by John Irving
'The porno king and his whole fucking gang,' Susie said. 'They're asking us if we've seen Fehlgeburt. And last night they were asking the whores.'
'Nobody has seen her?' I said, and there was the growingly familiar cold draft up the pants legs again, there was the whiff of dead air from the tombs holding the heartless Hapsburgs.
How many days had we waited for Father and Freud to bicker over finding a buyer for the Hotel New Hampshire before they blew the whistle on the would-be bombers? And how many nights had we wasted, arguing about whether we should tell the American Consulate, or the Embassy, and have them tell the police -- or whether we should just tell the Austrian police straightaway? When you're in love with your sister, you lose a lot of perspective on the real world. The goddamn Welt, as Frank would say.
Frank asked me, 'What floor does Fehlgeburt live on? I mean, you've seen her place. How high up is she?'
Lilly, the writer, tuned right in on the question, but it didn't make sense to me -- yet. 'It's the first floor,' I said to Frank, 'it's just one flight up.'
'Not high enough,' Lilly said, and then I got it. Not high enough to jump out the window, is what she meant. If Fehlgeburt had at last decided not to keep passing the open windows, she would have to have found another way.
'That's it,' Frank said, taking my arm. 'If she's pulled a King of Mice, she's probably still there.'
It was more than a little shortness of breath I felt, crossing the Plaza of Heroes and heading up the Ring toward the Rathaus; that's a long way for a wind sprint, but I was in shape. I felt a little out of breath, there can be no doubt of that, but I felt a lot guilty -- though it couldn't have been simply me; I couldn't even have been Fehlgeburt's main reason to stop passing the open windows. And there was no evidence, they said later, that she had done much of anything after I'd gone. Maybe she'd read a little more Moby-Dick, because the police were very thorough and even noted where she'd marked her place. And I know, of course, that the place she'd stopped reading was unmarked when I left. Curiously, she'd marked it just where she had stopped when she'd been reading to me -- as if she had reread that entire evening before adopting the open-window policy. Fehlgeburt's form of open-window policy had been a neat little gun I never knew about. The suicide note was simple and addressed to no one, but I knew it was meant for me.
The night you
saw Schwanger
you didn't see
me. I have a
gun, too! 'So
we beat on ...'
Fehlgeburt concluded, quoting Lilly's favorite ending.
I never actually saw Fehlgeburt. I waited in the hall outside her door -- for Frank. Frank was not in such good shape and it took him a while to meet me outside Fehlgeburt's room. Her room had a private entrance up a back staircase that people in the old apartment house used only when they were bringing out their garbage and trash. I suppose they thought the smell was from someone's garbage and trash. Frank and I didn't even open her door. The smell outside her door was already worse than Sorrow ever smelled to us.
'I told you, I told you all,' Father said. 'We're at the turning point. Are we ready?' We could see that he didn't really know what to do.
Frank had returned Lilly's contract to New York. As her 'agent,' he had said, he could not accept so uncommitted an offer for what was clearly a work of genius -- 'genius still blooming,' Frank added, though he'd not read Trying to Grow; not yet. Frank pointed out that Lilly was only eighteen. 'She's got a lot of growing to do, still,' he concluded. Any publisher would do well to get into the gargantuan building of literature that Lilly was going to construct (according to Frank) -- 'on the ground floor.'
Frank asked for fifteen thousand dollars -- and another fifteen thousand dollars was to be promised, for advertising.
'Let's not let a little economics stand between us,' Frank reasoned.
'If we know Fehlgeburt is dead,' Franny reasoned, 'then the radicals are going to know it, too.'
'It takes just a sniff,' Frank said, but I didn't say anything.
'I've almost got a buyer,' Freud said.
'Someone wants the hotel?' Franny asked.
'They want to convert it to offices,' Freud said.
'But Fehlgeburt is dead,' Father said. 'Now we have to tell the police -- tell them everything.'
'Tell them tonight,' Frank said.
'Tell the Americans,' Freud said, 'and tell them tomorrow. Tell the whores tonight.'
'Yes, warn the whores tonight,' Father agreed.
'Then in the morning, early,' Frank said, 'we'll go to the American Consulate -- or the Embassy. Which is it?'
I realized I didn't know which was for what, or who was for whom. We realized Father didn't know, either. 'Well, there are a number of us, after all,' Father said, sheepishly. 'Some of us can tell the Consulate, some of us can tell the ambassador.' It was apparent to me, then, how little any of us had really mastered about living abroad: we didn't even know if the American Embassy and the American Consulate were in the same building -- for all we knew, a consulate and an embassy might be the same thing. It was apparent to me, then, what the seven years had done to Father: he had lost the decisiveness he must have had that night in Dairy, New Hampshire, when he took my mother walking in Elliot Park and snowed her with his vision of converting the Thompson Female Seminary to a hotel. First he'd lost Earl -- the provider of his education. And when he lost Iowa Bob, he lost Iowa Bob's instincts, too. Iowa Bob was a man trained to pounce on a loose ball -- valuable instinct, especially in the hotel business. And now I could see what sorrow had cost Father.
'His marbles,' Franny would say later.
'He wasn't playing with a full deck of cards,' Frank would say.
'It's going to be okay, Pop,' Franny felt moved to tell him that afternoon in the former Gasthaus Freud.
'Sure, Dad,' said Frank. 'We're home free!'
'I'm going to make millions, Daddy,' Lilly said.
'Let's take a walk, Pop,' I said to him.
'Who'll tell the whores?' he asked, bewilderedly.
'Tell one, you've told them all,' Franny said.
'No,' said Freud. 'Sometimes they're secretive with each other. I'll tell Babette,' Freud said. Babette was Freud's favorite.
'I'll tell Old Billig,' said Susie the bear.
'I'll tell Screaming Annie,' my father said; he seemed in a daze.
Nobody offered to tell Jolanta anything, so I said I'd tell her. Franny looked at me, but I managed to look away. I saw that Frank was concentrating on the dressmaker's dummy; he was hoping for some clear signals. Lilly went to her room; she looked so small, I thought -- she was so small, of course. She must have been going to her room to try growing some more -- to write and write. When we had our family conferences in that second Hotel New Hampshire, Lilly was still so small that Father seemed to forget she was eighteen; he would occasionally just pick her up and sit her in his lap, and play with her pigtail. Lilly didn't mind; the only thing she liked about being so small, she told me, was that Father still handled her as if she were a child.
'Our child author,' as Frank, the agent, would occasionally refer to her.
'Let's take a walk, Pop,' I said again. I wasn't sure if he'd heard me.
We crossed the lobby; someone had spilled an ashtray on the sagging couch that faced the reception desk, and I knew it must have been Susie's day to clean the lobby. Susie was well intentioned, but she was a slob; the lobby looked like hell when it was Susie's day to clean it.
Franny was standing at the foot of the staircase, staring up the stairwell. I couldn't remember when she'd changed her clothes, but she suddenly seemed dressed up, to me. She was wearing a dress. Franny was not a blue jeans and T-shirt sort of person -- she liked loose skirts and blouses -- but she was not big on dresses, either, and she was wearing her pretty dark green one, with the thin shoulder straps.
'It's fall, already,' I told her. 'That's a summer dress. You'll be cold.'
'I'm not going out,' she said, still staring up the stai
rwell. I looked at her bare shoulders and felt cold for her. It was late afternoon, but we both knew Ernst hadn't called it quits -- he was still at work, up on the fifth floor. Franny started up the stairs. 'I'm just going to reassure him,' she said to me, but not looking at me -- or at Father. 'Don't worry, I won't tell him what we know -- I'll play dumb. I'm just going to try to find out what he knows,' she said.
'He's a real creep, Franny,' I said to her.
'I know,' she said, 'and you think about me too much.'
I took Father out on the Krugerstrasse. We were too early for the whores, but the working day was long over: the commuters were safe in the suburbs, and only the elegant people, killing time before dinner -- or before the Opera -- were out strolling.
We walked down the Karntnerstrasse to the Graben and did the obligatory gawking at St. Stephen's. We wandered into the Neuer Markt and stared at the nudes in the Donner Fountain. I realized that Father knew nothing about them, so I gave him an abbreviated history of Maria Theresa's repressive measures. He seemed genuinely interested. We walked by the lush scarlet and gold entrance that the Ambassador Hotel made into the Neuer Markt; Father avoided looking at the Ambassador, or he watched the pigeons shitting in the fountain, instead. We walked on. It wouldn't grow dark for a little while. When we passed the Kaffee Mozart, Father said, 'That looks like a nice place. That looks a lot nicer than the Kaffee Mowatt.'
'It is,' I said, trying to conceal my surprise that he'd never been there.
'I must remember to come here, one day,' he said.
I was trying to make the walk come out another way, but we ended up at the Hotel Sacher just as the light in the sky was beginning to go -- and just as they were turning on the lights in the Sacher Bar. We stopped to watch them light the bar; it is simply the most beautiful bar in the world, I think. 'In den ganzen Welt,' Frank says.
'Let's have a drink here,' Father said, and we went in. I was a little worried about how he was dressed. I looked all right myself; that is how I always look -- all right. But Father suddenly appeared a little shabby to me. I realized that his pants were so completely unironed that his legs were as round as stovepipes -- only baggy; he had lost weight in Vienna. No more home cooking had made him a little thin, and it didn't help that his belt was too long -- in fact, I noticed, it was Frank's belt; Father was just borrowing it. He wore a very faded gray-and-white pin-striped shirt, which was okay -- it had been mine, I realized, before the latest stages of the weight lifting had altered my upper body; it wouldn't fit me now, but it wasn't a bad shirt, only faded and a bit wrinkled. What was wrong was that the shirt was striped and the jacket was checkered. Thank God Father never wore a necktie -- I shuddered to think what sort of tie Father would wear. But then I realized that no one in the Sacher was going to be snotty to us, because I saw for the first time what my father really looked like. He looked like a very eccentric millionaire; he looked like the richest man in the world, but a man who didn't give a damn. He looked like that very wealthy combination of generosity and fecklessness; he could wear anything and look like he had a million dollars in his pocket -- even if his pocket had a hole in it. There were some terribly well dressed and well-to-do people at the Sacher Bar, but when my father and I came in, they all looked at him with a heartbreaking kind of envy. I think Father could see that, although he could see very little of the real world; and certainly he was naive about the way the women looked at him. There were people at the Sacher Bar who'd spent over an hour dressing themselves and my father was a man who had lived in Vienna for seven years and had not spent a total of even fifteen minutes buying his clothes. He wore what my mother had bought for him, and what he borrowed from Frank and me.
'Good evening, Mr. Berry,' the bartender said to him, and then I realized that Father came here all the time.
'Guten Abend,' Father said. That was about it for Father's German. He could also say 'Bitte' and 'Danke' and 'Auf Wiedersehen.' And he had a great way of bowing.
I had a beer and my father had 'the usual.' Father's 'usual' was an appalling, glopped-up drink that had some kind of whiskey or rum at its heart but resembled an ice cream sundae. He was no drinker; he just sipped a little of it and spent hours toying with the rest. He was not there for the drinking.
The best-looking people in Vienna stopped in off the street, and the guests from the Hotel Sacher made their plans or met their dinner companions at the Sacher Bar. Of course, the bartender never knew that my father lived at the terrible Hotel New Hampshire, a few minutes -- slow walking -- away. I wonder where the bartender thought Father was from. From off a yacht, I suppose; from at least the Bristol or the Ambassador or the Imperial. And I realized that Father had never actually needed the white dinner jacket to look the part.
'Well,' Father said to me, quietly, in the Sacher Bar. 'Well, John, I'm a failure. I've let you all down.'
'No you haven't,' I told him.
'Now it's back to the land of the free,' Father said, stirring his nauseating drink with his index finger, then sucking his finger. 'And no more hotels,' he said, softly. 'I'm going to have to get a job.'
He said it the way someone might have said that he was going to have to have an operation. I hated to see reality hemming him in.
'And you kids are going to have to go to school,' he said. 'To college,' he added, dreamily.
I reminded him that we had all been to school and to college. Frank and Franny and I even had finished our university degrees; and why did Lilly need to finish hers -- in American literature -- when she had already finished a novel?
'Oh,' he said. 'Well, maybe we'll all have to get jobs.'
'That's all right,' I said. He looked at me and smiled; he leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. He looked so absolutely perfect that no one in that bar could have possibly thought -- even for a moment -- that I was this middle-aged man's young lover. This was a father-and-son kiss and they looked at Father with even more envy than they had, heaped upon their vision of him when he walked in.
He took forever to finish playing with his drink. I had two more beers. I knew what he was doing. He was absorbing the Sacher Bar, he was getting his last good look at the Hotel Sacher; he was imagining, of course, that he owned it -- that he lived here.
'Your mother,' he said, 'would have loved all this.' He moved his hand only slightly, then rested it in his lap.
She would have loved all what? I wondered. The Hotel Sacher and the Sacher Bar -- oh yes. But what else would she have loved? Her son Frank, growing a beard and trying to decipher his mother's message -- her meaning -- from a dressmaker's dummy? Her littlest daughter Lilly trying to grow? Her biggest daughter Franny trying to find out everything that a pornographer knew? And would she have loved me? I wondered: the son who cleaned up his language, but wanted more than anything to make love to his own sister. And Franny wanted to, too! That was why she'd gone to Ernst, of course.
Father couldn't have known why I started to cry, but he said all the right things. 'It won't be so bad,' he reassured me. 'Human beings are remarkable -- at what we can learn to live with,' Father told me. 'If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have,' Father said, 'then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?' Father asked.
Everyone at the Sacher Bar watched me crying and my father comforting me. I guess that's just one of the reasons it's the most beautiful bar in the world, in my opinion: it has the grace to make no one feel self-conscious about any unhappiness.
I felt better with Father's arm around my shoulder.
'Good night, Mr. Berry,' the bartender said.
'Auf Wiedersehen,' Father said: he knew he'd never be back.
Outside, everything had changed. It was dark. It was the fall. The first man who passed us, walking in a hurry, was wearing black slacks, black dress shoes, and a white dinner jacket.
My father didn't notice the man in the white dinner jacket, but I didn't feel comfortable with this omen, with t
his reminder; the man in the white dinner jacket, I knew, was dressed for the Opera. He must have been hurrying to be on time. The 'fall season,' as Fehlgeburt had warned me, was upon us. You could feel it in the weather.
The 1964 season of the New York Metropolitan Opera opened with Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. I read this in one of Frank's opera books, but Frank says he doubts very much that the season would have opened with Lucia in Vienna. Frank says it's likely something more Viennese would have opened the season -- 'Their beloved Strauss, their beloved Mozart; even that Kraut, Wagner,' Frank says. And I don't even know if it was opening night when Father and I saw the man in the white dinner jacket. It was only clear that the State Opera was open for business.
'The 1835 Italian version of Lucia first opened in Vienna in 1837,' Frank told me. 'Of course, it's been back a few times since then. Perhaps most notably,' Frank added, 'with the great Adelina Patti in the title role -- and most particularly the night her dress caught fire, just as she was beginning to sing the mad scene.'
'What mad scene, Frank?' I asked him.
'You have to see it to believe it,' Frank said, 'and it's a little hard to believe, even then. But Patti's dress caught fire just as she was beginning to sing the mad scene -- the stage was lit with gas flares, in those days, and she must have stood too close to one. And do you know what the great Adelina Patti did?' Frank asked me.
'No,' I said.
'She ripped off her burning dress and kept singing,' Frank said. 'In Vienna,' he added. 'Those were the days.'
And in one of Frank's opera books I read that Adelina Patti's Lucia seemed fated for this kind of disturbance. In Bucharest, for example, the famous mad scene was interrupted by a member of the audience falling into the pit -- upon a woman -- and in the general panic, someone shouted 'Fire!' But the great Adelina Patti cried, 'No fire!' -- and went on singing. And in San Francisco, one weirdo threw a bomb onto the stage, and once more the fearless Patti riveted the audience to their seats. Despite the fact that the bomb exploded!
'A small bomb,' Frank has assured me.
But it was no small bomb that Frank and I had seen riding to the Opera between Arbeiter and Ernst; that bomb was as weighty as Sorrow, that bomb was as big as a bear. And it's doubtful that Donizetti's Lucia was at the Vienna Staatsoper the night Father and I said auf Wiedersehen to the Sacher. I like to think it was Lucia for my own reasons. There is a lot of blood and Schlagobers in that particular opera -- even Frank agrees -- and somehow the mad story of a brother who drives his sister crazy and causes her death, because he forces her on a man she doesn't love ... well, you can see why this particular version of blood and Schlagobers would seem especially appropriate, to me.
