The Hotel New Hampshire

revenge. Whatever we had done, it would never be as awful as what he had done to Franny—and if it had been as awful, it would have been too much.

I would feel, for the rest of my life, as if I were still holding Chipper Dove by his armpits—his feet a few inches off the ground of Seventh Avenue. There was really nothing to do with him except put him down; there never would be anything to do with him, too—with our Chipper Doves we just go on picking them up and putting them down, forever.

And so, you’d think, that was that. Lilly had proven herself with a real opera, a genuine fairy tale. Susie the bear had played out the part; she had exhausted her bear’s role; she would keep the bear suit only for its sentimental value, and for amusing children—and, of course, for Halloween. Father was about to get a Seeing Eye dog for Christmas. It would be his first of many Seeing Eye dogs. And once he had an animal to talk to, my father would finally figure out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

“Here comes the rest of our lives,” Franny said, with a kind of awed affection. “The rest of our fucking lives is finally coming up,” she said.

That day Chipper Dove wandered out of the Stanhope and back to his “firm,” it seemed we all would be survivors—those of us who were left; it seemed we had made it. Franny was now free to find a life, Lilly and Frank had their chosen careers—or, as they say, their careers had chosen them. Father needed only a little time with the animal side of himself—to help him make up his mind. I knew that an American literature degree from an Austrian university didn’t qualify me for very much, but what did I have to do but look after my father—but lift what weight I could lift off my brother and my sisters whenever the weight needed lifting?

What we had all forgotten in the pre-Christmas decorations, in our frenzy over dealing with Chipper Dove, was that shape that had haunted us from the beginning. As in any fairy tale, just when you think you’re out of the woods, there is more to the woods than you thought; just when you think you’re out of the woods, it turns out you’re still in them.

How could we so quickly have forgotten the lesson of the King of Mice? How could we have put away that old dog of our childhood, our dear Sorrow, as neatly as Susie folded up her bear suit and said, “That’s it. That’s over. Now it’s a whole new ball game”?

There is a song the Viennese sing—it is one of their so-called Heurigen songs, the songs they sing to celebrate the first wine of the season. Typical of those people Freud understood so well, their songs are full of death wishes. The King of Mice himself, no doubt, once sang this little song.

Verkauft’s mei G’wand, I Fahr in Himmel.

Sell my old clothes, I’m off to heaven.

When Susie the bear took her friends back to the Village, Frank and Franny and Lilly and I called up good old room service and ordered the champagne. As we tasted the very slight sweetness of our revenge on Chipper Dove, our childhood appeared like a clear lake—behind us. We felt we were free of sorrow. But one of us must have been singing that song, even then. One of us was secretly humming the tune.

LIFE IS SERIOUS BUT ART IS FUN!

The King of Mice was dead, but—for one of us—the King of Mice was not forgotten.

I am not a poet. I was not even the writer in our family. Donald Justice would become Lilly’s literary hero: he replaced even that marvelous ending of The Great Gatsby, which Lilly read to us too often. Donald Justice has most eloquently posed the question that flies to the heart of my hotel-living family. As Mr. Justice asks,

How shall I speak of doom, and ours in special,

But as of something altogether common?

Add doom to the list, then. Especially in families, doom is “altogether common.” Sorrow floats; love, too; and—in the long run—doom. It floats, too.

12 The King of Mice Syndrome; the Last Hotel New Hampshire

Here is the epilogue; there always is one. In a world where love and sorrow float, there are many epilogues—and some of them go on and on. in a world where doom always muscles in, some of the epilogues are short.

“A dream is a disguised fulfillment of a suppressed wish,” Father announced to us over Easter dinner at Frank’s apartment in New York—Easter, 1965.

“You’re quoting Freud again, Pop,” Lilly told him.

“Which Freud?” Franny asked, by rote.

“Sigmund,” Frank answered. “From Chapter Four of The Interpretation of Dreams.”

I should have known the source, too, because Frank and I were taking turns reading to Father in the evening. Father had asked us to read all of Freud to him.

“So what did you dream about, Pop?” Franny asked him.

“The Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea,” Father said. His Seeing Eye dog spent every mealtime with her head in Father’s lap; every time Father reached for his napkin, he would deposit a morsel into the dog’s waiting mouth and the dog would raise her head—momentarily—allowing Father access to his napkin.

“You should not feed her at the table,” Lilly scolded Father, but we all liked the dog. She was a German shepherd with a particularly rich golden-brown color that liberally interrupted the black all over her body and dominated the tone of her gentle face; she was particularly long-faced and high-cheek-boned, so that her appearance was nothing like a Labrador retriever’s. Father had wanted to call her Freud, but we thought there was enough confusion among us concerning which Freud was meant—by this remark or that. A third Freud, we convinced Father, would have driven everyone crazy.

Lilly suggested we call the dog Jung.

“What? That traitor! That anti-Semite!” Frank protested. “Whoever heard of naming a female after Jung?” Frank asked. “That’s something only Jung would have thought of,” he said, fuming.

Lilly then suggested we call the dog Stanhope, because of Lilly’s fondness for the fourteenth floor; Father liked the idea of naming his first Seeing Eye dog after a hotel, but he said he preferred naming the dog after a hotel he really liked. We all agreed, then, that the dog would be called “Sacher.” Frau Sacher, after all, had been a woman.

Sacher’s only bad habit was putting her head in Father’s lap every time Father sat down to eat anything, but Father encouraged this—so it was really Father’s bad habit. Sacher was otherwise a model Seeing Eye dog. She did not attack other animals, thus dragging my father wildly out of control after her; she was especially smart about the habits of elevators—blocking the door from reclosing with her body until my father had entered or exited. Sacher barked at the doorman at the St. Moritz but was otherwise friendly, if a trifle aloof, with Father’s fellow pedestrians. These were the days before you had to clean up after your dog in New York City, so Father was spared that humiliating task—which would have been almost impossible for him, he realized. In fact, Father feared the passing of such a law years before anyone was talking about it. “I mean,” he’d say, “if Sacher shits in the middle of Central Park South, how am I supposed to find the crap? It’s bad enough to have to pick up dog shit, but if you can’t see it, it’s positively arduous. I won’t do it!” he would shout. “If some