Sorrow floats; seven years in a place you hate is a long time. At least, I felt, Franny was safe; that was always the main thing. Franny was in limbo. She was taking it easy, marking time with Susie the bear -- and so I felt comfortable treading water, too.
At the university, Lilly and I would major in American literature (Fehlgeburt would be so pleased). Lilly majored in it, of course, because she wanted to be a writer -- she wanted to grow. I majored in it as yet another indirect way of courting the aloof Miss Miscarriage; it seemed the most romantic thing to do. Franny would major in world drama -- she was always the heavyweight among us; we would never catch up. And Frank took Schwanger's motherly and radical advice; Frank majored in economics. Thinking of Father and Freud, we all realized someone ought to. And Frank would be the one to save us, in time, so we would all be grateful to economics. Frank actually had a dual major, although the university would give him only a degree in economics. I guess I could say that Frank minored in world religions. 'Know thine enemy,' Frank would say, smiling.
For seven years we all floated. We learned German, but we spoke only our native language among ourselves. We learned literature, drama, economy, religion, but the sight of Freud's baseball bat could break our hearts for the land of baseball (though none of us was much interested in the game, that Louisville Slugger could bring tears to our eyes). We learned from the whores that, outside the Inner City, the Mariahilfer Strasse was the most promising hunting-ground for ladies of the night. And every whore spoke of getting out of the business if she was ever demoted to the districts past the Westbahnhof, to the Kaffee Eden, to the one-hundred-Schilling standing fucks in the Gaudenzdorfer Gurtel. We learned from the radicals that prostitution wasn't even officially legal -- as we had thought -- that there were registered whores who played by the rules, got their medical checkups, trafficked in the right districts, and that there were 'pirates' who never registered, or who turned in a Buchl (a license) but continued to practice the profession: that there were almost a thousand registered whores in the city in the early 1960s; that decadence was increasing at the necessary rate for the revolution.
Actually what revolution was supposed to take place we never learned. I don't know if all the radicals were sure, either.
'Got your Buchl?' we children would ask each other, going to school -- and, later, going to the university.
That, and -- 'Keep passing the open windows': the refrain from our King of Mice song.
Our father seemed to have lost his character when our mother was lost to him. In seven years, I believe, he grew to be more of a presence and less of a person -- for us children. He was affectionate; he could even be sentimental. But he seemed as lost to us (as a father) as Mother and Egg, and I think we sensed that he would need to endure some more concrete suffering before he would gain his character back -- before he could actually become a character again: in the way Egg had been a character, in the way Iowa Bob had been one. I sometimes thought that Father was even less of a character than Freud. For seven years we missed our father, as if he had been on that plane. We were waiting for the hero in him to take shape, and perhaps doubting its final form -- for with Freud as a model, one had to doubt my father's vision.
In seven years I would be twenty-two; Lilly, trying to grow and grow, would grow to be eighteen. Franny would be twenty-three -- with Chipper Dove still 'the first,' and Susie the bear her one-and-only. Frank, at twenty-four, grew a beard. It was almost as embarrassing as Lilly's wanting to be a writer.
Moby-Dick would sink the Pequod and only Ishmael would survive, again and again, to tell his tale to Fehlgeburt, who told it to us. In my years at the university, I used to press upon Fehlgeburt my desire to hear her read Moby-Dick aloud to me. 'I can never read this book by myself,' I begged her. 'I have to hear it from you.'
And that, at last, provided me with the entrance to Fehlgeburt's cramped, desultory room behind the Rathaus, near the university. She would read to me in the evenings, and I would try to coax out of her why some of the radicals chose to spend the night in the Hotel New Hampshire.
'You know,' Fehlgeburt would tell me, 'the single ingredient in American literature that distinguishes it from other literatures of the world is a kind of giddy, illogical hopefulness. It is quite technically sophisticated while remaining ideologically naive,' Fehlgeburt told me, on one of our walks to her room. Frank would eventually take the hint, and no longer accompany us -- though this took him about five years. And the evening Fehlgeburt told me that American literature was 'quite technically sophisticated while remaining ideologically naive' was not the evening I first tried to kiss her. After the line 'ideologically naive,' I think a kiss would have seemed out of place.
The night I first kissed Fehlgeburt we were in her room. She had just read that part when Ahab refuses to help the captain of the Rachel search for the lost son. Fehlgeburt had no furniture in her room; there were too many books, and a mattress on the floor -- a mattress for a single bed -- and a single reading lamp, also on the floor. It was a cheerless place, as dry and as crowded as a dictionary, as lifeless as Ernst's logic, an
d I leaned across the uncomfortable bed and kissed Fehlgeburt on the mouth. 'Don't,' she said, but I kept kissing her until she kissed me back. 'You should go,' she said, lying down on her back and pulling me on top of her.
'Now?' I said.
'No, now it is not necessary to go,' she said. Sitting up, she started to undress; she did it the way she usually marked her place in Moby-Dick -- uninterestedly.
'I should go after?' I asked, undressing myself.
'If you want,' she said. 'I mean you should go from the Hotel New Hampshire. You and your family. Leave,' she said. 'Leave before the fall season.'
'What fall season?' I asked her, completely naked now. I was thinking about Junior Jones's fall season with the Cleveland Browns.
'The Opera season,' Fehlgeburt said, naked herself -- at last. She was as thin as a novella; she was no bigger than some of the shortest stories she had ever read to Lilly. It was as if all the books in her room had been feeding on her, had consumed -- not nourished -- her.
'The Opera season will start in the fall,' Fehlgeburt said, 'and you and your family must leave the Hotel New Hampshire by then. Promise me,' she said, halting me from moving farther up her gaunt body.
'Why?' I asked.
'Please leave,' she said. When I entered her, I thought it was the sex that brought her tears on, but it was something else.
'Am I the first?' I asked. Fehlgeburt was twenty-nine.
'First and last,' she said, crying.
'Do you have anything to protect you?' I asked, inside her. 'I mean, you know, so you don't get schwanger?'
'It doesn't matter,' she said, in Frank's irritating fashion.
'Why?' I asked, trying to move cautiously.
'Because I'll be dead before the baby's born,' she said. I pulled out. I sat her up beside me, but she -- with surprising strength -- pulled me back on top of her; she took me in her hand and put me back inside her. 'Come on,' she said, impatiently -- but it was not the impatience of desire. It was something else.
'Fuck me,' she said, flatly. 'Then stay the night, or go home. I don't care. Just leave the Hotel New Hampshire, please leave it -- please make sure Lilly, especially, leaves it,' she begged me. Then she cried harder and lost what slight interest she'd ever had in the sex. I lay still inside her, growing smaller. I felt cold -- I felt the draft of coldness from under the ground, like the coldness I remembered feeling when Frank first read to us from Ernst's pornography.
'What are they doing on the fifth floor at night?' I asked Fehlgeburt, who bit into my shoulder, and shook her head, her eyes closed tightly in a violent squint. 'What are they planning?' I asked her. I grew so small I slipped completely outside of her. I felt her shaking and I shook, too.