The Hotel New Hampshire (52 page)

“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 this 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.

“
All
so-called serious opera is blood and
Schlagobers
,” Frank has told me. I don’t know enough about opera to know if that is true; all I know is that I think
Lucia di Lammermoor
should have been playing at the Vienna State Opera the night Father and I walked back to the Hotel New Hampshire from the Hotel Sacher.

“It doesn’t matter, really—which opera it was,” Frank is always saying, but I like to think it was
Lucia
. I like to think that the famous mad scene was not yet under way when Father and I arrived at the Hotel New Hampshire. There was Susie the bear in the lobby—
without
her bear’s head on!—and she was crying. Father walked right by Susie, without appearing to notice how upset she was—and out of costume!—but my father was used to unhappy bears.

He walked right upstairs. He was going to tell Screaming Annie the bad news about the radicals, the bad news for the Hotel New Hampshire. “She’s probably with a customer, or out on the street,” I said to him, but Father said he would just wait for her outside her room.

I sat down with Susie.

“She’s still with him,” Susie sobbed. If Franny was still with Ernst the pornographer, I knew, it meant she was more than
talking
to him. There was no reason to pretend to be a bear anymore. I held Susie’s bear head in my hands, I put it on, I took it off. I could not sit there in the lobby, waiting for Franny, like a whore, to be finished with him—to come down to the lobby again—and I knew I was helpless to interfere. I would have been too late, as always. There was no one around as fast as Harold Swallow, this time; there was no Black Arm of the Law. Junior Jones
would
rescue Franny again, but he was too late to save her from Ernst—and so was I. If I’d stayed in the lobby with Susie, I would have just cried with her, and I’d been crying entirely too much, I thought.

“Did you ‘tell Old Billig?” I asked Susie. “About the bombers?”

“She was only worried about her fucking china bears,” Susie said, and went on crying.

“I love Franny, too,” I told Susie, and gave her a hug.

“Not like I do!” Susie said, stifling a cry. Yes,
like you do
, I thought.

I started upstairs, but Susie misunderstood me.

“They’re somewhere on the third floor,” Susie said. “Franny came down for a key, but I didn’t see which room.” I looked at the reception desk; you could tell it was Susie the bear’s night to watch after the reception desk, because the reception desk was a big mess.

“I’m looking for Jolanta,” I said to Susie. “Not Franny.”

“Going to tell her, huh?” Susie asked.

But Jolanta wasn’t interested in being told.

“I’ve got something to tell you,” I said outside her door.

“Three hundred Schillings,” she said, so I slipped it under the door.

“Okay, you can come in,” Jolanta said. She was alone; a customer had just left her, apparently, because she was sitting on her bidet, naked except for her bra.

“You want to see the tits, too?” Jolanta asked me. “The tits cost another hundred Schillings.”

“I want to
tell
you something,” I said to her.

“That costs another hundred, too,” she said, washing herself with the mindless lack of energy of a housewife washing dishes.

I gave her another hundred Schillings and she took her bra off. “Undress,” she commanded me.

I did as I was told, while saying, “It’s the stupid radicals. They’ve ruined everything. They’re going to blow up the Opera.”

“So what?” Jolanta said, watching me undress. “Your body is basically wrong,” she told me. “You’re basically a little guy with big muscles.”

“I may need to borrow what’s in your purse,” I suggested to her, “—just until the police take care of things.” But Jolanta ignored this.

“You like it standing up, against the wall?” she asked me. “Is that how you want it? If we use the bed—if I have to lie down—it’s one hundred Schillings extra.” I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes.

“Jolanta,” I said. “They’re really serious. Fehlgeburt is
dead
,” I said. “And these crazy people have a bomb, a big bomb.”

“Fehlgeburt was born dead,” Jolanta said, dropping to her knees and sucking me into her mouth. Later, she put a prophylactic on me. I tried to concentrate, but when she stood up against me and stuffed me inside her, slamming me against the wall, she immediately informed me that I wasn’t tall enough to do it standing up. I paid her another hundred Schillings and we tried it on the bed.

“Now you’re not
hard
enough,” she complained, and I wondered if my failure to be hard enough would cost me another hundred Schillings.

“Please don’t let on to the radicals that you
know
about them,” I said to Jolanta. “And it would probably be better for you if you got out of here for a while—no one really knows what will become of the hotel. We’re going back to America,” I added.

“Okay, okay,” she said, shoving me off her. She sat up in bed, she crossed the floor and sat back down on the bidet. “
Auf Wiedersehen
,” she said.

“But I didn’t come,” I said.

“Whose fault is that?” she asked me, washing and washing herself, again and again.

I suppose, if I
had
come, it would have cost me another hundred Schillings. I watched her broad back rocking over the bidet; she was rocking with slightly more intensity than she had moved with when she was under me. Since her back was to me, I took her purse off the bedside table and looked in it. It looked like Susie the bear had been taking care of it. There was a tube of some kind of ointment that had opened; the inside of Jolanta’s purse was sticky with a sort of creme. There was the usual lipstick, the usual packages of prophylactics (I noticed I had forgotten to take mine
off
), the usual cigarettes, some pills, perfume, tissues, change, a fat wallet—and little jars of assorted
junk
. There wasn’t a knife, not to mention a gun. Her purse was an empty threat, her purse was a bluff; she was mock-sex, and now—it seemed—she was only mock-violence, too. Then I felt the jar that was quite a bit larger than the rest—it was quite an uncomfortable size, really. I pulled it out of her purse and looked at it; Jolanta turned and screamed at me.

“My
baby
!” she screamed. “Put my baby down!”

I almost dropped it—this large jar. And in the murky fluid, swimming there, I saw the human fetus, the tiny tight-fisted embryo that had been Jolanta’s only flower, nipped in the bud. In her mind—the way an ostrich comforts its head in the sand—was this embryo a kind of mock-weapon for Jolanta? Was it what she reached in her purse for, what she put her hands on when the going got rough? And what unlikely comfort was it to her?

“Put my baby down!” she cried, advancing toward me, naked—and dripping from her bidet. I put the bottled fetus gently on the pillow of her bed, and fled.

I heard Screaming Annie announcing her false arrival when I opened and closed Jolanta’s door. It appeared that Father was giving her the bad news. I sat on the second-floor landing, not wanting to see Susie the bear in the lobby, and not daring to seek out Franny on the floor above. Father came out of Screaming Annie’s room; he wished me a good night, with a hand on my shoulder, and went down the stairs to go to bed.

“Did I tell her?” I called after him.

“It didn’t seem to matter to her,” Father said. I went and knocked on Screaming Annie’s door.

“I already know,” she told me, when she saw who it was.

But I hadn’t been able to
come
with Jolanta; something else took possession of me outside Screaming Annie’s door. “Well, why didn’t you say so?” Screaming Annie said, when I had still said nothing. She took me inside her room and shut the door. “Like father, like son,” she said. She helped me undress; she was already undressed herself. No wonder she had to work so hard, I realized—because she didn’t know the system of charging for all the “extras” that Jolanta charged for. Screaming Annie just did it all for a flat four hundred Schillings.