by John Irving
My mother was worried about the chef, as Father insisted on calling her; she was a Canadian from Prince Edward Island, where she'd cooked for a large shipping family for fifteen years. 'There's a difference between cooking for a family and cooking for a hotel' Mother warned Father.
'But it was a large family -- she said so,' Father said. 'And besides, we're a small hotel.'
'We're a full hotel for the Exeter weekend,' Mother said. 'And a full restaurant.'
The cook's name was Mrs. Urick; she was to be assisted by her husband, Max -- a former merchant seaman and galley cook who was missing the thumb and index finger of his left hand. An accident in the galley of a vessel called the Miss Intrepid, he told us children, with a salty wink. He had been distracted imagining what Mrs. Urick would do to him if she knew about his time ashore with an intrepid lady in Halifax.
'All at once I looked down,' Max told us -- Lilly never taking her eyes from his maimed hand. 'And there was my thumb and my finger amongst the bloody carrots, and the cleaver was hacking away with a will of its own.' Max flinched his claw of a hand, as if recoiling from the blade, and Lilly blinked. Lilly was ten, although she didn't seem to have grown much since she'd been eight. Egg, who was six, seemed less frail than Lilly -- and sturdily unimpressed with Max Urick's stories.
Mrs. Urick didn't tell stories. For hours she scrutinized crossword puzzles without filling in the squares; she hung Max's laundry in the kitchen, which had been the girls' locker room of the Thompson Female Seminary -- thus it was familiar with drying socks and underwear. Mrs. Urick and my father had decided that the most fetching menu for the Hotel New Hampshire would be family-style meals. By this Mrs. Urick meant a choice of two big roasts, or a New England boiled dinner; a choice of two pies -- and on Mondays a variety of meat pies, made from leftover roasts. For luncheons there would be soups and cold cuts; for breakfasts, griddle cakes, and so forth.
'Nothing fancy, but just plain good,' said Mrs. Urick, rather humorlessly; she reminded Franny and me of the kind of boarding-school dietician we were familiar with from the Dairy School -- a firm believer that food was no fun but, somehow, morally essential. We shared Mother's anxieties about the cooking -- since it would be our standard fare, too -- but Father was sure Mrs. Urick would manage.
She was given a basement room of her own, 'to be close to my kitchen,' she said; she expected her stockpots to simmer overnight. Max Urick had a room of his own, too -- on the fourth floor. There was no elevator, and my father was happy to use up a fourth-floor room. The fourth-floor rooms had the child-sized toilets and sinks, but since Max had done his bathroom business for so many years in the cramped latrine of the Miss Intrepid, he was not insulted by the dwarf facilities.
'Good for my heart,' Max told us. 'Good for pumping the blood -- all that stair-climbing,' he said, and whacked his stringy gray chest with his damaged hand. But we thought that Max would go to great lengths to keep as far from Mrs. Urick as possible; he would even climb stairs -- he would pee and wash in anything. He claimed to be 'handy,' and when he wasn't helping Mrs. Urick in the kitchen he was supposed to be fixing things. 'Everything from toilets to locks!' he claimed; he could click his tongue like a key turning in a lock, and he could make a terrible whooshing sound -- like the tiny fourth-floor toilets in the Hotel New Hampshire sending their matter on an awesome, long voyage.
'What's the second advance booking?' I asked Father.
We knew there'd be a Dairy School graduation weekend, in the spring; and maybe a big hockey-game weekend in the winter. But the small, if steady, visits from parents of students at the Dairy School would hardly require any booking in advance.
'Graduation, right?' Franny asked. But Father shook his head.
'A giant wedding!' Lilly cried, and we stared at her.
'Whose wedding?' Frank asked.
'I don't know,' Lilly said. 'But a giant one -- a really big one. The biggest wedding in New England.'
We never knew where Lilly thought up the things she thought up; Mother looked worriedly at her, then she spoke to Father.
'Don't be secretive,' she said. 'We all want to know: what's the second advance booking?'
'It's not until summer,' he said. There's a lot of time to get ready for it. We have to concentrate on the Exeter weekend. First things first.'
'It's probably a convention for the blind,' Franny said to Frank and me, when we were walking to our classes in the morning.
'Or a leprosy clinic,' I said.
'It will be all right,' Frank said, worriedly.
We didn't take the path through the woods behind the practice field anymore. We walked straight across the soccer fields, sometimes throwing our apple cores into the goals, or else we walked down the main path that bisected the campus dormitories. We were concerned that we continue to avoid Iowa Bob's backfield; none of us wanted to be caught alone with Chipper Dove. We hadn't told Father of the incident -- Frank had asked Franny and me not to tell him.
'Mother already knows,' Frank told us. 'I mean, she knows I'm queer.'
This surprised Franny and me only for a moment; when we thought of it, it made perfect sense, really. If you had a secret, Mother would keep it; if you wanted a democratic debate, and a family discussion lasting for hours, maybe weeks -- perhaps months -- then you brought up whatever it was with Father. He was not very patient with secrets, although he was being silent enough about his second advance booking.
'It's going to be a meeting of all the great writers and artists of Europe,' Lilly guessed, and Franny and I kicked each other under the table and rolled our eyes; our eyes said: Lilly is weird, and Frank is queer, and Egg is only six. Our eyes said: We're all alone in this family -- just the two of us.
'It's going to be the circus,' said Egg.
'How'd you know?' Father snapped at him.
'Oh no, Win,' Mother said. 'It is a circus?'
'Just a little one,' Father said.
'Not the descendants of P.T. Barnum?' said Iowa Bob.
'Of course not,' Father said.
'The King Brothers!' Frank said; he had a King Brothers tiger-act poster in his room.
'No, I mean really small,' Father said. 'A sort of private circus.'
'One of those second-rate ones, you mean,' Coach Bob said.
'Not the kind with freaky animals!' Franny said.
'Certainly not,' said Father.
'What do you mean, 'freaky animals'?' Lilly asked.
'Horses with not enough legs,' said Frank. 'A cow with an extra head -- growing out of her back.'
'Where'd you see that?' I asked.
'Will there be tigers and lions?' Egg asked.
'Just so they're on the fourth floor,' said Iowa Bob.
'No, put them with Mrs. Urick!' Franny said.
'Win,' my mother said. 'What circus?'
'Well, they can use the field, you see,' Father said. 'They can pitch their tents on the old playground, they can eat in the restaurant, and some of them might actually stay in the hotel, too -- although most of those people have their own trailers, I think.'
'What will the animals be?' Lilly asked.
'Well,' said Father, 'I don't think they have too many animals. It's small, you see. Probably just a few animals. I think they have some special acts, you know -- but I'm not sure what animals.'
'What acts?' said Iowa Bob.
'It's probably one of those awful circuses,' Franny said. 'The kind with goats and chickens and those everyday junky animals everyone's seen -- some dumb reindeers, a talking crow. But nothing big, you know, and nothing exotic.'
'It's the exotic ones I'd just as soon not have around here,' Mother said.
'What acts?' said Iowa Bob.
'Well,' Father said. 'I'm not sure. Trapeze, maybe?'
'You don't know what animals,' Mother said. 'And you don't know what acts, either. What do you know?'
'They're small,' Father said. They just wanted to reserve some rooms, and maybe half the restaurant. They take Mondays off.'<
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'Mondays off?' said Iowa Bob. 'How long did you book them for?'
'Well,' Father said.
'Win!' my mother said. 'How many weeks will they be here?'
'They'll be here the whole summer,' Father said.
'Wow!' cried Egg. 'The circus!'
'A circus,' said Franny. 'A weirdo circus.'
'Dumb acts, dumb animals,' I said.
'Weird acts, weird animals,' Frank said.
'Well, you'll fit right in, Frank,' Franny told him.
'Stop it,' Mother said.
'There's no reason to get anxious,' Father said. 'It's just a small, private circus.'
'What's its name?' Mother asked.
'Well,' said Father.
'You don't know its name?' asked Coach Bob.
'Of course I know its name!' Father said. 'It's called Fritz's Act.'
'Fritz's act?' Frank said.
'What's the act?' I asked.
'Well,' Father said. That's just a name. I'm sure there's more than one act.'
'It sounds very modern,' Frank said.
'Modern, Frank?' Franny said.
'It sounds kinky,' I said.
'What's kinky?' said Lilly.
'A kind of animal?' Egg asked.
'Never mind,' said Mother.
'I think we should concentrate on the Exeter weekend,' Father said.
'Yes, and getting yourselves, and me, all moved in,' said Iowa Bob. There's lots of time to discuss the summer.'
'The whole summer is booked in advance?' Mother asked.
'You see?' Father said. 'Now, that's good business! Already we've taken care of the summer, and the Exeter weekend. First things first. Now all we have to do is move in.'
That happened a week before the Exeter game; it was the weekend when Iowa Bob's ringers rang up nine touchdowns -- to match their ninth straight victory, against no defeats. Franny didn't get to see it; she had decided not to be a cheerleader anymore. That Saturday Franny and I helped Mother move the last things that the moving vans hadn't already taken to the Hotel New Hampshire; Lilly and Egg went with Father and Coach Bob to the game; Frank, of course, was in the band.
There were thirty rooms over four floors, and our family occupied seven rooms in the southeast corner, covering two floors. One room in the basement was dominated by Mrs. Urick; that meant that, together with the fourth-floor resting place of Max, there were twenty-two rooms for guests. But the headwaitress and head maid, Ronda Ray, had a dayroom on the second floor -- to gather herself together, she'd said to Father. And two southeast-corner rooms on the third floor -- just above us -- were reserved for Iowa Bob. That left only nineteen rooms for guests, and only thirteen of those came with their own baths; six of the rooms came with the midget facilities.
'It's more than enough,' Father said. This is a small town. And not popular.'
It was more than enough for the circus called Fritz's Act, perhaps, but we were anxious how we were going to handle the full house we expected for the Exeter weekend.
That Saturday we moved in, Franny discovered the intercom system and switched on the 'Receiving' buttons in all the rooms. They were all empty, of course, but we tried to imagine listening to the first guests moving into them. The squawk-box system, as Father called it, had been left over from the Thompson Female Seminary, of course -- the principal could announce fire drills to the various classrooms, and teachers who were out of their homerooms could hear if the kids were fooling around. Father thought that keeping the intercom system would make it unnecessary to have phones in the rooms.
'They can call for help on the intercom,' Father said.
'Or we can wake them for breakfast. And if they want to use the phone, they can use the phone at the main desk.' But of course the squawk-box system also meant that it was possible to listen to the guests in their rooms.
'Not ethically possible,' Father said, but Franny and I couldn't wait.
That Saturday we moved in, we were without even the main-desk phone -- or a phone in our family's apartment -- and we were without linen, because the linen service that was going to handle the hotel laundry had also been contracted to do ours. They weren't starting service until Monday, Ronda Ray wasn't starting until Monday, either, but she was there -- in the Hotel New Hampshire -- looking over her dayroom when we arrived.
'I just need it, you know?' she asked Mother. 'I mean, I can't change sheets in the morning, after I wait on the breakfast eaters -- and before I serve lunch to the lunch eaters -- without having no place to lay down. And between lunch and supper, if I don't lay down, I get feeling nasty -- all over. And if you lived where I lived, you wouldn't wanna go home.
Ronda Ray lived at Hampton Beach, where she waitressed and changed sheets for the summer crowd. She'd been looking for a year-round arrangement for her hotel career -- and, my mother guessed, a way to get out of Hampton Beach, forever. She was about my mother's age, and in fact claimed to remember seeing Earl perform in Earl's casino years. She had not seen his ballroom dancing performance, though; it was the bandstand she remembered, and the act called 'Applying for a Job.'
'But I never believed it was a real bear,' she told Franny and me, as we watched her unpack a small suitcase in her dayroom. 'I mean,' Ronda Ray said, 'I thought nobody would get a kick out of undressing no real bear.'
We wondered why she was unpacking nightclothes from the suitcase, if this dayroom was not where she intended to spend the night; she was a woman Franny was curious about -- and I thought she was even exotic. She had dyed hair; I can't say what colour it was because it wasn't a real colour. It wasn't red, it wasn't blonde; it was the colour of plastic, or metal, and I wondered how it felt. Ronda Ray had a body that I imagined was formerly as strong as Franny's but had grown a little thick -- still powerful, but straining. It is hard to say what she smelled like, although -- after we left Ronda -- Franny tried.
'She put perfume on her wrist two days ago,' Franny said. 'You following me?'
'Yes,' I said.
'But her watchband wasn't there then -- her brother was wearing her watch, or her father,' Franny said. 'Some man, anyway, and he really sweated a lot.'
'Yes,' I said.
Then Ronda put the watchband on, over the perfume, and she wore it for a day while she was stripping beds,' Franny said.
'What beds?' I said.
Franny thought a minute. 'Beds very strange people had slept in,' she said.
'The circus called Fritz's Act slept in them!' I said.
'Right!' said Franny.
'The whole summer!' we said, in unison.
'Right,' Franny said. 'And what we smell when we smell Ronda is what Ronda's watchband smells like -- after all that.'
That was coming close to it, but I thought it was a slightly better smell than that -- just slightly. I thought of Ronda Ray's stockings, which she hung in the closet of her dayroom; I thought that if I sniffed just behind the knee of the pair of stockings she was wearing I would catch the true essence of her.
'You know why she wears them?' Franny asked me.
'No,' I said.
'Some man spilled hot coffee on her legs,' Franny said. 'He did it on purpose. He tried to boil her.'
'How do you know?' I asked.
'I've seen the scars,' Franny said. 'And she told me.'
At the squawk-box controls, we switched off all the rooms and listened to Ronda Ray's room. She was humming. Then we heard her smoke. We imagined how she'd sound with a man.
'Noisy,' Franny said. We listened to Ronda's breathing, intermixed with the crackles of the intercom system -- an ancient system that ran on the power from an automobile battery, like a clever electric fence.
When Lilly and Egg and Father came home from the game, Franny and I put Egg in the dumbwaiter and hauled him up and down the four-storey shaft until Frank ratted on us and Father told us that the dumbwaiter would be used only for removing linen and dishes and other things -- not humans -- from the rooms.
It wasn't safe. Father sa
id. If we let go of the rope, the dumbwaiter fell at the speed imposed by its own response to gravity. That was fast -- if not for a thing, at least for a human.
'But Egg is so light,' Franny argued. 'I mean, we're not going to try it with Frank.'
'You're not going to try it at all!' Father said.
Then Lilly got lost and we stopped unpacking for almost an hour, trying to find her. She was sitting in the kitchen with Mrs. Urick, who had seized Lilly's attention by telling her stories of the various ways she'd been punished when she'd been a girl. Her hair had been cut out in hunks, to humiliate her, when she forgot to wash before supper; she'd been told to go stand barefoot in the snow whenever she swore; when she'd 'snitched' food, she'd been force to eat a tablespoon of salt.
'If you and Mother go away,' Lilly said to Father, 'you won't leave us with Mrs. Urick, will you?'
Frank had the best room and Franny complained; she had to share a room with Lilly. A doorway without a door connected my room to Egg's. Max Urick dismantled his intercom; when we listened to his room, all we heard was static -- as if the old sailor were still far out to sea. Mrs. Urick's room bubbled like the stockpots on the back of her stove -- the sound of life held steadily at a simmer.
We were so restless for more guests, and for the Hotel New Hampshire to actually be open, that we couldn't keep still.
Father paced us through two fire drills, to tire us out, but it only roused us to wanting more action. When it was dark, we realized the electricity hadn't been turned on -- so we hid from each other, and searched for each other, through the empty rooms with candles.
I hid in Ronda Ray's dayroom on the second floor. I blew my candle out and, with my sense of smell, located the drawers where she'd put her nightclothes away. I heard Frank scream from the third floor -- he'd put his hand on a plant in the dark -- and what could only be Franny laughing in the echo chamber that the stairwell was.
'Have your fun now!' Father roared from our apartment. 'When there are guests here, you can't have the run of the place.'
Lilly found me in Ronda Ray's room and helped me put Ronda's clothes back in the chest of drawers. Father caught us leaving Ronda's room and took Lilly back to our apartment and put her to bed; he was irritable because he'd just tried to call the electric company to complain that the power was off and had discovered that our phones weren't connected, either. Mother had volunteered to take a walk with Egg and make the call from the railroad station.