“I wouldn’t want children until after the revolution,” Fehlgeburt said, humorlessly.
“Do you think Fehlgeburt likes me?” I asked Frank, when we were walking home.
“Wait till we start school,” Frank suggested. “Find a nice young girl—your own age.”
And so, although I lived in a Viennese whorehouse, my sexual world was probably like the sexual world for most Americans who were fifteen in 1957; I beat off to images of a dangerously violent prostitute, while I kept walking a young “older” girl to her home—waiting for the day I might dare to kiss her, or even hold her hand.
I expected that the “timid souls”—the guests who (Schwanger had predicted) would be drawn to the Hotel New Hampshire—would remind me of myself. They didn’t. They came occasionally in buses: odd groups on organized tours—and some of the tours were as odd as the groups. Librarians from Devon, Kent, and Cornwall; ornithologists from Ohio—they had been observing storks at Rust. They were so regular in their habits that they all went to bed before the whores started working; they slept right through the nightly rumpus and were often off on a tour in the morning before Screaming Annie wrapped up her last orgasm, before the radical Old Billig walked in off the street—the new world shining in his old mind’s eye. The groups were the oblivious ones, and Frank could sometimes make extra money by marching them off on “walking tours.” The groups were easy—even the Japanese Male Choral Society, who discovered the whores as a group (and used them as a group). What a loud, strange time that was—all that screwing, all that singing! The Japanese had a great many cameras with them and took everyone’s picture—all of our family pictures, too. In fact, Frank would always say it’s a shame that the only photographs we have of our time in Vienna come from that one visit of the Japanese Male Choral Society. There is one of Lilly with Fehlgeburt—and a book, of course. There’s a touching one of the two Old Billigs; they look like what Lilly would call a “sweet” old couple. There’s Franny leaning on the stout shoulder of Susie the bear, Franny looking a little thin, but sassy and strong—“strangely confident” is how Frank describes Franny in this period. There’s a curious one of Father and Freud. They appear to be sharing the baseball bat—or they appear to have been squabbling over the bat; it is as if they’d been fighting over who was up next, and they’d interrupted their brawl only long enough for the picture to be taken.
I’m standing with Dark Inge. I remember the Japanese gentleman who asked Inge and me to stand beside each other; we had been sitting down, playing crazy eights, but the Japanese said the light wasn’t right and so we had to stand. It’s a slightly unnatural moment; Screaming Annie is still sitting down—at that part of the table where the light was generous—and overly powdered Babette is whispering something to Jolanta, who is standing a little back from the table with her arms folded across her impressive bosom. Jolanta could never learn the rules to crazy eights. In this picture, Jolanta looks like she’s about to break up the game. I remember that the Japanese were afraid of her, too—perhaps because she was so much bigger than any of them.
And what distinguishes all these photographs—our only pictorial record of Vienna, 1957-64—is that all these people familiar to us have to share the photographs with a Japanese or two, with a total stranger or two. Even the photograph of Ernst the pornographer leaning against the car outside. Arbeiter is leaning against the fender with him—and those legs protruding from under the grille of the old Mercedes, those legs belong to the one called Wrench; Schraubenschlüssel never got more than his legs in a picture. And surrounding the car are Japanese—strangers none of us would see again.
Might we have known, then—had we looked at that photograph closely—that this was no ordinary car? Who ever heard of a Mercedes, even an old one, that needed so much mechanical attention? Herr Wrench was always under the car, and crawling around in it. And why did the one car belonging to the Symposium on East-West Relations need so much care when it was so rarely driven anywhere? Looking at it, now, of course … well, the photograph is obvious. It is hard to look at that photograph and not recognize that old Mercedes for what it was.
A bomb. A constantly wired and rewired, ever-ready bomb. The whole car was a bomb. And those unrecognizable Japanese that populate all of our only photographs … well, now it’s easy to see these strangers, those foreign gentlemen, as symbolic of the unknown angels of death which would accompany that car. To think that for years we children told each other jokes about how bad a mechanic Schraubenschlüssel must be in order to be constantly fussing with that Mercedes! When all the while he was an expert! Mr. Wrench, the bomb expert; for almost seven years that bomb was ready—every day.
We never knew what they were waiting for—or what moment would have been ripe for it, had we not forced their hand. We have only the Japanese pictures to go on, and they make a murky story.
“What do you remember of Vienna, Frank?”” I asked him—I ask him all the time. Frank went into a room to be alone with himself, and when he came out he handed me a short list:
1. Franny with Susie the bear.
2. Going to buy your damn barbells.
3. Walking Fehlgeburt home.
4. The presence of the King of Mice.
Frank handed me this list and said, “Of course, there’s more, but I don’t want to get into it.”
I understand, and of course I remember going to buy my barbells, too. We all went. Father, Freud, Susie, and we children. Freud went because he knew where the sports shop was. Susie went because Freud could help her remember where the shop was by shouting at her in the streetcar. “Are we past that hospital-supply place on Mariahilfer?” Freud would cry. “It’s the second left, or the third, after that.”
“Earl!” Susie would say, looking out the window. The Strassenbahn conductor would caution Freud, saying, “I hope it’s safe—it’s not tied: the bear. We don’t usually let them on if they’re not tied.”
“Earl!” Susie said.
“It’s a smart bear,” Frank told the conductor.
In the sports shop I bought 300 pounds of weights, one long barbell, and two dumbbell bars for the one-arm curls.
“Deliver them to the Hotel New Hampshire, Father said.
“They don’t deliver,” Frank said.
“They don’t deliver?” Franny said. “Well, we can’t carry them!”
“Earl!” Susie said.
“Be nice, Susie!” Freud shouted. “Don’t be rude!”
“The bear would really appreciate it if these weights were delivered,” Frank told the man in the sports shop. But it didn’t work. We should have seen then that the power of a bear in getting things to work out for us was diminishing. We distributed the weights as best we could. I put seventy-five on each of the short dumbbell bars and carried one in each hand. Father and Frank and Susie the bear struggled with the long bar, and another 150 pounds. Franny opened doors and cleared the sidewalk, and Lilly held on to Freud; she was his Seeing Eye bear for the trip home.
“Jesus God!” Father said, when they wouldn’t let us on the Strassenbahn.
“They let us on to get out here!” Franny said.
“It’s not the bear they mind,” Freud said. “It’s the long barbell.”
“It looks dangerous, the way you’re carrying it,” Franny told Frank, Susie, and Father.
“If you’d kept working with the weights, like Iowa Bob,” I told Father, “you could carry it by yourself. You wouldn’t make it look so heavy.”
Lilly had noticed that the Austrians permitted bears on streetcars, but not barbells; she also noticed that the Austrians were liberal in regard to skis. She suggested we buy a ski bag and put the long barbell in it; then the streetcar conductor would think the barbell was just some very heavy pair of skis.
Frank suggested someone go get Schraubenschlüssel’s car.
“It never runs,” Father said.
“It must be ready to run by now,” Franny said. “That asshole’s been fixing it for years.”
Father hopped the streetcar and went home to ask for the car. And shouldn’t we have known by the radicals” quick refusal that a bomb was parked outside our new hotel? But we thought it was all merely an aspect of the rudeness of the radicals; we carried all that weight home. I finally had to leave the others, and the long barbell, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. They wouldn’t let a barbell in the museum, either—nor would they let in a bear. “Brueghel wouldn’t have minded,” Frank said. But they had to kill time on the street corner. Susie danced a little; Freud tapped his baseball bat; Lilly and Franny sang an American song—they passed the time by making a little money. Street clowns, Viennese specialties, “the presence of the King of Mice,” as Frank would say—Frank passed the hat. It was the hat from the bus driver’s uniform Father had bought Frank—the seedy-funeral-parlor cap that Frank wore when he played doorman at the Hotel New Hampshire. Frank wore it all the time in Vienna—our imposter King of Mice, Frank. We all thought often of the sad performer with his unwanted rodents who one day stopped passing the open windows, who made the leap, taking his poor mice with him. LIFE IS SERIOUS BUT ART IS FUN! He made his statement; the open windows he had kept passing for so long—they finally drew him.
I jogged home with the 150 pounds.
“Hi, Wrench,” I said to the radical under the car.
I ran back to the Kunsthistorisches Museum and trotted home with seventy-five more pounds. Father, Frank, Susie the bear, Franny, Lilly, and Freud brought home the remaining seventy-five. So then I had weights, then I could evoke the first Hotel New Hampshire—and Iowa Bob—and some of the foreignness of Vienna disappeared.
We had to go to school, of course. It was an American school near the zoo in Hietzing, near the palace at Schönbrunn. For a while Susie would accompany us on the streetcar each morning, and meet us when school was over. It was a great way to meet the other kids—to be delivered and brought home by a bear. But Father or Freud had to come with Susie because bears were not allowed on the streetcars alone, and the school was near enough to the zoo so that people in the suburbs were more nervous about seeing a bear than were the people in the city.
It would only occur to me, later, that we all did Frank a great disservice by not acknowledging his sexual discretion. For seven years in Vienna, we never knew who his boyfriends were; he told us that they were boys at the American School—and being the oldest of us, and in the most advanced German course, Frank was often at school the longest, and alone. His proximity to the excess of sex in the second Hotel New Hampshire must have inclined Frank to discretion in much the same manner that I was convinced of whispering by my intercom initiation with Ronda Ray. And Franny had her bear for the moment—and her rape to get over, Susie kept telling me.
“She’s over it,” I said.
“You’re not,” Susie said. “You’ve still got Chipper Dove on your mind. And so does she.”
“Then it’s Chipper Dove Franny’s not done with,” I said. “The rape’s over.”
“We’ll see,” said Susie. “I’m a smart bear.”
And the timid souls kept coming, not in overwhelming numbers; overwhelming numbers of timid souls would probably have been a contradiction—although we could have used the numbers. Even so, we had a better guest list than we had in the first Hotel New Hampshire.
The tour groups were easier than the individuals. There’s something about an individual timid soul that is much more timid than a group of them. The timid souls who traveled alone, or the timid couples with the occasional timid children—these seemed to be the most easily upset by the day-and-night activity between which they were anxious guests. But in our first three or four years in the second Hotel New Hampshire, only one guest complained—that was how truly timid these timid souls were.
The complainer was an American. She was a woman traveling with her husband and her daughter, who was about Lilly’s age. They were from New Hampshire, but not from the Dairy part of the state. Frank was working the reception desk when they checked in—late afternoon, after school. Right away, Frank noticed, the woman started braying about missing some of the “clean, plain old honest-to-goodness decency “ that she apparently associated with New Hampshire.