The Hotel New Hampshire

“The whole car is the bomb,” I said, “or it’s the main bomb—whatever that means. That’s what Fehlgeburt said.”

“Let’s talk to Fehlgeburt,” Lilly said. “I trust Fehlgeburt,” she added, wondering how the girl who had virtually been her tutor for seven years had actually become so convinced of destroying herself. And if Fehlgeburt had been Lilly’s tutor, Schwanger had been Lilly’s nanny.

But we wouldn’t see Fehlgeburt again. I assumed it was me she was trying not to see; I assumed she was seeing the others. At the end of the summer of 1964—as “the fall season” loomed—I was doing my best not ever to be alone with Franny, and Franny was trying hard to convince Susie the bear that although nothing had changed between them, Franny thought it was best that they be “just good friends.”

“Susie’s so insecure,” Franny told me, “I mean, she’s really sweet—as Lilly would say—but I’m trying to let her down without undermining what little confidence I might have given her. I mean, she was just beginning to like herself, just a little. I had her almost believing she wasn’t ugly to look at; now that I’m rejecting her, she’s turning into a bear again.”

“I love you,” I told Franny, with my head down, “but what are we going to do?”

“We’re going to love each other,” Franny said. “But we’re not going to do anything.”

“Not ever, Franny?” I asked her.

“Not now, anyway,” Franny said, but her hand trailed across her lap, across her tight-together knees, and into my lap—where she squeezed my thigh so hard I jumped. “Not here, anyway,” she whispered, fiercely, then let me go. “Maybe it’s just desire,” she added. “Want to try the desire on someone else and see if the thing between us goes away?”

“Who else is there?” I said. It was late afternoon, in her room. I would not dare be in Franny’s room after dark.

“Which one do you think about?” Franny asked me. I knew she meant the whores.

“Jolanta,” I said, my hand involuntarily flying from my side and knocking a lampshade askew. Franny turned her back to me.

“Well, you know who I think about, don’t you?” she asked.

“Ernst,” I said, and my teeth chattered—I was so cold.

“Do you like that idea?” she asked me.

“God, no,” I whispered.

“You and your damn whispering,” Franny said. “Well, I don’t like you with Jolanta, either.”

“So we won’t,” I said.

“I’m afraid we will,” she said.

“Why, Franny?” I said, and I started across her room toward her.

“No, stop!” she cried, moving so that her desk was partially between us; there was a fragile standing lamp in the way.

Years later, Lilly would send us both a poem. When I read the poem, I called up Franny to see if Lilly had sent her a copy; of course she had. The poem was by a very good poet named Donald Justice, and I would one day hear Mr. Justice read his poems in New York City. I liked all of them, but I sat holding my breath while he was reading, half hoping he would read the poem Lilly sent to Franny and me, and half fearing he would. He didn’t read it, and I didn’t know what to do after the reading. People were speaking to him, but they looked like his friends—or maybe they were just other poets. Lilly told me that poets have a way of looking like they’re all one another’s friends. But I didn’t know what to do; if Franny had been with me, we would have just waltzed right up to Donald Justice and he would have been completely bowled over by Franny, I think—everyone always is. Mr. Justice looked like a real gentleman, and I don’t want to suggest that he would have been falling all over Franny. I thought that, like his poems, he would be both candid and formal, austere, even grave—but open, even generous. He looked like a man you’d ask to say an elegy for someone you’d loved; I think he could have done a heartbreaker for Iowa Bob, and—looking at him after his reading in New York, with some very smart-looking admirers around him—I wished he could have written and spoken some sort of elegy for Mother and for Egg. In a way, he did write an elegy for Egg; he wrote a poem called “On the Death of Friends in Childhood,” which I have taken rather personally as an elegy for Egg. Frank and I both love it, but Franny says it makes her too sad.

ON THE DEATH OF FRIENDS IN CHILDHOOD

We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven,

Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;

If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,

Forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands

In games whose very names we have forgotten.

Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.

But when I saw Mr. Justice in New York, I was thinking chiefly about Franny and the poem “Love’s Stratagems”—that was the name of the poem Lilly sent Franny and me. I didn’t even know what to say to Mr. Justice. I was too embarrassed to even shake his hand. I suppose I would have told him that I wished I’d read the poem “Love’s Stratagems” when I was in Vienna with Franny, at the dead end of the summer of 1964.

“But would it have mattered, anyway?” Franny would ask me, later. “Would we have believed it— then?”

I don’t even know if Donald Justice had written “Love’s Stratagems” by 1964. But he must have; it seems written for Franny and me.

“It doesn’t matter,” as Frank would say.

Anyway, years later, Franny and I would get “Love’s Stratagems” in the mail from dear little Lilly, and one night we would read it aloud to each other over the telephone. I tended to whisper when I read something that was good aloud, but Franny spoke up loud and clear.

LOVE’S STRATAGEMS

But these maneuverings to avoid

The touching of hands,

These shifts to keep the eyes employed

On objects more or less neutral

(As honor, for the time being, commands)

Will hardly prevent their downfall.

Stronger medicines are needed.

Already they find

None of their stratagems have succeeded,

Nor would have, no,

Not had their eyes been stricken blind,

Hands cut off at the elbow.

Stronger medicines were needed, indeed. Had our hands been cut off at the elbow, Franny and I would have touched each other with the stumps—with whatever we had left, stricken blind or not.

But that afternoon in her room we were saved by Susie the bear.

“Something’s up,” Susie said, shuffling in. Franny and I waited; we thought she meant us—we thought she knew.

Lilly knew, of course. Somehow she must have.

“Writers know everything,” Lilly said once. “Or they should. They ought to. Or they ought to shut up.”