'And look at me,' Susie the bear used to say. 'Why didn't he mention some of the world's great women? If you ask me,' Susie used to say, 'Freud's a little suspect.'
'Which Freud, Susie?' Franny would tease her.
'Either one,' Susie the bear used to say. 'Take your pick. One of them carried a baseball bat, one of them had that thing on his lip.'
'That was cancer, Susie,' Frank pointed out, rather stiffly.
'Sure,' said Susie the bear, 'but Freud called it "this thing on my lip." He didn't call cancer cancer, but he called everyone else repressed.'
'You're too hard on Freud, Susie,' Franny told her.
'He's a man, isn't he?' Susie said.
'You're too hard on men, Susie,' Franny told her.
'That's right, Susie,' Frank said. 'You ought to try one!'
'How about you, Frank?' Susie asked him, and Frank blushed.
'Well,' Frank stammered, 'that's not the way I go -- to be perfectly frank.'
'I think there's just someone else inside you, Susie,' Lilly said. 'There's someone else inside you who wants to get out.'
'Oh boy,' Franny groaned. 'Maybe there's a bear inside her that wants to get out!'
'Maybe there's a man inside her!' Frank suggested.
'Maybe just a nice woman is inside you, Susie,' Lilly said. Lilly, the writer, would always try to see the heroes in us all.
That night shortly before Christmas, 1964, I painfully inched my way along Central Park South; I started thinking about Susie the bear, and I remembered another photograph of Freud -- Sigmund Freud -- that I was fond of. In this one, Freud is eighty; in three years he would be dead. He is sitting at his desk at 19 Berggasse; it is 1936 and the Nazis would soon make him abandon his old study in his old apartment -- and his old city, Vienna. In this photograph, a pair of no-nonsense eyeglasses are seriously perched on the genital formation of Freud's nose. He is not looking at the camera -- he is eighty years old, and he hasn't much time; he is looking at his work, not wasting his time with us. Someone is looking at us in this photograph, however. It is Freud's pet dog, his chow named Jo-fi. A chow somewhat resembles a mutant lion; and Freud's chow has that glazed look of dogs who always stare stupidly into the camera. Sorrow used to do that; when he was stuffed, of course, Sorrow stared into the camera every time. And old Dr. Freud's little sorrowful dog is there in the photograph to tell us what's going to happen next; we might also recognize sorrow in the fragility of the knickknacks that are virtually crowding Freud out of his study, off 19 Berggasse and out of Vienna (the city he hated, the city that hated him). The Nazis would stick a swastika on his door; that damn city never liked him. And on June 4, 1938, the eighty-two-year-old Freud arrived in London; he had a year left to live -- in a foreign country. Our Freud, at the time, was one summer away from getting fed up with Earl; he would return to Vienna at the time when all those repressed suicides of the other Freud's day were turning into murderers. Frank has shown me an essay by a professor of history at the University of Vienna -- a very wise man named Friedrich Heer. And that's just what Heer says about the Viennese society of Freud's time (and this may be true of either Freud's time, I think): 'They were suicides about to become murderers.' They were all Fehlgeburts, trying hard to become Arbeiters; they were all Schraubenschlussels, admiring a pornographer.
They were ready to follow the instructions of a pornographer's dream.
'Hitler, you know,' Frank loves to remind me, 'had a rabid dread of syphilis. This is ironic,' Frank points out, in his tedious way, 'when you remind yourself that Hitler came from a country where prostitution has always thrived.'
It thrives in New York, too, you know. And one winter night I stood at the corner of Central Park South and Seventh Avenue, looking into the darkness downtown; I knew the whores were down there. My own sex tingled with pain from Franny's inspired efforts to save me -- to save us both -- and I knew, at last, that I was safe from them; I was safe from both extremes, safe from Franny and safe from the whores.
A car took the corner at Seventh Avenue and Central Park South a little too fast; it was after midnight and this fast-moving car was the only car I could see moving on either street. A lot of people were in the car; they were singing along with a song on the radio. The radio was so loud that I could hear a very clear snatch of the song, even with the
windows closed against the winter night. The song was not a Christmas carol, and it struck me as inappropriate to the decorations all over the city of New York, but Christmas decorations are seasonal and the song I heard just a snatch of was one of those universally bleeding-heart kind of Country and Western songs. Some trite-but-true thing was being tritely but truthfully expressed. I have been listening, for the rest of my life, for that song, but whenever I think I'm hearing it again, something strikes me as not quite the same. Franny teases me by telling me that I must have heard the Country and Western song called 'Heaven's Just a Sin Away.' And indeed, that one would do; almost any song like that would suffice.
There was just this snatch of a song, the Christmas decorations, the winter weather, my painful private parts -- and my great feeling of relief, that I was free to live my life now -- and the car that was moving too fast tore by me. When I started across Seventh Avenue, when it looked safe to cross, I looked up and saw the couple coming toward me. They were walking on Central Park South in the direction of the Plaza -- they were headed west to east -- and it was inevitable, I would later think, that we should have met in the middle of Seventh Avenue on the very night of Franny's and my own release. They were a slightly drunk couple, I think -- or at least the young woman was, and the way she leaned on the man made him weave a little, too. The woman was younger than the man; in 1964, at least, we would have called her a girl. She was laughing, hanging on her older boyfriend's arm; he looked about my age -- actually he was a little older. He would have been in his late twenties on this night in 1964. The girl's laughter was as sharp and as splintering of the frigid night air as the sound of very thin icicles breaking away from the eaves of a house encased in winter. I was in a really good mood, of course, and although there was something too educated and insufficiently visceral in the girl's cold, tingling laughter -- and although my balls ached and my cock stung -- I looked up at this handsome couple and smiled.
We had no trouble recognizing each other -- the man and I. I could never forget the quality of the quarterback in his face, though I had not seen him since that Halloween night on the footpath the football players always used -- and everyone else would have been well advised to let them use it, to let them have it for themselves. Some days when I was lifting weights, I could still hear him say, 'Hey, kid. Your sister's got the nicest ass at this school. Is she banging anybody?'
'Yes, she's banging me,' I could have told him that night on Seventh Avenue. But I didn't say anything to him. I just stopped and stood in front of him, until I was sure he knew who I was. He hadn't changed; he looked almost exactly as he'd always looked, to me. And although I thought I had changed -- I knew the weight lifting had at least changed my body -- I think that Franny's constant correspondence with him must have kept our family close to Chipper Dove's memory (if not close to his heart).
Chipper Dove stopped in the middle of Seventh Avenue, too. After a second or two he said, softly, 'Well, look who's here.'
Everything is a fairy tale.
I looked at Chipper Dove's girl friend and said, 'Watch out he doesn't rape you.'
Chipper Dove's girl friend laughed -- that high-strung, overstrenuous laugh like breaking ice, that laugh of little icicles shattering. Dove laughed a little bit with her. The three of us stayed in the middle of Seventh Avenue; a taxi heading downtown and turning off Central Park South almost killed us, but only the girl friend flinched -- Chipper Dove and I didn't move.
'Hey, we're in the middle of the street, you know,' the girl said. She was a lot younger than he was, I noticed. She skipped to the east side of Seventh Avenue and waited for us, but we didn't move.
'I've enjoyed hearing from Franny,' Dove said.