by John Irving
'Kind of like sorrow, huh, Frank?' Franny asked.
'Kind of,' Frank said, stonily. Sorrow was no friend of Frank's: not anymore.
In fact, the death of Mother and Egg -- with Sorrow in Egg's lap, and rising from the deep to mark the grave -- convinced Frank to give up trying to properly pose the dead; Frank would give up taxidermy in all its forms. All manifestations of resurrection were to be abandoned by him. 'Including religion,' Frank said. According to Frank, religion is just another kind of taxidermy.
As a result of Sorrow's tricking him, Frank would come down very hard on belief of any kind. He would become a greater fatalist than Iowa Bob, he would become a greater nonbeliever than Franny or me. A near-violent atheist, Frank would turn to believing only in Fate -- in random fortune or random doom, in arbitrary slapstick and arbitrary sorrow. He would become a preacher against every bill of goods anyone ever sold: from politics to morality, Frank was always for the opposition. By which Frank meant 'the opposing forces.'
'But what exactly do these forces oppose, Frank?' Franny asked him, once.
'Just oppose every prediction,' Frank advised. 'Anything anybody's for, be against it. Anything anybody's against, be for it. You get on a plane and it doesn't crash, that means you got on the right plane,' Frank said. 'And that's all it means.'
Frank, in other words, went 'off.' After Mother and Egg went away, Frank went ever farther away -- somewhere -- he went into a religion more vastly lacking in seriousness than even the established religions; he joined a kind of anti-everything sect.
'Or maybe Frank founded it,' Lilly said, once. Meaning nihilism, meaning anarchy, meaning trivial silliness and happiness in the face of gloom, meaning depression descending as regularly as night over the most mindless and joyful of days. Frank believed in zap! He believed in surprises. He was in constant attack and retreat, and he was equally, constantly, wide-eyed and goofily stumbling about in the sudden sunlight -- tripping across the wasteland littered with bodies from the darkness of just a moment ago.
'He just went crazy,' Lilly said. And Lilly should know.
Lilly went crazy, too. She seemed to take Mother's and Egg's deaths as a personal punishment for some failure deep within herself, and so she resolved she would change. She resolved, among other things, to grow.
'At least a little,' she said, grimly determined. Franny and I were worried about her. Growth seemed unlikely for Lilly, and her strenuousness with which we imagined Lilly pursuing her own 'growth' was frightening to Franny and me.
'I want to change, too,' I said to Franny. 'But Lilly -- I don't know. Lilly is just Lilly.'
'Everyone knows that,' Franny said.
'Everyone except Lilly,' I said.
'Precisely,' Franny said. 'So how are you going to change? You know something better than growing?'
'No. Not better,' I said. I was just a realist in a family of dreamers, large and small. I knew I couldn't grow. I knew I would never really grow up; I knew my childhood would never leave me, and I would never be quite adult enough -- quite responsible enough -- for the world. The goddamn Welt, as Frank would say. I couldn't change enough, and I knew it. All I could do was something that would have pleased Mother. I could give up swearing. I could clean up my language -- which had upset Mother so. And so I did.
'You mean you're not going to say "fuck" or "shit" or "cocksucker" or even "up yours" or "in the ear" or anything, anymore?' Franny asked me.
'That's right,' I said.
'Not even "asshole"?' Franny asked.
'Right,' I said.
'You asshole,' Franny said.
'It makes as much sense as anything else,' Frank reasoned.
'You dumb prick,' Franny baited me.
'I think it's rather noble,' Lilly said. 'Small, but noble.'
'He lives in a second-rate whorehouse with people who want to start the world over and he wants to clean up his language,' Franny said. 'Cunthead,' she told me. 'You wretched fart,' Franny said. 'Beat your meat all night and dream of tits, but you want to sound nice, is that it?' she asked.
'Come on, Franny,' Lilly said.
'You little turd, Lilly,' Franny said. Lilly started to cry.
'We've got to stick together, Franny,' Frank said. 'This sort of abuse is not helpful.'
'You're as queer as a cat fart, Frank,' she told him.
'And what are you, honey?' Susie the bear asked Franny. 'What makes you think you're so tough?'
'I'm not so tough,' Franny said. 'You dumb bear. You're just an unattractive girl, with zits -- with zit scars: you're scarred by zits -- and you'd rather be a dumb bear than a human being. You think that's tough? It's fucking easier to be a bear, isn't it?' Franny asked Susie. 'And to work for an old blind man who thinks you're smart -- and beautiful, too, probably,' Franny said. 'I'm not so tough,' Franny said. 'But I am smart. I can get by. I can more than get by,' she said. 'I can get what I want -- when I know what it is,' she added. 'I can see how things are,' Franny said. 'And you,' she said, speaking to us all -- even poor Miss Miscarriage -- 'you keep waiting for things to become something else. You think Father doesn't?' Franny asked me, suddenly.
'He lives in the future,' Lilly said, still sniffling.
'He's as blind as Freud,' Franny said, 'or he soon will be. So you know what I'm going to do?' she asked us. 'I'm not going to clean up my language. I'm going to aim my language wherever I want,' she told me. 'It's the one weapon I've got. And I'm only going to grow when I'm ready to, or when it's time,' she told Lilly. 'And I'm not ever going to be like you, Frank. No one else will ever be like you,' she added, affectionately. 'And I'm not going to be a bear,' she told Susie. 'You sweat like a pig in that stupid costume, you get your rocks off making people uneasy, but that's because you're uneasy just being you. Well, I'm easy being me,' Franny said.
'Lucky you,' Frank said.
'Yes, lucky you, Franny,' Lilly said.
'So what if you're beautiful?' said Susie. 'You're also a bitch.'
'From now on, I'm mainly a mother,' Franny said. 'I'm going to take care of you fuckers -- you, you, and you,' Franny said, pointing to Frank and Lilly and me. 'Because Mother's not here to do it -- and Iowa Bob is gone. The shit detectors are gone,' Franny said, 'so I'm left to detect it. I point out the shit that's my role. Father doesn't know what's going on,' Franny said, and we nodded -- Frank, Lilly, and I; even Susie the bear nodded. We knew this was true: Father was blind, or he soon would be.
'Even so, I don't need you to mother me,' Frank said to Franny, but he didn't look so sure.
Lilly went and put her head in Franny's lap; she cried there -- comfortably, I thought. Franny, of course, knew that I loved her -- hopelessly, and too much -- and so I didn't have to make a gesture or say anything to her.
'Well, I don't need a sixteen-year-old straightening me out,' said Susie the bear, but her bear's head was off; she held it in her big paws. Her ravaged complexion, her hurt eyes, her too-small mouth betrayed her. She put her bear's head back on; that was her only authority.
The student, Miss Miscarriage, serious and well intentioned, seemed at a loss for words. 'I don't know,' she said. 'I don't know.'
'Say it in German,' Frank encouraged her.
'Just spit it out any way you can,' Franny said.
'Well,' Fehlgeburt said. 'That passage. That lovely passage, that ending -- to The Great Gatsby -- that's what I mean,' she said.
'Get to it, Fehlgeburt,' Franny said. 'Spit it out.'
'Well,' Fehlgeburt said. 'I don't know, but -- somehow -- it makes me want to go to the United States. I mean, it's against my politics -- your country -- I know that. But that ending, all of it -- somehow -- is just so beautiful. It makes me want to be there. I mean, there's no sense to it, but I would just like to be in the United States.'
'So you think you'd like to be there?' Franny said. 'Well, I wish we'd never left.'
'Can we go back, Franny?' Lilly asked.
'We'll have to ask Father,' Frank said.
&nbs
p; 'Oh boy,' Franny said. And I could see her imagining that moment, waltzing a little reality into Father's dreams.
'Your country, if you'll forgive me,' said one of the other radicals-the one they called simply Arbeiter (Arbeiter means 'worker' in German), 'your country is really a criminal place,' Arbeiter said. 'If you'll forgive me,' he added, 'your country is the ultimate triumph of corporate creativity, which means it is a country controlled by the group-thinking of corporations. These corporations are without humanity because there is no one personally responsible for their use of power; a corporation is like a computer with profit as its source of energy -- and profit as its necessary fuel. The United States is -- you'll forgive me -- quite the worst country in the world for a humanist to live in, I think.'
'Fuck what you think,' Franny said. 'You raving asshole,' she said. 'You sound like a computer.'
'You think like a transmission,' Frank told Arbeiter. 'Four forward gears -- at predetermined speeds. One speed for reverse.'
Arbeiter stared. His English was a little plodding -- his mind, it would occur to me, later, was about as versatile as a lawn mower.
'And about as poetic,' Susie the bear would say. No one liked Arbeiter -- not even the impressionable Miss Miscarriage. Her weakness -- among the radicals -- was her fondness for literature, especially for the romance that is American literature. ('Your silly major, dear,' Schwanger always chided her.) But Fehlgeburt's fondness for literature was her strength -- to us children. It was the romantic part of her that wasn't quite dead; at least, not yet. In time, God forgive me, I would help to kill it.
'Literature is for dreamers,' Old Billig would tell poor Fehlgeburt. Old Billig the radical, I mean. Old Billig the whore liked dreams; she told Frank once that dreams were all she liked -- her dreams and her 'mementos.'
'Study economics, dear,' Schwanger told Fehlgeburt -- that's what Miss Pregnant told Miss Miscarriage.
'Human usefulness,' Arbeiter lectured to us, 'is directly related to the proportion of the whole population involved in decisions.'
'In the power,' Old Billig corrected him.
'In the powerful decisions,' Arbeiter said -- the two men stabbing like hummingbirds at a single small blossom.
'Bullfuck,' Franny said. Arbeiter's and Old Billig's English was so bad, it was easy to say things like 'Take it in the ear' to them all the time -- they didn't get it. And despite my vow to clean up my language, I was sorely tempted to say these things to them; I had to content myself, vicariously, by listening to Franny speak to them.
'The eventual race war, in America,' Arbeiter told us, 'will be misunderstood. It will actually be a war of class stratification.'
'When you fart, Arbeiter,' Franny asked him, 'do the seals in the zoo stop swimming?'
The other radicals were rarely a part of our group discussions. One spent himself on the typewriters; the other, on the single automobile that the Symposium on East-West Relations owned among themselves: all six of them, they could just fit. The mechanic who labored over the decrepit car -- the ever-ailing car, useless in any getaway, we imagined, and probably never to be called upon for a getaway, Father thought -- was a sullen, smudge-faced young man in coveralls and a navy-blue streetcar conductor's cap. He belonged to the union and worked the main-line Mariahilfer Strasse Strassenbahn all night. He looked sleepy and angry every day, and he clanked with tools. Appropriately, he was called Schraubenschlussel -- a Schraubenschlussel is a wrench. Frank liked to roll Schraubenschlussel's name off his tongue, to show off, but Franny and Lilly and I insisted on the translation. We called him Wrench.
'Hi, Wrench,' Franny would say to him, as he lay under the car, cursing. 'Hope you're keeping your mind clean, Wrench,' Franny would say. Wrench knew no English, and the only thing we knew about Wrench's private life was that he had once asked Susie the bear for a date.
'I mean, virtually nobody asks me out,' Susie said. 'What an asshole.'
'What an asshole,' Franny repeated.
'Well, he's never actually seen me, you know,' Susie said.
'Does he know you're female?' Frank asked.
'Jesus God, Frank,' Franny said.
'Well, I was just curious,' Frank said.
'That Wrench is a real weirdo, I can tell,' Franny said. 'Don't go out with him, Susie,' Franny advised the bear.
'Are you kidding?' Susie the bear said. 'Honey, I don't go out. With men.'
This seemed to settle almost passively at Franny's feet, but I could see Frank edging uncomfortably near to, and then away from, its presence.
'Susie is a lesbian, Franny,' I told Franny, when we were alone.
'She didn't exactly say that,' Franny said.
'I think she is,' I said.
'So?' Franny said. 'What's Frank? The grand banana? And Frank's okay.'
'Watch out for Susie, Franny,' I said.
'You think about me too much,' she repeated, and repeated. 'Leave me alone, will you?' Franny asked me. But that was the one thing I could never do.
'All sexual acts actually involve maybe four or five different sexes,' the sixth member of the Symposium on East-West Relations told us. This was such a garbling of Freud -- the other Freud -- that we had to beg Frank for a second translation because we couldn't understand the first.
'That's what he said,' Frank assured us. 'All sexual acts actually involve a bunch of different sexes.'
'Four or five?' Franny asked.
'When we do it with a woman,' the man said, 'we are doing it with ourselves as we will become, and with ourselves in our childhoods. And, it goes without saying, with the self our lover will become, and with the self of her childhood.'
' "It goes without saying"?' Frank asked.
'So every time there's one fuck there's four or five people actually at it?' Franny asked. 'That sounds exhausting.'
'The energy spent on sex is the only energy that doesn't require replacement by the society,' the rather dreamy sixth radical told us. Frank struggled to translate this. 'We replace our sexual energy ourselves,' the man said, looking at Franny as if he'd just said the most profound thing in the world.
'No kidding,' I whispered to Franny, but she seemed a little more mesmerized than I thought she should have been. I was afraid she liked this radical.
His name was Ernst. Just Ernst. A normal name, but just a first name. He didn't argue. He crafted isolated, meaningless sentences, spoke them quietly, went back to the typewriter. When the radicals left the Gasthaus Freud in the late afternoon, they seemed to flounder for hours in the Kaffee Mowatt (across the street) -- a dark and dim place with a billiard table and dart boards, and an ever-present solemn row of tea-with-rum drinkers playing chess or reading the newspapers. Ernst rarely joined his colleagues at the Kaffee Mowatt. He wrote and wrote.
If Screaming Annie was the last whore to go home, Ernst was the last radical to leave. If Screaming Annie often met Old Billig when the old radical was arriving for his morning's work, she often met Ernst when Ernst was finally calling it quits. He had an eerie other-worldliness about him; when he talked with Schwanger, their two voices would get so quiet that they would almost always end up whispering.
'What's Ernst write?' Franny asked Susie the bear.
'He's a pornographer,' Susie said. 'He's asked me out, too. And he's seen me.' That quieted us all for a moment.
'What sort of pornography?' Franny asked, cautiously.
'How many sorts are there, honey?' Susie the bear asked. 'The worst,' Susie said. 'Kinky acts. Violence. Degradation.'
'Degradation?' Lilly said.
'Not for you, honey,' Susie said.
'Tell me,' Frank said.
'Too kinky to tell,' Susie said to Frank. 'You know German better than I do, Frank -- you try it.'
Unfortunately, Frank tried it; Frank translated Ernst's pornography for us. I would ask Frank, later, if he thought pornography was the start of the real trouble -- if we had been able to ignore it, somehow, would things have gone downhill just the same? But Frank's new r
eligion -- his anti-religion -- had already taken over all his answers (to all the questions).
'Downhill?' Frank would say. 'Well, that is the eventual direction, of course -- I mean, regardless. If it hadn't been the pornography, it would have been something else. The point is we are bound to roll downhill. What do you know that rolls up? What starts the downward progress is immaterial,' Frank would say, with his irritating offhandedness.
'Look at it like this,' Frank would lecture me. 'Why does it seem to take more than half a lifetime to get to be a lousy teen-ager? Why does childhood take forever -- when you're a child? Why does it seem to occupy a solid three-quarters of the whole trip? And when it's over, when the kids grow up, when you suddenly have to face facts ... well,' Frank said to me, just recently, 'you know the story. When we were in the first Hotel New Hampshire, it seemed we'd go on being thirteen and fourteen and fifteen forever. For fucking forever, as Franny would say. But once we left the first Hotel New Hampshire,' Frank said, 'the rest of our lives moved past us twice as fast. That's just how it is,' Frank claimed, smugly. 'For half your life, you're fifteen. Then one day your twenties begin, and they're over the next day. And your thirties blow by you like a weekend spent with pleasant company. And before you know it, you're thinking about being fifteen again.
'Downhill?' Frank would say. 'It's a long uphill -- to that fourteen-year-old, fifteen-year-old, sixteen-year-old time of your life. And from then on,' Frank would say, 'of course it's all downhill. And anyone knows downhill is faster than uphill. It's up -- until fourteen, fifteen, sixteen -- then it's down. Down like water,' Frank said, 'down like sand,' he would say.
Frank was seventeen when he translated the pornography for us; Franny was sixteen, I was fifteen. Lilly, who was eleven, wasn't old enough to hear. But Lilly insisted that if she was old enough to listen to Fehlgeburt reading The Great Gatsby, she was old enough to hear Frank translating Ernst. (With typical hypocrisy, Screaming Annie wouldn't allow her daughter, Dark Inge, to hear a word of it.)
'Ernst' was his Gasthaus Freud name, of course. In the pornography, he went by a lot of different names. I do not like to describe the pornography. Susie the bear told us that Ernst taught a course at the university called 'The History of Eroticism Through Literature,' but Ernst's pornography was not erotic. Fehlgeburt had taken Ernst's erotic literature course, and even she admitted that Ernst's own work bore no resemblance to the truly erotic, which is never pornographic.