The Hotel New Hampshire

Old Billig (the radical Old Billig) was the first to arrive. Like Iowa Bob, he said he was too old to waste what was left of his life asleep. He got there so early in the morning that he occasionally passed the last whore on his way in, her way out. This was inevitably Screaming Annie, working the hardest hours—to save herself and her dark daughter.

Susie the bear slept in the early morning hours. There was little whore trouble after dawn, as if the light kept people safe—if not always honest—and the radicals never started quarreling before midmorning. Most of the radicals were late sleepers. They wrote their manifestos all day, and made their threatening phone calls. They harassed each other—“in the absence of more tangible enemies,” Father would say of them. Father, after all, was a capitalist. Who else could even imagine the perfect hotel? Who but a capitalist, and a basic non-rocker of the boat, would even want to live in a hotel, to manage a non-industry, to sell a product that was sleep—not work—a product that was at least rest if not recreation? My father thought the radicals were more ludicrous than the whores. I think that after the death of my mother my father felt familiar with the confusions of lust and loneliness; perhaps he was even grateful for “the business”—as the whores called their work.

He was less sympathetic to the world-changers, to the idealists bent on altering the unpleasantries of human nature. This surprises me, now, because I think of Father as simply another kind of idealist—but of course Father was more determined to outlive unpleasantries than change them. That my father would never learn German also kept him isolated from the radicals; by comparison, the whores spoke better English.

The radical Old Billig knew one phrase of English. He liked to tickle Lilly, or give her a lollipop, while he teased her. “Yankee go home,” he would say to her, lovingly.

“He’s a sweet old fart,” Franny said. Frank tried to teach Old Billig another English phrase that Frank thought Billig would like.

“Imperialist dog,” Frank would say, but Billig got this hopelessly confused with “Nazi swine,” and it always came out strange.

The radical who spoke the best English used the code name Fehlgeburt. It was Frank who first explained to me that Fehlgeburt means “miscarriage” in German.

“As in ‘miscarriage of justice,’ Frank?” Franny asked. “No,” Frank said. “The other kind. The baby kind of miscarriage,” Frank said.

Fräulein Fehlgeburt, as she was called—Miss Miscarriage, to us children—had never been pregnant, thus had never miscarried; she was a university student whose code name was “Miscarriage” because the only other woman on the staff of the Symposium on East-West Relations had the code name “Pregnant.” She had been. Fräulein Schwanger—for schwanger means “pregnant” in German—was an older woman, Father’s age, who was famous in Viennese radical circles for a past pregnancy. She had written a whole book about being pregnant, and another book—a kind of sequel to the first-about having an abortion. When she was first pregnant she had worn a bright red sign saying “pregnant” on her chest—SCHWANGER!—under which, in letters of the same size, was the question “ARE YOU THE FATHER?” It had made a sensational book jacket, too, and she had donated all her royalties to various radical causes. Her subsequent abortion—and that book—had made her a popular subject for controversy; she could still draw a crowd when she gave a speech, and she was a loyal donator of the proceeds. Schwanger’s abortion book—published in 1955, simultaneously with the end of the occupation—had made the expulsion of this unwanted child symbolic of Austria’s freeing herself from the occupying powers. “The father,” Schwanger wrote, “could have been Russian, French, British, or American; at least to my body, and to my way of thinking, he was an unwanted foreigner.”

Schwanger was close to Susie the bear; the two shared a great many rape theories together. But Schwanger would also befriend my father; she appeared to be the most consoling to him, after my mother’s loss, not because there was anything “between” them (as they say) but because the calmness of her voice—the steady, soft cadence of her speech—was the most like my mother’s of all the voices in Gasthaus Freud. Like my mother, Schwanger was a gentle persuader. “I’m just a realist,” she had a way of saying, so innocently—though her hopes for wiping the slate clean, for starting a new world, from scratch, were as fervent as the fire dreams of any of the radicals.

Schwanger took us children with her, several times a day, for coffee with milk and cinnamon and whipped cream at the Kaffee Europa on Kärntnerstrasse—or to the Kaffee Mozart at Albertinaplatz Zwei, just behind the State Opera. “In case you don’t know it,” Frank would say, later—and over and over, “The Third Man was filmed at the Kaffee Mozart.” Schwanger couldn’t have cared less; it was the whipped cream that drove her away from the clatter of typewriters and the heat of debate, it was the calm of the coffeehouse that got to her. “The only worthwhile institution in our society—a shame that the coffeehouse will have to go, too,” Schwanger told Frank, Franny, Lilly, and me. “Drink up, dears!”

When you wanted whipped cream, you asked for Schlagobers, and if Schwanger meant “pregnant” to the other radicals, she meant pure Schlagobers to us children. She was our mother-like radical with a weakness for whipped cream; we really liked her.

And young Fräulein Fehlgeburt, whose major at the University of Vienna was American literature, adored Schwanger. We thought she seemed actually proud to be code-named “Miscarriage,” perhaps because we thought that Fehlgeburt, in German, could also mean “Abortion.” I’m sure this can’t be true, but in Frank’s dictionary, at least, the word for miscarriage and abortion was the same word, Fehlgeburt—which symbolizes perfectly our out-of-itness with the radicals, our failure to ever understand them. Every misunderstanding has at its center a breakdown of language. We never actually understood what these two women meant—the tough and mother-like Schwanger, marshaling forces (and money) for causes that struck us children as left of reason, but able to soothe us with her gentle and most logical voice, and her Schlagobers ; and the waiflike, stuttering, shy university student of American literature, Miss Miscarriage, who read aloud to Lilly (not just to comfort a motherless child but to improve her English). She read so well that Franny, Frank, and I would almost always listen in. Fehlgeburt liked to read to us in Frank’s room, so it appeared that the dressmaker’s dummy was listening, too.

It was from Fräulein Fehlgeburt, in the Gasthaus Freud—with our father in France, with our Mother and Egg dragged from the cold sea (under the marker buoy that was Sorrow)—that we first heard the whole of The Great Gatsby ; it was that ending, with Miss Miscarriage’s lilting Austrian accent, that really got to Lilly.

“‘Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eludes us then, but that’s no matter,’” Fehlgeburt read, excitedly, “‘—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther …’!” Miss Miscarriage read. “‘And one fine morning—’” Fehlgeburt paused; her saucer-like eyes seemed glazed by that green light Gatsby saw—maybe by the orgiastic future, too.

“What?” Lilly said, breathlessly, and a little echo of Egg was in Frank’s room with us.

“‘So we beat on,’” Fehlgeburt concluded, “‘boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’”

“Is that it?” Frank asked. “Is it over?” He was squinting, his eyes were shut so tight.

“Of course it’s over, Frank,” Franny said. “Don’t you know an ending when you hear one?”

Fehlgeburt looked drained of her blood, her child-like face with a sad grown-up’s frown, a strand of her lank blond hair wrapped nervously around a neat pink ear. Then Lilly started in, and we couldn’t stop her. It was late afternoon, the whores hadn’t come around, but when Lilly started in, Susie the bear thought Screaming Annie was faking an orgasm in a room she didn’t belong in. Susie burst into Frank’s room, knocking the dressmaker’s dummy over and causing poor Fräulein Fehlgeburt to yip in alarm. But even that intrusion couldn’t stop Lilly. Her cry seemed caught in her throat, her grief seemed to be something she was sure to choke on; we could not believe such a small body could generate so much trembling, could orchestrate so much sound.

Of course, we were all thinking, it’s not that the book moved her so much—it’s that bit about being “borne back ceaselessly into the past,” it’s our past that’s moving her, we were all thinking; it’s Mother, it’s Egg, and how we won’t ever be able to forget them. But when we calmed her down, Lilly blurted out suddenly that it was Father she was crying for. “Father is a Gatsby,” she cried. “He is! I know he is!”

And we all started in on her, at once. Frank said, “Lilly, don’t let that ‘orgiastic future’ stuff get you down.