by John Irving
It was on Egg that we lavished the most presents, because he was the only one of us who was the prime age for Christmas that year. And Egg was very fond of things. Everyone got him animals and balls and tub toys and outdoor equiment -- most of it junk that would be lost or outgrown or broken or under the snow before the winter was over.
Franny and I found a jar of chimpanzee teeth in an antique store in Dairy, and we bought the teeth for Frank.
'He can use them in one of his stuffing experiments,' Franny said.
I was just as glad that we would not be giving Frank the teeth before Christmas, because I feared that Frank might try to use them in his version of Sorrow.
'Sorrow!' Iowa Bob screamed aloud one night, just before Christmas, and we all sat up in our beds with our hair itching. 'Sorrow!' the old man called and we heard him bellow down the deserted third-floor hall. 'Sorrow!' he called.
'The old fool is having a bad dream,' Father said, thumping upstairs in his bathrobe, but I went into Frank's room and stared at him.
'Don't look at me,' Frank said. 'Sorrow's still down at the lab. He's not finished.'
And we all went upstairs to see what was the matter with Iowa Bob.
He had 'seen' Sorrow, he said. Coach Bob had smelled the old dog in his sleep, and when he woke up, Sorrow was standing on the old oriental rug -- his favourite -- in Bob's room. 'But he looked at me with such menace,' old Bob said. 'He looked like he was going to attack!'
I stared at Frank again, but Frank shrugged. Father rolled his eyes.
'You were having a nightmare,' he told his old dad.
'Sorrow was in this room!' Coach Bob said. 'But he didn't look like Sorrow. He looked like he wanted to kill me.
'Hush, hush,' Mother said, and Father waved us out of the room; I heard him start talking to Iowa Bob that way I'd heard Father talk to Egg, or to Lilly -- or to any of us children, when we were younger -- and I realized that Father often talked to Bob that way, as if he thought his father was a child.
'It's that old rug,' Mother whispered to us kids. 'It's got so much dog hair on it that your grandfather can still smell Sorrow in his sleep.'
Lilly looked frightened, but Lilly often looked frightened. Egg was staggering around as if he were asleep on his feet.
'Sorrow is dead, isn't he?' Egg asked.
'Yes, yes,' Franny said.
'What?' Egg said, in such a loud voice that Lilly jumped.
'Okay, Frank,' I whispered in the stairwell. 'What pose did you put Sorrow in?'
'Attack,' he said, and I shuddered.
I thought that the old dog, in resentment for the terrible pose he'd been condemned to, had come back to haunt the Hotel New Hampshire. He'd gone to Iowa Bob's room because Bob had Sorrow's rug.
'Let's put Sorrow's old rug in Frank's room,' I suggested, at breakfast.
'I don't want that old rug,' Frank said.
'I do want that old rug,' said Coach Bob. 'It's perfect for my weights.'
'That was some dream you had last night,' Franny ventured to say.
'That was no dream, Franny,' Bob said, grimly. That was Sorrow -- in the flesh,' said the old coach, and Lilly shivered so hard at the word 'flesh' that she dropped her cereal spoon with a clatter.
'What is flesh?' Egg asked.
'Look, Frank,' I said to Frank, out in frozen Elliot Park -- the day before Christmas. 'I think you better let Sorrow stay down at the lab.'
Frank looked ready to 'attack' at this suggestion. 'He's all ready,' Frank said, 'and he's coming home tonight.'
'Do me a favour and don't gift-wrap him, okay?' I said.
'Gift-wrap him?' Frank said, with only mild disgust. 'Do you think I'm crazy?'
I didn't answer him, and he said, 'Look, don't you understand what's going on? I've done such a good job with Sorrow that Grandfather has had a premonition that Sorrow's come home,' Frank said.
It would always amaze me, how Frank could make pure idiocy sound logical.
And so we came to the night before Christmas. Not a creature was stirring, as they say. Just a stockpot or two. Max Urick's ever-present static. Ronda Ray was in her room. And there was a Turk in 2B -- a Turkish diplomat visiting his son at the Dairy School; he was the only student at the Dairy School who had not gone home (or to someone's home) for Christmas. All the presents were hidden with care. It was our family tradition to bring everything out and put it under the bare tree on Christmas morning.
Mother and Father, we knew, had hidden all our presents in 3E -- a room they visited happily and often. Iowa Bob had stored his gifts in one of the tiny fourth-floor bathrooms, which were not called 'fit for dwarfs,' not anymore -- not since the dubious diagnosis of Lilly's possible affliction. Franny showed me all the presents she got -- including modelling, for me, the sexy dress she bought for Mother. That prompted me to show her the nightgown I bought for Ronda Ray, and Franny promptly modelled it. When I saw it on her, I knew I should have gotten it for Franny. It was snow-white, a colour not available in Ronda's collection.
'You should have gotten this for me!' Franny said. 'I love it!'
But I would never catch on to what I should do about Franny, in time; as Franny said, 'I'll always be a year ahead of you, kid.'
Lilly hid her gifts in a small box; all her gifts were small. Egg didn't get anyone any gifts, but he searched endlessly through the Hotel New Hampshire for all the gifts people had gotten for him. And Frank hid Sorrow in Coach Bob's closet.
'Why?' I would ask him, and ask him, later.
'It was just for one night,' Frank said. 'And I knew that Franny would never look there.'
On Christmas Eve, 1956, everyone went to bed early and no one slept -- another family tradition. We heard the ice groaning under the snow in Elliot Park. There were times when Elliot Park could creak like a coffin changing temperature -- being lowered into the ground. Why is it that even the Christmas of 1956 felt a little like Halloween?
There was even a dog barking, late at night, and although the dog could not have been Sorrow, all of us who were awake thought of Iowa Bob's dream -- or his 'premonition,' as Frank called it.
And then it was Christmas morning -- clear, windy, and cold -- and I ran my forty or fifty wind sprints across Elliot Park. Naked, I was no longer as 'chubby' as I looked with my running clothes on -- as Ronda Ray was always telling me. Some of the bananas were turning hard. And Christmas morning or no Christmas morning, a routine is a routine: I joined Coach Bob for a little weight lifting before the family gathered for Christmas breakfast.
'You do your curls while I do my neck bridges,' Iowa Bob told me.
'Yes, Grandfather,' I said, and I did as I was told. Feet to feet on Sorrow's old rug, we did our sit-ups; head to head, our push-ups. There was only one long barbell, and the two short dumbbells for the one-arm curls. We traded the weights back and forth -- it was a kind of wordless morning prayer for us.
'Your upper arms, your chest, your neck -- that all looks pretty good,' Grandpa Bob told me, 'but your forearms could stand some work. And put maybe a flat twenty-five-pounder on your chest when you do your sit-ups -- you're doing them too easily. And bend your knees.'
'Yup,' I said, out of breath in my Ronda Ray way.
Bob put the long barbell up; he cleaned it neatly about ten times, then he pumped a few standing presses with it -- it seemed to me he had about 160 or 180 on the bar when the weights slid off one end and I got out of their way, and then about fifty or seventy-five pounds came sliding off the other end of the bar, and old Iowa Bob cried, 'Shit! Goddamn thing!' The weights rolled across the room. Father, downstairs, hollered up at us.
'Jesus God, you crazy weight lifters!' he yelled. 'Tighten those screws!'
And one of the weights rolled into the door of Bob's closet, and the door opened, of course, and out came the tennis racquet, Bob's laundry bag, a vacuum cleaner hose, a squash ball, and Sorrow -- stuffed.
I tried to say something, although the dog alarmed me nearly as much as it must have alarm
ed Iowa Bob; at least I knew what it was. It was Sorrow in Frank's 'attack' pose. It was a pretty good attack pose, all right, and a better job of stuffing a black Labrador retriever than I would have thought Frank capable of. Sorrow was screwed down to a pine board -- as Coach Bob would have said, 'Everything is screwed down in the Hotel New Hampshire; in the Hotel New Hampshire, we're screwed down for life!' The fierce dog slid rather gracefully out of the closet, landing firmly on all four feet and looking ready to spring. His black fur was so glossy it must have been recently oiled, and his yellow eyes caught the bright morning light -- and the light caught the gleam in his old yellow teeth, which Frank had polished white for the occasion. The dog's hackles were drawn back farther than I ever saw old Sorrow's hackles drawn back, when Sorrow had been alive, and a shiny sort of spittle -- very convincing stuff -- seemed to brighten the dead dog's gums. His black nose looked wet and healthy, and I could almost smell his fetid halitosis reaching out to Iowa Bob and me. But this Sorrow looked much too serious to fart.
This Sorrow meant business, and before I could get my breath back and tell my grandfather that it was only a Christmas present for Franny -- that it was only one of Frank's awful projects from down at the bio lab -- the old coach slung his barbell at the savage attack dog and threw his wonderful lineman's body back against me (to protect me, no doubt; that must have been what he meant to do).
'Holy cow!' said Iowa Bob, in a strangely small voice, and the weights clattered on all sides of Sorrow. The snarling dog was unfazed; he remained poised for the kill. And Iowa Bob, who was past the end of his last season, dropped dead in my arms.
'Jesus God, are you throwing those weights around on purpose?' Father screamed upstairs to us. 'Jesus God!' Father cried. Take a day off, will you? It's Christmas, for Christ's sake. Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!'
'Merry fucking Christmas!' shouted Franny, from downstairs.
'Merry Christmas!' said Lilly, and Egg -- and even Frank.
'Merry Christmas!' Mother called softly.
And was it Ronda Ray I heard chiming in? And the Uricks -- already setting up for Christmas breakfast in the Hotel New Hampshire? And I heard something unpronounceable -- it might have been the Turk in 2B.
In my arms, which I realized had grown very strong, I held the former Big Ten star, who was as heavy and meaningful, to me, as our family bear, and I stared into the short distance that separated us from Sorrow.
6 Father Hears from Freud
Coach Bob's Christmas present -- the framed, blown-up photograph of Junior Jones scoring Dairy's only touchdown against Exeter -- was given to Franny, who also inherited 3F, Iowa Bob's old room. Franny wanted nothing to do with Frank's version of Sorrow, which Egg dragged to his room; he hid the stuffed dog under his bed, where Mother discovered it, with a shriek, several days after Christmas. I know that Frank would have liked to have Sorrow back -- for further experimenting with the facial expression, or the pose -- but Frank had kept to himself, and to his room, since scaring his grandfather to death.
Iowa Bob was sixty-eight when he died, but the old lineman was in first-rate shape; without a fright of Sorrow's magnitude, he might have lived for another decade. Our family made every effort not to let the responsibility for the accident weigh too heavily on Frank. 'Nothing weighs too heavily on Frank,' Franny said, but even Franny tried to cheer him up. 'Stuffing Sorrow was a sweet idea, Frank,' Franny told him, 'but you must realize not everybody has your taste.'
What she might have told him was that taxidermy, like sex, is a very personal subject; the manner in which we impose it on others should be discreet.
Frank's guilt, if guilt was what he felt, was apparent only by his exaggerated absence; Frank was always more absent than the rest of us, but his usual silence grew even quieter. Even so, Franny and I felt that only Frank's sulking prevented him from asking for Sorrow.
Mother, against Egg's protests, instructed Max Urick to dispose of Sorrow, which Max accomplished by merely upending the paralyzed beast in one of the trash barrels at the delivery entrance. And one rainy morning, from Ronda Ray's room, I was startled to see the soggy tail and rump of Sorrow protruding from the mouth of the barrel; I could imagine the rubbish man, with his Department of Sanitation truck, being similarly startled -- thinking suddenly to himself: My God, when they're through with their pets at the Hotel New Hampshire, they just throw them out with the garbage!
'Come back to bed, John-O,' said Ronda Ray, but I just stared through the rain, which was turning to snow -falling over the row of barrels crammed with Christmas wrappings, ribbons and tinsel, the bottles and cartons and cans of the restaurant business, the bright and dull scraps of food, of interest to the birds and dogs, and one dead dog of interest to no one. Well, almost no one. It would have broken Frank's heart to see Sorrow come to this degrading end, and I looked out at the snow thickening over Elliot Park and saw another member of my family who was still keenly interested in Sorrow. I saw Egg, in his ski parka and ski hat, dragging his sled to the delivery entrance. He moved quickly over the slick coating of snow, his sled grating on the driveway, which was still bare and dotted with puddles. Egg knew where he was going -- a quick look into the basement windows and he was safely past Mrs. Urick's scrutiny; a glance to the fourth floor, but Max was not guarding the trash barrels. Our family's rooms didn't overlook the delivery entrance, and Egg knew that left only Ronda Ray who could see him. But she was in bed, and when Egg glanced up at her window, I ducked out of sight.
'If you'd rather be out running, John-O,' Ronda groaned, 'go run'
And when I looked out the window again. Egg was gone; Sorrow had gone with him. The efforts to bring Sorrow back from the grave were not over, I knew; I could only guess where the beast might reappear.
When Franny moved to Iowa Bob's room, Mother rearranged the rest of us. She put Egg and me together, where Franny and Lilly had been, and she gave Lilly my old room and Egg's adjoining room -- as if, illogically, Lilly's so-called dwarfism needed to be accommodated not only with privacy but with a large space. I complained, but Father said I would have a 'maturing' influence on Egg. Frank's secret quarters were unchanged, and the barbells still resided in Iowa Bob's room, which gave me more reason to visit Franny, who liked to watch me lift. So when I lifted, now, I was not thinking just of Franny -- my only audience! -- but with a little extra effort I could bring back Coach Bob. I was lifting for both of us.
I suppose that, by salvaging Sorrow from the inevitable journey to the dump, Egg might have been resurrecting Iowa Bob in the only way Egg could do it. What 'maturing' influence I was expected to have on Egg remained a mystery to me, though it was tolerable sharing a room with him. His clothes bothered me most of all, or not his clothes but his habits with clothes: Egg didn't dress himself, he costumed himself. He changed costumes several times a day, the discarded clothing always dominating a central area of our room and accumulating there, after several days, before Mother would rampage through the room and ask me if I couldn't urge Egg to be more tidy. Perhaps Father meant 'tidying' when he said 'maturing.'
For my first week of sharing a room with Egg, I was less concerned with his messiness than I was anxious to discover where he had hidden Sorrow. I did not want to be startled by that shape of death again, although I think the shape of death is always startling to us -- it is meant to be startling -- and not even proper anticipation can prepare us enough for it. This, at least, was true of Egg and Sorrow.
The night before New Year's Eve, with Iowa Bob not dead a week, and Sorrow missing from the garbage for only two days, I whispered across the darkness of our room to Egg; I knew he wasn't asleep.
'Okay, Egg,' I whispered. 'Where is he?' But it would always be a mistake to whisper to Egg.
'What?' Egg said. Mother and Dr. Blaze said that Egg's hearing was improving, although Father referred to Egg's 'deafness,' not to his 'hearing,' and concluded that Dr. Blaze must be deaf himself to think of Egg's condition as 'improving.' It was rather like Dr. Blaze's o
pinion of Lilly's dwarfism: that it was improving, too, because Lilly had grown (a little). But everyone else had grown much more, and the impression, therefore, was that Lilly was growing smaller.
'Egg,' I said more loudly. 'Where is Sorrow?'
'Sorrow is dead,' Egg said.
'I know he's dead, damn it,' I said, 'but where, Egg? Where is Sorrow?'
'Sorrow is with Grandpa Bob,' said Egg, who was right about that, of course, and I knew there would be no cajoling the whereabouts of the stuffed terror out of Egg.
Tomorrow is New Year's Eve,' I said.
'Who?' Egg said.
'New Year's Eve!' I said. 'We're having a party.'
'Where?' he asked.
'Here,' I said. 'In the Hotel New Hampshire.'
'What room?' he said.
'The main room,' I said. The big room. The restaurant, dummy,'
'We're not having a party in this room,' Egg said.
With Egg's costumes all around, there was hardly room for a party in our room, I knew, but I let this observation pass. I was almost asleep when Egg spoke again.
'How would you dry something that's wet?' Egg asked.
And I thought to myself of the likely condition of Sorrow, after God knows how many hours in the open trash barrel, in the rain and snow.
'What is it that's wet, Egg?' I asked.
'Hair,' he said. 'How would you dry hair?'
'Your hair, Egg?'
'Anybody's hair,' Egg said. 'Lots of hair. More hair than mine.'
'Well, with a hair dryer, I suppose,' I said.
'That thing Franny has?' Egg asked.
'Mother has one, too,' I told him.
'Yeah,' he said, 'but Franny's is bigger. I think it's hotter, too.'
'Got a lot of hair to dry, huh?' I said.
'What?' Egg said. But it wasn't worth repeating; an aspect of Egg's deafness was Egg's ability to choose when not to hear.
In the morning I watched him take off his pajamas, under which he wore -- and had slept in -- a full suit of clothes.
'It's good to be ready -- right, Egg?' I asked.
'Ready for what?' he asked. There isn't any school today -- it's still vacation.'
