by John Irving
'As soon as we're successful here,' Father assured us. 'Just as soon as we make it -- I promise.'
'When?' I hissed at him, but Father put a headlock on me, and kissed me.
'Soon,' he said. 'This place is going to take off -- soon. I can feel it.'
But we would be in Vienna until 1964; we would stay there seven years.
'I grew old there,' Lilly would say; she would be eighteen years old by the time we left Vienna. Older, but not a whole lot bigger -- as Franny would say.
Sorrow floats. We knew that. We shouldn't have been so surprised.
But the night that Susie the bear made Franny forget about pornography -- that night she made my sister sing so well -- Frank and I were struck by a resemblance stronger than the resemblance Ernst the pornographer bore to Chipper Dove. In Frank's room with the dressmaker's dummy pushed against Frank's door, Frank and I lay whispering in the darkness.
'Did you see the bear?' I said.
'You couldn't see her head,' Frank said.
'Right,' I said. 'So it was just the bear suit, really -- Susie was sort of hunched up.'
'Why was she still wearing the bear suit?' Frank asked.
'I don't know,' I said.
'Probably they were just starting,' Frank reasoned.
'But the way the bear looked,' I said. 'Did you see?'
'I know,' Frank whispered.
'All that fur, the body sort of curled,' I said.
'I know what you're saying,' Frank said. 'Stop it.'
In the darkness we both knew what Susie the bear had looked like -- we had both seen whom she resembled. Franny had warned us: she'd told us to be on the lookout for Sorrow's new poses, for Sorrow's new disguises.
'Sorrow,' Frank whispered. 'Susie the bear is Sorrow.'
'She looked like him, anyway,' I said.
'She's Sorrow, I know it,' Frank said.
'Well, for the moment, maybe,' I said. 'For now she is.'
'Sorrow,' Frank kept repeating, until he fell asleep. 'It's Sorrow,' he murmured. 'You can't kill it,' Frank mumbled. 'It's Sorrow. It floats.'
9 The Second Hotel New Hampshire
The last renovation in the new lobby of the Gasthaus Freud was my father's idea. I imagine him standing one morning in front of the post office on the Krugerstrasse, looking up the street at the new lobby -- the candy store completely absorbed, the old signs, like tired soldiers' rifles, leaning against the scaffolding that the workmen were taking down. The signs said: BONBONS, KONDITOREI, ZUCKERWAREN, SCHOKOLADEN, and GASTHAUS FREUD. And my father saw then that they should all be thrown away: no more candy store, no more Gasthaus Freud.
'The Hotel New Hampshire?' said Screaming Annie, always the first whore to arrive (and the last to leave).
'Change with the times,' said Old Billig, the radical. 'Roll with the punches, come up smiling. "The Hotel New Hampshire" sounds okay to me.'
'Another phase, another phase,' said Ernst the pornographer.
'A brilliant idea!' Freud cried. 'Think of the American clientele -- how it will hook them! And no more anti-Semitism,' the old man said.
'No more guests staying away because of their anti-Freudian tendencies, I suppose,' Frank said.
'What the fuck else did you think he'd call it?' Franny asked me. 'It's Father's hotel, isn't it?' she asked.
Screwed down for life, as Iowa Bob would have said.
'I think it's sweet,' Lilly said. 'It's a nice touch, sort of small, but sweet.'
'Sweet?' Franny said. 'Oh boy, we're in trouble: Lilly thinks it's sweet.'
'It's sentimental,' Frank said, philosophically, 'but it doesn't matter.'
I thought that if Frank said something didn't matter again, I would scream. I thought I could fake more than an orgasm if Frank said that again. But once more I was saved by Susie the bear.
'Look, kids,' Susie said. 'Your old man's made a step in a practical direction. Do you realize how many tourists from the U.S. and England are going to find that name reassuring?'
'This is true,' Schwanger said, pleasantly. 'This is a city of the East to the British and to the Americans. The very shape of some of the churches -- the dreaded onion-shaped dome,' Schwanger said, 'and its implications of a world incomprehensible to Westerners ... depending on how far West you come from, even Central Europe can look East,' Schwanger said. 'It's the timid souls who'll be attracted here,' Schwanger predicted, as if she were composing another pregnancy and abortion book. 'The Hotel New Hampshire will ring bells for them -- bells that sound like home.'
'Brilliant,' Freud said. 'Bring us the timid souls,' Freud said, sighing, reaching his hands out to pat the heads that were nearest to him. He found Franny's head and patted it, but the big soft paw of Susie the bear brushed Freud's hand away.
I would get used to that -- that possessive paw. This is a world where what strikes us, at first, as ominous can grow to become commonplace, even reassuring. What seems, at first, reassuring can grow to become ominous, too, but I had to accept that Susie the bear was a good influence on Franny. If Susie could keep Franny from Ernst, I had to be grateful -- and was it too much to hope that Susie the bear might even convince Franny that she should stop writing to Chipper Dove?
'Do you think you are a lesbian, Franny?' I asked her, in the safety of the darkness on the Krugerstrasse -- Father was having trouble with the pink neon flasher: HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE! HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE! HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE! Over and over again.
'I doubt it,' Franny said, softly. 'I think I just like Susie.'
I was thinking, of course, that since Frank knew he was a homosexual, and now Franny was involved with Susie the bear, maybe it was only a matter of time before Lilly and I discovered our similar inclinations. But, as usual, Franny was reading my mind.
'It's not like that,' she whispered. 'Frank is convinced. I'm not convinced of anything -- except, maybe, that this is easier for me. Right now. I mean, it's easier to love someone of your own sex. There's not quite so much to commit yourself to, there's not so much to risk,' she said. 'I feel safer with Susie,' she whispered. 'That's all, I think. Men are so different,' Franny said.
'A phase,' Ernst went around saying -- about everything.
While Fehlgeburt, encouraged by everyone's response to The Great Gatsby, started reading Moby-Dick to us. Because of what happened to Mother and Egg, hearing about the ocean was difficult for us, but we got over that; we concentrated on the whale, especially on the different harpooners (we each had our favorite), and we kept a sharp eye on Lilly, waiting for her to identify Father with Ahab -- 'or maybe she'll decide Frank is the white whale,' Franny whispered. But it was Freud Lilly identified for us.
One night when the dressmaker's dummy stood at attention, and Fehlgeburt was droning, like the sea -- like the tide -- Lilly said, 'Can you hear him? Ssshhh!'
'What?' Frank said, like a ghost -- like Egg would have said, we all knew.
'Cut it out, Lilly,' Franny whispered.
'No, listen,' Lilly said. And for a moment we thought we were below decks, in our seamen's bunks, listening to Ahab's artificial leg restlessly pacing above us. A wooden whack, a bonelike thud. It was just Freud's baseball bat; he was limping his blind way on the floor above us -- he was visiting one of the whores.
'Which one does he see?' I asked.
'Old Billig,' said Susie the bear.
'The old for the old,' Franny said.
'It's sort of sweet, I think,' Lilly said.
'I mean it's Old Billig tonight,' said Susie the bear. 'He must be tired.'
'He does it with all of them?' Frank said.
'Not Jolanta,' Susie said. 'She scares him.'
'She scares me,' I said.
'And not Dark Inge, of course,' Susie said. 'Freud can't see her.'
It did not occur to me to visit the whores -- one or all. Ronda Ray had not really been like them. With Ronda Ray, it was just sex with a fee attached; in Vienna, sex was a business. I could masturbate to my imagination of Jolanta; that was exciting enou
gh. And for love ... well, for love there was always my imagination of Franny. And in the late summer nights, there was also Fehlgeburt. Moby-Dick being such a monster of a reading experience, Fehlgeburt had taken to staying later in the evenings. Frank and I would walk her home. She rented a room in an ill-kept building behind the Rathaus, near the university, and she did not like crossing the Karntnerstrasse or the Graben alone at night, because she would occasionally be mistaken for a whore.
Anyone who mistook Fehlgeburt for a whore must have had a great imagination; she was so clearly a student. It was not that she wasn't pretty, it was that her prettiness clearly wasn't an issue -- for her. What plain good looks she had -- and she had them -- she either suppressed or neglected. Her hair was straggly; on the rare occasions when it was clean, it was simply uncared for. She wore blue jeans and a turtleneck, or a T-shirt, and about her mouth and eyes was the kind of tiredness that suggests too much reading, too much writing, too much thinking -- too many of those things larger than one's own body, and its care or pleasures. She seemed about the same age as Susie, but she was much too humorless to be a bear -- and her loathing for the nighttime activities in the Hotel New Hampshire surely bordered on what Ernst would have called 'disgust.' When it was raining, Frank and I would walk her no farther than the streetcar stop on the Ringstrasse at the opera; when it was nice, we walked her through the Plaza of Heroes and up the Ring toward the university. We were just three kids fresh from thinking about whales, walking under the big buildings in a city too old for all of us. Most nights it was as if Frank weren't there.
'Lilly is only eleven,' Fehlgeburt would say. 'It's wonderful that she loves literature. It could be her salvation. That hotel is no place for her.'
'Wo ist die Gemutlichkeit?' Frank was singing.
'You're very good with Lilly,' I told Miss Miscarriage. 'Do you want a family of your own, someday?'
'Four hundred and sixty-four!' Frank sang.
'I wouldn't want children until after the revolution,' Fehlgeburt said, humorlessly.
'Do you think Fehlgeburt likes me?' I asked Frank, when we were walking home.
'Wait till we start school,' Frank suggested. 'Find a nice young girl -- your own age.'
And so, although I lived in a Viennese whorehouse, my sexual world was probably like the sexual world for most Americans who were fifteen in 1957; I beat off to images of a dangerously violent prostitute, while I kept walking a young 'older' girl to her home -- waiting for the day I might dare to kiss her, or even hold her hand.
I expected that the 'timid souls' -- the guests who (Schwanger had predicted) would be drawn to the Hotel New Hampshire -- would remind me of myself. They didn't. They came occasionally in buses: odd groups on organized tours -- and some of the tours were as odd as the groups. Librarians from Devon, Kent, and Cornwall; ornithologists from Ohio -- they had been observing storks at Rust. They were so regular in their habits that they all went to bed before the whores started working; they slept right through the nightly rumpus and were often off on a tour in the morning before Screaming Annie wrapped up her last orgasm, before the radical Old Billig walked in off the street -- the new world shining in his old mind's eye. The groups were the oblivious ones, and Frank could sometimes make extra money by marching them off on 'walking tours.' The groups were easy -- even the Japanese Male Choral Society, who discovered the whores as a group (and used them as a group). What a loud, strange time that was -- all that screwing, all that singing! The Japanese had a great many cameras with them and took everyone's picture -- all of our family pictures, too. In fact, Frank would always say it's a shame that the only photographs we have of our time in Vienna come from that one visit of the Japanese Male Choral Society. There is one of Lilly with Fehlgeburt -- and a book, of course. There's a touching one of the two Old Billigs; they look like what Lilly would call a 'sweet' old couple. There's Franny leaning on the stout shoulder of Susie the bear, Franny looking a little thin, but sassy and strong -- 'strangely confident' is how Frank describes Franny in this period. There's a curious one of Father and Freud. They appear to be sharing the baseball bat -- or they appear to have been squabbling over the bat; it is as if they'd been fighting over who was up next, and they'd interrupted their brawl only long enough for the picture to be taken.
I'm standing with Dark Inge. I remember the Japanese gentleman who asked Inge and me to stand beside each other; we had been sitting down, playing crazy eights, but the Japanese said the light wasn't right and so we had to stand. It's a slightly unnatural moment; Screaming Annie is still sitting down -- at that part of the table where the light was generous -- and overly powdered Babette is whispering something to Jolanta, who is standing a little back from the table with her arms folded across her impressive bosom. Jolanta could never learn the rules to crazy eights. In this picture, Jolanta looks like she's about to break up the game. I remember that the Japanese were afraid of her, too -- perhaps because she was so much bigger than any of them.
And what distinguishes all these photographs -- our only pictorial record of Vienna, 1957-64 -- is that all these people familiar to us have to share the photographs with a Japanese or two, with a total stranger or two. Even the photograph of Ernst the pornographer leaning against the car outside. Arbeiter is leaning against the fender with him -- and those legs protruding from under the grille of the old Mercedes, those legs belong to the one called Wrench; Schraubenschlussel never got more than his legs in a picture. And surrounding the car are Japanese -- strangers none of us would see again.
Might we have known, then -- had we looked at that photograph closely -- that this was no ordinary car? Who ever heard of a Mercedes, even an old one, that needed so much mechanical attention? Herr Wrench was always under the car, and crawling around in it. And why did the one car belonging to the Symposium on East-West Relations need so much care when it was so rarely driven anywhere? Looking at it, now, of course ... well, the photograph is obvious. It is hard to look at that photograph and not recognize that old Mercedes for what it was.
A bomb. A constantly wired and rewired, ever-ready bomb. The whole car was a bomb. And those unrecognizable Japanese that populate all of our only photographs ... well, now it's easy to see these strangers, those foreign gentlemen, as symbolic of the unknown angels of death which would accompany that car. To think that for years we children told each other jokes about how bad a mechanic Schraubenschlussel must be in order to be constantly fussing with that Mercedes! When all the while he was an expert! Mr. Wrench, the bomb expert; for almost seven years that bomb was ready -- every day.
We never knew what they were waiting for -- or what moment would have been ripe for it, had we not forced their hand. We have only the Japanese pictures to go on, and they make a murky story.
'What do you remember of Vienna, Frank?'' I asked him -- I ask him all the time. Frank went into a room to be alone with himself, and when he came out he handed me a short list:
1.Franny with Susie the bear.
2.Going to buy your damn barbells.
3.Walking Fehlgeburt home.
4.The presence of the King of Mice.
Frank handed me this list and said, 'Of course, there's more, but I don't want to get into it.'
I understand, and of course I remember going to buy my barbells, too. We all went. Father, Freud, Susie, and we children. Freud went because he knew where the sports shop was. Susie went because Freud could help her remember where the shop was by shouting at her in the streetcar. 'Are we past that hospital-supply place on Mariahilfer?' Freud would cry. 'It's the second left, or the third, after that.'
'Earl!' Susie would say, looking out the window. The Strassenbahn conductor would caution Freud, saying, 'I hope it's safe -- it's not tied: the bear. We don't usually let them on if they're not tied.'
'Earl!' Susie said.
'It's a smart bear,' Frank told the conductor.
In the sports shop I bought 300 pounds of weights, one long barbell, and two dumbbell bars for the one-
arm curls.
'Deliver them to the Hotel New Hampshire, Father said.
'They don't deliver,' Frank said.
'They don't deliver?' Franny said. 'Well, we can't carry them!'
'Earl!' Susie said.
'Be nice, Susie!' Freud shouted. 'Don't be rude!'
'The bear would really appreciate it if these weights were delivered,' Frank told the man in the sports shop. But it didn't work. We should have seen then that the power of a bear in getting things to work out for us was diminishing. We distributed the weights as best we could. I put seventy-five on each of the short dumbbell bars and carried one in each hand. Father and Frank and Susie the bear struggled with the long bar, and another 150 pounds. Franny opened doors and cleared the sidewalk, and Lilly held on to Freud; she was his Seeing Eye bear for the trip home.
'Jesus God!' Father said, when they wouldn't let us on the Strassenbahn.
'They let us on to get out here!' Franny said.
'It's not the bear they mind,' Freud said. 'It's the long barbell.'
'It looks dangerous, the way you're carrying it,' Franny told Frank, Susie, and Father.
'If you'd kept working with the weights, like Iowa Bob,' I told Father, 'you could carry it by yourself. You wouldn't make it look so heavy.'
Lilly had noticed that the Austrians permitted bears on streetcars, but not barbells; she also noticed that the Austrians were liberal in regard to skis. She suggested we buy a ski bag and put the long barbell in it; then the streetcar conductor would think the barbell was just some very heavy pair of skis.
Frank suggested someone go get Schraubenschlussel's car.
'It never runs,' Father said.
'It must be ready to run by now,' Franny said. 'That asshole's been fixing it for years.'
Father hopped the streetcar and went home to ask for the car. And shouldn't we have known by the radicals' quick refusal that a bomb was parked outside our new hotel? But we thought it was all merely an aspect of the rudeness of the radicals; we carried all that weight home. I finally had to leave the others, and the long barbell, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. They wouldn't let a barbell in the museum, either -- nor would they let in a bear. 'Brueghel wouldn't have minded,' Frank said. But they had to kill time on the street corner. Susie danced a little; Freud tapped his baseball bat; Lilly and Franny sang an American song -- they passed the time by making a little money. Street clowns, Viennese specialties, 'the presence of the King of Mice,' as Frank would say -- Frank passed the hat. It was the hat from the bus driver's uniform Father had bought Frank -- the seedy-funeral-parlor cap that Frank wore when he played doorman at the Hotel New Hampshire. Frank wore it all the time in Vienna -- our imposter King of Mice, Frank. We all thought often of the sad performer with his unwanted rodents who one day stopped passing the open windows, who made the leap, taking his poor mice with him. LIFE IS SERIOUS BUT ART IS FUN! He made his statement; the open windows he had kept passing for so long -- they finally drew him.
