“I wonder where the gangs hang out,” said Junior Jones, looking over the streets with us.
The gangs?” said Egg. “The who?”
“The tough guys,” said Junior Jones. “The guys with guns and blades, man.”
“The gangs,” Lilly repeated, and we stared at the map as if the streets would indicate their darkest alleys to us.
“This is Europe,” Frank said, with disgust. “Maybe there aren’t gangs.”
“It’s a city, isn’t it?” Junior Jones said.
But on the map it looked like a toy city, to me—with pretty places of interest, and all the green spots where nature had been arranged for pleasure.
“Probably in the parks,” said Franny, biting her lower lip. “The gangs hang out in the parks.”
“Shit,” I said.
“There won’t be any gangs!” Frank cried. “There will be music! And pastry! And the people do a lot of bowing, and they dress differently!” We stared at him, but we knew he’d been reading up on Vienna; he’d gotten a head start on the books Father kept bringing home.
“Pastry and music and people bowing all the time, Frank?” Franny said. “Is that what it’s like?” Lilly was using her magnifying glass on the map now—as if people would spring to life, in miniature, on the paper; and they’d either be bowing, and dressed differently, or they’d be cruising in gangs.
“Well,” Franny said. “At least we can be pretty sure there won’t be any black gangs.” Franny was still angry with Junior Jones for sleeping with Ronda Ray.
“Shit,” Junior said. “You better hope there are black gangs. Black gangs are the best gangs, man. Those white gangs have inferiority complexes,” Junior said. “And there’s nothing worse than a gang with an inferiority complex.”
“A what?” said Egg. No doubt he thought that an inferiority complex was a weapon; sometimes, I guess, it is.
“Well, I think it’s going to be nice,” said Frank, grimly.
“Yes, it will be,” Lilly said, with a humourlessness akin to Frank’s.
“I can’t see it,” Egg said, seriously. “I can’t see it, so I don’t know what it’s going to be like.”
“It’ll be okay,” Franny said. “I don’t think it’s going to be great, but it’ll be all right.”
It was odd, but Franny seemed the most influenced by Iowa Bob’s philosophy—which, to a degree, had become Father’s philosophy. This was odd because Franny was frequently the most sarcastic to Father—and the most sarcastic about Father’s plans. Yet when she was raped, Father had said to her—incredibly! I thought—that when he had a bad day, he tried to see if he could construe it as the luckiest day of his life. “Maybe this is the luckiest day of your life,” he had said to her; I was amazed that she seemed to find this reverse thinking useful. She was a kind of parrot of other tidbits of Father’s philosophy. “It was just a little event among so many,” I heard her say—to Frank, about scaring Iowa Bob to death. And once, about Chipper Dove, I heard Father say, “He probably has a most unhappy life.” Franny actually agreed with him!
I felt much more nervous about going to Vienna than Franny seemed to feel, and I was ever conscious of what feelings Franny and I didn’t absolutely share—because it mattered to me that I stay close to her.
We all knew that Mother thought the idea was crazy, but we could not ever make her disloyal to Father—although we tried.
“We won’t understand the language,” Lilly said to Mother.
“The what?” Egg cried.
“The language!” Lilly said. “They speak German in Vienna.”
“You’ll all go to an English-speaking school,” Mother said.
“There will be weird kids in a school like that,” I said. “Everyone will be a foreigner.”
“We’ll be the foreigners,” Franny said.
“In an English-speaking school,” I said, “the whole place will be full of misfits.”
“And people from the government,” said Frank. “Diplomats and ambassadors will send their kids there. The kids will be all fucked up.”
“Who could be more fucked up than the kids at the Dairy School, Frank?” Franny asked.
“Whoa!” said Junior Jones. “There’s fucked up and then there’s foreign and fucked up.”
Franny shrugged; so did Mother.
“We’ll still be a family, “ Mother said. “The main part of your lives will be your family—just like now.”
And that seemed to please everyone. We busied ourselves with the books Father brought from the library, and the travel agency brochures. We reread the short but elated messages from Freud:
GOOD YOU COMING! BRING ALL KIDS AND PETS! LOTS OF ROOM. CENTRALLY LOCATED. GOOD SHOPPING FOR GIRLS (HOW MANY GIRLS?) AND PARKS FOR THE BOYS AND PETS TO PLAY IN. BRING MONEY. MUST RENOVATE—WITH YOUR ASSISTANCE. YOU’LL LIKE THE BEAR. A SMART BEAR MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE. NOW WE CAN WORK ON THE AMERICAN AUDIENCE. WHEN WE UPGRADE THE CLIENTELE, THEN WE’LL HAVE A HOTEL TO BE PROUD OF. I HOPE YOUR ENGLISH STILL GOOD IS. HA HA! BEST TO LEARN A LITTLE GERMAN, YOU KNOW? REMEMBER MIRACLES DON’T GET BUILT IN A NIGHT, BUT IN A COUPLE NIGHTS EVEN BEARS CAN BE QUEENS. HA HA! I GOT OLD—THAT WAS THE PROBLEM. NOW WE’LL BE OKAY. NOW WE SHOW THE BASTARDS SONSOFBITCHES AND COCKSUCKER NAZIS WHAT A GOOD HOTEL IS! HOPE THE KIDS DON’T HAVE COLDS, AND DON’T FORGET TO GIVE PETS NECESSARY SHOTS.
Since Sorrow was our only pet—and he needed help, but not a shot—we wondered if Freud thought we still had Earl.
“Of course not,” Father said. “He’s just speaking generally, he’s just trying to be helpful.”
“Make sure Sorrow gets his shots, Frank,” Franny said, but Frank was getting better about Sorrow; he could occasionally be teased about the new restoration, and he seemed to be committed to the task of refashioning Sorrow—in a cheerful pose—for Egg. We were not allowed to see the gross dog’s transformation, of course, but Frank himself seemed ever cheerful—upon returning from the bio lab—so that we could only hope that, this time, Sorrow would be “nice.”
Father read a book about Austrian anti-Semitism and wondered if Freud had made the right decision in naming the hotel the Gasthaus Freud; Father wondered, from what he read, if the Viennese even Jilted the other Freud. He also couldn’t help wondering who the “bastards sonsofbitches and cocksucker Nazis” were.
“I can’t help wondering how old Freud is,” Mother said. They determined that if he’d been in his middle or late forties in 1939, he would be only in his middle sixties now. But Mother said that he sounded older. In his messages to us, she meant.
HI! QUICK IDEA: YOU THINK IT BEST TO RESTRICT CERTAIN ACTIVITIES TO CERTAIN FLOORS? MAYBE HAVE CERTAIN KIND OF CLIENTELE ON FOURTH FLOOR, OTHER KIND IN BASEMENT? DELICATE MATTER TO DISCRIMINATE, YOU THINK? CURRENT DAYTIME AND NIGHTTIME CLIENTELE OF DIFFERENT—I WON’T SAY “WARRING”—INTERESTS. HA HA! ALL THAT WILL CHANGE WITH REMODELING. AND ONCE THEY STOP THE FUCKING DIGGING UP THE STREET. JUST A FEW MORE YEARS OF WAR RESTORATION, THEY SAY. WAIT TILL YOU MEET THE BEAR: NOT JUST SMART, BUT YOUNG! WHAT A TEAM WE’LL BE TOGETHER! WHAT YOU MEAN, “IS FREUD A REALLY WELL-LIKED NAME IN VIENNA?” DID YOU GO TO HARVARD OR NOT??!! HA HA.
“He doesn’t sound necessarily older,” said Franny, “but he sounds crazy.”
“He just doesn’t use English very well,” Father said. “It’s not his language.”
So we studied German. Franny and Frank and I took courses at the Dairy School, and brought the records home to play to Lilly; Mother worked with Egg. She started by just getting him familiar with the names of the streets and the places of interest on the tourist map.
“Lobkowitzplatz,” Mother would say.
“What?” Egg would say.
Father was supposed to be teaching himself, but he seemed to be making the least progress. “You kids have to learn it,” he kept saying. “I don’t have to go to school, meet new kids, all of that.”
“But we’re going to an English-speaking school,” Lilly said.
“Even so,” Father said. “You’ll need the German more than I will.”