The Hotel New Hampshire

“Look at it this way,” she said. “I’ll see Junior again; we’re going to write letters, and all that. We’re staying friends. Now, someday—when I’m older, and if we do stay friends—it might be the perfect thing to do: to sleep with him. I wouldn’t want to have used it up.”

“Why couldn’t you sleep with him twice?” I asked her.

“You don’t get it,” she said.

I was thinking it had to do with her having been raped, but Franny could always read me like a book.

“No, kid,” she said. “It’s got nothing to do with being raped. Sleeping with someone is very different— provided it means something. I just don’t know what it would mean—with Junior. Not yet. Also,” she said, with a big sigh— and she paused. “Also,” she said, “I don’t have exactly a lot of experience, but it seems that once someone—or some people—get to have you, you don’t ever hear from them again.”

Now, it seemed to me, she had to be talking about her rape; I was confused. I said, “Who do you mean, Franny?” And she bit her lip a while.

Then she said, “It surprises me that I have not heard one word—not a single word—from Chipper Dove. Can you imagine that?” she asked. “All this time and not one word.”

Now I was really confused; it seemed amazing to me that she would have thought she’d ever hear from him. I couldn’t think of anything to say, except a stupid joke, so I said. “Well, Franny, I don’t suppose you’ve written to him, either.”

Twice,” Franny said. “I think that’s enough.”

“Enough?” I cried. “Why the fuck did you write him at all?” I yelled.

She looked surprised. “Why, to tell him how I was, and what I was doing,” she said. I just stared at her, and she looked away. “I was in love with him, John,” she whispered to me.

“Chipper Dove raped you, Franny,” I said. “Dove and Chester Pulaski and Lenny Metz—they gang-banged you.”

“It’s not necessary to say that,” she snapped at me. “I’m talking about Chipper Dove,” she said. “Just him.”

“He raped you,” I said.

“I was in love with him,” she said, keeping her back to me. “You don’t understand. I was in love—and maybe I still am,” she said. “Now,” she added, brightly, “would you like to tell Junior that? Do you think I should tell Junior that?” she asked. “Wouldn’t Junior just love that?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“No, I thought not, too,” Franny said. “So I just thought that—under the circumstances—I wouldn’t sleep with him. Okay?” she asked.

“Okay,” I said, but I wanted to tell her that certainly Chipper Dove had not loved her.

“Don’t tell me,” Franny said. “Don’t tell me that he didn’t love me. I think I know. But do you know what?” she asked me. “One day,” Franny said, “Chipper Dove might fall in love with me. And you know what?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Maybe if that happens, if he falls in love with me,” Franny said, “maybe—by then—I won’t love him anymore. And then I’ll really get him, won’t I?” she asked me. I just stared at her; she was, as Junior Jones had observed, a very old sixteen indeed.

I felt suddenly that we all couldn’t get to Vienna soon enough—that we all needed time to grow older, and wiser (if that’s what really was involved in the process). I know that I wanted a chance to pull even with Franny, if not ever ahead of her, and I thought I needed a new hotel for that.

It suddenly occurred to me that Franny might have been thinking of Vienna in somewhat the same way: of using it—to make herself smarter and tougher and (somehow) grown-up enough for the world that neither of us understood.

“Keep passing the open windows,” was all I could say to her, at the moment. We looked at the stubbly grass on the practice field, and knew that in the fall it would be punctured everywhere with cleats, churned by knees striking the ground, and clawing fingers—and that, this fall, we would not be in Dairy to see it, or to look away from it. Somewhere else all that—or something like it—would be going on, and we would be watching, or taking part in, whatever it was.

I took Franny’s hand and we walked along the path the football players always used, pausing only briefly by the turn we remembered—the way into the woods, where the ferns were; we didn’t need to see them. “Bye-bye,” Franny whispered to that holy and unholy place; I squeezed her hand—she squeezed back, then she broke our grip—and we tried to speak only German to each other, all the way back to the Hotel New Hampshire. It would be our new language very soon, after all, and we weren’t very good at it. We both knew that we needed to get better in order to be free of Frank.

Frank was taking his hearse-driving tour through the trees when we returned to Elliot Park. “Want a lesson?” he asked Franny. She shrugged, and Mother sent them both on an errand—Franny driving, Frank praying and flinching beside her.

That night, when I went to bed, Egg had put Sorrow in my bed—and dressed him in my running clothes. Getting Sorrow out of my bed—and getting Sorrow’s hair out of my bed—I thoroughly woke myself up again. I went down to the restaurant and bar to read. Max Urick was having a drink, sitting in one of the screwed-down chairs.

“How many times did old Schnitzler give it to Jeanette What’s Her Name?” Max asked me.

“Four hundred and sixty-four,” I said.

“Isn’t that something!” he cried.

When Max stumbled upstairs to bed, I sat listening to Mrs. Urick putting away some pans. Ronda Ray was not around; she was out—or maybe she was in; it hardly mattered. It was too dark to take a run—and Franny was asleep, so I couldn’t lift weights. Sorrow had ruined my bed for a while, so I just tried to read. It was a book about the 1918 flu—about all the famous and the unfamous people who were wiped out by it. It seemed like one of the saddest times in Vienna. Gustav Klimt, who once called his own work ‘Pig shit,’ died; he had been Schiele’s teacher. Schiele’s wife died—her name was Edith—and then Schiele himself died, when he was very young. I read a whole chapter in the book about what pictures Schiele might have painted if the flu hadn’t got him. I was beginning to get the rather fuzzy idea that the whole book was about what Vienna might have become if the flu hadn’t come to town, when Lilly woke me up.

“Why aren’t you sleeping in your room?” she asked. I explained about Sorrow.

“I can’t sleep because I can’t imagine what my room over there is going to be like,” Lilly explained. I told her about the 1918 flu, but she wasn’t interested. “I’m worried,” Lilly admitted. “I’m worried about the violence.”

“What violence?” I asked her.

“In Freud’s hotel,” Lilly said. “There’s going to be violence.”

“Why, Lilly?” I asked.

“Sex and violence,” Lilly said.

“You mean the whores?” I asked her.

“The climate of them,” Lilly said, sitting pretty in one of the screwed-down chairs, rocking slightly in her seat—her feet, of course, not reaching the floor.

“The climate of whores?” I said.

“The climate of sex and violence,” Lilly said. “That’s what it sounds like to me. That whole city,” she said. “Look at Rudolf—killing his girl friend, then killing himself.”

“That was in the last century, Lilly,” I reminded her.

“And that man who fucked that woman four hundred and sixty-four times,” Lilly said.

“Schnitzler,” I said. “Almost a century ago, Lilly.”

“It’s probably worse now,” Lilly said. “Most things are.”

That would have been Frank—who told her that—I knew.