The Hotel New Hampshire

Everyone at the Sacher Bar watched me crying and my father comforting me. I guess that’s just one of the reasons it’s the most beautiful bar in the world, in my opinion: it has the grace to make no one feel self-conscious about any unhappiness.

I felt better with Father’s arm around my shoulder.

“Good night, Mr. Berry,” the bartender said.

“Auf Wiedersehen,” Father said: he knew he’d never be back.

Outside, everything had changed. It was dark. It was the fall. The first man who passed us, walking in a hurry, was wearing black slacks, black dress shoes, and a white dinner jacket.

My father didn’t notice the man in the white dinner jacket, but I didn’t feel comfortable with this omen, with this reminder; the man in the white dinner jacket, I knew, was dressed for the Opera. He must have been hurrying to be on time. The “fall season,” as Fehlgeburt had warned me, was upon us. You could feel it in the weather.

The 1964 season of the New York Metropolitan Opera opened with Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. I read this in one of Frank’s opera books, but Frank says he doubts very much that the season would have opened with Lucia in Vienna. Frank says it’s likely something more Viennese would have opened the season—“Their beloved Strauss, their beloved Mozart; even that Kraut, Wagner,” Frank says. And I don’t even know if it was opening night when Father and I saw the man in the white dinner jacket. It was only clear that the State Opera was open for business.

“The 1835 Italian version of Lucia first opened in Vienna in 1837,” Frank told me. “Of course, it’s been back a few times since then. Perhaps most notably,” Frank added, “with the great Adelina Patti in the title role—and most particularly the night her dress caught fire, just as she was beginning to sing the mad scene.”

“What mad scene, Frank?” I asked him.

“You have to see it to believe it,” Frank said, “and it’s a little hard to believe, even then. But Patti’s dress caught fire just as she was beginning to sing the mad scene—the stage was lit with gas flares, in those days, and she must have stood too close to one. And do you know what the great Adelina Patti did?” Frank asked me.

“No,” I said.

“She ripped off her burning dress and kept singing,” Frank said. “In Vienna,” he added. “Those were the days.”

And in one of Frank’s opera books I read that Adelina Patti’s Lucia seemed fated for this kind of disturbance. In Bucharest, for example, the famous mad scene was interrupted by a member of the audience falling into the pit—upon a woman—and in the general panic, someone shouted “Fire!” But the great Adelina Patti cried, “No fire!”—and went on singing. And in San Francisco, one weirdo threw a bomb onto the stage, and once more the fearless Patti riveted the audience to their seats. Despite the fact that the bomb exploded!

“A small bomb,” Frank has assured me.

But it was no small bomb that Frank and I had seen riding to the Opera between Arbeiter and Ernst; that bomb was as weighty as Sorrow, that bomb was as big as a bear. And it’s doubtful that Donizetti’s Lucia was at the Vienna Staatsoper the night Father and I said auf Wiedersehen to the Sacher. I like to think it was Lucia for my own reasons. There is a lot of blood and Schlagobers in that particular opera—even Frank agrees—and somehow the mad story of a brother who drives his sister crazy and causes her death, because he forces her on a man she doesn’t love … well, you can see why this particular version of blood and Schlagobers would seem especially appropriate, to me.

“All so-called serious opera is blood and Schlagobers,” Frank has told me. I don’t know enough about opera to know if that is true; all I know is that I think Lucia di Lammermoor should have been playing at the Vienna State Opera the night Father and I walked back to the Hotel New Hampshire from the Hotel Sacher.

“It doesn’t matter, really—which opera it was,” Frank is always saying, but I like to think it was Lucia. I like to think that the famous mad scene was not yet under way when Father and I arrived at the Hotel New Hampshire. There was Susie the bear in the lobby—without her bear’s head on!—and she was crying. Father walked right by Susie, without appearing to notice how upset she was—and out of costume!—but my father was used to unhappy bears.

He walked right upstairs. He was going to tell Screaming Annie the bad news about the radicals, the bad news for the Hotel New Hampshire. “She’s probably with a customer, or out on the street,” I said to him, but Father said he would just wait for her outside her room.

I sat down with Susie.

“She’s still with him,” Susie sobbed. If Franny was still with Ernst the pornographer, I knew, it meant she was more than talking to him. There was no reason to pretend to be a bear anymore. I held Susie’s bear head in my hands, I put it on, I took it off. I could not sit there in the lobby, waiting for Franny, like a whore, to be finished with him—to come down to the lobby again—and I knew I was helpless to interfere. I would have been too late, as always. There was no one around as fast as Harold Swallow, this time; there was no Black Arm of the Law. Junior Jones would rescue Franny again, but he was too late to save her from Ernst—and so was I. If I’d stayed in the lobby with Susie, I would have just cried with her, and I’d been crying entirely too much, I thought.

“Did you tell Old Billig?” I asked Susie. “About the bombers?”

“She was only worried about her fucking china bears,” Susie said, and went on crying.

“I love Franny, too,” I told Susie, and gave her a hug.

“Not like I do!” Susie said, stifling a cry. Yes, like you do, I thought.

I started upstairs, but Susie misunderstood me.

“They’re somewhere on the third floor,” Susie said. “Franny came down for a key, but I didn’t see which room.” I looked at the reception desk; you could tell it was Susie the bear’s night to watch after the reception desk, because the reception desk was a big mess.

“I’m looking for Jolanta,” I said to Susie. “Not Franny.”

“Going to tell her, huh?” Susie asked.

But Jolanta wasn’t interested in being told.

“I’ve got something to tell you,” I said outside her door.

“Three hundred Schillings,” she said, so I slipped it under the door.

“Okay, you can come in,” Jolanta said. She was alone; a customer had just left her, apparently, because she was sitting on her bidet, naked except for her bra.

“You want to see the tits, too?” Jolanta asked me. “The tits cost another hundred Schillings.”

“I want to tell you something,” I said to her.

“That costs another hundred, too,” she said, washing herself with the mindless lack of energy of a housewife washing dishes.

I gave her another hundred Schillings and she took her bra off. “Undress,” she commanded me.

I did as I was told, while saying, “It’s the stupid radicals. They’ve ruined everything. They’re going to blow up the Opera.”

“So what?” Jolanta said, watching me undress. “Your body is basically wrong,” she told me. “You’re basically a little guy with big muscles.”

“I may need to borrow what’s in your purse,” I suggested to her, “—just until the police take care of things.” But Jolanta ignored this.

“You like it standing up, against the wall?” she asked me. “Is that how you want it? If we use the bed—if I have to lie down—it’s one hundred Schillings extra.” I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes.

“Jolanta,” I said. “They’re really serious. Fehlgeburt is dead,” I said. “And these crazy people have a bomb, a big bomb.”

“Fehlgeburt was born dead,” Jolanta said, dropping to her knees and sucking me into her mouth. Later, she put a prophylactic on me. I tried to concentrate, but when she stood up against me and stuffed me inside her, slamming me against the wall, she immediately informed me that I wasn’t tall enough to do it standing up. I paid her another hundred Schillings and we tried it on the bed.

“Now you’re not hard enough,” she complained, and I wondered if my failure to be