The Hotel New Hampshire

but let me tell you: there’s no discrimination quite like the Ugly Treatment. I was an ugly kid and I just get uglier, every fucking day.”

We couldn’t help staring at her in the bear costume without the head; we wondered, of course, if Susie’s own body was as burly as a bear’s. And when we saw her later in the afternoon, sweating in her T-shirt and gym shorts, doing squats and knee bends against the wall of Freud’s office—warming up for her role when the radicals checked out for the day and the prostitutes came on at night—we could see she was physically suited to her particular form of animal imitation.

“Pretty chunky, huh?” she said to me. Too many bananas, Iowa Bob might have said; and not enough road work.

But—to be fair—it was hard for Susie to go anywhere not dressed, and performing, as a bear. Exercise is difficult when dressed as a bear.

“I can’t blow my cover or we’re in trouble,” she said.

Because how could Freud ever keep order without her? Susie the bear was the enforcer. When the radicals were bothered by troublemakers from the Right, when there were violent shouting matches in the hall and on the staircase, when some new-wave fascist started screaming, “Nothing is free!”—when a small mob came to protest in the lobby, carrying the banner that said the Symposium on East-West Relations should move … farther East—it was at these times that Freud needed her, Susie said.

“Get out, you’re making the bear hostile!” Freud would shout.

Sometimes it took a low growl and a short charge.

“It’s funny,” Susie said. “I’m not really so tough, but no one tries to fight a bear. All I have to do is grab someone and they roll into a ball and start moaning. I just sort of breathe on the bastards, I just kind of lay a little weight on them. No one fights back if you’re a bear.”

Because of the radicals” gratitude for this bearish protection, there was really no problem telling the radicals to move upstairs. My father and Freud explained their case in midafternoon. Father offered me as a typewriter mover, and I began carrying the machines up to the empty fifth-floor rooms. There were a half-dozen typewriters and a mimeograph machine; the usual office supplies; a seeming excess of telephones. I got a little tired with the third or fourth desk, but I hadn’t been doing my usual weight lifting—while we were traveling—and so I appreciated the exercise. I asked a couple of the younger radicals if they knew where I could get a set of barbells, but they seemed very suspicious—that we were Americans—and either they didn’t understand English or they chose to speak their own language. There was a brief protest from an older radical, who struck up what appeared to be quite a lively argument with Freud, but Susie the bear started whining and rolling her head around the old man’s ankles —as if she were trying to blow her nose on the cuffs of his pants—and he calmed down and climbed the stairs, even though he knew Susie wasn’t a real bear.

“What are they writing?” Franny asked Susie. “I mean, is it one of those newsletter kind of things, is it propaganda?”

“Why do they have so many phones?” I asked, because we hadn’t heard the phones ringing, not once—not all day.

“They make a lot of outgoing calls,” Susie said. “I think they’re into threatening phone calls. And I don’t read their newsletters. I’m not into their politics.”

“But what are their politics?” Frank asked.

“To change fucking everything,” Susie said. “To start again. They want to wipe the slate clean. They want a whole new ball game.”

“So do I,” said Frank. “That sounds like a good idea.”

“They’re scary,” said Lilly. “They look right over you, and they don’t see you when they’re looking right at you.”

“Well, you’re pretty short,” said Susie the bear. “They sure look at me, a lot.”

“And one of them looks at Franny, a lot,” I said.

“That’s not what I mean,” said Lilly. “I mean they don’t see people when they look at you.”

“That’s because they’re thinking about how everything could be different,” Frank said.

“People, too, Frank?” Franny asked. “Do they think people could be different? Do you?”

“Yeah,” said Susie the bear. “Like we could all be dead.”

Grief makes everything intimate; in our grieving for Mother and Egg, we got to know the radicals and whores as if we had always known them. We were the bereft children, motherless (to the whores), our golden brother slain (to the radicals). And so—to compensate for our gloom, and the added gloom of the conditions in the Gasthaus Freud—the radicals and whores treated us pretty well. And despite their day-and-night differences, they bore more similarities to each other than they might have supposed.

They both believed in the commercial possibilities of a simple ideal: they both believed they could, one day, be “free.” They both thought that their own bodies were objects easily sacrificed for a cause (and easily restored, or replaced, after the hardship of the sacrifice). Even their names were similar—if for different reasons. They had only code names, or nicknames, or if they used their real names, they used only their first names.

Two of them actually shared the same name, but there was no confusion, since the radical was male, the whore was female, and they were never at the Gasthaus Freud at the same time. The name was Old Billig— billig, in German, means “cheap.” The oldest whore was called this because her prices were substandard for the district of the city she strolled; the Krugerstrasse whores, although Krugerstrasse was in the First District, were themselves a sort of subdistrict to the Kärntnerstrasse whores (around the corner). If you turned off the Kärntnerstrasse onto our tiny street, it was as if you were lowering yourself (by comparison) into a world without light; one street off the Kärntnerstrasse you lost the glow of the Hotel Sacher, and the grand gleam of the State Opera, and you noticed how the whores wore more eyeshadow, how their knees buckled, slightly, or their ankles appeared to cave in (from standing too long), or how they appeared to be thicker in the waist—like the dressmaker’s dummy in Frank’s room. Old Billig was the captain of the Krugerstrasse whores.

Her namesake, among the radicals, was the old gentleman who had argued most ferociously with Freud about moving to the fifth floor. This Old Billig had earned his “cheap” designation for his reputation of leading a hand-to-mouth existence—and his history of being what the other radicals called “a radical’s radical.” When there were Bolsheviks, he was one; when the names changed, he changed his name. He was at the forefront of every movement, but—somehow—when the movement ran amok or into terminal trouble, Old Billig took up the rear position and discreetly trailed away out of sight, waiting for the next forefront. The idealists among the younger radicals were both suspicious of Old Billig and admiring of his endurance—his survival. This was not unlike the view held of Old Billig, the whore, by her colleagues.

Seniority is an institution that is revered and resented in and out of society.

Like Old Billig the radical, Old Billig the whore was the most argumentative with Freud about changing floors.

“But you’re going down,” Freud said, “you’ll have to climb one less flight of stairs. In a hotel with no elevator, the second floor is an improvement over the third.”

I could follow Freud’s German, but not Old Billig’s answer. Frank told me that she protested on the grounds of having too many “mementos” to move.

“Look at this boy!” Freud said, groping around for me. “Look at his muscles!” Freud, of course, “looked” at my muscles by feeling them; squeezing and punching me, he shoved me in the general direction of the old whore. “Feel him!” Freud cried. “He can move every memento you got. If we gave him a day, he could move the whole hotel!”

And Frank told me what Old Billig said. “I don’t need to feel any more muscles,” Old Billig told Freud, declining the offer to squeeze me. “I feel muscles in my frigging sleep,” she said. “Sure he can move the mementos,” she said. “But I don’t want nothing broken.”

And so I moved Old Billig’s “mementos” with the greatest of care. A collection of china bears that rivaled Mother’s collection (and after Mother’s death, Old Billig would invite me to visit her room in the daylight hours—