The Hotel New Hampshire

by John Irving

  'I wish you'd take those weights to another room,' Franny said. 'So I can get dressed by myself, sometimes -- for Christ's sake.'

  'What do you think about going to Vienna, Franny?' I asked her.

  'I think it will be more sophisticated than staying here,' Franny said. Completely dressed now, and always so sure of herself, she looked down at me where I struggled to let my bench press down slowly and levelly. 'I might even get a room without barbells in it,' she added. 'Even one without a weight lifter in it,' Franny said, blowing lightly into the armpit of my left (and weaker) arm -- and getting out of the way when the weights slid first to the left, then to the right, off the bar.

  'Jesus God!' Father shouted upstairs to me, and I thought that if Iowa Bob had still been with us, he would have said that Franny was wrong. Whether Vienna was more sophisticated, or less -- whether Franny had a room with barbells or a room with lace -- we were inhabitants of one Hotel New Hampshire after another.

  Freud's hotel -- or our imperfect picture of Freud's hotel, via air mail -- was called the Gasthaus Freud; it was unclear, from Freud's correspondence, whether or not the other Freud had ever stayed there. We only knew it was 'centrally located,' according to Freud -- 'in the First District!' -- but in the all-grey black-and-white photograph that Freud sent, we could barely make out the iron double door, sandwiched between the display cases of a land of candy store. KONDITOREI, said one sign; ZUCKERWAREN, said another; SCHOKOLADEN, promised a third; and over it all -- bigger than the faded letters saying, GASTHAUS FREUD -- was the word BONBONS.

  'What?' said Egg.

  'Bonbons,' said Franny. 'Oh boy.'

  'Which is the door to the candy store, and which is the door to the hotel?' Frank asked; Frank would always think like a doorman.

  'I think you have to live there to know,' Franny said.

  Lilly got a magnifying glass and deciphered the name of the street, in funny script, under the street number on the hotel's double door.

  'Krugerstrasse,' she decided, which at least matched the name of the street in Freud's address. Father bought a map of Vienna from a travel agency and we located Krugerstrasse -- in the First District, as Freud had promised; it appeared very central.

  'It's only a block or two from the opera!' Frank cried, enthusiastically.

  'Oh boy,' Franny said.

  The map had little green areas for parks, thin red and blue lines where the streetcars ran, and ornate buildings -- grossly out of proportion to the street -- to indicate the places of interest.

  'It looks like a kind of Monopoly board,' Lilly said.

  We noted cathedrals, museums, the town hall, the university, the Parliament.

  'I wonder where the gangs hang out,' said Junior Jones, looking over the streets with us.

  The gangs?' said Egg. 'The who?'

  'The tough guys,' said Junior Jones. 'The guys with guns and blades, man.'

  'The gangs,' Lilly repeated, and we stared at the map as if the streets would indicate their darkest alleys to us.

  'This is Europe,' Frank said, with disgust. 'Maybe there aren't gangs.'

  'It's a city, isn't it?' Junior Jones said.

  But on the map it looked like a toy city, to me -- with pretty places of interest, and all the green spots where nature had been arranged for pleasure.

  'Probably in the parks,' said Franny, biting her lower lip. The gangs hang out in the parks.'

  'Shit,' I said.

  'There won't be any gangs!' Frank cried. 'There will be music! And pastry! And the people do a lot of bowing, and they dress differently!' We stared at him, but we knew he'd been reading up on Vienna; he'd gotten a head start on the books Father kept bringing home.

  'Pastry and music and people bowing all the time, Frank?' Franny said. 'Is that what it's like?' Lilly was using her magnifying glass on the map now -- as if people would spring to life, in miniature, on the paper; and they'd either be bowing, and dressed differently, or they'd be cruising in gangs.

  'Well,' Franny said. 'At least we can be pretty sure there won't be any black gangs.' Franny was still angry with Junior Jones for sleeping with Ronda Ray.

  'Shit,' Junior said. 'You better hope there are black gangs. Black gangs are the best gangs, man. Those white gangs have inferiority complexes,' Junior said. 'And there's nothing worse than a gang with an inferiority complex.'

  'A what?' said Egg. No doubt he thought that an inferiority complex was a weapon; sometimes, I guess, it is.

  'Well, I think it's going to be nice,' said Frank, grimly.

  'Yes, it will be,' Lilly said, with a humourlessness akin to Frank's.

  'I can't see it,' Egg said, seriously. 'I can't see it, so I don't know what it's going to be like.'

  'It'll be okay,' Franny said. 'I don't think it's going to be great, but it'll be all right.'

  It was odd, but Franny seemed the most influenced by Iowa Bob's philosophy -- which, to a degree, had become Father's philosophy. This was odd because Franny was frequently the most sarcastic to Father -- and the most sarcastic about Father's plans. Yet when she was raped, Father had said to her -- incredibly! I thought -- that when he had a bad day, he tried to see if he could construe it as the luckiest day of his life. 'Maybe this is the luckiest day of your life,' he had said to her; I was amazed that she seemed to find this reverse thinking useful. She was a kind of parrot of other tidbits of Father's philosophy. 'It was just a little event among so many,' I heard her say -- to Frank, about scaring Iowa Bob to death. And once, about Chipper Dove, I heard Father say, 'He probably has a most unhappy life.' Franny actually agreed with him!

  I felt much more nervous about going to Vienna than Franny seemed to feel, and I was ever conscious of what feelings Franny and I didn't absolutely share -- because it mattered to me that I stay close to her.

  We all knew that Mother thought the idea was crazy, but we could not ever make her disloyal to Father -- although we tried.

  'We won't understand the language,' Lilly said to Mother.

  'The what?' Egg cried.

  'The language!' Lilly said. 'They speak German in Vienna.'

  'You'll all go to an English-speaking school,' Mother said.

  'There will be weird kids in a school like that,' I said. 'Everyone will be a foreigner.'

  'We'll be the foreigners,' Franny said.

  'In an English-speaking school,' I said, 'the whole place will be full of misfits.'

  'And people from the government,' said Frank. 'Diplomats and ambassadors will send their kids there. The kids will be all fucked up.'

  'Who could be more fucked up than the kids at the Dairy School, Frank?' Franny asked.

  'Whoa!' said Junior Jones. "There's fucked up and then there's foreign and fucked up.'

  Franny shrugged; so did Mother.

  'We'll still be a family,' Mother said. 'The main part of your lives will be your family -- just like now.'

  And that seemed to please everyone. We busied ourselves with the books Father brought from the library, and the travel agency brochures. We reread the short but elated messages from Freud:

  GOOD YOU COMING! BRING ALL KIDS AND PETS! LOTS OF ROOM. CENTRALLY LOCATED. GOOD SHOPPING FOR GIRLS (HOW MANY GIRLS?) AND PARKS FOR THE BOYS AND PETS TO PLAY IN. BRING MONEY. MUST RENOVATE -- WITH YOUR ASSISTANCE. YOU'LL LIKE THE BEAR. A SMART BEAR MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE. NOW WE CAN WORK ON THE AMERICAN AUDIENCE. WHEN WE UPGRADE THE CLIENTELE, THEN WE'LL HAVE A HOTEL TO BE PROUD OF. I HOPE YOUR ENGLISH STILL GOOD IS. HA HA! BEST TO LEARN A LITTLE GERMAN, YOU KNOW? REMEMBER MIRACLES DON'T GET BUILT IN A NIGHT, BUT IN A COUPLE NIGHTS EVEN BEARS CAN BE QUEENS. HA HA! I GOT OLD -- THAT WAS THE PROBLEM. NOW WE'LL BE OKAY. NOW WE SHOW THE BASTARDS SONSOFBITCHES AND COCKSUCKER NAZIS WHAT A GOOD HOTEL IS! HOPE THE KIDS DON'T HAVE COLDS, AND DON'T FORGET TO GIVE PETS NECESSARY SHOTS.

  Since Sorrow was our only pet -- and he needed help, but not a shot -- we wondered if Freud thought we still had Earl.

  'Of course not,' Father said. 'He's just speaking generally, he's just
trying to be helpful.'

  'Make sure Sorrow gets his shots, Frank,' Franny said, but Frank was getting better about Sorrow; he could occasionally be teased about the new restoration, and he seemed to be committed to the task of refashioning Sorrow -- in a cheerful pose -- for Egg. We were not allowed to see the gross dog's transformation, of course, but Frank himself seemed ever cheerful -- upon returning from the bio lab -- so that we could only hope that, this time, Sorrow would be 'nice.'

  Father read a book about Austrian anti-Semitism and wondered if Freud had made the right decision in naming the hotel the Gasthaus Freud; Father wondered, from what he read, if the Viennese even Jilted the other Freud. He also couldn't help wondering who the 'bastards sonsofbitches and cocksucker Nazis' were.

  'I can't help wondering how old Freud is,' Mother said. They determined that if he'd been in his middle or late forties in 1939, he would be only in his middle sixties now. But Mother said that he sounded older. In his messages to us, she meant.

  HI! QUICK IDEA: YOU THINK IT BEST TO RESTRICT CERTAIN ACTIVITIES TO CERTAIN FLOORS? MAYBE HAVE CERTAIN KIND OF CLIENTELE ON FOURTH FLOOR, OTHER KIND IN BASEMENT? DELICATE MATTER TO DISCRIMINATE, YOU THINK? CURRENT DAYTIME AND NIGHTTIME CLIENTELE OF DIFFERENT -- I WON'T SAY 'WARRING' -- INTERESTS. HA HA! ALL THAT WILL CHANGE WITH REMODELING. AND ONCE THEY STOP THE FUCKING DIGGING UP THE STREET. JUST A FEW MORE YEARS OF WAR RESTORATION, THEY SAY. WAIT TILL YOU MEET THE BEAR: NOT JUST SMART, BUT YOUNG! WHAT A TEAM WE'LL BE TOGETHER! WHAT YOU MEAN, 'IS FREUD A REALLY WELL-LIKED NAME IN VIENNA?' DID YOU GO TO HARVARD OR NOT??!! HA HA.

  'He doesn't sound necessarily older,' said Franny, 'but he sounds crazy.'

  'He just doesn't use English very well,' Father said. 'It's not his language.'

  So we studied German. Franny and Frank and I took courses at the Dairy School, and brought the records home to play to Lilly; Mother worked with Egg. She started by just getting him familiar with the names of the streets and the places of interest on the tourist map.

  'Lobkowitzplatz,' Mother would say.

  'What?' Egg would say.

  Father was supposed to be teaching himself, but he seemed to be making the least progress. 'You kids have to learn it,' he kept saying. 'I don't have to go to school, meet new kids, all of that.'

  'But we're going to an English-speaking school,' Lilly said.

  'Even so,' Father said. 'You'll need the German more than I will.'

  'But you're going to run a hotel,' Mother said to him.

  'I'm going to start off going after the American audience,' Father said. 'We're trying to drum up an American clientele, first -- remember?'

  'Better all brush up on our American, too,' said Franny.

  Frank was getting the German more quickly than any of us. It seemed to suit him: every syllable was pronounced, the verbs fell like grapeshot at the ends of sentences, the umlauts were a form of dressing up; and the whole idea of words having gender must have appealed to Frank. By the late winter he was (pretentiously) chatting in German, purposefully bewildering us all, correcting our attempts to answer him, then consoling our failures by telling us that he'd take care of us when we were 'over there.'

  'Oh boy,' Franny said. That's the part that really gets to me. Having Frank take us all to school, talk to the bus drivers, order in the restaurants, take all the phone calls. Jesus, now that I'm finally going abroad, I don't want to be dependent on him!'

  But Frank seemed to flower at the preparations for moving to Vienna. No doubt he was encouraged by having been given a second chance with Sorrow, but he also seemed genuinely interested in studying Vienna. After dinner he read aloud to us, selected excerpts from what Frank called the 'plums' of Viennese history; Ronda Ray and the Uricks listened too -- curiously, because they knew they weren't going and their future with Fritz's Act was unclear.

  After two months of history lessons, Frank gave us an oral examination on the interesting characters around Vienna at the time of the Crown Prince's suicide at Mayerling (which Frank had earlier read to us, in full detail, moving Ronda Ray to tears). Franny said that Prince Rudolf was becoming Frank's hero -- 'because of his clothes.' Frank had portraits of Rudolf hi his room: one in hunting costume -- a thin-headed young man with an oversized moustache, draped with furs and smoking a cigarette as thick as a finger -- and another in uniform, wearing the Order of the Golden Fleece, his forehead as vulnerable as a baby's, his beard as sharp as a spade.

  'All right, Franny,' Frank began, 'this one is for you. He was a composer of genius, perhaps the world's greatest organist, but he was a hick -- a complete rube in the imperial city -- and he had a stupid habit of falling in love with young girls.'

  'Why is that stupid?' I asked.

  'Shut up,' said Frank. 'It's stupid, and this is Franny's question.'

  'Anton Bruckner,' Franny said. 'He was stupid, all right.'

  'Very,' said Lilly.

  'Your turn, Lilly,' said Frank. 'Who was "the Flemish peasant"?'

  'Oh, come on,' said Lilly, 'that's too easy. Give it to Egg.'

  'It's too hard for Egg,' Franny said.

  'What is?' Egg said.

  'Princess Stephanie,' said Lilly, tiredly, 'the daughter of the King of Belgium, and Rudolf's wife.'

  'Now Father,' Frank said.

  'Oh boy,' Franny said, because Father was almost as bad at history as he was at German.

  'Whose music was so widely loved that even peasants copied the composer's beard?' Frank asked.

  'Jesus, you're strange, Frank,' Franny said.

  'Brahms?' Father guessed, and we all groaned.

  'Brahms had a beard like a peasant's,' Frank said. 'Whose beard did the peasants copy?'

  'Strauss!' Lilly and I yelled.

  'The poor drip,' said Franny. 'Now I get to ask Frank one.'

  'Shoot,' said Frank, shutting his eyes tight and scrunching up his face.

  'Who was Jeanette Heger?' Franny asked.

  'She was Schnitzler's "Sweet Girl," ' Frank said, blushing.

  'What's a "Sweet Girl," Frank?' Franny asked, and Ronda Ray laughed.

  'You know,' said Frank, still blushing.

  'And how many acts of love did Schnitzler and his "Sweet Girl" make between 1888 and 1889?' Franny asked.

  'Jesus,' said Frank. 'A lot! I forget.'

  'Four hundred and sixty-four!' cried Max Urick, who'd been present at all the historical readings, and never forgot a fact. Like Ronda Ray, Max had never been educated before; it was a novelty for Max and Ronda; they paid better attention at Frank's lessons than the rest of us.

  'I've got another one for Father!' Franny said. 'Who was Mitzi Caspar?'

  'Mitzi Caspar?' Father said. 'Jesus God.'

  'Jesus God,' said Frank. 'Franny only remembers the sexual parts.'

  'Who was she, Frank?' Franny asked.

  'I know!' said Ronda Ray. 'She was Rudolf's "Sweet Girl"; he spent the night with her before killing himself, with Marie Vetsera, at Mayerling.' Ronda had a special place in her memory, and in her heart, for Sweet Girls.

  'I'm one, aren't I?' she had asked me, after Frank's rendering of Arthur Schnitzler's life and work.

  'The sweetest,' I had told her.

  'Phooey,' said Ronda Ray.

  'Where did Freud live beyond his means?' Frank asked, to any of us who knew.

  'Which Freud?' Lilly asked, and we all laughed.

  "The Suhnhaus,' Frank said, answering his own question. Translation?' he asked. 'The Atonement House,' he answered.

  'Fuck you, Frank,' said Franny.

  'Not about sex, so she didn't know it,' Frank said to me.

  'Who was the last person to touch Schubert?' I asked Frank; he looked suspicious.

  'What do you mean?' he asked.

  'Just what I said,' I said. 'Who was the last person to touch Schubert?' Franny laughed; I had shared this story with her, and I didn't think Frank knew it -- because I had taken the pages out of Frank's book. It was a sick story.

  'Is this some kind of joke?' Fr
ank asked.

  When Schubert had been dead, for sixty years, the poor hick Anton Bruckner attended the opening of Schubert's grave. Only Bruckner and some scientists were allowed. Someone from the mayor's office delivered a speech, going on and on about Schubert's ghastly remains. Schubert's skull was photographed; a secretary took notes at the investigation -- noting that Schubert was a shade of orange, and that his teeth were in better shape than Beethoven's (Beethoven had been resurrected for similar studies, earlier). The measurements of Schubert's brain cavity were recorded.

  After nearly two hours of 'scientific' investigation, Bruckner could restrain himself no longer. He grabbed the head of Schubert and hugged it until he was asked to let it go. So Bruckner touched Schubert last. It was Frank's kind of story, really, and he was furious not to know it.

  'Bruckner, again,' Mother answered, quietly, and Franny and I were amazed that she knew; we went from day to day thinking that Mother knew nothing, and then she turned up knowing it all. For Vienna, we know, she had been secretly studying -- knowing, perhaps, that Father was unprepared.

  'What trivia!' said Frank, when we had explained the story to him. 'Honestly, what trivia!'

  'All history is trivia,' Father said, showing again the Iowa Bob side of himself.

  But Frank was usually the source of trivia -- at least concerning Vienna, he hated to be outdone. His room was full of drawings of soldiers in their regimentals: Hussars in skin-tight pink pants and fitted jackets of a sunny-lake blue, and the officers of the Tyrolean Rifle in dawn-green. In 1900, at the Paris World's Fair, Austria won the Most Beautiful Uniform Prize (for Artillery); it was no wonder that the fin de siecle in Vienna appealed to Frank. It was only alarming that the fin de siecle was the only period Frank really learned -- and taught to us. All the rest of it was not as interesting to him.

  'Vienna won't be like Mayerling, for Christ's sake,' Franny whispered to me, while I was lifting weights. 'Not now.'