The Hotel New Hampshire

Vienna, had a mission—which was to keep her safe, for a while. Lilly had decided to grow. It had to be with her imagination that she would do this, because we noted few physical changes.

What Lilly did in Vienna was write. Fehlgeburt’s reading had gotten to her. Lilly wanted to be a writer, of all things, and we were embarrassed enough for her that we never accused her of it— although we knew she was doing it, all the time. And she was embarrassed enough by it so that she never admitted it, either. But each of us knew that Lilly was writing something. For nearly seven years, she wrote and wrote. We knew the sound of her typewriter; it was different from the radicals”. Lilly wrote very slowly.

“What are you doing, Lilly?” someone would ask her, knocking on her ever-locked door.

“Trying to grow,” Lilly would say.

And that was our euphemism for it, too. If Franny managed to say she was beaten up, when she’d been raped—if Franny could get away with that, I thought—then Lilly ought to be allowed to say she was “trying to grow” when she was (we all knew) “trying to write.”

And so when I told Lilly that the New Hampshire family included a little girl just her age, Lilly said, “So what? I’ve got some growing to do. Maybe I’ll introduce myself, after supper.”

One of the curses of timid people—in bad hotels—is that they’re often too timid to leave. They’re so timid they don’t even dare to complain. And with their timidity comes a certain politeness; if they check out because a Schraubenschlüssel has frightened them on the stairs, because a Jolanta has bitten someone in the face in the lobby, because a Screaming Annie has inched them closer to death with her howls—even if they find bear hair in the bidet, they still apologize.

Not the woman from New Hampshire, however. She was more feisty than your average timid guest. She lasted through the early evening pickups of the whores (the family must have been dining out). The family lasted past midnight without a complaint; not even an inquiring phone call to the front desk. Frank was studying with the dressmaker’s dummy. Lilly was trying to grow. Franny was at the desk in the lobby, and Susie the bear was cruising there—her presence made the whores” customers their usual peaceful selves. I was restless. (I was restless for seven years, but this night I was especially restless.) I had been playing darts at the Kaffee Mowatt with Dark Inge and Old Billig. It was another slow night for Old Billig. Screaming Annie found a customer crossing the Kärntnerstrasse and turning down Krugerstrasse a little past midnight. I was waiting my turn at the darts when Screaming Annie and her furtive male companion peeked into the Mowatt; Screaming Annie saw Dark Inge with me and Old Billig.

“It’s after midnight,” she said to her daughter. “You go get some rest. It’s a school day tomorrow.”

So we all walked back to the Hotel New Hampshire more or less together. Screaming Annie and her customer a little ahead of us. Inge and I on either side of Old Billig, who was talking about the Loire Valley in France. “It’s where I’d like to retire,” she said, “or go for my next holiday.” Dark Inge and I knew that Old Billig always spent her holidays—every holiday—with her sister’s family in Baden. She took a bus or a train from a stop opposite the Opera; Baden would always be much more accessible to Old Billig than France.

When we walked into the hotel, Franny said that all the guests were in. The New Hampshire family had gone to bed about an hour ago. A youthful Swedish couple had gone to bed even earlier. Some old man from Burgenland hadn’t left his room all night, and some British bicycle enthusiasts had come in drunk, double-checked their bicycles in the basement, attempted to be sportive with Susie the bear (until she growled), and were now, no doubt, passed out in their rooms. I went to my room to lift weights—passing Lilly’s door at the magical instant her light went out; she had stopped growing for the night. I did some forearm curls with the long barbell, but I didn’t have much interest in it; it was too late. I was just lifting because I was bored. I heard the dressmaker’s dummy slam off the wall between my room and Frank’s; something Frank was studying had made him cross, and he was taking it out on the dummy—or he was just bored, too. I knocked on the wall.

“Keep passing the open windows,” Frank said.

“Wo ist die Gemütlichkeit?” I sang, half-heartedly.

I heard Franny and Susie the bear slipping past my door.

“Four hundred and sixty-four, Franny!” I whispered.

I heard the solid thock of Freud’s baseball bat, falling out of a bed above me. Babette’s bed, I could tell. Father, as usual, was sleeping soundly—dreaming well, no doubt; dreaming on and on. A man’s voice blurted out something on the landing of the second floor, and I heard Jolanta respond. She responded by throwing him down the stairs.

“Sorrow,” I heard Frank murmur.

Franny was singing the song Susie could make her sing, so I tried to concentrate on the fight in the lobby. It was an easy fight for Jolanta, I could tell. All the pain came from the man.

“You got a cock like a wet sock and you tell me it’s my fault?” Jolanta was saying. This was followed by the sound of the man absorbing a blow—the heel of the hand into the jowl? I guessed. Hard to be sure, but there was the sound of the man falling again—that was clear. He said something, but his words seemed strangled. Was Jolanta choking him? I wondered. Should I interrupt Franny’s song? Was this a job for Susie the bear?

And then I heard Screaming Annie. I think everyone on the Krugerstrasse heard Screaming Annie. I think that even some fashionable people who’d been to the Opera, and who were just leaving the Sacher Bar and walking home along the Kärntnerstrasse, must have heard Screaming Annie.

One November day in 1969—five years after we left Vienna—two seemingly unrelated bits of news made morning headlines in the city. As of the seventeenth of November, 1969, it was announced, prostitutes were to be barred from strolling on the Graben and the Kärntnerstrasse—and from all the side streets off the Kärntnerstrasse, too, except the Krugerstrasse. The whores had owned these streets for 300 years, but after 1969 they would be given only the Krugerstrasse. In my opinion, the people in Vienna gave up on trying to save the Krugerstrasse before 1969. In my opinion, it was Screaming Annie’s fake orgasm on the night the New Hampshire family was staying with us that determined the official decision. That particular fake orgasm finished the Krugerstrasse.

And on the same day in 1969 when the Austrian officials made their announcements about limiting the Kärntnerstrasse prostitutes to the Krugerstrasse, the newspapers also revealed that a new bridge over the Danube had cracked ; a few hours after the ceremonies that opened the bridge, the bridge cracked. The official word on the fault of the crack put the blame on the poor sun. In my opinion, the sun was not to blame. Only Screaming Annie could crack a bridge—even a new bridge. There must have been a window open somewhere where she was working.

I believe that Screaming Annie faking an orgasm could raise the corpses of the heartless Hapsburgs out of their tombs.

And that night when the timid New Hampshire family was visiting us, Screaming Annie got off what was surely the record fake orgasm for the duration of our stay in Vienna. It was a seven-year orgasm. It was followed so closely by the single short yelp of her male companion that I reached a hand out of my bed and grabbed one of my barbells for support. I felt the dressmaker’s dummy in Frank’s room fly off the wall, and Frank himself stumbled clumsily toward his door. Franny’s fine song was nipped in the upswing and Susie the bear, I knew, would be frantically searching for her head. For all the growing Lilly might have accomplished before she turned out her light, I knew she probably lost an inch in the single moment of recoiling from Screaming Annie’s terrible sound.

“Jesus God!” Father called out.

The man Jolanta was beating up in the lobby found the sudden strength necessary to break free and lunge out the door. And other prostitutes passing by on the Krugerstrasse—I can only imagine them reconsidering their profession. Whoever called this “the gentle occupation”? they must have been thinking.

Someone was whimpering. Babette, frightened, and thrown out of rhythm with Freud? Freud, seeking his baseball bat, as a weapon? Dark Inge, finally afraid for her mother? And it seemed that one of the radicals” typewriters way up on the fifth floor—all by itself moved itself off a typing table and crashed to the floor.

In less than a minute, we were in the lobby, moving up the stairs to the second floor. I had never seen Franny look so deeply disturbed; Lilly went to her and hung on her hip. Frank and I fell in line, like soldiers,