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.'