The Hotel New Hampshire (44 page)

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 Schraubenschlüssel’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.

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 Schönbrunn. 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?”