“We’ve been robbed all over Europe,” the New Hampshire woman’s husband told Frank.
Ernst was in the lobby, explaining to Franny and me some of the weirder positions of “Tantric union.” This was pretty hard to follow in German, but although Franny and I would never catch up to Frank’s German—and Lilly was, conversationally, almost as good as Frank within a year—Franny and I learned a lot at the American School. Of course, they didn’t teach coitus there. That was Ernst’s line, and although Ernst gave me the creeps, I couldn’t stand to see him talking to Franny alone, so whenever I saw him talking to her, I tried to listen in. Susie the bear liked to listen in, too—with a paw touching my sister somewhere, a nice big paw that Ernst could see. But the day the Americans from New Hampshire checked in, Susie the bear was in the W.C.
“And hair in the bathrooms,” the woman said to Frank. “You wouldn’t believe some of the filth we’ve been exposed to.”
“We’ve thrown the guidebooks away,” her husband said to Frank. “There’s no trusting them.”
“We’re trusting our instincts now,” the woman said, looking over the new lobby of the Hotel New Hampshire. “We’re looking for some American touches.”
“I can’t wait to get home,” the daughter said, in a mousy little voice.
“I’ve got a nice pair of rooms on the third floor,” Frank said; “adjoining rooms,” Frank added. But he was worrying if that wasn’t too close to the whores underneath—only a floor away. “Then again,” Frank said, “the view from the fourth is better.”
“The heck with the view,” the woman said. “We’ll take the adjoining rooms on three. And no hair,” she added, menacingly, just as Susie the bear shuffled into the lobby—saw the little girl guest, and gave a show-off toss of her head and a low, bearish huff and snort.
“Look, a bear,” the little girl said, holding her father’s leg. Frank hit the bell a sharp ping! “Luggage carrier!” Frank hollered.
I had to tear myself away from Ernst’s description of the Tantric positions.
“The vyanta group has two main positions,” he was saying, blandly. “The woman leans forward till she touches the ground with her hands, while the man takes her from behind, standing—that’s the dhenuka-vyanta-asana, or cow position,” Ernst said, with his liquid stare at Franny.
“Cow position?” Franny said.
“Earl!” Susie said, disapprovingly, putting her head in Franny’s lap—playing the bear for the new guests.
I started upstairs with the luggage. The little girl couldn’t take her eyes off the bear.
“I have a sister about your age,” I told her. Lilly was out taking Freud for a walk—Freud no doubt lecturing to her about all the sights he couldn’t see.
That was how Freud gave us tours. The baseball bat on one side, one of us children, or Susie, on the other. We steered him through the city, shouting out the names of the street corners when we arrived. Freud was getting deaf, too.
“Are we on Blutgasse?” Freud would cry out. “Are we on Blood Lane?” he would ask.
And Lilly or Frank or Franny or I would holler, “Ja! Blutgasse!”
“Take a right,” Freud would direct us. “When we get to Domgasse, children,” he’d say, “we must find Number Five. This is the entrance to the Figaro House, where Mozart wrote The Marriage of Figaro. What year, Frank?” Freud would cry.
“Seventeen eighty-five!” Frank would shout back.
“And more important than Mozart,” Freud would say, “is the first coffeehouse in Vienna. Are we still on Blutgasse, children?”
“Ja! Blood Lane,” we would say.
“Look for Number Six,” Freud would cry. “The first coffeehouse in Vienna! Even Schwanger doesn’t know this. She loves her Schlagobers, but she’s like all these political people,” Freud said. “She’s got no sense of history.”
It was true that we learned no history from Schwanger. We learned to love coffee, chased with little glasses of water; we learned to like the soft dirt of newspapers on our fingers. Franny and I would fight over the one copy of the International Herald Tribune. In our seven years in Vienna, there was always news of Junior Jones in there.
“Penn State thirty-five, Navy six!” Franny would read, and we’d all cheer.
And later, it would be the Cleveland Browns 28, the New York Giants 14. The Baltimore Colts 21, the poor Browns 17. Although Junior rarely imparted any more news than this to Franny—in his occasional letters—it was somehow special, hearing about him so indirectly, through the football scores, several days late, in the Herald Tribune.
“At Judengasse, turn right!” Freud would instruct. And we would follow Jews’ Lane to the church of St. Ruprecht.
“The eleventh century,” Frank would murmur. The older the better for Frank.
And down to the Danube Canal; at the foot of the slope, on Franz Josefs-Kai, was the monument Freud led us to rather often: the marble plaque memorializing those murdered by the Gestapo, whose headquarters had been on that spot.
“Right here!” Freud screamed, stamping and whacking with the baseball bat. “Describe the plaque to me!” he cried. “I’ve never seen it.”
Of course: because it was in one of the camps that he went blind. They had performed some failed experiment on his eyes in the camp.
“No, not summer camp,” Franny had to tell Lilly, who had always been afraid of being sent to summer camp and was unsurprised to hear that they tortured the campers.
“Not summer camp, Lilly,” Frank said. “Freud was in a death camp.”
“But Herr Tod never found me,” Freud said to Lilly. “Mr. Death never found me at home when he called.”
It was Freud who explained to us that the nudes in the fountain at the Neuer Markt, the Providence Fountain—or the Donner Fountain, after its creator—were actually copies of the original. The originals were in the Lower Belvedere. Designed to portray water as the source of life, the nudes had been condemned by Maria Theresa.
“She was a bitch,” Freud said. “She founded a Chastity Commission,” he told us.
“What did they do?” Franny asked. “The Chastity Commission?”
“What could they do?” Freud asked. “What can those people ever do? They couldn’t do anything to stop the sex, so they fucked around with a few fountains.”
Even the Vienna of Freud—the other Freud—was notorious for being unable to do anything to stop the sex, though this didn’t stop the Victorian counterparts of Maria Theresa’s Chastity Commission from trying. “In those days,” Freud pointed out, admiringly, “whores were allowed to make arrangements in the aisles of the Opera.”
“At intermissions,” Frank added, in case we didn’t know.
Frank’s favorite tour with Freud was the Imperial Vault—the Kaisergruft in the catacombs of the Kapuzinerkirche. The Hapsburgs have been buried there since 1633. Maria Theresa is there, the old prude. But not her heart. The corpses in the catacombs are heartless—their hearts are kept in another church; their hearts are to be found on another tour. “History separates everything, eventually,” Freud would intone in the heartless tombs.
Good-bye, Maria Theresa—and Franz Josef, and Elizabeth, and the unfortunate Maximilian of Mexico. And, of course, Frank’s prize lies with them: the Hapsburg heir, poor Rudolf the suicide—he’s also there. Frank always got especially gloomy in the catacombs.
Franny and I got gloomiest when Freud directed us along Wipplingerstrasse to Füttergasse.
“Turn!” he’d cry, the baseball bat trembling.
We were in the Judenplatz, the old Jewish quarter of the city. It had been a kind of ghetto as long ago as the thirteenth century; the first expulsion of the Jews, there, had been in 1421. We knew only slightly more about the recent expulsion.
What was hard about being there with Freud was that this tour was not so visibly historical. Freud would call out to apartments that were no longer apartments. He would identify whole buildings that were no longer there. And the people he used to know there—they weren’t there, either. It was a tour of things we couldn’t see, but Freud saw them still; he saw 1939, and before, when he’d last been in the Judenplatz with a working pair of eyes.
The day the New Hampshire couple and their child arrived, Freud had taken Lilly to the Judenplatz. I could tell because she was depressed when she came back. I had just taken the bags and the Americans to their rooms on the third floor, and I was depressed, too. I had been thinking all the way upstairs about Ernst describing the “cow position” to Franny. The bags weren’t especially heavy because I was imagining that they were Ernst, and I was carrying him up to the top of the Hotel New Hampshire, where I was going to drop him out a window on the fifth floor.
The woman from New Hampshire ran her hand briefly up the banister and said, “Dust.”
Schraubenschlüssel passed us on the landing of the second floor. He was smeared with grease from his fingertips to his bicepses; he had a coil of copper wire around his neck like a hangman’s noose and in his arms he lugged an obviously heavy box-shaped thing that resembled a giant battery—a battery too big for a Mercedes, I would recall, much later.