Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

place. Gone was her tart appeal and in its place was the sexless cynicism of some maiden aunts. She was shapeless and her hair was dyed a sort of bronze, so that her head resembled one of those copper scouring pads that you use on a pot. She did not remember me and was suspicious of my questions. Because I appeared to know so much about her past associates, she probably knew I was with the police.

The Hungarian singer had gone away -- another woman thrilled by his voice. The dream man had been taken away -- to an institution. His own dreams had turned to nightmares and he'd awakened the pension each night with his horrifying howls. His removal from the seedy premises, said Herr Theobald's sister, was almost simultaneous with the loss of the Grillparzer's B rating.

Herr Theobald was dead. He had dropped down clutching his heart in the hall, where he ventured one night to investigate what he thought was a prowler. It was only Duna, the malcontent bear, who was dressed in the dream man's pinstriped suit. Why Theobald's sister had dressed the bear in this fashion was not explained to me, but the shock of the sullen animal unicycling in the lunatic's left-behind clothes had been enough to scare Herr Theobald to death.

The man who could only walk on his hands had also fallen into the gravest trouble. His wristwatch snagged on a tine of an escalator, and he was suddenly unable to hop off; his necktie, which he rarely wore because it dragged on the ground when he walked on his hands, was drawn under the step-off grate at the end of the escalator -- where he was strangled. Behind him a line of people formed -- marching in place by taking one step back and allowing the escalator to carry them forward, then taking another step back. It was quite a while before anyone got up the nerve to step over him. The world has many unintentionally cruel mechanisms that are not designed for people who walk on their hands.

After that, Theobald's sister told me, the Pension Grillparzer went from Class C to much worse. As the burden of management fell more heavily on her, she had less time for Duna; the bear grew senile and indecent in his habits. Once he bullied a mailman down a marble staircase at such a ferocious pace that the man fell and broke his hip; the attack was reported and an old city ordinance forbidding unrestrained animals in places open to the public was enforced. Duna was outlawed at the Pension Grillparzer.

For a while, Theobald's sister kept the bear in a cage in the courtyard of the building, but he was taunted by dogs and children, and food (and worse) was dropped into his cage from the apartments that faced the courtyard. He grew unbearlike and devious-- only pretending to sleep -- and he ate most of someone's cat. Then he was poisoned twice and became afraid to eat anything in this perilous environment. There was no alternative but to donate him to the Schonbrunn Zoo, but there was even some doubt as to his acceptability. He was toothless and ill, perhaps contagious, and his long history of having been treated as a human being did not prepare him for the gentler routine of zoo life.

His outdoor sleeping quarters in the courtyard of the Grillparzer had inflamed his rheumatism, and even his one talent, unicycling, was irretrievable. When he first tried it in the zoo, he fell. Someone laughed. Once anyone laughed at something Duna did, Theobald's sister explained, Duna would never do that thing again. He became, at last, a kind of charity case at Schonbrunn, where he died a short two months after he'd taken up his new lodgings. In the opinion of Theobald's sister, Duna died of mortification-- the result of a rash that spread over his great chest, which then had to be shaved. A shaved bear, one zoo official said, is embarrassed to death.

In the cold courtyard of the building I looked in the bear's empty cage. The birds hadn't left a fruit seed, but in a corner of his cage was a looming mound of the bear's ossified droppings -- as void of life, and even odor, as the corpses captured by the holocaust at Pompeii. I couldn't help thinking of Robo; of the bear, there were more remains.

In the car I was further depressed to notice that not one kilometer had been added to the gauge, not one kilometer had been driven in secret. There was no one around to take liberties anymore.

"When we're a safe distance away from your precious Pension Grillparzer," my second wife said to me, "I'd like you to tell me why you brought me to such a shabby place."

"It's a long story," I admitted.

I was thinking I had noticed a curious lack of either enthusiasm or bitterness in the account of the world by Theobald's sister. There was in her story the flatness one associates with a storyteller who is accepting of unhappy endings, as if her life and her companions had never been exotic to her-- as if they had always been staging a ludicrous and doomed effort at reclassification.

The Pension Grillparzer (1976)

AUTHOR'S NOTES

Readers of The World According to Garp may remember that "The Pension Grillparzer" is T. S. Garp's first short story, and the first evidence in the novel of Garp's abilities as a young writer. Indeed, he is a very young writer when he is supposed to have written "Grillparzer" -- he is only 19. The late Henry Robbins, who was a dear friend and the editor of The World According to Garp, told me that the story was much too good for a 19-year-old to have written it.

I argued that I wanted to make a point about Garp, which is a point I have made about many American writers: the first thing they write is the best thing they ever write -- in Garp's case, it was all downhill after "Grillparzer." But Henry insisted that I had made "Grillparzer" seem too easy to write; it was Henry's suggestion that, for the credibility of the novel, I break up the story -- that I have Garp begin it and get stuck in it and put it aside. Garp takes up the story and finishes it only after an interval of several months; the death of a friend, a Viennese prostitute, is the real-life episode that informs the young author about the end of his story.

I agreed with Henry, and so "The Pension Grillparzer" was divided; readers who read it in the novel read it in two parts. I knew Henry was right, but I hated breaking up the story, which was originally published, two years before The World According to Garp, in Antaeus (Winter 1976); it won a Pushcart Prize -- the Best of the Small Presses -- but I suspect that most readers saw it first in Garp, in its divided form. That is why I wanted to publish it here -- for the first time, for many readers, whole; of one piece.

In the middle of the story, when Garp gets "stuck" and stops writing, Garp ponders the following: "But what did they mean? That dream and those desperate entertainers, and what would happen to them all -- everything had to connect. What sort of explanation would be natural? What sort of ending might make them all part of the same world?"

What made "The Pension Grillparzer" special to me (it is my favorite among my short stories) was both the grandmother's dream and the epilogue -- everything does "connect." The "ludicrous and doomed effort at reclassification" is a foreshadow of the "terminal cases" theme of the novel, which has its own epilogue -- I like epilogues, as anyone who's read my novels knows. The younger brother blown up in a history class, the innkeeper frightened to death by the bear "unicycling in the lunatic's left-behind clothes" -- the bear himself is "embarrassed to death" -- and especially the man who could only walk on his hands, strangled by his necktie on an escalator ... these calamities foreshadow some of the violent ends that my characters will meet, not only in Garp but in later novels; these are the unlikely disasters that many book reviewers have called my penchant for the bizarre.

But, according to Henry Robbins -- and I believed him; I believe him to this day -- the most bizarre element in The World According to Garp is that a 19-year-old could have written 'The Pension Grillparzer." Not one book reviewer ever made mention of that.

At the time I wrote "Grillparzer," I had already written three-and-a-half novels; I was 34. And I already knew I was a novelist, not a short-story writer; yet I never worked as hard on a short story, before or since, because I wanted the readers of The World According to Garp to know that T. S. Garp was a good writer.

OTHER PEOPLE'S DREAMS

Fred had no recollection of having had a dream life until his wife left him. Then he remembered some vague nightmares

from his childhood, and some specific, lustful dreams from what seemed to him to be the absurdly short period of time between his arrival at puberty and his marrying Gail (he had married young). The 10 dreamless years he had been married were wounds too tender for him to probe them very deeply, but he knew that in that time Gail had dreamed like a demon -- one adventure after another -- and he'd woken each morning feeling baffled and dull, searching her alert, nervous face for evidence of her nighttime secrets. She never told him her dreams, only that she had them -- and that she found it very peculiar that he didn't dream. "Either you do dream, Fred," Gail told him, "and your dreams are so sick that you prefer to forget them, or you're really dead. People who don't dream at all are quite dead."

In the last few years of their marriage, Fred found neither theory so farfetched.

After Gail left, he felt "quite dead." Even his girlfriend, who had been Gail's "last straw," couldn't revive him. He thought that everything that had happened to his marriage had been his own fault: Gail had appeared to be happy and faithful -- until he'd created some mess and she'd been forced to pay him back. Finally, after he had repeated himself too many times, she had given up on him. "Old fall-in-love Fred," she called him. He seemed to fall in love with someone almost once a year. Gail said: "I could possibly tolerate it, Fred, if you just went off and got laid, but why do you have to get so stupidly involved?"

He didn't know. After Gail's leaving, his girlfriend appeared so foolish, sexless and foul to him that he couldn't imagine what had inspired his last, alarming affair. Gail had abused him so much for this one that he was actually relieved when Gail was gone, but he missed the child -- they had just one child in 10 years, a nine-year-old boy named Nigel. They'd both felt their own names were so ordinary that they had stuck their poor son with this label. Nigel now lay in a considerable portion of Fred's fat heart like an arrested case of cancer. Fred could bear not seeing the boy (in fact, they hadn't gotten along together since Nigel was five), but he could not stand the thought of the boy's hating him, and he was sure Nigel hated him -- or, in time, would learn to. Gail had learned to.

Sometimes Fred thought that, if he'd only had dreams of his own, he wouldn't have had to act out his terrible love affairs with someone almost once a year.

For weeks after the settlement he couldn't sleep in the bed they'd shared for 10 years. Gail settled for cash and Nigel. Fred kept the house. He slept on the couch, bothered by restless nights of blurry discomfort -- too disjointed for dreams. He thrashed on the couch, his groaning disturbed the dog (he had settled for the dog, too), and his mouth in the morning was the mouth of a hangover -- though he hadn't been drinking. One night he imagined he was throwing up in a car; the passenger in the car was Mrs. Beal, and she was beating him with her purse while he retched and spilled over the steering wheel. "Get us home! Get us home!" Mrs. Beal cried at him. Fred didn't know then, of course, that he was having Mr. Beal's dream. Mr. Beal had passed out on Fred and Gail's couch many times; he had no doubt had that terrible dream there and had left it behind for the next troubled sleeper.

Fred simply gave up on the couch and sought the slim, hard bed in Nigel's room -- a child's captain's bed, with little drawers built under it for underwear and six-guns. The couch had given Fred a backache, but he was not ready to resume his life in the bed he'd shared with Gail.