The Hotel New Hampshire (38 page)

“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 Kärntnerstrasse. 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 Kärntnerstrasse whores (around the corner). If you turned off the Kärntnerstrasse onto our tiny street, it was as if you were lowering yourself (by comparison) into a world without light; one street off the Kärntnerstrasse 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 “mementos” 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.”

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.