The Hotel New Hampshire

“What’s this ‘little event among so many’ bullshit?” Susie the bear asked Franny. “What’s this ‘luckiest day of my life’ bullshit?” Susie asked her. “Those thugs didn’t just want to fuck you, honey, they wanted to take your strength away, and you let them. Any woman who accepts a violation of herself so passively … how you can actually say that you knew, somehow, Chip Dove would be ‘the first.’ Sweetheart! You have minimized the enormity of what has happened to you—just to make it a little easier to take.”

“Whose rape is it?” Franny asked Susie the bear. “I mean, you’ve got yours, I’ve got mine. If I say nobody got the me in me, then nobody got it. You think they get it every time?”

“You bet your sweet ass, honey,” Susie said. “A rapist is using his prick as a weapon. Nobody uses a weapon on you without getting you. For example,” said Susie the bear, “how’s your sex life these days?”

“She’s only sixteen,” I said. “She’s not supposed to have such a great sex life—at sixteen.”

“I’m not confused,” Franny said. “There’s sex and then there’s rape,” she said. “Day and night.”

“Then how come you keep saying Chipper Dove was ‘the first,’ Franny?” I asked her quietly.

“You bet your ass—that’s the point,” said Susie the bear.

“Look,” Franny said to us—with Frank uncomfortably playing solitaire and pretending not to listen; with Lilly following our conversation like a championship tennis match that demanded reverence for every stroke. “Look,” Franny said, “the point is I own my own rape. It’s mine. I own it. I’ll deal with it my way.”

“But you’re not dealing with it,” Susie said. “You never got angry enough. You’ve got to get angry. You’ve got to get savage about all the facts.”

“You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed,” said Frank, rolling his eyes and quoting old Iowa Bob.

“I’m serious,” said Susie the bear. She was too serious, of course—but more likable than she at first appeared. Susie the bear would finally get rape right, after a while. She would run a very fine rape crisis center, later in her life, and she would write in the very first line of advice in the rape-counseling literature that the matter of “Who Owns the Rape,” is the most important matter. She would finally understand that although her anger was essentially healthy for her, it might not have been the healthiest thing for Franny, at the time. “Allow the Victim to Ventilate,” she would wisely write in her counseling newsletter—and: “Keep Your Own Problems Separate from the Problems of the Victim.” Later, Susie the bear would really become a rape-expert woman—she of the famous line “Watch Out: the real issue of each rape may not be your real issue; kindly consider there might be more than one.” And to all her rape counselors she would impart this advice: “It is essential to understand that there is no one way that victims respond and adjust to this crisis. Any one victim might exhibit all, none, or any combination of the usual symptoms: guilt, denial, anger, confusion, fear, or something quite different. And problems might occur within a week, a year, ten years, or never.”

Very true; Iowa Bob would have liked this bear as much as he liked Earl. But in her first days with us, Susie was a bear on the rape issue—and on a lot of other issues, too.

And we were forced into an intimacy with her that was unnatural because we would suddenly turn to her as we would turn to a mother (in the absence of our own mother); after a while, we would turn to Susie for other things. Almost immediately this smart (though harsh) bear seemed more all-seeing than the blind Freud, and from our first day and night in our new hotel we turned to Susie the bear for all our information.

“Who are the people with the typewriters?” I asked her.

“How much do the prostitutes charge?” Lilly asked her.

“Where can I buy a good map?” Frank asked her. “Preferably, one that indicates walking tours.”

“Walking tours, Frank?” Franny said.

“Show the children their rooms, Susie,” Freud instructed his smart bear.

Somehow, we all went first to Egg’s room, which was the worst room—a room with two doors and no windows, a cube with a door connecting it to Lilly’s room (which was only one window better) and a door entering the ground-floor lobby.

“Egg won’t like it,” Lilly said, but Lilly was predicting that Egg wouldn’t like any of it: the move, the whole thing. I suspect she was right, and whenever I think of Egg, now, I tend to see him in his room in the Gasthaus Freud that he never saw. Egg in an airless,. windowless box, a tiny trapped space in the heart of a foreign hotel—a room unfit for guests.

The typical tyranny of families: the youngest child always gets the worst room. Egg would not have been happy in the Gasthaus Freud, and I wonder now if any of us could have been. Of course, we didn’t have a fair start. We had only a day and a night before the news of Mother and Egg would settle over us, before Susie became our Seeing Eye bear, too, and Father and Freud began their duet in the direction of a grand hotel—a successful hotel, at the very least, they hoped; if not a great hotel, at least a good one.

On the day of arrival, Father and Freud were already making plans. Father wanted to move the prostitutes to the fifth floor, and move the Symposium on East-West Relations to the fourth floor, thereby clearing floors two and three for guests.

“Why should the paying guests have to climb to the fourth and fifth floors?” Father asked Freud.

“The prostitutes,” Freud reminded my father, “are also paying guests.” He didn’t need to add that they also made a number of trips every night. “And some of their clients are too old for all those stairs,” Freud added.

“If they’re too old for the stairs,” Susie the bear said, “they’re too old for the dirty action, too. Better to have one croak on the stairs than to have one give up the ship in bed—on top of one of the smaller girls.”

“Jesus God,” said Father. “Maybe give the prostitutes the second floor, then. And make the damn radicals move to the top.”

“Intellectuals,” Freud said, “are in notorious bad shape.”

“Not all these radicals are intellectuals,” Susie said. “And we should have an elevator, eventually,” she added. “I’m for keeping the whores close to the ground and letting the thinkers do the climbing.”

“Yes, and put the guests in between,” Father said.

“What guests?” Franny asked. She and Frank had checked the registration; the Gasthaus Freud had no guests.

“It’s just the candy fire,” Freud said. “It smoked out the guests. Once we get the lobby right, the guests will pour in!”

“And the fucking will keep them awake all night, and the typewriters will wake them up in the morning,” said Susie the bear.

“A kind of bohemian hotel,” Frank said, optimistically.

“What do you know about bohemians, Frank?” Franny asked.

In Frank’s room was a dressmaker’s dummy, formerly the property of a prostitute who had kept a permanent room in the hotel. It was a stoutish dummy, upon which perched the chipped head of a mannequin Freud claimed had been stolen from one of the big department stores on the Kärntnerstrasse. A pretty but pitted face with her wig askew.

“Perfect for all your costume changes, Frank,” Franny said. Frank sullenly hung his coat on it.

“Very funny,” he said.

Franny’s room adjoined mine. We shared a bath with an ancient bathtub in it; the tub was deep enough to stew an ox in. The W.C. was down the hall and directly off the lobby. Only Father’s room had its own bath and its own W.C. It appeared that Susie shared the bath Franny and I shared, although she could enter it only through one of our rooms.

“Don’t sweat it,” Susie said. “I don’t wash a whole lot.”

We could tell. The odor was not exactly bear, but it was acrid, salty, rich, and strong, and when she took her bear’s head off, and we saw her dark, damp hair—her pale, pockmarked face, and her haggard, nervous eyes—we felt more comfortable with her appearance as a bear.

“What you see,” Susie said, “are the ravishments of acne—my teen-age misery. I am the original not-bad-if- you-put-a-bag-over-her-head girl.”

“Don’t feel bad,” said Frank. “I’m a homosexual. I’m not in for such a hot time as a teen-ager, either.”

“Well, at least you’re attractive,” said Susie the bear. “Your whole family is attractive,” she said, darting a mean look at us all. “You may get discriminated against,