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Sometime that spring I saw Franny use it: just a single deft shrug, with a hint of some involuntary ache behind it -- when Junior Jones told us that he would be accepting the football scholarship from Penn State in the fall.

'I'll write you,' Franny told him.

'Sure, and I'll write you,' he told her.

'I'll write you more,' said Franny. Junior Jones tried to shrug, but it didn't come off.

'Shit,' he told me, when we were throwing rocks at a tree in Elliot Park. 'What does Franny want to do, anyway? What does she think is going to happen to her over there?'

'Over there' was what we all called it. Except Frank: he now spoke of Vienna the German way.' Wien,' he said.

'Veen,' Lilly said, shuddering. 'It sounds like something a lizard would say.' And we all stared at her, waiting for Egg to say his 'What?'

Then the grass came out in Elliot Park, and one warm night, when I was sure Egg was asleep, I opened the window and looked at the moon and the stars and listened to the crickets and the frogs, and Egg said, 'Keep passing the open windows.'

'You awake?' I said.

'I can't sleep,' Egg said. 'I can't see where I'm going,' he said. 'I don't know what it'll be like.'

He sounded ready to cry, so I said, 'Come on, Egg. It will be great. You've never lived in a city,' I said.

'I know,' he said, sniffling a little.

'Well, there's more to do than there is to do here,' I promised him.

'I have a lot to do here,' he said.

'But this will be so different,' I told him.

'Why do the people jump out of windows?' he asked me.

And I explained to him that it was just a story, although the sense of a metaphor might have been lost on him.

'There are spies in the hotel,' he said. 'That's what Lilly said: "Spies and low women.'"

I imagined Lilly thinking that 'low women' were short, like her, and I tried to reassure Egg that there was nothing frightening about the occupants of Freud's hotel; I said that Father would take care of everything -- and heard the silence with which both Egg and I accepted that promise.

'How will we get there?' Egg asked. 'It's so far.'

'An airplane,' I said.

'I don't know what that's like, either,' he said.

(There would be two airplanes, actually, because Father and Mother would never fly on the same plane; many parents are like that. I explained that to Egg, too, but he kept repeating. 'I don't know what it'll be like.')

Then Mother came into our room to comfort Egg and I fell back to sleep with them talking together, and woke up again as Mother was leaving; Egg was asleep. Mother came over to my bed and sat down beside me; her hair was loose and she looked very young; in fact, in the half-dark, she looked a lot like Franny.

'He's only seven,' she said, about Egg. 'You should talk to him more.'

'Okay,' I said. 'Do you want to go to Vienna?'

And of course, she shrugged -- and smiled -- and said, 'Your father is a good, good man.' For the first time, really, I could see them in the summer of 1939, with Father promising Freud that he would get married, and he would go to Harvard -- and Freud asking Mother one thing: to forgive Father. Was this what she had to forgive him for? And was rooting us out of the terrible town of Dairy, and the wretched Dairy School -- and the first Hotel New Hampshire, which wasn't so hot a hotel (though nobody said so) -- was that so bad a thing that Father was doing, really?

'Do you like Freud?' I asked her.

'I don't really know Freud,' Mother said.

'But Father likes him,' I said.