'Good for Frank,' I said. I was still trembling; I had been looking for a prostitute and had found my sister. She wouldn't let go of me, either.
'Where were you?' Franny asked me; she pushed my hair back.
'With Fehlgeburt,' I said, sheepishly. I would never lie to Franny.
Franny frowned. 'Well, how was it?' she asked, still touching me -- but like a sister.
'Not so great,' I said. I looked away from Franny. 'Awful,' I added.
Franny put her arms around me and kissed me. She meant to kiss me on the cheek (like a sister), but I turned toward her, though I was trying to turn away, and our lips met. And that was it, that was all it took. That was, the end of the summer of 1964; suddenly it was autumn. I was twenty-two, Franny was twenty-three. We kissed a long time. There was nothing to say. She was not a lesbian, she still wrote to Junior Jones -- and to Chipper Dove -- and I had never been happy with another woman; not ever; not yet. We stayed out on the street, out of the light cast by the neon, so that no one in the Hotel New Hampshire could see us. We had to break up our kissing when a customer of Jolanta's came staggering out of the hotel, and we broke it up again when we heard Screaming Annie. In a little while her dazed customer came out, but Franny and I still stayed on the Krugerstrasse. Later, Babette went home. Then Jolanta went home, taking Dark Inge with her. Screaming Annie came out and back, out and back, like the tide. Old Billig the whore went across the street to the Kaffee Mowatt and dozed on a table. I walked Franny up to the Karntnerstrasse, and down to the Opera. 'You think of me too much,' Franny started to say, but she didn't bother to finish. We kissed some more. The Opera was so big beside us.
'They're going to blow it up,' I whispered to my sister. 'The Opera -- they're going to blow it up.' She let me hold her. 'I love you terribly much,' I told her.
'I love you, too, damn it,' Franny said.
Although the weather was feeling like fall, it was possible for us to stand there, guarding the Opera, until the light came up and the real people came out to go to work. There was no place we could go, anyway -- and absolutely nothing, we knew, that we should do.
'Keep passing the open windows,' we whispered to each other.
When we finally went back to the Hotel New Hampshire, the Opera was still standing there -- safe. Safe for a while, anyway, I thought.
'Safer than we are,' I told Franny. 'Safer than love.'
'Let me tell you, kid,' Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. 'Everything's safer than love.'
10 A Night at the Opera:
Schlagobers and Blood
'Children, children,' Father said to us, 'we must be very careful. I think this is the turning point, kids,' our father said, as if we were still eight, nine, ten, and so forth, and he was telling us about meeting Mother at the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea -- that night they first saw Freud, with State o' Maine.
'There's always a turning point,' Frank said, philosophically.
'Okay, supposing there is,' Franny said, impatiently, 'but what is this particular turning point?'
'Yeah,' said Susie the bear, looking Franny over very carefully; Susie was the only one who'd noticed that Franny and I were out all night. Franny had told her we'd gone to a party near the university with some people Susie didn't know. And what could be safer than having your brother, and a weight lifter, for an escort? Susie didn't like parties, anyway; if she went as a bear, there was no one she could talk to, and if she didn't go as a bear, no one seemed interested in talking to her. She looked sulky and cross. 'There's a lot of shit to deal with in a hurry, as I see it,' said Susie the bear.
'Exactly,' Father said. 'That's the typical turning-point situation.'
'We can't blow this one,' Freud said. 'I don't think I got many more hotels left in me.' Which might be a good thing, I thought, trying to keep my eyes off Franny. We were all in Frank's room, the conference room -- as if the dressmaker's dummy were a soothing presence, were a silent ghost of Mother or Egg or Iowa Bob; somehow the dummy was supposed to radiate signals and we were supposed to catch the signals (according to Frank).
'How much can we get for the novel, Frank?' Father asked.
'It's Lilly's book,' Franny said. 'It's not our book.'
'In a way, it is,' Lilly said.
'Precisely,' Frank said, 'and the way I understand publishing, it's out of her hands now. Now is where we either get taken or we make a killing.'
'It's just about growing up,' Lilly said. 'I'm sort of surprised they're interested.'
'They're only five thousand dollars interested, Lilly,' Franny said.
'We need fifteen or twenty thousand to leave,' Father said. 'If we're going to have a chance to do anything with it, back home,' he added.
'Don't forget: we'll get something for this place,' Freud said, defensively.
'Not after we blow the whistle on the fucking bombers,' said Susie the bear.