The Hotel New Hampshire (48 page)

In seven years I would be twenty-two; Lilly, trying to grow and grow, would grow to be eighteen. Franny would be twenty-three—with Chipper Dove still “the first,” and Susie the bear her one-and-only. Frank, at twenty-four, grew a beard. It was almost as embarrassing as Lilly’s wanting to be a writer.

Moby-Dick would sink the
Pequod
and only Ishmael would survive, again and again, to tell his tale to Fehlgeburt, who told it to us. In my years at the university, I used to press upon Fehlgeburt my desire to hear her read
Moby-Dick
aloud to me. “I can never read this book by myself,” I begged her. “I have to hear it from you.”

And that, at last, provided me with the entrance to Fehlgeburt’s cramped, desultory room behind the Rathaus, near the university. She would read to me in the evenings, and I would try to coax out of her why some of the radicals chose to spend the night in the Hotel New Hampshire.

“You know,” Fehlgeburt would tell me, “the single ingredient in American literature that distinguishes it from other literatures of the world is a kind of giddy, illogical hopefulness. It is quite technically sophisticated while remaining ideologically naïve,” Fehlgeburt told me, on one of our walks to her room. Frank would eventually take the hint, and no longer accompany us—though this took him about five years. And the evening Fehlgeburt told me that American literature was “quite technically sophisticated while remaining ideologically naïve” was
not
the evening I first tried to kiss her. After the line “ideologically naïve,” I think a kiss would have seemed out of place.

The night I first kissed Fehlgeburt we were in her room. She had just read that part when Ahab refuses to help the captain of the
Rachel
search for the lost son. Fehlgeburt had no furniture in her room; there were too many books, and a mattress on the floor—a mattress for a single bed—and a single reading lamp, also on the floor. It was a cheerless place, as dry and as crowded as a dictionary, as lifeless as Ernst’s logic, and I leaned across the uncomfortable bed and kissed Fehlgeburt on the mouth. “Don’t,” she said, but I kept kissing her until she kissed me back. “You should go,” she said, lying down on her back and pulling me on top of her.

“Now?” I said.

“No,
now
it is not necessary to go,” she said. Sitting up, she started to undress; she did it the way she usually marked her place in
Moby-Dick
—uninterestedly.

“I should go
after
?” I asked, undressing myself.

“If you want,” she said. “I mean you should go from the Hotel New Hampshire. You and your family.
Leave
,” she said. “Leave before the fall season.”

“What fall season?” I asked her, completely naked now. I was thinking about Junior Jones’s fall season with the Cleveland Browns.

“The Opera season,” Fehlgeburt said, naked herself—at last. She was as thin as a novella; she was no bigger than some of the shortest stories she had ever read to Lilly. It was as if all the books in her room had been feeding on her, had consumed—not nourished—her.

“The Opera season will start in the fall,” Fehlgeburt said, “and you and your family must leave the Hotel New Hampshire by then. Promise me,” she said, halting me from moving farther up her gaunt body.

“Why?” I asked.

“Please leave,” she said. When I entered her, I thought it was the sex that brought her tears on, but it was something else.

“Am I the first?” I asked. Fehlgeburt was twenty-nine.

“First and last,” she said, crying.

“Do you have anything to protect you?” I asked, inside her. “I mean, you know, so you don’t get
schwanger
?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, in Frank’s irritating fashion.

“Why?” I asked, trying to move cautiously.

“Because I’ll be dead before the baby’s born,” she said. I pulled out. I sat her up beside me, but she—with surprising strength—pulled me back on top of her; she took me in her hand and
put
me back inside her. “Come
on
,” she said, impatiently—but it was not the impatience of desire. It was something else.

“Fuck me,” she said, flatly. “Then stay the night, or go home. I don’t care. Just leave the Hotel New Hampshire, please
leave
it—please make sure Lilly, especially, leaves it,” she begged me. Then she cried harder and lost what slight interest she’d ever had in the sex. I lay still inside her, growing smaller. I felt cold—I felt the draft of coldness from under the ground, like the coldness I remembered feeling when Frank first read to us from Ernst’s pornography.

“What are they doing on the fifth floor at night?” I asked Fehlgeburt, who bit into my shoulder, and shook her head, her eyes closed tightly in a violent squint. “What are they planning?” I asked her. I grew so small I slipped completely outside of her. I felt her shaking and I shook, too.

“They’re going to blow up the Opera,” she whispered, “at one of the peak performances,” she whispered. “They’re going to blow up
The Marriage of Figaro
—something popular like that. Or something heavier,” she said. “I’m not sure which performance—
they’re
not sure. But one that’s full-house,” Fehlgeburt said. “The whole Opera.”

“They’re crazy,” I said; I didn’t recognize my voice. It sounded creaky; it was like Old Billig’s voice—Old Billig the whore
or
Old Billig the radical.

Fehlgeburt shook her head back and forth under me; her stringy hair whipped my face. “Please get your family out,” she whispered. “Especially Lilly,” she said. “Little Lilly,” she blubbered.

“But they’re not going to blow up the hotel, too, are they?” I asked Fehlgeburt.

“Everyone will be involved,” she said ominously. “It has to involve everyone, or it’s no good,” she said, and I heard Arbeiter’s voice behind hers, or Ernst’s all-embracing logic. A phase, a necessary phase. Everything.
Schlagobers
, the erotic, the State Opera, the Hotel New Hampshire—everything had to go. It was all decadent, I could hear them intoning. It was full of disgust. They would litter the Ringstrasse with
art
-lovers, with old-fashioned idealists silly and irrelevant enough to like
opera
. They would make some point or other by this kind of everything-bombing.

“Promise me,” Fehlgeburt whispered in my ear. “You’ll get them out. Your family. Everybody in it.”

“I promise,” I said. “Of course.”

“Don’t tell anyone I told you,” she said to me.

“Of course not,” I said.

“Please come back inside me, now,” Fehlgeburt said. “Please come inside me. I want to feel it—just once,” she added.

“Why just
once
?” I asked.

“Just do it,” she said. “Do everything to me.”

I did everything to her. I regret it; I am forever guilty for it; it was as desperate and joyless as any sex in the second Hotel New Hampshire ever was.

“If you think you’re going to die before you’ll even have time to have a baby,” I told Fehlgeburt, later, “why don’t you leave when
we
leave? Why don’t you get away before they do it, or before they try?”

“I can’t,” she said, simply.

“Why?” I asked. Of these radicals in our Hotel New Hampshire I would always be asking
why
.

“Because I drive the car,” Fehlgeburt said. “I’m the driver,” she said. “And the car’s the main bomb, it’s the one that starts all the rest. And someone has to drive it, and it’s
me
—
I
drive the bomb,” Fehlgeburt said.

“Why
you
?” I asked her, trying to hold her, trying to get her to stop shaking.

“Because I’m the most expendable,” she said, and there was Ernst’s dead voice again, there was Arbeiter’s lawnmower-like process of
thought
. I realized that in order for Fehlgeburt to believe this, even our gentle Schwanger would have had to convince her.

“Why not Schwanger?” I asked Miss Miscarriage.

“She’s too important,” Fehlgeburt said. “She’s
wonderful
,” she said, admiringly—and full of loathing for herself.

“Why not Wrench?” I asked. “He’s obviously good with cars.”

“That’s why,” Fehlgeburt said. “He’s too necessary. There will be other cars, other bombs to build. It’s the hostage part I don’t like,” she blurted out suddenly. “It’s not necessary, this time,” she added. “There will be better hostages.”

“Who are the hostages?” I asked.

“Your family,” she said. “Because you’re Americans. More than Austria will notice us, then,” she said. “That’s the idea.”

“Whose idea?” I asked.

“Ernst’s,” she said.

“Why not let Ernst be the driver?” I asked.

“He’s the idea man,” Fehlgeburt said. “He thinks it all up. Everything,” she added. Everything, indeed, I thought.

“And Arbeiter?” I asked. “He doesn’t know how to drive?”

“He’s too loyal,” she said. “We can’t lose anyone that loyal. I am not so loyal,” she whispered. “Look at me!” she cried. “I’m telling
you
all this, aren’t I?”

“And Old Billig?” I asked, winding down.

“He’s not trustworthy,” Fehlgeburt said. “He doesn’t even know the plan. He’s too slippery. He thinks of his own survival.”

“That’s
bad
?” I asked her, brushing her hair back, off her streaked face.

“At
this
phase, that’s bad,” Fehlgeburt said. And I realized what she was: a
reader
, only a reader. She read other people’s stories just beautifully; she took direction; she followed the leader. Why I wanted to hear her read
Moby-Dick
was the same reason the radicals had made her the driver. We both knew she would do it; she wouldn’t stop.

“Have we done everything?” Fehlgeburt asked me.

“What?” I said, and winced—and would wince, forever, to hear that echo of Egg. Even from myself.

“Have we done everything,
sexually
?” Fehlgeburt asked. “Was that it? Was that everything?”

I tried to remember. “I think so,” I said. “Do you want to do more?”

“Not especially,” she said. “I just wanted to have done it all once,” she said. “If we’ve done it all, you can go home—if you want,” she added. She shrugged. It was not Mother’s shrug, not Franny’s, not even Jolanta’s shrug. This was not quite a human movement; it was less a twitch than it was a kind of electrical pulsation, a mechanical lurch of her taut body, a dim signal. The dimmest, I thought. It was a nobody-home sign; it was an I’m-not-in, don’t-call-me-I’ll-call-you signal. It was a tick of a clock, or of a time bomb. Fehlgeburt’s eyes blinked once at me; then she was asleep. I gathered my clothes. I saw she hadn’t bothered to mark the spot where she stopped reading in
Moby-Dick
; I didn’t bother to mark it, either.

It was after midnight when I crossed the Ringstrasse, walking from the Rathausplatz down the Dr. Karl Renner-Ring and into the Volksgarten. In the beer garden some students were shouting at each other in a friendly way; I probably knew some of them, but I didn’t stop for a beer. I didn’t want to talk about the
art
of this or that. I didn’t want to have another conversation about
The Alexandria Quartet
—about which was the best of those novels, and which was the worst, and why. I didn’t want to hear about who benefited the most from their correspondence—Henry Miller or Lawrence Durrell. I didn’t even want to talk about
Die Blechtrommel
, which was the best thing there was to talk about perhaps
ever
. And I didn’t want to have another conversation about East-West relations, about socialism and democracy, about the long-term effects of President Kennedy’s assassination—and, being an American, what did I think of the racial question? It was the end of the summer of 1964; I hadn’t been in the United States since 1957, and I knew less about my country than some of the Viennese students knew. I also knew less about Vienna than any of them. I knew about my family, I knew about
our
whores, and
our
radicals; I was an expert on the Hotel New Hampshire and an amateur at everything else.

I walked all the way through the Heldenplatz—the Plaza of Heroes—and stood where thousands of cheering fascists had greeted Hitler, once. I thought that fanatics would always have an audience; all one might hope to influence was the
size
of the audience. I thought I must remember this perception, and test it against Frank, who would either take it over as his own perception, or revise it, or correct me. I wished I’d read as much as Frank; I wished I’d tried to grow as hard as Lilly. In fact, Lilly had sent off the efforts of her growth to some publisher in New York. She wasn’t even going to tell us, but she had to borrow money from Franny for the postage.

“It’s a novel,” Lilly said, sheepishly. “It’s a little autobiographical.”

“How little?” Frank had asked her.

“Well, it’s really
imaginative
autobiography,” Lilly said.

“It’s a
lot
autobiographical, you mean,” Franny said. “Oh boy.”

“I can’t wait,” Frank said. “I bet I come off like a real loon.”

“No,” Lilly said. “Everyone is a hero.”

“We’re
all
heroes?” I asked.

“Well, you all
are
heroes, to me,” Lilly said. “So in the book you are, too.”

“Even Father?” Franny asked.

“Well, he’s the most imagined,” Lilly said.

And I thought that Father had to be the most imagined because he was the least real—he was the least
there
(of any of us). Sometimes it seemed Father was less with us than Egg.

“What’s the book called, dear?” Father had asked Lilly.

“
Trying to Grow
,” Lilly had admitted.

“What else?” Franny said.

“How far’s it go?” Frank asked. “I mean, where’s it
stop
?”

“It’s over with the plane crash,” Lilly said. “That’s the end.”

The end of reality, I thought: just short of the plane crash seemed like a perfectly good place to stop—to me.