The Bear Called State O’Maine 32 страница

“That’s a

bear

,” Dove said.

“You bet your ass, man,” Ruthie said.

And Frank, sailing even higher, singing his way into Lucia’s song—and, seemingly, rising above even

her

madness—yelled out, “That’s a bear

in heat

!”

“That’s a bear that

wants

you,” I said to Chipper Dove.

When Dove looked at the bear again, he saw that Franny had her hand on Susie exactly where a bear’s private parts would be. Franny was rubbing the bear there, and Susie the bear got suddenly playful; she lolled her head around, she made the most disgusting noises. The West Village Workshop had simply worked wonders with Susie the bear; she’d been a smart bear before, but now she was a bear to be reckoned with.

“That bear’s so horny,” Ruthie said, “she’d even fuck

me

.”

“Hey, look,” said Chipper Dove. He was holding fast to the illusion that I was the only one among them who was sane. That was how he was reading it, now; I was his last hope. We had him right where Lilly wanted him when Scurvy, the maid, knocked on the door. I slung the barbell aside as if it weighed nothing at all. I yanked the door open so hard that Scurvy flew into the room in greater confusion and disarray than had marked Chipper Dove’s entrance. Susie the bear growled—not liking too much sudden movement—and the terrified maid stared up at me.

“It says DO NOT DISTURB, you moron!” I yelled at her. I pulled her to her feet and tore open the front of her little maid’s costume. She started to get hysterical right away. I held her upside down and shook her. Frank howled with delight.

“Black panties, black panties!” Frank shrieked on the bouncing bed.

“You’re fired,” I told the sniveling maid. “You don’t come in when the sign says DO NOT DISTURB. If you can’t learn that, you moron,” I told her, “then you’re fired.” I passed her, still holding her upside down, to Ruthie. Ruthie and Scurvy had been practicing this routine together all year, Susie had told me. It was a kind of apache dance. It was a kind of woman-raping-another-woman dance. Ruthie simply proceeded to maul Scurvy right there in front of Chipper Dove.

“I don’t care if you

do

own the hotel!” Scurvy was crying. “You’re terrible disgusting people and I won’t clean up after that bear again,

I won’t, I won’t

,” she moaned. Then she did an absolutely stunning job of

convulsing

under Ruthie—she gagged herself, she spewed, she gibbered. Ruthie left her in a ball, shriveled up and whining—with an occasional, absolutely chilling spasm.

Ruthie shrugged, and said to me, “You got to get a tougher crew of maids than this white trash, man. Every time the bear rapes someone, the maids can’t handle it. They just don’t know how to

deal

with it.”

And when I looked at Chipper Dove, I saw—at last!—that his ice-blue looks had left him. He was staring at the bear: Susie was more and more responsive, under Franny’s touch. Ruthie went up to the bear and took her muzzle off; Susie gave us a toothy smile. She was more bear than any bear; for this single performance of Lilly’s script, Susie the bear could have convinced a

bear

that she was a bear. A bear in heat.

I don’t even know if bears ever

get

in heat. “It doesn’t matter,” as Frank would say.

All that mattered was that Chipper Dove believed it. Ruthie started scratching Susie, cautiously, behind the ears. “

See

him? See him—

that

one, over there?” Ruthie said sweetly. And Susie the bear began to shuffle and sway; she started nosing her way toward Chipper Dove.

“Hey, look,” Dove started to say to me.

“Better not move suddenly,” I told him. “Bears don’t like any sudden movement.”

Dove froze. Susie, taking all the time in the world, started sniffing him over. Frank lay on the bed in the bedroom, exhausted. “I’ll give you some advice,” Frank said to Chipper Dove. “You introduced me to mud puddles, so I’ll give you some advice about bears,” Frank said.

“Hey, please,” Chipper Dove said softly, to me.

“The main thing,” Frank said, “is

don’t move

. Don’t resist

anything

. The bear does not appreciate resistance of any kind.”

“Just kind of go with it, man,” Ruthie said, dreamily.

I stepped up to Dove and unbuckled his belt; he started to stop me, but I said, “No sudden movements.” Susie the bear jabbed her snout into Dove’s crotch the instant Dove’s pants hit the rug with a soft flop.

“I recommend holding your breath,” Frank advised, from the bedroom.

And that was Lilly’s cue. In she came. It looked to Dove as if she just walked in with her own key from the door to the hall.

We all stared at the dwarf nurse; Lilly looked cross.

“I had the feeling you were up to this again, Franny,” Lilly said to her patient. Franny curled up on the couch, putting her back to us all.

“You’re her nurse, not her mother,” I snapped at Lilly.

“It’s not

good

for her—this lunatic raping, raping,

raping

everyone!” Lilly shouted at me. “Every time that damn bear is in heat, you just pull anyone you want in here and

rape

him—and I’m telling you it’s not

good

for her.”

“But it’s all Franny

likes

,” Frank said, peevishly.

“It’s not

right

that she likes it,” Lilly pointed out, like a stubborn but good nurse, which she was.

“Aw, come

on

,” I said. “

This

one is special. This one raped

her

!” I cried to Lilly.

“He made me fuck a mud puddle!” Frank wailed.

“If we can just rape

this

one,” I pleaded with Lilly, “we won’t rape anybody else.”

“Promises, promises,” said Lilly, folding her little arms across her little breasts.

“We promise!” Frank shouted. “Just one more. Just

this

one.”

“Earl!” Susie snorted, and I thought Dove was going to faint dead away. Susie snorted violently into Dove’s crotch. Susie the bear seemed to be saying that she was especially interested in

this

one, too.

“Please, please!” Dove started to scream. Susie knocked his legs out from under him and laid her weight over his chest. She put a big paw—a

real

paw—right on his private parts. “Please!” Dove said. “Please don’t!

Please

!”

And that was all Lilly wrote. That was where we were supposed to stop. Nobody had any more lines, except Lilly. Lilly was just supposed to say, “There will be no more rapes,

no more

—that’s final.” And I was supposed to pick Dove up and dump him out in the hall.

But Franny got up off the couch and pushed everyone away; she walked over to Dove. “That’s enough, Susie,” Franny said, and Susie got off Dove. “Put your pants back on, Chipper,” Franny said to him. He stood up but he fell; he struggled to his feet again and pulled his pants up. “And the next time you take your pants

off

, for

anybody

,” Franny told Chipper Dove, “I want you to think of me.”

“Think of

all

of us,” said Frank, coming out of the bedroom.

“Remember us,” I said to Chipper Dove.

“If you see us again,” big Ruthie told him, “better go the other way. Any one of us might kill you, man,” she told him, matter-of-factly.

Susie the bear took her bear’s head off; she would never

need

to wear it again. From now on, the bear suit was just for fun. She looked Chipper Dove right in the eye. The number one first-class hysteric named Scurvy got up off the rug and came over to look at Chipper Dove, too. She looked at him as if she was committing him to memory; then she shrugged, and lit a cigarette, and looked away.

“Don’t pass any open windows!” Frank called down the hall to Dove, as he left us; he walked away holding the wall of the hall for support. We all couldn’t help but notice that he’d wet his pants.

Chipper Dove moved like a man seeking the men’s room in a hospital ward for the disoriented; he moved with the feeble lack of sureness of a man who wasn’t sure what experience awaited him in the men’s room—as if, even, he wouldn’t be sure what to do when he arrived at the urinal.

But there was, in all of us, that initial sense of letdown that should be documented in any fair study of revenge. Whatever we had done, it would never be as awful as what he had done to Franny—and if it

had

been as awful, it would have been too much.

I would feel, for the rest of my life, as if I were still holding Chipper Dove by his armpits—his feet a few inches off the ground of Seventh Avenue. There was really nothing to do with him except put him down; there never

would

be anything to do with him, too—with our Chipper Doves we just go on picking them up and putting them down, forever.

And so, you’d think, that was that. Lilly had proven herself with a real opera, a genuine fairy tale. Susie the bear had played out the part; she had exhausted her bear’s role; she would keep the bear suit only for its sentimental value, and for amusing children—and, of course, for Halloween. Father was about to get a Seeing Eye dog for Christmas. It would be his first of many Seeing Eye dogs. And once he had an animal to talk to, my father would finally figure out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

“Here comes the rest of our lives,” Franny said, with a kind of awed affection. “The rest of our fucking lives is finally coming up,” she said.

That day Chipper Dove wandered out of the Stanhope and back to his “firm,” it seemed we

all

would be survivors—those of us who were left; it seemed we had made it. Franny was now free to find a life, Lilly and Frank had their chosen careers—or, as they say, their careers had chosen them. Father needed only a little time with the animal side of himself—to help him make up his mind. I knew that an American literature degree from an Austrian university didn’t qualify

me

for very much, but what did I

have

to do but look after my father—but lift what weight I could lift off my brother and my sisters whenever the weight needed lifting?

What we had all forgotten in the pre-Christmas decorations, in our frenzy over dealing with Chipper Dove, was that shape that had haunted us from the beginning. As in any fairy tale, just when you think you’re out of the woods, there is more to the woods than you thought; just when you think you’re out of the woods, it turns out you’re still

in

them.

How could we so quickly have forgotten the lesson of the King of Mice? How could we have put away that old dog of our childhood, our dear Sorrow, as neatly as Susie folded up her bear suit and said, “That’s it. That’s over. Now it’s a whole new ball game”?

There is a song the Viennese sing—it is one of their so-called

Heurigen

songs, the songs they sing to celebrate the first wine of the season. Typical of those people Freud understood so well, their songs are full of death wishes. The King of Mice himself, no doubt, once sang this little song.

Verkauft’s mei G’wand, I Fahr in Himmel.

Sell my old clothes, I’m off to heaven.

When Susie the bear took her friends back to the Village, Frank and Franny and Lilly and I called up good old room service and ordered the champagne. As we tasted the very slight sweetness of our revenge on Chipper Dove, our childhood appeared like a clear lake—behind us. We felt we were free of sorrow. But one of us must have been singing that song, even then. One of us was secretly humming the tune.

LIFE IS SERIOUS BUT ART IS FUN!

The King of Mice was dead, but—for one of us—the King of Mice was not forgotten.

I am not a poet. I was not even the writer in our family. Donald Justice would become Lilly’s literary hero: he replaced even that marvelous ending of

The Great Gatsby

, which Lilly read to us too often. Donald Justice has most eloquently posed the question that flies to the heart of my hotel-living family. As Mr. Justice asks,

How shall I speak of doom, and ours in special,

But as of something altogether common?

Add doom to the list, then. Especially in families, doom is “altogether common.” Sorrow floats; love, too; and—in the long run—doom. It floats, too.

The King of Mice Syndrome; the Last Hotel New Hampshire

Here is the epilogue; there always is one. In a world where love and sorrow float, there are many epilogues—and some of them go on and on. in a world where doom always muscles in, some of the epilogues are short.

“A dream is a

disguised

fulfillment of a

suppressed

wish,” Father announced to us over Easter dinner at Frank’s apartment in New York—Easter, 1965.

“You’re quoting Freud again, Pop,” Lilly told him.

“Which Freud?” Franny asked, by rote.

“Sigmund,” Frank answered. “From Chapter Four of

The Interpretation of Dreams

.”

I should have known the source, too, because Frank and I were taking turns reading to Father in the evening. Father had asked us to read all of Freud to him.

“So what did you dream about, Pop?” Franny asked him.

“The Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea,” Father said. His Seeing Eye dog spent every mealtime with her head in Father’s lap; every time Father reached for his napkin, he would deposit a morsel into the dog’s waiting mouth and the dog would raise her head—momentarily—allowing Father access to his napkin.

“You should

not

feed her at the table,” Lilly scolded Father, but we all liked the dog. She was a German shepherd with a particularly rich golden-brown color that liberally interrupted the black all over her body and dominated the tone of her gentle face; she was particularly long-faced and high-cheek-boned, so that her appearance was nothing like a Labrador retriever’s. Father had wanted to call her Freud, but we thought there was enough confusion among us concerning

which

Freud was meant—by this remark or that. A

third

Freud, we convinced Father, would have driven everyone crazy.

Lilly suggested we call the dog Jung.

“What? That traitor! That anti-Semite!” Frank protested. “Whoever heard of naming a

female

after

Jung

?” Frank asked. “That’s something only

Jung

would have thought of,” he said, fuming.

Lilly then suggested we call the dog Stanhope, because of Lilly’s fondness for the fourteenth floor; Father liked the idea of naming his first Seeing Eye dog after a hotel, but he said he preferred naming the dog after a hotel he really liked. We all agreed, then, that the dog would be called “Sacher.” Frau Sacher, after all, had been a woman.

Sacher’s only bad habit was putting her head in Father’s lap every time Father sat down to eat anything, but Father encouraged this—so it was really Father’s bad habit. Sacher was otherwise a model Seeing Eye dog. She did not attack other animals, thus dragging my father wildly out of control after her; she was especially smart about the habits of elevators—blocking the door from reclosing with her body until my father had entered or exited. Sacher barked at the doorman at the St. Moritz but was otherwise friendly, if a trifle aloof, with Father’s fellow pedestrians. These were the days before you had to clean up after your dog in New York City, so Father was spared that humiliating task—which would have been almost impossible for him, he realized. In fact, Father feared the passing of such a law years before anyone was talking about it. “I mean,” he’d say, “if Sacher shits in the middle of Central Park South, how am I supposed to

find

the crap? It’s bad enough to have to pick up dog shit, but if you can’t

see

it, it’s positively arduous. I won’t do it!” he would shout. “If some self-righteous citizen even

tries

to speak to me, even

suggests

that I am responsible for my dog’s messes, I think I’ll use the baseball bat!” But Father was safe—for a while. We wouldn’t be living in New York by the time they passed the dog shit law. As the weather got nice, Sacher and my father would walk, unaccompanied, between the Stanhope and Central Park South, and my father felt free to be blind to Sacher’s shitting.

At Frank’s, the dog slept on the rug between Father’s bed and mine, and I sometimes wondered, in my sleep, if it was Sacher I heard dreaming, or Father.

“So you dreamed about the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea,” Franny said to Father. “So what else is new?”

“No,” Father said. “It wasn’t one of the

old

dreams. I mean, your mother wasn’t there. We weren’t

young

again, or anything like that.”

“No man in a white dinner jacket, Daddy?” Lilly asked him.

“No, no,” Father said. “I was old. In the dream I was even older than I am now,” he said; he was forty-five. “In the dream,” Father said, “I was just walking along the beach with Sacher; we were just taking a stroll over the grounds—around the hotel,” he said.

“All around the

ruins

, you mean,” Franny said.

“Well,” Father said, slyly, “of course I couldn’t actually

see

if the Arbuthnot was still a ruin, but I had the feeling it was

restored

—I had the feeling it was all fixed up,” Father said, shoveling food off his plate and into his lap—and into Sacher. “It was a brand-new hotel,” Father said, impishly.

“And you

owned

it, I’ll bet,” Lilly said to him.

“You

did

say I could do

anything

, didn’t you, Frank?” Father asked.

“In the dream you

owned

the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea?” Frank asked him. “And it was all fixed up?”

“Open for business as usual, Pop?” Franny asked him.

“Business as usual,” Father said, nodding; Sacher nodded, too.

“Is

that

what you want to do?” I asked Father. “You want to own the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea?”

“Well,” Father said. “Of course we’d have to change the name.”

“Of course,” Franny said.

“The

third

Hotel New Hampshire!” Frank cried. “Lilly!” he shouted. “Just think of it!

Another

TV series!”

“I haven’t really been working on the first series,” Lilly said, worriedly.

Franny knelt beside Father; she put her hand on his knee; Sacher licked Franny’s fingers. “You want to do it

again

?” Franny asked Father. “You want to start all over again? You understand that you don’t

have

to.”

“But what

else

would I do, Franny?” he asked her, smiling. “It’s the

last

one—I promise you,” he said, addressing all of us. “If I can’t make the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea into something special, then I’ll throw in the towel.”

Franny looked at Frank and shrugged; I shrugged, too, and Lilly just rolled her eyes. Frank said, “Well, I guess it’s simple enough to inquire what it costs, and who owns it.”

“I don’t want to see him—if

he

still owns it,” Father said. “I don’t want to see the bastard.” Father was always pointing out to us the things he didn’t want to “see,” and we were usually restrained enough to resist pointing out to him that he couldn’t “see” anything.

Franny said she didn’t want to see the man in the white dinner jacket, either, and Lilly said she saw him all the time—in her sleep; Lilly said she was tired of seeing him.

It would be Frank and I who would rent a car and drive all the way to Maine; Frank would teach me how to drive along the way. We would see the ruin that was the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea again. We would note that ruins don’t change a lot: what capacity for change is in a ruin has usually been. exhausted in the considerable process of change undergone in order for the ruin to

become

a ruin. Once becoming a ruin, a ruin stays pretty much the same. We noted some more vandalism, but it’s not much fun vandalizing a ruin, we supposed, and so the whole place looked almost exactly as it had looked to us in the fall of 1946 when we had all come to the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea to watch Earl die.

We had no trouble recognizing the dock where old State o’Maine was shot, although that dock—and the surrounding docks—had been rebuilt, and there were a lot of new boats in the water. The Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea looked like a small ghost town, but what had once been a quaint fishing and lobstering village—alongside the hotel grounds—was now a scruffy little tourist town. There was a marina where you could rent boats and buy clam worms, and there was a rocky public beach within sight of the private beach belonging to the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea. Since no one was around to care, the “private” beach was hardly private anymore. Two families were having a picnic there when Frank and I visited the place; one of the families had arrived by boat, but the other family had driven right down to the beach in their car. They’d driven up the same “private” driveway that Frank and I had driven up, past the faded sign that still said: CLOSED FOR THE SEASON!

The chain that once had blocked that driveway had long ago been torn down and dragged away.

“It would cost a fortune to even make the place habitable,” Frank said.

“Provided they even want to sell it,” I said.

“Who in God’s name would want to

keep

it?” Frank asked.

It was at the realty office in Bath, Maine, that Frank and I found out that the man in the white dinner jacket still owned the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea—and he was still alive.

“You want to buy old Arbuthnot’s place!” the shocked realtor asked.

We were delighted to learn that there was an “old Arbuthnot.”

“I only hear from his lawyers,” the realtor said. “They’ve been trying to unload the place, for years. Old Arbuthnot lives in California,” the realtor told us, “but he’s got lawyers all over the country. The one I deal with most of the time is in New York.”

We thought, then, that it would simply be a matter of letting the New York lawyer know that we wanted it, but—back in New York—Arbuthnot’s lawyer told us that Arbuthnot wanted to see us.

“We’ll have to go to California,” Frank said. “Old Arbuthnot sounds as senile as one of the Hapsburgs, but he won’t sell the place unless he gets to

meet

us.”

“Jesus God,” Franny said. “That’s an expensive trip to make just to meet someone!”

Frank informed her that Arbuthnot was paying our way.

“He probably wants to laugh in your faces,” Franny told us.

“He probably wants to meet someone who’s crazier than

he

is,” Lilly said.

“I can’t believe I’m so lucky!” Father cried. “To imagine that it’s still available!” Frank and I saw no reason to describe the ruins—and the seedy new tourism surrounding his cherished Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea.

“He won’t

see

any of it, anyway,” Frank whispered.

And I am glad that Father never got the chance to see old Arbuthnot, a terminal resident of the Beverly Hills Hotel. When Frank and I arrived at the Los Angeles airport, we rented our second car of that week and drove ourselves to meet the aged Arbuthnot.

In a suite with its own palm garden, we found the old man with an attending nurse, an attending lawyer (this one was a California lawyer), and what would prove to be a fatal case of emphysema. He sat propped up in a fancy hospital bed—he sat breathing very carefully alongside a row of air-conditioners.

“I like L.A.,” Arbuthnot gasped. “Not so many Jews here as there are in New York. Or else I’ve finally gotten

immune

to Jews,” he added. Then he was flung off at a sharp angle on his hospital bed by a cough that seemed to attack him by surprise (and from the side); he sounded as if he were choking on a whole turkey leg—it seemed impossible he would recover, it seemed his persistent anti-Semitism would finally be the death of him (I’m sure that would have made Freud happy), but just as suddenly as the attack had seized him, the attack left him and he was calm. His nurse plumped up his pillows for him; his lawyer placed some important-looking documents upon the old man’s chest and produced a pen for old Arbuthnot to hold in his trembling hand.

“I’m dying,” Arbuthnot said to Frank and me, as if this hadn’t been obvious from our first glimpse of him. He wore white silk pajamas; he looked about one hundred years old; he couldn’t have weighed more than fifty pounds.

“They say they’re not Jews,” the lawyer told Arbuthnot, indicating Frank and me.

“Is

that

why you wanted to meet us?” Frank asked the old man. “You could have found that out over the phone.”

“I may be dying,” he said, “but I’m not selling out to the Jews.”

“My father,” I told Arbuthnot, “was a dear friend of Freud.”

“Not

the

Freud,” Frank said to Arbuthnot, but the old man had begun coughing again and he didn’t hear what Frank had to say.

“Freud?” Arbuthnot said, hacking and spewing. “

I

knew a Freud, too! He was a Jewish animal trainer. The Jews aren’t good with animals, though,” Arbuthnot confided to us. “Animals can tell, you know,” he said. “They can always sense anything funny about you,” he said. “This Freud

I

knew was a dumb Jewish animal trainer. He tried to train a bear, but the bear ate him!” Arbuthnot howled with delight—which brought on more coughing.

“A sort of anti-Semitic bear?” Frank asked, and Arbuthnot laughed so hard I thought his subsequent coughing would kill him.

“I was

trying

to kill him,” Frank said later.

“You must be crazy to want that place,” Arbuthnot told us. “I mean, don’t you know where

Maine

is? It’s nowhere! There’s no decent train service, and there’s no decent flying service. It’s a terrible place to drive to—it’s too far from

both

New York and Boston—and when you

do

get there, the water’s too cold and the bugs can bleed you to death in an hour. None of the really

class

sailors sail there anymore—I mean the sailors with money,” he said. “If you have a little money,” Arbuthnot said, “there’s absolutely nothing to spend it on in Maine! They don’t even have

whores

there.”

“We like it anyway,” Frank told him.

“They’re not Jews, are they?” Arbuthnot asked his lawyer.

“No,” the lawyer said.

“It’s hard to tell, looking at them,” Arbuthnot said. “I used to be able to spot a Jew at first glance,” he explained to us. “But I’m dying now,” he added.

“Too bad,” Frank said.

“Freud

wasn’t

eaten by a bear,” I told Arbuthnot.

“The Freud

I

knew was eaten by a bear,” Arbuthnot said.

“No,” said Frank, “the Freud you knew was a

hero

.”

“Not the Freud I knew,” old Arbuthnot argued, petulantly. His nurse caught some spittle dribbling off his chin and wiped him as absentmindedly as she might have dusted a table.

“The Freud we

both

know,” I said, “saved the Vienna State Opera.”

“Vienna!” Arbuthnot cried. “Vienna is full of Jews!” he yelled.

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