The Hotel New Hampshire

Father looked at Franny. It reminded me of the looks he occasionally gave Mother; he was looking into the future, again, and he was looking for forgiveness—in advance. He wanted to be excused for everything that would happen. It was as if the power of his dreaming was so vivid that he felt compelled to simply act out whatever future he imagined—and we were being asked to tolerate his absence from reality, and maybe his absence from our lives, for a while. That is what “pure love” is: the future. And that’s the look Father gave to Franny.

“Franny?” Father asked her. “What do you think?”

Franny’s opinion was the one we always waited for. She looked at the spot in the street where Ernst had been—Ernst the pornographer, Ernst the “aesthete” on the subject of erotica, Ernst the lady-killer. I saw that the her in her was in trouble; something was already amiss in Franny’s heart.

“Franny?” Father said, softly.

“I think we should stay,” Franny said. “We should see what it’s like,” she said, facing us all. We children looked away, but Father gave Franny a hug and a kiss.

“Atta girl, Franny!” he said. Franny shrugged; she gave Father Mother’s shrug, of course—it could get to him, every time.

Someone has told me that the Krugerstrasse, today, is mostly closed to all but pedestrian traffic, and that there are two hotels on the street, a restaurant, a bar, and a coffeehouse—even a movie theater and a record store. Someone has told me that it’s a posh street, now. Well, that’s just so hard to believe. And I wouldn’t ever want to see the Krugerstrasse again, no matter how much it has changed.

Someone has told me that there are fancy places on the Krugerstrasse itself, now: a boutique and a hairdresser, a bookstore and a record store, a place that sells furs and a place that sells bathroom fittings. This is utterly amazing.

Someone has told me that the post office is still there. The mail goes on.

And there are still prostitutes on the Krugerstrasse; no one has to tell me that prostitution still goes on.

The next morning I woke up Susie the bear. “Earl!” she said, fighting out of sleep. “What the fuck is it now?”

“I want your help,” I said to her. “You’ve got to save Franny.”

“Franny’s real tough,” said Susie the bear. “She’s beautiful and tough,” said Susie, rolling over, “and she doesn’t need me.”

“You impress her,” I said; this was a hopeful lie. Susie was only twenty, only four years older than Franny, but when you’re sixteen, four years is a big difference. “She likes you,” I said; this was true, I knew. “You’re at least older, like an older sister to her, you know?” I said.

“Earl!” Susie the bear said, staying in disguise.

“Maybe you are weird,” Frank told Susie, “but Franny can be more influenced by you than she can be influenced by us.”

“Save Franny from what?” Susie the bear asked.

“From Ernst,” I said.

“From pornography itself,” said Lilly, shuddering.

“Help her get the her in her back,” Frank begged Susie the bear.

“I don’t normally mess with underage girls,” Susie said.

“We want you to help her, not mess with her,” I said to Susie, but Susie the bear only smiled. She sat up in her bed, her costume disheveled on the floor of her room, her own hair like bear hair with its stiff and erratic directions, her hard face like a wound above her ratty T-shirt.

“Helping someone is the same as messing with someone,” said Susie the bear.

“Will you please try?” I asked her.

“And you ask me where the real trouble began,” Frank would say to me, later: “Well, it didn’t start with the pornography—not in my opinion,” Frank would say. “Not that it matters, of course, but I know what started the trouble that got to you,” Frank would tell me.

Like the pornography, I don’t wish to describe it, but Frank and I had only a very brief picture—we had only the quickest glimpse of it, though we saw more than enough. It started one evening in August, when it was so hot Lilly had woken up Frank and me and asked for a glass of water—as if she were a baby again—one evening when it was too quiet in the Gasthaus Freud. There were no customers to make Screaming Annie scream, there was no one even interested enough to grunt with Jolanta, to whimper with Babette, to strike a bargain with Old Billig, or even look at young Dark Inge. It was too hot to sit in the Kaffee Mowatt; the whores sat on the stairs in the cool, dark lobby of the Gasthaus Freud—now under construction. Freud was in bed, asleep, of course; he could not see the heat. And Father, who saw the future more clearly than the moment, was asleep, too.

I went in Frank’s room and boxed the dressmaker’s dummy around for a while.

“Jesus God,” Frank said, “I’ll be glad when you find some barbells and you leave my dummy alone.” But he couldn’t sleep, either; we shoved the dressmaker’s dummy back and forth between us.

There was no mistaking the sound for Screaming Annie—or for any of the whores. The sound seemed to bear no relationship to sorrow; there was too much light in the sound to have anything to do with sorrow, there was too much of the music of water in the sound to make Frank and me think of fucking for money, or even of lust there was too much light and water music for lust, either. Frank and I had never heard this sound before—and in my memory, which is a forty-year-old’s memory now, I do not remember another recording of this song; no one would ever sing quite exactly this song to me.

It was the song Susie the bear made Franny sing. Susie went through Franny’s room to use the bathroom. Frank and I went through my room to get to the same bathroom; through the bathroom door we could peek into Franny’s room.

The head of the bear on the rug at the foot of Franny’s bed was at first unnerving, as if someone had severed Susie from her head when she’d first intruded. But the bear’s head was not the focal point of Frank’s and my attention. It was Franny’s sound that drew us—both keen and soft, as nice as Mother, as happy as Egg. It was a sound almost without sex in it, although sex was the song’s subject, because Franny lay on her bed with her arms flung over her head and her head thrown back, and between her long, slightly stirring legs (treading water, as if she were very buoyant), in my sister’s dark lap (which I shouldn’t have seen) was a headless bear—a headless bear was lapping there, like an animal eating from a fresh kill, like an animal drinking in the heart of a forest.

This vision frightened Frank and me. We didn’t know where to go after seeing this, and for no reason, with nothing on our minds—or with too much on them—we stumbled into the lobby. There all the whores on the stairs greeted us; the heat and their own boredom, their inactivity, seemed to make them unusually glad to see us, although they always seemed to be pretty glad to see us. Only Screaming Annie looked disappointed to see us—as if she’d thought, for a moment, we might be “business.”

Dark Inge said, “Hey, you guys, you look like you seen a ghost.”

“Something you ate, dears?” asked Old Billig. “It’s too late for you to be up.”

“Your hard-ons keeping you awake?” Jolanta asked.

“Oui, oui,” sang Babette. “Bring us your hard-ons!”

“Stop that,” said Old Billig. “It’s too hot to fuck, anyway.”

“Never too hot,” Jolanta said.

“Never too cold,” said Screaming Annie.

“Do you want to play cards?” Dark Inge asked us. “Crazy eights?”

But Frank and I, like windup soldiers, did a few awkward turns at the foot of the stairs, reversed direction, made our way back to Frank’s room—and then, like magnets, we were drawn to Father.

“We want to go home,” I said to him. He woke up, and took both Frank and me into his bed with him, as if we were still small.

“Please, let’s go home, Dad,” Frank whispered.

“As soon as we’re successful here,” Father assured us. “Just as soon as we make it—I promise.”

“When?” I hissed at him, but Father put a headlock on me, and kissed me.