The Hotel New Hampshire

would feel the pain of our lovemaking for days. And that pain would keep us sane; the pain would convince us both that awaiting us in this particular pursuit of each other was our certain self-destruction.

Franny found some money for a cab in her purse; when she gave me the money, she gave me a very chaste and sisterly kiss. To this day—between Franny and me—no other kind of kiss will do. We kiss each other now the way I imagine most brothers and sisters kiss. It may be dull, but it’s a way to keep passing the open windows.

And when I left the Stanhope—on that night shortly before Christmas, 1964—I felt truly safe, for the first time. I felt fairly sure that all of us would keep passing the open windows—that we were all survivors. I guess, now, that Franny and I had been thinking only of each other, we had been thinking a little too selfishly. I think Franny felt that her invulnerability was infectious—most people who are inclined toward feelings of invulnerability do think this way, you know. And I tended to try to follow Franny’s feelings, as exactly as I could manage.

I caught a cab going downtown at about midnight and rode it down Fifth Avenue to Central Park South; despite the agony of my private parts, I was sure I could walk to Frank’s from there. Also, I wanted to look at the Christmas decorations in front of the Plaza. I thought of walking just a little out of my way so that I could look at the toys displayed in the windows of F. A. O. Schwarz. I thought of how Egg would have loved those windows; Egg had never been to New York. But, I thought, Egg had probably imagined better windows, full of more toys, all the time.

I limped along Central Park South. Number 222 is between the East Side and the West, but nearer to the West—a perfect place for Frank, I was thinking; and for us all, for all of us were the survivors of the Symposium on East-West Relations.

There is a photograph of Freud—of the other Freud—in his apartment in Vienna at 19 Berggasse. He is fifty-eight; it is 1914. Freud has an I-told-you-so sort of stare; he looks both cross and worried. He looks as emphatic as Frank and as anxious as Lilly. The war that would begin in August of that year would destroy the Austro-Hungarian Empire; that war would also convince Herr Professor Doktor Freud that his diagnosis of the aggressive and self-destructive tendencies in human beings had been quite correct. In the photograph one can imagine where Freud got his idea that the human nose was “a genital formation.” Freud got that idea “from the mirror,” as Frank says. I think Freud hated Vienna; to his credit, our Freud hated Vienna, too, as Franny was the first to point out. Franny also hated Vienna; she would always be a Freudian in her contempt for sexual hypocrisy, for example. And Frank would be a Freudian in the sense that he was anti-Strauss—“the other Strauss,” Frank would note; he meant Johann, the very Viennese Strauss, the one who wrote that dippy song: “Happy is the man who forgets what he cannot change” (Die Fledermaus ). But both our Freud and the other Freud were morbidly obsessed with what was forgotten—they were interested in what was repressed, in what we dreamed. That made them both very un –Viennese. And our Freud had called Frank a prince; Freud had said that no one should call Frank “queer”; the other Freud had also endeared himself to Frank—when some mother wrote the good doctor and begged him to cure her son of his homosexuality, Freud brusquely informed her that homosexuality was not a disease; there was nothing to “cure.” Many of the world’s great men, the great Freud told this mother, had been homosexuals.

“That’s right on target!” Frank was fond of shouting. “Just look at me!”

“And look at me,” Susie the bear used to say. “Why didn’t he mention some of the world’s great women? If you ask me,” Susie used to say, “Freud’s a little suspect.”

“Which Freud, Susie?” Franny would tease her.

“Either one,” Susie the bear used to say. “Take your pick. One of them carried a baseball bat, one of them had that thing on his lip.”

“That was cancer, Susie,” Frank pointed out, rather stiffly.

“Sure,” said Susie the bear, “but Freud called it ‘this thing on my lip.’ He didn’t call cancer cancer, but he called everyone else repressed.”

“You’re too hard on Freud, Susie,” Franny told her.

“He’s a man, isn’t he?” Susie said.

“You’re too hard on men, Susie,” Franny told her.

“That’s right, Susie,” Frank said. “You ought to try one!”

“How about you, Frank?” Susie asked him, and Frank blushed.

“Well,” Frank stammered, “that’s not the way I go—to be perfectly frank.”

“I think there’s just someone else inside you, Susie,” Lilly said. “There’s someone else inside you who wants to get out.”

“Oh boy,” Franny groaned. “Maybe there’s a bear inside her that wants to get out!”

“Maybe there’s a man inside her!” Frank suggested.

“Maybe just a nice woman is inside you, Susie,” Lilly said. Lilly, the writer, would always try to see the heroes in us all.

That night shortly before Christmas, 1964, I painfully inched my way along Central Park South; I started thinking about Susie the bear, and I remembered another photograph of Freud—Sigmund Freud—that I was fond of. In this one, Freud is eighty; in three years he would be dead. He is sitting at his desk at 19 Berggasse; it is 1936 and the Nazis would soon make him abandon his old study in his old apartment—and his old city, Vienna. In this photograph, a pair of no-nonsense eyeglasses are seriously perched on the genital formation of Freud’s nose. He is not looking at the camera—he is eighty years old, and he hasn’t much time; he is looking at his work, not wasting his time with us. Someone is looking at us in this photograph, however. It is Freud’s pet dog, his chow named Jo-fi. A chow somewhat resembles a mutant lion; and Freud’s chow has that glazed look of dogs who always stare stupidly into the camera. Sorrow used to do that; when he was stuffed, of course, Sorrow stared into the camera every time. And old Dr. Freud’s little sorrowful dog is there in the photograph to tell us what’s going to happen next; we might also recognize sorrow in the fragility of the knickknacks that are virtually crowding Freud out of his study, off 19 Berggasse and out of Vienna (the city he hated, the city that hated him). The Nazis would stick a swastika on his door; that damn city never liked him. And on June 4, 1938, the eighty-two-year-old Freud arrived in London; he had a year left to live—in a foreign country. Our Freud, at the time, was one summer away from getting fed up with Earl; he would return to Vienna at the time when all those repressed suicides of the other Freud’s day were turning into murderers. Frank has shown me an essay by a professor of history at the University of Vienna—a very wise man named Friedrich Heer. And that’s just what Heer says about the Viennese society of Freud’s time (and this may be true of either Freud’s time, I think): “They were suicides about to become murderers.” They were all Fehlgeburts, trying hard to become Arbeiters; they were all Schraubenschlüssels, admiring a pornographer.

They were ready to follow the instructions of a pornographer’s dream.

“Hitler, you know,” Frank loves to remind me, “had a rabid dread of syphilis. This is ironic,” Frank points out, in his tedious way, “when you remind yourself that Hitler came from a country where prostitution has always thrived.”

It thrives in New York, too, you know. And one winter night I stood at the corner of Central Park South and Seventh Avenue, looking into the darkness downtown; I knew the whores were down there. My own sex tingled with pain from Franny’s inspired efforts to save me—to save us both—and I knew, at last, that I was safe from them ; I was safe from both extremes, safe from Franny and safe from the whores.

A car took the corner at Seventh Avenue and Central Park South a little too fast; it was after midnight and this fast-moving car was the only car I could see moving on either street. A lot of people were in the car; they were singing along with a song on the radio. The radio was so loud that I could hear a very clear snatch of the song, even with the windows closed against the winter night. The song was not a Christmas carol, and it struck me as inappropriate to the decorations all over the city of New York, but Christmas decorations are seasonal and the song I heard just a snatch of was one of those universally bleeding-heart kind of Country and Western songs. Some trite-but-true thing was being tritely but truthfully expressed. I have been listening, for the rest of my life, for that song, but whenever I think I’m hearing it again, something strikes me as not quite the same. Franny teases me by telling me that I must have heard the Country and Western song called “Heaven’s Just a Sin Away.” And indeed,