“You passed out, outside,” I said. “I brought you in so you wouldn’t freeze. Now you have to leave.”
“I have to use the bathroom,” he said, with dignity.
“Go outside,” I said. “Can you walk?”
“Of course I can walk,” he said. He went toward the delivery entrance, but stopped on the threshold. “It’s dark out there,” he said. “You’re setting me up, aren’t you? How many of them are there—out there?”
I led him to the front lobby door and turned on the outside light. I’m afraid that this was the light that woke up Father. “Good-bye,” I told the man in the white dinner jacket, “and Happy New Year.”
“This is Elliot Park!” he cried, indignantly.
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, this is that funny hotel, then,” he concluded. “If it’s a hotel, I want a room for the night.”
I thought it best not to tell him that he didn’t have any money on him, so I said instead, “We’re full. No vacancies.”
The man in the white dinner jacket stared at the desolate lobby, gawked at the empty mail slots, and at the abandoned trunk of Junior Jones’s winter clothes lying at the foot of the dingy stairs. “You’re full?” he said, as if some truth about life in general had occured to him, for the first time. “Holy cow,” he said. “I’d heard this place was going under.” It wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
I steered him toward the main door again, but he bent down and picked up the mail and handed it to me; in our haste to prepare for the party, no one had been to the mail slot at the front lobby door all day; no one had picked up the mail.
The man walked only a little way out of the door, then came back.
“I want to call a cab,” he informed me. “There’s too much violence out there,” he said, gesturing, again, to life in general; he couldn’t have meant Elliot Park—at least not now, not since Doris Wales had gone.
“You don’t have enough money for a cab,” I informed him.
“Oh,” the man in the white dinner jacket said. He sat down on the steps in the cold, foggy air. “I need a minute,” he said.
“What for?” I asked him.
“Have to remember where I’m going,” he said.
“Home?” I suggested, but the man waved his hand above his head.
He was thinking. I looked at the mail. The usual bills, the usual absence of letters from unknowns requesting rooms. And one letter that stood out from the rest. It had pretty foreign stamps; österreich said the stamps—and a few other exotic things. The letter was from Vienna, and it was addressed to my father in a most curious way:
Win Berry
Graduate of Harvard
Class of 194?
U.S.A.
The letter had taken a long time to reach my father, but the postal authorities had found one among them who knew where Harvard was. My father would say later that getting that letter was the most concrete thing going to Harvard ever did for him; if he’d gone to some less-famous school, the letter would never have been delivered. That’s a good reason,” Franny would say, later, “to wish he’d gone to a less-famous school.”
But, of course, the alumni network at Harvard is efficient and vast. My father’s name and “Class of 194?” was all they needed to discover the right class, ’46, and the correct address.
“What’s going on?” I heard my father calling; he had come out of our family’s second-floor rooms and was on the landing, calling down the stairwell to me.
“Nothing!” I said, kicking the drunk on the steps in front of me, because he was falling asleep again.
“Why’s the front light on?” Father called.
“Get going!” I said to the man in the white dinner jacket.
“I’m happy to meet you!” the man said, cordially. “I’ll just be trotting along now!”
“Good, good,” I whispered.
But the man walked only to the bottom step before he seemed overcome with thought again.
“Who are you talking to?” Father called.
“No one! Just a drunk!” I said.
“Jesus God,” said Father, “A drunk isn’t no one!”
“I can handle it!” I called.
“Wait till I get dressed,” Father said. “Jesus God.”
“Get going!” I yelled at the man in the white dinner jacket.
“Good-bye! Good-bye!” the man called, happily waving to me from the bottom step of the Hotel New Hampshire. “I had a wonderful time!”
The letter, of course, was from Freud. I knew that, and I wanted to see what it said before I let my father see it. I wanted to talk with Franny about it, for hours—and even with Mother—before I let Father see it. But there wasn’t time. The letter was brief and to the point.
IF YOU GOT THIS, THEN YOU WENT TO HARVARD LIKE YOU PROMISED ME [Freud wrote]. YOU GOOD BOY, YOU!
“Good night! God bless you!” cried the man in the white dinner jacket. But he would walk no farther than the perimeter of light; where the darkness of Elliot Park began, he stopped and waved.
I flicked off the light so that if Father came, Father couldn’t spot the apparition in formal attire.
“I can’t see!” the drunk wailed, and I turned the light on again.
“Get out of here or I’ll beat the shit out of you!” I screamed at him.
“That’s no way to handle it” I heard Father yelling.
“Good night, bless you all!” cried the man; he was still in the circle of light when I cut the light off him, again, and he made no protest. I kept the light off. I finished Freud’s letter.
I FINALLY GOT A SMART BEAR [Freud wrote]. IT MADE ALL THE DIFFERENCE. I HAD A GOOD HOTEL GOING, BUT I GOT OLD. IT COULD STILL BE A GREAT HOTEL [Freud added], IF YOU AND MARY COME HELP ME RUN IT. I GOT A SMART BEAR, BUT I NEED A SMART HARVARD BOY LIKE YOU, TOO!
Father stormed into the wretched lobby of the Hotel New Hampshire; in his slippers he stumbled over a beer bottle, which he kicked, and his bathrobe flapped in the wind from the open door.