The Hotel New Hampshire

by John Irving

  'Then why'd you wear your clothes to bed?' I asked him, but he let that pass; he was rummaging through various piles of costumes. 'What are you looking for?' I asked him. 'You're already dressed.' But whenever Egg detected that the tone I took toward him was a teasing one, he ignored me.

  'See you at the party,' he said.

  Egg loved the Hotel New Hampshire; perhaps he loved it even more than Father, because Father loved most of all the idea of it; in fact, Father seemed daily more and more unsure of the actual success of his venture. Egg loved all the rooms, the stairwells, the great unoccupied emptiness of the former all-girls' school. Father knew we were unoccupied a little too much of the time, but that was fine with Egg.

  Guests would occasionally bring odd things they had found in their rooms to breakfast. The room was very clean,' they would begin, 'but someone must have left this . . . this something.' The right rubber arm of a cowboy; the wrinkled, webbed foot of a dried toad. A playing card, with a face drawn over the face of the jack of diamonds; the five of clubs with the word 'Yuck' written across it. A small sock with six marbles in it. A costume change (Egg's policeman's badge pinned to his baseball uniform) hanging in the closet of 4G.

  On the day of New Year's Eve, the weather was that thawing kind -- a mist spreading over Elliot Park, and yesterday's snow already melting and revealing the grey snow of a week ago. 'Where were you this morning, John-O?' Ronda Ray asked me, as we were fussing with the restaurant for the New Year's Eve party.

  'It wasn't raining,' I pointed out. A weak excuse, I knew -- and she knew. I was hardly being unfaithful to Ronda -- there was no one to be unfaithful with -- but I dreamed of an imaginary someone else, about Franny's age, all the time. I had even asked Franny for a date with one of her friends, someone she would recommend -although Franny was in the habit of saying that her friends were too old for me, now; by which she meant that they were sixteen.

  'No weight lifting this morning?' Franny asked me. 'Aren't you afraid you'll get out of shape?'

  'I'm in training for the party,' I said.

  For the party, we expected that three or four Dairy students (who were cutting their Christmas break short) would be spending the night in the hotel, among them Junior Jones, who was Franny's date, and a sister of Junior Jones, who was not a Dairy student. Junior was bringing her with him for me -- I was terrified that Junior Jones's sister was going to be as big as Junior Jones, and I was also eager to know if this was the sister who'd been raped, as Harold Swallow had told me; it seemed unjustly important to know. Was I to have a large, raped girl for a date or a large, unraped girl? -- for either way, I was sure, she would have to be huge.

  'Don't be nervous,' Franny said to me.

  We dismantled the Christmas tree, which brought tears to my father's eyes, because it had been Iowa Bob's tree; Mother had to leave the room. The funeral had seemed so subdued to us children -- it was the first funeral we had ever seen, being too young to remember what was done about Latin Emeritus and my mother's mother; the bear called State o' Maine had not been given a funeral. I think that considering the noise attached to the death of Iowa Bob, we expected the funeral to be louder, too -- 'at least the sound of barbells falling,' I said to Franny.

  'Be serious,' she said. She seemed to think she was growing much older than me, and I was afraid she was right.

  'Is this the sister who was raped?' I asked Franny suddenly. 'I mean, which sister is Junior bringing?' By Franny's look at me, I guessed that this question also put years between us.

  'He only has one sister,' Franny said, looking straight at me. 'Does it matter to you that she was raped?'

  Of course I didn't know what to say: that it did? That one would not discuss rape with someone who'd been raped, as opposed to launching into the subject right away with someone who hadn't? That one would look for the lasting scars in the personality, or not look for them? That one would assume lasting scars in the personality, and speak to the person as to an invalid? (And how did one speak to an invalid?) That it didn't matter? But it did. I knew why, too. I was fourteen. In my inexpert years (and I would always be inexpert on the subject of rape), I imagined that one would touch a person who'd been raped a little differently, or a little less; or that one would not touch her at all. I said that to Franny, finally, and she stared at me.

  'You're wrong,' she said, but it was the way she said to Frank, 'You're an asshole,' and I felt that I would probably always be fourteen, too.

  'Where is Egg?' Father bellowed. 'Egg!'

  'Egg never does any work,' Frank complained, sweeping the dead needles from the Christmas tree aimlessly about the restaurant.

  'Egg is a little boy, Frank,' Franny said.

  'Egg could be more mature than he is,' Father said. And I (who was to be the maturing influence). . . I knew very well why Egg was out of earshot. He was in some empty room of the Hotel New Hampshire, contemplating the terrible mass of wet black Labrador retriever, which was Sorrow.

  When the last of Christmas had been swept and dragged out of the Hotel New Hampshire, we considered what decorations would be appropriate for New Year's Eve.

  'No one feels very much like New Year's Eve,' Franny said. 'Let's not decorate anything at all.'

  'A party is a party,' said Father, gamely, although we suspected he felt the least like a party of us all. Everyone knew whose idea a New Year's Eve party had been: Iowa Bob's.

  There won't be anybody coming, anyway,' Frank said.

  'Well, speak for yourself, Frank,' Franny said. 'I have some friends coming.'

  There could be a hundred people here and you'd still stay in your room, Frank,' I said.

  'Go eat another banana,' Frank said. 'Go take a run -- to the moon.'

  'Well, I like having a party,' Lilly said, and everyone looked at her -- because, of course, we had not seen her until she spoke; she was getting so small. Lilly was almost eleven, but she now seemed substantially smaller than Egg; she barely came up to my waist and she weighed less than forty pounds.

  So we all rallied to the occasion: as long as Lilly was looking forward to a party, we would try to get in the mood.

  'So how should we decorate the restaurant, Lilly?' Frank asked her; he had a way of bending over when he spoke to Lilly, as if he were addressing a baby in a carriage and what he had to say were pure gibberish.

  'Let's not decorate anything at all,' Lilly said. 'Let's just have a good time.'

  We all stood still, facing this prospect as we might face a death sentence, but Mother said, 'That's a wonderful idea! I'm going to call the Matsons!'

  'The Matsons?' Father said.

  'And the Foxes, and maybe the Calders,' Mother said.

  'Not the Matsons!' Father said. 'And the Calders already asked us to a party -- they have a New Year's party every year.'

  'Well, we'll just have a few friends,' Mother said.

  'Well, there will be the usual customers, too,' Father said, but he didn't look too sure, and we looked away from him. The 'usual customers' were such a small cluster of cronies; for the most part, they were the drinking friends of Coach Bob. We wondered if they'd ever show up again -- and on New Year's Eve we doubted it.

  Mrs. Urick didn't know how much food to have on hand; Max wondered if the entire parking lot should be plowed, or just the usual few spaces. Ronda Ray seemed in the spirit for a New Year's party of her own; she had a dress she wanted to wear -- she'd told me all about it. I already knew the dress: it was the sexy dress Franny had bought Mother for Christmas; Mother had given it to Ronda. Having seen Franny model it, I was anxious about how Ronda would ever cram herself into it.

  Mother had arranged to have a live band. 'An almost live band,' Franny said, because she'd heard the band before. They played to the Hampton Beach crowd in the summers, but during the regular year most of them were still in high school. The electric guitarist was a high school hood named Sleazy Wales; his mother was the lead singer and acoustic guitarist -- a strapping, loud woman named Doris, whom Rond
a Ray fervently called a slut. The band was named either after Doris or after the mild hurricane of some years before -- which was also named Doris. The band was called, naturally, Hurricane Doris, and it featured Sleazy Wales and his mother and two of Sleazy's high school pals; acoustic bass and drums. I think that the boys worked in the same auto garage after school, because the band's uniforms consisted of garage mechanics' clothes -- on the boys -- with their names sewn on the breast alongside the GULF insignia. Their names were Danny, Jake, Sleazy -- and all of them were GULF. Doris wore whatever she wanted to -- dresses that even Ronda Ray would have thought immodest. Frank, of course, called Hurricane Doris 'disgusting.'

  The band favoured Elvis Presley numbers -- 'with lots of slow stuff if there's a lot of grown-ups in the crowd,' Doris told my mother over the phone, 'and the faster shit if the crowd's,young.'

  'Oh boy,' Franny said. 'I can't wait to hear what Junior thinks of Hurricane Doris.'

  And I dropped several glass ashtrays that I was supposed to be distributing to the tables, because I couldn't wait to see what Junior Jones's sister would think of me.

  'How old is she?' I asked Franny.

  'If you're lucky, kid,' Franny teased me, 'she'll be about twelve.'

  Frank had returned the mop and broom to the first-floor utility closet and had discovered, in the closet, a clue to the existence of Sorrow. It was the board, the cut-to-size plank, upon which Sorrow had been mounted in his attack pose. There were four neat screw holes in the board, and the trace of the dog's paw prints; he'd been screwed by his paws to the plank.

  'Egg!' Frank screamed. 'You little thief, Egg!'

  So Egg had removed Sorrow from his stand, and was perhaps at this very moment refashioning Sorrow's pose into something closer to his own version of our old pet.

  'It's a good thing Egg never got hold of State o' Maine,' Lilly said.

  'It's a good thing Frank didn't get hold of State o' Maine,' Franny noted.

  'There's not going to be much room for dancing,' said Ronda Ray, wearily. 'We can't move any of the chairs out of the way.'

  'We'll dance around the chairs!' Father cried, optimistically.

  'Screwed down for life,' Franny murmured, but Father heard her, and he wasn't ready to hear any of Iowa Bob's old lines played back to him -- not just yet. He looked very hurt, then he looked away. I remember New Year's Eve of 1956 as a time when everyone did a lot of 'looking away.'

  'Oh, damn,' Franny whispered to me, and looked -- actually -- ashamed.

  Ronda Ray gave Franny a quick hug. 'You just got a grow up a little, honey,' she said to her. 'You got to find out: grown-ups don't bounce back as fast as kids.'

  We could hear Frank wailing for Egg in the stairwell. Frank didn't 'bounce back' so well, either, I thought. But Frank, in a way, was never a kid.

  'Shut up your noise!' yelled Max Urick-from the fourth floor.

  'Come down and help us with the party -- both of you!' Father cried.

  'Kids!' Max bellowed.

  'What does he know about kids?' Mrs. Urick grumbled.

  Then Harold Swallow called from Detroit. He wasn't coming back to Dairy early, after all; he was going to miss the party. He said that he just remembered that New Year's Eve depressed him and he always ended up watching the whole thing on television. 'I might as well do that in Detroit,' he said. 'I don't have to take no airplane to Boston and ride in no car with Junior Jones and a whole crowd, just to stay in a funny hotel to watch New Year's Eve on TV.'

  'We won't turn on the TV,' I told him. 'It would conflict with the band, anyway.'

  'Well,' he said. Then I'd miss it. I better stay in Detroit.' There was never very much logic to the conversations one had with Harold Swallow; I never knew what to say next to him.

  'Sorry about Bob,' Harold said, and I thanked him and reported to the others.

  'Nasty isn't coming, either,' Franny said. 'Nasty' was the Boston boyfriend of Franny's friend Ernestine Tuck of Greenwich, Connecticut. Ernestine was called Bitty by everyone but Franny and Junior Jones. Apparently her mother had called her a 'little bitty' one terrible night and the name, as they say, stuck. Ernestine didn't seem to mind it, and she tolerated Junior Jones's version of her name, too: she had wondrous breasts and Junior called her Titsie Tuck, and Franny did, too. Bitty Tuck idolized Franny so much that she would endure any insult from her; and everyone in the world, I used to think, would simply have to accept insults from Junior Jones. Bitty Tuck was rich and pretty and eighteen, and not a bad person -- she was just so easy to tease -- and she was coming for New Year's Eve because she was what Franny called a party girl, and Franny's only female friend at the Dairy School. At eighteen, Bitty was very sophisticated -- in Franny's opinion. The plan, Franny explained to me, was that Junior Jones and his sister were driving their own car from Philadelphia; they would pick up Titsie Tuck in Greenwich, en route, and then pick up Titsie's boyfriend, Peter ('Nasty') Raskin, in Boston. But now, Franny said, Nasty was not allowed to come -because he had insulted an aunt at a family wedding. Titsie had decided to come with Junior and his sister, anyway.

  'Then there will be an extra girl -- for Frank,' Father said, in his well-meaning way, and several shapes of death passed above us all, in silence.

  'Just so there isn't a girl for me,' said Egg.

  'Egg!' Frank yelled, making us all jump. None of us knew that Egg was with us, or when he'd arrived, but he had changed his costume and was pretending to straighten up things in a busy fashion about the restaurant, as if he'd been working right along with the rest of us, all day.

  'I want to talk to you, Egg,' Frank said.

  'What?' said Egg.

  'Don't shout at Egg!' Lilly said, and drew Egg aside in her irritating, motherly fashion. We noticed that Lilly had taken an interest in mothering Egg as soon as Egg grew bigger than she was. Frank followed them into a corner of the room, hissing at Egg like a barrel of snakes.

  'I know you've got him, Egg,' Frank was hissing.

  'What?' Egg said.

  Frank didn't dare say 'Sorrow' with Father in the restaurant, and none of us would allow Egg to be bullied; Egg was safe, and he knew it. Egg was wearing his infantry combat uniform; Franny had told me that she thought Frank probably wished he had a uniform like that, and that it made Frank mad every time Egg wore a uniform -- and Egg had several. If Frank's love of uniforms seemed odd, it seemed natural enough for Egg to love them; no doubt Frank resented this.

  Then I asked Franny how Junior Jones's sister was going to get back to Philadelphia once New Year's was over and the Dairy School started again. Franny looked puzzled, and I explained that I didn't think Junior was going to drive his sister all the way back to Philadelphia, and then come right back to Dairy for school, and he wouldn't be allowed to keep a car at Dairy. That was against school rules.

  'She'll drive herself back, I suppose,' Franny said. 'I mean, it's her car -- or I think it is.'

  Then it dawned on me that Junior Jones's sister, since they were bringing her car, had to be old enough to drive. 'She's got to be at least sixteen!' I said to Franny.

  'Don't be frightened,' Franny said. 'How old do you guess Ronda is?' she whispered.

  But the thought of an older girl was intimidating enough without imagining a huge older girl: a bigger, older, once-raped girl.

  'It's reasonable to assume that she'll be black, too,' Franny said to me. 'Or didn't that occur to you, either?'

  'That doesn't bother me,' I said.

  'Oh, everything bothers you,' Franny said. 'Titsie Tuck is eighteen and she bothers the hell out of you, and she'll be here, too.'

  That was true: Titsie Tuck referred to me, publicly, as 'cute' -- in her rich, rather condescending way. But I don't mean that; she was nice -- she just never regarded me at all, unless it was to joke with me; she was intimidating to me in the way someone who never remembers your name can be intimidating. 'In this world,' Franny once observed, 'just when you're trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always s
omeone who forgets that they've met you.'

  It was an up-and-down day at the Hotel New Hampshire, getting ready for New Year's Eve: I remember that something more pronounced than even the usual weave of silliness and sadness seemed to hang over us all, as if we'd be conscious, from time to time, of hardly mourning for Iowa Bob at all -- and conscious, at other times, that our most necessary responsibility (not just in spite of but because of Iowa Bob) was to have fun. It was perhaps our first test of a dictum passed down to my father from old Iowa Bob himself; it was a dictum Father preached to us, over and over again. It was so familiar to us, we wouldn't dream of not behaving as if we believed it, although we probably never knew -- until much later -- whether we believed it or not.

  The dictum was connected with Iowa Bob's theory that we were all on a big ship -- 'on a big cruise, across the world.' And in spite of the danger of being swept away, at any time, or perhaps because of the danger, we were not allowed to be depressed or unhappy. The way the world worked was not cause for some sort of blanket cynicism or sophomoric despair; according to my father and Iowa Bob, the way the world worked -- which was badly -- was just a strong incentive to live purposefully, and to be determined about living well.

  'Happy fatalism,' Frank would speak of their philosophy, later; Frank, as a troubled youth, was not a believer.

  And one night, when we were watching a wretched melodrama on the TV above the bar in the Hotel New Hampshire, my mother said, 'I don't want to see the end of this. I like happy endings.'

  And Father said, 'There are no happy endings.'

  'Right!' cried Iowa Bob -- an odd mixture of exuberance and stoicism in his cracked voice. 'Death is horrible, final, and frequently premature,' Coach Bob declared.

  'So what?' my father said.

  'Right!' cried Iowa Bob. 'That's the point: So what?'

  Thus the family maxim was that an unhappy ending did not undermine a rich and energetic life. This was based on the belief that there were no happy endings. Mother resisted this, and Frank was morose about it, and Franny and I were probably believers of this religion -- or if, at times, we doubted Iowa Bob, the world would always come up with something that seemed to prove the old lineman right. We never knew what Lilly's religion was (no doubt it was a small idea, kept to herself), and Egg would be the retriever of Sorrow, in more than one sense. Retrieving Sorrow is a kind of religion, too.