'It's just the candy fire,' Freud said. 'It smoked out the guests. Once we get the lobby right, the guests will pour in!'
'And the fucking will keep them awake all night, and the typewriters will wake them up in the morning,' said Susie the bear.
'A kind of bohemian hotel,' Frank said, optimistically.
'What do you know about bohemians, Frank?' Franny asked.
In Frank's room was a dressmaker's dummy, formerly the property of a prostitute who had kept a permanent room in the hotel. It was a stoutish dummy, upon which perched the chipped head of a mannequin Freud claimed had been stolen from one of the big department stores on the Karntnerstrasse. A pretty but pitted face with her wig askew.
'Perfect for all your costume changes, Frank,' Franny said. Frank sullenly hung his coat on it.
'Very funny,' he said.
Franny's room adjoined mine. We shared a bath with an ancient bathtub in it; the tub was deep enough to stew an ox in. The W.C. was down the hall and directly off the lobby. Only Father's room had its own bath and its own W.C. It appeared that Susie shared the bath Franny and I shared, although she could enter it
only through one of our rooms.
'Don't sweat it,' Susie said. 'I don't wash a whole lot.'
We could tell. The odor was not exactly bear, but it was acrid, salty, rich, and strong, and when she took her bear's head off, and we saw her dark, damp hair -- her pale, pockmarked face, and her haggard, nervous eyes -- we felt more comfortable with her appearance as a bear.
'What you see,' Susie said, 'are the ravishments of acne -- my teen-age misery. I am the original not-bad-if-you-put-a-bag-over-her-head girl.'
'Don't feel bad,' said Frank. 'I'm a homosexual. I'm not in for such a hot time as a teen-ager, either.'
'Well, at least you're attractive,' said Susie the bear. 'Your whole family is attractive,' she said, darting a mean look at us all. 'You may get discriminated against, but let me tell you: there's no discrimination quite like the Ugly Treatment. I was an ugly kid and I just get uglier, every fucking day.'
We couldn't help staring at her in the bear costume without the head; we wondered, of course, if Susie's own body was as burly as a bear's. And when we saw her later in the afternoon, sweating in her T-shirt and gym shorts, doing squats and knee bends against the wall of Freud's office -- warming up for her role when the radicals checked out for the day and the prostitutes came on at night -- we could see she was physically suited to her particular form of animal imitation.
'Pretty chunky, huh?' she said to me. Too many bananas, Iowa Bob might have said; and not enough road work.
But -- to be fair -- it was hard for Susie to go anywhere not dressed, and performing, as a bear. Exercise is difficult when dressed as a bear.
'I can't blow my cover or we're in trouble,' she said.
Because how could Freud ever keep order without her? Susie the bear was the enforcer. When the radicals were bothered by troublemakers from the Right, when there were violent shouting matches in the hall and on the staircase, when some new-wave fascist started screaming, 'Nothing is free!' -- when a small mob came to protest in the lobby, carrying the banner that said the Symposium on East-West Relations should move ... farther East -- it was at these times that Freud needed her, Susie said.
'Get out, you're making the bear hostile!' Freud would shout.
Sometimes it took a low growl and a short charge.
'It's funny,' Susie said. 'I'm not really so tough, but no one tries to fight a bear. All I have to do is grab someone and they roll into a ball and start moaning. I just sort of breathe on the bastards, I just kind of lay a little weight on them. No one fights back if you're a bear.'
Because of the radicals' gratitude for this bearish protection, there was really no problem telling the radicals to move upstairs. My father and Freud explained their case in midafternoon. Father offered me as a typewriter mover, and I began carrying the machines up to the empty fifth-floor rooms. There were a half-dozen typewriters and a mimeograph machine; the usual office supplies; a seeming excess of telephones. I got a little tired with the third or fourth desk, but I hadn't been doing my usual weight lifting -- while we were traveling -- and so I appreciated the exercise. I asked a couple of the younger radicals if they knew where I could get a set of barbells, but they seemed very suspicious -- that we were Americans -- and either they didn't understand English or they chose to speak their own language. There was a brief protest from an older radical, who struck up what appeared to be quite a lively argument with Freud, but Susie the bear started whining and rolling her head around the old man's ankles -- as if she were trying to blow her nose on the cuffs of his pants -- and he calmed down and climbed the stairs, even though he knew Susie wasn't a real bear.
'What are they writing?' Franny asked Susie. 'I mean, is it one of those newsletter kind of things, is it propaganda?'
'Why do they have so many phones?' I asked, because we hadn't heard the phones ringing, not once -- not all day.
'They make a lot of outgoing calls,' Susie said. 'I think they're into threatening phone calls. And I don't read their newsletters. I'm not into their politics.'
'But what are their politics?' Frank asked.
'To change fucking everything,' Susie said. 'To start again. They want to wipe the slate clean. They want a whole new ball game.'
'So do I,' said Frank. 'That sounds like a good idea.'
'They're scary,' said Lilly. 'They look right over you, and they don't see you when they're looking right at you.'