The Hotel New Hampshire

“Soon,” he said. “This place is going to take off—soon. I can feel it.”

But we would be in Vienna until 1964; we would stay there seven years.

“I grew old there,” Lilly would say; she would be eighteen years old by the time we left Vienna. Older, but not a whole lot bigger—as Franny would say.

Sorrow floats. We knew that. We shouldn’t have been so surprised.

But the night that Susie the bear made Franny forget about pornography—that night she made my sister sing so well—Frank and I were struck by a resemblance stronger than the resemblance Ernst the pornographer bore to Chipper Dove. In Frank’s room with the dressmaker’s dummy pushed against Frank’s door, Frank and I lay whispering in the darkness.

“Did you see the bear?” I said.

“You couldn’t see her head,” Frank said.

“Right,” I said. “So it was just the bear suit, really—Susie was sort of hunched up.”

“Why was she still wearing the bear suit?” Frank asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Probably they were just starting,” Frank reasoned.

“But the way the bear looked,” I said. “Did you see?”

“I know,” Frank whispered.

“All that fur, the body sort of curled,” I said.

“I know what you’re saying,” Frank said. “Stop it.”

In the darkness we both knew what Susie the bear had looked like—we had both seen whom she resembled. Franny had warned us: she’d told us to be on the lookout for Sorrow’s new poses, for Sorrow’s new disguises.

“Sorrow,” Frank whispered. “Susie the bear is Sorrow.”

“She looked like him, anyway,” I said.

“She’s Sorrow, I know it,” Frank said.

“Well, for the moment, maybe,” I said. “For now she is.”

“Sorrow,” Frank kept repeating, until he fell asleep. “It’s Sorrow,” he murmured. “You can’t kill it,” Frank mumbled. “It’s Sorrow. It floats.”

9 The Second Hotel New Hampshire

The last renovation in the new lobby of the Gasthaus Freud was my father’s idea. I imagine him standing one morning in front of the post office on the Krugerstrasse, looking up the street at the new lobby—the candy store completely absorbed, the old signs, like tired soldiers” rifles, leaning against the scaffolding that the workmen were taking down. The signs said: BONBONS, KONDITOREI, ZUCKERWAREN, SCHOKOLADEN, and GASTHAUS FREUD. And my father saw then that they should all be thrown away: no more candy store, no more Gasthaus Freud.

“The Hotel New Hampshire?” said Screaming Annie, always the first whore to arrive (and the last to leave).

“Change with the times,” said Old Billig, the radical. “Roll with the punches, come up smiling. ‘The Hotel New Hampshire’ sounds okay to me.”

“Another phase, another phase,” said Ernst the pornographer.

“A brilliant idea!” Freud cried. “Think of the American clientele—how it will hook them! And no more anti- Semitism,” the old man said.

“No more guests staying away because of their anti-Freudian tendencies, I suppose,” Frank said.

“What the fuck else did you think he’d call it?” Franny asked me. “It’s Father’s hotel, isn’t it?” she asked.

Screwed down for life, as Iowa Bob would have said.

“I think it’s sweet,” Lilly said. “It’s a nice touch, sort of small, but sweet.”

“Sweet?” Franny said. “Oh boy, we’re in trouble: Lilly thinks it’s sweet.”

“It’s sentimental,” Frank said, philosophically, “but it doesn’t matter.”

I thought that if Frank said something didn’t matter again, I would scream. I thought I could fake more than an orgasm if Frank said that again. But once more I was saved by Susie the bear.

“Look, kids,” Susie said. “Your old man’s made a step in a practical direction. Do you realize how many tourists from the U.S. and England are going to find that name reassuring?”

“This is true,” Schwanger said, pleasantly. “This is a city of the East to the British and to the Americans. The very shape of some of the churches—the dreaded onion-shaped dome,” Schwanger said, “and its implications of a world incomprehensible to Westerners … depending on how far West you come from, even Central Europe can look East,” Schwanger said. “It’s the timid souls who’ll be attracted here,” Schwanger predicted, as if she were composing another pregnancy and abortion book. “The Hotel New Hampshire will ring bells for them—bells that sound like home.”

“Brilliant,” Freud said. “Bring us the timid souls,” Freud said, sighing, reaching his hands out to pat the heads that were nearest to him. He found Franny’s head and patted it, but the big soft paw of Susie the bear brushed Freud’s hand away.

I would get used to that—that possessive paw. This is a world where what strikes us, at first, as ominous can grow to become commonplace, even reassuring. What seems, at first, reassuring can grow to become ominous, too, but I had to accept that Susie the bear was a good influence on Franny. If Susie could keep Franny from Ernst, I had to be grateful—and was it too much to hope that Susie the bear might even convince Franny that she should stop writing to Chipper Dove?

“Do you think you are a lesbian, Franny?” I asked her, in the safety of the darkness on the Krugerstrasse— Father was having trouble with the pink neon flasher: HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE! HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE! HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE! Over and over again.

“I doubt it,” Franny said, softly. “I think I just like Susie.”

I was thinking, of course, that since Frank knew he was a homosexual, and now Franny was involved with Susie the bear, maybe it was only a matter of time before Lilly and I discovered our similar inclinations. But, as usual, Franny was reading my mind.

“It’s not like that,” she whispered. “Frank is convinced. I’m not convinced of anything—except, maybe, that this is easier for me. Right now. I mean, it’s easier to love someone of your own sex. There’s not quite so much to commit yourself to, there’s not so much to risk,” she said. “I feel safer with Susie,” she whispered. “That’s all, I think. Men are so different,” Franny said.

“A phase,” Ernst went around saying—about everything.

While Fehlgeburt, encouraged by everyone’s response to The Great Gatsby, started reading Moby-Dick to us. Because of what happened to Mother and Egg, hearing about the ocean was difficult for us, but we got over that; we concentrated on the whale, especially on the different harpooners (we each had our favorite), and we kept a sharp eye on Lilly, waiting for her to identify Father with Ahab—“or maybe she’ll decide Frank is the white whale,” Franny whispered. But it was Freud Lilly identified for us.

One night when the dressmaker’s dummy stood at attention, and Fehlgeburt was droning, like the sea—like the tide—Lilly said, “Can you hear him? Ssshhh!”

“What?” Frank said, like a ghost—like Egg would have said, we all knew.

“Cut it out, Lilly,” Franny whispered.

“No, listen,” Lilly said. And for a moment we thought we were below decks, in our seamen’s bunks, listening to Ahab’s artificial leg restlessly pacing above us. A wooden whack, a bonelike thud. It was just Freud’s baseball