The Hotel New Hampshire

“Not very clean,” said the woman from New Hampshire.

“Is there an automobile on the top floor?” her husband asked.

As we turned down the third-floor corridor, searching in the half-dark for the correct rooms, a door opened up on the fifth floor, the clamor of a kind of eleventh-hour typing reached us—Fehlgeburt, perhaps, either bringing a manifesto to a close or writing her thesis on the romance that is at the heart of American literature—and Arbeiter screamed down the stairwell.

“Compromise!” Arbeiter shrieked. “You represent nothing so strongly as you represent compromise!”

“Each time is its own time!” Old Billig hollered back. Old Billig the radical was leaving for the day; he crossed the third-floor landing while I was still fumbling with the luggage and keys.

“You blow the way the wind blows, old man!” Arbeiter yelled. This was in German, of course, and I suppose—for the Americans, who didn’t understand German—it might have seemed more ominous in that language than it was. I thought it was pretty ominous, and I understood it. “One day, old man,” Arbeiter concluded, “the wind’s going to blow you away!”

Old Billig the radical stopped on the landing and yelled back up to Arbeiter. “You’re crazy!” he screamed. “You’ll kill us all! You have no patience!” he shouted.

And somewhere between the third and fifth floors, moving softly, her gentle figure generous with Schlagobers, the good Schwanger tried to soothe them both, trotting downstairs a few steps toward Old Billig, and talking in a whisper, trotting upstairs a few steps toward Arbeiter—with whom she had to speak up a little.

“Shut up!” Arbeiter snapped at her. “Go get pregnant again,” he said to her. “Go get another abortion. Go get some Schlagobers,” he abused her.

“Animal!” Old Billig cried; he started back upstairs. “It is possible to remain a gentleman, but not you!” he screamed up at Arbeiter. “You are not even a humanist!”

“Please,” Schwanger was soothing. “Bitte, bitte. …”

“You want Schlagobers?” Arbeiter roared at her. “I want Schlagobers running all over the Kärntnerstrasse,” he said, crazily. “I want Schlagobers stopping the traffic on the Ring. Schlagobers and blood,” he said. “That’s what you’ll see: over everything. Oozing over the streets!” said Arbeiter. “Schlagobers and blood.”

And I let the timid Americans from New Hampshire into their dusty rooms. Soon it would be dark, I knew, and the shouting matches upstairs would cease. And downstairs the groaning would start, the bed-rocking, the constant flushing of the bidets, the pacing of the bear—policing the second floor—and the baseball bat of Freud, whumping steadily, room to room.

Would the Americans go to the Opera? Would they return to see Jolanta muscling a brave drunk upstairs—or rolling him down? Would someone be kneading Babette, like dough, in the lobby, where I played cards with Dark Inge and told her about the heroics of Junior Jones? The Black Arm of the Law made her happy. When she was “old enough,” she said, she was going to make a bundle, then go visit her father and see for herself how bad it was for blacks in America.

And at what hour of the night would Screaming Annie’s first fake orgasm send the daughter from New Hampshire scurrying into her parents” room through the adjoining door? Would they three huddle in one bed until morning—overhearing the tired bargains made with Old Billig, the mean thudding of Jolanta wrecking someone?

Screaming Annie had told me what she would do to me if I ever touched Dark Inge.

“I keep Inge away from the men in the street,” she confided. “But I don’t want her thinking she’s in love, or something. I mean, in a way, that’s worse—I know. That really fucks you up. I mean, I’m not letting anyone pay her for it—not ever—and I’m not letting you sneak in for free.”

“She’s only my sister Lilly’s age,” I said. “To me.”

“Who cares how old she is?” Screaming Annie said. “I’m watching you.”

“You’re old enough to get a rod, occasionally,” Jolanta told me. “I’ve seen it. I got an eye for seeing rods.”

“If you get a hard-on, you might use it,” Screaming Annie said. “And I’m just telling you, if you want to use it, don’t use it on Dark Inge. Use it on her and you lose it,” Screaming Annie told me.

“That’s right,” Jolanta said. “Use it with us, never with the kid. Use it with the kid and we’ll finish you. Lift all the weights you want, sometime you got to fall asleep.”

“And when you wake up,” said Screaming Annie, “your rod will be gone.”

“Got it?” Jolanta asked.

“Sure,” I said. And Jolanta leaned close to me and kissed me on the mouth. It was a kiss as threatening with lifelessness as the New Year’s Eve kiss, tinged with vomit, that I had received from Doris Wales. But when Jolanta finished this kiss, she pulled away suddenly with my lower lip trapped in her teeth—just until I screamed. Then her mouth released me. I felt my arms lift up all by themselves—the way they do when I’ve been curling the one-arm dumbbells, for half an hour or so. But Jolanta was backing away from me very watchfully, her hands in her purse. I looked at the hands and the purse until she was out of my room. Screaming Annie was still there.

“Sorry about the bite,” she said. “I really didn’t tell her to do it. She’s just mean, all by herself. You know what she’s got in the purse?” I didn’t want to know.

Screaming Annie would know. She lived with Jolanta—Dark Inge had told me. In fact, Dark Inge told me, not only were her mother and Jolanta girl friends of the lesbian kind, but Babette also lived with a woman (a whore who worked the Mariahilfer Strasse). Only Old Billig actually preferred men; and, Dark Inge told me, Old Billig was so old she preferred nothing at all—most of the time.

So I stayed strictly nonsexual with Dark Inge; in fact, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to even think of her sexually if her mother hadn’t brought it up. I stayed strictly to my imagination: of Franny, of Jolanta. And of course my shy, stumbling courtship of Fehlgeburt, the reader. The girls at the American School all knew I lived in “that hotel on the Krugerstrasse”; I was not in the same class of Americans that they were in. People say that in America most Americans are not at all class- conscious, but I know about the Americans who live abroad, and they are wildly conscious about what kind of Americans they are.

Franny had her bear, and, I suppose, she had her imagination as much as I had mine. She had Junior Jones and his football scores; she must have had to work hard to imagine him past the ends of the games. And she had her correspondence with Chipper Dove, she had her rather one-sided imagination concerning him.

Susie had a theory about Franny’s letters to Chipper Dove. “She’s afraid of him,” Susie said. “She’s actually terrified of ever seeing him again. It’s fear that makes her do it—write to him all the time. Because if she can address him, in a normal voice—if she can pretend that she’s having a normal relationship with him—well … then he’s no rapist, then he never did actually do it to her, and she doesn’t want to deal with the fact that he did. Because,” Susie said, “she’s afraid that Dove or someone like him will rape her again.”

I thought about that. Susie the bear might not have been the smart bear Freud had in mind, but she was a smart bear on her own terms.

What Lilly once said about her has stayed with me. “You can make fun of Susie because she’s afraid to simply be a human being and have to deal—as she would say—with other human beings. But how many human beings feel that way and don’t have the imagination to do anything about it? It may be stupid to go through life as a bear,” Lilly would say, “but you’ll have to admit it takes imagination.”

And we were all familiar with living with imagination, of course. Father thrived there; imagination was his own hotel. Freud could see only there. Franny, composed in the present, was also looking ahead—and I was always, for the most part, looking at Franny (for signals, for some vital signs, for directions). Of us all, Frank was perhaps the most successfully imaginative; he made up his own world and kept to himself there. And Lilly, in