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Sorrow floats. We knew that. We shouldn't have been so surprised.

But the night that Susie the bear made Franny forget about pornography -- that night she made my sister sing so well -- Frank and I were struck by a resemblance stronger than the resemblance Ernst the pornographer bore to Chipper Dove. In Frank's room with the dressmaker's dummy pushed against Frank's door, Frank and I lay whispering in the darkness.

'Did you see the bear?' I said.

'You couldn't see her head,' Frank said.

'Right,' I said. 'So it was just the bear suit, really -- Susie was sort of hunched up.'

'Why was she still wearing the bear suit?' Frank asked.

'I don't know,' I said.

'Probably they were just starting,' Frank reasoned.

'But the way the bear looked,' I said. 'Did you see?'

'I know,' Frank whispered.

'All that fur, the body sort of curled,' I said.

'I know what you're saying,' Frank said. 'Stop it.'

In the darkness we both knew what Susie the bear had looked like -- we had both seen whom she resembled. Franny had warned us: she'd told us to be on the lookout for Sorrow's new poses, for Sorrow's new disguises.

'Sorrow,' Frank whispered. 'Susie the bear is Sorrow.'

'She looked like him, anyway,' I said.

'She's Sorrow, I know it,' Frank said.

'Well, for the moment, maybe,' I said. 'For now she is.'

'Sorrow,' Frank kept repeating, until he fell asleep. 'It's Sorrow,' he murmured. 'You can't kill it,' Frank mumbled. 'It's Sorrow. It floats.'

9 The Second Hotel New Hampshire

The last renovation in the new lobby of the Gasthaus Freud was my father's idea. I imagine him standing one morning in front of the post office on the Krugerstrasse, looking up the street at the new lobby -- the candy store completely absorbed, the old signs, like tired soldiers' rifles, leaning against the scaffolding that the workmen were taking down. The signs said: BONBONS, KONDITOREI, ZUCKERWAREN, SCHOKOLADEN, and GASTHAUS FREUD. And my father saw then that they should all be thrown away: no more candy store, no more Gasthaus Freud.

'The Hotel New Hampshire?' said Screaming Annie, always the first whore to arrive (and the last to leave).

'Change with the times,' said Old Billig, the radical. 'Roll with the punches, come up smiling. "The Hotel New Hampshire" sounds okay to me.'

'Another phase, another phase,' said Ernst the pornographer.

'A brilliant idea!' Freud cried. 'Think of the American clientele -- how it will hook them! And no more anti-Semitism,' the old man said.

'No more guests staying away because of their anti-Freudian tendencies, I suppose,' Frank said.

'What the fuck else did you think he'd call it?' Franny asked me. 'It's Father's hotel, isn't it?' she asked.

Screwed down for life, as Iowa Bob would have said.

'I think it's sweet,' Lilly said. 'It's a nice touch, sort of small, but sweet.'

'Sweet?' Franny said. 'Oh boy, we're in trouble: Lilly thinks it's sweet.'

'It's sentimental,' Frank said, philosophically, 'but it doesn't matter.'