The Hotel New Hampshire

'Deutschland!' Frank said. He led us through the Frankfurt airport to our connecting flight to Vienna, reading all the signs out loud, speaking amiably to all the foreigners.

'We're the foreigners,' Franny kept whispering.

'Guten Tag!' Frank hailed all the passing strangers.

'Those people were French, Frank,' Franny said. 'I'm sure of it.'

Father almost lost the passports, so we attached them with two stout rubber bands to Lilly's wrist; then I carried Lilly, who seemed exhausted from her tears.

We left Frankfurt at quarter to nine, or maybe quarter to ten, and arrived in Vienna about noon. It was a short, choppy flight in a smaller plane; Lilly saw some mountains and was frightened; Franny said she hoped it would be smoother weather, the next day, for Mother and Egg; Frank vomited twice.

'Say it in German, Frank,' Franny said, but Frank felt too terrible to answer her.

We had a day and a night and the next morning to get the Gasthaus Freud ready for Mother and Egg. Our flight had totaled about eight hours in the air -- about six or seven from Boston to Frankfurt, and another hour or so to Vienna. The flight that Mother and Egg were taking was supposed to leave Boston slightly later in the evening of the next day and fly to Zurich; their connecting flight, to Vienna, would take about an hour, and Boston to Zurich -- like our flight t

o Frankfurt -- was scheduled for about seven hours. But Mother and Egg -- and Sorrow -- landed short of Zurich. Less than six hours out of Boston, they struck the Atlantic Ocean a glancing blow -- off the coastline of that part of the continent called France. In my imagination, later (and illogically), it was some slight consolation to know that they did not fall in darkness, and to imagine that there might -- in their minds -- have been some hopefulness implied by the vision of solid ground in the distance {though they did not reach the ground). It is too unlikely to imagine that Egg was sleeping, although anyone would hope so; knowing Egg, he would have been wide-awake the whole way -- Sorrow jouncing on his knees. Egg would have had the window seat.

What went wrong, we were told, went wrong quickly; but surely there would have been time to blurt out some advice -- in some language. And time for Mother to kiss Egg, and squeeze him; time for Egg to ask, 'What?'

And though we had moved to the city of Freud, I must say that dreams are vastly overrated: my dream of Mother's death was inexact, and I would never dream it again. Her death -- by some considerable stretch of the imagination -- might have been initiated by the man in the white dinner jacket, but no pretty white sloop sailed her away. She shot from the sky to the bottom of the sea with her son beside her screaming, Sorrow hugged to his chest.

It was Sorrow, of course, that the rescue planes saw. Searching for the sunken wreckage, trying to spot the first debris upon the surface of the grey morning water, someone saw a dog swimming. Closer examination convinced the rescue crew that the dog was just another victim; there were no survivors, and how could the rescue crew have known that this dog was already dead? This knowledge of what led the rescue crew to the bodies came as no surprise to my surviving family. We had learned this fact of Sorrow, previously, from Frank: Sorrow floats.

It was Franny who said, later, that we must all watch out for whatever form Sorrow would take next; we must learn to recognize the different poses.

Frank was silent, pondering the responsibilities of resurrection -- always a source of mystery to him, and now a source of pain.

Father had to identify the bodies; he left us in Freud's care and travelled by train. Later, he wouldn't speak often of Mother or Egg; he was not a backward-looking man, and his need to care for us no doubt prevented him from such indulgent and dangerous reflection. No doubt it would have crossed his mind that this was what Freud wanted Mother to forgive my father for.

Lilly would weep, knowing all along that Fritz's Act would have been smaller and easier to live with -- all around.

And I? With Egg and Mother gone -- and Sorrow in an unknown pose, or in disguise -- I knew we had arrived in a foreign country.

8 Sorrow Floats

Ronda Ray, whose breathing first seduced me over an intercom -- whose warm, strong, heavy hands I can still feel (occasionally) in my sleep -- would never leave the first Hotel New Hampshire. She would remain faithful to Fritz's Act, and serve them well -- perhaps discovering, as she grew older, that waiting on midgets and making their beds were altogether preferable to the services she'd rendered to more fully grown adults. One day Fritz would write us that Ronda Ray had died -- 'in her sleep.' After losing Mother and Egg, no death would ever strike me as 'appropriate,' though Franny said that Ronda's was.

It was more appropriate, at least, than the unfortunate passing of Max Urick, who succumbed to life in the Hotel New Hampshire in a bathtub on the third floor. Perhaps Max never got over his irritation at having to give up the smaller bathroom equipment, and his cherished hideaway on the fourth floor, because I imagine him plagued by the sense, if not by the actual sound, of the midgets living over his head. I always thought it was probably the same bathtub where Egg attempted to conceal Sorrow that finally did in Max -- having come close to doing the job on Bitty Tuck. Fritz never explained which tub it was, just that it was on the third floor; Max had appeared to suffer a stroke while bathing -- he subsequently drowned. That an old sailor who'd come back from the deep so many times should end it all in a bathtub was a source of anguish to poor Mrs. Urick, who found Max's leaving so inappropriate.

'Four hundred and sixty-four,' Franny would go on saying, whenever we mentioned Max.

Mrs. Urick is still the cook for Fritz's Act today -- perhaps a testament to the food, and to the life, of plainness but goodness. One Christmas Lilly would send her a pretty handwritten scroll with these words from an anonymous poet, translated from the Anglo-Saxon: 'They who live humbly have angels from heaven to carry them courage and strength and belief.'

Amen.

Fritz of Fritz's Act surely had similar angels looking after him. He would retire in Dairy, making the Hotel New Hampshire his year-round home (when he no longer hit the road, and the winter circus circuit, with the younger midgets). Lilly would get sad whenever she thought of him, because if it had been Fritz's size that first impressed her, it was the vision of staying in Fritz's Hotel New Hampshire (instead of going to Vienna) that Lilly imagined whenever she thought of Fritz -- and Lilly would therefore imagine how all our lives might have been different if we had not lost Mother and Egg. No 'angels from heaven' had been on hand to save them.

But, of course, we had no such vision of the world when we first saw Vienna. 'Freud's Vienna,' as Frank would say -- and we knew which Freud he meant.

All over Vienna (in 1957) were the gaps between the buildings, were the buildings collapsed and airy, the buildings left as the bombs had left them. In some rubbled lots, often the perimeters of playgrounds abandoned by children, one had the feeling of unexploded bombs buried in the raked and orderly debris. Between the airport and the outer districts, we passed a Russian tank that had been firmly arranged -- in concrete -- as a kind of memorial. The tank's top hatch was sprouting flowers, its long barrel was draped with flags, its red star faded and speckled by birds. It was permanently parked in front of what looked like a post office, but our cab flew by too fast for us to be sure.

Sorrow floats, but we arrived in Vienna before our bad news arrived, and we were inclined toward a cautious optimism. The war damage was more contained as we approached the inner districts; on occasion, even the sun shone through the elaborate buildings -- and a row of stone cupids leaned off a roof over us, their bellies pockmarked by machine-gun fire. More people appeared in the streets, though the outer districts resembled one of those old sepia photographs taken at a time of day before everyone was up -- or after everyone had been killed.

'It's spooky,' Lilly ventured; out of fright, she had finally stopped crying.

'It's old,' Franny said.

'Wo ist die Gemutlichkeit?' Frank sang, cheerfully -- looking around for some.