“Why, Franny?” I said, and I started across her room toward her.
“No, stop!” she cried, moving so that her desk was partially between us; there was a fragile standing lamp in the way.
Years later, Lilly would send us both a poem. When I read the poem, I called up Franny to see if Lilly had sent her a copy; of course she had. The poem was by a very good poet named Donald Justice, and I would one day hear Mr. Justice read his poems in New York City. I liked all of them, but I sat holding my breath while he was reading, half hoping he would read the poem Lilly sent to Franny and me, and half fearing he would. He didn’t read it, and I didn’t know what to do after the reading. People were speaking to him, but they looked like his friends—or maybe they were just other poets. Lilly told me that poets have a way of looking like they’re all one another’s friends. But I didn’t know what to do; if Franny had been with me, we would have just waltzed right up to Donald Justice and he would have been completely bowled over by Franny, I think—everyone always is. Mr. Justice looked like a real gentleman, and I don’t want to suggest that he would have been falling all over Franny. I thought that, like his poems, he would be both candid and formal, austere, even grave—but open, even generous. He looked like a man you’d ask to say an elegy for someone you’d loved; I think he could have done a heartbreaker for Iowa Bob, and—looking at him after his reading in New York, with some very smart-looking admirers around him—I wished he could have written and spoken some sort of elegy for Mother and for Egg. In a way, he did write an elegy for Egg; he wrote a poem called “On the Death of Friends in Childhood,” which I have taken rather personally as an elegy for Egg. Frank and I both love it, but Franny says it makes her too sad.
ON THE DEATH OF FRIENDS IN CHILDHOOD
We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven,
Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;
If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,
Forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands
In games whose very names we have forgotten.
Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.
But when I saw Mr. Justice in New York, I was thinking chiefly about Franny and the poem “Love’s Stratagems”—that was the name of the poem Lilly sent Franny and me. I didn’t even know what to say to Mr. Justice. I was too embarrassed to even shake his hand. I suppose I would have told him that I wished I’d read the poem “Love’s Stratagems” when I was in Vienna with Franny, at the dead end of the summer of 1964.
“But would it have mattered, anyway?” Franny would ask me, later. “Would we have believed it—then?”
I don’t even know if Donald Justice had written “Love’s Stratagems” by 1964. But he must have; it seems written for Franny and me.
“It doesn’t matter,” as Frank would say.
Anyway, years later, Franny and I would get “Love’s Stratagems” in the mail from dear little Lilly, and one night we would read it aloud to each other over the telephone. I tended to whisper when I read something that was good aloud, but Franny spoke up loud and clear.
LOVE’S STRATAGEMS
But these maneuverings to avoid
The touching of hands,
These shifts to keep the eyes employed
On objects more or less neutral
(As honor, for the time being, commands)
Will hardly prevent their downfall.
Stronger medicines are needed.
Already they find
None of their stratagems have succeeded,
Nor would have, no,
Not had their eyes been stricken blind,
Hands cut off at the elbow.
Stronger medicines were needed, indeed. Had our hands been cut off at the elbow, Franny and I would have touched each other with the stumps—with whatever we had left, stricken blind or not.
But that afternoon in her room we were saved by Susie the bear.
“Something’s up,” Susie said, shuffling in. Franny and I waited; we thought she meant us—we thought she knew.
Lilly knew, of course. Somehow she must have.
“Writers know everything,” Lilly said once. “Or they should. They ought to. Or they ought to shut up.”
“Lilly must have known from the beginning,” Franny said to me, long distance, the night we discovered “Love’s Stratagems.” It was not a good connection; there was crackling on the line—as if Lilly were listening in. Or Frank were listening in—Frank was, as I have said, born to the role of listening in on love.
“Something’s up, you two,” Susie the bear repeated, menacingly. “They can’t find Fehlgeburt.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked.
“The porno king and his whole fucking gang,” Susie said. “They’re asking us if we’ve seen Fehlgeburt. And last night they were asking the whores.”
“Nobody has seen her?” I said, and there was the growingly familiar cold draft up the pants legs again, there was the whiff of dead air from the tombs holding the heartless Hapsburgs.
How many days had we waited for Father and Freud to bicker over finding a buyer for the Hotel New Hampshire before they blew the whistle on the would-be bombers? And how many nights had we wasted, arguing about whether we should tell the American Consulate, or the Embassy, and have them tell the police—or whether we should just tell the Austrian police straightaway? When you’re in love with your sister, you lose a lot of perspective on the real world. The goddamn Welt, as Frank would say.
Frank asked me, “What floor does Fehlgeburt live on? I mean, you’ve seen her place. How high up is she?”
Lilly, the writer, tuned right in on the question, but it didn’t make sense to me—yet. “It’s the first floor,” I said to Frank, “it’s just one flight up.”
“Not high enough,” Lilly said, and then I got it. Not high enough to jump out the window, is what she meant. If Fehlgeburt had at last decided not to keep passing the open windows, she would have to have found another way.
“That’s it,” Frank said, taking my arm. “If she’s pulled a King of Mice, she’s probably still there.”
It was more than a little shortness of breath I felt, crossing the Plaza of Heroes and heading up the Ring toward the Rathaus; that’s a long way for a wind sprint, but I was in shape. I felt a little out of breath, there can be no doubt of that, but I felt a lot guilty—though it couldn’t have been simply me ; I couldn’t even have been Fehlgeburt’s main reason to stop passing the open windows. And there was no evidence, they said later, that she had done much of anything after I’d gone. Maybe she’d read a little more Moby-Dick, because the police were very thorough and even noted where she’d marked her place. And I know, of course, that the place she’d stopped reading was un marked when I left. Curiously, she’d marked it just where she had stopped when she’d been reading to me—as if she had reread that entire evening before adopting the open-window policy. Fehlgeburt’s form of open-window policy had been a neat little gun I never knew about. The suicide note was simple and addressed to no one, but I knew it was meant for me.
The night you
saw Schwanger
you didn’t see
me. I have a
gun, too! “So