'He's too loyal,' she said. 'We can't lose anyone that loyal. I am not so loyal,' she whispered. 'Look at me!' she cried. 'I'm telling you all this, aren't I?'
'And Old Billig?' I asked, winding down.
'He's not trustworthy,' Fehlgeburt said. 'He doesn't even know the plan. He's too slippery. He thinks of his own survival.'
'That's bad?' I asked her, brushing her hair back, off her streaked face.
'At this phase, that's bad,' Fehlgeburt said. And I realized what she was: a reader, only a reader. She read other people's stories just beautifully; she took direction; she followed the leader. Why I wanted to hear her read Moby-Dick was the same reason the radicals had made her the driver. We both knew she would do it; she wouldn't stop.
'Have we done everything?' Fehlgeburt asked me.
'What?' I said, and winced -- and would wince, forever, to hear that echo of Egg. Even from myself.
'Have we done everything, sexually?' Fehlgeburt asked. 'Was that it? Was that everything?'
I tried to remember. 'I think so,' I said. 'Do you want to do more?'
'Not especially,' she said. 'I just wanted to have done it all once,' she said. 'If we've done it all, you can go home -- if you want,' she added. She shrugged. It was not Mother's shrug, not Franny's, not even Jolanta's shrug. This was not quite a human movement; it was less a twitch than it was a kind of electrical pulsation, a mechanical lurch of her taut body, a dim signal. The dimmest, I thought. It was a nobody-home sign; it was an I'm-not-in, don't-call-me-I'll-call-you signal. It was a tick of a clock, or of a time bomb. Fehlgeburt's eyes blinked once at me; then she was asleep. I gathered my clothes. I saw she hadn't bothered to mark the spot where she stopped reading in Moby-Dick; I didn't bother to mark it, either.
It was after midnight when I crossed the Ringstrasse, walking from the Rathausplatz down the Dr. Karl Renner-Ring and into the Volksgarten. In the beer garden some students were shouting at each other in a friendly way; I probably knew some of them, but I didn't stop for a beer. I didn't want to talk about the art of this or that. I didn't want to have another conversation about The Alexandria Quartet -- about which was the best of those novels, and which was the worst, and why. I didn't want to hear about who benefited the most from their correspondence -- Henry Miller or Lawrence Durrell. I didn't even want to talk about Die Blechtrommel, which was the best thing there was to talk about perhaps ever. And I didn't want to have another conversation about East-West relations, about socialism and democracy, about the long-term effects of President Kennedy's assassination -- and, being an American, what did I think of the racial question? It was the end of the summer of 1964; I hadn't been in the United States since 1957, and I knew less about my country than some of the Viennese students knew. I also knew less about Vienna than any of them. I knew about my family, I knew about our whores, and our radicals; I was an expert on the Hotel New Hampshire and an amateur at everything else.
I walked all the way through the Heldenplatz -- the Plaza of Heroes -- and stood where thousands of cheering fascists had greeted Hitler, once. I thought that fanatics would always have an audience; all one might hope to influence was the size of the audience. I thought I must remember this perception, and test it against Frank, who would either take it over as his own perception, or revise it, or correct me. I wished I'd read as much as Frank; I wished I'd tried to grow as hard as Lilly. In fact, Lilly had sent off the efforts of her growth to some publisher in New York. She wasn't even going to tell us, but she had to borrow money from Franny for t
he postage.
'It's a novel,' Lilly said, sheepishly. 'It's a little autobiographical.'
'How little?' Frank had asked her.
'Well, it's really imaginative autobiography,' Lilly said.
'It's a lot autobiographical, you mean,' Franny said. 'Oh boy.'
'I can't wait,' Frank said. 'I bet I come off like a real loon.'
'No,' Lilly said. 'Everyone is a hero.'
'We're all heroes?' I asked.
'Well, you all are heroes, to me,' Lilly said. 'So in the book you are, too.'
'Even Father?' Franny asked.
'Well, he's the most imagined,' Lilly said.
And I thought that Father had to be the most imagined because he was the least real -- he was the least there (of any of us). Sometimes it seemed Father was less with us than Egg.
'What's the book called, dear?' Father had asked Lilly.
'Trying to Grow,' Lilly had admitted.
'What else?' Franny said.
'How far's it go?' Frank asked. 'I mean, where's it stop?'
'It's over with the plane crash,' Lilly said. 'That's the end.'
The end of reality, I thought: just short of the plane crash seemed like a perfectly good place to stop -- to me.