by John Irving
'What's that machine she's on?' said old Latin Emeritus. 'Who's that with her?'
'It's a motorcycle and that's Win Berry!' my mother's mother said.
'No, no!' said Latin Emeritus. 'Who's the other one?' The old man stared at the bundled figure in the sidecar.
'It must be Coach Bob,' said my mother's mother.
That moron!' Latin Emeritus said. 'What in hell is he wearing in this weather? Don't they know how to dress in Iowa?'
'I'm going to marry Win Berry!' my mother rushed up and told her parents. That's his motorcycle. He's going to Harvard. And this . . . is Earl.'
Coach Bob was more understanding. He liked Earl.
'I'd love to know what he could bench-press,' the former Big Ten lineman said. 'But can't we cut his nails?'
It was silly to have another wedding; my father thought that Freud's service would suffice. But my mother's family insisted that they be married by the Congregational minister who had taken Mother to her graduation dance, and so they were.
It was a small, informal wedding, where Coach Bob played the best man and Latin Emeritus gave his daughter away, with only an occasional mumbling of an odd Latin phrase; my mother's mother wept, full of the knowledge that Win Berry was not the Harvard man destined to whisk Mary Bates back to Boston -- at least, not right away. Earl sat out the whole service in the sidecar of the' 37 Indian, where he was pacified with crackers and herring.
My mother and father had a brief honeymoon by themselves.
'Then you surely must have done it!' Franny always cried. But they probably didn't; they didn't stay anywhere overnight. They took an early train to Boston and wandered around Cambridge, imagining themselves living there, one day, and Father attending Harvard; they took the milk train back to New Hampshire, arriving at dawn the next day. Their first nuptial bed would have been the single bed in my mother's girlhood room in the house of Latin Emeritus -- which was where my mother would still reside, while Father sought his fortune for Harvard.
Coach Bob was sorry to see Earl leave. Bob was sure the bear could be taught to play defensive end, but my father told Iowa Bob that the bear was going to be his family's meal ticket and his tuition. So one evening (after the Nazis took Poland), with the earliest nip of fall in the air, my mother kissed my father good-bye on the athletic fields of the Dairy School, which rolled right up to Iowa Bob's back door.
'Look after your parents,' my father told Mother, 'and I'll be back to look after you.'
'Yuck!' Franny always groaned for some reason, this part bothered her. She never believed it. Lilly, too, shivered and turned up her nose.
'Shut up and listen to the story,' Frank always said.
At least I'm not opinionated to the degree of my brothers and sisters. I could simply see how Mother and Father must have kissed: carefully -- Coach Bob amusing the bear with some game, so that Earl would not think my mother and father were eating something that they weren't sharing with him. Kissing would always be hazardous around Earl.
My mother told us that she knew my father would be faithful to her because the bear would maul him if he kissed anybody.
'And were you faithful?' Franny asked Father, in her terrible way.
'Why, of course,' Father said.
'I'll bet,' Franny said. Lilly always looked worried -- Frank looked away.
That was the fall of 1939. Although she didn't know it, my mother was already pregnant -- with Frank. My father would motorcycle down the East Coast, his exploration of resort hotels -- the big-band sounds, the bingo crowds, and the casinos -- taking him farther and farther south as the seasons changed. He was in Texas in the spring of 1940 when Frank was born; Father and Earl were at that time touring with an outfit called the Lone Star Brass Band. Bears were popular in Texas -although some drunk in Fort Worth had tried to steal the 1937 Indian, unaware that Earl slept chained to it. Texas law charged Father for the man's hospitalization, and it cost Father some more of his earnings to drive all the way East to welcome his first child into the world.
My mother was still in the hospital when Father returned to Dairy. They called Frank 'Frank' because my father said that was what they would always be to each other and to the family: 'frank.'
'Yuck!' Franny used to say. But Frank was quite proud of the origins of his name.
Father stayed with my mother in Dairy only long enough to get her pregnant again. Then he and Earl hit Virginia Beach and the Carolinas. They were banned from Falmouth, Cape Cod, on the Fourth of July, and back home with Mother in Dairy -- to recover -- soon after their disaster. The 1937 Indian had thrown a bearing in the Falmouth Independence Day Parade, and Earl had run amok when a fireman from Buzzards Bay tried to help Father with the ailing motorcycle. The fireman was unfortunately accompanied by two Dalmatian dogs, a breed not known for intelligence; doing nothing to disprove their reputation, the Dalmatians attacked Earl in the sidecar. Earl beheaded one of them quite cleanly, then chased the other one into the marching unit of the Osterville Men's Softball Team, where the foolish dog attempted to conceal himself. The parade was thus scattered, the grieving fireman from Buzzards Bay refused my father any more help with the Indian, and the sheriff of Falmouth escorted Father and Earl to the city limits. Since Earl refused to ride in cars, this had been a most tedious escort, Earl sitting in the sidecar of the motorcycle, which had to be towed. They were five days finding parts to rebuild the engine.
Worse, Earl had developed a taste for dogs. Coach Bob tried to train him out of this maiming habit by teaching him other sports: retrieving balls, perfecting the forward roll -- even sit-ups -- but Earl was already old, and not blessed with the belief in vigorous exercise that possessed Iowa Bob. Slaughtering dogs didn't even require much running, Earl discovered; if he was sly -- and Earl was sly -- the dogs would come right up to him. 'And then it's all over,' Coach Bob observed. 'What a hell of a linebacker he could have been!'
So Father kept Earl chained, most of the time, and tried to make him wear his muzzle. Mother said that Earl was depressed -- she found the old bear increasingly sad -- but my father said that Earl wasn't depressed in the slightest. 'He's just thinking about dogs.' Father said. 'And he's perfectly happy to be attached to the motorcycle.'
That summer of '40 Father lived at the Bates house in Dairy and worked the Hampton Beach crowd at night. He managed to teach Earl a new routine. It was called 'Applying for a Job,' and it saved wear and tear on the old Indian.
Earl and Father performed in the outdoor bandstand at Hampton Beach. When the lights came on, Earl would be seated in a chair, wearing a man's suit; the suit, radically altered, had once belonged to Coach Bob. After the laughter died down, my father entered the bandstand with a piece of paper in one hand.
'Your name?' Father would ask.
'Earl!' Earl said.
'Yes, Earl, I see,' Father said. 'And you want a job, Earl?'
'Earl!' said Earl.
'Yes, I know it's Earl, but you want a job, right?' Father said. 'Except it says here that you can't type, you can't even read -- it says -- and you have a drinking problem.'
'Earl,' Earl agreed.
The crowd occasionally threw fruit, but Father had fed Earl well; this was not the same kind of crowd that Father remembered from the Arbuthnot.
'Well, if all you can say is your own name,' Father said, 'I would venture to say that either you've been drinking this very night or you're too stupid to even know how to take off your own clothes.'
Earl said nothing.
'Well?' Father asked. 'Let's see if you can do it. Take off your own clothes. Go on!' And here Father would pull the chair out from under Earl, who would do one of the forward rolls Coach Bob had taught him.
'So you can do a somersault,' Father said. 'Big deal. The clothes, Earl. Let's see the clothes come off.'
For some reason it is silly for a crowd of humans to watch a bear undress: my mother hated this routine -- she said it was unfair to Earl to expose him to such a rowdy, uncouth bunch. When Earl
undressed, Father usually had to help him with his tie -- without help, Earl would get frustrated and rip it off his neck.
'You sure are hard on ties, Earl,' Father would say then. The audience at Hampton Beach loved it.
When Earl was undressed, Father would say, 'Well, come on -- don't stop now. Off with the bear suit.'
'Earl?' Earl would say.
'Off with the bear suit,' Father would say, and he'd pull Earl's fur -- just a little.
'Earl!' Earl would roar, and the audience would scream in alarm.
'My God, you're a real bear!' Father would cry.
'Earl!' Earl would bellow, and chase Father around and around the chair -- half the audience fleeing into the night, some of them stumbling through the soft beach sand and down to the water; some of them threw more fruit, and paper cups with warm beer.
A more gentle act, for Earl, was performed once a week in the Hampton Beach casino. Mother had refined Earl's dancing style, and she would kick off the big band's opening number by taking a turn with Earl around the empty floor, the couples crowded close and wondering at them -- the short, bent, broad bear in Iowa Bob's suit, surprisingly graceful on his hind paws, shuffling after my mother, who led.
Those evenings Coach Bob would babysit with Frank. Mother and Father and Earl would drive home along the coast road, stopping to watch the surf at Rye, where the homes of the rich were; the surf at Rye was called 'the breakers.' The New Hampshire coast was both more civilized and more seedy than Maine, but the phosphore-.scence off the breakers at Rye must have reminded my parents of evenings at the Arbuthnot. They said they always paused there, before driving home to Dairy.
One night Earl did not want to leave the breakers at Rye.
'He thinks I'm taking him fishing,' Father said. .'Look. Earl, I've got no gear -- no bait, no spooners, no pole -- dummy,' Father said to the bear, holding out his empty hands. Earl looked bewildered; they realized the bear was nearly blind. They talked Earl out of fishing and took him home.
'How did he get so old?' my mother asked my father.
'He's started peeing in the sidecar,' Father said.
My mother was quite pregnant, this time with Franny, when Father left for the winter season in the fall of 1940. He had decided on Florida, and Mother first heard from him in Clearwater, and then from Tarpon Springs. Earl had acquired an odd skin disease -- an ear infection, some fungus peculiar to bears -- and business was slow.
That was shortly before Franny was born, late in the winter of 1941. Father was not home for this birth, and Franny never forgave him for it.
'I suspect he knew I would be a girl,' Franny was fond of saying.
It was the summer of '41 before Father was back in Dairy again; he promptly impregnated my mother with me.
He promised he would not have to leave her again; he had enough money from a successful circus stint in Miami to start Harvard in the fall. They could have a relaxed summer, playing Hampton Beach only when they felt like it. He would commute on the train to Boston for his classes, unless a cheap place in Cambridge turned up.
Earl was getting older by the minute. A pale blue salve, the texture of the film on a jellyfish, had to be put in his eyes every day; Earl rubbed it off on the furniture. My mother noticed alarming absences of hair from much of his body, which seemed shrunken and looser. 'He's lost his muscle tone,' Coach Bob worried. 'He ought to be lifting weights, or running.'
'Just try to get away from him on the Indian,' my father told his father. 'He'll run.' But when Coach Bob tried it, he got away with it. Earl didn't run; he didn't care.
'With Earl,' Father said, 'familiarity does breed a little contempt.' He had worked with Earl long and hard enough to understand Freud's exasperation with the bear.
My mother and father rarely talked of Freud; with 'the war in Europe,' it was too easy to imagine what could have happened to him.
The liquor stores in Harvard Square sold Wilson's 'That's All' rye whiskey, very cheap, but my father was not a drinker. The Oxford Grill in Cambridge used to dispense draught beer in a glass container the shape of a brandy snifter and holding a gallon. If you could drink this within some brief amount of time, you got a free one. But Father drank one regular beer there, when his week's classes were over, and he'd hurry to the North Station to catch the train to Dairy.
He accelerated his courses as much as possible, to graduate sooner; he was able to do this not because he was smarter than the other Harvard boys (he was older, but not smarter, than most of them) but because he spent little time with friends. He had a pregnant wife and two babies; he hardly had time for friends. His only recreation, he said, was listening to professional baseball games on the radio. Just a few months after the World Series, Father listened to the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
I was born in March of 1942, and named John -- after John Harvard. (Franny had been called Franny because it somehow went with Frank.) My mother was not only busy taking care of us; she was busy taking care of old Latin Emeritus, and helping Coach Bob with the aged Earl; she didn't have time for friends, either.
By the end of summer of 1942, the war had really obtruded on everyone; it was no longer just 'the war in Europe.' And although it used very little gas, the 1937 Indian was retired to the status of living quarters for Earl; it was no longer used for transportation. Patriotic mania spread across the nation's campuses. Students were allowed to receive sugar stamps, which most students gave to their families. Within a three-month period, every acquaintance Father had at Harvard either was drafted or had volunteered into some programme. When Latin Emeritus died -- and, in her sleep, my mother's mother quickly followed him -- my mother came into a modest inheritance. My father accelerated his induction voluntarily and went off in the spring of 1943 for basic training; he was twenty-three.
He left behind Frank, Franny, and me with Mother in the Bates family house; he left behind his father, Iowa Bob, to whom he trusted the tedious care of Earl.
My father wrote home that basic training was a lesson in ruining the hotels of Atlantic City. They washed down the wood floors daily, and marched off down the boardwalk for rifle training on a sand dune. The bars on the boardwalk did a booming business with the trainees, except my father. No one inquired about age; the trainees, most of them younger than my father, wore all their marksman's medals and drank on. The bars were full of office girls from Washington, and everyone smoked unfiltered cigarettes -- except my father.
Father said everyone romanticized about 'a last fling' before going overseas, although far fewer realized it than boasted of it; Father, at least, had his -- with my mother, in a hotel in New Jersey. This time, fortunately, he did not make her pregnant, so Mother would not be adding to Frank, Franny, and me for a while.
From Atlantic City my father went to a former prep school north of New York, for cryptographic training. He was then sent to Chanute Field -- Kearns, Utah -- and then to Savannah, Georgia, where he'd earlier performed, with Earl, in the old DeSoto Hotel. Then it was Hampton Roads, Port of Embarkation, and my father went to 'the war in Europe,' having a vague idea that he might find Freud there. Father felt confident that by leaving three offspring with my mother he was ensuring his safe return.
He had Air Force assignment at a bomber base in Italy, and the greatest danger was shooting someone when drunk, being shot by someone who was drunk, or falling into the latrine when drunk -- which actually happened to a colonel my father knew; the colonel was crapped on several times before he was rescued. The only other danger involved acquiring a venereal disease from an Italian whore. And since my father did not drink or screw, he had a safe passage through World War II.
He left Italy via Navy transport and Trinidad to Brazil -- 'which is like Italy in Portuguese,' he wrote my mother. He flew back to the States with a shell-shocked pilot who buzzed a C-47 up the broadest street of Miami. From the air, my father recognized a parking lot where Earl had vomited after a performance.
My mother's contribution to the war eff
ort -- although she did secretarial work for her alma mater, the Thompson Female Seminary -- consisted of hospital training; she was in the second class the Dairy Hospital gave to prepare nurses' aides. She worked one eight-hour shift per week and was on call for substitutions, which were frequent (there being a great shortage of nurses). Her favourite stations were the maternity ward and the delivery room; she knew what it was like to have a baby in that hospital with no husband around. That was how my mother spent the war.
Just after the war, Father took Coach Bob to see a professional football game, which was played in Fenway Park, Boston. On their way to the North Station to take the train back home to Dairy, they met one of Father's Harvard classmates, who sold them a 1940 Chevy coupe for 600 dollars -- a bit more than it cost new, but it was in fair shape and gasoline was ridiculously cheap, maybe twenty cents a gallon; Coach Bob and my father split the cost of insurance, so at last our family had a car. While Father finished his degree at Harvard, my mother had a means to take Frank, Franny, and me to the beaches on the New Hampshire shore, and Iowa Bob drove us once to the White Mountains, where Frank was badly stung by yellow jackets when Franny pushed him into a nest.
Harvard life had changed; the rooms were overcrowded; the Crimson had a new crew. The Slavic studies students claimed responsibility for the American discovery of vodka; no one mixed it with anything -- you drank it Russian style, cold and straight in little stemmed glasses -- but my father stuck with beer and changed his major to English literature. That way he tried, once again, to accelerate his graduation.
There were not many of the big bands around. Ballroom dancing was declining as a sport and pastime. And Earl was too decrepit to perform anymore; my father's first Christmas out of the Air Force, he worked in the toy department of Jordan Marsh and made my mother pregnant, again. This time, it would be Lilly. As concrete as the reasons were for calling Frank Frank and Franny Franny and me John, there was no specific reason for calling Lilly Lilly -- a fact that would bother Lilly, perhaps more than we knew; maybe for all her life.
