But Susie wasn’t being menacing. “You two have got a real problem,” she confided in Franny and me.
“No shit,” Franny said.
“Well, we’re being very careful,” I told Susie.
“For how long can anybody be that careful?” Susie asked. “The bombs haven’t all gone off,” Susie said. “You two have a bomb between you,” said Susie the bear. “You’ve got to be more than careful,” Susie warned Franny and me. “The bomb between you two,” Susie said, “can blow you both away.”
For once, it seemed, Franny had nothing to say; I held her hand; she squeezed me back.
“I love you,” I told her, when we were, alone—which we should never have allowed ourselves to be. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, “but I love you, I do.”
“I love you terribly much,” Franny said. And it was Lilly who saved us that time; despite the fact that we were all supposed to be packed and ready to leave, Lilly was writing. We heard the typewriter and could imagine our sister’s little hands blurring over the keyboard.
“Now that I’m going to get published,” Lilly had said, “I have to really get better. I’ve got to keep growing,” she said a little desperately. “My God, the next book has got to be bigger than the first. And the one after that,” she said, “it will have to be even bigger.” There was a certain despair about the way she said this, and Frank said, “Stick with me, kid. With a good agent, you’ve got the world by the balls.”
“But I still have to do it,” Lilly complained. “I still have to write. I mean, now I’m expected to grow.”
And the sound of Lilly trying so hard to grow distracted Franny and me from each other. We went out in the lobby, where it was somewhat more public—where we felt safe. Two men had just been killed in that lobby, but it was a safer place for Franny and me than in our own rooms.
The whores were gone. I do not care, anymore, what became of them. They didn’t care what became of us.
The hotel was empty; a dangerous number of rooms beckoned to Franny and me.
“One day,” I said to her, “we’ll have to. You know that. Or do you think it will change—if we wait it out?”
“It won’t change,” she said, “but maybe—one day—we’ll be able to handle it. One day it might be a little safer than it feels right now.”
I doubted that it would ever be safe enough, and I was on the verge of trying to convince her to do it now, to use the second Hotel New Hampshire as it was meant to be used—to get it over with, to see if we were doomed or just perversely attracted to each other—but Frank was our savior … this time.
He brought his bags out into the lobby and startled the hell out of us.
“Jesus, Frank!” Franny screamed.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. Frank had his usual queer lot of things: his odd books, his peculiar clothes, and his dressmaker’s dummy.
“Are you taking that dummy back to America, Frank?” Franny asked him.
“It’s not as heavy as what you two are carrying,” Frank said. “And it’s a lot safer.”
So Frank knew too, we realized. At that time, Franny and I thought Lilly didn’t know; and—regarding our own dilemma—we were grateful that Father was blind.
“Keep passing the open windows,” Frank said to Franny and me—the damn dressmaker’s dummy, slung like a light log over his shoulder, had a distressing resemblance about it. It was the falseness of it that Franny and I noticed: the mannequin’s chipped face, the obvious wig, and the stiff, unfleshly bust of the dummy—the fake bosom, the still chest, the rigid waist. In the bad light in the lobby of the second Hotel New Hampshire, Franny and I could be fooled into thinking we saw shapes of Sorrow when we saw nothing at all. But hadn’t Sorrow taught us to be on guard, to look everywhere? Sorrow can take any shape in the world.
“You keep passing the open windows, too, Frank,” I said—trying not to look too closely at his dressmaker’s dummy.
“We’ve all got to stick together,” Franny said—as Father, in his sleep, cried out, “Auf Wiedersehen, Freud!”
Love also floats. And, that being true, love probably resembles Sorrow in other ways.
We flew to New York City in the fall of 1964—no separate flights this time; we were sticking together, as Franny had advised. The stewardess was troubled by the baseball bat, but she let Father hold it between his knees—humane concessions are made to the blind, in spite of “regulations.”
Junior Jones was unable to meet our plane. Junior was playing out his last season with the Browns—in a hospital in Cleveland. “Man,” he said to me, over the phone, “just tell your father I’ll give him my eyes if he’ll give me his knees.”
“And what will you give me if I give you my knees,” I heard Franny ask Junior over the phone. I didn’t hear what he said to her, but she smiled and winked at me.
We could have flown to Boston; I’m sure Fritz would have met our plane, and let us stay for free at the first Hotel New Hampshire. But Father had told us he never wanted to see Dairy, New Hampshire, or that first Hotel New Hampshire again. Of course Father wouldn’t have “seen” it if we’d gone there and stayed there the rest of our lives, but we understood his meaning. None of us had the stomach for seeing Dairy again, and recalling when our family was whole—when each of us had both eyes open.
New York was neutral territory—and for a while, Frank knew, Lilly’s publisher would put us up and entertain us.
“Enjoy yourselves,” Frank said to us. “Just call room service.” Father would behave like a child with room service, ordering stuff he’d never eat, and ordering his usual undrinkable drinks. He’d never stayed in a hotel with room service before; he behaved as if he’d never been in New York before, either, because he complained that all the room service personnel couldn’t speak English any better than the Viennese—they couldn’t, of course, because they were foreigners.
They’re more foreign than the Viennese ever dreamed of being!” my father would cry. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” he’d yell into the phone. “Jesus God, Frank,” Father would say, “order us a proper Frühstück, would you? These people don’t understand me.”
“This is New York, Pop,” Franny said.
“They don’t speak German or English in New York, Dad,” Frank explained.
“What the hell do they speak?” Father asked. “I order croissant and coffee and I get tea and toast!”
“Nobody knows what they speak here,” said Lilly, looking out the window.
Lilly’s publisher put us up at the Stanhope on Eighty-first and Fifth Avenue; Lilly had asked to be near the Metropolitan Museum and I had asked to be near Central Park—I wanted to run. And so I ran around and around the Reservoir, four times around, twice a day—that last lap luxurious with pain, my head lolling, the tall buildings of New York appearing to topple over me.
Lilly looked out the windows of our suite on the fourteenth floor. She liked watching the people flood in and out of the museum. “I think I’d like to live here,” she said softly. “It’s like watching a castle change kings,” Lilly whispered. “And you can see the leaves change in the park, too,” Lilly noted. “And whenever you visit me,” Lilly said to me, “you can run around the Reservoir and reassure me that it’s still there. I don’t ever want to see it up close,” Lilly said weirdly, “but it’s comforting to have you report to me on the health of the water, the number of other runners in the park, the amount of horse shit on the bridle path. A writer has to know these things,” Lilly said.
“Well, Lilly,” Frank said, “I think you’ll be able to afford a permanent suite here, but you could get an apartment, instead, you know. You don’t have to live at the Stanhope, Lilly,” Frank said. “It might be more practical to get your own apartment.”
“No,” Lilly said. “If I can afford it, I want to live here. Surely this family can understand why I might like to live in a hotel,” Lilly said.
Franny shivered. She didn’t want to live in a hotel, she had told me. But Franny would stay with Lilly for a while—after the publisher stopped paying the tab and Lilly maintained her corner suite on the fourteenth floor, Franny would keep Lilly company for a while. “Just so you have a chaperon, Lilly,” Franny teased her. But I knew it was Franny who needed the chaperon.
“And you know who I need a chaperon from,” Franny told me.
Frank and Father would be my chaperons; Father and I would move in with Frank. He found a palatial apartment on Central Park South. I could still run there, I could run through the entirety of Central Park, investigate the Reservoir for Lilly, arrive dripping with sweat and panting at the Stanhope, to report on the health of the water, and so forth, and to show myself to Franny—to get a glimpse of her.
These would not be permanent residences for Franny, Father, or me, but Frank and Lilly would become the kind of New Yorkers who affix themselves to certain parts of Central Park and never leave. Lilly would live at the Stanhope for the rest of her life, writing away, trying to grow up to the stature of the fourteenth floor; though small, she was ambitious. And Frank, the agent, would wheel and deal from his apartment, with its six telephones, at 222 Central Park South. They were both terribly industrious—Lilly and Frank—and I once asked Franny what she thought the difference between them was.
“About twenty blocks and the Central Park Zoo,” Franny said. That was the distance between them exactly, but Franny implied it was the difference between Lilly and Frank, too: a whole zoo and more than twenty blocks.
“And what’s the difference between us, Franny?” I asked her, shortly after we’d arrived in New York.
“One difference between us is that I’ll get over you, somehow,” Franny told me. “That’s just how I am: I get over things. And I’ll get over you, too. But you won’t get over me,” Franny warned me. “I know you, my brother, my love,” she told me. “And you won’t get over me—at least, not without my help.”
She was right, of course; Franny was always right—and always one step ahead of me. When Franny would finally sleep with me, she would engineer it. She would know exactly why she was doing it, too—as a fulfillment of the promise she had made to mother us children now that Mother was gone; as the only way to take care of us; as the only way to save us. “You and me need saving, kid,” Franny said. “But especially you need it. You think we’re in love, and maybe I think so, too. It’s time to show you that I’m not so special. It’s time to prick the bubble before it bursts,” Franny told me.
She chose the moment in the same way she chose not to sleep with Junior Jones—“to save it,” as she would say. Franny always had her plans and her reasons.