The Hotel New Hampshire

by John Irving

  'Wutcha gonna call it?' asked the old cop.

  'The Hotel New Hampshire,' my father said.

  'Holy cow,' said Howard Tuck.

  'Holy cow' might have been a better name for it, but the matter was decided: the Hotel New Hampshire it would be.

  I was still awake when Mother and Father came home -- they were gone much longer than fifteen minutes, so I knew that they'd encountered at least the white sloop, if not Freud and the man in the white dinner jacket, along the way.

  'My God, Sorrow,' I heard Father say. 'Couldn't you have done that outside?'

  The vision of them coming home was clear to me: Sorrow snorting through the hedges alongside the clapboard buildings of the town, rousing the light-sleeping elderly from their beds. Confused with time, these old people might have looked out and seen my father with my mother, hand in hand, unaware of the years gone by, they would have gone back to bed, muttering, 'It's Iowa Bob's boy, with the Bates girl and that old bear, again.'

  'Just one thing I don't understand,' my mother was saying. 'Will we have to sell this house, and move out of it, before we're ready to move in there?'

  Because that was the only way he could afford to convert a school into a hotel, of course. The town would be glad to let him have the Thompson Female Seminary, dirt-cheap. Who wanted to have the eye-sore left empty, where children could get hurt, smashing the windows and climbing the fire escapes? But it was my mother's family house -- the lush Bates family house -- that would have to pay for the restoration. Perhaps this was what Freud meant: what Mother must forgive Father for.

  'We may have to sell it before we move there,' Father said, 'but we may not have to move out. Those are just details.'

  Those details (and others) would take us years, and would cause Franny to say, long after the stitches were out of her lip and the scar was so thin that you thought you could brush it away with your finger -- or that one good kiss would erase the mark from her mouth -- 'If Father could have bought another bear, he wouldn't have needed to buy a hotel.' But the first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels.

  3 Iowa Bob's Winning Season

  In 1954 Frank joined the freshman class at the Dairy School -- an uneventful transition for him, it seemed, except that he spent even more time in his room, by himself. There was a vague homosexual incident, but a number of boys, all from the same dormitory, had been involved -- all older than Frank -- and the assumption was that Frank had been the victim of a rather common prep school joke. After all, he lived at home; it's not surprising that he was naive about dormitory life.

  In 1955 Franny went to the Dairy School; that was the first year women went there, and the transition was not so smooth. Transitions would never be too smooth when Franny was involved, but in this case there were many unforeseen problems, ranging from discrimination in the classrooms to not enough showers in the wing of the gym they had partitioned for the women to use. Also, the sudden presence of women teachers on the faculty caused several tottering marriages to fall, and the fantasy life of the boys at Dairy was no doubt increased a thousand-fold.

  In 1956 it was my turn. That was the year they bought an entire backfield and three linemen for Coach Bob; the school knew he was retiring, and he hadn't had a winning season since just after the war. They thought they'd do him a favour by stocking his football team with one-year postgraduate athletes from the toughest Boston high schools. For once Coach Bob not only had a backfield; he had some beef up front, for blocking, and although the old man disliked the idea of a 'bought' team -- of what (even in those days) we called 'ringers' -- he appreciated the gesture. The Dairy School, however, had more in mind than making Iowa Bob's last year a winning season. They were shooting every angle they could, to attract more alumni money and a new and younger football coach for the next year. One more losing season, Bob knew, and the Dairy School would drop football forever. Coach Bob would rather have gone out a winner with a team he built, over several years, but who wouldn't rather go out a winner almost any way possible.

  'Besides,' said Coach Bob, 'even good talent needs a coach. These guys wouldn't be so hot without me. Everybody needs a game plan; everybody needs to be told what they're doing wrong.'

  In those years, Iowa Bob had lots to say to my father on the subject of game plan and doing wrong. Coach Bob said that the restoration of the Thompson Female Seminary was 'a task akin to raping a rhinoceros.' It took a little longer than my father had expected.

  He had no trouble selling Mother's family house -- it was a beauty, and we made a killing on it -- but the new owners were impatient to take possession and we paid them a stiff rent to live there for a full year after all the papers were signed.

  I remember watching the old school desks being removed from what was going to be the Hotel New Hampshire -- hundreds of desks that had been screwed down to the floor. Hundreds of holes in the floor to fill, or else carpet the whole thing. That was 'one of the details Father had to deal with.

  And the fourth-floor bathroom equipment was a surprise to him. My mother should have remembered: years before her time at the Thompson Female Seminary, the toilets and sinks for the top floor had been misordered. Instead of outfitting bathrooms for high school-sized students, the toilet and sink people delivered and installed miniatures -- they were meant for a kindergarten in the north of the state. Since the mistake cost less than the original order, the Thompson Female Seminary had let it pass. And so generations of high school girls had stooped and cracked their knees while trying to pee and wash -- the tiny child-sized toilets breaking the girls' backs if they sat down too fast, the little sinks hitting them a knee level, the mirrors staring straight at their breasts.

  'Jesus God,' Father said. 'It's an outhouse for elves.' He had hoped simply to disperse the old bathroom equipment throughout the hotel; he had enough sense to know that the guests wouldn't want to share communal bathrooms, but he thought he could save a lot of money by using the toilets and sinks that were already there. After all, there wasn't much equipment that a high school and a hotel had in common.

  'We can use the mirrors, anyway,' Mother said. 'We'll just mount them higher on the walls.'

  'And we can use the sinks and toilets, too,' Father insisted.

  'Who can use them?' Mother asked.

  'Dwarfs?' said Coach Bob.

  'Lilly and Egg, anyway,' Franny said. 'At least for a few more years.'

  Then there were the screwed-down desk chairs that had matched the desks. Father wouldn't throw them out, either.

  'They're perfectly good chairs,' Father said. 'They're very comfortable.'

  'It's sort of quaint how they have names carved in them,' Frank said.

  'Quaint, Frank?' Franny said.

  'But they have to be screwed down to the floor,' Mother said. 'People won't be able to move them around.'

  'Why should people have to move hotel furniture around?' Father asked. 'I mean, we set the rooms the way they should be, 'right? I don't want people moving the chairs, anyway,' he said. 'This way, they can't.'

  'Even in the restaurant?' Mother asked.

  'People like to shove back their chairs after a big meal,' said Iowa Bob.

  'Well, they can't -- that's all,' Father said. 'We'll let them push the tables away from them instead.'

  'Why not screw down the tables, too?' Frank suggested.

  'That's a quaint idea,' Franny said. She would say, later, that Frank's insecurity was so vast that he would have preferred all of life screwed down to the floor.

  Of course, the partitioning of rooms, with their own baths, took the longest. And the plumbing was as complex as a freight yard of tracks in a city railroad station; when someone flushed on the fourth floor, you could hear it coursing through the entire hotel -- trying to find a way down. And some of the rooms still had blackboards.

  'So long as they're clean,' Father said, 'what's the harm?'
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  'Sure,' said Iowa Bob. 'One guest can leave messages for the next guest.'

  Things like 'Don't ever stay here!' Franny said.

  'It will be all right,' Frank said. 'I just want my own room.'

  'In a hotel, Frank,' Franny said, 'everybody gets a room.'

  Even Coach Bob would get a room; after his retirement, the Dairy School wouldn't let him go on living in campus housing. Coach Bob was cautiously warming to the idea; he was ready to move in when we were ready. He was interested in the future of the playground equipment: the cracked-clay volleyball court, the field-hockey field, and the basketball backboards and hoops -- the nets were long since rotted away.

  There's nothing that looks more abandoned,' Bob said, 'than a basketball hoop without a net. I think that's so sad.'

  And one day we watched the men with the pneumatic drills chipping THOMPSON FEMALE SEMINARY off the death-grey face of stone, sunk in the bricks, above the great front door. They stopped work for the day -- I'm sure on purpose -- leaving only the letters MALE SEMIN over the door. It was Friday, so the letters stayed that way over the weekend, to my mother's and father's irritation -- and to Coach Bob's amusement.

  'Why don't you call it the Hotel Male Semen?' Iowa Bob asked my father. Then you'll only have to change one letter.' Bob was in a good mood, because his team was winning and he knew he was about to get out of the wretched Dairy School.

  If my father was in a bad mood, he rarely let it show. (He was full of energy -- 'Energy begets energy,' he would repeat and repeat to us, over our homework and at sports practices for the teams he coached.) He had not resigned from the Dairy School; he probably didn't dare, or Mother wouldn't let him. He was going ahead with the Hotel New Hampshire, but he was teaching three classes of English and coaching track winter and spring, so he was going ahead at half-speed.

  Frank seemed to disappear at the Dairy School; he was like one of the token cows. You didn't notice him after a while. He did his work -- he seemed to find it hard -- and he attended the required athletics, although he favoured no particular sport and wasn't good enough for (or didn't try to make) any of the teams. He was big and strong and as awkward as ever.

  And (at sixteen) he grew a thin moustache on his upper lip, which made him look much older. There was something floppy and puppylike about him -- a certain heavy cloddishness in his feet -- that suggested he would one day be a very large and imposing dog; but Frank would wait forever for the poise that must attend imposing size in order for the animal to be imposing. He had no friends, but no one worried; Frank had never been much for having friends.

  Franny, of course, had lots of boyfriends. Most of them were older than Franny, and one of them I liked: he was a tall, red-haired senior at the school -- a strong, silent type who stroked the first boat of the varsity crew. His name was Struthers, he had grown up in Maine, and except for the blisters on his hands, which were painted a rust-brown with benzoin -- to toughen them -- and the fact that he smelled, at times, like wet socks, he was acceptable to everyone in our family. Even Frank. Sorrow growled at Struthers, but that was a smell thing: Struthers threatened Sorrow's dominance of our house. I didn't know if Struthers was Franny's favourite boyfriend, but he was very fond of her, and nice to the rest of us.

  Some of the others -- one of them was the leader of that pack of Boston ringers who'd been hired to play for Coach Bob -- were not so nice. In fact, the quarterback of that imported backfield was a boy who made Ralph De Meo look like a saint. His name was Sterling Dove, although he was called Chip, or Chipper, and he was a cruel, angular boy from one of the posher Boston suburban schools.

  'He's a natural leader, that Chip Dove,' Coach Bob said.

  He's a natural commander of someone's secret police, I thought. Chipper Dove was blondly handsome, in a spotless, slightly pretty sort of way; we were a dark-haired family, except for Lilly, who was not so blond as she was washed-out -- all over; even her hair was pale.

  I would have enjoyed seeing Chip Dove play quarterback without a good line to protect him -- and when he had to throw a lot of passes to catch up several touchdowns -- but the admissions office had done a good job for Coach Bob; Dairy's football team never fell behind. When they got the ball, they kept it, and Dove rarely had to pass. Although it was the first winning season that any of us children could remember, it was dull -- watching them grind down the field, eating up the clock and scoring from three or four yards out. They were not flashy, they were simply strong and precise and well coached; their defence was not so strong -- the other teams scored back on them, but not too often: the other teams rarely got to have the ball.

  'Ball control,' crowed Iowa Bob. 'First time I've had a ball-control team since the war.'

  My only comfort in Franny's relationship with Chipper Dove was that Dove was such a team boy he was rarely in Franny's company without the rest of the Dairy backfield -- and often a lineman or two. They menaced the campus that year like a horde, and Franny sometimes was seen in their camp; Dove was attracted to her -- every boy, except Frank, seemed attracted to Franny. Girls were cautious in her company; she simply outshone them, and perhaps she was not a very good friend to them. Franny was always meeting more and newer people; she was probably too curious about strangers to be loyal in the way girls want their girl friends to be loyal.

  I don't know; I was kept in the dark about that. At times Franny would fix me up with a date, but the girls were usually older and it didn't work out. 'Everyone thinks you're cute,' Franny said, 'but you have to talk to people a little bit, you know -- you can't just start out necking.'

  'I don't start out necking,' I'd tell her. 'I never get to the necking.'

  'Well,' she said, 'that's because you just sit there waiting for something to happen. Everyone knows what you're thinking.'

  'You don't,' I said. 'Not always.'

  'About me, you mean?' she asked, but I didn't say anything. 'Listen, kid,' Franny said. 'I know you think about me too much -- if that's what you mean.'

  It was at Dairy that she started calling me 'kid,' although there was just a year's difference between us. To my shame, the name stuck.

  'Hey, kid,' Chip Dove said to me in the showers at the gym. 'Your sister's got the nicest ass at this school. Is she banging anybody?'

  'Struthers,' I said, although I hoped it wasn't true. Struthers was at least better than Dove.

  'Struthers!' Dove said. 'The fucking oarsman? The clod who rows?'

  'He's very strong,' I said; that much was true -- oarsmen are strong, and Struthers was the strongest of them.

  'Yeah, but he's a clod,' Dove said.

  'Just pulls his oar all day!' said Lenny Metz, a running back who was always -- even in the showers -- just to the right of Chip Dove's hip, as if he expected, even there, to be handed the ball. He was as dumb as cement, and as hard.

  'Well, kid,' said Chipper Dove. 'You tell Franny I think she's got the nicest ass at this school.'

  'And tits!' cried Lenny Metz.

  'Well, they're okay,' Dove said. 'But it's the ass that's really special.'

  'She has a nice smile, too,' Metz said.

  Chip Dove rolled his eyes at me, conspiratorially -- as if to show me he knew how dumb Metz was, and he was much, much smarter. 'Don't forget to use a little soap, huh, Lenny?' Dove said, and passed him the slippery bar, which Metz, instinctively -- a non-fumbler -- slapped against his belly in his bearish grip.

  I turned off my shower because some bigger person had moved under the stream of water with me. He shoved me out of his way altogether and turned the water back on.

  'Move on, man,' he said, softly. It was one of the linemen who kept other football players from hurting Chipper Dove. His name was Samuel Jones, Jr., and he was called Junior Jones. Junior Jones was as black as any night in which my father's imagination was inspired; he would go on to play college football at Penn State, and pro ball in Cleveland, until someone messed up his knee.

  I was fourteen, in 1956, and Junior Jones was
the largest organization of human flesh I had ever seen. I moved out of his way, but Chipper Dove said, 'Hey, Junior, don't you know this kid?'

  'No, I haven't met him,' said Junior Jones.

  'Well, this is Franny Berry's brother,' Chip Dove said.

  'How do you do?' said Junior Jones.

  'Hello,' I said.

  'Old Coach Bob is this kid's grandfather, Junior,' Dove said.

  That's nice,' said Junior Jones. He filled his mouth with a froth of lather from the tiny bar of soap in his hand, then tipped his head back and rinsed his mouth out in the downstream of the shower. Perhaps, I thought, this was what he did instead of brushing his teeth.

  'We were talking,' Dove said, 'about what it was we liked about Franny.'

  'Her smile,' Metz said.

  'You said her tits, too,' Chipper Dove said. 'And I said she had the nicest ass at this school. We didn't get to ask the kid, here, what he likes about his sister, but I thought we'd ask you first, Junior.'

  Junior Jones had lathered his bar of soap away to nothing; his huge head was awash with white froth; when he rinsed himself under the shower, the suds lapped around his ankles. I looked down at my feet and felt the close presence of the remaining twosome from Iowa Bob's backfield. A burnt-face boy named Chester Pulaski, who spent too much time under the sun lamp -- even so, his neck blazed with boils; his forehead was studded with them. He was primarily a blocking back -- not by choice; he simply didn't run quite as well as Lenny Metz. Chester Pulaski was a natural blocking back because he tended to run at his opponents more than he tended away from them. With him, and flitting near to me, like a horsefly that won't leave you alone, was a boy as black as Junior Jones; any comparison, however, was over with their colour. He sometimes lined up as a wide receiver, and when he ran out of the backfield it was only to catch Chipper Dove's short and safe little passes. His name was Harold Swallow, and he was no bigger than I was, but Harold Swallow could fly. He had moves like the bird he was named for; if anyone ever tackled him, he might have broken in half, but when he wasn't catching passes and flying out of bounds, he was just hiding in the backfield, usually behind Chester Pulaski or Junior Jones.