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The Bear Called State O’Maine 15 страница



Could I blame my father for trying? Or Frank for being the agent of such depressing optimism? And there was no blaming Egg, of course; we would, none of us, ever blame Egg.

Only Lilly had slept through it all, perhaps already inhabiting a world not quite like ours. Doris Wales and Ronda Ray had not climbed four flights of stairs to see the body, but when we found them in the restaurant, they seemed almost sobered by the experience—even secondhand. Whatever hopes for even a mini-seduction that might have been on Junior Jones’s mind were dashed by the interruption to the music; Franny kissed Junior good night and went to her own room. And Bitty Tuck, although she loved my kisses, could not forgive the intrusion upon her privacy in the bathroom—both Sorrow’s and mine. I suppose she resented, most of all, the ungainly position I’d discovered her in—“Fainted while diaphragming herself!” as Franny would later characterize the scene.

I found myself alone with Junior Jones at the delivery entrance, drinking up the cold beer and watching out into Elliot Park for any other New Year’s Eve survivors. Sleazy Wales and the boys in the band had gone home; Doris and Ronda were draped upon the bar—a kind of camaraderie had suddenly risen, in a blurry fashion, between them. And Junior Jones said, “No offence to your sister, man, but I am very horny.”

“Ditto,” I said, “and no offence to yours.”

The laughter of the women in the restaurant reached us, and Junior said, “Want to try to hustle them ladies at the bar?” I didn’t dare tell Junior the repugnance of that idea, to me—having already been hustled by one of them—but I felt badly later at how quickly I was willing to betray Ronda Ray. I told Junior that she could be hustled very easily, and it would only cost him money.

Later, I drank another beer and listened to Junior carrying Ronda to the stairwell at the hall’s far end, away from me. And after another beer, or two, I heard Doris Wales, all alone, start to sing “Heartbreak Hotel,” without the music, and occasionally forgetting the words of her religion—and occasionally slurring the rest. Lastly came the unmistakable sound of her throwing up in the bar sink.

After a while she found me in the lobby, at the open door to the delivery entrance, and I offered the last cold beer. “Sure, why not?” she said. “It helps to cut the phlegm. That damn ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’” she added. “It always moves me too much.”

Doris Wales was wearing her knee-high cowboy boots and carrying her thin-strapped green high heels in her hand; in her other hand she dallied her coat, a sad-flecked tweed with a skimpy fur collar. “It’s just muskrat,” she said, rubbing it against my cheek. She gripped the throat of her beer bottle in the hand with her high-heeled shoes and drank nearly all of it down. The hickey on her tilted throat appeared to have been made by a red-hot fifty-cent piece. She dropped the beer bottle at her feet and kicked it out the door, where it rolled toward the trash barrels at the delivery entrance. She stepped closer to me and thrust her thigh between my legs; she kissed me on the mouth, a kiss like nothing Sabrina Jones had shown me; it was a kiss like a wedge of soft fruit being mashed past my teeth and tongue until I gagged; her kiss tasted, lingeringly, of vomit and beer.

“I’m picking Sleazy up at this party,” she said. “Wanna come?”

It reminded me of when Sleazy offered to force-feed me the ball of bread or poke out my eyes with the nail in the movies. “No thanks,” I said.

 

“Chicken shit,” she said, and belched sharply. “Kids today have no

spunk

.” Then she slammed me to her chest and hugged me to her body, hard as a man’s but with her breasts sliding between us like two fresh-caught fish in loose bags; her tongue lolled along my jawline before skidding into my ear. “You squirrel dink,” she whispered, then pushed me from her.

 

She fell in the slush near the delivery entrance, but when I helped her to her feet, she shoved me into the trash barrels and walked into the darkness of Elliot Park, unassisted. I waited for her to pass out of the darkness and into the pale lamplight from the single streetlight, and then pass into the darkness again; when she came briefly under the light, I called to her.



“Good night, Mrs. Wales, and thank you for the music!” She gave me the finger, slipped, almost fell again, and lurched out of the light—cursing at something, or someone, she encountered there. “What the fuck?” she said. “Cram it, will you?”

I turned away from the light and threw up in the emptiest trash barrel. When I looked back at the streetlight again, a figure was just veering under it, and I thought it was Doris Wales, returning to abuse me. But it was someone from another New Year’s Eve party, for whom home was in another direction. It was a man, or a reasonably grown-up teen-ager, and although he was weaving under the spell of alcohol, he maintained slightly better footing in the slush than Doris Wales.

“Cram it yourself, lady!” he cried into the darkness.

“Chicken shit!” called Doris, from the dark and far away.

“Whore!” the man yelled, then lost his balance and sat down in the slush. “Shit,” he said, to no one in particular; he couldn’t see me.

 

It was then that I noticed how he was dressed. Black slacks and shoes, black cummerbund and bow tie—and a white dinner jacket. Of course I knew he was not

the

man in the white dinner jacket; he was lacking the necessary dignity, and whatever voyage he was on, or interrupting, it was not an exotic voyage. Also, it was New Year’s Eve, and not the season—in New England—for white dinner jackets. The man was inappropriately dressed, and I knew this was no eccentric habit of distinction. In Dairy, New Hampshire, it could only mean that the moron had gone to the rental tuxedo shop after all the

black

jackets had been taken. Or else he didn’t know the difference between summer and winter formal dress in our town; he was either a young clod coming from a high school dance or an older clod coming from an older dance (which had been no less sad and wasteful than anything a high school could engender). He was not

our

man in the white dinner jacket, but he reminded me of him.

 

Then I noticed that the man had stretched out in the slush under the streetlight and had gone to sleep there. The temperature was right around freezing.

I felt, at last, that New Year’s Eve had come to something: there seemed to be a purpose for my having taken part in it at all—a purpose beyond the simultaneously vague and concrete sensations of lust. I lifted the man in the white dinner jacket and carried him to the lobby of the Hotel New Hampshire; he was easier to carry than Bitty Tuck’s luggage; he didn’t weigh much, although he was a man, not a teen-ager—in fact, he looked older than my father, to me. And when I searched him for some identification, I found I had been right about the rental clothes. PROPERTY OF CHESTER’S MEN’S STORE, said the label in the white dinner jacket. The man, although he looked reasonably distinguished—at least for Dairy, New Hampshire—carried no wallet, but he had a silver comb.

Perhaps Doris Wales had mugged him in the dark, and that was what they’d been yelling about. But no, I thought: Doris would have taken the silver comb, too.

It seemed a good trick, to me, to arrange the man in the white dinner jacket on the couch in the lobby of the Hotel New Hampshire—so that early in the morning I might be able to surprise Father and Mother. I could say, “There’s someone who came for the last dance—last night—but he was too late. He’s waiting to see you, in the lobby.”

 

I thought that was a terrific idea, but I felt—since I had been drinking—that I should really wake up Franny and show her the man in the white dinner jacket, who was peacefully passed out on the couch; Franny would inform me if she thought this was a

bad

idea. She would like it, too, I was sure.

 

I straightened the black bow tie of the man in the white dinner jacket and folded his hands upon his chest; I buttoned the waist button of his jacket, and straightened his cummerbund, so that he wouldn’t look sloppy. The only thing missing was the tan, and the black cigarette box—and the white sloop outside the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea.

That was not the sound of the sea outside the Hotel New Hampshire, I knew; it was the sound of the slush in Elliot Park, freezing and thawing and refreezing; and those were not the gulls calling, but dogs—alley dogs, ripping into the trash, which was everywhere. I hadn’t noticed, until I arranged the man in the white dinner jacket on the couch, how shabby our lobby was—how the presence of an all-girls” school had never left the building: the ostracism, the anxiety of being considered (sexually) second-best, the too-early marriages, and other disappointments, that waited ahead. The almost elegant man in the white dinner jacket looked—in the Hotel New Hampshire—like someone from another planet, and I suddenly didn’t want my father to see him.

I ran into the restaurant for some cold water; Doris Wales had broken a glass at the bar, and Ronda Ray’s oddly sexless working shoes were scuffed under a table, where she must have kicked them—when she started dancing, and making her move for Junior Jones.

If I woke up Franny, I thought, Franny might catch on that Junior was with Ronda, and wouldn’t that hurt her?

I listened at the stairwell and felt a flash of interest in Bitty Tuck returning to me—the thought of seeing her, asleep—but when I listened to her on the intercom, she was snoring (as deep and wallowing a sound as a pig in mud). The book of reservations hadn’t a single name marked down; there was nothing until the summer, when the circus called Fritz’s Act would arrive and (no doubt) appall us all. The petty-cash box, at the reception desk, wasn’t even locked—and Frank, in his boredom during phone duty, had used the sharp end of the bottle opener to gouge his name into the armrest of the chair.

In the grey, after-the-party stench of New Year’s Day, I felt that I should spare my father the vision of the man in the white dinner jacket. I thought that, if I could wake the man, I could employ Junior Jones to scare the man away, but I would have been embarrassed to disturb Junior with Ronda Ray.

“Hey, get up!” I hissed at the man in the white dinner jacket.

 

“Snorf!” he shouted, in his sleep. “

Ack

! A whore!”

 

“Be quiet!” I whispered fiercely to him.

 

“Gick?” he said. I seized him around the chest and squeezed him. “

Fuh

!” he moaned. “God help me.”

 

“You’re all right,” I said. “But you have to leave.”

He opened his eyes and sat up on the couch.

“A young thug,” he said. “Where have you taken me?”

“You passed out, outside,” I said. “I brought you in so you wouldn’t freeze. Now you have to leave.”

“I have to use the bathroom,” he said, with dignity.

“Go outside,” I said. “Can you walk?”

“Of course I can walk,” he said. He went toward the delivery entrance, but stopped on the threshold. “It’s dark out there,” he said. “You’re setting me up, aren’t you? How many of them are there—out there?”

I led him to the front lobby door and turned on the outside light. I’m afraid that this was the light that woke up Father. “Good-bye,” I told the man in the white dinner jacket, “and Happy New Year.”

“This is Elliot Park!” he cried, indignantly.

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, this is that funny hotel, then,” he concluded. “If it’s a hotel, I want a room for the night.”

I thought it best not to tell him that he didn’t have any money on him, so I said instead, “We’re full. No vacancies.”

 

The man in the white dinner jacket stared at the desolate lobby, gawked at the empty mail slots, and at the abandoned trunk of Junior Jones’s winter clothes lying at the foot of the dingy stairs. “You’re

full

?” he said, as if some truth about life in general had occured to him, for the first time. “Holy cow,” he said. “I’d heard this place was going under.” It wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

 

I steered him toward the main door again, but he bent down and picked up the mail and handed it to me; in our haste to prepare for the party, no one had been to the mail slot at the front lobby door all day; no one had picked up the mail.

The man walked only a little way out of the door, then came back.

“I want to call a cab,” he informed me. “There’s too much violence out there,” he said, gesturing, again, to life in general; he couldn’t have meant Elliot Park—at least not now, not since Doris Wales had gone.

“You don’t have enough money for a cab,” I informed him.

“Oh,” the man in the white dinner jacket said. He sat down on the steps in the cold, foggy air. “I need a minute,” he said.

“What for?” I asked him.

“Have to remember where I’m going,” he said.

“Home?” I suggested, but the man waved his hand above his head.

He was thinking. I looked at the mail. The usual bills, the usual absence of letters from unknowns requesting rooms. And one letter that stood out from the rest. It had pretty foreign stamps; österreich said the stamps—and a few other exotic things. The letter was from Vienna, and it was addressed to my father in a most curious way:

 

Win Berry

Graduate of Harvard

Class of 194?

U.S.A.

 

The letter had taken a long time to reach my father, but the postal authorities had found one among them who knew where Harvard was. My father would say later that getting that letter was the most concrete thing going to Harvard ever did for him; if he’d gone to some less-famous school, the letter would never have been delivered. That’s a good reason,” Franny would say, later, “to wish he’d gone to a less-famous school.”

But, of course, the alumni network at Harvard is efficient and vast. My father’s name and “Class of 194?” was all they needed to discover the right class, ’46, and the correct address.

“What’s going on?” I heard my father calling; he had come out of our family’s second-floor rooms and was on the landing, calling down the stairwell to me.

“Nothing!” I said, kicking the drunk on the steps in front of me, because he was falling asleep again.

“Why’s the front light on?” Father called.

“Get going!” I said to the man in the white dinner jacket.

“I’m happy to meet you!” the man said, cordially. “I’ll just be trotting along now!”

“Good, good,” I whispered.

 

But the man walked only to the bottom step before he seemed overcome with

thought

again.

 

“Who are you talking to?” Father called.

“No one! Just a drunk!” I said.

“Jesus God,” said Father, “A drunk isn’t no one!”

“I can handle it!” I called.

“Wait till I get dressed,” Father said. “Jesus God.”

“Get going!” I yelled at the man in the white dinner jacket.

“Good-bye! Good-bye!” the man called, happily waving to me from the bottom step of the Hotel New Hampshire. “I had a wonderful time!”

The letter, of course, was from Freud. I knew that, and I wanted to see what it said before I let my father see it. I wanted to talk with Franny about it, for hours—and even with Mother—before I let Father see it. But there wasn’t time. The letter was brief and to the point.

 

IF YOU GOT THIS, THEN YOU WENT TO HARVARD LIKE YOU PROMISED ME [Freud wrote]. YOU GOOD BOY, YOU!

 

“Good night! God bless you!” cried the man in the white dinner jacket. But he would walk no farther than the perimeter of light; where the darkness of Elliot Park began, he stopped and waved.

I flicked off the light so that if Father came, Father couldn’t spot the apparition in formal attire.

“I can’t see!” the drunk wailed, and I turned the light on again.

“Get out of here or I’ll beat the shit out of you!” I screamed at him.

“That’s no way to handle it” I heard Father yelling.

“Good night, bless you all!” cried the man; he was still in the circle of light when I cut the light off him, again, and he made no protest. I kept the light off. I finished Freud’s letter.

 

 

I FINALLY GOT A SMART BEAR [Freud wrote]. IT MADE ALL THE DIFFERENCE. I HAD A GOOD HOTEL GOING, BUT I GOT OLD. IT COULD STILL BE A

GREAT

HOTEL [Freud added], IF YOU AND MARY COME HELP ME RUN IT. I GOT A SMART BEAR, BUT I NEED A SMART HARVARD BOY LIKE YOU, TOO!

 

 

Father stormed into the wretched lobby of the Hotel New Hampshire; in his slippers he stumbled over a beer bottle, which he kicked, and his bathrobe flapped in the wind from the open door.

“He’s gone,” I said to Father. “Just some drunk.” But Father snapped on the outside light—and there, waving, on the rim of the light, was the man in the white dinner jacket. “Good-bye!” he called, hopefully. “Goodbye! Good luck! Good-bye!” The effect was stunning: the man in the white dinner jacket stepped out of the light and was gone—as gone as if he were gone to sea—and my father gaped into the darkness after him.

 

“Hello!” Father screamed. “Hello?

Come back

! Hello?”

 

“Good-bye! Good luck! Good-bye!” called the voice of the man in the white dinner jacket, and my father stood staring into the darkness until the wind chilled him and he shivered in his bathrobe and slippers; he let me pull him inside.

Like any storyteller, I had the power to end the story, and I could have. But I didn’t destroy Freud’s letter; I gave it to Father, while the vision of the man in the white dinner jacket was still upon him. I handed over Freud’s letter—like any storyteller, knowing (more or less) where we would all be going.

 

Sorrow Strikes Again

 

Sabrina Jones, who taught me how to kiss—whose deep and mobile mouth will have a hold on me, always—found the man who could fathom her teeth-in-or-out mystery; she married a lawyer from the same firm in which she was a secretary and had three healthy children (“Bang, Bang, Bang,” as Franny would say).

Bitty Tuck, who fainted while diaphragming herself—whose wondrous breasts and modern ways would, one day, seem not nearly as unique as they seemed to me in 1956—survived her encounter with Sorrow; in fact, I heard (not long ago) that she is still unmarried, and still a party girl.

 

And a man named Frederick Worter, who was only a hair over four feet tall, and forty-one years old, and who was better known to our family as “Fritz”—whose circus, called Fritz’s Act, was an advance booking for a summer that we looked forward to with curiosity and dread—

bought

the first Hotel New Hampshire from my father in the winter of 1957.

 

“For a son, I’ll bet,” Franny said. But we children never knew how much Father sold the Hotel New Hampshire for; since Fritz’s Act was the only advance booking for the summer of 1957, my father had written to Fritz first—warning the diminutive circus king of our family’s move to Vienna.

 

“Vienna?” Mother kept muttering, and shaking her head at my father. “What do you know about

Vienna

?”

 

“What did I know about motorcycles?” Father asked. “Or bears? Or hotels?”

 

“And what have you

learned

?” Mother asked him, but my father had no doubt. Freud had said that a smart bear made all the difference.

 

“I know that Vienna isn’t Dairy, New Hampshire,” Father said to Mother; and he apologized to Fritz of Fritz’s Act—saying that he was putting the Hotel New Hampshire up for sale, and that the circus might need to seek other lodgings. I don’t know if the circus called Fritz’s Act made my father a good offer, but it was the first offer, and Father took it.

“Vienna?” said Junior Jones. “Holy cow.”

Franny might have protested the move, for fear that she would miss Junior, but Franny had discovered Junior’s infidelity (with Ronda Ray on New Year’s Eve), and she was being cool to him.

“Tell her I was just horny, man,” Junior told me.

“He was just horny, Franny,” I said.

 

“Clearly,” Franny said. “And you surely know all about what

that’s

like.”

 

 

“Vienna,” said Ronda Ray, sighing under me—probably from boredom. “

I’d

like to go to Vienna,” she said. “But I suppose I have to stay here—where I might be out of a job. Or else work for that bald midget.”

 

Frederick “Fritz” Worter was the bald midget, a runt figure who visited us one snowy weekend; he was especially impressed with the size of the fourth-floor bathroom facilities—and with Ronda Ray. Lilly, of course, was most impressed with Fritz. He was only a little bigger than Lilly, although we tried to assure Lilly (and, mainly, ourselves) that she would continue to grow—a little—and that her features (we hoped) would not ever appear so out of proportion. Lilly was pretty: tiny but nice. But Fritz had a head several sizes too large for his body; his forearms sagged like slack calf muscles obscenely grafted to the wrong limbs; his fingers were sawed-off salamis; his ankles were swollen over his little doll’s feet—like socks with wrecked elastic.

“What kind of circus do you have?” Lilly asked him, boldly.

“Weird acts, weird animals,” Franny whispered in my ear, and I shivered.

 

Little

acts,

little

animals,” Frank mumbled.

 

“We’re just a small circus,” Fritz told Lilly, meaningfully.

“Meaning,” said Max Urick—after Fritz was gone—“that they’ll all fit just fine on the fucking fourth floor.”

“If they’re all like him,” said Mrs. Urick, “they won’t eat very much.”

 

“If they’re all like

him

,” said Ronda Ray, and rolled her eyes—but she didn’t continue; she decided to let it pass.

 

“I think he’s cute,” said Lilly.

But Fritz of Fritz’s Act gave Egg nightmares—great shrieks that stiffened my back and tore muscles in my neck; Egg’s arm lashed out and bashed the bedside lamp, his legs thrashed under the sheets, as if the bedclothes were drowning him.

“Egg!” I cried. “It’s just a dream! You’re having a dream!”

 

“A

what

?” he screamed.

 

“A dream!” I yelled.

“Midgets!” Egg shouted. “They’re under the bed! They’re crawling all around! They’re all over, everywhere!” he howled.

“Jesus God,” Father said. “If they’re just midgets, why does he get so upset?”

“Hush,” Mother said, ever fearful of hurting Lilly’s little feelings.

 

And I lay under the barbell in the morning, sneaking a look at Franny getting out of bed—or getting dressed—and thinking of Iowa Bob. What would he have said about going to Vienna? About Freud’s hotel that somehow

needed

a smart Harvard boy? About the differences a smart bear might make—to

anyone’s

prospects for success? I lifted and thought. “It doesn’t matter,” Iowa Bob would have said. “Whether we go to Vienna or stay here, it won’t matter.” Under all that weight, that’s what I thought Coach Bob would have said. “Here or there,” Bob would have said, “we’re screwed down for life.” It would be

Father’s

hotel—whether in Dairy or in Vienna. Would nothing, ever, make us more or less exotic than we were? I wondered, with the weight wonderfully taut and rising, and Franny in the corner of my eye.

 

“I wish you’d take those weights to another room,” Franny said. “So I can get dressed by myself, sometimes—for Christ’s sake.”

“What do you think about going to Vienna, Franny?” I asked her.

“I think it will be more sophisticated than staying here,” Franny said. Completely dressed now, and always so sure of herself, she looked down at me where I struggled to let my bench press down slowly and levelly. “I might even get a room without barbells in it,” she added. “Even one without a weight lifter in it,” Franny said, blowing lightly into the armpit of my left (and weaker) arm—and getting out of the way when the weights slid first to the left, then to the right, off the bar.

“Jesus God!” Father shouted upstairs to me, and I thought that if Iowa Bob had still been with us, he would have said that Franny was wrong. Whether Vienna was more sophisticated, or less—whether Franny had a room with barbells or a room with lace—we were inhabitants of one Hotel New Hampshire after another.

 

Freud’s hotel—or our imperfect picture of Freud’s hotel, via air mail—was called the Gasthaus Freud; it was unclear, from Freud’s correspondence, whether or not the other Freud had ever stayed there. We only knew it was “centrally located,” according to Freud—“in the First District!”—but in the all-grey black-and-white photograph that Freud sent, we could barely make out the iron double door, sandwiched between the display cases of a land of candy store. KONDITOREI, said one sign; ZUCKERWAREN, said another; SCHOKOLADEN, promised a third; and over it all—bigger than the faded letters saying, GASTHAUS FREUD—was the word BONBONS.

“What?” said Egg.

 

Bonbons

,” said Franny. “Oh boy.”

 

“Which is the door to the candy store, and which is the door to the hotel?” Frank asked; Frank would always think like a doorman.

“I think you have to live there to know,” Franny said.

Lilly got a magnifying glass and deciphered the name of the street, in funny script, under the street number on the hotel’s double door.

“Krugerstrasse,” she decided, which at least matched the name of the street in Freud’s address. Father bought a map of Vienna from a travel agency and we located Krugerstrasse—in the First District, as Freud had promised; it appeared very central.

“It’s only a block or two from the opera!” Frank cried, enthusiastically.

“Oh boy,” Franny said.

The map had little green areas for parks, thin red and blue lines where the streetcars ran, and ornate buildings—grossly out of proportion to the street—to indicate the places of interest.

“It looks like a kind of Monopoly board,” Lilly said.

We noted cathedrals, museums, the town hall, the university, the Parliament.

“I wonder where the gangs hang out,” said Junior Jones, looking over the streets with us.

 

The

gangs

?” said Egg. “The

who

?”

 

“The tough guys,” said Junior Jones. “The guys with guns and blades, man.”

“The gangs,” Lilly repeated, and we stared at the map as if the streets would indicate their darkest alleys to us.

 

“This is

Europe

,” Frank said, with disgust. “Maybe there

aren’t

gangs.”

 

“It’s a city, isn’t it?” Junior Jones said.

But on the map it looked like a toy city, to me—with pretty places of interest, and all the green spots where nature had been arranged for pleasure.

“Probably in the parks,” said Franny, biting her lower lip. “The gangs hang out in the parks.”

“Shit,” I said.

“There won’t be any gangs!” Frank cried. “There will be music! And pastry! And the people do a lot of bowing, and they dress differently!” We stared at him, but we knew he’d been reading up on Vienna; he’d gotten a head start on the books Father kept bringing home.

 

“Pastry and music and people

bowing

all the time, Frank?” Franny said. “Is that what it’s like?” Lilly was using her magnifying glass on the map now—as if people would spring to life, in miniature, on the paper; and they’d either be bowing, and dressed differently, or they’d be cruising in gangs.

 

 

“Well,” Franny said. “At least we can be pretty sure there won’t be any

black

gangs.” Franny was still angry with Junior Jones for sleeping with Ronda Ray.

 

“Shit,” Junior said. “You better hope there are black gangs. Black gangs are the best gangs, man. Those white gangs have inferiority complexes,” Junior said. “And there’s nothing worse than a gang with an inferiority complex.”

 

“A

what

?” said Egg. No doubt he thought that an inferiority complex was a weapon; sometimes, I guess, it

is

.

 

“Well, I think it’s going to be nice,” said Frank, grimly.

 

“Yes, it

will

be,” Lilly said, with a humourlessness akin to Frank’s.

 

 

“I can’t see it,” Egg said, seriously. “I can’t see it, so I don’t know

what

it’s going to be like.”

 

“It’ll be okay,” Franny said. “I don’t think it’s going to be great, but it’ll be all right.”

 

It was odd, but Franny seemed the most influenced by Iowa Bob’s philosophy—which, to a degree, had become Father’s philosophy. This was odd because Franny was frequently the most sarcastic to Father—and the most sarcastic about Father’s plans. Yet when she was raped, Father had said to her—


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