The World According to Garp

6. THE PENSION GRILLPARZER

WHEN spring came to Vienna, Garp had still not finished “The Pension Grillparzer"; he had not, of course, even written to Helen about his life with Charlotte and her colleagues, Jenny had kicked her writing habit into yet a hiqher gear; she had found the sentence that had been boiling in her since that night she discussed lust with Garp and Charlotte: it was an old sentence, actually, from her life long ago, and it was the sentence with which she truly began the book that would make her famous.

“In this dirty-minded world,” Jenny wrote, “you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore—or fast on your way to becoming one or the other.” The sentence set a tone for the book, which the book had been lacking; Jenny was discovering that when she began with that sentence, an aura was cast over her autobiography that bound the disharmonious parts of her life's story together—the way fog shrouds an uneven landscape, the way heat reaches through a rambling house into every room. That sentence inspired others like it, and Jenny wove them as she might have woven a bright and binding thread of brilliant color through a sprawling tapestry of no apparent design.

“I wanted a job and I wanted to live alone,” she wrote. “That made me A Sexual Suspect.” And that gave her a title, too. A Sexual Suspect, the autobiography of Jenny Fields. It would go through eight hard-cover printings and be translated into six languages even before the paperback sale that could keep Jenny, and a regiment of nurses, in new uniform, for a century.

“Then I wanted a baby, but I didn't want to have to share my body or my life to have one,” Jenny wrote. “That made me A Sexual Suspect, too.” Thus Jenny had found the string with which to sew her messy book together.

But when spring came to Vienna, Garp felt like a trip; maybe Italy; possibly, they could rent a car.

“Do you know how to drive?” Jenny asked him. She knew perfectly well that he hadn't ever learned; there had never been a need. “Well, I don't know how, either,” she told him. “And besides, I'm working; I can't stop now. If you want to take a trip, take a trip by yourself.”

It was in the American Express office, where Garp and Jenny got their mail, that Garp met his first traveling young Americans. Two girls who had formerly gone to Dibbs, and a boy named Boo who had gone to Bath. “Hey, how about us?” one of the girls said to Garp, when they had all met. “We're all prep school stuff.”

Her name was Flossie and it appeared to Garp that she had a relationship with Boo. The other girl was called Vivian, and under the tiny cafй table on the Schwarzenbergplatz, Vivian squeezed Garp's knee between her own and drooled while sipping her wine. “I just went to a denthisht,” she explained to him. “Got so much Novocain in my goddamn mouth I don't know whether it's open or shut.”

“Sort of half and half,” Garp said to her. But he thought, “Oh, what the hell". He missed Cushie Percy, and his relationships with prostitutes were beginning to make him feel like A Sexual Suspect. Charlotte, it was now clear, was interested in mothering him—though he tried to imagine her on another level, he knew, sadly, that this level would never carry beyond the professional.

Flossie and Vivian and Boo were all going to Greece but they let Garp show them Vienna for three days. In that time Garp slept twice with Vivian, whose Novocain finally wore off; he also slept once with Flossie, while Boo was out cashing travelers' checks and changing the oil in the car. There was no love lost between Steering and Bath boys, Garp knew; but Boo had the last laugh.

It is impossible to know whether Garp got gonorrhea from Vivian or from Flossie, but Garp was convinced that the source of the dose was Boo. It was, in Garp's opinion, “Bath clap.” By the time of the first symptoms, of course, the threesome had left for Greece and Garp faced the dripping and the burning alone. There could be no worse a case of clap to catch in all of Europe, he thought. “I caught a dose of Boo's goo,” he wrote, but much later; it was not funny when it happened, and he didn't dare seek his mother's professional advice. He knew she would refuse to believe that he hadn't caught it from a whore. He got up the nerve to ask Charlotte to recommend a doctor who was familiar with the matter; he thought she would know. He thought later that Jenny would possibly have been less angry with him.

“You'd think Americans would know a little simple hygiene!” Charlotte said furiously. “You should think of your mother! I'd expect you to have better taste. People who give it away for free to someone they hardly know—well, they should make you suspicious, shouldn't they?” Once again, Garp had been caught without a condom.

Thus Garp winced his way to Charlotte's personal physician, a hearty man named Thalhammer who was missing his left thumb. “And I was once left-handed,” Herr Doktor Thalhammer told Garp. “But everything is surmountable if we have energy. We can learn anything we can set our minds to!” he said, with firm good cheer; he demonstrated for Garp how he could write the prescription, with an enviable penmanship, with his right hand. It was a simple and painless cure. In Jenny's day, at good old Boston Mercy, they would have given Garp the Valentine treatment and he'd have learned, more emphatically, how not all rich kids are clean kids.

He didn't write Helen about this, either.

His spirits slumped; spring wore on, the city opened in many small ways—like buds. But Garp felt he had walked Vienna out. He could barely get his mother to stop writing long enough to eat dinner with him. When he sought out Charlotte, her colleague told him she was sick; she hadn't worked for weeks. For three Saturdays, Garp did not see her at the Naschmarkt. When he stopped her colleagues one May evening on the Kдrntnerstrasse, he saw they were reluctant to discuss Charlotte. The whore whose forehead appeared to have beep pockmarked by a peach pit merely told Garp that Charlotte was sicker than she first thought. The young girl, Garp's age, with the misshapen lip and the half-knowledge of English, tried to explain to him. “Her sex is sick,” she said.

That was a curious way to put it, Garp thought. Garp was not surprised to hear that anyone's sex was sick, but when he smiled at the remark, the young whore who spoke English frowned at him and wallied away.

“You don't understand,” said the overlush prostitute with the pockmark. “Forget Charlotte.”

It was mid-June, and Charlote had still not come back, when Garp called Herr Doktor Thalhammer and asked where he could find her. “I doubt that she wants to see anybody,” Thalhammer told him, “but human beings can adjust to almost anything.”

Very near Grinzing and the Vienna Woods, out in the nineteenth district where the whores don't go, Vienna looks like a village imitation of itself; in these suburbs, many of the streets are still cobblestoned and trees grow along the sidewalks. Unfamiliar with this part of the city, Garp rode the No. 38 Strassenbahn too far out the Grinzinger Allee; he had to walk back to the corner of Billrothstrasse and Rudolfinergasse to the hospital.

The Rudolfinerhaus is a private hospital in a city of socialized medicine: its old stone walls are the same Maria Theresa yellow as the palace at Schцnbrunn, or the Upper and Lower Belvedere. Its own gardens are enclosed in its own courtyard, and it costs as much as almost any hospital in the United States. The Rudolfinerhaus does not normally provide pajamas for its patients, for example, because its patients usually prefer their own nightclothes. The well-to-do Viennese treat themselves to the luxury of being sick there—and most foreigners who are afraid of socialized medicine end up there, where they are shocked at the prices.

In June, when Garp went there, the hospital struck him as full of pretty young mothers who'd just delivered babies. But it was also full of well-off people who'd come there to get seriously well again, and it was partially full of well-off people, like Charlotte, who'd come there to die.

Charlotte had a private room because, she said, there was no reason to save her money now. Garp knew she was dying as soon as he saw her. She had lost almost thirty pounds. Garp saw that she wore what was left of her rings on her index and middle fingers: her other fingers were so shrunken that her rings would slide off. Charlotte was the color of the dull ice on the brackish Steering River. She did not appear very surprised to see Garp, but she was so heavily anesthetized that Garp imagined Charlotte was fairly unsurprised in general. Garp had brought a basket of fruit; since they had shopped together, he knew what Charlotte liked to eat, but she had a tube down her throat for several hours each day and it left her throat too sore to swallow anything but liquid. Garp ate a few cherries while Charlotte enumerated the parts of her body that had been removed. Her sex parts, she thought, and much of her digestive tract, and something that had to do with the process of elimination. “Oh, and my breasts, I think,” she said, the whites of her eyes very gray and her hands held above her chest where she flattered herself to imagine her breasts used to be. To Garp it appeared that they had not touched her breasts; under the sheet, there was still something there. But he later thought that Charlotte had been such a lovely woman that she could hold her body in such a way as to inspire the illusion of breasts.

“Thank God I've got money,” Charlotte said. “Isn't this a Class A place?”

Garp nodded. The next day he brought a bottle of wine; the hospital was very relaxed about liquor and visitors; perhaps this was one of the luxuries one paid for. “Even if I got out,” Charlotte said, “what could I do? They cut my purse out.” She tried to drink some wine, then fell asleep. Garp asked a nurse's aide to explain what Charlotte meant by her “purse,” though he thought he knew. The nurse's aide was Garp's age, nineteen or maybe younger, and she blushed and looked away from him when she translated the slang.

A purse was a prostitute's word for her vagina.

“Thank you,” Garp said.

Once or twice when he visited Charlotte he encountered her two colleagues, who were shy and girlish with Garp in the daylight of Charlotte's sunny room. The young one who spoke English was named Wanga; she had cut her lip that way as a child when she tripped while running home from the store with a jar of mayonnaise. “We were on a picnic going,” she explained, “but my whole family had me instead to the hospital to bring.”

The riper, sulkish woman with the peach pit pockmark on her forehead, and the breasts like two full pails, did not offer to explain her scar; she was the notorious “Tina,” for whom nothing was too “funny.”

Occasionally Garp ran into Herr Doktor Thalhammer there, and once he walked with Thalhammer to Thalhammer's car, they happened to be leaving the hospital together. “Do you want a lift?” Thalhammer offered him, pleasantly. In the car was a pretty young schoolgirl whom Thalhammer introduced to Garp is his daughter. They all talked easily about Die Vereinigten Staaten and Thalhammer assured Garp it was no trouble to drive Garp all the way to his doorstep at the Schwindgasse. Thalhammer's daughter reminded Garp of Helen, but he could not even imagine asking to see the girl again; that her father had recently treated him for clap seemed to Garp to be an insurmountable awkwardness—despite Thalhammer's optimism that people can adjust to anything. Garp doubted that Thalhammer could have adjusted to that.

All around Garp, now, the city looked ripe with dying. The teeming parks and gardens reeked of decay to him, and the subject of the great painters in the great museums was always death. There were always cripples and old people riding the No. 38 Strassenbahn out to Grinzinger Allee, and the heady flowers planted along the pruned paths of the courtyard in the Rudolfinerhaus reminded Garp only of funeral parlors. He recalled the pensions he and Jenny had stayed in when they first arrived, over a year ago: the faded and unmatched wallpaper, the dusty bric-a-brac, the chipped china, the hinges crying for oil. “In the life of a man,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, “his time is but a moment...his body a prey of worms...”

The young nurse's aide whom Garp had embarrassed by asking about Charlotte's “purse” was increasingly snotty to him. One day when he arrived early, before visitors were permitted, she asked him a little too aggressively what he was to Charlotte, anyway. A member of the family? She had seen Charlotte's other visitors—her gaudy colleagues—and she assumed Garp was just an old hooker's customer. “She's my mother,” Garp said; he didn't know why, but he appreciated the shock of the young nurse's aide, and her subsequent respect.

“What did you tell them?” Charlotte whispered to him, a few days later. “They think you're my son.” He confessed his lie; Charlotte confessed she had done nothing to correct it. “Thank you,” she whispered. “It's nice to trick the swine. They think they're so superior.” And mustering her former and fading lewdness, she said, “I'd let you have it once for free, if I still had the equipment. Maybe twice for half price,” she said.

He was touched and cried in front of her.

“Don't be a baby,” she said. “What am I to you, really?” When she was asleep, he read on her hospital chart that she was fifty-one.

She died a week later. When Garp went to her room, it was whisked clean, the bed stripped back, the windows wide open. When he asked for her, there was a nurse in charge of the floor whom he didn't recognize—an iron-gray maiden who kept shaking her head. “Frдulein Charlotte,” Garp said. “She was Herr Doktor Thalhammer's patient.”

“He has lots of patients,” said the iron-gray maiden. She was consulting a list, but Garp did not know Charlotte's real name. Finally, he could think of no other way to identify her.

“The whore,” he said. “She was a whore.” The gray woman regarded him coolly; if Garp could detect no satisfaction in her expression, he could detect no sympathy either.

“The prostitute is dead,” the old nurse said. Perhaps Garp only imagined that he heard a little triumph in her voice.

“One day, meine Frau,” he said to her, “you will be dead, too.” And that, he thought—leaving the Rudolfinerhaus—was a properly Viennese thing to say. Take that, you old gray city, you dead bitch, he thought.

He went to his first opera that night; to his surprise, it was in Italian, and since he understood none of it, he took the whole performance to be a kind of religious service. He walked in the night to the fit spires of Saint Stephen's; the south tower of the cathedral, he read on some plaque, was started in the middle of the fourteenth century and completed in 1439. Vienna, Garp thought, was a cadaver; all Europe, maybe, was a dressed-up corpse in an open coffin. “In the life of a man,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, “his time is but a moment...his fortune dark...”

In this mood Garp walked home on the Kдrntnerstrasse, where he met the notorious Tina. Her deep pockmark, harboring the neon of the city lights, was a greenish blue.

“Guten Abend, Herr Garp,” she said. “Guess what?”

Tina explained that Charlotte had bought Garp a favor. The favor was that Garp could have Tina and Wanga for free; he could have them one at a time or both together, Tina explained. Together, Tina thought, was more interesting—and quicker. But perhaps Garp did not like both of them. Garp admitted that Wanga did not appeal to him; she was too close to his own age, and though he would never say this if she were here and her feelings could be hurt, he did not care for the way the mayonnaise jar had pulled her lip askew.

“Then you can have me twice,” Tina said, cheerfully. “Once now, and once,” she added, “after you've had a long time to catch your breath. Forget Charlotte,” Tina said. Death happened to everyone, Tina explained. Even so, Garp politely declined the offer.

“Well, it's here,” Tina said. “When you want it.” She reached out and frankly cupped him in her warm palm; her big hand was an ample codpiece for him, but Garp only smiled and bowed to her—as the Viennese do—and walked home to his mother.

He enjoyed his slight pain. He took pleasure in this silly self-denial—and more pleasure in his imagination of Tina, he suspected, than he ever could have derived from her vaguely gross flesh. The silvery gouge on her forehead was nearly as big as her mouth; her pockmark looked to Garp like a small, open grave.

What Garp was savoring was the beginning of a writer's long-sought trance, wherein the world falls under one embracing tone of voice. “All that is body is as coursing waters,” Garp remembered, “all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors.” It was July when Garp went back to work on “The Pension Grillparzer". His mother was finishing up the manuscript that would soon change both their lives.

It was August when Jenny finished her book and announced that she was ready to travel, to at last see something of Europe—maybe Greece? she suggested. “Let's take the train somewhere,” she said. “I always wanted to take the Orient Express. Where's it go?”

“From Paris to Istanbul, I think,” Garp said. “But you take it, Mom. I've got too much work to do.”

Tit for tat, Jenny had to admit. She was so sick of A Sexual Suspect that she couldn't even proofread it one more time. She didn't even know what to do with it, now; did one just go to New York and hand over one's life story to a stranger? She wanted Garp to read it, but she saw that Garp was at last engrossed in a task of his own, she felt sbe shouldn't bother him. Besides, she was unsure; a large part of her life story was his life story, too—she thought the story might upset him.

Garp worked through August on the conclusion of his short story, “The Pension Grillparzer.” Helen, exasperated, wrote to Jenny. “Is Garp dead?” she asked, “Kindly send details.” That Helen Holm is a bright girl, Jenny thought. Helen got more of an answer than she counted on. Jenny sent her a copy of the manuscript of A Sexual Suspect with a note explaining that this was what she'd been doing all year, and now Garp was writing something, too. Jenny said she would appreciate Helen's candid opinion of the manuscript. Perhaps, said Jenny, some of Helen's college teachers would know what one did with a finished book?

Garp relaxed, when he wasn't writing, by going to the zoo: it was a part of the great grounds and gardens surrounding the Schцnbrunn Palace. It appeared to Garp that many of the buildings in the zoo were war ruins, three-quarters destroyed; they had been partially restored to house the animals. This gave Garp the eerie impression that the zoo still existed in Vienna's war period; it also interested him in the period. To fall asleep at night he took to reading some very specific, historical accounts of Vienna during the Nazi and the Russian occupations. This was not unrelated to the death themes that haunted his writing of “The Pension Grillparzer.” Garp discovered that when you are writing something, everything seems related to everything else. Vienna was dying, the zoo was not as well restored from the war damage as the homes the people lived in; the history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness, and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories. He felt the holes from the machine-gun fire in the stone walls of the lobby of the apartment on the Schwindgasse.

Now he knew what the grandmother's dream meant.

He wrote Helen that a young writer needs desperately to live with someone and he had decided that he wanted to live with her; even marry her, he offered, because sex was simply necessary but it took too much of one's time if one had to be constantly planning how one was going to get it. Therefore, Garp reasoned, it is better to live with it!

Helen revised several letters before she finally sent him one that said he could, so to speak, go stick it in his ear. Did he think she was going through college so rigorously so that she could provide him with sex that was not even necessary to plan?

He did not revise, at all, his letter back to her; he said he was too busy writing to take the time to explain it to her: she would have to read what he was working on and judge for herself how serious he was.

“I don't doubt that you're quite serious,” she told him. “And right now I have more to read than I need to know.”

She did not tell him that she was referring to Jenny's book, A Sexual Suspect; it was 1,158 manuscript pages long. Though Helen would later agree with Garp that it was no literary jewel, she had to admit that it was a very compelling story.

While Garp put the finishing touches on his much shorter story, Jenny Fields plotted her next move. In her restlessness she had bought an American news magazine at a large Vienna newsstand, in it she had read that a courageous New York editor at a well-known publishing house had just rejected the manuscript submitted by an infamous former member of the government who had been convicted of stealing government money. The book was a thinly disguised “fiction” of the criminal's own sordid, pitty, political dealings. “It was a lousy novel,” the editor was quoted as saying. “The man can't write. Why should he make any money off his crummy life?” The book, of course, would be published elsewhere, and it would eventually make its despicable author and its publisher lots of money. “Sometimes I feel it is my responsibility to say no,” the editor was quoted as saying, “even if I know people do want to read this slop.” The slop, eventually, would be treated to several serious reviews, just as if it were a serious book, but Jenny was greatly impressed with the editor who had said no and she clipped the article out of the news magazine. She drew a circle around the editor's name—a plain name, almost like an actor's name, or the name of an animal in a children's book: John Wolf. There was a picture of John Wolf in the magazine; he looked like a man who took care of himself, and he was very well dressed; he looked like any number of people who work and live in New York—where good business and good sense suggest that you'd better take care of yourself and dress as well as you can—but to Jenny Fields he looked like an angel. He was going to be her publisher, she was sure. She was convinced that her life was not “crummy,” and that John Wolf would believe she deserved to make money off it.

Garp had other ambitions for “The Pension Grillparzer.” It would never make him much money; it would first appear in a “serious” magazine where almost no one would read it. Years later, when he was better known, it would be published in a more attentive way, and several appreciative things, would be written about it, but in his lifetime “The Pension Grillparzer” wouldn't make Garp enough money to buy a good car. Garp, however, expected more than money or transportation from “The Pension Grillparzer.” Very simply, he expected to get Helen Holm to live with him—even marry him.

When he finished “The Pension Grillparzer,” he announced to his mother that he wanted to go home and see Helen; he would send her a copy of the story and she could have read it by the time he arrived back in the United States. Poor Helen, Jenny thought; Jenny knew that Helen had a lot to read. Jenny also worried how Garp referred to Steering as “home"; but she had reasons of her own for wanting to see Helen, and Ernie Holm would not mind their company for a few days. There was always the parental mansion at Dog's Head Harbor—if Garp and Jenny needed a place to recover, or to make their plans.

Garp and Jenny were such singularly obsessed people that they did not pause to wonder why they had seen so little of Europe, and now they were leaving. Jenny packed her nursing uniforms. There remained, in Garp's mind, only the favors that Charlotte had left up to Tina's devising.

Garp's imagination of these favors had sustained him during the writing of “The Pension Grillparzer,” but as he would learn all his life, the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar. His imagination sustained him when he was writing; now that he wasn't writing, he wanted Tina. He went to look for her on the Kдrntnerstrasse, but the mayonnaise-jar whore, who spoke English, told him that Tina had moved from the first district.

“So goes it,” Wanga said. “Forget Tina.”

Garp found that he could forget her; lust, as his mother called it, was tricky that way. And time, he discovered, had softened his dislike of Wanga's mayonnaise-jar lip, suddenly, he liked it. And so he had her, twice, and as he would learn all his life, nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

Garp and Jenny had spent fifteen months in Vienna. It was September. Garp and Helen were only nineteen, and Helen would be going back to college very soon. The plane flew from Vienna to Frankfurt. The slight tingling (that was Wanga) quietly left Garp's flesh. When Garp thought of Charlotte, he imagined that Charlotte had been happy. After all, she had never had to leave the first district.

The plane flew from Frankfurt to London, Garp reread “The Pension Grillparzer” and hoped that Helen would not turn him down. From London to New York, Jenny read her son's story. In terms of what she'd spent more than a year doing, Garp's story struck Jenny as rather unreal. But her taste for literature was never keen and she marveled at her son's imagination. Later she would say that “The Pension Grillparzer” was just the sort of story she'd expect a boy without a proper family to make up.

Maybe so. Helen would later say that it is in the conclusion of “The Pension Grillparzer” that we can glimpse what the world according to Garp would be like.

The Pension Grillparzer [Conclusion]

In the breakfast room of the Pension Grillparzer we confronted Herr Theobald with the menagerie of his other guests who had disrupted our evening. I knew that (as never before) my father was planning to reveal himself as a Tourist Bureau spy.

“Men walking about on their hands,” said Father.

“Men looking under the floor of the W.C.,” said Grandmother.

“That man,” I said, and pointed to the small, sulking fellow at the corner table, seated for breakfast with his cohorts—the dream man and the Hungarian singer.

“He does it for his living,” Herr Theobold told us, and as if to demonstrate that this was so, the man who stood on his hands began to stand on his hands.

“Make him stop that,” Father said. “We know he can do it.”

“But did you know that he can't do it any other way?” the dream man asked suddenly. “Did you know his legs were useless? He has no shinbones. It is wonderful that he can walk on his hands! Otherwise, he wouldn't walk at all.” The man, although it was clearly hard to do while standing on his hands, nodded his head.

“Please sit down,” Mother said.

“It is perfectly all right to be crippled,” Grandmother said, boldly. “But you are evil,” she told the dream man. “You know things you have no right to know. He knew my dream,” she told Herr Theobald, as if she were reporting a theft from her room.

“He is a little evil, I know,” Theobald admitted. “But not usually! And he behaves better and better. He can't help what he knows.”

“I was just trying to straighten you out,” the dream man told Grandmother. “I thought it would do you good. Your husband has been dead quite a while, after all, and it's about time you stopped making so much of that dream. You're not the only person who's had such a dream.”

“Stop it,” Grandmother said.

“Well, you ought to know,” said the dream man.

“No, be quiet, please,” Herr Theobald told him.

“I am from the Tourist Bureau,” Father announced, probably because he couldn't think of anything else to say.

“Oh my God shit!” Herr Theobald said.

“It's not Theobald's fault,” said the singer. “It's our fault. He's nice to put up with us, though it costs him his reputation.”

“They married my sister,” Theobald told us. “They are family, you see. What can I do?”

“They married your sister?” Mother said.

“Well, she married me first,” said the dream man.

“And then she heard me sing!” the singer said.

“She's never been married to the other one,” Theobald said, and everyone looked apologetically toward the man who could only walk on his hands.

Theobald said, “They were once a circus act, but politics got them in trouble.”

“We were the best in Hungary,” said the singer. “You ever hear of the Circus Szolnok?”

“No, I'm afraid not,” Father said, seriously.

“We played in Miskolc, in Szeged, in Debrecen,” said the dream man.

“Twice in Szeged,” the singer said.

“We would have made it to Budapest if it hadn't been for the Russians,” said the man who walked on his hands.

“Yes, it was the Russians who removed his shinbones!” said the dream man.

“Tell the truth,” the singer said. “He was born without shinbones. But it's true that we couldn't get along with the Russians.”

“They tried to jail the bear,” said the dream man.

“Tell the truth,” Theobald said.

“We rescued his sister from them,” said the man who walked on his hands.

“So of course I must put them up,” said Herr Theobald, “and they work as hard as they can. But who's interested in their act in this country? It's a Hungarian thing. There's no tradition of bears on unicycles here,” Theobald told us. “And the damn dreams mean nothing to us Viennese.”

“Tell the truth,” said the dream man. “It is because I have told the wrong dreams. We worked a nightclub on the Kдrntnerstrasse, but then we got banned.”

“You should never have told that dream,” the singer said gravely.

“Well, it was your wife's responsibility, too!” the dream man said.

“She was your wife, then,” the singer said.

“Please stop it,” Theobald begged.

“We get to do the balls for children's diseases,” the dream man said. “And some of the state hospitals—especially at Christmas.”

“If you would only do more with the bear,” Herr Theobald advised them.

“Speak to your sister about that,” said the singer. “It's her bear—she's trained him, she's let him get lazy and sloppy and full of bad habits.”

“He is the only one of you who never makes fun of me,” said the man who could only walk on his hands.

“I would like to leave all this,” Grandmother said. “This is, for me, an awful experience.”

“Please, dear lady,” Herr Theobold said, “we only wanted to show you that we meant no offense. These are hard times. I need the B rating to attract more tourists, and I can't—in my heart—throw out the Circus Szolnok.”

“In his heart, my ass!” said the dream man. “He's afraid of his sister. He wouldn't dream of throwing us out.”

“If he dreamed it, you would know it!” cried the man on his hands.

“I am afraid of the bear,” Herr Theobald said. “It does everything she tells it to do.”

“Say “he", not “it",” said the man on his hands. “He is a fine bear, and he never hurt anybody. He has no claws, you know perfectly well—and very few teeth, either.”

“The poor thing has a terribly hard time eating,” Herr Theobald admitted. “He is quite old, and he's messy.”

Over my father's shoulder, I saw him write in the giant pad: “A depressed bear and an unemployed circus. This family is centered on the sister.”

At that moment, out on the sidewalk, we could see her tending to the bear. It was early morning and the street was not especially busy. By law, of course, she had the bear on a leash, but it was a token control. In her startling red turban the woman walked up and down the sidewalk, following the lazy movements of the bear on his unicycle. The animal pedaled easily from parking meter to parking meter, sometimes leaning a paw on the meter as he turned. He was very talented on the unicycle, you could tell, but you could also tell that the unicycle was a dead end for him. You could see that the bear felt he could go no further with unicycling.

“She should bring him off the street now,” Herr Theobald fretted. “The people in the pastry shop next door complain to me,” he told us. “They say the bear drives their customers away.”

“That bear makes the customers come!” said the man on his hands.

“It makes some people come, it turns some away,” said the dream man. He was suddenly somber, as if his profundity had depressed him.

But we had been so taken up with the antics of the Circus Szolnok that we had neglected old Johanna. When my mother saw that Grandmother was quietly crying, she told me to bring the car around.

“It's been too much for her,” my father whispered to Theobald. The Circus Szolnok looked ashamed of themselves.

Outside on the sidewalk the bear pedaled up to me and handed me the keys; the car was parked at the curb. “Not everyone likes to be given the keys in that fashion,” Herr Theobald told his sister.

“Oh, I thought he'd rather like it,” she said, rumpling my hair. She was as appealing as a barmaid, which is to say that she was more appealing at night; in the daylight I could see that she was older than her brother, and older than her husbands too—and in time, I imagined, she would cease being lover and sister to them, respectively, and become a mother to them all. She was already a mother to the bear.

“Come over here,” she said to him. He pedaled listlessly in place on his unicycle, holding on to a parking meter for support. He licked the little glass face of the meter. She tugged his leash. He stared at her. She tugged again. Insolently, the bear began to pedal—first one way, then the next. It was as if he took interest, seeing that he had an audience. He began to show off.

“Don't try anything,” the sister said to him, but the bear pedaled faster and faster, going forward, going backward, angling sharply and veering among the parking meters; the sister had to let go of the leash. “Duna, stop it!” she cried, but the bear was out of control. He let the wheel roll too close to the curb and the unicycle pitched him hard into the fender of a parked car. He sat on the sidewalk with the unicycle beside him; you could tell that he hadn't injured himself but he looked very embarrassed and nobody laughed. “Oh, Duna,” the sister said, scoldingly, but she went over and crouched beside him at the curb. “Duna, Duna,” she reproved him, gently. He shook his big head; he would not look at her. There was some saliva strung on the fur near his mouth and she wiped this away with her hand. He pushed her hand away with his paw.

“Come back again!” cried Herr Theobald, miserably, as we got into our car.

Mother sat in the car with her eyes closed and her fingers massaging her temples; this way she seemed to hear nothing we said. She claimed it was her only defense against traveling with such a contentious family.

I did not want to report on the usual business concerning the care of the car, but I saw that Father was trying to maintain order and calm; he had the giant pad spread on his lap as if we'd just completed a routine investigation. “What does the gauge tell us?” he asked.

“Someone put thirty-five kilometers on it,” I said.

“That terrible bear has been in here,” Grandmother said. “There are hairs from the beast on the back seat, and I can smell him.”

“I don't smell anything,” Father said.

“And the perfume of that gypsy in the turban,” Grandmother said. “It is hovering near the ceiling of the car.” Father and I sniffed. Mother continued to massage her temples.

On the floor by the brake and clutch pedals I saw several of the mint-green toothpicks that the Hungarian singer was in the habit of wearing like a scar at the corner of his mouth. I didn't mention them. It was enough to imagine them all—out on the town, in our car. The singing driver, the man, on his hands beside him—waving out the window with his feet. And in back, separating the dream man from his former wife—his great head brushing the upholstered roof, his mauling paws relaxed in his large lap—the old bear slouched like a benign drunk.

“Those poor people,” Mother said, her eyes still closed.

“Liars and criminals,” Grandmother said. “Mystics and refugees and broken-down animals.”

“They were trying hard,” Father said, “but they weren't coming up with the prizes.”

“Better off in a zoo,” said Grandmother.

“I had a good time,” Robo said.

“It's hard to break out of Class C,” I said.

“They have fallen post Z,” said old Johanna. “They have disappeared from the human alphabet.”

“I think this calls for a letter,” Mother said.

But Father raised his hand—as if he were going to bless us—and we were quiet. He was writing in the giant pad and wished to be undisturbed. His face was stern. I knew that Grandmother felt confident of his verdict. Mother knew it was useless to argue. Robo was already bored. I steered us off through the tiny streets; I took Spiegelgasse to Lobkowitzplatz. Spiegelgasse is so narrow that you can see the reflection of your own car in the windows of the shops you pass, and I felt our movement through Vienna was superimposed(like that)—like a trick with a movie camera, as if we made a fairy-tale journey through a toy city.

When Grandmother was asleep in the car, Mother said, “I don't suppose that in this case a change in the classification will matter very much, one way or another.”

“No,” Father said, “not much at all.” He was right about that, though it would be years until I saw the Pension Grillparzer again.

When Grandmother died, rather suddenly and in her sleep, Mother announced that she was tired of traveling. The real reason, however, was that she began to find herself plagued by Grandmothers dream. “The horses are so thin,” she told me, once. “I mean, I always knew they would be thin, but not this thin. And the soldiers—I knew they were miserable,” she said, “but not that miserable.”

Father resigned from the Tourist Bureau and found a job with a local detective agency specializing in hotels and department stores. It was a satisfactory job for him, though he refused to work durinq the Christmas season—when, he said, some people ought to be allowed to steal a little.

My parents seemed to me to relax as they got older, and I really felt they were fairly happy near the end. I know that the strength of Grandmother's dream was dimmed by the real world, and specifically by what happened to Robo. He went to a private school and was well liked there, but he was killed by a homemade bomb in his first year at the university. He was not even “political.” In his last letter to my parents he wrote: “The self-seriousness of the radical factions among the students is much overrated. And the food is execrable.” Then Robo went to his history class, and his classroom was blown apart.

It was after my parents died that I gave up smoking and took up traveling again. I took my second wife back to the Pension Grillparzer. With my first wife, I never got as far as Vienna.

The Grillparzer had not kept Father's B rating very long, and it had fallen from the ratings altogether by the time I returned to it. Herr Theobald's sister was in charge of the place. Gone was her tort appeal and in its place was the sexless cynicism of some maiden aunts. She was shapeless and her hair was dyed a sort of bronze, so that her head resembled one of those copper scouring pads that you use on a pot. She did not remember me and was suspicious of my questions. Because I appeared to know so much about her past associates, she probably knew I was with the police.

The Hungarian singer had gone away—another woman thrilled by his voice. The dream man had been taken away—to an institution. His own dreams had turned to nightmares and he'd awakened the pension each night with his horrifying howls. His removal from the seedy premises, said Herr Theobald's sister, was almost simultaneous with the loss of the Grillparzer's B rating.

Herr Theobald was dead. He had dropped down clutching his heart in the hall, where he ventured one night to investigate what he thought was a prowler. It was only Duna, the malcontent bear, who was dressed in the dream man's pin-striped suit. Why Theobald's sister had dressed the bear in this fashion was not explained to me, but the shock of the sullen animal unicycling in the lunatic's left-behind clothes had been enough to scare Herr Theobald to death.

The man who could only walk on his hands had also fallen into the gravest trouble. His wristwatch snagged on a tine of an escalator and he was suddenly unable to hop off; his necktie, which he rarely wore because it dragged on the ground when he walked on his hands, was drawn under the step-off grate at the end of the escalator—where he was strangled. Behind him a line of people formed—marching in place by taking one step back and allowing the escalator to carry them forward, then taking another step back. It was quite a while before anyone got up the nerve to step over him. The world has many unintentionally cruel mechanisms that are not designed for people who walk on their hands.

After that, Theobald's sister told me, the Pension Grillparzer went from Class C to much worse. As the burden of management fell more heavily on her, she had less time for Duna and the bear grew senile and indecent in his habits. Once he bullied a mailman down a marble staircase at such a ferocious pace that the man fell and broke his hip; the attack was reported and an old city ordinance forbidding unrestrained animals in places open to the public was enforced, Duna was outlawed at the Pension Grillparzer.

For a while, Theobald's sister kept the bear in a cage in the courtyard of the building, but he was taunted by dogs and children, and food (and worse) was dropped into his cage from the apartments that faced the courtyard. He grew unbear-like and devious—only pretending to sleep—and he ate most of someone's cat. Then he was poisoned twice and became afraid to eat anything in this perilous environment. There was no alternative but to donate him to the Schцnbrunn Zoo, but there was even some doubt as to his acceptability. He was toothless and ill, perhaps contagious, and his long history of having been treated as a human being did not prepare him for the gentler routine of zoo life.

His outdoor sleeping quarters in the courtyard of the Grillparzer had inflamed his rheumatism, and even his one talent, unicycling, was irretrievable. When he first tried it in the zoo, he fell. Someone laughed. Once anyone laughed at something Duna did, Theobald's sister explained, Duna would never do that thing again. He became, at last, a kind of charity case at Schцnbrunn, where he died a short two months after he'd taken up his new lodgings. In the opinion of Theobald's sister, Duna died of mortification—the result of a rash that spread over his great chest, which then had to be shaved. A shaved bear, one zoo official said, is embarrassed to death.

In the cold courtyard of the building I looked in the bear's empty cage. The birds hadn't left a fruit seed, but in a corner of his cage was a looming mound of the bear's ossified droppings—void of life, and even odor, as the corpses captured by the holocaust at Pompeii. I couldn't help thinking of Robo; of the bear, there were more remains.

In the car I was further depressed to notice that not one kilometer had been added to the gauge, not one kilometer had been driven in secret. There was no one around to take liberties anymore.

“When we're a safe distance away from your precious Pension Grillparzer,” my second wife said to me, “I'd like you to tell me why you brought me to such a shabby place.”

“It's a long story,” I admitted.

I was thinking I had noticed a curious lack of either enthusiasm or bitterness in the account of the world by Theobald's sister. There was in her story the flatness one associates with a storyteller who is accepting of unhappy endings, as if her life and her companions had never been exotic to her—as if they had always been staging a ludicrous and doomed effort at reclassification.