The Hotel New Hampshire

'Earl!' said Susie. The husband, thinking Susie might attack him and his family, poked the lamp, threateningly, in Susie's face.

'Don't make the bear hostile!' Frank warned him, and the family retreated.

'Be careful, Susie,' Franny said.

'Murder,' murmured the New Hampshire woman.

'Something unspeakable,' her husband said.

'A knife,' the daughter said.

'It was just a fucking orgasm,' Freud said. 'Haven't you ever had one, for Christ's sake?' Freud blundered forward with his hand on Susie's back; he struck the door a blow with his baseball bat, then fumbled for the knob. 'Annie?' he called. I noticed Jolanta close behind Freud, like his larger shadow -- her fierce hands in her dark purse. Susie made a convincing snorfle at the base of the door.

'An orgasm?' said the woman from New Hampshire -- her husband automatically covered the daughter's ears.

'My God,' Franny would say later. 'They would bring their daughter to see a murder, but they wouldn't even let her hear about an orgasm. Americans sure are strange.'

Susie the bear shouldered the door, knocking Freud off balance. The end of his Louisville Slugger skidded along the hall floor, but Jolanta caught the old man and propped him up against the doorjamb, and Susie roared into the room. Screaming Annie was naked, except for her stockings and her garter belt; she was smoking a cigarette, and she leaned over the completely unmoving man on his back on the bed and blew smoke into his face; he didn't flinch, or cough, and he was naked except for his ankle-length dark green socks.

'Dead!' gasped the woman from New Hampshire.

'Tod?' whispered Freud. 'Somebody tell me!'

Jolanta took her hands out of her purse and sunk a fist in the man's groin. His knees snapped up all by themselves and he coughed; then he went flat again.

'He's not dead,' Jolanta said, and muscled her way out of the room.

'He just passed right out on me,' Screaming Annie said. She seemed surprised. But I would think, later, that there was no way you could keep both sane and conscious when you were deluded into thinking that Screaming Annie was coming. It was probably safer to pass out than to hang on and go home crazy.

'Is she a whore?' the husband asked, and this time it was the woman from New Hampshire who covered her daughter's ears; she tried to cover the girl's eyes, too.

'What are you, blind?' Freud asked. 'Of course she's a whore!'

'We're all whores,' Dark Inge said, coming from nowhere and hugging her mother -- glad to see she was all right. 'What's wrong with that?'

'Okay, okay,' Father said. 'Everyone back to bed!'

'These are your children?' the New Hampshire woman asked Father; she wasn't sure which of us to indicate with her sweep of the hand.

'Well, some of them are,' Father said, amiably.

'You should be ashamed,' the woman told him. 'Exposing children to this sordid life.'

I don't think it had occurred to Father

that we were being 'exposed' to anything particularly 'sordid.' Nor was the New Hampshire woman's tone of voice anything Father ever would have heard from my mother. But nonetheless my father seemed suddenly stricken by this accusation. Franny said later that she could see in the genuine bewilderment on his face -- and then the growing look of something as close to guilt as we would ever see in him -- that despite the sorrow Father's dreaming might cause us, we would always prefer him dreamy to guilty; we could accept him as being out of it, but we couldn't like him as much if he were truly a worrier, if he had been truly 'responsible' in the way that fathers are expected to be responsible.

'Lilly, you shouldn't be here, darling,' Father said to Lilly, turning her away from the door.

'I should think not,' said the husband from New Hampshire, now struggling to keep both his daughter's eyes and ears covered at the same time -- but unable to tear himself away from the scene.

'Frank, take Lilly to her room, please,' Father said, softly. 'Franny?' Father asked, 'are you okay, dear?'

'Sure,' Franny said.

'I'm sorry, Franny,' Father said, steering her down the hall. 'For everything,' he added.

'He's sorry!' said the woman from New Hampshire, facetiously. 'He exposes his children to such disgusting filth as this and he's sorry!' But Franny turned on her. We might criticize Father, but no one else could.