The Hotel New Hampshire

being nice? Are you being rude?” Susie the bear turned to him and made a short run at him, on all fours; the bear butted the old man in the stomach—knocking him to the floor. My father seemed inclined to intervene, but Freud— leaning on the baseball bat—got back to his feet. It was hard to tell if he was chuckling. “Oh, Susie!” he said, in the wrong direction. “Susie’s just showing off. She don’t like criticism,” Freud said. “And she’s not so fond of men as she is of the girls. Where are the girls?” the old man said, his hands held out in two directions, and Franny and Lilly went to him—Susie the bear following Franny, nudging her affectionately from behind. Frank, suddenly obsessed with making friends with the bear, tugged the animal’s coarse fur, stammering, “Uh, you must be Susie the bear. We’ve all heard a lot about you. I’m Frank. Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

“No, no,” said Freud, “not German. Susie don’t like German. She speaks your language,” Freud said in Frank’s general direction.

Frank, oafishly, bent down to the bear, tugging its fur again. “Do you shake hands, Susie?” Frank asked, bending down, but the bear turned to face him; the bear stood up.

“She’s not being rude, is she?” Freud cried. “Susie, be nice! Don’t be rude.” Standing up, the bear wasn’t as tall as any of us—except she was taller than Lilly, and she was taller than Freud. The bear’s snout came to Frank’s chin. They stood face to face, for a moment, the bear shifting its weight on its hind legs, shuffling like a boxer.

“I’m Frank,” Frank said nervously to the bear, holding out his hand; then, with both hands, he tried to grasp the bear’s right paw and shake it.

“Keep your hands to yourself, kid,” the bear said to Frank, cuffing Frank’s arms apart with a swift, short blow. Frank, reeling backwards, stumbled on the reception bell—which made a quick ping.

“How’d you do that?” Franny asked Freud. “How’d you make it talk?”

“Nobody makes me talk, honey,” Susie the bear said, nuzzling Franny’s hip.

Lilly screamed again. “The bear talks, the bear talks!” she cried.

“She’s a smart bear!” Freud shouted. “Didn’t I tell you?”

“The bear talks!” Lilly screamed, hysterically.

“At least I don’t scream,” Susie the bear said. Then she dropped all semblance of bear-like mannerisms; she walked upright, and sullenly, back to the couch—where Lilly’s first scream had disturbed her. She sat down and crossed her legs and put her feet on the chair. It was Time magazine that she was reading, a rather out-of-date issue.

“Susie’s from Michigan,” Freud said, as if this explained everything. “But she went to college in New York. She’s very smart.”

“I went to Sarah Lawrence,” the bear said, “but I dropped out. What an elitist crock of shit,” she said—of Sarah Lawrence—the world of Time magazine passing impatiently through her paws.

“She’s a girl!” Father said. “It’s a girl in a bear suit!”

“A woman,” Susie said. “Watch it.” It was only 1957; Susie was a bear ahead of her time.

“A woman in a bear suit,” Frank said, with Lilly sliding against me and clutching my leg.

“There are no smart bears,” Freud said, ominously. “Except this kind.”

Upstairs, the typewriters were quarreling over our stunned silence. We regarded Susie the bear—a smart bear, indeed; and a Seeing Eye bear, too. Knowing she was not a real bear suddenly made her appear larger; she took on new power before us. She was more than Freud’s eyes, we thought; she might be his heart and mind, too.

Father viewed the lobby, while his old, blind mentor leaned on him for support. And what was Father seeing this time? I wondered. What castle, what palace, what deluxe-class possibility looming larger and larger—as he passed over the sagging couch where the she-bear sat, passed over the imitation Impressionists: the pink, bovine nudes fallen in flowers of light (on the clashing floral wallpaper)? And the easy chair with its stuffing exploding (like the bombs to be imagined under all the debris in the outer districts); and the one reading lamp too dim to dream by.

“Too bad about the candy store,” Father said to Freud.

“Too bad?” Freud cried. “Nein, nein, nicht too bad! It’s good. The place is gone, and they had no insurance. We can buy them up—cheap! Give ourselves a lobby people will notice—from the street!” Freud cried, though of course there was nothing his own eyes would notice, or could. “A very fortunate fire,” Freud said, “a fire perfectly timed for your arrival,” Freud said, squeezing my father’s arm. “A brilliant fire!” Freud said.

“A smart bear’s sort of fire,” said Susie the bear, cynically tearing her way through the old issue of Time.

“Did you set it?” Franny asked Susie the bear.

“You bet your sweet ass, honey,” Susie said.

Oh, there once was a woman who had also been raped, but when I told her Franny’s story, and how it seemed to me that Franny had handled it—by not handling it, perhaps, or by denying the worst of it—this woman told me that Franny and I were wrong.

“Wrong?” I said.

“You bet your ass,” this woman said. “Franny was raped, not beaten up. And those bastards did get the ‘her in her’—as your bullshit black friend calls it. What’s he know? A rape expert because he’s got a sister? Your sister robbed herself of the only weapon she had against those punks—their semen. And nobody stopped her from washing herself, nobody made her deal with it—so she’s going to be dealing with it all her life. In fact, she sacrificed her own integrity by not fighting her attackers in the first place—and you,” this woman said to me, “you conveniently diffused the rape of your sister and robbed the rape of its integrity by running off to find the hero instead of staying on the scene and dealing with it yourself.”

“A rape has integrity?” Frank asked.

“I went to get help,” I said. “They just would have beaten the shit out of me and raped her, anyway.”

“I’ve got to talk to your sister, honey,” this woman said. “She’s into her own amateurish psychology and it won’t work, believe me: I know rape.”

“Whoa!” Iowa Bob said, once. “All psychology is amateurish. Fuck Freud, and all that!”

“That Freud, anyway,” my father had added. And I would think, later: Maybe our Freud, too.

Anyway, this rape-expert woman said that Franny’s apparent reaction to her own rape was bullshit; and knowing that Franny still wrote letters to Chipper Dove made me wonder. The rape-expert woman said that rape simply wasn’t like that, that it didn’t have that effect—at all. She knew, she said. It had happened to her. And in college she’d joined a kind of club of women who’d all been raped, and they had agreed among themselves exactly what it was like, and what were the exactly correct responses to have to it. Even before she started talking to Franny, I could see how desperately important this woman’s private unhappiness was to her, and how—in her mind—the only credible reaction to the event of rape was hers. That someone else might have responded differently to a similar abuse only meant to her that the abuse couldn’t possibly have been the same.

“People are like that,” Iowa Bob would have said. “They need to make their own worst experiences universal. It gives them a kind of support.”

And who can blame them? It is just infuriating to argue with someone like that; because of an experience that has denied them their humanity, they go around denying another kind of humanity in others, which is the truth of human variety—it stands alongside our sameness. Too bad for her.

“She probably has had a most unhappy life,” Iowa Bob would have said.

Indeed: this woman had had a most unhappy life. This rape-expert woman was Susie the bear.