you didn't see
me. I have a
gun, too! 'So
we beat on ...'
Fehlgeburt concluded, quoting Lilly's favorite ending.
I never actually saw Fehlgeburt. I waited in the hall outside her door -- for Frank. Frank was not in such good shape and it took him a while to meet me outside Fehlgeburt's room. Her room had a private entrance up a back staircase that people in the old apartment house used only when they were bringing out their garbage and trash. I suppose they thought the smell was from someone's garbage and trash. Frank and I didn't even open her door. The smell outside her door was already worse than Sorrow ever smelled to us.
'I told you, I told you all,' Father said. 'We're at the turning point. Are we ready?' We could see that he didn't really know what to do.
Frank had returned Lilly's contract to New York. As her 'agent,' he had said, he could not accept so uncommitted an offer for what was clearly a work of genius -- 'genius still blooming,' Frank added, though he'd not read Trying to Grow; not yet. Frank pointed out that Lilly was only eighteen. 'She's got a lot of growing to do, still,' he concluded. Any publisher would do well to get into the gargantuan building of literature that Lilly was going to construct (according to Frank) -- 'on the ground floor.'
Frank asked for fifteen thousand dollars -- and another fifteen thousand dollars was to be promised, for advertising.
'Let's not let a little economics stand between us,' Frank reasoned.
'If we know Fehlgeburt is dead,' Franny reasoned, 'then the radicals are going to know it, too.'
'It takes just a sniff,' Frank said, but I didn't say anything.
'I've almost got a buyer,' Freud said.
'Someone wants the hotel?' Franny asked.
'They want to convert it to offices,' Freud said.
'But Fehlgeburt is dead,' Father said. 'Now we have to tell the police -- tell them everything.'
'Tell them tonight,' Frank said.
'Tell the Americans,' Freud said, 'and tell them tomorrow. Tell the whores tonight.'
'Yes, warn the whores tonight,' Father agreed.
'Then in the morning, early,' Frank said, 'we'll go to the American Consulate -- or the Embassy. Which is it?'
I realized I didn't know which was for what, or who was for whom. We realized Father didn't know, either. 'Well, there are a number of us, after all,' Father said, sheepishly. 'Some of us can tell the Consulate, some of us can tell the ambassador.' It was apparent to me, then, how little any of us had really mastered about living abroad: we didn't even know if the American Embassy and the American Consulate were in the same building -- for all we knew, a consulate and an embassy might be the same thing. It was apparent to me, then, what the seven years had done to Father: he had lost the decisiveness he must have had that night in Dairy, New Hampshire, when he took my mother walking in Elliot Park and snowed her with his vision of converting the Thompson Female Seminary to a hotel. First he'd lost Earl -- the provider of his education. And when he lost Iowa Bob, he lost Iowa Bob's instincts, too. Iowa Bob was a man trained to pounce on a loose ball -- valuable instinct, especially in the hotel business. And now I could see what sorrow had cost Father.
'His marbles,' Franny would say later.
'He wasn't playing with a full deck of cards,' Frank would say.
'It's going to be okay, Pop,' Franny felt moved to tell him that afternoon in the former Gasthaus Freud.
'Sure, Dad,' said Frank. 'We're home free!'
'I'm going to make millions, Daddy,' Lilly said.
'Let's take a walk, Pop,' I said to him.
'Who'll tell the whores?' he asked, bewilderedly.
'Tell one, you've told them all,' Franny said.
'No,' said Freud. 'Sometimes they're secretive with each other. I'll tell Babette,' Freud said. Babette was Freud's favorite.