Page 94

'Of course it's over, Frank,' Franny said. 'Don't you know an ending when you hear one?'

Fehlgeburt looked drained of her blood, her child-like face with a sad grown-up's frown, a strand of her lank blond hair wrapped nervously around a neat pink ear. Then Lilly started in, and we couldn't stop her. It was late afternoon, the whores hadn't come around, but when Lilly started in, Susie the bear thought Screaming Annie was faking an orgasm in a room she didn't belong in. Susie burst into Frank's room, knocking the dressmaker's dummy over and causing poor Fraulein Fehlgeburt to yip in alarm. But even that intrusion couldn't stop Lilly. Her cry seemed caught in her throat, her grief seemed to be something she was sure to choke on; we could not believe such a small body could generate so much trembling, could orchestrate so much sound.

Of course, we were all thinking, it's not that the book moved her so much -- it's that bit about being 'borne back ceaselessly into the past,' it's our past that's moving her, we were all thinking; it's Mother, it's Egg, and how we won't ever be able to forget them. But when we calmed her down, Lilly blurted out suddenly that it was Father she was crying for. 'Father is a Gatsby,' she cried. 'He is! I know he is!'

And we all started in on her, at once. Frank said, 'Lilly, don't let that "orgiastic future" stuff get you down. It's not exactly what Iowa Bob meant when he was always saying how Father lives in the future.'

'It's a rather different future, Lilly,' I said.

'Lilly,' Franny said. 'What's "the green light," Lilly? I mean, for Father: what's his green light, Lilly?'

'You see, Lilly,' Frank said, as if he were bored, 'Gatsby was in love with the idea of being in love with Daisy; it wasn't even Daisy he was in love with, not anymore. And Father hasn't got a Daisy, Lilly,' Frank said, choking up just a little -- because it had probably just occurred to him that Father didn't have a wife anymore, either.

But Lilly said, 'It's the man in the white dinner jacket, it's Father, he's a Gatsby. "It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- " ' Lilly quoted to us. 'Don't you see?

' she shrieked. 'There's always going to be an It -- and It is going to elude us, every time. It's going to always get away,' Lilly said. 'And Father's not going to stop,' she said. 'He's going to keep going after it, and it's always going to get away. Oh, damn it!' she howled, stamping her little foot. 'Damn it! Damn it!' Lilly wailed, and she was off again, unstoppable -- a match for Screaming Annie, who could only fake an orgasm; Lilly, we suddenly understood, could fake death itself. Her grief was so real that I thought Susie the bear was going to take the bear's head off and pay a little human reverence, but Susie prowled through Frank's room in her strictly bearish fashion; she bumped out the door, leaving us to deal with Lilly's anguish.

Lilly's Weltschmerz, as Frank would come to call it. 'The rest of us have anguish,' Frank would say. 'The rest of us have grief, the rest of us merely suffer. But Lilly,' Frank would say, 'Lilly has true Weltschmerz. It shouldn't be translated as "world-weariness," ' Frank would lecture us, 'that's much too mild for what Lilly's got. Lilly's Weltschmerz is like "world-hurt," ' Frank would say. 'Literally "World" -- that's the Welt part -- and "hurt," because that's what the Schmerz part really is: pain, real ache. Lilly's got a case of world-hurt, ' Frank concluded, proudly.

'Kind of like sorrow, huh, Frank?' Franny asked.

'Kind of,' Frank said, stonily. Sorrow was no friend of Frank's: not anymore.

In fact, the death of Mother and Egg -- with Sorrow in Egg's lap, and rising from the deep to mark the grave -- convinced Frank to give up trying to properly pose the dead; Frank would give up taxidermy in all its forms. All manifestations of resurrection were to be abandoned by him. 'Including religion,' Frank said. According to Frank, religion is just another kind of taxidermy.

As a result of Sorrow's tricking him, Frank would come down very hard on belief of any kind. He would become a greater fatalist than Iowa Bob, he would become a greater nonbeliever than Franny or me. A near-violent atheist, Frank would turn to believing only in Fate -- in random fortune or random doom, in arbitrary slapstick and arbitrary sorrow. He would become a preacher against every bill of goods anyone ever sold: from politics to morality, Frank was always for the opposition. By which Frank meant 'the opposing forces.'

'But what exactly do these forces oppose, Frank?' Franny asked him, once.

'Just oppose every prediction,' Frank advised. 'Anything anybody's for, be against it. Anything anybody's against, be for it. You get on a plane and it doesn't crash, that means you got on the right plane,' Frank said. 'And that's all it means.'

Frank, in other words, went 'off.' After Mother and Egg went away, Frank went ever farther away -- somewhere -- he went into a religion more vastly lacking in seriousness than even the established religions; he joined a kind of anti-everything sect.

'Or maybe Frank founded it,' Lilly said, once. Meaning nihilism, meaning anarchy, meaning trivial silliness and happiness in the face of gloom, meaning depression descending as regularly as night over the most mindless and joyful of days. Frank believed in zap! He believed in surprises. He was in constant attack and retreat, and he was equally, constantly, wide-eyed and goofily stumbling about in the sudden sunlight -- tripping across the wasteland littered with bodies from the darkness of just a moment ago.

'He just went crazy,' Lilly said. And Lilly should know.

Lilly went crazy, too. She seemed to take Mother's and Egg's deaths as a personal punishment for some failure deep within herself, and so she resolved she would change. She resolved, among other things, to grow.

'At least a little,' she said, grimly determined. Franny and I were worried about her. Growth seemed unlikely for Lilly, and her strenuousness with which we imagined Lilly pursuing her own 'growth' was frightening to Franny and me.

'I want to change, too,' I said to Franny. 'But Lilly -- I don't know. Lilly is just Lilly.'

'Everyone knows that,' Franny said.

'Everyone except Lilly,' I said.

'Precisely,' Franny said. 'So how are you going to change? You know something better than growing?'

'No. Not better,' I said. I was just a realist in a family of dreamers, large and small. I knew I couldn't grow. I knew I would never really grow up; I knew my childhood would never leave me, and I would never be quite adult enough -- quite responsible enough -- for the world. The goddamn Welt, as Frank would say. I couldn't change enough, and I knew it. All I could do was something that would have pleased Mother. I could give up swearing. I could clean up my language -- which had upset Mother so. And so I did.

'You mean you're not going to say "fuck" or "shit" or "cocksucker" or even "up yours" or "in the ear" or anything, anymore?' Franny asked me.

'That's right,' I said.

'Not even "asshole"?' Franny asked.

'Right,' I said.