'What could they do?' Freud asked. 'What can those people ever do? They couldn't do anything to stop the sex, so they fucked around with a few fountains.'
Even the Vienna of Freud -- the other Freud -- was notorious for being unable to do anything to stop the sex, though this didn't stop the Victorian counterparts of Maria Theresa's Chastity Commission from trying. 'In those days,' Freud pointed out, admiringly, 'whores were allowed to make arrangements in the aisles of the Opera.'
'At intermissions,' Frank added, in case we didn't know.
Frank's favorite tour with Freud was the Imperial Vault -- the Kaisergruft in the catacombs of the Kapuzinerkirche. The Hapsburgs have been buried there since 1633. Maria Theresa is there, the old prude. But not her heart. The corpses in the catacombs are heartless -- their hearts are kept in another church; their hearts are to be found on another tour. 'History separates everything, eventually,' Freud would intone in the heartless tombs.
Goodbye, Maria Theresa -- and Franz Josef, and Elizabeth, and the unfortunate Maximilian of Mexico. And, of course, Frank's prize lies with them: the Hapsburg heir, poor Rudolf the suicide -- he's also there. Frank always got especially gloomy in the catacombs.
Franny and I got gloomiest when Freud directed us along Wipplingerstrasse to Futtergasse.
'Turn!' he'd cry, the baseball bat trembling.
We were in the Judenplatz, the old Jewish quarter of the city. It had been a kind of ghetto as long ago as the thirteenth century; the first expulsion of the Jews, there, had been in 1421. We knew only slightly more about the recent expulsion.
What was hard about being there with Freud was that this tour was not so visibly historical. Freud would call out to apartments that were no longer apartments. He would identify whole buildings that were no longer there. And the people he used to know there -- they weren't there, either. It was a tour of things we couldn't see, but Freud saw them still; he saw 1939, and before, when he'd last been in the Judenplatz with a working pair of eyes.
The day the New Hampshire couple and their child arrived, Freud had taken Lilly to the Judenplatz. I could tell because she was depressed when she came back. I had just taken the bags and the Americans to their rooms on the third floor, and I was depressed, too. I had been thinking all the way upstairs about Ernst describing the 'cow position' to Franny. The bags weren't especially heavy because I was imagining that they were Ernst, and I was carrying him up to the top of the Hotel New Hampshire, where I was going to drop him out a window on the fifth floor.
The woman from New Hampshire ran her hand briefly up the banister and said, 'Dust.'
Schraubenschlussel passed us on the landing of the second floor. He was smeared with grease from his fingertips to his bicepses; he had a coil of copper wire around his neck like a hangman's noose and in his arms he lugged an obviously heavy box-shaped thing that resembled a giant battery -- a battery too big for a Mercedes, I would recall, much later.
'Hi, Wrench,' I said, and he grunted past us; in his teeth he held, quite delicately -- for him -- some kind of glass-wrapped little fuse.
'The hotel's mechanic,' I explained, because it was the easiest thing to say.
'Not very clean,' said the woman from New Hampshire.
'Is there an automobile on the top floor?' her husband asked.
As we turned down the third-floor corridor, searching in the half-dark for the correct rooms, a door opened up on the fifth floor, the clamor of a kind of eleventh-hour typing reached us -- Fehlgeburt, perhaps, either bringing a manifesto to a close or writing her thesis on the romance that is at the heart of American literature -- and Arbeiter screamed down the stairwell.
'Compromise!' Arbeiter shrieked. 'You represent nothing so strongly as you represent compromise!'
'Each time is its own time!' Old Billig hollered back. Old Billig the radical was leaving for the day; he crossed the third-floor landing while I was still fumbling with the luggage and keys.
'You blow the way the wind blows, old man!' Arbeiter yelled. This was in German, of course, and I suppose -- for the Americans, who didn't understand German -- it might have seemed more ominous in that language than it was. I thought it was pretty ominous, and I understood it. 'One day, old man,' Arbeiter concluded, 'the wind's going to blow you away!'
Old Billig the radical stopped on the landing and yelled back up to Arbeiter. 'You're crazy!' he screamed. 'You'll kill us all! You have no patience!' he shouted.
And somewhere between the third and fifth floors, moving softly, her gentle figure generous with Schlagobers, the good Schwanger tried to soothe them both, trotting downstairs a few steps toward Old Billig, and talking in a whisper, trotting upstairs a few steps toward Arbeiter -- with whom she had to speak up a little.
'Shut up!' Arbeiter snapped at her. 'Go get pregnant again,' he said to her. 'Go get another abortion. Go get some Schlagobers,' he abused her.
'Animal!' Old Billig cried; he started back upstairs. 'It is possible to remain a gentleman, but not you!' he screamed up at Arbeiter. 'You are not even a humanist!'
'Please,' Schwanger was soothing. 'Bitte, bitte. ...'
'You want Schlagobers?' Arbeiter roared at her. 'I want Schlagobers running all over the Karntnerstrasse,' he said, crazily. 'I want Schlagobers stopping the traffic on the Ring. Schlagobers and blood,' he said. 'That's what you'll see: over everything. Oozing over the streets!' said Arbeiter. 'Schlagobers and blood.'
And I let the timid Americans from New Hampshire into their dusty rooms. Soon it would be dark, I knew, and the shouting matches upstairs would cease. And downstairs the groaning would start, the bed-rocking, the constant flushing of the bidets, the pacing of the bear -- policing the second floor -- and the baseball bat of Freud, whumping steadily, room to room.
Would the Americans go to the Opera? Would they return to see Jolanta muscling a brave drunk upstairs -- or rolling him down? Would someone be kneading Babette, like dough, in the lobby, where I played cards with Dark Inge and told her about the heroics of Junior Jones? The Black Arm of the Law made her happy. When she was 'old enough,' she said, she was going to make a bundle, then go visit her father and see for herself how bad it was for blacks in America.
And at what hour of the night would Screaming Annie's first fake orgasm send the daughter from New Hampshire scurrying into her parents' room through the adjoining door? Would they three huddle in one bed until morning -- overhearing the tired bargains made with Old Billig, the mean thudding of Jolanta wrecking someone?
Screaming Annie had told me what she would do to me if I ever touched Dark Inge.