The Hotel New Hampshire (56 page)

“Politics are always idiotic!” as Iowa Bob would have said.

And there was not enough about Fehlgeburt, how she could break your heart the way she read the ending of
The Great Gatsby
. They acknowledged that my father was a hero, of course. They seemed polite about the reputation that our second Hotel New Hampshire had enjoyed—“in its prime,” as Frank would refer to those sordid days.

When Father got out of the hospital, we gave him a present. Franny had written Junior Jones for it. Junior Jones had provided us with baseballs for seven years, so Franny knew that Junior could be counted on to find Father a new baseball bat. A Louisville Slugger all his own. He would need it, of course. And Father seemed touched by our present—by Franny’s thoughtfulness, really, because the bat was Franny’s idea. I think Father must have cried a little when he first reached out his hands and we placed the bat in them, and he felt what it was he held. We couldn’t see if he cried, however, because the bandages were still on his eyes.

And Frank, who had always had to translate for Father, had to become his interpreter in other ways. When the people from the Stastsoper wanted to pay us a tribute, Frank had to sit next to Father—at the Opera—and whisper to him about the action on the stage. Father could follow the music, just fine. I don’t even remember what opera it was. It wasn’t
Lucia
, I know that much. It was a particularly farcical comic opera, because Lilly had insisted that we wanted no
Schlagobers
and blood. It was nice that the Vienna State Opera wanted to thank us for saving them, but we didn’t want to sit through any
Schlagobers
and blood. We’d already seen
that
opera. That was the opera that played in the Hotel New Hampshire for seven years.

And so, at the opening of this merry farce of an opera—whatever it was—the conductor and the orchestra and all the singers pointed out my father in one of the front-row seats (that’s where Father had insisted on sitting. “So I can be sure to
see
,” he had said). And Father stood up and took a bow; he was great at bowing. And he waved the baseball bat to the audience; the Viennese loved the Louisville Slugger part of the story, and they were touched and applauded for a long time when Father waved the bat at them. We children felt very proud.

I often wonder if the New York publisher who wanted Lilly’s book for five thousand dollars would have listened to Frank’s demands
if
we hadn’t all become famous—if we hadn’t saved the Opera and murdered the terrorists in our good old American family kind of way. “Who cares?” Frank asks, slyly. The point is, Lilly had not signed the five-thousand-dollar contract. Frank had gone for higher stakes. And when the publishers realized that
this
Lilly Berry was the little girl who’d had a gun held to her head, that little Lilly Berry was the youngest surviving (and certainly the smallest) member of
the
Berry family—the terrorist killers, the Opera savers—well ... at that point, of course, Frank was in the driver’s seat.

“My author is already at work on a new book,” Frank, the agent, said. “We’re in no hurry about any of this. As far as
Trying to Grow
is concerned, we’re interested in the best offer.”

Frank would make a killing, of course.

“You mean we’re going to be
rich
?” Father asked, sightlessly. When he was first blind, he had an awkward way of inclining his head too far forward—as if this might help him to see. And the Louisville Slugger was his ever-restless companion, his percussion instrument.

“We can do anything we want, Pop,” Franny said. “
You
can,” she added, to him. “Just think of it,” she told Father, “and it’s yours.”

“Dream on, Daddy,” Lilly said, but Father seemed stupefied by all the options.

“
Anything
?” Father asked.

“You name it,” I told him. He was our hero again; he was our father—at last. He was blind, but he was in charge.

“Well, I’ll have to think about it,” Father said, cautiously, the baseball bat playing all kinds of music—that Louisville Slugger in my father’s hands was as musically complicated as a full orchestra. Though Father would never make as much noise with a baseball bat as Freud had made, he was more various than Freud could have dreamed of being.

And so we left our seven-year home away from home. Frank sold the second Hotel New Hampshire for a ridiculously high price. After all, it was a kind of historical landmark, Frank argued.

“I’m coming home!” Franny wrote to Junior Jones.

“I’m coming home,” she also wrote to Chipper Dove.

“
Why
, damn it, Franny?” I asked. “
Why write to Chipper Dove
?”

But Franny refused to talk about it; she just shrugged.

“I told you,” Susie the bear said. “Franny’s got to
deal
with it—sooner or later. You’ve
both
got to deal with Chipper Dove,” Susie said, “and you’re going to have to deal with
each other
, too,” said Susie the bear. I looked at Susie as if I didn’t know what she was talking about, but Susie said, “
I’m
not blind, you know. I got eyes. And I’m a smart bear, too.”

But Susie wasn’t being menacing. “You two have got a real problem,” she confided in Franny and me.

“No shit,” Franny said.

“Well, we’re being very careful,” I told Susie.

“For how long can anybody be
that
careful?” Susie asked. “The bombs haven’t all gone off,” Susie said. “You two have a bomb between you,” said Susie the bear. “You’ve got to be more than careful,” Susie warned Franny and me. “The bomb between you two,” Susie said, “can blow you both away.”

For once, it seemed, Franny had nothing to say; I held her hand; she squeezed me back.

“I love you,” I told her, when we were, alone—which we should never have allowed ourselves to be. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, “but I love you, I do.”

“I love you terribly much,” Franny said. And it was Lilly who saved us that time; despite the fact that we were all supposed to be packed and ready to leave, Lilly was writing. We heard the typewriter and could imagine our sister’s little hands
blurring
over the keyboard.

“Now that I’m going to get published,” Lilly had said, “I have to really get better. I’ve got to keep growing,” she said a little desperately. “My God, the next book has got to be bigger than the first. And the one after that,” she said, “it will have to be even
bigger
.” There was a certain despair about the way she said this, and Frank said, “Stick with me, kid. With a good agent, you’ve got the world by the balls.”

“But I still have to
do
it,” Lilly complained. “I still have to write. I mean, now I’m
expected
to grow.”

And the sound of Lilly trying so hard to grow distracted Franny and me from each other. We went out in the lobby, where it was somewhat more public—where we felt safe. Two men had just been killed in that lobby, but it was a safer place for Franny and me than in our own rooms.

The whores were gone. I do not care, anymore, what became of them. They didn’t care what became of us.

The hotel was empty; a dangerous number of rooms beckoned to Franny and me.

“One day,” I said to her, “we’ll
have
to. You know that. Or do you think it will change—if we wait it out?”

“It won’t change,” she said, “but maybe—one day—we’ll be able to handle it. One day it might be a little
safer
than it feels right now.”

I doubted that it would ever be safe enough, and I was on the verge of trying to convince her to do it now, to
use
the second Hotel New Hampshire as it was meant to be used—to get it over with, to see if we were doomed or just perversely attracted to each other—but Frank was our savior ... this time.

He brought his bags out into the lobby and startled the hell out of us.

“Jesus, Frank!” Franny screamed.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. Frank had his usual queer lot of things: his odd books, his peculiar clothes, and his dressmaker’s dummy.

“Are you taking that dummy back to America, Frank?” Franny asked him.

“It’s not as heavy as what
you two
are carrying,” Frank said. “And it’s a lot
safer
.”

So Frank knew too, we realized. At that time, Franny and I thought Lilly
didn’t
know; and—regarding our own dilemma—we were grateful that Father was blind.

“Keep passing the open windows,” Frank said to Franny and me—the damn dressmaker’s dummy, slung like a light log over his shoulder, had a distressing resemblance about it. It was the
falseness
of it that Franny and I noticed: the mannequin’s chipped face, the obvious wig, and the stiff, unfleshly bust of the dummy—the fake bosom, the still chest, the rigid waist. In the bad light in the lobby of the second Hotel New Hampshire, Franny and I could be fooled into thinking we saw shapes of Sorrow when we saw nothing at all. But hadn’t Sorrow taught us to be on guard, to look
everywhere
? Sorrow can take any shape in the world.

“You keep passing the open windows, too, Frank,” I said—trying not to look too closely at his dressmaker’s dummy.

“We’ve all got to stick together,” Franny said—as Father, in his sleep, cried out, “
Auf Wiedersehen
, Freud!”

11

Being in Love with Franny; Dealing with Chipper Dove

Love also floats. And, that being true, love probably resembles Sorrow in other ways.

We flew to New York City in the fall of 1964—no separate flights this time; we were sticking together, as Franny had advised. The stewardess was troubled by the baseball bat, but she let Father hold it between his knees—humane concessions are made to the blind, in spite of “regulations.”

Junior Jones was unable to meet our plane. Junior was playing out his last season with the Browns—in a hospital in Cleveland. “Man,” he said to me, over the phone, “just tell your father I’ll give him my eyes if he’ll give me his
knees
.”

“And what will you give
me
if I give you
my
knees,” I heard Franny ask Junior over the phone. I didn’t hear what he said to her, but she smiled and winked at me.

We could have flown to Boston; I’m sure Fritz would have met our plane, and let us stay for free at the first Hotel New Hampshire. But Father had told us he never wanted to see Dairy, New Hampshire, or that first Hotel New Hampshire again. Of course Father wouldn’t have “seen” it if we’d gone there and stayed there the rest of our lives, but we understood his meaning. None of us had the stomach for seeing Dairy again, and recalling when our family was whole—when each of us had both eyes open.

New York was neutral territory—and for a while, Frank knew, Lilly’s publisher would put us up and entertain us.

“Enjoy yourselves,” Frank said to us. “Just call room service.” Father would behave like a child with room service, ordering stuff he’d never eat, and ordering his usual undrinkable drinks. He’d never stayed in a hotel with room service before; he behaved as if he’d never been in New York before, either, because he complained that all the room service personnel couldn’t speak English any better than the Viennese—they couldn’t, of course, because they were foreigners.

They’re more foreign than the Viennese ever
dreamed
of being!” my father would cry. “
Sprechen Sie Deutsch
?” he’d yell into the phone. “Jesus God, Frank,” Father would say, “order us a proper
Frühstück
, would you? These people don’t understand me.”

“This is New York, Pop,” Franny said.

“They don’t speak German
or
English in New York, Dad,” Frank explained.

“What the hell
do
they speak?” Father asked. “I order croissant and coffee and I get tea and toast!”

“Nobody knows what they speak here,” said Lilly, looking out the window.

Lilly’s publisher put us up at the Stanhope on Eighty-first and Fifth Avenue; Lilly had asked to be near the Metropolitan Museum and I had asked to be near Central Park—I wanted to run. And so I ran around and around the Reservoir, four times around, twice a day—that last lap luxurious with pain, my head lolling, the tall buildings of New York appearing to topple over me.

Lilly looked out the windows of our suite on the fourteenth floor. She liked watching the people flood in and out of the museum. “I think I’d like to live here,” she said softly. “It’s like watching a castle change kings,” Lilly whispered. “And you can see the leaves change in the park, too,” Lilly noted. “And whenever you visit me,” Lilly said to me, “you can run around the Reservoir and reassure me that it’s still there. I don’t ever want to see it up close,” Lilly said weirdly, “but it’s comforting to have you report to me on the health of the water, the number of other runners in the park, the amount of horse shit on the bridle path. A writer has to know these things,” Lilly said.

“Well, Lilly,” Frank said, “I think you’ll be able to
afford
a permanent suite here, but you could get an apartment, instead, you know. You don’t have to
live
at the Stanhope, Lilly,” Frank said. “It might be more practical to get your own apartment.”

“No,” Lilly said. “If I can afford it, I want to live here. Surely
this
family can understand why I might like to live in a hotel,” Lilly said.

Franny shivered. She didn’t want to live in a hotel, she had told me. But Franny would stay with Lilly for a while—after the publisher stopped paying the tab and Lilly maintained her corner suite on the fourteenth floor, Franny would keep Lilly company for a while. “Just so you have a chaperon, Lilly,” Franny teased her. But I knew it was Franny who needed the chaperon.

“And you know who I need a chaperon
from
,” Franny told me.

Frank and Father would be my chaperons; Father and I would move in with Frank. He found a palatial apartment on Central Park South. I could still run there, I could run through the entirety of Central Park, investigate the Reservoir for Lilly, arrive dripping with sweat and panting at the Stanhope, to report on the health of the water, and so forth, and to show myself to Franny—to get a glimpse of her.