The Hotel New Hampshire

by John Irving

  I went looking for Franny, but she had made it back to the lobby, undetected; she switched all the intercoms to 'Broadcasting' and broadcast an announcement throughout the hotel.

  'Now hear this!' Franny boomed. 'Now hear this! Everyone out of bed for a sex check!'

  'What's a sex check?' I wondered, running down the stairwell to the lobby.

  Frank fortunately missed the message; he was hiding in the fourth-floor utility closet, where there was no squawk box installed: when he heard Franny's announcement, the message was garbled. He probably thought that Father was pacing us through another fire drill; in his haste to leave the utility closet, Frank stepped in a pail and fell on all fours, his head hitting the floor and one hand touching, this time, a dead mouse.

  We heard him scream again, and Max Urick opened his door at the end of the fourth-floor hall and bellowed as if he were out to sea and going down.

  'Shut up your God-awful screeching, or I'll hang you by your little fingers off the fire escape!'

  That put Frank in a bad mood; he declared that our games were 'childish' and he went to his room. Franny and I watched out over Elliot Park from the big corner window in 3F; that would be Coach Bob's bedroom, but Bob was out at an Athletic Department banquet, celebrating all but the last game -- yet to be played.

  Elliot Park was typically deserted, and the unused playground facilities stuck up like dead trees against the dull glow from the one streetlight. The last of the construction equipment was still there, the diesel machines and the workmen's shack, but the Hotel New Hampshire was finished, now, except for landscaping, and the only machine that had been in use, for days, was the backhoe that crouched near the front flagstone path like a starving dinosaur. There were still a few stumps from the dead elms to dig out of the ground, and a few holes to fill around the periphery of the new parking lot. A soft, glossy light came from the windows of our apartment, where Father was putting Lilly to bed, by candlelight, and Frank was, no doubt, looking at himself in his band uniform in the mirror of his room.

  Franny and I saw the squad car come into Elliot Park -- like a shark cruising forsaken waters for an unlikely meal. We speculated that the old patrolman, Howard Tuck, would 'arrest' Mother and Egg as they were walking back from the railroad station. We speculated that the candlelight in the Hotel New Hampshire would convince Patrolman Tuck that there were ghosts of old Thompson Female Seminary students haunting the hotel. But Howard parked the patrol car behind the most obvious pile of construction rubble and shut off his engine and his lights.

  We saw the head of his cigar, like the shimmering red eye of an animal, in the dark car.

  We saw Mother and Egg crossing the playground undetected. They came out of the darkness, and out of the scant light, as if their time on earth were that brief and that dimly illuminated; it gave me a twinge, to see them like that, and I felt Franny shudder beside me.

  'Let's go turn all the lights on,' Franny suggested. 'In all the rooms.'

  'But the electricity is out,' I said.

  'It is now, dummy,' she said, 'but if we turn on all the lights, the whole hotel will light up when they turn the power on.'

  That sounded like a fine idea, so I helped her do it -- even the hall lights outside Max Urick's room -- and the outdoor floodlights, which would one day illuminate a patio extending from the restaurant but now would shine only on the backhoe, and a yellow steel hard hat that dangled by its chin strap from a small tree the backhoe had left alone. The workman whose hat it was seemed gone forever.

  The abandoned hat reminded me of Struthers, strong and dull; I knew Franny hadn't seen him in a while. I knew she had no favourite boyfriends, and she seemed sullen on the subject. Franny was a virgin, she'd told me, not because she wanted to be but because there wasn't a boy at the Dairy School who was (as she put it) 'worth it.'

  'I don't mean I think I'm so great,' she told me, 'but I don't want some clod ruining it for me, and I don't want someone who'd laugh at me, either. It's very important, John,' she told me, 'especially the first time.'

  'Why?' I asked.

  It just is,' Franny said. 'It's the first time, that's why. It stays with you forever.'

  I doubted it; I hoped not. I thought of Ronda Ray: what had the first time meant to her? I thought of her nightclothes, smelling -- ambiguously -- like her wrist under her watchband, like the back of her knee.

  Howard Tuck and the patrol car hadn't moved by the time Franny and I accomplished turning on all the lights. We snuck outdoors; when the power went on, we wanted to see the whole hotel ablaze. We climbed into the driver's seat of the backhoe and waited.

  Howard Tuck sat so still in the squad car, he looked as if he were waiting for his retirement. In fact, Iowa Bob was fond of saying that Howard Tuck always looked 'at death's door.'

  When Howard Tuck cranked the ignition of the squad car, the hotel lit up as if he'd done it. When the patrol car's headlights bunked on, every light in the hotel came to life, and Howard Tuck seemed to lurch the car forward and stall -- as if the sight of the bright hotel had dazed him and his foot had slipped off the gas or off the clutch. Actually, the sight of the Hotel New Hampshire blazing with light the instant he started his car had been too much for old Howard Tuck. His life in Elliot Park had been less illuminated -- only occasional sexual discoveries, inexpert teen-agers caught in his spotlight, and the odd vandal interested in doing trivial damage to the Thompson Female Seminary. Once the Dairy School students had stolen one of the school's token cows and tied it to the goal at one end of the field-hockey field.

  What Howard Tuck saw when he started his car had been a four-storey shock of light -- the way the Hotel New Hampshire might look the precise second it was bombed. Max Urick's radio came on with a blast of music that caused Max to shriek in alarm; a stove tuner chimed in Mrs. Urick's underground kitchen; Lilly cried out in her sleep; Frank came to life in the dark mirror; Egg, anxious at the hum of electricity he felt throb through the hotel, shut his eyes; Franny and I, in the backhoe, held our hands over our ears -- as if the sight of this much sudden light could only be accompanied by an explosion. And the old patrolman, Howard Tuck, felt his foot slip off the clutch at the moment his heart stopped and he departed a world where hotels could spring to life so easily.

  Franny and I were the first to get to the squad car. We saw the policeman's body slumped against the steering wheel and heard the horn blaring. Father and Mother and Frank ran out of the Hotel New Hampshire, as if the police car were sounding the signal for another fire drill.

  'Jesus, Howard, you're dead!' Father said to the old man, shaking him.

  'We didn't mean to, we didn't mean to,' Franny said.

  Father thumped old Howard Tuck on the chest and stretched him out on the police car's front seat; then he struck him on the chest again.

  'Call somebody!' Father said, but there was no working phone in our unlikely house. Father looked at the puzzling maze of wires and switches and ear-and mouthpieces in the squad car. 'Hello? Hello!' he said into something, pushing something else. 'How the fuck does this thing work?' he cried.

  'Who's this?' said a voice out of the tubes of the car.

  'Get an ambulance to Elliot Park!' my father said.

  'Halloween alert?' said the voice. 'Halloween trouble? Hello. Hello.'

  'Jesus God, it's Halloween!' Father said. 'Goddamn silly machine!' he cried, slamming the dashboard of the squad car with one hand; he gave a fairly hard thump to the quiet chest of Howard Tuck with his other hand.

  'We can get an ambulance!' Franny said. 'The school ambulance!'

  And I ran with her through Elliot Park, which was now glowing in the stunning light that poured from the Hotel New Hampshire. 'Holy cow,' said Iowa Bob, when we ran into him at the Pine Street entrance to the park; he was looking at the bright hotel as if the place had opened for business without him. In the unnatural light, Coach Bob looked years older to me, but I suppose he really looked only as old as he was -- a grandfather and a retiring c
oach with one more game to play.

  'Howard Tuck had a heart attack!' I told him, and Franny and I ran on toward the Dairy School -- which was always up to heart-attack tricks of its own, especially on Halloween.

  4 Franny Loses a Fight

  On Halloween, the Police Department of the town of Dairy sent old Howard Tuck to Elliot Park, as usual, but the State Police sent two cars to cruise the campus of the Dairy School, and the campus security force was doubled; although short on tradition, the Dairy School had a considerable Halloween reputation.

  It had been Halloween when one of the token cows had been tied to the goal at the Thompson Female Seminary. It had been another Halloween when another cow had been led to the Dairy School field house and indoor swimming pool, where the beast suffered a violent reaction to the chlorine in the water and drowned.

  It had been Halloween when four little kids from the town had made the mistake of going trick-or-treating in one of the Dairy dorms. The children were kidnapped for the night; they had their heads shaved by a student costumed as an executioner, and one child was unable to speak for a week.

  'I hate Halloween,' Franny said, as we noted there were few trick-or-treaters on the streets; the little kids of Dairy were frightened of Halloween. An occasional cringing child, with a paper bag or a mask on its head, cowered as Franny and I ran by; and a group of small children -- one dressed as a witch, one as a ghost, and two as robots from a recent film about a Martian invasion -- fled into the safety of a lit doorway as we charged up the sidewalk toward them.

  Cars with anxious parents were parked here and there along the street -- spotting for would-be attackers as their children cautiously approached a door to ring a bell. The usual anxieties about the razor blades in apples, the arsenic in the chocolate cookies, were no doubt passing through the parked parents' minds. One such anxious father put his headlights on Franny and me and leaped from his car to give chase. 'Hey, you!' he yelled.

  'Howard Tuck had a heart attack!' I called to him, and that seemed to stop him -- cold. Franny and I ran through the open gate, like the gate to a cemetery, that admitted us to the playing fields of the Dairy School; past the pointed iron bars, I tried to imagine the gate for the Exeter weekend -- when they would be selling pennants and blankets and cowbells to bash together at the game. It was a rather cheerless gate, now, and as we ran in, a small horde of children rushed by us, running out -- the other way. They were running for their lives, it seemed, and a few of their terrified faces were as shocking as the Halloween masks some of the other kids had managed to keep on. Their plastic black-and-white and pumpkin-coloured costumes were in shreds and tatters, and they wailed like a children's hospital ward -- great gagging snivels of fear.

  'Jesus God,' Franny said, and they fled away from her -- as if she were in costume and I wore the worst mask of all.

  I grabbed a small boy and asked him, 'What's happening?' But he writhed and screamed in my hands, he tried to bite my wrist -- he was wet and trembling and he smelled strange, and his skeleton costume came away in pieces in my hands, like soggy toilet paper or a decomposing sponge. 'Giant spiders!' he cried, witlessly. I let him go.

  'What's happening?' Franny called to the children, but they were gone as suddenly as they'd appeared. The playing fields stretched in front of us, dark and empty; at the end of them, like tall ships across a harbour shrouded by fog, the dorms and buildings of the Dairy School seemed sparsely lit -- as if everyone had gone to bed early, and only a few good students were burning, as they say, the midnight oil. But Franny and I knew that there were very few 'good' students at Dairy, and on a Halloween Saturday night we doubted that even the good ones were studying -- and we doubted that any of the dark windows meant that anyone was sleeping. Perhaps they were drinking in the blackness of their rooms, perhaps they were violating each other, and some captured children, in their dark dorms. Perhaps there was a new religion, the rage of the campus, and the religion required total night for its rituals -- and Halloween was its day of reckoning.

  Something was wrong. The white wooden goal at the near end of the soccer field seemed too white, to me, although it was the darkest night I had been in. Something was too stark and apparent about the goal.

  'I wish Sorrow was with us,' Franny said.

  Sorrow will be with us, I thought -- knowing what Franny didn't know: that Father had taken Sorrow to the vet's this very day, to have the old dog put to sleep. There had been a sober discussion -- in Franny's absence -- of the need for this. Lilly and Egg weren't with us, either. Father had told Mother, Frank, and me -- and Iowa Bob. 'Franny won't understand,' Father had said. 'And Lilly and Egg are too young. There's no point in asking their opinion. They won't be rational.'

  Frank did not care for Sorrow, but even Frank seemed saddened by the death sentence.

  'I know he smells bad,' Frank said, 'but that's not exactly a fatal disease.'

  'In a hotel it is,' Father said. That dog has terminal flatulence.'

  'And he is old,' Mother said.

  'When you get old,' I told Mother and Father, 'we won't put you to sleep.'

  'And what about me?' Iowa Bob said. 'I suppose I'm the next one to go. Got to watch my farting, or it's off to the nursing home!'

  'You're no help at all,' Father told Coach Bob. 'It's only Franny who really loves the dog. She's the one who's really going to be upset, and we'll just have to make it as easy for her as we can.'

  Father no doubt thought that anticipation was nine-tenths of suffering: he was not really being cowardly by not seeking Franny's opinion; he knew what her opinion would be, of course, and he knew that Sorrow had to go.

  And so I wondered how long we would be moved into the Hotel New Hampshire before Franny would notice the old farter's absence, before she would start sniffing around for Sorrow -- Father would have to put all his cards on the table.

  'Well, Franny,' I could imagine Father beginning. 'You know that Sorrow wasn't getting any younger -- or any better at controlling himself.'

  Passing the dead-white soccer goal, under the black sky, I shuddered to think how Franny would take it. 'Murderers!' she would call us all. And we would all look guilty. 'Franny, Franny,' Father would say, but Franny would make an awful fuss. I pitied the strangers in the Hotel New Hampshire who would waken to the variety of sounds Franny was capable of.

  Then I realized what was wrong about the soccer goal: the net was gone. End of the season? I thought. But no, if there was one week more of football, surely there was a week more of soccer, too. And I recalled in past years how the nets would stay on the goals until the first snow, as if it took the first storm to remind the maintenance crew what they had forgotten. The nets in the goals held the drifted snow -- like spider webs so dense that they trap dust.

  'The net's gone -- off the goal' I said to Franny.

  'Big deal' she said, and we veered into the woods. Even in the dark, Franny and I could find the shortcut, the path the football players always used -- and everyone else, because of them, stayed off it.

  A Halloween prank? I thought. Stealing a net to a soccer goal . . . and then, of course, Franny and I ran right into it. Suddenly the net was over us, and under us, and there were two other people trapped like us: a Dairy School freshman, named Firestone, his face as round as a tyre and as soft as a kind of cheese, and a small trick-or-treater from town. The trick-or-treater was wearing a gorilla suit, though he was closer, in size, to a spider monkey. His gorilla mask was backwards on his head, so that when you saw the back of his head you saw a monkey, and when you saw his screaming face you saw him for the frightened little boy he was.

  It was a jungle trap, and the monkey thrashed in it wildly. Firestone tried to He down, but the net kept jiggling him out of position -- he collided with me and said, 'Sorry'; then he collided with Franny and said, 'God, awfully sorry.' Every time I tried to get back on my feet, the net would jerk my feet out from under me, or the net over my head would jerk my head back and I'd fall. Franny crouched on all
fours, keeping her balance. Inside the net with us was a large brown paper bag, spewing forth the Halloween hoardings of the child in the gorilla suit -- candy corn and sticky balls of coagulated popcorn, breaking apart under us, and lollipops with their crinkly cellophane wrappers. The child in the gorilla suit was screaming in that breathless, hysterical way, as if he were about to choke, and Franny got her arms around him and tried to calm him down. 'It's all right, it's just a dirty trick,' she said to him. They'll let us go.'

  'Giant spiders!' cried the child, slapping himself all over and twitching in Franny's grasp.

  'No, no,' Franny said. 'No spiders. They're just people.'

  But I thought I knew what people they were; I would have preferred the spiders.

  'Got four of them!' said someone -- a voice with a locker-room familiarity to it. 'Got fucking four of them at once!'

  'Got a little one and three big ones,' said another familiar voice, a ballcarrier's voice or a blocking back's voice -- it was hard to tell.

  Flashlights, like the blinking eyes of rather mechanical spiders in the night, looked us over.

  'Well, look who's here,' said the voice in command, said the quarterback called Chipper Dove.

  'Got pretty little feet,' said Harold Swallow.

  'Got beautiful skin,' said Chester Pulasik.

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

  'And the best ass in the whole school,' said Chipper Dove. Franny rested on her knees.

  'Howard Tuck had a heart attack!' I told them all. 'We've got to get an ambulance!'

  'Let the fucking monkey go,' said Chip Dove. The net shifted. The thin black arm of Harold Swallow snatched the kid in the gorilla suit out of the spider's web and released him into the night. 'Trick or treat!' said Harold, and the little gorilla was gone.

  'Is that you, Firestone?' Dove asked, and the flashlight shone on the bland boy named Firestone, who looked as if he were trying to fall asleep at the bottom of the net, his knees drawn fetus-tight up to his chest, his eyes closed, his hand over his mouth.

  'You fag, Firestone,' said Lenny Metz. 'What are you doing?'