The Hotel New Hampshire

by John Irving

  '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.

  'We'll have to go to California,' Frank said. 'Old Arbuthnot sounds as senile as one of the Hapsburgs, but he won't sell the place unless he gets to meet us.'

  'Jesus God,' Franny said. 'That's an expensive trip to make just to meet someone!'

  Frank informed her that Arbuthnot was paying our way.

  'He probably wants to laugh in your faces,' Franny told us.

  'He probably wants to meet someone who's crazier than he is,' Lilly said.

  'I can't believe I'm so lucky!' Father cried. 'To imagine that it's still available!' Frank and I saw no reason to describe the ruins -- and the seedy new tourism surrounding his cherished Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea.

  'He won't see any of it, anyway,' Frank whispered.

  And I am glad that Father never got the chance to see old Arbuthnot, a terminal resident of the Beverly Hills Hotel. When Frank and I arrived at the Los Angeles airport, we rented our second car of that week and drove ourselves to meet the aged Arbuthnot.

  In a suite with its own palm garden, we found the old man with an attending nurse, an attending lawyer (this one was a California lawyer), and what would prove to be a fatal case of emphysema. He sat propped up in a fancy hospital bed -- he sat breathing very carefully alongside a row of air-conditioners.

  'I like L.A.,' Arbuthnot gasped. 'Not so many Jews here as there are in New York. Or else I've finally gotten immune to Jews,' he added. Then he was flung off at a sharp angle on his hospital bed by a cough that seemed to attack him by surprise (and from the side); he sounded as if he were choking on a whole turkey leg -- it seemed impossible he would recover, it seemed his persistent anti-Semitism would finally be the death of him (I'm sure that would have made Freud happy), but just as suddenly as the attack had seized him, the attack left him and he was calm. His nurse plumped up his pillows for him; his lawyer placed some important-looking documents upon the old man's chest and produced a pen for old Arbuthnot to hold in his trembling hand.

  'I'm dying,' Arbuthnot said to Frank and me, as if this hadn't been obvious from our first glimpse of him. He wore white silk pajamas; he looked about one hundred years old; he couldn't have weighed more than fifty pounds.

  'They say they're not Jews,' the lawyer told Arbuthnot, indicating Frank and me.

  'Is that why you wanted to meet us?' Frank asked the old man. 'You could have found that out over the phone.'

  'I may be dying,' he said, 'but I'm not selling out to the Jews.'

  'My father,' I told Arbuthnot, 'was a dear friend of Freud.'

  'Not the Freud,' Frank said to Arbuthnot, but the old man had begun coughing again and he didn't hear what Frank had to say.

  'Freud?' Arbuthnot said, hacking and spewing. 'I knew a Freud, too! He was a Jewish animal trainer. The Jews aren't good with animals, though,' Arbuthnot confided to us. 'Animals can tell, you know,' he said. 'They can always sense anything funny about you,' he said. 'This Freud I knew was a dumb Jewish animal trainer. He tried to train a bear, but the bear ate him!' Arbuthnot howled with delight -- which brought on more coughing.

  'A sort of anti-Semitic bear?' Frank asked, and Arbuthnot laughed so hard I thought his subsequent coughing would kill him.

  'I was trying to kill him,' Frank said later.

  'You must be crazy to want that place,' Arbuthnot told us. 'I mean, don't you know where Maine is? It's nowhere! There's no decent train service, and there's no decent flying service. It's a terrible place to drive to -- it's too far from both New York and Boston -- and when you do get there, the water's too cold and the bugs can bleed you to death in an hour. None of the really class sailors sail there anymore -- I mean the sailors with money,' he said. 'If you have a little money,' Arbuthnot said, 'there's absolutely nothing to spend it on in Maine! They don't even have whores there.'

  'We like it anyway,' Frank told him.

  'They're not Jews, are they?' Arbuthnot asked his lawyer.

  'No,' the lawyer said.

  'It's hard to tell, looking at them,' Arbuthnot said. 'I used to be able to spot a Jew at first glance,' he explained to us. 'But I'm dying now,' he added.

  'Too bad,' Frank said.

  'Freud wasn't eaten by a bear,' I told Arbuthnot.

  'The Freud I knew was eaten by a bear,' Arbuthnot said.

  'No,' said Frank, 'the Freud you knew was a hero.'

  'Not the Freud I knew,' old Arbuthnot argued, petulantly. His nurse caught some spittle dribbling off his chin and wiped him as absentmindedly as she might have dusted a table.

  'The Freud we both know,' I said, 'saved the Vienna State Opera.'

  'Vienna!' Arbuthnot cried. 'Vienna is full of Jews!' he yelled.

  'There's more of them in Maine than there used to be,' Frank teased him.

  'In L.A., too,' I said.

  'I'm dying, anyway,' Arbuthnot said. 'Thank God.' He signed the documents on his chest and his lawyer handed them over to us. And that was how, in 1965, Frank bought the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea and twenty-five acres on the coast of Maine. 'For a song,' as F
ranny would say.

  An almost sky-blue mole was sprouting on old Arbuthnot's face and both his ears were painted a vivid purple with gentian violet, an old-fashioned fungicide. It was as if a giant fungus were consuming Arbuthnot from the inside out. 'Wait a minute,' he said, as we were leaving -- his chest made a watery echo of his words. His nurse plumped up his pillows again; his lawyer snapped a briefcase shut; the cold of the room, from all the purring air-conditioners, made the place feel, to Frank and me, like the tomb -- the Kaisergruft -- for the heartless Hapsburgs in Vienna. 'What are your plans?' Arbuthnot asked us. 'What in hell are you going to do with that place?'

  'It's going to be a Special Commando Training Camp,' Frank told old Arbuthnot. 'For the Israeli Army.'

  I saw Arbuthnot's lawyer crack a smile; it was the special sort of smile that would make Frank and me later look up the lawyer's name on the documents that had been handed over to us. The lawyer's name was Irving Rosenman, and despite the fact that he came from Los Angeles, Frank and I were pretty sure he was Jewish.

  Old Arbuthnot didn't crack a smile. 'Israeli commandos?' he said.

  'Ratta-tat-tat-tat-tat!' said Frank, imitating a machine gun. We thought that Irving Rosenman was going to throw himself into the air-conditioners to keep himself from laughing.

  'The bears will get them,' Arbuthnot said, strangely. 'The bears will get all the Jews, in the end,' he said -- the mindless hatred in his old face was as old-fashioned and as vivid as the gentian violet in his ears.

  'Have a nice death,' Frank told him.

  Arbuthnot started coughing; he tried to say something more but he couldn't stop coughing. He motioned the nurse over to him and she seemed to interpret his coughing without very much difficulty; she was used to it; she motioned us out of Arbuthnot's room, then she came outside and told us what Arbuthnot had told her to tell us.

  'He said he's going to have the best death money can buy,' she told us, which -- Arbuthnot had added -- was more than Frank and I were going to get.

  And Frank and I could think of no message to give the nurse to pass on to old Arbuthnot. We were content to leave him with the idea of Israeli commandos in Maine. Frank and I said good-bye to Arbuthnot's nurse and to Irving Rosenman and we flew back to New York with the third Hotel New Hampshire in Frank's pocket.

  'That's just where you should keep it, Frank,' Franny told him. 'In your pocket.'

  'You'll never make that old place into a hotel again,' Lilly told Father. 'It's had its chance.'

  'We'll start out modestly,' Father assured Lilly.

  Father and I were the 'we' Father meant. I told him I'd go to Maine with him and help him get started.

  'Then you're as crazy as he is,' Franny had told me.

  But I had an idea I would never share with Father. If, as Freud says, a dream is the fulfillment of a wish, then -- as Freud also says -- the same holds true for jokes. A joke is also the fulfillment of a wish. I had a joke to play on Father. And I have been playing it, now, for more than fifteen years. Since Father is more than sixty years old now, I think it's fair to say that the joke 'came off'; it's fair to say that I have gotten away with it.

  The last Hotel New Hampshire was never -- and never will be -- a hotel. That is the joke I have played on Father for all these years. Lilly's first book, Trying to Grow, would make enough money so that we could have restored the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea; and when they made the movie version, we could have bought back the Gasthaus Freud, too. Maybe, by then, we could have afforded the Sacher; at least we could have bought the Stanhope. But I knew it wasn't necessary that the third Hotel New Hampshire be a real hotel.

  '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 unpaying 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.