incredibly
! I thought—that when
he
had a bad day, he tried to see if he could construe it as the luckiest day of his life. “Maybe this is the luckiest day of your life,” he had said to her; I was amazed that she seemed to find this reverse thinking useful. She was a kind of parrot of other tidbits of Father’s philosophy. “It was just a little event among so many,” I heard her say—to Frank, about scaring Iowa Bob to death. And once, about Chipper Dove, I heard Father say, “He probably has a most unhappy life.” Franny actually agreed with him!
I felt much more nervous about going to Vienna than Franny seemed to feel, and I was ever conscious of what feelings Franny and I didn’t absolutely share—because it mattered to me that I stay close to her.
We all knew that Mother thought the idea was crazy, but we could not ever make her disloyal to Father—although we tried.
“We won’t understand the language,” Lilly said to Mother.
“The
what
?” Egg cried.
“The language!” Lilly said. “They speak German in Vienna.”
“You’ll all go to an English-speaking school,” Mother said.
“There will be weird kids in a school like that,” I said. “Everyone will be a foreigner.”
“
We’ll
be the foreigners,” Franny said.
“In an English-speaking school,” I said, “the whole place will be full of misfits.”
“And people from the government,” said Frank. “Diplomats and ambassadors will send their kids there. The kids will be all fucked up.”
“Who could be more fucked up than the kids at the Dairy School, Frank?” Franny asked.
“Whoa!” said Junior Jones. “There’s fucked up and then there’s
foreign
and fucked up.”
Franny shrugged; so did Mother.
“We’ll still be a
family,
” Mother said. “The main part of your lives will be your family—just like now.”
And that seemed to please everyone. We busied ourselves with the books Father brought from the library, and the travel agency brochures. We reread the short but elated messages from Freud:
GOOD YOU COMING! BRING ALL KIDS AND PETS! LOTS OF ROOM. CENTRALLY LOCATED. GOOD SHOPPING FOR GIRLS (HOW MANY GIRLS?) AND PARKS FOR THE BOYS AND PETS TO PLAY IN. BRING MONEY. MUST RENOVATE—WITH YOUR ASSISTANCE. YOU’LL LIKE THE BEAR. A SMART BEAR MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE. NOW WE CAN WORK ON THE
AMERICAN
AUDIENCE. WHEN WE UPGRADE THE CLIENTELE, THEN WE’LL HAVE A HOTEL TO BE PROUD OF. I HOPE YOUR ENGLISH STILL GOOD IS. HA HA! BEST TO LEARN A LITTLE GERMAN, YOU KNOW? REMEMBER MIRACLES DON’T GET BUILT IN A NIGHT, BUT IN A COUPLE NIGHTS EVEN BEARS CAN BE QUEENS. HA HA! I GOT OLD—THAT WAS THE PROBLEM. NOW WE’LL BE OKAY. NOW WE SHOW THE BASTARDS SONSOFBITCHES AND COCKSUCKER NAZIS WHAT A GOOD HOTEL IS! HOPE THE KIDS DON’T HAVE COLDS, AND DON’T FORGET TO GIVE PETS NECESSARY SHOTS.
Since Sorrow was our only pet—and he needed help, but not a shot—we wondered if Freud thought we still had Earl.
“Of course not,” Father said. “He’s just speaking generally, he’s just trying to be helpful.”
“Make sure Sorrow gets his shots, Frank,” Franny said, but Frank was getting better about Sorrow; he could occasionally be teased about the new restoration, and he seemed to be committed to the task of refashioning Sorrow—in a cheerful pose—for Egg. We were not allowed to see the gross dog’s transformation, of course, but Frank himself seemed ever cheerful—upon returning from the bio lab—so that we could only hope that, this time, Sorrow would be “nice.”
Father read a book about Austrian anti-Semitism and wondered if Freud had made the right decision in naming the hotel the Gasthaus Freud; Father wondered, from what he read, if the Viennese even Jilted the other Freud. He also couldn’t help wondering who the “bastards sonsofbitches and cocksucker Nazis” were.
“I can’t help wondering how
old
Freud is,” Mother said. They determined that if he’d been in his middle or late forties in 1939, he would be only in his middle sixties now. But Mother said that he
sounded
older. In his messages to us, she meant.
HI! QUICK IDEA: YOU THINK IT BEST TO RESTRICT CERTAIN ACTIVITIES TO CERTAIN FLOORS? MAYBE HAVE CERTAIN KIND OF CLIENTELE ON FOURTH FLOOR, OTHER KIND IN BASEMENT? DELICATE MATTER TO DISCRIMINATE, YOU THINK? CURRENT DAYTIME AND NIGHTTIME CLIENTELE OF DIFFERENT—I WON’T SAY “WARRING”—INTERESTS. HA HA! ALL THAT WILL CHANGE WITH REMODELING. AND ONCE THEY STOP THE FUCKING DIGGING UP THE STREET. JUST A FEW MORE YEARS OF WAR RESTORATION, THEY SAY. WAIT TILL YOU MEET THE BEAR: NOT JUST SMART, BUT
YOUNG
! WHAT A TEAM WE’LL BE TOGETHER! WHAT YOU MEAN, “IS FREUD A REALLY WELL-LIKED NAME IN VIENNA?” DID YOU GO TO HARVARD OR NOT??!! HA HA.
“He doesn’t sound necessarily
older
,” said Franny, “but he sounds crazy.”
“He just doesn’t use English very well,” Father said. “It’s not his language.”
So we studied German. Franny and Frank and I took courses at the Dairy School, and brought the records home to play to Lilly; Mother worked with Egg. She started by just getting him familiar with the names of the streets and the places of interest on the tourist map.
“Lobkowitzplatz,” Mother would say.
“What?” Egg would say.
Father was supposed to be teaching himself, but he seemed to be making the least progress. “You kids have to learn it,” he kept saying. “I don’t have to go to school, meet new kids, all of that.”
“But we’re going to an English-speaking school,” Lilly said.
“Even so,” Father said. “You’ll need the German more than I will.”
“But
you’re
going to run a hotel,” Mother said to him.
“I’m going to start off going after the American audience,” Father said. “We’re trying to drum up an American clientele, first—remember?”
“Better all brush up on our American, too,” said Franny.
Frank was getting the German more quickly than any of us. It seemed to suit him: every syllable was
pronounced
, the verbs fell like grapeshot at the ends of sentences, the umlauts were a form of dressing up; and the whole idea of words having
gender
must have appealed to Frank. By the late winter he was (pretentiously) chatting in German, purposefully bewildering us all, correcting our attempts to answer him, then consoling our failures by telling us that he’d take care of us when we were “over there.”
“Oh boy,” Franny said. “That’s the part that really gets to me. Having
Frank
take us all to school, talk to the bus drivers, order in the restaurants, take all the phone calls. Jesus, now that I’m finally going abroad, I don’t want to be dependent on
him
!”
But Frank seemed to flower at the preparations for moving to Vienna. No doubt he was encouraged by having been given a second chance with Sorrow, but he also seemed genuinely interested in
studying
Vienna. After dinner he read aloud to us, selected excerpts from what Frank called the “plums” of Viennese history; Ronda Ray and the Uricks listened too—curiously, because they knew they
weren’t
going and their future with Fritz’s Act was unclear.
After two months of history lessons, Frank gave us an oral examination on the interesting characters around Vienna at the time of the Crown Prince’s suicide at Mayerling (which Frank had earlier read to us, in full detail, moving Ronda Ray to tears). Franny said that Prince Rudolf was becoming Frank’s hero—“because of his clothes.” Frank had portraits of Rudolf hi his room: one in hunting costume—a thin-headed young man with an oversized moustache, draped with furs and smoking a cigarette as thick as a finger—and another in uniform, wearing the Order of the Golden Fleece, his forehead as vulnerable as a baby’s, his beard as sharp as a spade.
“All right, Franny,” Frank began, “this one is for you. He was a composer of genius, perhaps the world’s greatest organist, but he was a hick—a complete rube in the imperial city—and he had a stupid habit of falling in love with young girls.”
“Why is that stupid?” I asked.
“Shut up,” said Frank. “It’s stupid, and this is Franny’s question.”
“Anton Bruckner,” Franny said. “He was stupid, all right.”
“Very,” said Lilly.
“Your turn, Lilly,” said Frank. “Who was ‘the Flemish peasant’?”
“Oh, come on,” said Lilly, “that’s too easy. Give it to Egg.”
“It’s too hard for Egg,” Franny said.
“
What
is?” Egg said.
“Princess Stephanie,” said Lilly, tiredly, “the daughter of the King of Belgium, and Rudolf’s wife.”
“Now Father,” Frank said.
“Oh boy,” Franny said, because Father was almost as bad at history as he was at German.
“Whose music was so widely loved that even peasants copied the composer’s beard?” Frank asked.
“Jesus, you’re strange, Frank,” Franny said.
“Brahms?” Father guessed, and we all groaned.
“Brahms had a beard
like
a peasant’s,” Frank said. “Whose beard did the peasants
copy
?”
“Strauss!” Lilly and I yelled.
“The poor drip,” said Franny. “Now I get to ask
Frank
one.”
“Shoot,” said Frank, shutting his eyes tight and scrunching up his face.
“Who was Jeanette Heger?” Franny asked.
“She was Schnitzler’s ‘Sweet Girl,’” Frank said, blushing.
“What’s a ‘Sweet Girl,’ Frank?” Franny asked, and Ronda Ray laughed.
“
You
know,” said Frank, still blushing.
“And how many acts of love did Schnitzler and his ‘Sweet Girl’ make between 1888 and 1889?” Franny asked.
“Jesus,” said Frank. “A lot! I forget.”
“Four hundred and sixty-four!” cried Max Urick, who’d been present at all the historical readings, and never forgot a fact. Like Ronda Ray, Max had never been educated before; it was a novelty for Max and Ronda; they paid better attention at Frank’s lessons than the rest of us.
“I’ve got another one for Father!” Franny said. “Who was Mitzi Caspar?”
“Mitzi Caspar?” Father said. “Jesus God.”
“Jesus God,” said Frank. “Franny only remembers the
sexual
parts.”
“Who was she, Frank?” Franny asked.
“I know!” said Ronda Ray. “She was Rudolf’s ‘Sweet Girl’; he spent the night with her before killing himself, with Marie Vetsera, at Mayerling.” Ronda had a special place in her memory, and in her heart, for Sweet Girls.
“
I’m
one, aren’t I?” she had asked me, after Frank’s rendering of Arthur Schnitzler’s life and work.
“The sweetest,” I had told her.
“Phooey,” said Ronda Ray.
“
Where
did Freud live beyond his means?” Frank asked, to any of us who knew.
“
Which
Freud?” Lilly asked, and we all laughed.
“The Sühnhaus,” Frank said, answering his own question. “Translation?” he asked. “The Atonement House,” he answered.
“Fuck you, Frank,” said Franny.
“Not about sex, so she didn’t know it,” Frank said to me.
“Who was the last person to touch Schubert?” I asked Frank; he looked suspicious.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Just what I said,” I said. “Who was the last person to
touch
Schubert?” Franny laughed; I had shared this story with her, and I didn’t think Frank knew it—because I had taken the pages out of Frank’s book. It was a sick story.
“Is this some kind of joke?” Frank asked.
When Schubert had been dead, for sixty years, the poor hick Anton Bruckner attended the opening of Schubert’s grave. Only Bruckner and some scientists were allowed. Someone from the mayor’s office delivered a speech, going on and on about Schubert’s ghastly remains. Schubert’s skull was photographed; a secretary took notes at the investigation—noting that Schubert was a shade of orange, and that his teeth were in better shape than Beethoven’s (Beethoven had been resurrected for similar studies, earlier). The measurements of Schubert’s brain cavity were recorded.
After nearly two hours of “scientific” investigation, Bruckner could restrain himself no longer. He grabbed the head of Schubert and hugged it until he was asked to let it go. So Bruckner touched Schubert last. It was Frank’s kind of story, really, and he was furious not to know it.
“Bruckner, again,” Mother answered, quietly, and Franny and I were amazed that
she
knew; we went from day to day thinking that Mother knew nothing, and then she turned up knowing it all. For Vienna, we know, she had been secretly studying—knowing, perhaps, that Father was unprepared.
“What trivia!” said Frank, when we had explained the story to him. “Honestly, what trivia!”
“All history is trivia,” Father said, showing again the Iowa Bob side of himself.
But Frank was usually the source of trivia—at least concerning Vienna, he hated to be outdone. His room was full of drawings of soldiers in their regimentals: Hussars in skin-tight pink pants and fitted jackets of a sunny-lake blue, and the officers of the Tyrolean Rifle in dawn-green. In 1900, at the Paris World’s Fair, Austria won the Most Beautiful Uniform Prize (for Artillery); it was no wonder that the
fin de siècle
in Vienna appealed to Frank. It was only alarming that the
fin de siècle
was the only period Frank really learned—and taught to us. All the rest of it was not as interesting to him.
“Vienna won’t be like
Mayerling
, for Christ’s sake,” Franny whispered to me, while I was lifting weights. “Not now.”
“Who was the master of the song—as an art form?” I asked her. “But his beard was plucked raw because he was so nervous he never let the hairs alone.”
“Hugo Wolf, you asshole,” she said. “Don’t you see? Vienna isn’t
like
that anymore.”
HI!
Freud wrote to us.
YOU ASKED FOR A FLOOR PLAN? WELL I HOPE I KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN. THE JOURNAL FOR THE SYMPOSIUM ON EAST-WEST RELATIONS OCCUPIES THE SECOND FLOOR—THEIR DAYTIME OFFICES—AND I LET THE PROSTITUTES USE THE THIRD FLOOR, BECAUSE THEY’RE ABOVE THE OFFICES, YOU SEE, WHICH ARE NEVER USED AT NIGHT. SO NOBODY COMPLAINS (USUALLY). HA HA! THE FIRST FLOOR IS OUR FLOOR, I MEAN THE BEAR AND ME—AND YOU, ALL OF YOU, WHEN YOU COME. SO THERE’S THE FOURTH AND FIFTH FOR THE GUESTS, WHEN WE GET THE GUESTS. WHY YOU ASK? YOU HAVE A PLAN? THE PROSTITUTES SAY WE NEED AN ELEVATOR, BUT THEY MAKE LOTS OF TRIPS. HA HA! WHAT YOU MEAN, HOW OLD AM I? ABOUT ONE HUNDRED! BUT VIENNESE ANSWER IS BETTER: WE SAY, “I KEEP PASSING THE OPEN WINDOWS.” THIS IS AN OLD JOKE. THERE WAS A STREET CLOWN CALLED KING OF THE MICE: HE TRAINED RODENTS, HE DID HOROSCOPES, HE COULD IMPERSONATE NAPOLEAN, HE COULD MAKE DOGS FART ON COMMAND. ONE NIGHT HE JUMPED OUT HIS WINDOW WITH ALL HIS PETS IN A BOX. WRITTEN ON THE BOX WAS THIS: “LIFE IS SERIOUS BUT ART IS FUN!” I HEAR HIS FUNERAL WAS A PARTY. A STREET ARTIST HAD KILLED HIMSELF. NOBODY HAD SUPPORTED HIM BUT NOW EVERYBODY MISSED HIM. NOW WHO WOULD MAKE THE DOGS MAKE MUSIC AND THE MICE PANT? THE BEAR KNOWS THIS, TOO: IT IS HARD WORK AND GREAT ART TO MAKE LIFE NOT SO SERIOUS. PROSTITUTES KNOW THIS TOO.
“Prostitutes?” Mother said.
“What?” said Egg.
“Whores?” said Franny.
“There are whores in the hotel?” Lilly asked. So what
else
is new? I thought, but Max Urick looked more than usually overcome with sullenness at the thought of staying behind; Ronda Ray shrugged.
“Sweet Girls!” said Frank.
“Well, Jesus God,” Father said. “If they’re there, we’ll just get them out.”
Wo
bleibt die alte Zeit
und die Gemütlichkeit?
Frank went around singing.
Where is the old time?
Where is the Gemütlichkeit?
It was the song Bratfisch sang at the Fiacre Ball; Bratfisch had been Crown Prince Rudolf’s personal horse-cab driver—a dangerous-looking rake with a whip.
Wo bleibt die alte Zeit?
Pfirt di Gott, mein schönes
Wien!
Frank went on singing. Bratfisch had sung this after Rudolf murdered his mistress and then blew out his own brains.
Where is the old time?
Fare thee well, my
beautiful Vienna!
HI!
Freud wrote.
DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE PROSTITUTES. THEY’RE LEGAL HERE. IT’S JUST BUSINESS. THAT EAST-WEST RELATIONS BUNCH IS THE BUNCH TO WATCH. THEIR TYPEWRITERS BOTHER THE BEAR. THEY COMPLAIN A LOT AND THEY TIE UP THE PHONES. DAMN POLITICS, DAMN INTELLECTUALS, DAMN INTRIGUE.
“Intrigue?” Mother said.
“A language problem,” Father said. “Freud doesn’t know the language.”
“Name one anti-Semite for whom an actual square, a whole
Platz
, in the city of Vienna has been named,” Frank demanded. “Name just one.”
“Jesus God, Frank,” Father said.
“No,” Frank said.
“Dr. Karl Lueger,” Mother said, with such a dullness in her voice that Franny and I felt a chill.
“Very good,” said Frank, impressed.
“Who thought all Vienna was an elaborate job of concealing sexual reality?” Mother asked.
“Freud?” said Frank.
“Not
our
Freud,” said Franny.
But
our
Freud wrote to us:
ALL VIENNA IS AN ELABORATE JOB OF CONCEALING SEXUAL REALITY. THIS IS WHY PROSTITUTION IS LEGAL. THIS IS WHY WE BELIEVE IN BEARS. OVER AND OUT!
I was with Ronda Ray one morning, thinking wearily of Arthur Schnitzler fucking Jeanette Heger 464 times in something like eleven months, and Ronda asked me, “What does he mean, it’s ‘legal’—prostitution is
legal
—what’s he mean?”
“It’s not against the law,” I said. “In Vienna, apparently, prostitution is not against the law.”
There was a long silence from Ronda; she moved, awkwardly, out from under me.
“Is it legal
here
?” she asked me; I could see she was serious—she looked frightened.
“
Everything’s
legal in the Hotel New Hampshire!” I said; it was an Iowa Bob thing to say.
“No,
here
!” she said, angrily. “In America. Is it legal?”
“No,” I said. “Not in New Hampshire.”
“
No
?” she cried. “It’s against the
law
? It
is
?” she screamed.
“Well, but it happens, anyway,” I said.
“
Why
?” Ronda yelled. “Why is it against the law?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You better go,” she said. “And you’re going to Vienna and leaving me
here
?” she added, pushing me out the door. “You better go,” she said.
“Who worked for two years on a fresco and called it
Schweinsdreck
?” Frank asked me at breakfast.
Schweinsdreck
means “pig shit.”
“Jesus, Frank, it’s breakfast,” I said.
“Gustav Klimt,” Frank said, smugly.
And there went the winter of 1957: still lifting the weights, but going easy on the bananas; still visiting Ronda Ray, but dreaming of the imperial city; learning irregular verbs and the mesmerizing trivia of history, trying to imagine the circus Fritz’s Act and the hotel called Gasthaus Freud. Our mother seemed tired, but she was loyal; she and my father appeared to rely on more frequent visits to old 3E, where the differences between them perhaps appeared easier to solve. The Uricks were wary; a cautious streak had developed in them, because they no doubt felt abandoned—“to a dwarf,” Max said, but not around Lilly. And one morning in early spring, with the ground in Elliot Park still half-frozen but turning spongy, Ronda Ray refused to take my money—but she accepted me.
“It’s not legal,” she whispered, bitterly. “I’m no criminal.”
It was later that I discovered she was playing for higher stakes.
“Vienna,” she whispered. “What will you do there without me?” she asked. I had a million ideas, and almost as many pictures, but I promised Ronda I would ask Father to consider bringing her along.
“She’s a real worker,” I told Father. Mother frowned. Franny started choking on something. Frank mumbled about the weather in Vienna—“Lots of rain.” Egg, naturally, asked what we were talking about.
“No,” Father said. “Not Ronda. We can’t afford it.” Everyone looked relieved—even me, I confess.
I broke the news to Ronda when she was oiling the top of the bar.
“Well, there was no harm in asking, right?” she said.
“No harm,” I said. But the next morning, when I stopped and breathed a little outside her door, it seemed that there had been some harm.
“Just keep running, John-O,” she said. “Running is legal. Running is free.”
I then had an awkward and vague conversation with Junior Jones about lust; it was comforting that he didn’t seem to understand it any better than I did. It was a frustration to us both that Franny had so many other opinions on the subject.
“Women,” said Junior Jones. “They’re very different from you and me.” I nodded, of course. Franny seemed to have forgiven Junior for his lust with Ronda Ray, but a part of her remained aloof to him; she appeared, at least outwardly, indifferent to leaving Junior for Vienna. Perhaps she was torn between not wanting to miss Junior Jones too much and remaining hopeful but calm about the possible adventure that Vienna could be for her.
She was detached when asked about it, and I found myself, that spring, more often stuck with Frank; Frank was in high gear. His moustache resembled, nervously, the facial excesses of the departed Crown Prince Rudolf, although Franny and I liked to call Frank the King of Mice.
“Here he comes! He can make dogs fart on command! Who is it?” I would cry.
“‘Life Is Serious But Art Is Fun!’” Franny would shout. “Here is the hero of the street clowns! Keep him away from the open windows!”
“King of the Mice!” I yelled.
“Drop dead, both of you,” Frank said.
“How’s it coming with the dog, Frank?” I asked; this would win him over, every time.
“Well,” Frank said, some vision of Sorrow crossing his mind and making his moustache quiver, “I think Egg will be pleased—although Sorrow may seem a little tame, to the rest of us.”
“I doubt it,” I said. Looking at Frank, I could imagine the Crown Prince, moodily en route to Mayerling—and the murder of his mistress, and the killing of himself—but it was easier to think of Freud’s street artist leaping out a window with his box of pets: the King of Mice dashed to the ground and a city that ignored him, once, now mourning him. Somehow, Frank looked the part.
“Who will make the dogs make music and the mice pant?” I asked Frank over breakfast.
“Go lift a few weights,” he said. “And drop them on your head.”
So Frank journeyed back to the bio lab; if the King of Mice could make dogs fart on command, Frank could make Sorrow live in more than one pose—so perhaps he was a kind of Crown Prince, like Rudolf, Emperor of Austria to Be, King of Bohemia, King of Transylvania, Margrave of Moravia, Duke of Auschwitz (to mention only a few of Rudolf’s titles).
“Where is the King of Mice?” Franny would ask.
“With Sorrow,” I would say. “Teaching Sorrow to fart on command.”
And passing each other in the halls of the Hotel New Hampshire, I would say to Lilly, or Franny would say to Frank, “Keep passing the open windows.”
“
Schweinsdreck
,” Frank would say.
“Show off,” Franny would say back to him.
“Pig shit to you, Frank,” I’d say.
“
What
?” Egg would shout.
And one morning Lilly asked Father, “Will we leave before the circus called Fritz’s Act moves in, or will we get to see them?”
“I hope to
miss
seeing them,” Franny said.
“Won’t we overlap, at least a day?” Frank asked. “I mean for the passing of the keys, or something?”
“
What
keys?” Max Urick asked.
“What
locks
?” said Ronda Ray, whose door was shut to me.
“Perhaps we’ll coincide for about ten or fifteen minutes,” Father said.
“I want to see them,” Lilly said, seriously. And I looked at Mother, who looked tired—but nice: she was a soft, rumpled woman, whom Father clearly loved to touch. He was always burrowing his face in her neck, and cupping her breasts, and hugging her from behind—which she only pretended to resent (in front of us children). When he was around Mother, Father was remindful of those dogs whose heads are always thrust in your lap, whose snouts take comfort in armpits and crotches—I don’t mean, at all, that Father was crude with her, but he was always making contact: hugging and hanging on tight.
Of course, Egg did this with Mother, too, and Lilly—to a degree—though Lilly was more dignified, and holding back of herself, since her smallness had become such an item. It was as if she didn’t want to appear any smaller than she was by acting too young.
“The average Austrian is three to four inches shorter than the average American, Lilly,” Frank informed her, but Lilly appeared not to care—she shrugged; it was Mother’s move, independent and pretty. In their different ways both Franny and Lilly had inherited the motion.
Sometime that spring I saw Franny use it: just a single deft shrug, with a hint of some involuntary ache behind it—when Junior Jones told us that he would be accepting the football scholarship from Penn State in the fall.
“I’ll write you,” Franny told him.
“Sure, and
I’ll
write
you
,” he told her.
“I’ll write you more,” said Franny. Junior Jones tried to shrug, but it didn’t come off.
“Shit,” he told me, when we were throwing rocks at a tree in Elliot Park. “What does Franny want to
do
, anyway? What does she think is going to happen to her over there?”
“Over there” was what we all called it. Except Frank: he now spoke of Vienna the German way. “
Wien
,” he said.
“
Veen
,” Lilly said, shuddering. “It sounds like something a lizard would say.” And we all stared at her, waiting for Egg to say his “What?”
Then the grass came out in Elliot Park, and one warm night, when I was sure Egg was asleep, I opened the window and looked at the moon and the stars and listened to the crickets and the frogs, and Egg said, “Keep passing the open windows.”
“You awake?” I said.
“I can’t sleep,” Egg said. “I can’t see where I’m going,” he said. “I don’t know what it’ll be like.”
He sounded ready to cry, so I said, “Come on, Egg. It will be
great
. You’ve never lived in a
city
,” I said.
“I know,” he said, sniffling a little.
“Well, there’s more to do than there is to do here,” I promised him.
“I have a lot to do here,” he said.
“But this will be so
different
,” I told him.
“Why do the people jump out of windows?” he asked me.
And I explained to him that it was just a story, although the sense of a metaphor might have been lost on him.
“There are spies in the hotel,” he said. “That’s what Lilly said: ‘Spies and low women.’”
I imagined Lilly thinking that “low women” were short, like her, and I tried to reassure Egg that there was nothing frightening about the occupants of Freud’s hotel; I said that Father would take care of everything—and heard the silence with which both Egg and I accepted
that
promise.
“How will we get there?” Egg asked. “It’s so far.”
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