The Hotel New Hampshire

about being so small, she told me, was that Father still handled her as if she were a child.

“Our child author,” as Frank, the agent, would occasionally refer to her.

“Let’s take a walk, Pop,” I said again. I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me.

We crossed the lobby; someone had spilled an ashtray on the sagging couch that faced the reception desk, and I knew it must have been Susie’s day to clean the lobby. Susie was well intentioned, but she was a slob; the lobby looked like hell when it was Susie’s day to clean it.

Franny was standing at the foot of the staircase, staring up the stairwell. I couldn’t remember when she’d changed her clothes, but she suddenly seemed dressed up, to me. She was wearing a dress. Franny was not a blue jeans and T-shirt sort of person—she liked loose skirts and blouses—but she was not big on dresses, either, and she was wearing her pretty dark green one, with the thin shoulder straps.

“It’s fall, already,” I told her. “That’s a summer dress. You’ll be cold.”

“I’m not going out,” she said, still staring up the stairwell. I looked at her bare shoulders and felt cold for her. It was late afternoon, but we both knew Ernst hadn’t called it quits—he was still at work, up on the fifth floor. Franny started up the stairs. “I’m just going to reassure him,” she said to me, but not looking at me—or at Father. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell him what we know—I’ll play dumb. I’m just going to try to find out what he knows,” she said.

“He’s a real creep, Franny,” I said to her.

“I know,” she said, “and you think about me too much.”

I took Father out on the Krugerstrasse. We were too early for the whores, but the working day was long over: the commuters were safe in the suburbs, and only the elegant people, killing time before dinner—or before the Opera—were out strolling.

We walked down the Kärntnerstrasse to the Graben and did the obligatory gawking at St. Stephen’s. We wandered into the Neuer Markt and stared at the nudes in the Donner Fountain. I realized that Father knew nothing about them, so I gave him an abbreviated history of Maria Theresa’s repressive measures. He seemed genuinely interested. We walked by the lush scarlet and gold entrance that the Ambassador Hotel made into the Neuer Markt; Father avoided looking at the Ambassador, or he watched the pigeons shitting in the fountain, instead. We walked on. It wouldn’t grow dark for a little while. When we passed the Kaffee Mozart, Father said, “That looks like a nice place. That looks a lot nicer than the Kaffee Mowatt.”

“It is,” I said, trying to conceal my surprise that he’d never been there.

“I must remember to come here, one day,” he said.

I was trying to make the walk come out another way, but we ended up at the Hotel Sacher just as the light in the sky was beginning to go—and just as they were turning on the lights in the Sacher Bar. We stopped to watch them light the bar; it is simply the most beautiful bar in the world, I think. “In den ganzen Welt,” Frank says.

“Let’s have a drink here,” Father said, and we went in. I was a little worried about how he was dressed. I looked all right myself; that is how I always look—all right. But Father suddenly appeared a little shabby to me. I realized that his pants were so completely unironed that his legs were as round as stovepipes—only baggy; he had lost weight in Vienna. No more home cooking had made him a little thin, and it didn’t help that his belt was too long—in fact, I noticed, it was Frank’s belt; Father was just borrowing it. He wore a very faded gray-and-white pin- striped shirt, which was okay—it had been mine, I realized, before the latest stages of the weight lifting had altered my upper body; it wouldn’t fit me now, but it wasn’t a bad shirt, only faded and a bit wrinkled. What was wrong was that the shirt was striped and the jacket was checkered. Thank God Father never wore a necktie—I shuddered to think what sort of tie Father would wear. But then I realized that no one in the Sacher was going to be snotty to us, because I saw for the first time what my father really looked like. He looked like a very eccentric millionaire; he looked like the richest man in the world, but a man who didn’t give a damn. He looked like that very wealthy combination of generosity and fecklessness; he could wear anything and look like he had a million dollars in his pocket—even if his pocket had a hole in it. There were some terribly well dressed and well-to-do people at the Sacher Bar, but when my father and I came in, they all looked at him with a heartbreaking kind of envy. I think Father could see that, although he could see very little of the real world; and certainly he was naïve about the way the women looked at him. There were people at the Sacher Bar who’d spent over an hour dressing themselves and my father was a man who had lived in Vienna for seven years and had not spent a total of even fifteen minutes buying his clothes. He wore what my mother had bought for him, and what he borrowed from Frank and me.

“Good evening, Mr. Berry,” the bartender said to him, and then I realized that Father came here all the time.

“Guten Abend,” Father said. That was about it for Father’s German. He could also say “Bitte” and “Danke” and “Auf Wiedersehen.” And he had a great way of bowing.

I had a beer and my father had “the usual.” Father’s “usual” was an appalling, glopped-up drink that had some kind of whiskey or rum at its heart but resembled an ice cream sundae. He was no drinker; he just sipped a little of it and spent hours toying with the rest. He was not there for the drinking.

The best-looking people in Vienna stopped in off the street, and the guests from the Hotel Sacher made their plans or met their dinner companions at the Sacher Bar. Of course, the bartender never knew that my father lived at the terrible Hotel New Hampshire, a few minutes—slow walking—away. I wonder where the bartender thought Father was from. From off a yacht, I suppose; from at least the Bristol or the Ambassador or the Imperial. And I realized that Father had never actually needed the white dinner jacket to look the part.

“Well,” Father said to me, quietly, in the Sacher Bar. “Well, John, I’m a failure. I’ve let you all down.”

“No you haven’t,” I told him.

“Now it’s back to the land of the free,” Father said, stirring his nauseating drink with his index finger, then sucking his finger. “And no more hotels,” he said, softly. “I’m going to have to get a job.”

He said it the way someone might have said that he was going to have to have an operation. I hated to see reality hemming him in.

“And you kids are going to have to go to school,” he said. “To college,” he added, dreamily.

I reminded him that we had all been to school and to college. Frank and Franny and I even had finished our university degrees; and why did Lilly need to finish hers—in American literature—when she had already finished a novel?

“Oh,” he said. “Well, maybe we’ll all have to get jobs.”

“That’s all right,” I said. He looked at me and smiled; he leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. He looked so absolutely perfect that no one in that bar could have possibly thought—even for a moment—that I was this middle-aged man’s young lover. This was a father-and-son kiss and they looked at Father with even more envy than they had, heaped upon their vision of him when he walked in.

He took forever to finish playing with his drink. I had two more beers. I knew what he was doing. He was absorbing the Sacher Bar, he was getting his last good look at the Hotel Sacher; he was imagining, of course, that he owned it—that he lived here.

“Your mother,” he said, “would have loved all this.” He moved his hand only slightly, then rested it in his lap.

She would have loved all what? I wondered. The Hotel Sacher and the Sacher Bar—oh yes. But what else would she have loved? Her son Frank, growing a beard and trying to decipher his mother’s message—her meaning—from a dressmaker’s dummy? Her littlest daughter Lilly trying to grow? Her biggest daughter Franny trying to find out everything that a pornographer knew? And would she have loved me? I wondered: the son who cleaned up his language, but wanted more than anything to make love to his own sister. And Franny wanted to, too! That was why she’d gone to Ernst, of course.

Father couldn’t have known why I started to cry, but he said all the right things. “It won’t be so bad,” he reassured me. “Human beings are remarkable—at what we can learn to live with,” Father told me. “If we couldn’t get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can’t have,” Father said, “then we couldn’t ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?” Father asked.