needed
lots of “manipulation.” A famous choreographer had bogged down in her autobiography; she was blocked in her childhood, she confided to Frank, who just kept brushing his teeth. He rinsed his mouth, turned off the bathroom light, and then heard Lilly.
“Hi, it’s me,” she said, apologetically—to the machine. Lilly was always apologizing. Frank smiled and untucked his bedcovers; he always put his dressmaker’s dummy in bed before he crawled in. There was a long pause on the machine and Frank thought the thing was broken; it often was. But then Lilly added, “It’s just me.” Something about the tiredness in her voice made Frank check the time of night, and made him listen with some anxiety. In the pause that followed, Frank remembers whispering her name. “Go on, Lilly,” he whispered.
And Lilly sang her little song, just a little snatch of a song; it was one of the
Heurigen
songs—a silly, sad song, a King of Mice song. Frank knew the song by heart, of course.
Yerkauft’s mei G’wand, I Fahr in Himmel.
Sell my old clothes, I’m off to heaven.
“Holy cow, Lilly,” Frank whispered to the recorder; he started getting dressed, fast.
“
Auf Wiedersehen
, Frank,” Lilly said, when her little song was over.
Frank didn’t answer her. He ran down to Columbus Circle and caught an uptown cab. And even though Frank was no runner, I’m sure he made good time; I couldn’t have done any better. Even if he’d been home when Lilly called, I always told him that it would take
anyone
longer to cover twenty blocks and a zoo than it takes to fall fourteen stories—the distance from the window of the corner suite on the Stanhope’s fourteenth floor to the pavement at Eighty-first and Fifth Avenue. Lilly had a shorter trip to take than Frank’s, and she would have beaten him to her destination—regardless; there was nothing he could have done. Even so, Frank said, he didn’t say (or even think to himself), “
Auf Wiedersehen
, Lilly,” until after they’d shown him her little body.
She left a better note than Fehlgeburt had left. Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note.
Sorry,
said the note.
Just not big enough.
I best remember her little hands: how they leaped about in her lap, whenever she said anything thoughtful—and Lilly was always thoughtful. “Not enough laughter in her, man,” as Junior Jones would say. Lilly’s hands could not contain themselves; they danced to whatever she thought she heard—maybe it was the same music Freud tapped his baseball bat to, the same song Father is hearing now, the bat stirring gracefully at his tired feet. My father, the blind walker: he walks everywhere, he covers the grounds of the Hotel New Hampshire for hours every day, summer and winter. First Sacher led him, then Schlagobers, then Fred; when Fred developed his habit of killing skunks, we had to get rid of him. “I
like
Fred,” Father said, “but between the farting and the skunks, he’ll drive the guests away.”
“Well, the
guests
aren’t complaining,” I told Father.
“Well, they’re just being polite,” Father said. “They’re showing their class, but it’s loathsome, it’s truly an imposition, and if Fred ever attacks a skunk when I’m with him … well, for Christ’s sake, I’ll
kill
him; it’s the baseball bat for him, then.”
So we found a nice family who wanted a watchdog; they weren’t blind, but they didn’t care if Fred farted and smelled like a skunk.
And now Father walks with Seeing Eye Dog Number Four. We got tired of naming them, and when Lilly died, Father lost a little more of his playfulness. “I just am not up to naming another dog,” he said. “Want to do this one?” But I wasn’t up to a dog-naming either. Franny was shooting a film in France, and Frank—who was the hardest hit by Lilly’s leaving us—was irritated at the whole idea of dogs. Frank had too much sorrow on his mind; he wasn’t in a mood for naming dogs at all.
“Jesus God,” Frank said. “Call it Number Four.”
My father shrugged and settled for just plain old “Four.” So that now, in the twilight, when Father is searching for his walking companion, I hear him screaming the number four. “Four!” he bellows. “Goddamn it, Four!” And old Fred, the handyman, still cries out, “What?” And Father goes on with his “Four! Four! Four!” Like someone remembering a childhood game: that one where you throw up the ball and yell someone’s number, and the one called has to try to catch the ball before the ball hits the ground. “Four!” I hear Father calling, and I imagine some child running, arms held out for the ball.
Sometimes the child is Lilly, sometimes it’s Egg.
And when Father has finally found Four, I watch out the window as Four leads my father carefully down to the docks; in the failing light, it’s possible to mistake my father and his Seeing Eye dog for a much younger man on the dock—with a bear, perhaps; possibly they’re fishing for pollack. “It’s no fun fishing when you can’t see the fish come out of the water,” Father has told me. And so, with Four, Father just sits on the dock, welcoming the evening, until the fierce Maine mosquitoes drive him back to the Hotel New Hampshire.
There is even a sign: HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE. Father insisted on it, and although he can’t see it—and wouldn’t miss it, if I only pretended there was a sign—it is a concession I gladly make for him, although it is a nuisance, at times. Occasionally tourists get lost and find us; they see the sign and think we
are
a hotel. I have explained to Father a very complicated system that our “success” in
this
hotel business has afforded us. When the lost tourists find us and ask for rooms, we ask them if they have reservations.
They say no, of course, but invariably—looking around themselves, at the silence, at the abandoned quality of peace we have achieved at the third Hotel New Hampshire—they ask, “But surely you have vacancies?”
“No vacancies,” we always say. “No reservations, no vacancies.”
Sometimes Father argues with me about this. “But surely we have
room
for them,” he hisses. “They seem very nice. There’s a child or two, I can hear them quarreling, and the mother sounds tired—they’ve probably been doing too much driving.”
“Standards are standards, Pop,” I say. “Really, what would our other guests think if we got too loose about this?”
“It’s just so elitist,” he whispers, wonderingly. “I mean, I always
knew
this was a special place, but, somehow, I never dreamed it would
actually
…”And he usually breaks off his sentence right there, smiling. And then he adds, “Well, wouldn’t your mother have loved all
this
!” The baseball bat waves, showing it all to Mother.
And I say, without the slightest tone of qualification in my voice, “She sure would have, Pop.”
“If not every minute,” my father adds, thoughtfully, “at least this part. At least the end.”
Lilly’s end, considering her cult following, was as quiet as we could have it. I wish I’d had the courage to ask Donald Justice for an elegy but it was—as much as possible—a family funeral. Junior Jones was there; he sat with Franny, and I couldn’t help but notice how perfectly they held each other’s hands. It often takes a funeral to make you realize who has grown older. I noticed Junior had added a few gentle lines around his eyes; he was a very hardworking lawyer, now—we’d hardly heard from him when he was in law school; he disappeared almost as completely into law school as he had once disappeared into the bottom of a pile of Cleveland Browns. I guess law school and football are similarly myopic experiences. Playing in the line, Junior always said, had prepared him for law school. Hard work, but boring, boring, boring.
Now Junior ran the Black Arm of the Law, and I knew that when Franny was in New York, she stayed with him.
They were both stars, and maybe they were finally at ease with each other, I thought. But at Lilly’s funeral, all I could think was how Lilly would have loved seeing them together.
Father, next to Susie the bear, kept the heavy end of his baseball bat on the floor between his knees—just swaying slightly. And when he walked—on Susie’s arm, on the arm of Freud’s former Seeing Eye bear—he carried the Louisville Slugger with great dignity, as if it were simply a stout sort of cane.
Susie was a wreck, but she held herself together at the funeral—for Father’s sake, I think. She had worshiped my father ever since his miracle swing of the bat—the fabulous, instinctual swing that had batted Ernst the pornographer away. By the time of Lilly’s suicide, Susie the bear had been around. She’d left the East Coast for the West, and then had come back East again. She ran a commune in Vermont for a while. “I ran that fucker right into the ground,” she would tell us, laughing. She started a family counseling service in Boston, which blossomed into a day care center (because there was a greater need for one of those), which blossomed into a rape crisis center (as soon as day care centers were everywhere). The rape crisis center was not welcome in Boston, and Susie admits that not
all
the hostility was external. There were rape lovers and women haters everywhere, of course, and a variety of stupid people who were willing to assume that women who worked in a rape crisis center
had
to be what Susie called “hardcore dykes and feminist troublemakers.” The Bostonians gave Susie and her first rape crisis center a rather hard time. Apparently, as a way of making their point, they even raped one of the rape crisis center employees. But, even Susie admits, some of the rape crisis women in those early days
were
“hardcore dykes and feminist troublemakers,” they really
were
just man haters, and so
some
of the trouble at the rape crisis center was internal. Some of those women were simply anti-system philosophers without Frank’s sense of humor, and if the law-enforcement personnel were antagonistic to women wanting to see a little rape justice—for a change—so were the women antagonistic to the law, in general, and nobody really did the
victim
much good.
Susie’s rape crisis center, in Boston, was broken up when some of the man haters castrated an alleged rapist in a parking lot in Back Bay. Susie had come back to New York—she had gone back to family counseling. She specialized in child beatings—“dealing with,” as she would say, both the children and the beaters—but she was sick of New York City (she said it was no fun to live in Greenwich Village if you
weren’t
a bear) and she was convinced that she had a future in rape crisis.
Having witnessed her performance at the Stanhope in 1964, I had to agree. Franny always said it was a better performance than any performance
Franny
would ever give, and Franny is very good. The way Franny held herself together for her one-line part in dealing with Chipper Dove must have given her the necessary confidence. In fact, in all her later films, Franny would make that old line live again: “Well, look who’s here.” She always finds a way to slip in that lovely line. She does not use her own name, of course. Movie stars almost never do. And Franny Berry isn’t exactly the sort of name that people notice.
Franny’s Hollywood name, her acting name, is one you know. This is our family’s story, and it’s inappropriate for me to use Franny’s stage name—but I know that you know her. Franny is the one you always desire. She is the best one, even when she’s the villain; she’s always the real hero, even when she dies, even when she dies for love—or worse, for war. She’s the most beautiful, the most unapproachable, but the most vulnerable, too, somehow—and the toughest. (She’s why you go to the movie, or why you stay.) Others dream of her, now—now that she has freed me from dreaming about her in quite such a devastating way. Now I can live with what
I
dream about Franny, but there must be members of her audience who don’t live so well with what they dream about her.
She made the adjustment to her fame very easily. It was an adjustment Lilly could never have made, but Franny made it easily—because she was always our family’s star. She was used to being the main attraction, the center of everyone’s attention—the one we waited for, the one we listened to. She was born to the leading role.
“And I was born to be a miserable fucking
agent
,” Frank said gloomily, after Lilly’s funeral. “I have agented even this,” he said, meaning Lilly’s death. “She wasn’t big enough for all the shit I gave her to do!” he said, morosely; then he began to cry. We tried to cheer him up, but Frank said, “I’m always the fucking
agent
, damn it. I bring it all about—that’s me. Look at Sorrow!” he howled. “Who stuffed him? Who started the whole story?” Frank cried, crying and crying. “I’m just the asshole agent,” he blubbered.
But Father reached out to Frank, the baseball bat as his antenna, and he said, “Frank, Frank, my boy.
You’re
not the agent of Lilly’s trouble, Frank,” Father said. “Who is the family dreamer, Frank?” Father asked, and we all looked at him. “Well, it’s
me
—
I’m
the dreamer, Frank,” Father said. “And Lilly just dreamed more than she could
do
, Frank. She
inherited
the damn dreams,” Father said. “From me.”
“But I was her agent,” Frank said, stupidly.
“Yes, but that doesn’t matter, Frank,” Franny said. “I mean, it matters that you’re
my
agent, Frank—I really need you,” Franny told him. “But
nobody
could be Lilly’s agent, Frank.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered, Frank,” I told him—because he was always saying this to me. “It wouldn’t have mattered who her agent was, Frank.”
“But it was me,” he said—he was so infuriatingly stubborn!
“Christ, Frank,” Franny said. “It’s easier to talk to your
answering
service.” That finally brought him around.
For a while we would have to endure the wall of worshipful wailers: Lilly’s suicide cult—they were her fans who thought that Lilly’s suicide was her ultimate statement, was the proof of her seriousness. This was ironic in Lilly’s case, because Frank and Franny and I knew that Lilly’s suicide—from Lilly’s point of view was the ultimate admission that she was not serious
enough
. But these people insisted on loving her for what she least loved in herself.
A group of Lilly’s suicide fans even wrote to Franny, requesting that Franny travel to the nation’s college campuses giving readings from Lilly’s work—as Lilly. It was Franny the actress they were appealing to: they wanted Franny to play Lilly.
And we remembered Lilly’s only writer-in-residence role, and her account of the only English Department meeting she ever attended. In the meeting, the Lecture Committee revealed that there was only enough money remaining for two more visits by moderately well-known poets, or one more visit by a well-known writer
or
a poet, or they could contribute
all
the remaining money toward the considerable expenses asked by a woman who was traveling the nation’s campuses “doing” Virginia Woolf. Although Lilly was the only person in the English Department who actually taught any of Virginia Woolf’s books in her courses, she found that she was alone in resisting the department’s wishes to invite the Virginia Woolf impersonator. “I think Virginia Woolf would have wanted the money to go to a living writer,” Lilly said. “To a
real
writer,” she added. But the department insisted that they wanted all the money to go to the woman who “did” Virginia Woolf.
“Okay,” Lilly finally said. “I’ll agree, but only if the woman does it
all
. Only if she goes all the way.” There was a silence in the English Department meeting and someone asked Lilly if she was really serious—if she could possibly be in such “bad taste” as to suggest that the woman come to the campus to commit suicide.
And my sister Lilly said, “It is what my brother Frank would call disgusting that you—as teachers of literature—would actually spend money on an actress imitating a dead writer, whose work you do not teach, rather than spend it on a living writer, whose work you probably haven’t read. Especially,” said Lilly, “when you consider that the woman whose work is not being taught, and whose person is being imitated, was virtually
obsessed
with the difference between greatness and
posing
. And you want to
pay
someone to pose as
her
? You should be ashamed,” Lilly told them. “Go ahead and bring the woman here,” Lilly added. “I’ll give her the rocks to put in her pockets; I’ll lead her to the river.”
And that is what Franny told the group who wanted her to pose as Lilly and “do” the nation’s campuses. “You should be ashamed,” Franny said. “Besides,” she added, “I am much too tall to play Lilly. My sister was really
short
.”
This, by the suicide fans, was construed as Franny’s insensitivity—and by association, in various aspects of the news, our family was characterized as being indifferent to Lilly’s death (for our unwillingness to take part in these Lilly
poses
). In frustration, Frank volunteered to “do” Lilly at a public reading from the works of suicidal poets and writers. Naturally, none of the writers or poets were reading from their own work; various hired readers, sympathetic to the work of the deceased—or worse, sympathetic to their “lifestyle,” which nearly always meant their “death-style”—would read the work of the suicides as if they
were
the dead authors come back to life. Franny wanted no part of this, either, but Frank volunteered; he was rejected. “On the grounds of ‘insincerity,’” he said. “They surmised I was insincere. Fucking
right
I was!” he shouted. “They could all stand a fucking overdose of insincerity!” he added.
And Junior Jones would marry Franny—finally! “This is a fairy tale,” Franny told me, long distance, “but Junior and I have decided that if we save it any longer, we won’t have anything worth saving.” Franny was sneaking up on forty at the time. The Black Arm of the Law and Hollywood had, at least,
Schlagobers
and blood in common. I suppose that Franny and Junior Jones would strike people—in their New York and their Los Angeles life—as “glamorous,” but I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people. Junior and Franny were consumed by their work, and they succumbed to the comfort of having each other’s arms to fall exhausted into.
I was truly happy for them, and only sorry that they both announced that they would have no time for kids. “I don’t want children if I can’t take care of them,” Franny said.
“Ditto, man,” said Junior Jones.
And one night Susie the bear told me that
she
didn’t want children either, because the children she gave birth to would be ugly, and she wouldn’t bring an ugly child into the world—not for anything, she said; it was simply the cruelest life one could expose a child to: the discrimination suffered by people who aren’t good-looking.
“But you’re
not
ugly, Susie,” I told her. “You just take a little getting used to,” I told her. “I think you’re really attractive, if you want to know.” And I
did
think so; I thought Susie the bear was a hero.
“You’re sick, then,” Susie said. “I got a face like a hatchet, like a chisel with a bad complexion. And I got a body like a paper bag,” she said. “Like a paper bag of cold oatmeal,” Susie said.
“I think you’re very nice,” I told her, and I did; Franny had shown me how lovable Susie the bear was. And I had heard the song Susie the bear taught Franny to sing; I’d had some interesting dreams concerning Susie’s teaching me a song like that. So I repeated to her, “I think you’re very nice.”
“Then you’ve got a
brain
like a paper bag of cold oatmeal,” Susie told me. “If you think I’m very nice, you’re a real sick boy.”
And one night when there were no guests in the Hotel New Hampshire, I heard a peculiar creeping sound; Father was as likely to walk around at night as he was likely to walk around in the daylight—because, of course, it was always nighttime for him. But wherever Father went, the Louisville Slugger trailed after him or searched ahead of him, and as he grew older his gait more and more resembled the gait of Freud, as if Father had psychologically developed a limp—as a form of kinship to the old interpreter of dreams. Also, wherever Father went, Seeing Eye Dog Number Four went with him! We were negligent about keeping Four’s toenails clipped, so that Father, accompanied by Four, made quite a clatter.
Old Fred, the handyman, had a room on the third floor and slept like a stone at the bottom of the sea; he slept as soundly as the abandoned weirs, ruined by seals and now sunk in the mud flats, now rinsed by the tide. Old Fred was a sundown and sunup sort of sleeper; because he was deaf, he said, he didn’t like to be up at night. Especially in summer, the Maine nights are vibrant with noise—at least when you compare the nights to the Maine
days
.
“The opposite of New York,” Frank liked to say. “The only time it’s quiet on Central Park South is about three in the morning. But in Maine,” Frank liked to say, “about three in the morning is about the
only
time anything’s going on. Fucking nature comes to life.”
It was about three in the morning, I noted—a summer night, with the insect world teeming; the seabirds sounded fairly restful but the sea was no less determined. And I heard this peculiar creeping sound. It was at first hard to tell if it was outside my window, which was open—though there was a screen—or if the sound was outside my door, in the hall. My door was open, too; and the outside doors to the Hotel New Hampshire were never locked—there were too many of them.
A raccoon, I thought.
But then something much heavier than any raccoon shuffled across the bare floor at the landing to the stairs and softly padded down the carpeted hall toward my door; I could feel the
weight
of whatever it was—it was making the floorboards sigh. Even the sea seemed to quiet itself, even the sea seemed to listen to whatever it was—it was the kind of sound you hear in the night that makes the tide pause, that makes the birds (who never fly at night) float up to the sky and hang suspended as if they were painted there.
“Four?” I whispered, thinking that the dog might be on the prowl, but whatever was in the hall was too tentative to be Seeing Eye Dog Number Four. Four had been in the hall before; old Four wouldn’t be pausing at every door.
I wished I had Father’s baseball bat, but when the bear lurched into my doorway I realized there was no weapon in the Hotel New Hampshire powerful enough to protect me from
this
intruder. I lay very still, pretending to be sound asleep—with my eyes wide open. In the flat, blurred, flannel-soft light of the predawn, the bear seemed huge. It stared into my room, at my motionless bed, like an old nurse taking a bed check in a hospital; I tried not to breathe, but the bear knew I was there. It sniffed, deeply; and very gracefully, on all fours, it came into my room. Well, why not? I was thinking. A bear began my life’s fairy tale; it is fitting that a bear should end it. The bear shoved its warm face near mine and breathed in everything about me; with one purposeful sniff, it seemed to review my life’s story—and in a gesture resembling commiseration, it placed its heavy paw on my hip. It was quite a warm summer night—for Maine—and I was naked, covered by just a sheet. The bear’s breath was hot, and a little fruity—perhaps it had just been feeding in the wild blueberries—but it was surprisingly pleasant breath, if not exactly fresh. When the bear drew back the sheet and looked me over, I felt just the tip of the iceberg of fear that Chipper Dove must have felt when he truly believed that a bear
in heat
wanted him. But this bear rather disrespectfully snorted at what it saw. “Earl!” said the bear, and rather roughly shoved me; it made room beside me for itself and crawled into my bed with me. It was only when it embraced me, and I identified the most distinctive component of its strange and powerful scent, that I suspected this was no ordinary bear. Mixed with the pleasure of its fruited breath, and the mustard-green sharpness of its summer sweat, I detected the obvious odor of
mothballs
.
“Susie?” I said.
“Thought you’d never guess,” she said.
“Susie!” I cried, and turned to her, returning her embrace; I had never been so happy to see her.
“Keep it down,” Susie ordered me. “Don’t wake up your father. I’ve been crawling all over this fucking hotel trying to find you. I found your father first, and someone who says ‘What?’ in his sleep, and I met an absolute
moron
of a dog who didn’t even know I was a bear—the fucker wagged his tail and went right back to sleep. What a watchdog! And fucking
Frank
gave me the directions—I don’t think Frank should be trusted to give the directions to
Maine
, much less to
this
queer little part of the wretched state. Holy cow,” said Susie, “I just wanted to see you before it got light, I wanted to get to you while it was still dark, for Christ’s sake, and I must have left New York about noon, yesterday, and now it’s almost fucking dawn,” she said. “And I’m exhausted,” she added; she started to cry. “I’m sweating like a pig in this dumb fucking suit, but I smell so bad and look so awful I don’t dare take it off.”
“Take it off,” I told her. “You smell very nice.”
“Oh sure,” she said, still crying. But I coaxed her out of the bear head. She smudged her tears with her paws, but I held her paws and kissed her on the mouth for a while. I think I was right about the blueberries; that’s what Susie tastes like, to me: wild blueberries.
“You taste very nice,” I told her.
“Oh sure,” she mumbled, but she let me help her out of the rest of the bear suit. It was like a sauna inside there. I realized that Susie was built like a bear, and she was as slick with sweat as a bear fresh out of a lake. I realized how I admired her—for her bearishness, for her complicated courage.
“I’m very fond of you, Susie,” I said, closing my door and getting back into bed with her.
“Hurry up, it will be light soon,” she said, “and then you’ll see how ugly I am.”
“I can see you now,” I said, “and I think you’re lovely.”
“You’re going to have to work hard to convince me,” said Susie the bear.
For some years now I have been convincing Susie the bear that she is lovely.
I
think so, of course, and in a few more years, I think, Susie will finally agree. Bears are stubborn but they are sane creatures; once you gain their trust, they will not shy away from you.
At first Susie was so obsessed with her ugliness that she took every conceivable precaution against a possible pregnancy, believing that the worst thing on earth for her to do would be to bring a poor child into this cruel world and allow him or her to suffer the treatment that is usually bestowed upon the ugly. When I first started sleeping with Susie the bear, she was taking the Pill, and she also wore a diaphragm; she put so much spermicidal jelly on the diaphragm that I had to suppress the feeling that we were engaging in an act of overkill—to sperm. To ease me over this peculiar anxiety, Susie insisted that I wear a prophylactic, too.
“That’s the trouble with men,” she used to say. “You got to arm yourself so heavily before you dare do it with them that you sometimes lose sight of the purpose.”
But Susie has calmed down, recently. She seems to feel that
one
method of birth control is adequate. And if the accident happens I can’t help but hope that she will accept it bravely. Of course, I wouldn’t push her to have a baby if she didn’t want to; those people who want to make people have babies they don’t want to have are ogres.
Дата добавления: 2015-11-04; просмотров: 28 | Нарушение авторских прав
| <== предыдущая лекция | | | следующая лекция ==> |