The Hotel New Hampshire

ng sympathy bomb!'

Franny later said that she knew, immediately: Father was blind. It was not just because of where he was standing when the car blew up, or the glass that was blasted into his face as he stood at the revolving door; it was not all the blood in his eyes that Franny saw when she wiped his face enough to see what was wrong with him. 'I knew somehow,' she said. 'I mean, before I saw his eyes. I always knew he was as blind as Freud, or he would be. I knew he would be,' Franny said.

'Auf Wiedersehen, Freud!' Father was crying.

'Hold still, Daddy,' I heard Lilly saying to Father.

'Yes, hold still, Pop,' Franny said.

Frank had run up the Krugerstrasse to the Karntnerstrasse, and around the corner up to the Opera. He had to see, of course, if the sympathy bomb had responded -- but Freud had possessed the vision to see that the Mercedes parked in front of the Hotel New Hampshire was too far from sympathy to make the Opera respond. And Schwanger must have just kept walking. Or maybe she decided simply to stay and watch the end of the opera; maybe it was one she liked. Maybe she wanted to be there, watching them all at the curtain call, taking their last bows above the unexploded bomb.

Frank said later that when he ran out of the Hotel New Hampshire to go see if the Opera was safe, he noticed that Arbeiter was a very vivid magenta color, that his fingers were still moving -- or perhaps just twitching -- and that he seemed to be kicking his feet. Lilly told me later that while Frank was gone -- Arbeiter turned from magenta to blue. 'A slate-blue color,' Lilly, the writer, said. 'The color of the ocean on a cloudy day.' And by the time Frank got back from seeing if the Opera was safe, Franny told me that Arbeiter was completely motionless and a dead-white color -- the color was all gone from his face. 'He was the color of a pearl,' Lilly said. He was dead. I had crushed him.

'You can let him go now,' Franny finally had to tell me. 'It's okay, it's going to be okay,' she whispered to me, because she knew how I liked whispering. She kissed my face, and then I let Arbeiter go.

I have not felt the same about weight lifting since. I still do it, but I'm very low-key about the lifting now; I don't like to push myself. A little light lifting, just enough to make me start feeling good; I don't like to strain, not anymore.

The authorities told us that Schraubenschlussel's 'sympathy bomb' might even have worked if the car had been closer. The bomb authorities also implied that any explosion in the area might have set the sympathy bomb off at any time; I guess old Schraubenschlussel hadn't been as exact as he thought he was. A lot of nonsense was written about what the radicals had meant. An unbelievable amount of garbage would be written about the 'statement' they had been trying to make. And there wasn't enough about Freud. His blindness was noted, in passing; and that he had been in one of the camps. There was absolutely nothing about the summer of 1939, about State o' Maine and the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea, about dreaming -- or about the other Freud, and what he might have had to say about all this. There was a lot of idiocy about the politics of what had happened.

'Politics are always idiotic!' as Iowa Bob would have said.

And there was not enough about Fehlgeburt, how she could break your heart the way she read the ending of The Great Gatsby. They acknowledged that my father was a hero, of course. They seemed polite about the reputation that our second Hotel New Hampshire had enjoyed -- 'in its prime,' as Frank would refer to those sordid days.

When Father got out of the hospital, we gave him a present. Franny had written Junior Jones for it. Junior Jones had provided us with baseballs for seven years, so Franny knew that Junior could be counted on to find Father a new baseball bat. A Louisville Slugger all his own. He would need it, of course. And Father seemed touched by our present -- by Franny's thoughtfulness, really, because the bat was Franny's idea. I think Father must have cried a little when he first reached out his hands and we placed the bat in them, and he felt what it was he held. We couldn't see if he cried, however, because the bandages were still on his eyes.

And Frank, who had always had to translate for Father, had to become his interpreter in other ways. When the people from the Stastsoper wanted to pay us a tribute, Frank had to sit next to Father -- at the Opera -- and whisper to him about the action on the stage. Father could follow the music, just fine. I don't even remember what opera it was. It wasn't Lucia, I know that much. It was a particularly farcical comic opera, because Lilly had insisted that we wanted no Schlagobers and blood. It was nice that the Vienna State Opera wanted to thank us for saving them, but we didn't want to sit through any Schlagobers and blood. We'd already seen that opera. That was the opera that played in the Hotel New Hampshire for seven years.

And so, at the opening of this merry farce of an opera -- whatever it was -- the conductor and the orchestra and all the singers pointed out my father in one of the front-row seats (that's where Father had insisted on sitting. 'So I can be sure to see,' he had said). And Father stood up and took a bow; he was great at bowing. And he waved the baseball bat to the audience; the Viennese loved the Louisville Slugger part of the story, and they were touched and applauded for a long time when Father waved the bat at them. We children felt very proud.

I often wonder if the New York publisher who wanted Lilly's book for five thousand dollars would have listened to Frank's demands if we hadn't all become famous -- if we hadn't saved the Opera and murdered the terrorists in our good old American family kind of way. 'Who cares?' Frank asks, slyly. The point is, Lilly had not signed the five-thousand-dollar contract. Frank had gone for higher stakes. And when the publishers realized that this Lilly Berry was the little girl who'd had a gun held to her head, that little Lilly Berry was the youngest surviving (and certainly the smallest) member of the Berry family -- the terrorist killers, the Opera savers -- well ... at that point, of course, Frank was in the driver's seat.

'My author is already at work on a new book,' Frank, the agent, said. 'We're in no hurry about any of this. As far as Trying to Grow is concerned, we're interested in the best offer.'

Frank would make a killing, of course.

'You mean we're going to be rich?' Father asked, sightlessly. When he was first blind, he had an awkward way of inclining his head too far forward -- as if this might help him to see. And the Louisville Slugger was his ever-restless companion, his percussion instrument.

'We can do anything we want, Pop,' Franny said. 'You can,' she added, to him. 'Just think of it,' she told Father, 'and it's yours.'

'Dream on, Daddy,' Lilly said, but Father seemed stupefied by all the options.

'Anything?' Father asked.

'You name it,' I told him. He was our hero again; he was our father -- at last. He was blind, but he was in charge.

'Well, I'll have to think about it,' Father said, cautiously, the baseball bat playing all kinds of music -- that Louisville Slugger in my father's hands was as musically complicated as a full orchestra. Though Father would never make as much noise with a baseball bat as Freud had made, he was more various than Freud could have dreamed of being.

And so we left our seven-year home away from home. Frank sold the second Hotel New Hampshire for a ridiculously high price. After all, it was a kind of historical landmark, Frank argued.

'I'm coming home!' Franny wrote to Junior Jones.

'I'm coming home,' she also wrote to Chipper Dove.

'Why, damn it, Franny?' I asked. 'Why write to Chipper Dove?'

But Franny refused to talk about it; she just shrugged.

'I told you,' Susie the bear said. 'Franny's got to deal with it -- sooner or later. You've both got to deal with Chipper Dove,' Susie said, 'and you're going to have to deal with each other, too,' said Susie the bear. I looked at Susie as if I didn't know what she was talking about, but Susie said, 'I'm not blind, you know. I got eyes. And I'm a smart bear, too.'