she asked me. I had to ask Frank for a translation. 'Because she pays you to fuck her,' Jolanta said. This I understood without Frank's help.

  'Did you get it?' Frank asked me.

  'Jesus, yes, Frank,' I said.

  'Then laugh,' Frank said. 'You'd better laugh.' And I looked at Jolanta's hands -- she had the wrists of a farmer, the knuckles of a boxer -- and laughed.

  Dark Inge was not a laugher. She'd had a most unhappy life. More important, she had not lived very much of her life, yet; she was only eleven. A mulatto -- with an Austrian mother and a black American G. I. for her father -- she'd been born at the start of the occupation. Her father had left with the occupying powers, in 1955, and nothing he'd told Inge or her mother about the treatment of black people in the United States had made them want to go with him. Dark Inge's English was the best among the whores, and when Father left for France -- to identify the bodies of Mother and Egg -- it was Dark Inge we spent most of our sleepless nights with. She was as tall as I was, although she was only Lilly's age, and the way they dressed her up made her look as old as Franny. Lithe and pretty and mocha-colored, she worked as a tease; she was not a real whore.

  She was not allowed to stroll the Krugerstrasse without another whore beside her, unless she strolled the Krugerstrasse with Susie the bear; when any man wanted her, he was told he could only look at her -- and touch himself. Dark Inge was not old enough to be touched, and no man was allowed to be alone in a room with her. If a man wanted to be with her, Susie the bear kept them company. It was a simple system, but it worked. If a man looked as if he was about to touch Dark Inge, Susie the bear would make the necessary sounds and gestures preparatory to a charge. If the man asked Dark Inge to take off too many clothes, or if he insisted she look at him while he masturbated, Susie the bear would get restless. 'You're making the bear hostile,' Dark Inge would warn the man, who would leave -- or else finish masturbating quickly, while Dark Inge looked away.

  All the whores knew that Susie the bear could get to their rooms in a matter of seconds. All it required was some cry of distress, because Susie -- like any well-trained animal -- knew all their voices by heart. Babette's nasal little yelp, Jolanta's violent bellow, Old Billig's shattering 'mementos.' But to us children the worst customers were the shame-faced men who masturbated to only the most modest glimpses of Dark Inge.

  'I don't think I could beat off with a bear in my room,' Frank said.

  'I don't think you could beat off with Susie in your room, Frank,' Franny said.

  Lilly shuddered, and I joined her. With Father in France -- with those bodies most important to us -- we viewed the body traffic in the Gasthaus Freud with that detachment peculiar to mourners.

  'When I get old enough,' Dark Inge told us, 'I can charge for the real thing.' It surprised us children that 'the real thing' cost more money than beating off while watching Inge.

  Dark Inge's mother was planning to get Inge out of the business by the time her daughter was 'old enough.' Dark Inge's mother planned to retire her daughter before her daughter came of age. Dark Inge's mother was the fifth lady of the night in the Gasthaus Freud -- the one called Screaming Annie. She made more money than any other whore on the Krugerstrasse, because she was working for a respectable retirement (for her daughter and for herself).

  If you wanted a frail flower, or a little French, you asked for Babette. If you wanted experience, and a bargain, you got Old Billig. If you courted danger -- if you liked a touch of violence -- you could take your chances with Jolanta. If you were ashamed of yourself, you could pay to steal a look at Dark Inge. And if you desired the ultimate deception, you went with Screaming Annie.

  As Susie the bear said, 'Screaming Annie's got the best fake orgasm in the business.'

  Screaming Annie's fake orgasm could jar Lilly out of her worst nightmares, it could cause Frank to sit bolt upright in bed and howl in terror at the dark figure of the dressmaker's dummy lurking at the foot of his bed, it could rip me out of the deepest sleep -- suddenly wide-awake, with an erection, or grabbing my own throat to feel where it was slashed. Screaming Annie, in my opinion, was an argument -- all by herself -- for not having the whores occupy the floor most immediately above our own.

  She could even stir Father out of his grief -- even upon his immediate return from France. 'Jesus God,' he would say, and come to kiss each of us, and see if we were safe.

  Only Freud could sleep through it. 'Leave it to Freud,' Frank said, 'to not be fooled by a fake orgasm.' Frank thought himself very clever for this oft-repeated remark -- because, of course, he meant the other Freud, not our blind manager.

  Screaming Annie could sometimes fool even Susie the bear, who would grumble, 'God, that's got to be a real one.' Or, worse, Susie would occasionally confuse a fake orgasm with a possible scream for help. 'That's nobody coming, for Christ's sake!' Susie would roar, reminding me of Ronda Ray. 'That is somebody dying!' And she would go bawling down the second-floor hall, throw herself against Screaming Annie's door, charge the wrecked bed with her terrifying snarls -- causing Screaming Annie's mate to fly, or faint, or wither on the spot. And Screaming Annie would say, mildly, 'No no, Susie, nothing's wrong. He's a nice man.' By which time it was often too late to revive the man -- at the very least reduced to a cringing, shrunken shape of fear.

  'That's the ultimate guilt trip,' Franny used to say. 'Just when some guy's about to get off, a bear busts into the room and starts mauling him.'

  'Actually, honey,' Susie told Franny, 'I think some of them get off on that.'

  Were there actually some customers at the Gasthaus Freud who could only come when attacked by a bear? I wondered. But we were too young; we would never know some things about that place. Like the ghouls of all our Halloweens past, the clientele in the Gasthaus Freud would never be quite real for us. At least not the whores, and their customers -- and not the radicals.

  Old Billig (the radical Old Billig) was the first to arrive. Like Iowa Bob, he said he was too old to waste what was left of his life asleep. He got there so early in the morning that he occasionally passed the last whore on his way in, her way out. This was inevitably Screaming Annie, working the hardest hours -- to save herself and her dark daughter.

  Susie the bear slept in the early morning hours. There was little whore trouble after dawn, as if the light kept people safe -- if not always honest -- and the radicals never started quarreling before midmorning. Most of the radicals were late sleepers. They wrote their manifestos all day, and made their threatening phone calls. They harassed each other -- 'in the absence of more tangible enemies,' Father would say of them. Father, after all, was a capitalist. Who else could even imagine the perfect hotel? Who but a capitalist, and a basic non-rocker of the boat, would even want to live in a hotel, to manage a non-industry, to sell a product that was sleep -- not work -- a product that was at least rest if not recreation? My father thought the radicals were more ludicrous than the whores. I think that after the death of my mother my father felt familiar with the confusions of lust and loneliness; perhaps he was even grateful for 'the business' -- as the whores called their work.

  He was less sympathetic to the world-changers, to th
e idealists bent on altering the unpleasantries of human nature. This surprises me, now, because I think of Father as simply another kind of idealist -- but of course Father was more determined to outlive unpleasantries than change them. That my father would never learn German also kept him isolated from the radicals; by comparison, the whores spoke better English.

  The radical Old Billig knew one phrase of English. He liked to tickle Lilly, or give her a lollipop, while he teased her. 'Yankee go home,' he would say to her, lovingly.

  'He's a sweet old fart,' Franny said. Frank tried to teach Old Billig another English phrase that Frank thought Billig would like.

  'Imperialist dog,' Frank would say, but Billig got this hopelessly confused with 'Nazi swine,' and it always came out strange.

  The radical who spoke the best English used the code name Fehlgeburt. It was Frank who first explained to me that Fehlgeburt means 'miscarriage' in German.

  'As in "miscarriage of justice," Frank?' Franny asked. 'No,' Frank said. 'The other kind. The baby kind of miscarriage,' Frank said.

  Fraulein Fehlgeburt, as she was called -- Miss Miscarriage, to us children -- had never been pregnant, thus had never miscarried; she was a university student whose code name was 'Miscarriage' because the only other woman on the staff of the Symposium on East-West Relations had the code name 'Pregnant.' She had been. Fraulein Schwanger -- for schwanger means 'pregnant' in German -- was an older woman, Father's age, who was famous in Viennese radical circles for a past pregnancy. She had written a whole book about being pregnant, and another book -- a kind of sequel to the first-about having an abortion. When she was first pregnant she had worn a bright red sign saying 'pregnant' on her chest -- SCHWANGER! -- under which, in letters of the same size, was the question 'ARE YOU THE FATHER?' It had made a sensational book jacket, too, and she had donated all her royalties to various radical causes. Her subsequent abortion -- and that book -- had made her a popular subject for controversy; she could still draw a crowd when she gave a speech, and she was a loyal donator of the proceeds. Schwanger's abortion book -- published in 1955, simultaneously with the end of the occupation -- had made the expulsion of this unwanted child symbolic of Austria's freeing herself from the occupying powers. 'The father,' Schwanger wrote, 'could have been Russian, French, British, or American; at least to my body, and to my way of thinking, he was an unwanted foreigner.'

  Schwanger was close to Susie the bear; the two shared a great many rape theories together. But Schwanger would also befriend my father; she appeared to be the most consoling to him, after my mother's loss, not because there was anything 'between' them (as they say) but because the calmness of her voice -- the steady, soft cadence of her speech -- was the most like my mother's of all the voices in Gasthaus Freud. Like my mother, Schwanger was a gentle persuader. 'I'm just a realist,' she had a way of saying, so innocently -- though her hopes for wiping the slate clean, for starting a new world, from scratch, were as fervent as the fire dreams of any of the radicals.

  Schwanger took us children with her, several times a day, for coffee with milk and cinnamon and whipped cream at the Kaffee Europa on Karntnerstrasse -- or to the Kaffee Mozart at Albertinaplatz Zwei, just behind the State Opera. 'In case you don't know it,' Frank would say, later -- and over and over, 'The Third Man was filmed at the Kaffee Mozart.' Schwanger couldn't have cared less; it was the whipped cream that drove her away from the clatter of typewriters and the heat of debate, it was the calm of the coffeehouse that got to her. 'The only worthwhile institution in our society -- a shame that the coffeehouse will have to go, too,' Schwanger told Frank, Franny, Lilly, and me. 'Drink up, dears!'

  When you wanted whipped cream, you asked for Schlagobers, and if Schwanger meant 'pregnant' to the other radicals, she meant pure Schlagobers to us children. She was our mother-like radical with a weakness for whipped cream; we really liked her.

  And young Fraulein Fehlgeburt, whose major at the University of Vienna was American literature, adored Schwanger. We thought she seemed actually proud to be code-named 'Miscarriage,' perhaps because we thought that Fehlgeburt, in German, could also mean 'Abortion.' I'm sure this can't be true, but in Frank's dictionary, at least, the word for miscarriage and abortion was the same word, Fehlgeburt -- which symbolizes perfectly our out-of-itness with the radicals, our failure to ever understand them. Every misunderstanding has at its center a breakdown of language. We never actually understood what these two women meant -- the tough and mother-like Schwanger, marshaling forces (and money) for causes that struck us children as left of reason, but able to soothe us with her gentle and most logical voice, and her Schlagobers; and the waiflike, stuttering, shy university student of American literature, Miss Miscarriage, who read aloud to Lilly (not just to comfort a motherless child but to improve her English). She read so well that Franny, Frank, and I would almost always listen in. Fehlgeburt liked to read to us in Frank's room, so it appeared that the dressmaker's dummy was listening, too.

  It was from Fraulein Fehlgeburt, in the Gasthaus Freud -- with our father in France, with our Mother and Egg dragged from the cold sea (under the marker buoy that was Sorrow) -- that we first heard the whole of The Great Gatsby; it was that ending, with Miss Miscarriage's lilting Austrian accent, that really got to Lilly.

  ' "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eludes us then, but that's no matter," ' Fehlgeburt read, excitedly, ' " -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther ..."!' Miss Miscarriage read. ' "And one fine morning -- " ' Fehlgeburt paused; her saucer-like eyes seemed glazed by that green light Gatsby saw -- maybe by the orgiastic future, too.

  'What?' Lilly said, breathlessly, and a little echo of Egg was in Frank's room with us.

  ' "So we beat on," ' Fehlgeburt concluded, ' "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." '

  'Is that it?' Frank asked. 'Is it over?' He was squinting, his eyes were shut so tight.

  'Of course it's over, Frank,' Franny said. 'Don't you know an ending when you hear one?'

  Fehlgeburt looked drained of her blood, her child-like face with a sad grown-up's frown, a strand of her lank blond hair wrapped nervously around a neat pink ear. Then Lilly started in, and we couldn't stop her. It was late afternoon, the whores hadn't come around, but when Lilly started in, Susie the bear thought Screaming Annie was faking an orgasm in a room she didn't belong in. Susie burst into Frank's room, knocking the dressmaker's dummy over and causing poor Fraulein Fehlgeburt to yip in alarm. But even that intrusion couldn't stop Lilly. Her cry seemed caught in her throat, her grief seemed to be something she was sure to choke on; we could not believe such a small body could generate so much trembling, could orchestrate so much sound.

  Of course, we were all thinking, it's not that the book moved her so much -- it's that bit about being 'borne back ceaselessly into the past,' it's our past that's moving her, we were all thinking; it's Mother, it's Egg, and how we won't ever be able to forget them. But when we calmed her down, Lilly blurted out suddenly that it was Father she was crying for. 'Father is a Gatsby,' she cried. 'He is! I know he is!'

  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.