The Hotel New Hampshire

by John Irving

  So we found a nice family who wanted a watchdog; they weren't blind, but they didn't care if Fred farted and smelled like a skunk.

  And now Father walks with Seeing Eye Dog Number Four. We got tired of naming them, and when Lilly died, Father lost a little more of his playfulness. 'I just am not up to naming another dog,' he said. 'Want to do this one?' But I wasn't up to a dog-naming either. Franny was shooting a film in France, and Frank -- who was the hardest hit by Lilly's leaving us -- was irritated at the whole idea of dogs. Frank had too much sorrow on his mind; he wasn't in a mood for naming dogs at all.

  'Jesus God,' Frank said. 'Call it Number Four.'

  My father shrugged and settled for just plain old 'Four.' So that now, in the twilight, when Father is searching for his walking companion, I hear him screaming the number four. 'Four!' he bellows. 'Goddamn it, Four!' And old Fred, the handyman, still cries out, 'What?' And Father goes on with his 'Four! Four! Four!' Like someone remembering a childhood game: that one where you throw up the ball and yell someone's number, and the one called has to try to catch the ball before the ball hits the ground. 'Four!' I hear Father calling, and I imagine some child running, arms held out for the ball.

  Sometimes the child is Lilly, sometimes it's Egg.

  And when Father has finally found Four, I watch out the window as Four leads my father carefully down to the docks; in the failing light, it's possible to mistake my father and his Seeing Eye dog for a much younger man on the dock -- with a bear, perhaps; possibly they're fishing for pollack. 'It's no fun fishing when you can't see the fish come out of the water,' Father has told me. And so, with Four, Father just sits on the dock, welcoming the evening, until the fierce Maine mosquitoes drive him back to the Hotel New Hampshire.

  There is even a sign: HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE. Father insisted on it, and although he can't see it -- and wouldn't miss it, if I only pretended there was a sign -- it is a concession I gladly make for him, although it is a nuisance, at times. Occasionally tourists get lost and find us; they see the sign and think we are a hotel. I have explained to Father a very complicated system that our 'success' in this hotel business has afforded us. When the lost tourists find us and ask for rooms, we ask them if they have reservations.

  They say no, of course, but invariably -- looking around themselves, at the silence, at the abandoned quality of peace we have achieved at the third Hotel New Hampshire -- they ask, 'But surely you have vacancies?'

  'No vacancies,' we always say. 'No reservations, no vacancies.'

  Sometimes Father argues with me about this. 'But surely we have room for them,' he hisses. 'They seem very nice. There's a child or two, I can hear them quarreling, and the mother sounds tired -- they've probably been doing too much driving.'

  'Standards are standards, Pop,' I say. 'Really, what would our other guests think if we got too loose about this?'

  'It's just so elitist,' he whispers, wonderingly. 'I mean, I always knew this was a special place, but, somehow, I never dreamed it would actually ...'And he usually breaks off his sentence right there, smiling. And then he adds, 'Well, wouldn't your mother have loved all this!' The baseball bat waves, showing it all to Mother.

  And I say, without the slightest tone of qualification in my voice, 'She sure would have, Pop.'

  'If not every minute,' my father adds, thoughtfully, 'at least this part. At least the end.'

  Lilly's end, considering her cult following, was as quiet as we could have it. I wish I'd had the courage to ask Donald Justice for an elegy but it was -- as much as possible -- a family funeral. Junior Jones was there; he sat with Franny, and I couldn't help but notice how perfectly they held each other's hands. It often takes a funeral to make you realize who has grown older. I noticed Junior had added a few gentle lines around his eyes; he was a very hardworking lawyer, now -- we'd hardly heard from him when he was in law school; he disappeared almost as completely into law school as he had once disappeared into the bottom of a pile of Cleveland Browns. I guess law school and football are similarly myopic experiences. Playing in the line, Junior always said, had prepared him for law school. Hard work, but boring, boring, boring.

  Now Junior ran the Black Arm of the Law, and I knew that when Franny was in New York, she stayed with him.

  They were both stars, and maybe they were finally at ease with each other, I thought. But at Lilly's funeral, all I could think was how Lilly would have loved seeing them together.

  Father, next to Susie the bear, kept the heavy end of his baseball bat on the floor between his knees -- just swaying slightly. And when he walked -- on Susie's arm, on the arm of Freud's former Seeing Eye bear -- he carried the Louisville Slugger with great dignity, as if it were simply a stout sort of cane.

  Susie was a wreck, but she held herself together at the funeral -- for Father's sake, I think. She had worshiped my father ever since his miracle swing of the bat -- the fabulous, instinctual swing that had batted Ernst the pornographer away. By the time of Lilly's suicide, Susie the bear had been around. She'd left the East Coast for the West, and then had come back East again. She ran a commune in Vermont for a while. 'I ran that fucker right into the ground,' she would tell us, laughing. She started a family counseling service in Boston, which blossomed into a day care center (because there was a greater need for one of those), which blossomed into a rape crisis center (as soon as day care centers were everywhere). The rape crisis center was not welcome in Boston, and Susie admits that not all the hostility was external. There were rape lovers and women haters everywhere, of course, and a variety of stupid people who were willing to assume that women who worked in a rape crisis center had to be what Susie called 'hardcore dykes and feminist troublemakers.' The Bostonians gave Susie and her first rape crisis center a rather hard time. Apparently, as a way of making their point, they even raped one of the rape crisis center employees. But, even Susie admits, some of the rape crisis women in those early days were 'hardcore dykes and feminist troublemakers,' they really were just man haters, and so some of the trouble at the rape crisis center was internal. Some of those women were simply anti-system philosophers without Frank's sense of humor, and if the law-enforcement personnel were antagonistic to women wanting to see a little rape justice -- for a change -- so were the women antagonistic to the law, in general, and nobody really did the victim much good.

  Susie's rape crisis center, in Boston, was broken up when some of the man haters castrated an alleged rapist in a parking lot in Back Bay. Susie had come back to New York -- she had gone back to family counseling. She specialized in child beatings -- 'dealing with,' as she would say, both the children and the beaters -- but she was sick of New York City (she said it was no fun to live in Greenwich Village if you weren't a bear) and she was convinced that she had a future in rape crisis.

  Having witnessed her performance at the Stanhope in 1964, I had to agree. Franny always said it was a better performance than any performance Franny would ever give, and Franny is very good. The way Franny held herself together for her oneline part in dealing with Chipper Dove must have given her the necessary confidence. In fact, in all her later films, Franny would make that old line live again: 'Well, look who's here.' She always finds a way to slip in that lovely line. She does not use her own name, of course. Movie stars almost never do. And Franny Berry isn't exactly the sort of name that people notice.

  Franny's Hollywood name, her acting name, is one you know. This is our family's story, and it's inappropriate for me to use Franny's stage name -- but I know that you know her. Franny is the one you always desire. She is the best one, even when she's the villain; she's always the real hero, even when she dies, even when she dies for love -- or worse, for war. She's the most beautiful, the most unapproachable, but the most vulnerable, too, somehow -- and the toughest. (She's why you go to the movie, or why you stay.) Others dream of her, now -- now that she has freed me from dreaming about her in quite such a devastating way. Now I can live with what I dream about Franny, but there must be membe
rs of her audience who don't live so well with what they dream about her.

  She made the adjustment to her fame very easily. It was an adjustment Lilly could never have made, but Franny made it easily -- because she was always our family's star. She was used to being the main attraction, the center of everyone's attention -- the one we waited for, the one we listened to. She was born to the leading role.

  'And I was born to be a miserable fucking agent,' Frank said gloomily, after Lilly's funeral. 'I have agented even this,' he said, meaning Lilly's death. 'She wasn't big enough for all the shit I gave her to do!' he said, morosely; then he began to cry. We tried to cheer him up, but Frank said, 'I'm always the fucking agent, damn it. I bring it all about -- that's me. Look at Sorrow!' he howled. 'Who stuffed him? Who started the whole story?' Frank cried, crying and crying. 'I'm just the asshole agent,' he blubbered.

  But Father reached out to Frank, the baseball bat as his antenna, and he said, 'Frank, Frank, my boy. You're not the agent of Lilly's trouble, Frank,' Father said. 'Who is the family dreamer, Frank?' Father asked, and we all looked at him. 'Well, it's me -- I'm the dreamer, Frank,' Father said. 'And Lilly just dreamed more than she could do, Frank. She inherited the damn dreams,' Father said. 'From me.'

  'But I was her agent,' Frank said, stupidly.

  'Yes, but that doesn't matter, Frank,' Franny said. 'I mean, it matters that you're my agent, Frank -- I really need you,' Franny told him. 'But nobody could be Lilly's agent, Frank.'

  'It wouldn't have mattered, Frank,' I told him -- because he was always saying this to me. 'It wouldn't have mattered who her agent was, Frank.'

  'But it was me,' he said -- he was so infuriatingly stubborn!

  'Christ, Frank,' Franny said. 'It's easier to talk to your answering service.' That finally brought him around.

  For a while we would have to endure the wall of worshipful wailers: Lilly's suicide cult -- they were her fans who thought that Lilly's suicide was her ultimate statement, was the proof of her seriousness. This was ironic in Lilly's case, because Frank and Franny and I knew that Lilly's suicide -- from Lilly's point of view was the ultimate admission that she was not serious enough. But these people insisted on loving her for what she least loved in herself.

  A group of Lilly's suicide fans even wrote to Franny, requesting that Franny travel to the nation's college campuses giving readings from Lilly's work -- as Lilly. It was Franny the actress they were appealing to: they wanted Franny to play Lilly.

  And we remembered Lilly's only writer-in-residence role, and her account of the only English Department meeting she ever attended. In the meeting, the Lecture Committee revealed that there was only enough money remaining for two more visits by moderately well-known poets, or one more visit by a well-known writer or a poet, or they could contribute all the remaining money toward the considerable expenses asked by a woman who was traveling the nation's campuses 'doing' Virginia Woolf. Although Lilly was the only person in the English Department who actually taught any of Virginia Woolf's books in her courses, she found that she was alone in resisting the department's wishes to invite the Virginia Woolf impersonator. 'I think Virginia Woolf would have wanted the money to go to a living writer,' Lilly said. 'To a real writer,' she added. But the department insisted that they wanted all the money to go to the woman who 'did' Virginia Woolf.

  'Okay,' Lilly finally said. 'I'll agree, but only if the woman does it all. Only if she goes all the way.' There was a silence in the English Department meeting and someone asked Lilly if she was really serious -- if she could possibly be in such 'bad taste' as to suggest that the woman come to the campus to commit suicide.

  And my sister Lilly said, 'It is what my brother Frank would call disgusting that you -- as teachers of literature -- would actually spend money on an actress imitating a dead writer, whose work you do not teach, rather than spend it on a living writer, whose work you probably haven't read. Especially,' said Lilly, 'when you consider that the woman whose work is not being taught, and whose person is being imitated, was virtually obsessed with the difference between greatness and posing. And you want to pay someone to pose as her? You should be ashamed,' Lilly told them. 'Go ahead and bring the woman here,' Lilly added. 'I'll give her the rocks to put in her pockets; I'll lead her to the river.'

  And that is what Franny told the group who wanted her to pose as Lilly and 'do' the nation's campuses. 'You should be ashamed,' Franny said. 'Besides,' she added, 'I am much too tall to play Lilly. My sister was really short.'

  This, by the suicide fans, was construed as Franny's insensitivity -- and by association, in various aspects of the news, our family was characterized as being indifferent to Lilly's death (for our unwillingness to take part in these Lilly poses). In frustration, Frank volunteered to 'do' Lilly at a public reading from the works of suicidal poets and writers. Naturally, none of the writers or poets were reading from their own work; various hired readers, sympathetic to the work of the deceased -- or worse, sympathetic to their 'lifestyle,' which nearly always meant their 'death-style' -- would read the work of the suicides as if they were the dead authors come back to life. Franny wanted no part of this, either, but Frank volunteered; he was rejected. 'On the grounds of "insincerity," ' he said. 'They surmised I was insincere. Fucking right I was!' he shouted. 'They could all stand a fucking overdose of insincerity!' he added.

  And Junior Jones would marry Franny -- finally! 'This is a fairy tale,' Franny told me, long distance, 'but Junior and I have decided that if we save it any longer, we won't have anything worth saving.' Franny was sneaking up on forty at the time. The Black Arm of the Law and Hollywood had, at least, Schlagobers and blood in common. I suppose that Franny and Junior Jones would strike people -- in their New York and their Los Angeles life -- as 'glamorous,' but I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people. Junior and Franny were consumed by their work, and they succumbed to the comfort of having each other's arms to fall exhausted into.

  I was truly happy for them, and only sorry that they both announced that they would have no time for kids. 'I don't want children if I can't take care of them,' Franny said.

  'Ditto, man,' said Junior Jones.

  And one night Susie the bear told me that she didn't want children either, because the children she gave birth to would be ugly, and she wouldn't bring an ugly child into the world -- not for anything, she said; it was simply the cruelest life one could expose a child to: the discrimination suffered by people who aren't good-looking.

  'But you're not ugly, Susie,' I told her. 'You just take a little getting used to,' I told her. 'I think you're really attractive, if you want to know.' And I did think so; I thought Susie the bear was a hero.

  'You're sick, then,' Susie said. 'I got a face like a hatchet, like a chisel with a bad complexion. And I got a body like a paper bag,' she said. 'Like a paper bag of cold oatmeal,' Susie said.

  'I think you're very nice,' I told her, and I did; Franny had shown me how lovable Susie the bear was. And I had heard the song Susie the bear taught Franny to sing; I'd had some interesting dreams concerning Susie's teaching me a song like that. So I repeated to her, 'I think you're very nice.'

  'Then you've got a brain like a paper bag of cold oatmeal,' Susie told me. 'If you think I'm very nice, you're a real sick boy.'

  And one night when there were no guests in the Hotel New Hampshire, I heard a peculiar creeping sound; Father was as likely to walk around at night as he was likely to walk around in the daylight -- because, of course, it was always nighttime for him. But wherever Father went, the Louisville Slugger trailed after him or searched ahead of him, and as he grew older his gait more and more resembled the gait of Freud, as if Father had psychologically developed a limp -- as a form of kinship to the old interpreter of dreams. Also, wherever Father went, Seeing Eye Dog Number Four went with him! We were negligent about keeping Four's toenails clipped, so that Father, accompanied by Four, made quite a clatter.

  Old Fred, the handyman, ha
d a room on the third floor and slept like a stone at the bottom of the sea; he slept as soundly as the abandoned weirs, ruined by seals and now sunk in the mud flats, now rinsed by the tide. Old Fred was a sundown and sunup sort of sleeper; because he was deaf, he said, he didn't like to be up at night. Especially in summer, the Maine nights are vibrant with noise -- at least when you compare the nights to the Maine days.

  'The opposite of New York,' Frank liked to say. 'The only time it's quiet on Central Park South is about three in the morning. But in Maine,' Frank liked to say, 'about three in the morning is about the only time anything's going on. Fucking nature comes to life.'

  It was about three in the morning, I noted -- a summer night, with the insect world teeming; the seabirds sounded fairly restful but the sea was no less determined. And I heard this peculiar creeping sound. It was at first hard to tell if it was outside my window, which was open -- though there was a screen -- or if the sound was outside my door, in the hall. My door was open, too; and the outside doors to the Hotel New Hampshire were never locked -- there were too many of them.

  A raccoon, I thought.

  But then something much heavier than any raccoon shuffled across the bare floor at the landing to the stairs and softly padded down the carpeted hall toward my door; I could feel the weight of whatever it was -- it was making the floorboards sigh. Even the sea seemed to quiet itself, even the sea seemed to listen to whatever it was -- it was the kind of sound you hear in the night that makes the tide pause, that makes the birds (who never fly at night) float up to the sky and hang suspended as if they were painted there.

  'Four?' I whispered, thinking that the dog might be on the prowl, but whatever was in the hall was too tentative to be Seeing Eye Dog Number Four. Four had been in the hall before; old Four wouldn't be pausing at every door.

  I wished I had Father's baseball bat, but when the bear lurched into my doorway I realized there was no weapon in the Hotel New Hampshire powerful enough to protect me from this intruder. I lay very still, pretending to be sound asleep -- with my eyes wide open. In the flat, blurred, flannel-soft light of the predawn, the bear seemed huge. It stared into my room, at my motionless bed, like an old nurse taking a bed check in a hospital; I tried not to breathe, but the bear knew I was there. It sniffed, deeply; and very gracefully, on all fours, it came into my room. Well, why not? I was thinking. A bear began my life's fairy tale; it is fitting that a bear should end it. The bear shoved its warm face near mine and breathed in everything about me; with one purposeful sniff, it seemed to review my life's story -- and in a gesture resembling commiseration, it placed its heavy paw on my hip. It was quite a warm summer night -- for Maine -- and I was naked, covered by just a sheet. The bear's breath was hot, and a little fruity -- perhaps it had just been feeding in the wild blueberries -- but it was surprisingly pleasant breath, if not exactly fresh. When the bear drew back the sheet and looked me over, I felt just the tip of the iceberg of fear that Chipper Dove must have felt when he truly believed that a bear in heat wanted him. But this bear rather disrespectfully snorted at what it saw. 'Earl!' said the bear, and rather roughly shoved me; it made room beside me for itself and crawled into my bed with me. It was only when it embraced me, and I identified the most distinctive component of its strange and powerful scent, that I suspected this was no ordinary bear. Mixed with the pleasure of its fruited breath, and the mustard-green sharpness of its summer sweat, I detected the obvious odor of mothballs.