by John Irving
'Excuse me,' we heard Frank say; Franny locked her hands around my waist at the base of my spine; I tried to force her chin up, off my shoulder, but Lilly was sitting on my head.
'What is it, dear?' Mother said.
'What's up, Frank?' Father said, and we could tell by the sharp creak of a chair that Father had grabbed for Frank; he was always trying to loosen Frank up a little by wrestling with him, or trying to get him to play, but Frank wouldn't go for it. Franny and I loved it when Father would roughhouse with us, but Frank didn't like it at all.
'Excuse me,' Frank repeated.
'You're excused, you're excused,' Father said.
'Franny is out of her room, she's in bed with John,' Frank said. 'And Lilly's with them. She brought them something to eat.'
I felt Franny slide away from me; she was out of my bed and out of my room, her flannel nightie ballooning like a sail in the draught from the upstairs hall by the stairwell; Lilly grabbed her sheet and crawled into my closet. The old Bates family house was huge; there were so many places to hide, but my mother knew them all. I thought Franny was dashing back to her room, but I heard her going downstairs, instead, and then I heard her screaming.
'You weirdo fink, Frank!' she screamed. 'You fart! You turd in a birdbath!'
'Franny!' Mother said.
I ran to the stairwell and hugged the banister; the stairs were carpeted, deep and soft, the same carpet that covered the house, I could see Franny go straight for the headlock on Frank in the dining room. She took him down fast -- Frank was slow-moving and not very physical; he was badly coordinated, although bigger than Franny, and much bigger than me. I rarely fought with him, even in fun; Frank did little in the way of fighting for fun, and even in fun he could hurt you. He was too large, and despite his distaste for the physical life, he was strong. He had a way, too, of finding your ear with his elbow, or your nose with his knee; he was the kind of fighter whose fingers and thumbs always found an eye, whose head bobbed up and split your lip against your own teeth. There are people who are so physically uncomfortable with themselves that they seem to jar against any other body. Frank was like that, and I left him alone; it was not just because he was two years older.
Franny occasionally couldn't stand not testing him, but they almost always hurt each other. I watched her locked in a death grip with Frank under the dining room table.
'Stop them, Win!' my mother said, but Father hit his head on the table trying to drag them out where he could separate them; Coach Bob went under the table from the other side.
'Shit!' Father said.
I felt something warm against my hip at the banister; it was Lilly, peering out from under her sheet.
'You rat's asshole, Frank!' Franny was screaming.
Then Frank got Franny's hair and yanked her head against the dining table leg; although I did not have breasts of my own, I could feel it in my chest when Frank dug his knuckles into Franny's breast. She had to let go of her headlock and he rapped her head against the table leg twice more, snarling her hair around his fist, before Coach Bob got three of their four legs in his huge hands and hauled them out from under the table. Franny lashed out with her free foot and caught Bob with a good blow to the nose, but the old Iowa lineman hung on. Franny was crying now, but she managed to strain against her hair hard enough to bite Frank on the cheek. Frank grabbed one of her breasts in his hand; he must have squeezed her hard because Franny's mouth opened against Frank's cheek and a losing sob broke from her. It was so terrible and defeated a sound that it sent Lilly running back to my room with her sheet. Father knocked Frank's hand from Franny's breast and Coach Bob got a headlock on Franny, so that she couldn't bite Frank again. But Franny had a hand free and she went for Frank's private parts; whether you were in a cup, in or out of a jock, or wearing nothing at all, Franny could get to your private parts when the chips were down. Frank was suddenly all arms and legs jerking, and a moan so blue escaped him that I shivered. Father slapped Franny in the face, but she wouldn't let go; he had to claw her fingers open. Coach Bob dragged Frank free of her, but Franny took a last kick with her long leg and Father was forced to slap her, hard, across the mouth. That ended it.
Father sat on the dining room carpet, holding Franny's head against his chest and rocking her in his arms while she cried. 'Franny, Franny,' he said to her softly. 'Why does everyone have to hurt you to stop you?'
'Easy, son, just breathe easy,' Coach Bob told Frank, who lay on his side with his knees up to his chest, his face as grey as one of the Dairy School colours; old Iowa Bob knew how to console somebody who'd been felled by a blow to the balls. 'Feel kind of sick, don't you?' Coach Bob inquired, gently. 'Just breathe easy, lie still. It goes away.'
Mother cleared the table, picked up the fallen chairs; her determined disapproval of her family's inner violence registered on her face as enforced silence, bitter and hurt and full of dread.
'Try a deeper breath, now,' Coach Bob advised Frank; Frank tried and coughed. 'Okay, okay,' said Iowa Bob. 'Stick with the little breaths awhile longer.' Frank moaned.
Father examined Franny's lower lip while her tears streamed down her face and she made those gagging kinds of sobs, half strangled in her chest. 'I think you need some stitches, darling,' he said, but Franny shook her head furiously. Father held her head tightly between his hands and kissed her just above her eyes, twice. 'I'm sorry, Franny,' he said, 'but what can I do with you, what can I do?'
'I don't need stitches,' Franny mourned. 'No stitches. No way.'
But on her lower lip a jagged flap protruded and Father had to cup his hand under Franny's chin to catch her blood. Mother brought a washcloth full of ice.
I went back to my room and coaxed Lilly out of the closet; she wanted to stay with me and I let her. She fell right asleep, but I lay in bed thinking that every time someone said 'Hotel,' there would be blood and sudden sorrow. Father and Mother drove Franny to the Dairy School infirmary, where someone would stitch her lip together; no one would blame Father -- least of all Franny. Franny would blame Frank, of course, which -in those days -- was my tendency, too. Father would not blame himself -- or at least not for long -- and Mother would blame herself, inexplicably, for some while longer.
Whenever we fought, Father usually cried at us, 'Do you know how this upsets your mother and me? Imagine that we fought all the time, and you had to live with it? But do your mother and I fight? Do we? Would you like it if we did?'
We would not, of course; and they didn't -- most of the time. There was only the old argument, the living-in-the-future-and-not-enjoying-today argument, which Coach Bob expressed more vehemently than Mother, though we knew it was her opinion of my father, too (that, and that Father couldn't help it).
It didn't seem like a big thing, to us kids. I rolled Lilly on her side so that I could stretch out flat on my back with both my ears off the pillow, so that I could hear Iowa Bob coaching Frank upstairs. 'Easy, boy, just lean on me,' Bob was saying. 'The secret's in the breathing.' Frank blubbered something and Coach Bob said, 'But you can't grab a girl's tit, boy, and not expect to take a shot in the balls, now, can you?'
But Frank blubbered on: how Franny was terrible to him, how she never let him alone, how she was always turning the other kids against him, how he tried to avoid her but she was always there. 'She's in the middle of everything bad that happens to me!' he cried. 'You don't know!' he croaked. 'You don't know how she teases me.'
I thought I knew, and Frank was right; he was also rather unlikable, and that was the problem. Franny was awful to him, but Franny was not awful; and Frank was not really awful to any of us, except he (himself) was, somehow, awful. It bewildered me, lying there. Lilly began to snore. I heard Egg snuffle down the hall and wondered how Coach Bob would handle it if Egg woke up hollering for Mother. Bob had his hands full with Frank in the bathroom.
'Go on,' Bob said. 'Just let me see you do it.' Frank sobbed. There!' cried Iowa Bob, as if he'd just discovered a fumble in the end zone 'See? N
o blood, boy -- just piss. You're okay.'
'You don't know,' Frank kept saying. 'You don't know.'
I went to see what Egg wanted; being three, he wanted something unobtainable, I thought, but I was surprised that he was cheerful when I came into his room. He was obviously surprised to see me, and when I returned all the soft animals to his bed -- he had thrown them all over his room -- he proceeded to introduce me to each of them: the frayed squirrel he had vomited on, many times; the worn elephant with one ear; the orange hippopotamus. He was upset whenever I tried to leave him, so I took him into my room and put him in my bed with Lilly. Then I carried Lily back to her room, although that was a long way for me to carry her and she woke up and became irritable before I got her in her own bed.
'I never get to stay in your room,' she said; then she was asleep again, instantly.
I went back to my room and got in bed with Egg, who was wide-awake and talking nonsense. He was happy, though, and I heard Coach Bob talking downstairs -- at first, I thought, to Frank, but then I realized Bob was talking to our old dog, Sorrow. Frank must have gone off to sleep, or at least gone off to sulk.
'You smell worse than Earl,' Iowa Bob was telling the dog. And, in truth. Sorrow was dreadful to smell; not only his farting but his halitosis could kill you if you weren't careful, and the old black Labrador retriever seemed viler to me, too, than my faint memory of the foul odors of Earl. 'What are we going to do with you?' Bob mumbled to the dog, who enjoyed lying under the dining room table and farting all through mealtimes.
Iowa Bob opened windows downstairs. 'Come on, boy,' he called to Sorrow. 'Jesus,' Bob said, under his breath. I heard the front door open; presumably Coach Bob had put Sorrow out.
I lay awake with Egg crawling all over me, waiting for Franny to get back; if I was awake, I knew she'd come and show me her stitches. When Egg finally fell asleep, I carried him back to his room and his animals.
Sorrow was still outside when Father and Mother drove Franny home; if his barking hadn't woken me up, I'd have missed them. 'Well, that looks pretty good,' Coach Bob was saying, obviously approving of Franny's lip job. 'That won't leave any scar at all, after a while.'
'Five of them,' Franny said, thickly, as though they had given her an additional tongue.
'Five!' Iowa Bob cried. Terrific!'
'That dog's been farting in here again,' Father said; he sounded grouchy and tired, as if they'd been talking, talking, talking nonstop since they'd left for the infirmary.
'Oh, he's so sweet,' Franny said, and I heard Sorrow's hard tail wagging against a chair or the sideboard -- whack, whack, whack. Only Franny could he next to Sorrow for hours and be unaffected by the dog's various stenches. Of course, Franny seemed to notice smell, in general, less than the rest of us. She had never objected to changing Egg's diapers -- or even Lilly's, when we were all much younger. And when Sorrow, in his senility, would have an accident overnight, Franny never found the dog shit displeasing; she had a cheerful curiosity about strong things. She could go the longest, of any of us, without a bath.
I heard all the grown-ups kiss Franny good night and I thought: Families must be like this -- gore one minute, forgiveness the next. Just as I knew she would, Franny came into my room to show me her lip. The stitches were a crisp, shiny black, like pubic hair; Franny had pubic hair, I did not. Frank did, but he hated it.
'You know what your stitches look like?' I asked her.
'Yeah, I know,' she said.
'Did he hurt you?' I asked her, and she crouched close by my bed and let me touch her breast.
'It was the other one, dummy,' she said, and moved away from me.
'You really got Frank,' I said.
'Yeah, I know,' she said. 'Good night.' Then she peeked back in my door. 'We are going to move to a hotel,' she said. Then I heard her going into Frank's room.
'Want to see my stitches?' she whispered.
'Sure,' Frank said.
'You know what they look like?' Franny asked him.
'They look gross,' Frank said.
'Yeah, but you know what they look like, don't you?' Franny asked.
'Yes, I know,' he said, 'and they're gross.'
'Sorry about your balls, Frank,' Franny told him.
'Sure,' he said. They're okay. Sorry about . . .' Frank started to say, but he had never said 'breast,' much less 'tit,' in his life. Franny waited; so did I. 'Sorry about the whole thing,' Frank said.
'Yeah, sure,' Franny said. 'Me too.'
Then I heard her testing Lilly, but Lilly was too soundly asleep to be disturbed. 'Want to see my stitches?' Franny whispered. Then after a while I heard her say to Lilly, 'Sweet dreams, kiddo.'
There was, of course, no point in showing stitches to Egg. He would assume that they were remnants of something Franny had eaten.
'Want a ride home?' my father asked his father, but old Iowa Bob said he could always use the exercise.
'You may think this is a crummy town,' Bob said, 'but at least it's safe to walk at night.'
Then I listened some more; I knew when my parents were alone.
'I love you,' my father said.
And my mother said, 'I know you do. And I love you.' I knew, then, that she was tired, too.
'Let's take a walk,' Father said.
'I don't like to leave the children,' Mother said, but that was no argument, I knew; Franny and I were perfectly capable of looking after Lilly and Egg, and Frank looked after himself.
'It won't take fifteen minutes,' Father said. 'Let's just walk up there and look at it.'
'It,' of course, was the Thompson Female Seminary -- that beast of a building Father wanted to turn into a hotel.
'I went to school there,' Mother said, 'I know that building better than you do; I don't want to look at it.'
'You used to like walking with me at night,' Father said, and I could tell by my mother's laughter, which was only slightly mocking, that she was shrugging her shoulders for him again.
It was quiet downstairs; I couldn't tell if they were kissing or putting on their jackets -- because it was a fall night, damp and cool -- and then I heard Mother say, 'I don't think you have any idea how much money you're going to have to sink into that building to make it even resemble a hotel anybody would ever want to stay in.'
'Not necessarily want,' Father said. 'Remember? It will be the only hotel in town.'
'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.