The Hotel New Hampshire

was the grand slam. What a lot for that baseball bat to go through in one night! That Louisville Slugger was never found. Freud was never entirely found, either, and Schraubenschlüssel’s own mother would fail to identify him. My father was blasted back from the revolving door, the white light and glass flying in his face. Franny and Frank ran to help him, and I got my arms around Arbeiter just as the bomb blew—just as Freud had told me to do.

Arbeiter in his black tuxedo, dressed for the Opera, was a little taller than I was, and a little heavier; my chin rested firmly between his shoulder blades, my arms went around his chest, pinning his arms to his side. He fired the gun once, into the floor. I thought for a moment that he might be able to shoot my foot with it, but I knew I’d never let him raise the gun any higher. I knew Lilly was out of Arbeiter’s range. He fired two more shots into the floor. I held him so tightly that he couldn’t even locate my foot, which was right behind his foot. His next shot hit his own foot and he started screaming. He dropped the gun. I heard it hit the floor and saw Lilly grab it, but I wasn’t paying much attention to the gun. I was concentrating on squeezing Arbeiter. For someone who’d shot himself in the foot, he stopped screaming pretty soon. Frank would tell me, later, that Arbeiter stopped screaming because he couldn’t breathe. I wasn’t paying much attention to Arbeiter’s screaming, either. I concentrated on the squeezing. I imagined the biggest barbell in the world. I don’t know, exactly, what I imagined I was doing to the barbell—curling it, bench-pressing it, dead-lifting it, or simply hugging it to my own chest. It didn’t matter; I was just concentrating on its weight. I really concentrated. I made my arms believe in themselves. If I had hugged Jolanta this hard, she would have broken in two. If I had hugged Screaming Annie this hard, she would have been quiet. Once I had dreamed of holding Franny this tightly. I had been lifting weights since Franny was raped, since Iowa Bob showed me how; with Arbeiter in my arms, I was the strongest man in the world.

“A sympathy bomb!” I heard Father yelling. I knew he was in pain. “Jesus God! Can you believe it? A fucking sympathy bomb!”

Franny later said that she knew, immediately: Father was blind. It was not just because of where he was standing when the car blew up, or the glass that was blasted into his face as he stood at the revolving door; it was not all the blood in his eyes that Franny saw when she wiped his face enough to see what was wrong with him. “I knew somehow,” she said. “I mean, before I saw his eyes. I always knew he was as blind as Freud, or he would be. I knew he would be,” Franny said.

“Auf Wiedersehen, Freud!” Father was crying.

“Hold still, Daddy,” I heard Lilly saying to Father.

“Yes, hold still, Pop,” Franny said.

Frank had run up the Krugerstrasse to the Kärntnerstrasse, and around the corner up to the Opera. He had to see, of course, if the sympathy bomb had responded—but Freud had possessed the vision to see that the Mercedes parked in front of the Hotel New Hampshire was too far from sympathy to make the Opera respond. And Schwanger must have just kept walking. Or maybe she decided simply to stay and watch the end of the opera; maybe it was one she liked. Maybe she wanted to be there, watching them all at the curtain call, taking their last bows above the unexploded bomb.

Frank said later that when he ran out of the Hotel New Hampshire to go see if the Opera was safe, he noticed that Arbeiter was a very vivid magenta color, that his fingers were still moving—or perhaps just twitching —and that he seemed to be kicking his feet. Lilly told me later that while Frank was gone—Arbeiter turned from magenta to blue. “A slate-blue color,” Lilly, the writer, said. “The color of the ocean on a cloudy day.” And by the time Frank got back from seeing if the Opera was safe, Franny told me that Arbeiter was completely motionless and a dead-white color—the color was all gone from his face. “He was the color of a pearl,” Lilly said. He was dead. I had crushed him.

“You can let him go now,” Franny finally had to tell me. “It’s okay, it’s going to be okay,” she whispered to me, because she knew how I liked whispering. She kissed my face, and then I let Arbeiter go.

I have not felt the same about weight lifting since. I still do it, but I’m very low-key about the lifting now; I don’t like to push myself. A little light lifting, just enough to make me start feeling good; I don’t like to strain, not anymore.

The authorities told us that Schraubenschlüssel’s “sympathy bomb” might even have worked if the car had been closer. The bomb authorities also implied that any explosion in the area might have set the sympathy bomb off at any time; I guess old Schraubenschlüssel hadn’t been as exact as he thought he was. A lot of nonsense was written about what the radicals had meant. An unbelievable amount of garbage would be written about the “statement” they had been trying to make. And there wasn’t enough about Freud. His blindness was noted, in passing; and that he had been in one of the camps. There was absolutely nothing about the summer of 1939, about State o’Maine and the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea, about dreaming—or about the other Freud, and what he might have had to say about all this. There was a lot of idiocy about the politics of what had happened.

“Politics are always idiotic!” as Iowa Bob would have said.

And there was not enough about Fehlgeburt, how she could break your heart the way she read the ending of The Great Gatsby. They acknowledged that my father was a hero, of course. They seemed polite about the reputation that our second Hotel New Hampshire had enjoyed—“in its prime,” as Frank would refer to those sordid days.

When Father got out of the hospital, we gave him a present. Franny had written Junior Jones for it. Junior Jones had provided us with baseballs for seven years, so Franny knew that Junior could be counted on to find Father a new baseball bat. A Louisville Slugger all his own. He would need it, of course. And Father seemed touched by our present—by Franny’s thoughtfulness, really, because the bat was Franny’s idea. I think Father must have cried a little when he first reached out his hands and we placed the bat in them, and he felt what it was he held. We couldn’t see if he cried, however, because the bandages were still on his eyes.

And Frank, who had always had to translate for Father, had to become his interpreter in other ways. When the people from the Stastsoper wanted to pay us a tribute, Frank had to sit next to Father—at the Opera—and whisper to him about the action on the stage. Father could follow the music, just fine. I don’t even remember what opera it was. It wasn’t Lucia, I know that much. It was a particularly farcical comic opera, because Lilly had insisted that we wanted no Schlagobers and blood. It was nice that the Vienna State Opera wanted to thank us for saving them, but we didn’t want to sit through any Schlagobers and blood. We’d already seen that opera. That was the opera that played in the Hotel New Hampshire for seven years.

And so, at the opening of this merry farce of an opera—whatever it was—the conductor and the orchestra and all the singers pointed out my father in one of the front-row seats (that’s where Father had insisted on sitting. “So I can be sure to see,” he had said). And Father stood up and took a bow; he was great at bowing. And he waved the baseball bat to the audience; the Viennese loved the Louisville Slugger part of the story, and they were touched and applauded for a long time when Father waved the bat at them. We children felt very proud.

I often wonder if the New York publisher who wanted Lilly’s book for five thousand dollars would have listened to Frank’s demands if we hadn’t all become famous—if we hadn’t saved the Opera and murdered the terrorists in our good old American family kind of way. “Who cares?” Frank asks, slyly. The point is, Lilly had not signed the five-thousand-dollar contract. Frank had gone for higher stakes. And when the publishers realized that this Lilly Berry was the little girl who’d had a gun held to her head, that little Lilly Berry was the youngest surviving (and certainly the smallest) member of the Berry family—the terrorist killers, the Opera savers—well … at that point, of course, Frank was in the driver’s seat.

“My author is already at work on a new book,” Frank, the agent, said. “We’re in no hurry about any of this. As far as Trying to Grow is concerned, we’re interested in the best offer.”

Frank would make a killing, of course.

“You mean we’re going to be rich?” Father asked, sightlessly. When he was first blind, he had an awkward way of inclining his head too far forward—as if this might help him to see. And the Louisville Slugger was his ever-restless companion, his percussion instrument.

“We can do anything we want, Pop,” Franny said. “You can,” she added, to him.