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I thought that if Frank said something didn't matter again, I would scream. I thought I could fake more than an orgasm if Frank said that again. But once more I was saved by Susie the bear.

'Look, kids,' Susie said. 'Your old man's made a step in a practical direction. Do you realize how many tourists from the U.S. and England are going to find that name reassuring?'

'This is true,' Schwanger said, pleasantly. 'This is a city of the East to the British and to the Americans. The very shape of some of the churches -- the dreaded onion-shaped dome,' Schwanger said, 'and its implications of a world incomprehensible to Westerners ... depending on how far West you come from, even Central Europe can look East,' Schwanger said. 'It's the timid souls who'll be attracted here,' Schwanger predicted, as if she were composing another pregnancy and abortion book. 'The Hotel New Hampshire will ring bells for them -- bells that sound like home.'

'Brilliant,' Freud said. 'Bring us the timid souls,' Freud said, sighing, reaching his hands out to pat the heads that were nearest to him. He found Franny's head and patted it, but the big soft paw of Susie the bear brushed Freud's hand away.

I would get used to that -- that possessive paw. This is a world where what strikes us, at first, as ominous can grow to become commonplace, even reassuring. What seems, at first, reassuring can grow to become ominous, too, but I had to accept that Susie the bear was a good influence on Franny. If Susie could keep Franny from Ernst, I had to be grateful -- and was it too much to hope that Susie the bear might even convince Franny that she should stop writing to Chipper Dove?

'Do you think you are a lesbian, Franny?' I asked her, in the safety of the darkness on the Krugerstrasse -- Father was having trouble with the pink neon flasher: HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE! HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE! HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE! Over and over again.

'I doubt it,' Franny said, softly. 'I think I just like Susie.'

I was thinking, of course, that since Frank knew he was a homosexual, and now Franny was involved with Susie the bear, maybe it was only a matter of time before Lilly and I discovered our similar inclinations. But, as usual, Franny was reading my mind.

'It's not like that,' she whispered. 'Frank is convinced. I'm not convinced of anything -- except, maybe, that this is easier for me. Right now. I mean, it's easier to love someone of your own sex. There's not quite so much to commit yourself to, there's not so much to risk,' she said. 'I feel safer with Susie,' she whispered. 'That's all, I think. Men are so different,' Franny said.

'A phase,' Ernst went around saying -- about everything.

While Fehlgeburt, encouraged by everyone's response to The Great Gatsby, started reading Moby-Dick to us. Because of what happened to Mother and Egg, hearing about the ocean was difficult for us, but we got over that; we concentrated on the whale, especially on the different harpooners (we each had our favorite), and we kept a sharp eye on Lilly, waiting for her to identify Father with Ahab -- 'or maybe she'll decide Frank is the white whale,' Franny whispered. But it was Freud Lilly identified for us.

One night when the dressmaker's dummy stood at attention, and Fehlgeburt was droning, like the sea -- like the tide -- Lilly said, 'Can you hear him? Ssshhh!'

'What?' Frank said, like a ghost -- like Egg would have said, we all knew.

'Cut it out, Lilly,' Franny whispered.

'No, listen,' Lilly said. And for a moment we thought we were below decks, in our seamen's bunks, listening to Ahab's artificial leg restlessly pacing above us. A wooden whack, a bonelike thud. It was just Freud's baseball bat; he was limping his blind way on the floor above us -- he was visiting one of the whores.

'Which one does he see?' I asked.

'Old Billig,' said Susie the bear.

'The old for the old,' Franny said.

'It's sort of sweet, I think,' Lilly said.

'I mean it's Old Billig tonight,' said Susie the bear. 'He must be tired.'

'He does it with all of them?' Frank said.

'Not Jolanta,' Susie said. 'She scares him.'

'She scares me,' I said.

'And not Dark Inge, of course,' Susie said. 'Freud can't see her.'

It did not occur to me to visit the whores -- one or all. Ronda Ray had not really been like them. With Ronda Ray, it was just sex with a fee attached; in Vienna, sex was a business. I could masturbate to my imagination of Jolanta; that was exciting enou

gh. And for love ... well, for love there was always my imagination of Franny. And in the late summer nights, there was also Fehlgeburt. Moby-Dick being such a monster of a reading experience, Fehlgeburt had taken to staying later in the evenings. Frank and I would walk her home. She rented a room in an ill-kept building behind the Rathaus, near the university, and she did not like crossing the Karntnerstrasse or the Graben alone at night, because she would occasionally be mistaken for a whore.

Anyone who mistook Fehlgeburt for a whore must have had a great imagination; she was so clearly a student. It was not that she wasn't pretty, it was that her prettiness clearly wasn't an issue -- for her. What plain good looks she had -- and she had them -- she either suppressed or neglected. Her hair was straggly; on the rare occasions when it was clean, it was simply uncared for. She wore blue jeans and a turtleneck, or a T-shirt, and about her mouth and eyes was the kind of tiredness that suggests too much reading, too much writing, too much thinking -- too many of those things larger than one's own body, and its care or pleasures. She seemed about the same age as Susie, but she was much too humorless to be a bear -- and her loathing for the nighttime activities in the Hotel New Hampshire surely bordered on what Ernst would have called 'disgust.' When it was raining, Frank and I would walk her no farther than the streetcar stop on the Ringstrasse at the opera; when it was nice, we walked her through the Plaza of Heroes and up the Ring toward the university. We were just three kids fresh from thinking about whales, walking under the big buildings in a city too old for all of us. Most nights it was as if Frank weren't there.

'Lilly is only eleven,' Fehlgeburt would say. 'It's wonderful that she loves literature. It could be her salvation. That hotel is no place for her.'

'Wo ist die Gemutlichkeit?' Frank was singing.

'You're very good with Lilly,' I told Miss Miscarriage. 'Do you want a family of your own, someday?'