The Hotel New Hampshire

“Lilly must have known from the beginning,” Franny said to me, long distance, the night we discovered “Love’s Stratagems.” It was not a good connection; there was crackling on the line—as if Lilly were listening in. Or Frank were listening in—Frank was, as I have said, born to the role of listening in on love.

“Something’s up, you two,” Susie the bear repeated, menacingly. “They can’t find Fehlgeburt.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked.

“The porno king and his whole fucking gang,” Susie said. “They’re asking us if we’ve seen Fehlgeburt. And last night they were asking the whores.”

“Nobody has seen her?” I said, and there was the growingly familiar cold draft up the pants legs again, there was the whiff of dead air from the tombs holding the heartless Hapsburgs.

How many days had we waited for Father and Freud to bicker over finding a buyer for the Hotel New Hampshire before they blew the whistle on the would-be bombers? And how many nights had we wasted, arguing about whether we should tell the American Consulate, or the Embassy, and have them tell the police—or whether we should just tell the Austrian police straightaway? When you’re in love with your sister, you lose a lot of perspective on the real world. The goddamn Welt, as Frank would say.

Frank asked me, “What floor does Fehlgeburt live on? I mean, you’ve seen her place. How high up is she?”

Lilly, the writer, tuned right in on the question, but it didn’t make sense to me—yet. “It’s the first floor,” I said to Frank, “it’s just one flight up.”

“Not high enough,” Lilly said, and then I got it. Not high enough to jump out the window, is what she meant. If Fehlgeburt had at last decided not to keep passing the open windows, she would have to have found another way.

“That’s it,” Frank said, taking my arm. “If she’s pulled a King of Mice, she’s probably still there.”

It was more than a little shortness of breath I felt, crossing the Plaza of Heroes and heading up the Ring toward the Rathaus; that’s a long way for a wind sprint, but I was in shape. I felt a little out of breath, there can be no doubt of that, but I felt a lot guilty—though it couldn’t have been simply me ; I couldn’t even have been Fehlgeburt’s main reason to stop passing the open windows. And there was no evidence, they said later, that she had done much of anything after I’d gone. Maybe she’d read a little more Moby-Dick, because the police were very thorough and even noted where she’d marked her place. And I know, of course, that the place she’d stopped reading was un marked when I left. Curiously, she’d marked it just where she had stopped when she’d been reading to me—as if she had reread that entire evening before adopting the open-window policy. Fehlgeburt’s form of open-window policy had been a neat little gun I never knew about. The suicide note was simple and addressed to no one, but I knew it was meant for me.

The night you

saw Schwanger

you didn’t see

me. I have a

gun, too! “So

we beat on …”

Fehlgeburt concluded, quoting Lilly’s favorite ending.

I never actually saw Fehlgeburt. I waited in the hall outside her door—for Frank. Frank was not in such good shape and it took him a while to meet me outside Fehlgeburt’s room. Her room had a private entrance up a back staircase that people in the old apartment house used only when they were bringing out their garbage and trash. I suppose they thought the smell was from someone’s garbage and trash. Frank and I didn’t even open her door. The smell outside her door was already worse than Sorrow ever smelled to us.

“I told you, I told you all,” Father said. “We’re at the turning point. Are we ready?” We could see that he didn’t really know what to do.

Frank had returned Lilly’s contract to New York. As her “agent,” he had said, he could not accept so uncommitted an offer for what was clearly a work of genius—“genius still blooming,” Frank added, though he’d not read Trying to Grow ; not yet. Frank pointed out that Lilly was only eighteen. “She’s got a lot of growing to do, still,” he concluded. “Any publisher would do well to get into the gargantuan building of literature that Lilly was going to construct (according to Frank)—“on the ground floor.”

Frank asked for fifteen thousand dollars—and another fifteen thousand dollars was to be promised, for advertising.

“Let’s not let a little economics stand between us,” Frank reasoned.

“If we know Fehlgeburt is dead,” Franny reasoned, “then the radicals are going to know it, too.”

“It takes just a sniff,” Frank said, but I didn’t say anything.

“I’ve almost got a buyer,” Freud said.

“Someone wants the hotel?” Franny asked.

“They want to convert it to offices,” Freud said.

“But Fehlgeburt is dead,” Father said. “Now we have to tell the police—tell them everything.”

“Tell them tonight,” Frank said.

“Tell the Americans,” Freud said, “and tell them tomorrow. Tell the whores tonight.”

“Yes, warn the whores tonight,” Father agreed.

“Then in the morning, early,” Frank said, “we’ll go to the American Consulate—or the Embassy. Which is it?”

I realized I didn’t know which was for what, or who was for whom. We realized Father didn’t know, either. “Well, there are a number of us, after all,” Father said, sheepishly. “Some of us can tell the Consulate, some of us can tell the ambassador.” It was apparent to me, then, how little any of us had really mastered about living abroad: we didn’t even know if the American Embassy and the American Consulate were in the same building—for all we knew, a consulate and an embassy might be the same thing. It was apparent to me, then, what the seven years had done to Father: he had lost the decisiveness he must have had that night in Dairy, New Hampshire, when he took my mother walking in Elliot Park and snowed her with his vision of converting the Thompson Female Seminary to a hotel. First he’d lost Earl—the provider of his education. And when he lost Iowa Bob, he lost Iowa Bob’s instincts, too. Iowa Bob was a man trained to pounce on a loose ball—valuable instinct, especially in the hotel business. And now I could see what sorrow had cost Father.

“His marbles,” Franny would say later.

“He wasn’t playing with a full deck of cards,” Frank would say.

“It’s going to be okay, Pop,” Franny felt moved to tell him that afternoon in the former Gasthaus Freud.

“Sure, Dad,” said Frank. “We’re home free!”

“I’m going to make millions, Daddy,” Lilly said.

“Let’s take a walk, Pop,” I said to him.

“Who’ll tell the whores?” he asked, bewilderedly.

“Tell one, you’ve told them all,” Franny said.

“No,” said Freud. “Sometimes they’re secretive with each other. I’ll tell Babette,” Freud said. Babette was Freud’s favorite.

“I’ll tell Old Billig,” said Susie the bear.

“I’ll tell Screaming Annie,” my father said; he seemed in a daze.

Nobody offered to tell Jolanta anything, so I said I’d tell her. Franny looked at me, but I managed to look away. I saw that Frank was concentrating on the dressmaker’s dummy; he was hoping for some clear signals. Lilly went to her room; she looked so small, I thought—she was so small, of course. She must have been going to her room to try growing some more—to write and write. When we had our family conferences in that second Hotel New Hampshire, Lilly was still so small that Father seemed to forget she was eighteen; he would occasionally just pick her up and sit her in his lap, and play with her pigtail. Lilly didn’t mind; the only thing she liked