The Hotel New Hampshire

by John Irving

  I jogged home with the 150 pounds.

  'Hi, Wrench,' I said to the radical under the car.

  I ran back to the Kunsthistorisches Museum and trotted home with seventy-five more pounds. Father, Frank, Susie the bear, Franny, Lilly, and Freud brought home the remaining seventy-five. So then I had weights, then I could evoke the first Hotel New Hampshire -- and Iowa Bob -- and some of the foreignness of Vienna disappeared.

  We had to go to school, of course. It was an American school near the zoo in Hietzing, near the palace at Schonbrunn. For a while Susie would accompany us on the streetcar each morning, and meet us when school was over. It was a great way to meet the other kids -- to be delivered and brought home by a bear. But Father or Freud had to come with Susie because bears were not allowed on the streetcars alone, and the school was near enough to the zoo so that people in the suburbs were more nervous about seeing a bear than were the people in the city.

  It would only occur to me, later, that we all did Frank a great disservice by not acknowledging his sexual discretion. For seven years in Vienna, we never knew who his boyfriends were; he told us that they were boys at the American School -- and being the oldest of us, and in the most advanced German course, Frank was often at school the longest, and alone. His proximity to the excess of sex in the second Hotel New Hampshire must have inclined Frank to discretion in much the same manner that I was convinced of whispering by my intercom initiation with Ronda Ray. And Franny had her bear for the moment -- and her rape to get over, Susie kept telling me.

  'She's over it,' I said.

  'You're not,' Susie said. 'You've still got Chipper Dove on your mind. And so does she.'

  'Then it's Chipper Dove Franny's not done with,' I said. 'The rape's over.'

  'We'll see,' said Susie. 'I'm a smart bear.'

  And the timid souls kept coming, not in overwhelming numbers; overwhelming numbers of timid souls would probably have been a contradiction -- although we could have used the numbers. Even so, we had a better guest list than we had in the first Hotel New Hampshire.

  The tour groups were easier than the individuals. There's something about an individual timid soul that is much more timid than a group of them. The timid souls who traveled alone, or the timid couples with the occasional timid children -- these seemed to be the most easily upset by the day-and-night activity between which they were anxious guests. But in our first three or four years in the second Hotel New Hampshire, only one guest complained -- that was how truly timid these timid souls were.

  The complainer was an American. She was a woman traveling with her husband and her daughter, who was about Lilly's age. They were from New Hampshire, but not from the Dairy part of the state. Frank was working the reception desk when they checked in -- late afternoon, after school. Right away, Frank noticed, the woman started braying about missing some of the 'clean, plain old honest-to-goodness decency' that she apparently associated with New Hampshire.

  'It's the old plainness-but-goodness bullshit,' Franny would say, recalling Mrs. Urick.

  'We've been robbed all over Europe,' the New Hampshire woman's husband told Frank.

  Ernst was in the lobby, explaining to Franny and me some of the weirder positions of 'Tantric union.' This was pretty hard to follow in German, but although Franny and I would never catch up to Frank's German -- and Lilly was, conversationally, almost as good as Frank within a year -- Franny and I learned a lot at the American School. Of course, they didn't teach coitus there. That was Ernst's line, and although Ernst gave me the creeps, I couldn't stand to see him talking to Franny alone, so whenever I saw him talking to her, I tried to listen in. Susie the bear liked to listen in, too -- with a paw touching my sister somewhere, a nice big paw that Ernst could see. But the day the Americans from New Hampshire checked in, Susie the bear was in the W.C.

  'And hair in the bathrooms,' the woman said to Frank. 'You wouldn't believe some of the filth we've been exposed to.'

  'We've thrown the guidebooks away,' her husband said to Frank. 'There's no trusting them.'

  'We're trusting our instincts now,' the woman said, looking over the new lobby of the Hotel New Hampshire. 'We're looking for some American touches.'

  'I can't wait to get home,' the daughter said, in a mousy little voice.

  'I've got a nice pair of rooms on the third floor,' Frank said; 'adjoining rooms,' Frank added. But he was worrying if that wasn't too close to the whores underneath -- only a floor away. 'Then again,' Frank said, 'the view from the fourth is better.'

  'The heck with the view,' the woman said. 'We'll take the adjoining rooms on three. And no hair,' she added, menacingly, just as Susie the bear shuffled into the lobby -- saw the little girl guest, and gave a show-off toss of her head and a low, bearish huff and snort.

  'Look, a bear,' the little girl said, holding her father's leg. Frank hit the bell a sharp ping! 'Luggage carrier!' Frank hollered.

  I had to tear myself away from Ernst's description of the Tantric positions.

  'The vyanta group has two main positions,' he was saying, blandly. 'The woman leans forward till she touches the ground with her hands, while the man takes her from behind, standing -- that's the dhenuka-vyanta-asana, or cow position,' Ernst said, with his liquid stare at Franny.

  'Cow position?' Franny said.

  'Earl!' Susie said, disapprovingly, putting her head in Franny's lap -- playing the bear for the new guests.

  I started upstairs with the luggage. The little girl couldn't take her eyes off the bear.

  'I have a sister about your age,' I told her. Lilly was out taking Freud for a walk -- Freud no doubt lecturing to her about all the sights he couldn't see.

  That was how Freud gave us tours. The baseball bat on one side, one of us children, or Susie, on the other. We steered him through the city, shouting out the names of the street corners when we arrived. Freud was getting deaf, too.

  'Are we on Blutgasse?' Freud would cry out. 'Are we on Blood Lane?' he would ask.

  And Lilly or Frank or Franny or I would holler, 'Ja! Blutgasse!'

  'Take a right,' Freud would direct us. 'When we get to Domgasse, children,' he'd say, 'we must find Number Five. This is the entrance to the Figaro House, where Mozart wrote The Marriage of Figaro. What year, Frank?' Freud would cry.

  'Seventeen eighty-five!' Frank would shout back.

  'And more important than Mozart,' Freud would say, 'is the first coffeehouse in Vienna. Are we still on Blutgasse, children?'

  'Ja! Blood Lane,' we would say.

  'Look for Number Six,' Freud would cry. 'The first coffeehouse in Vienna! Even Schwanger doesn't know this. She loves her Schlagobers, but she's like all these political people,' Freud said. 'She's got no sense of history.'

  It was true that we learned no history from Schwanger. We learned to love coffee, chased with little glasses of water; we learned to like the soft dirt of newspapers on our fingers. Franny and I would fight over the one copy of the International Herald Tribune. In our seven years in Vienna, there was always news of Junior Jones in there.

  'Penn State thirty-five, Navy six!' Franny would read, and we'd all cheer.

  And later, it would be the Cleveland Browns 28, the New York Giants 14. The Baltimore Colts 21, the poor Browns 17. Although Junior rarely imparted any more news than this to Franny -- in his occasional letters -- it was somehow special, hearing about him so indirectly, through the football scores, several days late, in the Herald Tribune.

  'At Judengasse, turn right!' Freud would instruct. And we would follow Jews' Lane to the church of St. Ruprecht.

  'The eleventh century,' Frank would murmur. The older the better for Frank.

  And down to the Danube Canal; at the foot of the slope, on Franz Josefs-Kai, was the monument Freud led us to rather often: the marble plaque memorializing those murdered by the Gestapo, whose headquarters had been on that spot.

  'Right here!' Freud screamed, stamping and whacking with the baseball bat. 'Describe the plaque to me!' he cried.
'I've never seen it.'

  Of course: because it was in one of the camps that he went blind. They had performed some failed experiment on his eyes in the camp.

  'No, not summer camp,' Franny had to tell Lilly, who had always been afraid of being sent to summer camp and was unsurprised to hear that they tortured the campers.

  'Not summer camp, Lilly,' Frank said. 'Freud was in a death camp.'

  'But Herr Tod never found me,' Freud said to Lilly. 'Mr. Death never found me at home when he called.'

  It was Freud who explained to us that the nudes in the fountain at the Neuer Markt, the Providence Fountain -- or the Donner Fountain, after its creator -- were actually copies of the original. The originals were in the Lower Belvedere. Designed to portray water as the source of life, the nudes had been condemned by Maria Theresa.

  'She was a bitch,' Freud said. 'She founded a Chastity Commission,' he told us.

  'What did they do?' Franny asked. 'The Chastity Commission?'

  '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.

  Goodbye, 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 Futtergasse.

  '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.'

  Schraubenschlussel 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 Karntnerstrasse,' 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.