How shall I speak of doom, and ours in special,
But as of something altogether common?
Add doom to the list, then. Especially in families, doom is “altogether common.” Sorrow floats; love, too; and—in the long run—doom. It floats, too.
Here is the epilogue; there always is one. In a world where love and sorrow float, there are many epilogues—and some of them go on and on. in a world where doom always muscles in, some of the epilogues are short.
“A dream is a disguised fulfillment of a suppressed wish,” Father announced to us over Easter dinner at Frank’s apartment in New York—Easter, 1965.
“You’re quoting Freud again, Pop,” Lilly told him.
“Which Freud?” Franny asked, by rote.
“Sigmund,” Frank answered. “From Chapter Four of The Interpretation of Dreams.”
I should have known the source, too, because Frank and I were taking turns reading to Father in the evening. Father had asked us to read all of Freud to him.
“So what did you dream about, Pop?” Franny asked him.
“The Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea,” Father said. His Seeing Eye dog spent every mealtime with her head in Father’s lap; every time Father reached for his napkin, he would deposit a morsel into the dog’s waiting mouth and the dog would raise her head—momentarily—allowing Father access to his napkin.
“You should not feed her at the table,” Lilly scolded Father, but we all liked the dog. She was a German shepherd with a particularly rich golden-brown color that liberally interrupted the black all over her body and dominated the tone of her gentle face; she was particularly long-faced and high-cheek-boned, so that her appearance was nothing like a Labrador retriever’s. Father had wanted to call her Freud, but we thought there was enough confusion among us concerning which Freud was meant—by this remark or that. A third Freud, we convinced Father, would have driven everyone crazy.
Lilly suggested we call the dog Jung.
“What? That traitor! That anti-Semite!” Frank protested. “Whoever heard of naming a female after Jung?” Frank asked. “That’s something only Jung would have thought of,” he said, fuming.
Lilly then suggested we call the dog Stanhope, because of Lilly’s fondness for the fourteenth floor; Father liked the idea of naming his first Seeing Eye dog after a hotel, but he said he preferred naming the dog after a hotel he really liked. We all agreed, then, that the dog would be called “Sacher.” Frau Sacher, after all, had been a woman.
Sacher’s only bad habit was putting her head in Father’s lap every time Father sat down to eat anything, but Father encouraged this—so it was really Father’s bad habit. Sacher was otherwise a model Seeing Eye dog. She did not attack other animals, thus dragging my father wildly out of control after her; she was especially smart about the habits of elevators—blocking the door from reclosing with her body until my father had entered or exited. Sacher barked at the doorman at the St. Moritz but was otherwise friendly, if a trifle aloof, with Father’s fellow pedestrians. These were the days before you had to clean up after your dog in New York City, so Father was spared that humiliating task—which would have been almost impossible for him, he realized. In fact, Father feared the passing of such a law years before anyone was talking about it. “I mean,” he’d say, “if Sacher shits in the middle of Central Park South, how am I supposed to find the crap? It’s bad enough to have to pick up dog shit, but if you can’t see it, it’s positively arduous. I won’t do it!” he would shout. “If some self-righteous citizen even tries to speak to me, even suggests that I am responsible for my dog’s messes, I think I’ll use the baseball bat!” But Father was safe—for a while. We wouldn’t be living in New York by the time they passed the dog shit law. As the weather got nice, Sacher and my father would walk, unaccompanied, between the Stanhope and Central Park South, and my father felt free to be blind to Sacher’s shitting.
At Frank’s, the dog slept on the rug between Father’s bed and mine, and I sometimes wondered, in my sleep, if it was Sacher I heard dreaming, or Father.
“So you dreamed about the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea,” Franny said to Father. “So what else is new?”
“No,” Father said. “It wasn’t one of the old dreams. I mean, your mother wasn’t there. We weren’t young again, or anything like that.”
“No man in a white dinner jacket, Daddy?” Lilly asked him.
“No, no,” Father said. “I was old. In the dream I was even older than I am now,” he said; he was forty-five. “In the dream,” Father said, “I was just walking along the beach with Sacher; we were just taking a stroll over the grounds—around the hotel,” he said.
“All around the ruins, you mean,” Franny said.
“Well,” Father said, slyly, “of course I couldn’t actually see if the Arbuthnot was still a ruin, but I had the feeling it was restored—I had the feeling it was all fixed up,” Father said, shoveling food off his plate and into his lap—and into Sacher. “It was a brand-new hotel,” Father said, impishly.
“And you owned it, I’ll bet,” Lilly said to him.
“You did say I could do anything, didn’t you, Frank?” Father asked.
“In the dream you owned the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea?” Frank asked him. “And it was all fixed up?”
“Open for business as usual, Pop?” Franny asked him.
“Business as usual,” Father said, nodding; Sacher nodded, too.
“Is that what you want to do?” I asked Father. “You want to own the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea?”
“Well,” Father said. “Of course we’d have to change the name.”
“Of course,” Franny said.
“The third Hotel New Hampshire!” Frank cried. “Lilly!” he shouted. “Just think of it! Another TV series!”
“I haven’t really been working on the first series,” Lilly said, worriedly.
Franny knelt beside Father; she put her hand on his knee; Sacher licked Franny’s fingers. “You want to do it again?” Franny asked Father. “You want to start all over again? You understand that you don’t have to.”
“But what else would I do, Franny?” he asked her, smiling. “It’s the last one—I promise you,” he said, addressing all of us. “If I can’t make the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea into something special, then I’ll throw in the towel.”
Franny looked at Frank and shrugged; I shrugged, too, and Lilly just rolled her eyes. Frank said, “Well, I guess it’s simple enough to inquire what it costs, and who owns it.”
“I don’t want to see him—if he still owns it,” Father said. “I don’t want to see the bastard.” Father was always pointing out to us the things he didn’t want to “see,” and we were usually restrained enough to resist pointing out to him that he couldn’t “see” anything.
Franny said she didn’t want to see the man in the white dinner jacket, either, and Lilly said she saw him all the time—in her sleep; Lilly said she was tired of seeing him.
It would be Frank and I who would rent a car and drive all the way to Maine; Frank would teach me how to drive along the way. We would see the ruin that was the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea again. We would note that ruins don’t change a lot: what capacity for change is in a ruin has usually been. exhausted in the considerable process of change undergone in order for the ruin to become a ruin. Once becoming a ruin, a ruin stays pretty much the same. We noted some more vandalism, but it’s not much fun vandalizing a ruin, we supposed, and so the whole place looked almost exactly as it had looked to us in the fall of 1946 when we had all come to the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea to watch Earl die.
We had no trouble recognizing the dock where old State o’Maine was shot, although that dock—and the surrounding docks—had been rebuilt, and there were a lot of new boats in the water. The Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea looked like a small ghost town, but what had once been a quaint fishing and lobstering village—alongside the hotel grounds—was now a scruffy little tourist town. There was a marina where you could rent boats and buy clam worms, and there was a rocky public beach within sight of the private beach belonging to the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea. Since no one was around to care, the “private” beach was hardly private anymore. Two families were having a picnic there when Frank and I visited the place; one of the families had arrived by boat, but the other family had driven right down to the beach in their car. They’d driven up the same “private” driveway that Frank and I had driven up, past the faded sign that still said: CLOSED FOR THE SEASON!
The chain that once had blocked that driveway had long ago been torn down and dragged away.
“It would cost a fortune to even make the place habitable,” Frank said.
“Provided they even want to sell it,” I said.
“Who in God’s name would want to keep it?” Frank asked.
It was at the realty office in Bath, Maine, that Frank and I found out that the man in the white dinner jacket still owned the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea—and he was still alive.
“You want to buy old Arbuthnot’s place!” the shocked realtor asked.
We were delighted to learn that there was an “old Arbuthnot.”
“I only hear from his lawyers,” the realtor said. “They’ve been trying to unload the place, for years. Old Arbuthnot lives in California,” the realtor told us, “but he’s got lawyers all over the country. The one I deal with most of the time is in New York.”
We thought, then, that it would simply be a matter of letting the New York lawyer know that we wanted it, but—back in New York—Arbuthnot’s lawyer told us that Arbuthnot wanted to see us.