The Hotel New Hampshire

when she was off duty, and gone from the Gasthaus Freud—and I could spend a quiet time alone with her bears, remembering Mother’s collection, which perished with her). Old Billig also liked plants—plants that leaped out of those pots designed to resemble animals and birds: flowers springing from the backs of frogs, ferns sprawling over a grove of flamingos, an orange tree sprouting from the head of an alligator. The other whores mostly had changes of clothes and cosmetics and medicines to move. It was strange to think of them as having only “night rooms” at the Gasthaus Freud—as opposed to Ronda Ray having her “dayroom”; it struck me how dayrooms and night rooms were used for similar purposes.

We met the whores that first night we helped them move from the third to the second floor. There were four whores on the Krugerstrasse, plus Old Billig. Their names were Babette, Jolanta, Dark Inge, and Screaming Annie. Babette was called Babette because she was the only one who spoke French; she tended to get most of the French customers (the French being most sensitive about speaking any language but French). Babette was small—and therefore Lilly’s favorite—with a pixie face that the somber light in the lobby of the Gasthaus Freud could cause to look (at certain angles) unpleasantly rodent-like. In later years I would think of Babette as probably anoretic, without knowing it—none of us knew what anorexia was, in 1957. She wore flowery prints, very summer-like dresses—even when it wasn’t summer—and she had a funny kind of over-powdered sense about her (as if, if you touched her, a small puff of powder would blast through her pores); at other times, her skin had a waxiness about it (as if, if you touched her, your finger might leave a dent). Lilly told me once that Babette’s smallness was an important part of her (Lilly’s) growing up, because Babette helped Lilly realize that small people could actually have sex with large people and not be altogether destroyed. That’s how Lilly liked to put it: “Not altogether destroyed.”

Jolanta called herself Jolanta because she said it was a Polish name and she was fond of Polish jokes. She was square-faced, strong-looking, as big as Frank (and nearly as awkward); she gave off a heartiness that you suspected of being false—as if, in the middle of a booming good joke, she might turn suddenly sour and produce a knife from her handbag or grind a wineglass into someone’s face. She was broad-shouldered and heavy-breasted, solid in her legs but not fat—Jolanta had the robust charm of a peasant who’d been strangely corrupted by a sneaky sort of city violence; she looked erotic, but dangerous. In my first days and nights at the Gasthaus Freud it was her image I most often masturbated to—it was Jolanta I had the greatest trouble speaking to, not because she was the most coarse but because I was the most afraid of her.

“How can you recognize a Polish prostitute?” she asked me. I had to ask Frank for a translation. “Because she pays you to fuck her,” Jolanta said. This I understood without Frank’s help.

“Did you get it?” Frank asked me.

“Jesus, yes, Frank,” I said.

“Then laugh,” Frank said. “You’d better laugh.” And I looked at Jolanta’s hands—she had the wrists of a farmer, the knuckles of a boxer—and laughed.

Dark Inge was not a laugher. She’d had a most unhappy life. More important, she had not lived very much of her life, yet; she was only eleven. A mulatto—with an Austrian mother and a black American G. I. for her father—she’d been born at the start of the occupation. Her father had left with the occupying powers, in 1955, and nothing he’d told Inge or her mother about the treatment of black people in the United States had made them want to go with him. Dark Inge’s English was the best among the whores, and when Father left for France—to identify the bodies of Mother and Egg—it was Dark Inge we spent most of our sleepless nights with. She was as tall as I was, although she was only Lilly’s age, and the way they dressed her up made her look as old as Franny. Lithe and pretty and mocha-colored, she worked as a tease; she was not a real whore.

She was not allowed to stroll the Krugerstrasse without another whore beside her, unless she strolled the Krugerstrasse with Susie the bear; when any man wanted her, he was told he could only look at her—and touch himself. Dark Inge was not old enough to be touched, and no man was allowed to be alone in a room with her. If a man wanted to be with her, Susie the bear kept them company. It was a simple system, but it worked. If a man looked as if he was about to touch Dark Inge, Susie the bear would make the necessary sounds and gestures preparatory to a charge. If the man asked Dark Inge to take off too many clothes, or if he insisted she look at him while he masturbated, Susie the bear would get restless. “You’re making the bear hostile,” Dark Inge would warn the man, who would leave—or else finish masturbating quickly, while Dark Inge looked away.

All the whores knew that Susie the bear could get to their rooms in a matter of seconds. All it required was some cry of distress, because Susie—like any well-trained animal—knew all their voices by heart. Babette’s nasal little yelp, Jolanta’s violent bellow, Old Billig’s shattering “mementos.” But to us children the worst customers were the shame-faced men who masturbated to only the most modest glimpses of Dark Inge.

“I don’t think I could beat off with a bear in my room,” Frank said.

“I don’t think you could beat off with Susie in your room, Frank,” Franny said.

Lilly shuddered, and I joined her. With Father in France—with those bodies most important to us—we viewed the body traffic in the Gasthaus Freud with that detachment peculiar to mourners.

“When I get old enough,” Dark Inge told us, “I can charge for the real thing.” It surprised us children that “the real thing” cost more money than beating off while watching Inge.

Dark Inge’s mother was planning to get Inge out of the business by the time her daughter was “old enough.” Dark Inge’s mother planned to retire her daughter before her daughter came of age. Dark Inge’s mother was the fifth lady of the night in the Gasthaus Freud—the one called Screaming Annie. She made more money than any other whore on the Krugerstrasse, because she was working for a respectable retirement (for her daughter and for herself).

If you wanted a frail flower, or a little French, you asked for Babette. If you wanted experience, and a bargain, you got Old Billig. If you courted danger—if you liked a touch of violence—you could take your chances with Jolanta. If you were ashamed of yourself, you could pay to steal a look at Dark Inge. And if you desired the ultimate deception, you went with Screaming Annie.

As Susie the bear said, “Screaming Annie’s got the best fake orgasm in the business.”

Screaming Annie’s fake orgasm could jar Lilly out of her worst nightmares, it could cause Frank to sit bolt upright in bed and howl in terror at the dark figure of the dressmaker’s dummy lurking at the foot of his bed, it could rip me out of the deepest sleep—suddenly wide-awake, with an erection, or grabbing my own throat to feel where it was slashed. Screaming Annie, in my opinion, was an argument—all by herself—for not having the whores occupy the floor most immediately above our own.

She could even stir Father out of his grief—even upon his immediate return from France. “Jesus God,” he would say, and come to kiss each of us, and see if we were safe.

Only Freud could sleep through it. “Leave it to Freud,” Frank said, “to not be fooled by a fake orgasm.” Frank thought himself very clever for this oft-repeated remark—because, of course, he meant the other Freud, not our blind manager.

Screaming Annie could sometimes fool even Susie the bear, who would grumble, “God, that’s got to be a real one.” Or, worse, Susie would occasionally confuse a fake orgasm with a possible scream for help. “That’s nobody coming, for Christ’s sake!” Susie would roar, reminding me of Ronda Ray. “That is somebody dying!” And she would go bawling down the second-floor hall, throw herself against Screaming Annie’s door, charge the wrecked bed with her terrifying snarls—causing Screaming Annie’s mate to fly, or faint, or wither on the spot. And Screaming Annie would say, mildly, “No no, Susie, nothing’s wrong. He’s a nice man.” By which time it was often too late to revive the man—at the very least reduced to a cringing, shrunken shape of fear.

“That’s the ultimate guilt trip,” Franny used to say. “Just when some guy’s about to get off, a bear busts into the room and starts mauling him.”

“Actually, honey,” Susie told Franny, “I think some of them get off on that.”

Were there actually some customers at the Gasthaus Freud who could only come when attacked by a bear? I wondered. But we were too young; we would never know some things about that place. Like the ghouls of all our Halloweens past, the clientele in the Gasthaus Freud would never be quite real for us. At least not the whores, and their customers—and not the radicals.