“After all,” as Frank would say, “the first two weren’t real hotels, either.” The truth is, Father had always been blind, or Freud’s blindness had proved to be contagious.
We had the debris cleaned off the beach. We had the “grounds” more or less restored, which is to say we mowed the lawn again, and we even made an effort with one of the tennis courts. Many years later we put in a swimming pool, because Father liked to swim and it made me nervous to watch him in the ocean; I was always afraid he’d make a wrong turn and head out to sea. And the buildings that had been dormitories for the staff—where Mother and Father and Freud had once resided? We simply removed them; we had the wreckers come and drag them away. We had the ground leveled, and we paved it. We told Father it was a parking lot, although we never had very many cars around.
We put our hearts into the main building. We put a bar where the reception desk had been; we turned that lobby into a huge game room. We were thinking of the dart board and the billiard tables in the Kaffee Mowatt, so I suppose it’s accurate to say—as Franny says—that we converted the lobby to a Viennese coffeehouse. It led into what had been the hotel restaurant, and the kitchen; we just knocked down some walls and made the whole thing into what the architect called “a kind of country kitchen.”
“A huge kind,” Lilly said.
“A weird kind,” said Frank.
It was Frank’s idea to restore the ballroom. “In case we have a big party,” he argued, though we would never have a party so large that the so-called country kitchen couldn’t handle it. Even with eliminating many of the bathrooms, even with turning the top floor into storage space, and the second floor into a library, we could sleep thirty-odd people—in complete privacy—if we’d ever gone through with it and bought enough beds.
At first Father seemed puzzled by how quiet it was: “Where are the guests?” he’d ask, especially in summer, with the windows open, when you would expect to hear the children—their high, light voices swept up from the beach and mingled with the cries of gulls and terns. I explained to Father that we did well enough in the summers to not even need to bother to stay open for business in the winter, but some summers he would question me about the surrounding silence orchestrated by the steady percussion of the sea. “By my count, I can’t imagine there’s more than two or three guests around here,” Father would say, “unless I’m going deaf, too,” he would add.
But we’d all explain to him how we were such a first-class resort hotel that we didn’t really need to fill the place; we were getting such a stiff price for a room, we didn’t need to fill every room to be making a bundle.
“Isn’t that fantastic?” he’d say. “It’s what I knew this place could be,” he’d remind us. “It needed only that proper combination of class and democracy. I always knew it could be special.”
Well, my family was a model of democracy, of course; first Lilly made the money, then Frank went to work with the money, and so the third Hotel New Hampshire had lots of un paying guests. We wanted as many people around as possible, because the presence of people, both their merry and quarrelsome sounds, helped further my father’s illusions that we were at last a joint of distinction, operating wholly in the black. Lilly came and stayed as long as she could stand it. She never liked working in the library, although we offered her—virtually—the entire second floor. “Too many books in the library,” she said; she felt, when she was writing, that the presence of other books dwarfed her little efforts. Lilly even tried writing in the ballroom, once—that vast space awaiting music and graceful feet. Lilly would write and write in there, but her tiny pecks upon her typewriter would never fill the empty dance floor—though she tried. How Lilly tried.
And Franny would come and stay, out of the public’s scrutiny; Franny would use our third Hotel New Hampshire to collect herself. Franny would be famous—more famous than Lilly, too, I’m afraid. In the movie version of Trying to Grow, Franny got the part of playing herself. After all, she is the hero of the first Hotel New Hampshire. In the movie version, of course, she’s the only one of us who seems authentic. They made Frank into your stereotypical homosexual cymbalist and taxidermist; they made Lilly “cute,” but Lilly’s smallness was never cute to us. Her size, I’m afraid, always seemed like a failed effort—no cuteness involved in the struggle, or in the result. And they overplayed Egg: Egg the heartbreaker—Egg really was “cute.”
They found some veteran Western actor to play Iowa Bob (Frank and Franny and I all remembered seeing this old duffer shot off a horse a million times); he had a way of lifting weights as if he were wolfing down a plate of flapjacks—he was completely unconvincing. And, of course, they cut out all the swearing. Some producer actually told Franny that profanity revealed a poor vocabulary and a lack of imagination. And Frank and Lilly and Father and I all loved to shout at Franny, then, and ask her what she had said to that. “What an anal crock of shit, you dumb asshole!” she’d told the producer. “Up yours—and in your ear, too!”
But even with the limitation imposed upon her language, Franny came across in Trying to Grow. Even though they cast Junior Jones in such a way that he came on like some self-conscious buffoon auditioning for a jazz band; even though the people playing Mother and Father were insipid and vague; and the one who was supposed to be me!—well, Jesus God. Even with these handicaps, Franny shone through. She was in her twenties when they shot the movie, but she was so pretty that she played sixteen just fine.
“I think the oaf they got to play you,” Franny told me, “was supposed to exude an absolutely lifeless combination of sweetness and stupidity.”
“Well, I don’t know, that’s what you do exude, every now and then,” Frank would tease me.
“Like a kind of weight-lifting maiden aunt,” Lilly said to me. “That’s how they cast you.”
But in my first few years of looking after Father at the third Hotel New Hampshire, that is rather what I felt like much of the time: a kind of weight-lifting maiden aunt. With a degree in American literature from Vienna, I could do worse than become the caretaker of my father’s illusions.
“You need a nice woman,” Franny said to me, long distance—from New York, from L.A., from the viewpoint of her rising stardom.
Frank would argue with her that perhaps what I needed was a nice man. But I was wary. I was happy setting up my father’s fantasy. In the tradition established by the doomed Fehlgeburt, I would especially enjoy reading to Father in the evenings; reading aloud to someone is one of this world’s pleasures. I would even succeed in interesting Father in lifting weights. You don’t have to see to do it. And in the mornings, now, Father and I have a wonderful time in the old ballroom. We’ve got mats spread out everywhere, and a proper bench for the bench presses. We’ve got barbells and dumbbells for every occasion—and we have the ballroom’s splendid view of the Atlantic Ocean. If Father hasn’t the means to see the view, he is content to feel the sea breeze wash over him as he lies lifting. Ever since squeezing Arbeiter, as I’ve said, I don’t put quite as much into the weights, and Father has become sophisticated enough as a weight lifter to realize this; he chides me a little bit About it, but I enjoy just taking a light workout with him. I leave him to do the heavy lifting, now.
“Oh, I know you’re still in shape,” he teases me, “but you’re no match for what you were in the summer of sixty-four.”
“You can’t be twenty-two all your life,” I remind him, and we lift and lift for a while. On those mornings, with the Maine mist not yet burned off, and the sea damp settled upon us, I can imagine that I’m just starting the voyage all over again—I can believe I’m lying on the rug old Sorrow liked to lie on, and it’s Iowa Bob beside me, instructing me, instead of me instructing my father.
I would be sneaking up on forty before I would try living with a woman.
For my thirtieth birthday, Lilly sent me a Donald Justice poem. She liked the ending and thought it applied to me. I was feeling cross at the time and fired back a note to Lilly, saying, “Who is this Donald Justice and how come everything he says applies to us?” But it’s a nice ending to any poem, and I did feel just like this at thirty.
Thirty today, I saw
The trees flare briefly like
The candles upon a cake
As the sun went down the sky,
A momentary flash,
Yet there was time to wish
Before the light could die,
If I had known what to wish,
As once I must have known,
Bending above the clean,
Candlelit tablecloth
To blow them out with a breath.
And, when Frank was forty, I would send him a birthday greeting with Donald Justice’s “Men at Forty” poem enclosed.
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
Frank fired me back a note saying he stopped reading the damn poem right there. “Close your own doors!” Frank snapped. “You’ll be forty soon enough. As for me, I bang the damn doors and come back to them all the fucking time!”
Bravo, Frank! I thought. He has always kept passing the open windows without the slightest trace of fear. It’s what all the great agents do: they make the most incredible and illogical advice sound reasonable, they make you go ahead without fear, and that way you get it, you get more or less what you want, or you get something, anyway; at least you don’t end up with nothing when you go ahead without fear, when you lunge into the darkness as if you were operating on the soundest advice in the world. Who would have thought Frank would have ended up so lovable? (He was such a rotten kid.) And I do not blame Frank for pushing Lilly too hard. “It was Lilly,” Franny always said, “who pushed Lilly too hard.”
When the damn reviewers liked her Trying to Grow—when they condescended to her with their superior forms of praise, saying how in spite of who she was, the Lilly Berry of that famous opera-saving family, she was really “not a bad writer,” she was really very “promising”—when they prattled on and on about the freshness of her voice, all it meant to Lilly was that now she had to get going; now she had to get serious.
But our little Lilly wrote her first book almost by accident; that book was only a euphemism for trying to grow, yet it insisted to her that she was a writer, when perhaps she was only a sensitive and loving reader, a lover of literature who thought she wanted to write. I think it was the writing that killed Lilly, because writing can do that. It just burned her up; she wasn’t big enough to take the self-abuse of it, to take the constant chipping away—of herself. After the movie version of Trying to Grow made Franny famous, and after the TV series of “The First Hotel New Hampshire” made Lilly Berry a household word, I suppose that Lilly wanted to “just write,” as one is always hearing writers say. I suppose she just wanted to be free to write her book, now. The problem was, it wasn’t a very good book—the second one. It was called The Evening of the Mind, from a line she stole from her guru, Donald Justice.
Now comes the evening of the mind.
Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood;
and so on. She might have been wiser to take her title and make her book from another Donald Justice line:
Time a bow bent with his certain failure.
She might have called her book Certain Failure, because it was just that. It was more than she could handle; it was over her head. It was about the death of dreams, it was about how hard the dreams die. It was a brave book, in that it departed from anything directly relatable to Lilly’s little autobiography, but it departed to a country too foreign for her to grasp; she wrote a vague book that reflected how foreign the language she was only visiting was to her. When you write vaguely, you are always vulnerable. She was easily wounded when the critics—when the damn reviewers, with their dull, plodding cunning—jumped on her.