by John Irving
"I am afraid of the bear," Herr Theobald said. "It does everything she tells it to do."
"Say 'he,' not 'it,'" said the man on his hands. "He is a fine bear, and he never hurt anybody. He has no claws, you know perfectly well -- and very few teeth, either."
"The poor thing has a terribly hard time eating," Herr Theobald admitted. "He is quite old, and he's messy."
Over my father's shoulder, I saw him write in the giant pad: "A depressed bear and an unemployed circus. This family is centered on the sister."
At that moment, out on the sidewalk we could see her tending to the bear. It was early morning and the street was not especially busy. By law, of course, she had the bear on a leash, but it was a token control. In her startling red turban the woman walked up and down the sidewalk, following the lazy movements of the bear on his unicycle. The animal pedaled easily from parking meter to parking meter, sometimes leaning a paw on the meter as he turned. He was very talented on the unicycle, you could tell, but you could also tell that the unicycle was a dead end for him. You could see that the bear felt he could go no further with unicycling.
"She should bring him off the street now," Herr Theobald fretted. "The people in the pastry shop next door complain to me," he told us. "They say the bear drives their customers away."
"That bear makes the customers come!" said the man on his hands.
"It makes some people come, it turns some away," said the dream man. He was suddenly somber, as if his profundity had depressed him.
But we had been so taken up with the antics of the Circus Szolnok that we had neglected old Johanna. When my mother saw that Grandmother was quietly crying, she told me to bring the car around.
"It's been too much for her," my father whispered to Theobald. The Circus Szolnok looked ashamed of themselves.
Outside on the sidewalk the bear pedaled up to me and handed me the keys; the car was parked at the curb. "Not everyone likes to be given the keys in that fashion," Herr Theobald told his sister.
"Oh, I thought he'd rather like it," she said, rumpling my hair. She was as appealing as a barmaid, which is to say that she was more appealing at night; in the daylight I could see that she was older than her brother, and older than her husbands, too -- and in time, I imagined, she would cease being lover and sister to them, respectively, and become a mother to them all. She was already a mother to the bear.
"Come over here," she said to him. He pedaled listlessly in place on his unicycle, holding on to a parking meter for support. He licked the little glass face of the meter. She tugged his leash. He stared at her. She tugged again. Insolently, the bear began to pedal -- first one way, then the next. It was as if he took interest, seeing that he had an audience. He began to show off.
"Don't try anything," the sister said to him, but the bear pedaled faster and faster, going forward, going backward, angling sharply and veering among the parking meters; the sister had to let go of the leash. "Duna, stop it!" she cried, but the bear was out of control. He let the wheel roll too close to the curb and the unicycle pitched him hard into the fender of a parked car. He sat on the sidewalk with the unicycle beside him; you could tell that he hadn't injured himself, but he looked very embarrassed and nobody laughed. "Oh, Duna," the sister said, scoldingly, but she went over and crouched beside him at the curb. "Duna, Duna," she reproved him, gently. He shook his big head; he would not look at her. There was some saliva strung on the fur near his mouth and she wiped this away with her hand. He pushed her hand away with his paw.
"Come back again!" cried Herr Theobald, miserably, as we got into our car.
Mother sat in the car with her eyes closed and her fingers massaging her temples; this way she seemed to hear nothing we said. She claimed it was her only defense against traveling with such a contentious family.
I did not want to report on the usual business concerning the care of the car, but I saw that Father was trying to maintain order and calm; he had the giant pad spread on his lap as if we'd just completed a routine investigation. "What does the gauge tell us?" he asked.
"Someone put thirty-five kilometers on it," I said.
"That terrible bear has been in here," Grandmother said. "There are hairs from the beast on the back seat, and I can smell him."
"I don't smell anything," Father said.
"And the perfume of that gypsy in the turban," Grandmother said. "It is hovering near the ceiling of the car." Father and I sniffed. Mother continued to massage her temples.
On the floor by the brake and clutch pedals I saw several of the mint-green toothpicks that the Hungarian singer was in the habit of wearing like a scar at the corner of his mouth. I didn't mention them. It was enough to imagine them all -- out on the town, in our car. The singing driver, the man on his hands beside him -- waving out the window with his feet. And in back, separating the dream man from his former wife -- his great head brushing the upholstered roof, his mauling paws relaxed in his large lap -- the old bear slouched like a benign drunk.
"Those poor people," Mother said, her eyes still closed.
"Liars and criminals," Grandmother said. "Mystics and refugees and broken-down animals."
"They were trying hard," Father said, "but they weren't coming up with the prizes."
"Better off in a zoo," said Grandmother.
"I had a good time," Robo said.
"It's hard to break out of Class C," I said.
"They have fallen past Z," said old Johanna. "They have disappeared from the human alphabet."
"I think this calls for a letter," Mother said.
But Father raised his hand -- as if he were going to bless us -- and we were quiet. He was writing in the giant pad and wished to be undisturbed. His face was stern. I knew that Grandmother felt confident of his verdict. Mother knew it was useless to argue. Robo was already bored. I steered us off through the tiny streets; I took Spiegelgasse to Lobkowitzplatz. Spiegelgasse is so narrow that you can see the reflection of your own car in the windows of the shops you pass, and I felt our movement through Vienna was superimposed (like that) -- like a trick with a movie camera, as if we made a fairy-tale journey through a toy city.
When Grandmother was asleep in the car, Mother said, "I don't suppose that in this case a change in the classification will matter very much, one way or another."
"No," Father said, "not much at all." He was right about that, though it would be years until I saw the Pension Grillparzer again.
When Grandmother died, rather suddenly and in her sleep, Mother announced that she was tired of traveling. The real reason, however, was that she began to find herself plagued by Grandmother's dream. "The horses are so thin," she told me once. "I mean, I always knew they would be thin, but not this thin. And the soldiers -- I knew they were miserable," she said, "but not that miserable."
Father resigned from the Tourist Bureau and found a job with a local detective agency specializing in hotels and department stores. It was a satisfactory job for him, though he refused to work during the Christmas season -- when, he said, some people ought to be allowed to steal a little.
My parents seemed to me to relax as they got older, and I really felt they were fairly happy near the end. I know that the strength of Grandmother's dream was dimmed by the real world, and specifically by what happened to Robo. He went to a private school and was well liked there, but he was killed by a homemade bomb in his first year at the university. He was not even "political." In his last letter to my parents he wrote: "The self-seriousness of the radical factions among the students is much overrated. And the food is execrable." Then Robo went to his history class, and his classroom was blown apart.
It was after my parents died that I gave up smoking and took up traveling again. I took my second wife back to the Pension Grillparzer. With my first wife, I never got as far as Vienna.
The Grillparzer had not kept Father's B rating very long, and it had fallen from the ratings altogether by the time I returned to it. Herr Theobald's sister was in charge of the
place. Gone was her tart appeal and in its place was the sexless cynicism of some maiden aunts. She was shapeless and her hair was dyed a sort of bronze, so that her head resembled one of those copper scouring pads that you use on a pot. She did not remember me and was suspicious of my questions. Because I appeared to know so much about her past associates, she probably knew I was with the police.
The Hungarian singer had gone away -- another woman thrilled by his voice. The dream man had been taken away -- to an institution. His own dreams had turned to nightmares and he'd awakened the pension each night with his horrifying howls. His removal from the seedy premises, said Herr Theobald's sister, was almost simultaneous with the loss of the Grillparzer's B rating.
Herr Theobald was dead. He had dropped down clutching his heart in the hall, where he ventured one night to investigate what he thought was a prowler. It was only Duna, the malcontent bear, who was dressed in the dream man's pinstriped suit. Why Theobald's sister had dressed the bear in this fashion was not explained to me, but the shock of the sullen animal unicycling in the lunatic's left-behind clothes had been enough to scare Herr Theobald to death.
The man who could only walk on his hands had also fallen into the gravest trouble. His wristwatch snagged on a tine of an escalator, and he was suddenly unable to hop off; his necktie, which he rarely wore because it dragged on the ground when he walked on his hands, was drawn under the step-off grate at the end of the escalator -- where he was strangled. Behind him a line of people formed -- marching in place by taking one step back and allowing the escalator to carry them forward, then taking another step back. It was quite a while before anyone got up the nerve to step over him. The world has many unintentionally cruel mechanisms that are not designed for people who walk on their hands.
After that, Theobald's sister told me, the Pension Grillparzer went from Class C to much worse. As the burden of management fell more heavily on her, she had less time for Duna; the bear grew senile and indecent in his habits. Once he bullied a mailman down a marble staircase at such a ferocious pace that the man fell and broke his hip; the attack was reported and an old city ordinance forbidding unrestrained animals in places open to the public was enforced. Duna was outlawed at the Pension Grillparzer.
For a while, Theobald's sister kept the bear in a cage in the courtyard of the building, but he was taunted by dogs and children, and food (and worse) was dropped into his cage from the apartments that faced the courtyard. He grew unbearlike and devious-- only pretending to sleep -- and he ate most of someone's cat. Then he was poisoned twice and became afraid to eat anything in this perilous environment. There was no alternative but to donate him to the Schonbrunn Zoo, but there was even some doubt as to his acceptability. He was toothless and ill, perhaps contagious, and his long history of having been treated as a human being did not prepare him for the gentler routine of zoo life.
His outdoor sleeping quarters in the courtyard of the Grillparzer had inflamed his rheumatism, and even his one talent, unicycling, was irretrievable. When he first tried it in the zoo, he fell. Someone laughed. Once anyone laughed at something Duna did, Theobald's sister explained, Duna would never do that thing again. He became, at last, a kind of charity case at Schonbrunn, where he died a short two months after he'd taken up his new lodgings. In the opinion of Theobald's sister, Duna died of mortification-- the result of a rash that spread over his great chest, which then had to be shaved. A shaved bear, one zoo official said, is embarrassed to death.
In the cold courtyard of the building I looked in the bear's empty cage. The birds hadn't left a fruit seed, but in a corner of his cage was a looming mound of the bear's ossified droppings -- as void of life, and even odor, as the corpses captured by the holocaust at Pompeii. I couldn't help thinking of Robo; of the bear, there were more remains.
In the car I was further depressed to notice that not one kilometer had been added to the gauge, not one kilometer had been driven in secret. There was no one around to take liberties anymore.
"When we're a safe distance away from your precious Pension Grillparzer," my second wife said to me, "I'd like you to tell me why you brought me to such a shabby place."
"It's a long story," I admitted.
I was thinking I had noticed a curious lack of either enthusiasm or bitterness in the account of the world by Theobald's sister. There was in her story the flatness one associates with a storyteller who is accepting of unhappy endings, as if her life and her companions had never been exotic to her-- as if they had always been staging a ludicrous and doomed effort at reclassification.
The Pension Grillparzer (1976)
AUTHOR'S NOTES
Readers of The World According to Garp may remember that "The Pension Grillparzer" is T. S. Garp's first short story, and the first evidence in the novel of Garp's abilities as a young writer. Indeed, he is a very young writer when he is supposed to have written "Grillparzer" -- he is only 19. The late Henry Robbins, who was a dear friend and the editor of The World According to Garp, told me that the story was much too good for a 19-year-old to have written it.
I argued that I wanted to make a point about Garp, which is a point I have made about many American writers: the first thing they write is the best thing they ever write -- in Garp's case, it was all downhill after "Grillparzer." But Henry insisted that I had made "Grillparzer" seem too easy to write; it was Henry's suggestion that, for the credibility of the novel, I break up the story -- that I have Garp begin it and get stuck in it and put it aside. Garp takes up the story and finishes it only after an interval of several months; the death of a friend, a Viennese prostitute, is the real-life episode that informs the young author about the end of his story.
I agreed with Henry, and so "The Pension Grillparzer" was divided; readers who read it in the novel read it in two parts. I knew Henry was right, but I hated breaking up the story, which was originally published, two years before The World According to Garp, in Antaeus (Winter 1976); it won a Pushcart Prize -- the Best of the Small Presses -- but I suspect that most readers saw it first in Garp, in its divided form. That is why I wanted to publish it here -- for the first time, for many readers, whole; of one piece.
In the middle of the story, when Garp gets "stuck" and stops writing, Garp ponders the following: "But what did they mean? That dream and those desperate entertainers, and what would happen to them all -- everything had to connect. What sort of explanation would be natural? What sort of ending might make them all part of the same world?"
What made "The Pension Grillparzer" special to me (it is my favorite among my short stories) was both the grandmother's dream and the epilogue -- everything does "connect." The "ludicrous and doomed effort at reclassification" is a foreshadow of the "terminal cases" theme of the novel, which has its own epilogue -- I like epilogues, as anyone who's read my novels knows. The younger brother blown up in a history class, the innkeeper frightened to death by the bear "unicycling in the lunatic's left-behind clothes" -- the bear himself is "embarrassed to death" -- and especially the man who could only walk on his hands, strangled by his necktie on an escalator ... these calamities foreshadow some of the violent ends that my characters will meet, not only in Garp but in later novels; these are the unlikely disasters that many book reviewers have called my penchant for the bizarre.
But, according to Henry Robbins -- and I believed him; I believe him to this day -- the most bizarre element in The World According to Garp is that a 19-year-old could have written 'The Pension Grillparzer." Not one book reviewer ever made mention of that.
At the time I wrote "Grillparzer," I had already written three-and-a-half novels; I was 34. And I already knew I was a novelist, not a short-story writer; yet I never worked as hard on a short story, before or since, because I wanted the readers of The World According to Garp to know that T. S. Garp was a good writer.
OTHER PEOPLE'S DREAMS
Fred had no recollection of having had a dream life until his wife left him. Then he remembered some vague nightmares
from his childhood, and some specific, lustful dreams from what seemed to him to be the absurdly short period of time between his arrival at puberty and his marrying Gail (he had married young). The 10 dreamless years he had been married were wounds too tender for him to probe them very deeply, but he knew that in that time Gail had dreamed like a demon -- one adventure after another -- and he'd woken each morning feeling baffled and dull, searching her alert, nervous face for evidence of her nighttime secrets. She never told him her dreams, only that she had them -- and that she found it very peculiar that he didn't dream. "Either you do dream, Fred," Gail told him, "and your dreams are so sick that you prefer to forget them, or you're really dead. People who don't dream at all are quite dead."
In the last few years of their marriage, Fred found neither theory so farfetched.
After Gail left, he felt "quite dead." Even his girlfriend, who had been Gail's "last straw," couldn't revive him. He thought that everything that had happened to his marriage had been his own fault: Gail had appeared to be happy and faithful -- until he'd created some mess and she'd been forced to pay him back. Finally, after he had repeated himself too many times, she had given up on him. "Old fall-in-love Fred," she called him. He seemed to fall in love with someone almost once a year. Gail said: "I could possibly tolerate it, Fred, if you just went off and got laid, but why do you have to get so stupidly involved?"
He didn't know. After Gail's leaving, his girlfriend appeared so foolish, sexless and foul to him that he couldn't imagine what had inspired his last, alarming affair. Gail had abused him so much for this one that he was actually relieved when Gail was gone, but he missed the child -- they had just one child in 10 years, a nine-year-old boy named Nigel. They'd both felt their own names were so ordinary that they had stuck their poor son with this label. Nigel now lay in a considerable portion of Fred's fat heart like an arrested case of cancer. Fred could bear not seeing the boy (in fact, they hadn't gotten along together since Nigel was five), but he could not stand the thought of the boy's hating him, and he was sure Nigel hated him -- or, in time, would learn to. Gail had learned to.