by John Irving
'You know what's at the Opera tonight, Arbeiter?' Frank asked.
'Music,' Arbeiter said, 'music and singing.'
'But it matters -- which opera,' Frank lied. 'I mean, it's not exactly a full-house performance tonight -- I hope you know that. It's not as if the Viennese have come in droves. It's not as if it's Mozart, or Strauss. It's not even Wagner,' Frank said.
'I don't care what it is,' Arbeiter said. 'The front rows will be full. The front rows are always full. And the dumb singers will be onstage. And the orchestra has to show up.'
'It's Lucia,' Frank said. 'Practically an empty house. You don't have to be a Wagnerian to know that Donizetti's not worth listening to. I confess to being something of a Wagnerian,' Frank confessed, 'but you don't have to share the Germanic opinion of Italian opera to know that Donizetti is simply insipid. Stale harmonies, lack of any dramatism appropriate to the music,' Frank said.
'Shut up,' Arbeiter said.
'Organ-grinder tunes!' Frank said. 'God, I wonder if anyone will show up.'
'They'll show up,' Arbeiter said.
'Better to wait for a big shot,' Frank said. 'Blow the place another night. Wait for an important opera. If you blow up Lucia,' Frank reasoned, 'the Viennese will applaud! They'll think your target was Donizetti, or, even better -- Italian opera! You'll be a kind of cultural hero,' Frank argued, 'not the villain you want to be.'
'And when you get your audience,' Susie the bear told Arbeiter, 'who's going to do the talking?'
'Your talker is dead,' Franny said to Arbeiter.
'You don't think you can hold an audience, do you, Arbeiter?' Susie the bear asked him.
'Shut Up,' Arbeiter said. 'It's possible to have a bear ride in the car with Freud. Everyone knows Freud's got a thing for bears. It might be a nice idea to have a bear ride with him -- on his last trip.'
'No change in the plan, not now,' said Schraubenschlussel, nervously. 'According to plan,' he said, looking at his watch. 'Two minutes.'
'Go now,' Arbeiter said. 'It will take a while to get the blind man out the door and in the car.'
'Not me!' Freud cried. 'I know the way! It's my hotel, I know where the door is,' the old man said, hobbling on the baseball bat toward the door. 'And you've parked that damn car in the same place for years!'
'Go with him, Schraubenschlussel,' Arbeiter told Wrench. 'Hold the old fucker's arm.'
'I don't need any assistance,' Freud said, cheerfully. 'Goodbye, Lilly dear!' Freud cried. 'Don't throw up, dear,' he urged her. 'And keep growing!'
Lilly gagged again, and shook; Arbeiter moved the gun about two inches away from her ear. He was apparently disgusted with her puking, though it was only a very small puddle that Lilly had managed; she was not even a big vomiter.
'Hang in there, Frank!' Freud called -- to the entire lobby. 'Don't let anyone tell you you're queer! You're a prince, Frank!' Freud cried. 'You're better than Rudolf!' Freud yelled to Frank. 'You're more majestic than all the Hapsburgs, Frank!' Freud encouraged him. Frank couldn't speak, he was crying so hard.
'You're lovely, Franny my dear, Franny my sweetheart,' said Freud softly. 'One doesn't have to see to know how beautiful you are,' he said.
'Auf Wiedersehen, Freud,' Franny said.
'Auf Wiedersehen, weight lifter!' Freud cried to me. 'Give me a hug,' he asked me, holding out his arms, the Louisville Slugger like a sword in one hand. 'Let me feel how strong you are,' Freud said to me, and I went up to him and hugged him. That was when he whispered in my ear.
'When you hear the explosion,' Freud whispered, 'kill Arbeiter.'
'Come on!' Schraubenschlussel said, nervously. He grabbed Freud's arm.
'I love you, Win Berry!' Freud cried, but my father had his head in his hands; he would not look up from where he sat, sunk in the couch. 'I'm sorry I got you in the hotel business,' Freud said to my father. 'And the bear business,' Freud added. 'Goodbye, Susie!' Freud said.
Susie started to cry. Schraubenschlussel steered Freud through the door. We could see the car, the Mercedes that was a bomb; it was parked against the curb almost in front of the door to the Hotel New Hampshire. It was a revolving door, and Freud and Schraubenschlussel revolved through it.
'I don't need your assistance!' Freud was complaining to Wrench. 'Just let me feel the car, just get me to the fender,' Freud complained. 'I can find the door by myself, you idiot,' Freud was saying. 'Just let me touch the fender.'
Arbeiter was getting a stiff back, leaning over Lilly. He straightened up a little; he glanced at me, checking on where I was. He glanced at Franny. His gun wandered around.
'There it is, I've got it!' we heard Freud crying, cheerfully, outside. 'That's the headlight, right?' he asked Schraubenschlussel. My father raised his head from his hands and looked at me.
'Of course that's the headlight, you old fool!' Schraubenschlussel yelled at Freud. 'Get in, will you?'
'Freud!' Father screamed. He must have known, then. He ran to the revolving door. 'Auf Wiedersehen, Freud!' Father cried. At the revolving door, Father saw the whole thing very clearly. Freud, with his hand feeling along the headlight, slipped toward the grille of the Mercedes instead of toward the door.
'The other way, you moron!' Schraubenschlussel advised. But Freud knew exactly where he was. He tore his arm out of Wrench's grasp; he leveled the Louisville Slugger and started swinging. He was looking for the front license plate, of course. Blind people have a knack for knowing exactly where things that have always been are. It took Freud only three swings to locate the license plate, my father would always remember. The first swing was a little high-off the grille.
'Lower!' Father screamed, through the revolving door. 'Auf Wiedersehen!'
The second swing hit the front bumper a little to the left of the license plate, and my father yelled, 'To your right! Auf Wiedersehen, Freud!' Schraubenschlussel, Father said later, was already running away. He never got far enough away, however. Freud's third swing was on the money; Freud's third swing 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 Schraubenschlussel'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 fucki
ng 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 Karntnerstrasse, 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 Schraubenschlussel'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 Schraubenschlussel 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. 'Just think of it,' she told Father, 'and it's yours.'
'Dream on, Daddy,' Lilly said, but Father seemed stupefied by all the options.
'Anything?' Father asked.
'You name it,' I told him. He was our hero again; he was our father -- at last. He was blind, but he was in charge.
'Well, I'll have to think about it,' Father said, cautiously, the baseball bat playing all kinds of music -- that Louisville Slugger in my father's hands was as musically complicated as a full orchestra. Though Father would never make as much noise with a baseball bat as Freud had made, he was more various than Freud could have dreamed of being.
And so we left our seven-year home away from home. Frank sold the second Hotel New Hampshire for a ridiculously high price. After all, it was a kind of historical landmark, Frank argued.
'I'm coming home!' Franny wrote to Junior Jones.
'I'm coming home,' she also wrote to Chipper Dove.
'Why, damn it, Franny?' I asked. 'Why write to Chipper Dove?'
But Franny refused to talk about it; she just shrugged.
'I told you,' Susie the bear said. 'Franny's got to deal with it -- sooner or later. You've both got to deal with Chipper Dove,' Susie said, 'and you're going to have to deal with each other, too,' said Susie the bear. I looked at Susie as if I didn't know what she was talking about, but Susie said, 'I'm not blind, you know. I got eyes. And I'm a smart bear, too.'
But Susie wasn't being menacing. 'You two have got a real problem,' she confided in Franny and me.
'No shit,' Franny said.
'Well, we're being very careful,
' I told Susie.
'For how long can anybody be that careful?' Susie asked. 'The bombs haven't all gone off,' Susie said. 'You two have a bomb between you,' said Susie the bear. 'You've got to be more than careful,' Susie warned Franny and me. 'The bomb between you two,' Susie said, 'can blow you both away.'
For once, it seemed, Franny had nothing to say; I held her hand; she squeezed me back.
'I love you,' I told her, when we were, alone -- which we should never have allowed ourselves to be. 'I'm so sorry,' I whispered, 'but I love you, I do.'
'I love you terribly much,' Franny said. And it was Lilly who saved us that time; despite the fact that we were all supposed to be packed and ready to leave, Lilly was writing. We heard the typewriter and could imagine our sister's little hands blurring over the keyboard.
'Now that I'm going to get published,' Lilly had said, 'I have to really get better. I've got to keep growing,' she said a little desperately. 'My God, the next book has got to be bigger than the first. And the one after that,' she said, 'it will have to be even bigger.' There was a certain despair about the way she said this, and Frank said, 'Stick with me, kid. With a good agent, you've got the world by the balls.'
'But I still have to do it,' Lilly complained. 'I still have to write. I mean, now I'm expected to grow.'
And the sound of Lilly trying so hard to grow distracted Franny and me from each other. We went out in the lobby, where it was somewhat more public -- where we felt safe. Two men had just been killed in that lobby, but it was a safer place for Franny and me than in our own rooms.
The whores were gone. I do not care, anymore, what became of them. They didn't care what became of us.
The hotel was empty; a dangerous number of rooms beckoned to Franny and me.
'One day,' I said to her, 'we'll have to. You know that. Or do you think it will change -- if we wait it out?'
'It won't change,' she said, 'but maybe -- one day -- we'll be able to handle it. One day it might be a little safer than it feels right now.'
I doubted that it would ever be safe enough, and I was on the verge of trying to convince her to do it now, to use the second Hotel New Hampshire as it was meant to be used -- to get it over with, to see if we were doomed or just perversely attracted to each other -- but Frank was our savior ... this time.