“But where’s the money going to come from?” Mother said.
“Come on, Sorrow,” Father said, and I knew that they were on their way out the door. “Come on, Sorrow. Come stink up the whole town,” Father said. Mother laughed again.
“Answer me,” she said, but she was being flirtatious now; Father had already convinced her, somewhere, sometime before—perhaps when Franny was taking the stitches in her lip (stoically, I knew: without a tear). “Where’s the money going to come from?” Mother asked him.
“You know,” he said, and closed the door. I heard Sorrow barking at the night, at everything in it, at nothing at all.
And I knew that if a white sloop had pulled up to the front porch and the trellises of the old Bates family house, my mother and father would not have been surprised. If the man in the white dinner jacket, who owned the once exotic Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea, had been there to greet them, they wouldn’t have blinked an eye. If he’d been there, smoking, tanned and impeccable, and if he’d said to them, “Welcome aboard!”—they would have set out to sea on the white sloop there and then.
And when they walked up Pine Street to Elliot Park and turned past the last row of the houses lived in by the widows and widowers, the wretched Thompson Female Seminary must have shone in the night to them like a chateau, or a villa, throwing a gala for the rich and famous—although there couldn’t have been a light on, and the only soul around would have been the old policeman in his squad car, cruising every hour or so to break up the teen-agers who went there to neck. There was just one streetlight in Elliot Park; Franny and I would never cross the park after dark in our bare feet for fear of stepping on beer bottle glass—or used condoms.
But how Father must have painted a different picture! How he must have taken Mother past the stumps of long-dead elms—the glass crunching underfoot must have imitated the sound of pebbles on an expensive beach, to them—and how he must have said, “Can’t you just imagine it? A family-run hotel! We’d have it to ourselves most of the time. With the killing we’d make on the big school weekends, we wouldn’t even have to advertise—at least, not much. Just keep the restaurant and bar open during the week, to attract the businessmen—the lunch and cocktail crowd.”
“Businessmen?” my mother might have wondered aloud. “What lunch and cocktail crowd?”
But even when Sorrow flushed the teen-agers from the bushes, even when the squad car stopped Father and Mother and asked them to identify themselves, my father must have been convincing. “Oh, it’s you, Win Berry,” the policeman must have said. Old Howard Tuck drove the night car; he was a moron and smelled of cigars extinguished in puddles of beer. Sorrow must have growled at him: here was an odour to conflict with the dog’s own highly developed smell. “Poor Bob’s having a rough season,” old Howard Tuck probably said, because everyone knew my father was Iowa Bob’s son; Father had been a backup quarterback for one of Coach Bob’s old Dairy teams—the teams that used to win.
“Another rough season,” my father must have joked.
“Wutcha doin’ here?” old Howard Tuck must have asked them.
And my father, without a doubt, must have said, “Well, Howard, between you and me, we’re going to buy this place.”
“You are?”
“You betcha,” Father would have said. “We’re going to turn this place into a hotel.”
“A hotel?”
“That’s right,” Father would have said. “And a restaurant, with a bar, for the lunch and cocktail crowd.”
“The lunch and cocktail crowd,” Howard Tuck would have repeated.
“You’ve got the picture,” Father would have said. “The finest hotel in New Hampshire!”
“Holy cow,” the cop could only have replied.
Anyway, it was the night-duty town patrolman, Howard Tuck, who asked my father, “Wutcha gonna call it?”
Remember: it was night, and the night inspired my father. He had first seen Freud and his bear at night; he had fished with State o’Maine at night; nighttime was the only time the man in the white dinner jacket made an appearance; it was after dark when the German and his brass band arrived at the Arbuthnot to spill a little blood; it must have been dark when my father and mother first slept together; and Freud’s Europe was in total darkness now. There in Elliot Park, with the patrol car’s spotlight on him, my father looked at the four-storey brick school that indeed resembled a county jail—the rust-iron fire escapes crawled all over it, like scaffolding on a building trying to become something else. No doubt he took my mother’s hand. In the darkness, where the imagination is never impeded, my father felt the name of his future hotel, and our future, coming to him.
“Wutcha gonna call it?” asked the old cop.
“The Hotel New Hampshire,” my father said.
“Holy cow,” said Howard Tuck.
“Holy cow” might have been a better name for it, but the matter was decided: the Hotel New Hampshire it would be.
I was still awake when Mother and Father came home—they were gone much longer than fifteen minutes, so I knew that they’d encountered at least the white sloop, if not Freud and the man in the white dinner jacket, along the way.
“My God, Sorrow,” I heard Father say. “Couldn’t you have done that outside?”
The vision of them coming home was clear to me: Sorrow snorting through the hedges alongside the clapboard buildings of the town, rousing the light-sleeping elderly from their beds. Confused with time, these old people might have looked out and seen my father with my mother, hand in hand, unaware of the years gone by, they would have gone back to bed, muttering, “It’s Iowa Bob’s boy, with the Bates girl and that old bear, again.”
“Just one thing I don’t understand,” my mother was saying. “Will we have to sell this house, and move out of it, before we’re ready to move in there?”
Because that was the only way he could afford to convert a school into a hotel, of course. The town would be glad to let him have the Thompson Female Seminary, dirt-cheap. Who wanted to have the eye-sore left empty, where children could get hurt, smashing the windows and climbing the fire escapes? But it was my mother’s family house—the lush Bates family house—that would have to pay for the restoration. Perhaps this was what Freud meant: what Mother must forgive Father for.
“We may have to sell it before we move there,” Father said, “but we may not have to move out. Those are just details.”
Those details (and others) would take us years, and would cause Franny to say, long after the stitches were out of her lip and the scar was so thin that you thought you could brush it away with your finger—or that one good kiss would erase the mark from her mouth—“If Father could have bought another bear, he wouldn’t have needed to buy a hotel.” But the first of my father’s illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels.
In 1954 Frank joined the freshman class at the Dairy School—an uneventful transition for him, it seemed, except that he spent even more time in his room, by himself. There was a vague homosexual incident, but a number of boys, all from the same dormitory, had been involved—all older than Frank—and the assumption was that Frank had been the victim of a rather common prep school joke. After all, he lived at home; it’s not surprising that he was naïve about dormitory life.
In 1955 Franny went to the Dairy School; that was the first year women went there, and the transition was not so smooth. Transitions would never be too smooth when Franny was involved, but in this case there were many unforeseen problems, ranging from discrimination in the classrooms to not enough showers in the wing of the gym they had partitioned for the women to use. Also, the sudden presence of women teachers on the faculty caused several tottering marriages to fall, and the fantasy life of the boys at Dairy was no doubt increased a thousand-fold.
In 1956 it was my turn. That was the year they bought an entire backfield and three linemen for Coach Bob; the school knew he was retiring, and he hadn’t had a winning season since just after the war. They thought they’d do him a favour by stocking his football team with one-year postgraduate athletes from the toughest Boston high schools. For once Coach Bob not only had a back-field; he had some beef up front, for blocking, and although the old man disliked the idea of a “bought” team—of what (even in those days) we called “ringers”—he appreciated the gesture. The Dairy School, however, had more in mind than making Iowa Bob’s last year a winning season. They were shooting every angle they could, to attract more alumni money and a new and younger football coach for the next year. One more losing season, Bob knew, and the Dairy School would drop football forever. Coach Bob would rather have gone out a winner with a team he built, over several years, but who wouldn’t rather go out a winner almost any way possible.
“Besides,” said Coach Bob, “even good talent needs a coach. These guys wouldn’t be so hot without me. Everybody needs a game plan; everybody needs to be told what they’re doing wrong.”
In those years, Iowa Bob had lots to say to my father on the subject of game plan and doing wrong. Coach Bob said that the restoration of the Thompson Female Seminary was “a task akin to raping a rhinoceros.” It took a little longer than my father had expected.
He had no trouble selling Mother’s family house—it was a beauty, and we made a killing on it—but the new owners were impatient to take possession and we paid them a stiff rent to live there for a full year after all the papers were signed.
I remember watching the old school desks being removed from what was going to be the Hotel New Hampshire—hundreds of desks that had been screwed down to the floor. Hundreds of holes in the floor to fill, or else carpet the whole thing. That was “one of the details Father had to deal with.
And the fourth-floor bathroom equipment was a surprise to him. My mother should have remembered: years before her time at the Thompson Female Seminary, the toilets and sinks for the top floor had been misordered. Instead of outfitting bathrooms for high school-sized students, the toilet and sink people delivered and installed miniatures—they were meant for a kindergarten in the north of the state. Since the mistake cost less than the original order, the Thompson Female Seminary had let it pass. And so generations of high school girls had stooped and cracked their knees while trying to pee and wash—the tiny child-sized toilets breaking the girls” backs if they sat down too fast, the little sinks hitting them a knee level, the mirrors staring straight at their breasts.
“Jesus God,” Father said. “It’s an outhouse for elves.” He had hoped simply to disperse the old bathroom equipment throughout the hotel; he had enough sense to know that the guests wouldn’t want to share communal bathrooms, but he thought he could save a lot of money by using the toilets and sinks that were already there. After all, there wasn’t much equipment that a high school and a hotel had in common.
“We can use the mirrors, anyway,” Mother said. “We’ll just mount them higher on the walls.”
“And we can use the sinks and toilets, too,” Father insisted.
“Who can use them?” Mother asked.
“Dwarfs?” said Coach Bob.
“Lilly and Egg, anyway,” Franny said. “At least for a few more years.”
Then there were the screwed-down desk chairs that had matched the desks. Father wouldn’t throw them out, either.
“They’re perfectly good chairs,” Father said. “They’re very comfortable.”
“It’s sort of quaint how they have names carved in them,” Frank said.