The Hotel New Hampshire

But these maneuverings to avoid

The touching of hands,

These shifts to keep the eyes employed

On objects more or less neutral

(As honor, for the time being, commands)

Will hardly prevent their downfall.

Stronger medicines are needed.

Already they find

None of their stratagems have succeeded,

Nor would have, no,

Not had their eyes been stricken blind,

Hands cut off at the elbow.

Stronger medicines were needed, indeed. Had our hands been cut off at the elbow, Franny and I would have touched each other with the stumps -- with whatever we had left, stricken blind or not.

But that afternoon in her room we were saved by Susie the bear.

'Something's up,' Susie said, shuffling in. Franny and I waited; we thought she meant us -- we thought she knew.

Lilly knew, of course. Somehow she must have.

'Writers know everything,' Lilly said once. 'Or they should. They ought to. Or they ought to shut up.'

'Lilly must have known from the beginning,' Franny said to me, long distance, the night we discovered 'Love's Stratagems.' It was not a good connection; there was crackling on the line -- as if Lilly were listening in. Or Frank were listening in -- Frank was, as I have said, born to the role of listening in on love.

'Something's up, you two,' Susie the bear repeated, menacingly. 'They can't find Fehlgeburt.'

'Who's "they'?" I asked.

'The porno king and his whole fucking gang,' Susie said. 'They're asking us if we've seen Fehlgeburt. And last night they were asking the whores.'

'Nobody has seen her?' I said, and there was the growingly familiar cold draft up the pants legs again, there was the whiff of dead air from the tombs holding the heartless Hapsburgs.

How many days had we waited for Father and Freud to bicker over finding a buyer for the Hotel New Hampshire before they blew the whistle on the would-be bombers? And how many nights had we wasted, arguing about whether we should tell the American Consulate, or the Embassy, and have them tell the police -- or whether we should just tell the Austrian police straightaway? When you're in love with your sister, you lose a lot of perspective on the real world. The goddamn Welt, as Frank would say.

Frank asked me, 'What floor does Fehlgeburt live on? I mean, you've seen her place. How high up is she?'

Lilly, the writer, tuned right in on the question, but it didn't make sense to me -- yet. 'It's the first floor,' I said to Frank, 'it's just one flight up.'

'Not high enough,' Lilly said, and then I got it. Not high enough to jump out the window, is what she meant. If Fehlgeburt had at last decided not to keep passing the open windows, she would have to have found another way.

'That's it,' Frank said, taking my arm. 'If she's pulled a King of Mice, she's probably still there.'

It was more than a little shortness of breath I felt, crossing the Plaza of Heroes and heading up the Ring toward the Rathaus; that's a long way for a wind sprint, but I was in shape. I felt a little out of breath, there can be no doubt of that, but I felt a lot guilty -- though it couldn't have been simply me; I couldn't even have been Fehlgeburt's main reason to stop passing the open windows. And there was no evidence, they said later, that she had done much of anything after I'd gone. Maybe she'd read a little more Moby-Dick, because the police were very thorough and even noted where she'd marked her place. And I know, of course, that the place she'd stopped reading was unmarked when I left. Curiously, she'd marked it just where she had stopped when she'd been reading to me -- as if she had reread that entire evening before adopting the open-window policy. Fehlgeburt's form of open-window policy had been a neat little gun I never knew about. The suicide note was simple and addressed to no one, but I knew it was meant for me.

The night you

saw Schwanger