The World According to Garp

beast of a man sneaking about in disguise! Up to what? It's a man in a bear suit, I know it is,” she said. “I want to go to that one first. If there's going to be a Class C experience on this trip, lets get it over with as soon as possible.”

“But we haven't got reservations for tonight,” Mother said.

“Yes, we might as well give them a chance to be at their best,” Father said. Although he never revealed to his victims that he worked for the Tourist Bureau, Father believed that reservations were simply a decent way of allowing the personnel to be as prepared as they could be.

“I'm sure we don't need to make a reservation in a place frequented by men who disguise themselves as animals,” Johanna said. “I'm sure there is always a vacancy there. I'm sure the guests are regularly dying in their beds—of fright, or else of whatever unspeakable injury the madman in the foul bear suit does to them.”

“It's probably a real bear,” Robo said, hopefully—for in the turn the conversation was taking, Robo certainly saw that a real bear would be preferable to Grandmother's imagined ghoul. Robo had no fear, I think, of a real bear.

I drove us as inconspicuously as possible to the dark, dwarfed corner of Planken and Seilergasse. We were looking for the Class C pension that wanted to be a B.

“No place to park,” I said to Father, who was already making note of that in his pad.

I doubled-parked and we sat in the car and peered up at the Pension Grillparzer; it rose only four slender stories between a pastry shop and a Tabak Trafik.

“See?” Father said. “No bears.”

“No men, I hope,” said Grandmother.

“They come at night,” Robo said, looking cautiously up and down the street.

We went inside to meet the manager, a Herr Theobald, who instantly put Johanna on her guard. “Three generations traveling together!” he cried. “Like the old days,” he added, especially to Grandmother, “before all these divorces and the young people wanting apartments by themselves. This is a family pension! I just wish you had made a reservation—so I could put you more closely together.”

“We're not accustomed to sleeping in the same room,” Grandmother told him.

“Of course not!” Theobald cried. “I just meant that I wished your rooms could be closer together.” This worried Grandmother, clearly.

“How far apart must we be put?” she asked.

“Well, I've only two rooms left,” he said. “And only one of them is large enough for the two boys to share with their parents.”

“And my room is how far from theirs?” Johanna asked coolly.

“You're right across from the W.C.!” Theobald told her, as if this were a plus.

But as we were shown to our rooms, Grandmother staying With Father—contemptuously to the rear of our procession—I heard her mutter, “This is not how I conceived of my retirement. Across the hall from a W.C., listening to all the visitors.”

“Not one of these rooms is the same,” Theobald told us. “The furniture is all from my family.” We could believe it. The one large room Robo and I were to share with my parents was a hall-sized museum of knickknacks, every dresser with a different style of knob. On the other hand, the sink had brass faucets and the headboard of the bed was carved. I could see my father balancing things up for future notation in the giant pad.

“You may do that later,” Johanna informed him. “Where do I stay?”

As a family, we dutifully followed Theobald and my grandmother down the long, twining hall, my father counting the paces to the W.C. The hall rug was thin, the color of a shadow. Along the walls were old photographs of speed-skating teams—on their feet the strange blades curled up at the tips like court jesters' shoes or the runners of ancient sleds.

Robo, running far ahead, announced his discovery of the W.C.

Grandmother's room was full of china, polished wood, and the hint of mold. The drapes were damp. The bed had an unsettling ridge at its center, like fur risen on a dog's spine—it was almost as if a very slender body lay stretched beneath the bedspread.

Grandmother said nothing, and when Theobald reeled out of the room like a wounded man who's been told he'll live, Grandmother asked my father, “On what basis can the Pension Grillparzer hope to get a B?”

“Quite decidedly C,” Father said.

“Born C and will die C,” I said.

“I would say, myself,” Grandmother told us, “that it was E or F.”

In the dim tearoom a man without a tie sang a Hungarian song. “It does not mean he's Hungarian,” Father reassured Johanna, but she was skeptical.

    'I'd say the odds are not in his favor,” she suggested. She would not have tea or coffee, Robo ate a little cake, which he claimed to like. My mother and I smoked a cigarette; she was trying to quit and I was trying to start. Therefore, we shared a cigarette between us—in fact, we'd promised never to smoke a whole one alone.

“He's a great guest,” Herr Theabold whispered to my father; he indicated the singer. “He knows songs from all over.”

“From Hungary, at least,” Grandmother said, but she smiled.

A small man, clean-shaven but with that permanent gun-blue shadow of a beard on his lean face, spoke to my grandmother. He wore a clean white shirt (but yellow from age and laundering), suit pants, and an unmatching jacket.

“Pardon me?” said Grandmother.

“I said that I tell dreams,” the man informed her.

“You tell dreams,” Grandmother said. “Meaning, you have them?”

“Have them and tell them,” he said mysteriously. The singer stopped singing.

“Any dreams you want to know,” said the singer. “He can tell it.”

“I'm quite sure I don't want to know any,” Grandmother said. She viewed with displeasure the ascot of dark hair bursting out at the open throat of the singer's shirt. She would not regard the man who “told” dreams at all.

“I can see you are a lady,” the dream man told Grandmother. “You don't respond to just every dream that comes along.”

“Certainly not,” said Grandmother. She shot my father one of her how-could-you-have-let-this-happen-to-me? looks.

“But I know one,” said the dream man; he shut his eyes. The singer slipped a chair forward and we suddenly realized he was sitting very close to us. Robo, though he was much too old for it, sat in Father's lap. “In a great castle,” the dream man began, “a woman lay beside her husband. She was wide awake, suddenly, in the middle of the night. She woke up without the slightest idea of what had awakened her, and she felt as alert as if she'd been up for hours. It was also clear to her, without a look, a word, or a touch, that her husband was wide awake too— and just as suddenly.”

“I hope this is suitable for the child to hear, ha ha,” Herr Theobald said, but no one even looked at him. My grandmother folded her hands in her lap and stared at them—her knees together, her heels tucked under her straight-backed chair. My mother held my father's hand.

I sat next to the dream man, whose jacket smelled like a zoo. He said, “The woman and her husband lay awake listening for sounds in the castle, which they were only renting and did not know intimately. They listened for sounds in the courtyard, which they never bothered to lock. The village people always took walks by the castle; the village children were allowed to swing on the great courtyard door. What had woken them?”

“Bears?” said Robo, but Father touched his fingertips to Robo's mouth.

“They heard horses,” said the dream man. Old Johanna, her eyes shut, her head inclined toward her lap, seemed to shudder in her stiff chair. “They heard the breathing and stamping of horses who were trying to keep still,” the dream man said. “The husband reached out and touched his wife. “Horses?', he said. The woman got out of bed and went to the courtyard window. She would swear to this day that the courtyard was full of soldiers on horseback—but what soldiers they were! They wore armor!