'Sorry,' I whispered. 'Go back to sleep.'
'What a long run you had,' he groaned. 'You must be exhausted.'
I was, of course, but I was also wide-awake. I went and sat at the desk in front of Frank's six phones. The resident rape expert (in the second Hotel New Hampshire) was only a phone call away; the rape advice I wanted was actually residing in New York City now. Susie the bear was living in Greenwich Village. Although it was one o'clock in the morning, I picked up the phone. At last the issue had presented itself. It didn't matter that it was almost Christmas, 1964, because we were back to Halloween, 1956. All Franny's unanswered letters finally deserved an answer. Although Junior Jones's Black Arm of the Law would one day provide New York City with its admirable servic
es, Junior was still recovering from the thug game of football; he would spend three years in law school, and he'd spend another six starting the Black Arm of the Law. Although Junior would rescue Franny, he could be counted upon for his late arrivals. The issue of Chipper Dove had presented itself now; although Harold Swallow had never found him, Dove was out of hiding now. And in dealing with Chipper Dove, I knew, Franny would need the help of a smart bear.
Good old Susie the bear is a fairy tale, all by herself.
When she answered her telephone at 1 A.M. she was like a boxer springing off the ropes.
'Dumb-fuck! Creep-of-the-night! Pervert! Do you know what time it is?' Susie the bear roared.
'It's me,' I said.
'Jesus God,' Susie said. 'I was expecting an obscene call.' When I told her about Chipper Dove, she decided it was an obscene call. 'I don't think Franny's going to be happy that you told him where she lives,' Susie said. 'I think she wrote all those letters so she wouldn't ever hear from him again.'
Susie lived in a simply terrible place in Greenwich Village. Franny liked going down there to see her, and Frank occasionally dropped in -- when he was in the vicinity (there was a very Frank-like bar around the corner from where Susie lived) -- but Lilly and I hated the Village. Susie came uptown to see us.
In the Village, Susie could be a bear when she wanted to be; there were people down there who looked worse than bears. But when Susie came uptown, she had to look normal; they wouldn't have let her in the Stanhope, as a bear, and on Central Park South some policeman would have shot her -- thinking her an escapee from the Central Park Zoo. New York was not Vienna, and although Susie was trying to break herself of the bear habit, she could revert to bearishness in the Village and nobody would even notice. She lived with two other women in a place that had only a toilet and a cold-water sink; Susie came uptown to bathe -- preferring Lilly's suite at the Stanhope to the opulent bathroom at Frank's place at 222 Central Park South; I think Susie liked the potential danger of the upward-flushing toilets.
She was trying to be an actress in those days. The two women she shared the terrible apartment with were both members of something called the West Village Workshop. It was an actors' workshop; it was a place that trained street clowns. Frank said of it that if the King of Mice had still been alive, he could have gotten tenure at the West Village Workshop. But I thought that if there'd been such a thing as the West Village Workshop in Vienna, maybe the King of Mice would still be alive. There ought to be someplace where you can study street dancing, animal imitations, pantomime, unicycling, scream therapy, and acts of degradation that are only acts. Susie said the West Village Workshop was basically teaching her how to be as confident as a bear without the bear suit. It was a slow process, she admitted, and in the meantime -- hedging her bets -- she'd had the bear suit refashioned by an animal costume expert in the Village.
'You ought to see the suit now,' Susie was always telling me. 'I mean, if you think I looked like a real bear before, man ... you haven't seen the whole story!'
'It is rather remarkable,' Frank had told me. 'There's even a wet look about the mouth, and the eyes are uncanny. And the fangs,' Frank said -- always an admirer of costumes and uniforms, Frank would say, 'The fangs are great.'
'But we all want Susie to get over being a bear,' Franny said.
'We want the bear in her to emerge,' Lilly would say, and we'd all grunt and make other disgusting sounds together.
But when I told Susie that Franny and I had saved each other from each other -- only to meet up again with Chipper Dove -- Susie was all business; Susie was that ever-essential friend, the one who'll be a bear for you when the going gets rough.
'You at Frank's?' Susie asked.
'Yes,' I said.
'Hang in there, kid,' Susie said. 'I'll be right up. Warn the doorman.'
'Should I warn him about a bear or about you, Susie?' I asked her.
'One day, honey,' Susie said, 'the real me is going to surprise you.' One day, it was true, Susie would surprise me. But before Susie got up to 222 Central Park South, Lilly called me on one of Frank's six phones.
'What's wrong?' I said. It was nearly two in the morning.
'Chipper Dove,' Lilly whispered, in a frightened little voice. 'He called here! He asked for Franny!' That son of a bitch! I thought. He'd call up a girl he'd raped when she was sleeping! He must have wanted to be sure that Franny really did live at the Stanhope. So now he knew.
'What did Franny say to him?' I asked Lilly.
'Franny wouldn't talk to him,' Lilly said. 'Franny couldn't talk to him,' Lilly said. 'I mean, she couldn't get her mouth to work -- no words came out,' Lilly said. 'I told him Franny was out and he said he'd call again. You better come over here,' Lilly said. 'Franny is afraid,' Lilly whispered. 'I've never seen Franny afraid,' Lilly added. 'She won't even go back to bed, she just keeps looking out the window. I think she thinks he's going to rape her again,' Lilly whispered.
I went to Frank's room and woke him up. He sat bolt upright in bed, throwing back the covers and flinging the dressmaker's dummy away from him. 'Dove,' was all I had whispered to him. 'Chipper Dove,' was all I had to say, and Frank woke up as if he were still banging the cymbals. We left a message for Father in the tape recorder next to his bed. We just said we were at the Stanhope.
Father was pretty good on the telephone; he counted the holes. Even so, Father still got a lot of wrong numbers, and they made him so cross that he invariably shouted to the persons on the receiving end of his calls -- as if the wrong numbers had been their fault. 'Jesus God!' he would holler. 'You're the wrong number!' Thus, in this small way, did my father and his Louisville Slugger terrorize a portion of New York.
Frank and I met Susie at the door of 222 Central Park South. We had to run up to Columbus Circle to find a cab. Susie was not wearing the bear suit. She was wearing old pants and a sweater over a sweater over a sweater.
'Of course she's afraid,' Susie told Frank and me as we sped uptown. 'But she's got to deal with it. Fear is one of the first phases, my dears. If she can get over the fucking fear, then she gets to the anger. And once she's angry,' Susie said, 'then she's home free. Just look at me,' she declared, and Frank and I looked at her and didn't say anything. We were over our heads, and we knew it.