by John Irving
When I turned down the Krugerstrasse, I had already decided that I would go with the first one who approached me -- even if it was Old Billig; even if it was Jolanta, I bravely promised myself. It didn't matter; maybe one by one I would try them all. I could do anything Freud could do, and Freud had done it all -- our Freud and the other Freud, I thought; they had simply gone as far as they could.
Nobody I knew was in the Kaffee Mowatt, and I didn't recognize the figure standing under the pink neon: HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE! HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE! HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE!
It's Babette, I thought, vaguely repulsed -- but it was just the sickly-sweet diesel breeze of the last night of summer that made me think of her. The woman saw me and started walking toward me -- aggressively, I thought; hungrily, too. And I was sure it was Screaming Annie; I momentarily wondered how I would hold together during her famous fake orgasm. Maybe -- given my fondness for whispering -- I could ask her not to do it at all, I could simply tell her I knew it was a fake and it simply wasn't necessary, not for my benefit. The woman was too slender to be Old Billig, but she was too solid to be Screaming Annie, I realized; she was too well built to be Screaming Annie. So it was Jolanta, I thought; at last I would find out what she kept in her evil purse. In the time ahead, I thought -- shuddering -- I might even have to use what's in Jolanta's purse. But the woman approaching me was not solid enough for Jolanta; this woman was too well built in the other way -- she was too sleek, too youthful in her movements. She ran toward me on the street and caught me in her arms; she took my breath away, she was so beautiful. The woman was Franny.
'Where have you been?' she asked me. 'Gone all day, gone all night,' she scolded me. 'We've all been dying to find you!'
'Why?' I asked. Franny's smell made me dizzy.
'Lilly's going to get published!' Franny said. 'Some publisher in New York is really going to buy her book!'
'How much?' I said, because I was hoping it might be enough. It might be our ticket out of Vienna -- the ticket that the second Hotel New Hampshire would never buy us.
'Jesus God,' Franny said. 'Your sister has a literary success and you ask "How much?" -- you're just like Frank. That's just what Frank asked.'
'Good for Frank,' I said. I was still trembling; I had been looking for a prostitute and had found my sister. She wouldn't let go of me, either.
'Where were you?' Franny asked me; she pushed my hair back.
'With Fehlgeburt,' I said, sheepishly. I would never lie to Franny.
Franny frowned. 'Well, how was it?' she asked, still touching me -- but like a sister.
'Not so great,' I said. I looked away from Franny. 'Awful,' I added.
Franny put her arms around me and kissed me. She meant to kiss me on the cheek (like a sister), but I turned toward her, though I was trying to turn away, and our lips met. And that was it, that was all it took. That was, the end of the summer of 1964; suddenly it was autumn. I was twenty-two, Franny was twenty-three. We kissed a long time. There was nothing to say. She was not a lesbian, she still wrote to Junior Jones -- and to Chipper Dove -- and I had never been happy with another woman; not ever; not yet. We stayed out on the street, out of the light cast by the neon, so that no one in the Hotel New Hampshire could see us. We had to break up our kissing when a customer of Jolanta's came staggering out of the hotel, and we broke it up again when we heard Screaming Annie. In a little while her dazed customer came out, but Franny and I still stayed on the Krugerstrasse. Later, Babette went home. Then Jolanta went home, taking Dark Inge with her. Screaming Annie came out and back, out and back, like the tide. Old Billig the whore went across the street to the Kaffee Mowatt and dozed on a table. I walked Franny up to the Karntnerstrasse, and down to the Opera. 'You think of me too much,' Franny started to say, but she didn't bother to finish. We kissed some more. The Opera was so big beside us.
'They're going to blow it up,' I whispered to my sister. 'The Opera -- they're going to blow it up.' She let me hold her. 'I love you terribly much,' I told her.
'I love you, too, damn it,' Franny said.
Although the weather was feeling like fall, it was possible for us to stand there, guarding the Opera, until the light came up and the real people came out to go to work. There was no place we could go, anyway -- and absolutely nothing, we knew, that we should do.
'Keep passing the open windows,' we whispered to each other.
When we finally went back to the Hotel New Hampshire, the Opera was still standing there -- safe. Safe for a while, anyway, I thought.
'Safer than we are,' I told Franny. 'Safer than love.'
'Let me tell you, kid,' Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. 'Everything's safer than love.'
10 A Night at the Opera:
Schlagobers and Blood
'Children, children,' Father said to us, 'we must be very careful. I think this is the turning point, kids,' our father said, as if we were still eight, nine, ten, and so forth, and he was telling us about meeting Mother at the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea -- that night they first saw Freud, with State o' Maine.
'There's always a turning point,' Frank said, philosophically.
'Okay, supposing there is,' Franny said, impatiently, 'but what is this particular turning point?'
'Yeah,' said Susie the bear, looking Franny over very carefully; Susie was the only one who'd noticed that Franny and I were out all night. Franny had told her we'd gone to a party near the university with some people Susie didn't know. And what could be safer than having your brother, and a weight lifter, for an escort? Susie didn't like parties, anyway; if she went as a bear, there was no one she could talk to, and if she didn't go as a bear, no one seemed interested in talking to her. She looked sulky and cross. 'There's a lot of shit to deal with in a hurry, as I see it,' said Susie the bear.
'Exactly,' Father said. 'That's the typical turning-point situation.'
'We can't blow this one,' Freud said. 'I don't think I got many more hotels left in me.' Which might be a good thing, I thought, trying to keep my eyes off Franny. We were all in Frank's room, the conference room -- as if the dressmaker's dummy were a soothing presence, were a silent ghost of Mother or Egg or Iowa Bob; somehow the dummy was supposed to radiate signals and we were supposed to catch the signals (according to Frank).
'How much can we get for the novel, Frank?' Father asked.
'It's Lilly's book,' Franny said. 'It's not our book.'
'In a way, it is,' Lilly said.
'Precisely,' Frank said, 'and the way I understand publishing, it's out of her hands now. Now is where we either get taken or we make a killing.'
'It's just about growing up,' Lilly said. 'I'm sort of surprised they're interested.'
'They're only five thousand dollars interested, Lilly,' Franny said.
'We need fifteen or twenty thousand to leave,' Father said. 'If we're going to have a chance to do anything with it, back home,' he added.
'Don't forget: we'll get something for this place,' Freud said, defensively.
'Not after we blow the whistle on the fucking bombers,' said Susie the bear.
'There will be such a scandal,' Frank said, 'we won't get a buyer.'
'I told you: we'll get the police on our ass if we blow the whistle at all,' Freud said. 'You don't know our police, their Gestapo tactics. They'll find something we're doing wrong with the whores, too.'
'Well, there's a lot that is wrong,' Franny said. We couldn't look at each other; when Franny talked, I looked out the window. I saw Old Billig the radical crossing the street. I saw Screaming Annie dragging herself home.
'There's no way we can't blow the whistle,' Father said. 'If they actually think they can blow up the Opera, there's no talking to them.'
'There never was any talking to them,' Franny said. 'We just listened.'
'They've always been crazy,' I said to Father.
'Don't you know that, Daddy?' Lilly asked him.
Father hung his head. He was forty-four, a distinguished gray appearing on the thick brown h
air around his ears; he had never worn sideburns, and he had his hair cut in a uniform, mid-ear, mid-forehead, just-covering-the-back-of-his-neck way; he never thinned it. He wore bangs, like a little boy, and his hair fit his head so dramatically well that from a distance we were sometimes fooled into thinking that Father was wearing a helmet.
'I'm sorry, kids,' Father said, shaking his head. 'I know this isn't very pleasant, but I feel we're at the turning point.' He shook his head some more; he looked really lost to us, and it was only later that I would remember him on Frank's bed, in that dressmaker's dummy of a room, as looking really quite handsome and in charge of things. Father was always good at creating the illusion that he was in charge of things: Earl, for example. He hadn't lifted the weights, like Iowa Bob, or like me, but Father had kept his athletic figure, and certainly he had kept his boyishness -- 'too fucking much boyishness,' as Franny would say. It occurred to me that he must be lonely; in seven years, he hadn't had a date! And if he used the whores, he was discreet about it -- and in that Hotel New Hampshire, who could be that discreet?
'He can't be seeing any of them,' Franny had said. 'I'd simply know it, if he was.'
'Men are sneaky,' Susie the bear had said. 'Even nice guys.'
'So he's not doing it; that's settled,' Franny had said. Susie the bear had shrugged, and Franny had hit her.
But in Frank's room, it was Father who brought up the whores.
'We should tell them what we're going to do about the crazy radicals,' Father said, 'before we tell the police.'
'Why?' Susie the bear asked him. 'One of them might blow the whistle on us.'
'Why would they do that?' I asked Susie.
'We should tell them so they can make other plans,' Father said.
'They'll have to change hotels,' Freud said. 'The damn police will close us down. In this country, you're guilty by association!' Freud cried. 'Just ask any Jew!' Just ask the other Freud, I thought.
'But suppose we were heroes,' Father said, and we all looked at him. Yes, that would be nice, I was thinking.
'Like in Lilly's book?' Frank asked Father.
'Suppose the police thought that we were heroes for uncovering the bomb plot?' Father asked.
'The police don't think that way,' Freud said.
'But suppose, as Americans,' Father said, 'we told the American Consulate, or the Embassy, and someone over there passed on the information to the Austrian authorities -- as if this whole thing had been a really top-secret, first-class kind of intrigue.'
'This is why I love you, Win Berry!' Freud said, tapping time to some interior tune with his baseball bat. 'You really are a dreamer,' Freud told my father. 'This is no first-class intrigue! This is a second-class hotel,' Freud said. 'Even I can see that,' he said, 'and in case you haven't noticed, I'm blind. And those aren't any first-class terrorists; either,' Freud said. 'They can't keep a perfectly good car running!' he shouted. 'I, for one, don't believe they know how to blow up the Opera! I actually think we're perfectly safe. If they had a bomb, they'd probably fall downstairs with it!'
'The whole car is the bomb,' I said, 'or it's the main bomb -- whatever that means. That's what Fehlgeburt said.'
'Let's talk to Fehlgeburt,' Lilly said. 'I trust Fehlgeburt,' she added, wondering how the girl who had virtually been her tutor for seven years had actually become so convinced of destroying herself. And if Fehlgeburt had been Lilly's tutor, Schwanger had been Lilly's nanny.
But we wouldn't see Fehlgeburt again. I assumed it was me she was trying not to see; I assumed she was seeing the others. At the end of the summer of 1964 -- as 'the fall season' loomed -- I was doing my best not ever to be alone with Franny, and Franny was trying hard to convince Susie the bear that although nothing had changed between them, Franny thought it was best that they be 'just good friends.'
'Susie's so insecure,' Franny told me, 'I mean, she's really sweet -- as Lilly would say -- but I'm trying to let her down without undermining what little confidence I might have given her. I mean, she was just beginning to like herself, just a little. I had her almost believing she wasn't ugly to look at; now that I'm rejecting her, she's turning into a bear again.'
'I love you,' I told Franny, with my head down, 'but what are we going to do?'
'We're going to love each other,' Franny said. 'But we're not going to do anything.'
'Not ever, Franny?' I asked her.
'Not now, anyway,' Franny said, but her hand trailed across her lap, across her tight-together knees, and into my lap -- where she squeezed my thigh so hard I jumped. 'Not here, anyway,' she whispered, fiercely, then let me go. 'Maybe it's just desire,' she added. 'Want to try the desire on someone else and see if the thing between us goes away?'
'Who else is there?' I said. It was late afternoon, in her room. I would not dare be in Franny's room after dark.
'Which one do you think about?' Franny asked me. I knew she meant the whores.
'Jolanta,' I said, my hand involuntarily flying from my side and knocking a lampshade askew. Franny turned her back to me.
'Well, you know who I think about, don't you?' she asked.
'Ernst,' I said, and my teeth chattered -- I was so cold.
'Do you like that idea?' she asked me.
'God, no,' I whispered.
'You and your damn whispering,' Franny said. 'Well, I don't like you with Jolanta, either.'
'So we won't,' I said.
'I'm afraid we will,' she said.
'Why, Franny?' I said, and I started across her room toward her.
'No, stop!' she cried, moving so that her desk was partially between us; there was a fragile standing lamp in the way.
Years later, Lilly would send us both a poem. When I read the poem, I called up Franny to see if Lilly had sent her a copy; of course she had. The poem was by a very good poet named Donald Justice, and I would one day hear Mr. Justice read his poems in New York City. I liked all of them, but I sat holding my breath while he was reading, half hoping he would read the poem Lilly sent to Franny and me, and half fearing he would. He didn't read it, and I didn't know what to do after the reading. People were speaking to him, but they looked like his friends -- or maybe they were just other poets. Lilly told me that poets have a way of looking like they're all one another's friends. But I didn't know what to do; if Franny had been with me, we would have just waltzed right up to Donald Justice and he would have been completely bowled over by Franny, I think -- everyone always is. Mr. Justice looked like a real gentleman, and I don't want to suggest that he would have been falling all over Franny. I thought that, like his poems, he would be both candid and formal, austere, even grave -- but open, even generous. He looked like a man you'd ask to say an elegy for someone you'd loved; I think he could have done a heartbreaker for Iowa Bob, and -- looking at him after his reading in New York, with some very smart-looking admirers around him -- I wished he could have written and spoken some sort of elegy for Mother and for Egg. In a way, he did write an elegy for Egg; he wrote a poem called 'On the Death of Friends in Childhood,' which I have taken rather personally as an elegy for Egg. Frank and I both love it, but Franny says it makes her too sad.
ON THE DEATH OF FRIENDS IN CHILDHOOD
We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven,
Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;
If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,
Forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands
In games whose very names we have forgotten.
Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.
But when I saw Mr. Justice in New York, I was thinking chiefly about Franny and the poem 'Love's Stratagems' -- that was the name of the poem Lilly sent Franny and me. I didn't even know what to say to Mr. Justice. I was too embarrassed to even shake his hand. I suppose I would have told him that I wished I'd read the poem 'Love's Stratagems' when I was in Vienna with Franny, at the dead end of the summer of 1964.
'But would it have mattered, anyway?' F
ranny would ask me, later. 'Would we have believed it -- then?'
I don't even know if Donald Justice had written 'Love's Stratagems' by 1964. But he must have; it seems written for Franny and me.
'It doesn't matter,' as Frank would say.
Anyway, years later, Franny and I would get 'Love's Stratagems' in the mail from dear little Lilly, and one night we would read it aloud to each other over the telephone. I tended to whisper when I read something that was good aloud, but Franny spoke up loud and clear.
LOVE'S STRATAGEMS
But these maneuverings to avoid
The touching of hands,
These shifts to keep the eyes employed
On objects more or less neutral
(As honor, for the time being, commands)
Will hardly prevent their downfall.
Stronger medicines are needed.
Already they find
None of their stratagems have succeeded,
Nor would have, no,
Not had their eyes been stricken blind,
Hands cut off at the elbow.
Stronger medicines were needed, indeed. Had our hands been cut off at the elbow, Franny and I would have touched each other with the stumps -- with whatever we had left, stricken blind or not.
But that afternoon in her room we were saved by Susie the bear.
'Something's up,' Susie said, shuffling in. Franny and I waited; we thought she meant us -- we thought she knew.
Lilly knew, of course. Somehow she must have.
'Writers know everything,' Lilly said once. 'Or they should. They ought to. Or they ought to shut up.'
'Lilly must have known from the beginning,' Franny said to me, long distance, the night we discovered 'Love's Stratagems.' It was not a good connection; there was crackling on the line -- as if Lilly were listening in. Or Frank were listening in -- Frank was, as I have said, born to the role of listening in on love.
'Something's up, you two,' Susie the bear repeated, menacingly. 'They can't find Fehlgeburt.'
'Who's "they'?" I asked.