“No?” she cried. “It’s against the law? It is?” she screamed.
“Well, but it happens, anyway,” I said.
“Why?” Ronda yelled. “Why is it against the law?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You better go,” she said. “And you’re going to Vienna and leaving me here?” she added, pushing me out the door. “You better go,” she said.
“Who worked for two years on a fresco and called it Schweinsdreck?” Frank asked me at breakfast. Schweinsdreck means “pig shit.”
“Jesus, Frank, it’s breakfast,” I said.
“Gustav Klimt,” Frank said, smugly.
And there went the winter of 1957: still lifting the weights, but going easy on the bananas; still visiting Ronda Ray, but dreaming of the imperial city; learning irregular verbs and the mesmerizing trivia of history, trying to imagine the circus Fritz’s Act and the hotel called Gasthaus Freud. Our mother seemed tired, but she was loyal; she and my father appeared to rely on more frequent visits to old 3E, where the differences between them perhaps appeared easier to solve. The Uricks were wary; a cautious streak had developed in them, because they no doubt felt abandoned—“to a dwarf,” Max said, but not around Lilly. And one morning in early spring, with the ground in Elliot Park still half-frozen but turning spongy, Ronda Ray refused to take my money—but she accepted me.
“It’s not legal,” she whispered, bitterly. “I’m no criminal.”
It was later that I discovered she was playing for higher stakes.
“Vienna,” she whispered. “What will you do there without me?” she asked. I had a million ideas, and almost as many pictures, but I promised Ronda I would ask Father to consider bringing her along.
“She’s a real worker,” I told Father. Mother frowned. Franny started choking on something. Frank mumbled about the weather in Vienna—“Lots of rain.” Egg, naturally, asked what we were talking about.
“No,” Father said. “Not Ronda. We can’t afford it.” Everyone looked relieved—even me, I confess.
I broke the news to Ronda when she was oiling the top of the bar.
“Well, there was no harm in asking, right?” she said.
“No harm,” I said. But the next morning, when I stopped and breathed a little outside her door, it seemed that there had been some harm.
“Just keep running, John-O,” she said. “Running is legal. Running is free.”
I then had an awkward and vague conversation with Junior Jones about lust; it was comforting that he didn’t seem to understand it any better than I did. It was a frustration to us both that Franny had so many other opinions on the subject.
“Women,” said Junior Jones. “They’re very different from you and me.” I nodded, of course. Franny seemed to have forgiven Junior for his lust with Ronda Ray, but a part of her remained aloof to him; she appeared, at least outwardly, indifferent to leaving Junior for Vienna. Perhaps she was torn between not wanting to miss Junior Jones too much and remaining hopeful but calm about the possible adventure that Vienna could be for her.
She was detached when asked about it, and I found myself, that spring, more often stuck with Frank; Frank was in high gear. His moustache resembled, nervously, the facial excesses of the departed Crown Prince Rudolf, although Franny and I liked to call Frank the King of Mice.
“Here he comes! He can make dogs fart on command! Who is it?” I would cry.
“‘Life Is Serious But Art Is Fun!’” Franny would shout. “Here is the hero of the street clowns! Keep him away from the open windows!”
“King of the Mice!” I yelled.
“Drop dead, both of you,” Frank said.
“How’s it coming with the dog, Frank?” I asked; this would win him over, every time.
“Well,” Frank said, some vision of Sorrow crossing his mind and making his moustache quiver, “I think Egg will be pleased—although Sorrow may seem a little tame, to the rest of us.”
“I doubt it,” I said. Looking at Frank, I could imagine the Crown Prince, moodily en route to Mayerling—and the murder of his mistress, and the killing of himself—but it was easier to think of Freud’s street artist leaping out a window with his box of pets: the King of Mice dashed to the ground and a city that ignored him, once, now mourning him. Somehow, Frank looked the part.
“Who will make the dogs make music and the mice pant?” I asked Frank over breakfast.
“Go lift a few weights,” he said. “And drop them on your head.”
So Frank journeyed back to the bio lab; if the King of Mice could make dogs fart on command, Frank could make Sorrow live in more than one pose—so perhaps he was a kind of Crown Prince, like Rudolf, Emperor of Austria to Be, King of Bohemia, King of Transylvania, Margrave of Moravia, Duke of Auschwitz (to mention only a few of Rudolf’s titles).
“Where is the King of Mice?” Franny would ask.
“With Sorrow,” I would say. “Teaching Sorrow to fart on command.”
And passing each other in the halls of the Hotel New Hampshire, I would say to Lilly, or Franny would say to Frank, “Keep passing the open windows.”
“Schweinsdreck,” Frank would say.
“Show off,” Franny would say back to him.
“Pig shit to you, Frank,” I’d say.
“What?” Egg would shout.
And one morning Lilly asked Father, “Will we leave before the circus called Fritz’s Act moves in, or will we get to see them?”
“I hope to miss seeing them,” Franny said.
“Won’t we overlap, at least a day?” Frank asked. “I mean for the passing of the keys, or something?”
“What keys?” Max Urick asked.
“What locks?” said Ronda Ray, whose door was shut to me.
“Perhaps we’ll coincide for about ten or fifteen minutes,” Father said.
“I want to see them,” Lilly said, seriously. And I looked at Mother, who looked tired—but nice: she was a soft, rumpled woman, whom Father clearly loved to touch. He was always burrowing his face in her neck, and cupping her breasts, and hugging her from behind—which she only pretended to resent (in front of us children). When he was around Mother, Father was remindful of those dogs whose heads are always thrust in your lap, whose snouts take comfort in armpits and crotches—I don’t mean, at all, that Father was crude with her, but he was always making contact: hugging and hanging on tight.
Of course, Egg did this with Mother, too, and Lilly—to a degree—though Lilly was more dignified, and holding back of herself, since her smallness had become such an item. It was as if she didn’t want to appear any smaller than she was by acting too young.
“The average Austrian is three to four inches shorter than the average American, Lilly,” Frank informed her, but Lilly appeared not to care—she shrugged; it was Mother’s move, independent and pretty. In their different ways both Franny and Lilly had inherited the motion.
Sometime that spring I saw Franny use it: just a single deft shrug, with a hint of some involuntary ache behind it—when Junior Jones told us that he would be accepting the football scholarship from Penn State in the fall.
“I’ll write you,” Franny told him.