“I’ll write you more,” said Franny. Junior Jones tried to shrug, but it didn’t come off.
“Shit,” he told me, when we were throwing rocks at a tree in Elliot Park. “What does Franny want to do, anyway? What does she think is going to happen to her over there?”
“Over there” was what we all called it. Except Frank: he now spoke of Vienna the German way. “Wien,” he said.
“Veen,” Lilly said, shuddering. “It sounds like something a lizard would say.” And we all stared at her, waiting for Egg to say his “What?”
Then the grass came out in Elliot Park, and one warm night, when I was sure Egg was asleep, I opened the window and looked at the moon and the stars and listened to the crickets and the frogs, and Egg said, “Keep passing the open windows.”
“You awake?” I said.
“I can’t sleep,” Egg said. “I can’t see where I’m going,” he said. “I don’t know what it’ll be like.”
He sounded ready to cry, so I said, “Come on, Egg. It will be great. You’ve never lived in a city,” I said.
“I know,” he said, sniffling a little.
“Well, there’s more to do than there is to do here,” I promised him.
“I have a lot to do here,” he said.
“But this will be so different,” I told him.
“Why do the people jump out of windows?” he asked me.
And I explained to him that it was just a story, although the sense of a metaphor might have been lost on him.
“There are spies in the hotel,” he said. “That’s what Lilly said: ‘Spies and low women.’”
I imagined Lilly thinking that “low women” were short, like her, and I tried to reassure Egg that there was nothing frightening about the occupants of Freud’s hotel; I said that Father would take care of everything—and heard the silence with which both Egg and I accepted that promise.
“How will we get there?” Egg asked. “It’s so far.”
“An airplane,” I said.
“I don’t know what that’s like, either,” he said.
(There would be two airplanes, actually, because Father and Mother would never fly on the same plane; many parents are like that. I explained that to Egg, too, but he kept repeating. “I don’t know what it’ll be like.”)
Then Mother came into our room to comfort Egg and I fell back to sleep with them talking together, and woke up again as Mother was leaving; Egg was asleep. Mother came over to my bed and sat down beside me; her hair was loose and she looked very young; in fact, in the half-dark, she looked a lot like Franny.
“He’s only seven,” she said, about Egg. “You should talk to him more.”
“Okay,” I said. “Do you want to go to Vienna?”
And of course, she shrugged—and smiled—and said, “Your father is a good, good man.” For the first time, really, I could see them in the summer of 1939, with Father promising Freud that he would get married, and he would go to Harvard—and Freud asking Mother one thing: to forgive Father. Was this what she had to forgive him for? And was rooting us out of the terrible town of Dairy, and the wretched Dairy School—and the first Hotel New Hampshire, which wasn’t so hot a hotel (though nobody said so)—was that so bad a thing that Father was doing, really?
“Do you like Freud?” I asked her.
“I don’t really know Freud,” Mother said.
“But Father likes him,” I said.
“Your father likes him,” Mother said, “but he doesn’t really know him, either.”
“What do you think the bear will be like?” I asked her.
“I don’t know what the bear is for,” Mother whispered, “so I couldn’t guess what it could be like.”
“What could it be for?” I asked, but she shrugged again—perhaps remembering what Earl had been like, and trying to remember what Earl could have been for.
“We’ll all find out,” she said, and kissed me. It was an Iowa Bob thing to say.
“Good night,” I said to Mother, and kissed her.
“Keep passing the open windows,” she whispered, and I was asleep.
Then I had a dream that Mother died.
“No more bears,” she said to Father, but he misunderstood her; he thought she was asking him a question.
“No, one more bear,” he said. “Just one more. I promise.”
And she smiled and shook her head; she was too tired to explain. There was the faintest effort of her famous shrug, and the intention of a shrug in her eyes, which rolled up and out of sight, suddenly, and Father knew that the man in the white dinner jacket had taken Mother’s hand.
“Okay! No more bears!” Father promised, but Mother was aboard the white sloop, now, and she went sailing out to sea.
In the dream, Egg wasn’t there; but Egg was there when I woke up—he was still sleeping, and someone else was watching him. I recognized the sleek, black back—the fur thick and short and oily; the square back of his blundering head, and the half-cocked, no-account ears. He was sitting on his tail, as he used to do—in life—and he was facing Egg. Frank had probably made him smiling, or at least panting, witlessly, in that goofy way of dogs who repeatedly drop balls and sticks at your feet. Oh, the moronic but happy fetchers of this world—that was our old Sorrow: a fetcher and a farter. I crept out of bed to face the beast—from Egg’s point of view.
I could see at a glance that Frank had outdone himself at “niceness.” Sorrow sat on his tail with his forepaws touching and modestly hiding his groin; his face had a dippy, glazed happiness about it, his tongue lolled stupidly out of his mouth. He looked ready to fart, or wag his tail, or roll idiotically on his back; he looked like he was dying to be scratched behind his ears—he looked like a hopelessly slavish animal, forever in need of fondling attention. If it weren’t for the fact that he was dead, and that it was impossible to banish from memory Sorrow’s other manifestations, this Sorrow looked as harmless as Sorrow ever could have looked.
“Egg?” I whispered. “Wake up.” But it was Saturday morning—Egg’s morning for sleeping in—and I knew Egg had slept badly, or only a little, through the night. Out the window I saw our car driving between the trees of Elliot Park, treating the soggy park like a slalom course—at slow speed—and I knew that meant Frank was at the wheel; he’d just gotten his driver’s license, and he liked to practice by driving around the trees in Elliot Park. Also, Franny had just gotten her learner’s permit and Frank was teaching her to drive. I could tell it was Frank at the wheel because of the stately progress of the car through the trees, at limousine speed, at hearse speed—that was the way Frank always drove. Even when he drove Mother to the supermarket, he drove as if he were bearing the coffin of a queen past throngs of mourners seeking one last look. When Franny drove, Frank yelped beside her, cringing in the passenger seat; Franny liked to go fast.
“Egg!” I said more loudly, and he stirred a little. There was a slamming of doors outside, a changing of drivers in our car in Elliot Park; I could tell Franny had taken the wheel when the car began to careen between the trees, great slithers of the spring mud flying—and the wild, half-seen gestures of Frank’s arms waving in what is popularly called the death seat.
“Jesus God!” I heard Father yell, out another window. Then he shut the window and I heard him raving at Mother—about the way Franny drove, about having to replant the grass in Elliot Park, about having to chip the mud off the car with a chisel—and while I was still watching Franny racing among the trees, Egg opened his eyes and saw Sorrow. His scream jammed my thumbs against the windowsill and made me bite my tongue. Mother ran into the room to see what was the matter and greeted Sorrow with a shriek of her own.
“Jesus God,” said Father. “Why does Frank have to spring the damn dog on everyone? Why can’t he just say, ‘Now I’m going to show you Sorrow,’ and carry the damn thing into a room—when we’re all ready for it, for Christ’s sake!”
“Sorrow?” said Egg, peering from under his bedclothes.
“It’s just Sorrow, Egg,” I said. “Doesn’t he look nice?” Egg smiled cautiously at the foolish-looking dog.
“He does look nice,” Father said, suddenly pleased.
“He’s smiling!” Egg said.