He took forever to finish playing with his drink. I had two more beers. I knew what he was doing. He was absorbing the Sacher Bar, he was getting his last good look at the Hotel Sacher; he was imagining, of course, that he owned it -- that he lived here.
'Your mother,' he said, 'would have loved all this.' He moved his hand only slightly, then rested it in his lap.
She would have loved all what? I wondered. The Hotel Sacher and the Sacher Bar -- oh yes. But what else would she have loved? Her son Frank, growing a beard and trying to decipher his mother's message -- her meaning -- from a dressmaker's dummy? Her littlest daughter Lilly trying to grow? Her biggest daughter Franny trying to find out everything that a pornographer knew? And would she have loved me? I wondered: the son who cleaned up his language, but wanted more than anything to make love to his own sister. And Franny wanted to, too! That was why she'd gone to Ernst, of course.
Father couldn't have known why I started to cry, but he said all the right things. 'It won't be so bad,' he reassured me. 'Human beings are remarkable -- at what we can learn to live with,' Father told me. 'If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have,' Father said, 'then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?' Father asked.
Everyone at the Sacher Bar watched me crying and my father comforting me. I guess that's just one of the reasons it's the most beautiful bar in the world, in my opinion: it has the grace to make no one feel self-conscious about any unhappiness.
I felt better with Father's arm around my shoulder.
'Good night, Mr. Berry,' the bartender said.
'Auf Wiedersehen,' Father said: he knew he'd never be back.
Outside, everything had changed. It was dark. It was the fall. The first man who passed us, walking in a hurry, was wearing black slacks, black dress shoes, and a white dinner jacket.
My father didn't notice the man in the white dinner jacket, but I didn't feel comfortable with this omen, with t
his reminder; the man in the white dinner jacket, I knew, was dressed for the Opera. He must have been hurrying to be on time. The 'fall season,' as Fehlgeburt had warned me, was upon us. You could feel it in the weather.
The 1964 season of the New York Metropolitan Opera opened with Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. I read this in one of Frank's opera books, but Frank says he doubts very much that the season would have opened with Lucia in Vienna. Frank says it's likely something more Viennese would have opened the season -- 'Their beloved Strauss, their beloved Mozart; even that Kraut, Wagner,' Frank says. And I don't even know if it was opening night when Father and I saw the man in the white dinner jacket. It was only clear that the State Opera was open for business.
'The 1835 Italian version of Lucia first opened in Vienna in 1837,' Frank told me. 'Of course, it's been back a few times since then. Perhaps most notably,' Frank added, 'with the great Adelina Patti in the title role -- and most particularly the night her dress caught fire, just as she was beginning to sing the mad scene.'
'What mad scene, Frank?' I asked him.
'You have to see it to believe it,' Frank said, 'and it's a little hard to believe, even then. But Patti's dress caught fire just as she was beginning to sing the mad scene -- the stage was lit with gas flares, in those days, and she must have stood too close to one. And do you know what the great Adelina Patti did?' Frank asked me.
'No,' I said.
'She ripped off her burning dress and kept singing,' Frank said. 'In Vienna,' he added. 'Those were the days.'
And in one of Frank's opera books I read that Adelina Patti's Lucia seemed fated for this kind of disturbance. In Bucharest, for example, the famous mad scene was interrupted by a member of the audience falling into the pit -- upon a woman -- and in the general panic, someone shouted 'Fire!' But the great Adelina Patti cried, 'No fire!' -- and went on singing. And in San Francisco, one weirdo threw a bomb onto the stage, and once more the fearless Patti riveted the audience to their seats. Despite the fact that the bomb exploded!
'A small bomb,' Frank has assured me.
But it was no small bomb that Frank and I had seen riding to the Opera between Arbeiter and Ernst; that bomb was as weighty as Sorrow, that bomb was as big as a bear. And it's doubtful that Donizetti's Lucia was at the Vienna Staatsoper the night Father and I said auf Wiedersehen to the Sacher. I like to think it was Lucia for my own reasons. There is a lot of blood and Schlagobers in that particular opera -- even Frank agrees -- and somehow the mad story of a brother who drives his sister crazy and causes her death, because he forces her on a man she doesn't love ... well, you can see why this particular version of blood and Schlagobers would seem especially appropriate, to me.
'All so-called serious opera is blood and Schlagobers,' Frank has told me. I don't know enough about opera to know if that is true; all I know is that I think Lucia di Lammermoor should have been playing at the Vienna State Opera the night Father and I walked back to the Hotel New Hampshire from the Hotel Sacher.
'It doesn't matter, really -- which opera it was,' Frank is always saying, but I like to think it was Lucia. I like to think that the famous mad scene was not yet under way when Father and I arrived at the Hotel New Hampshire. There was Susie the bear in the lobby -- without her bear's head on! -- and she was crying. Father walked right by Susie, without appearing to notice how upset she was -- and out of costume! -- but my father was used to unhappy bears.
He walked right upstairs. He was going to tell Screaming Annie the bad news about the radicals, the bad news for the Hotel New Hampshire. 'She's probably with a customer, or out on the street,' I said to him, but Father said he would just wait for her outside her room.
I sat down with Susie.
'She's still with him,' Susie sobbed. If Franny was still with Ernst the pornographer, I knew, it meant she was more than talking to him. There was no reason to pretend to be a bear anymore. I held Susie's bear head in my hands, I put it on, I took it off. I could not sit there in the lobby, waiting for Franny, like a whore, to be finished with him -- to come down to the lobby again -- and I knew I was helpless to interfere. I would have been too late, as always. There was no one around as fast as Harold Swallow, this time; there was no Black Arm of the Law. Junior Jones would rescue Franny again, but he was too late to save her from Ernst -- and so was I. If I'd stayed in the lobby with Susie, I would have just cried with her, and I'd been crying entirely too much, I thought.
'Did you "tell Old Billig?" I asked Susie. 'About the bombers?'
'She was only worried about her fucking china bears,' Susie said, and went on crying.
'I love Franny, too,' I told Susie, and gave her a hug.
'Not like I do!' Susie said, stifling a cry. Yes, like you do, I thought.
I started upstairs, but Susie misunderstood me.