by John Irving
She fell in the slush near the delivery entrance, but when I helped her to her feet, she shoved me into the trash barrels and walked into the darkness of Elliot Park, unassisted. I waited for her to pass out of the darkness and into the pale lamplight from the single streetlight, and then pass into the darkness again; when she came briefly under the light, I called to her.
'Good night, Mrs. Wales, and thank you for the music!' She gave me the finger, slipped, almost fell again, and lurched out of the light -- cursing at something, or someone, she encountered there. 'What the fuck?' she said. 'Cram it, will you?'
I turned away from the light and threw up in the emptiest trash barrel. When I looked back at the streetlight again, a figure was just veering under it, and I thought it was Doris Wales, returning to abuse me. But it was someone from another New Year's Eve party, for whom home was in another direction. It was a man, or a reasonably grown-up teen-ager, and although he was weaving under the spell of alcohol, he maintained slightly better footing in the slush than Doris Wales.
'Cram it yourself, lady!' he cried into the darkness.
'Chicken shit!' called Doris, from the dark and far away.
'Whore!' the man yelled, then lost his balance and sat down in the slush. 'Shit,' he said, to no one in particular; he couldn't see me.
It was then that I noticed how he was dressed. Black slacks and shoes, black cummerbund and bow tie -- and a white dinner jacket. Of course I knew he was not the man in the white dinner jacket; he was lacking the necessary dignity, and whatever voyage he was on, or interrupting, it was not an exotic voyage. Also, it was New Year's Eve, and not the season -- in New England -- for white dinner jackets. The man was inappropriately dressed, and I knew this was no eccentric habit of distinction. In Dairy, New Hampshire, it could only mean that the moron had gone to the rental tuxedo shop after all the black jackets had been taken. Or else he didn't know the difference between summer and winter formal dress in our town; he was either a young clod coming from a high school dance or an older clod coming from an older dance (which had been no less sad and wasteful than anything a high school could engender). He was not our man in the white dinner jacket, but he reminded me of him.
Then I noticed that the man had stretched out in the slush under the streetlight and had gone to sleep there. The temperature was right around freezing.
I felt, at last, that New Year's Eve had come to something: there seemed to be a purpose for my having taken part in it at all -- a purpose beyond the simultaneously vague and concrete sensations of lust. I lifted the man in the white dinner jacket and carried him to the lobby of the Hotel New Hampshire; he was easier to carry than Bitty Tuck's luggage; he didn't weigh much, although he was a man, not a teen-ager -- in fact, he looked older than my father, to me. And when I searched him for some identification, I found I had been right about the rental clothes. PROPERTY OF CHESTER'S MEN'S STORE, said the label in the white dinner jacket. The man, although he looked reasonably distinguished -- at least for Dairy, New Hampshire -- carried no wallet, but he had a silver comb.
Perhaps Doris Wales had mugged him in the dark, and that was what they'd been yelling about. But no, I thought: Doris would have taken the silver comb, too.
It seemed a good trick, to me, to arrange the man in the white dinner jacket on the couch in the lobby of the Hotel New Hampshire -- so that early in the morning I might be able to surprise Father and Mother. I could say, 'There's someone who came for the last dance -- last night -- but he was too late. He's waiting to see you, in the lobby.'
I thought that was a terrific idea, but I felt -- since I had been drinking -- that I should really wake up Franny and show her the man in the white dinner jacket, who was peacefully passed out on the couch; Franny would inform me if she thought this was a bad idea. She would like it, too, I was sure.
I straightened the black bow tie of the man in the white dinner jacket and folded his hands upon his chest; I buttoned the waist button of his jacket, and straightened his cummerbund, so that he wouldn't look sloppy. The only thing missing was the tan, and the black cigarette box -- and the white sloop outside the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea.
That was not the sound of the sea outside the Hotel New Hampshire, I knew; it was the sound of the slush in Elliot Park, freezing and thawing and refreezing; and those were not the gulls calling, but dogs -- alley dogs, ripping into the trash, which was everywhere. I hadn't noticed, until I arranged the man in the white dinner jacket on the couch, how shabby our lobby was -- how the presence of an all-girls' school had never left the building: the ostracism, the anxiety of being considered (sexually) second-best, the too-early marriages, and other disappointments, that waited ahead. The almost elegant man in the white dinner jacket looked -- in the Hotel New Hampshire -- like someone from another planet, and I suddenly didn't want my father to see him.
I ran into the restaurant for some cold water; Doris Wales had broken a glass at the bar, and Ronda Ray's oddly sexless working shoes were scuffed under a table, where she must have kicked them -- when she started dancing, and making her move for Junior Jones.
If I woke up Franny, I thought, Franny might catch on that Junior was with Ronda, and wouldn't that hurt her?
I listened at the stairwell and felt a flash of interest in Bitty Tuck returning to me -- the thought of seeing her, asleep -- but when I listened to her on the intercom, she was snoring (as deep and wallowing a sound as a pig in mud). The book of reservations hadn't a single name marked down; there was nothing until the summer, when the circus called Fritz's Act would arrive and (no doubt) appall us all. The petty-cash box, at the reception desk, wasn't even locked -- and Frank, in his boredom during phone duty, had used the sharp end of the bottle opener to gouge his name into the armrest of the chair.
In the grey, after-the-party stench of New Year's Day, I felt that I should spare my father the vision of the man in the white dinner jacket. I thought that, if I could wake the man, I could employ Junior Jones to scare the man away, but I would have been embarrassed to disturb Junior with Ronda Ray.
'Hey, get up!' I hissed at the man in the white dinner jacket.
'Snorf!' he shouted, in his sleep. 'Ack! A whore!'
'Be quiet!' I whispered fiercely to him.
'Gick?' he said. I seized him around the chest and squeezed him. 'Fuh!' he moaned. 'God help me.'
'You're all right,' I said. 'But you have to leave.'
He opened his eyes and sat up on the couch.
'A young thug,' he said. 'Where have you taken me?'
'You passed out, outside,' I said. 'I brought you in so you wouldn't freeze. Now you have to leave.'
'I have to use the bathroom,' he said, with dignity.
'Go outside,' I said. 'Can you walk?'
'Of course I can walk,' he said. He went toward the delivery entrance, but stopped on the threshold. 'It's dark out there,' he said. 'You're setting me up, aren't you? How many of them are there -- out there?'
I led him to the front lobby door and turned on the outside light. I'm afraid that this was the light that woke up Father. 'Goodbye,' I told the man in the white dinner jacket, 'and Happy New Year.'
'This is Elliot Park!' he cried, indignantly.
'Yes,' I said.
'Well, this is that funny hotel, then,' he concluded. 'If it's a hotel, I want a room for the night.'
I thought it best not to tell him that he didn't have any money on him, so I said instead, 'We're full. No vacancies.'
The man in the white dinner jacket stared at the desolate lobby, gawked at the empty mail slots, and at the abandoned trunk of Junior Jones's winter clothes lying at the foot of the dingy stairs. 'You're full?' he said, as if some truth about life in general had occured to him, for the first time. 'Holy cow,' he said. 'I'd heard this place was going under.' It wasn't what I wanted to hear.
I steered him toward the main door again, but he bent down and picked up the mail and handed it to me; in our haste to prepare for the party, no one had been to the mail slot
at the front lobby door all day; no one had picked up the mail.
The man walked only a little way out of the door, then came back.
'I want to call a cab,' he informed me. There's too much violence out there,' he said, gesturing, again, to life in general; he couldn't have meant Elliot Park -- at least not now, not since Doris Wales had gone.
'You don't have enough money for a cab,' I informed him.
'Oh,' the man in the white dinner jacket said. He sat down on the steps in the cold, foggy air. 'I need a minute,' he said.
'What for?' I asked him.
'Have to remember where I'm going,' he said.
'Home?' I suggested, but the man waved his hand above his head.
He was thinking. I looked at the mail. The usual bills, the usual absence of letters from unknowns requesting rooms. And one letter that stood out from the rest. It had pretty foreign stamps; osterreich said the stamps -- and a few other exotic things. The letter was from Vienna, and it was addressed to my father in a most curious way:
Win Berry
Graduate of Harvard
Class of 194?
U.S.A.
The letter had taken a long time to reach my father, but the postal authorities had found one among them who knew where Harvard was. My father would say later that getting that letter was the most concrete thing going to Harvard ever did for him; if he'd gone to some less-famous school, the letter would never have been delivered. That's a good reason,' Franny would say, later, 'to wish he'd gone to a less-famous school.'
But, of course, the alumni network at Harvard is efficient and vast. My father's name and 'Class of 194?' was all they needed to discover the right class, '46, and the correct address.
'What's going on?' I heard my father calling; he had come out of our family's second-floor rooms and was on the landing, calling down the stairwell to me.
'Nothing!' I said, kicking the drunk on the steps in front of me, because he was falling asleep again.
'Why's the front light on?' Father called.
'Get going!' I said to the man in the white dinner jacket.
'I'm happy to meet you!' the man said, cordially. 'I'll just be trotting along now!'
'Good, good,' I whispered.
But the man walked only to the bottom step before he seemed overcome with thought again.
'Who are you talking to?' Father called.
'No one! Just a drunk!' I said.
'Jesus God,' said Father, 'A drunk isn't no one!'
'I can handle it!' I called.
'Wait till I get dressed,' Father said. 'Jesus God.'
'Get going!' I yelled at the man in the white dinner jacket.
'Goodbye! Goodbye!' the man called, happily waving to me from the bottom step of the Hotel New Hampshire. 'I had a wonderful time!'
The letter, of course, was from Freud. I knew that, and I wanted to see what it said before I let my father see it. I wanted to talk with Franny about it, for hours -- and even with Mother -- before I let Father see it. But there wasn't time. The letter was brief and to the point.
IF YOU GOT THIS, THEN YOU WENT TO HARVARD LIKE YOU PROMISED ME [Freud wrote]. YOU GOOD BOY, YOU!
'Good night! God bless you!' cried the man in the white dinner jacket. But he would walk no farther than the perimeter of light; where the darkness of Elliot Park began, he stopped and waved.
I flicked off the light so that if Father came, Father couldn't spot the apparition in formal attire.
'I can't see!' the drunk wailed, and I turned the light on again.
'Get out of here or I'll beat the shit out of you!' I screamed at him.
'That's no way to handle it' I heard Father yelling.
'Good night, bless you all!' cried the man; he was still in the circle of light when I cut the light off him, again, and he made no protest. I kept the light off. I finished Freud's letter.
I FINALLY GOT A SMART BEAR [Freud wrote]. IT MADE ALL THE DIFFERENCE. I HAD A GOOD HOTEL GOING, BUT I GOT OLD. IT COULD STILL BE A GREAT HOTEL [Freud added], IF YOU AND MARY COME HELP ME RUN IT. I GOT A SMART BEAR, BUT I NEED A SMART HARVARD BOY LIKE YOU, TOO!
Father stormed into the wretched lobby of the Hotel New Hampshire; in his slippers he stumbled over a beer bottle, which he kicked, and his bathrobe flapped in the wind from the open door.
'He's gone,' I said to Father. 'Just some drunk.' But Father snapped on the outside light -- and there, waving, on the rim of the light, was the man in the white dinner jacket. 'Goodbye!' he called, hopefully. 'Goodbye! Good luck! Goodbye!' The effect was stunning: the man in the white dinner jacket stepped out of the light and was gone -- as gone as if he were gone to sea -- and my father gaped into the darkness after him.
'Hello!' Father screamed. 'Hello? Come back! Hello?'
'Goodbye! Good luck! Goodbye!' called the voice of the man in the white dinner jacket, and my father stood staring into the darkness until the wind chilled him and he shivered in his bathrobe and slippers; he let me pull him inside.
Like any storyteller, I had the power to end the story, and I could have. But I didn't destroy Freud's letter; I gave it to Father, while the vision of the man in the white dinner jacket was still upon him. I handed over Freud's letter -- like any storyteller, knowing (more or less) where we would all be going.
7 Sorrow Strikes Again
Sabrina Jones, who taught me how to kiss -- whose deep and mobile mouth will have a hold on me, always -- found the man who could fathom her teeth-in-or-out mystery; she married a lawyer from the same firm in which she was a secretary and had three healthy children ('Bang, Bang, Bang,' as Franny would say).
Bitty Tuck, who fainted while diaphragming herself -- whose wondrous breasts and modern ways would, one day, seem not nearly as unique as they seemed to me in 1956 -- survived her encounter with Sorrow; in fact, I heard (not long ago) that she is still unmarried, and still a party girl.
And a man named Frederick Worter, who was only a hair over four feet tall, and forty-one years old, and who was better known to our family as 'Fritz' -- whose circus, called Fritz's Act, was an advance booking for a summer that we looked forward to with curiosity and dread -- bought the first Hotel New Hampshire from my father in the winter of 1957.
'For a son, I'll bet,' Franny said. But we children never knew how much Father sold the Hotel New Hampshire for; since Fritz's Act was the only advance booking for the summer of 1957, my father had written to Fritz first -- warning the diminutive circus king of our family's move to Vienna.
'Vienna?' Mother kept muttering, and shaking her head at my father. 'What do you know about Vienna?'
'What did I know about motorcycles?' Father asked. 'Or bears? Or hotels?'
'And what have you learned?' Mother asked him, but my father had no doubt. Freud had said that a smart bear made all the difference.
'I know that Vienna isn't Dairy, New Hampshire,' Father said to Mother; and he apologized to Fritz of Fritz's Act -- saying that he was putting the Hotel New Hampshire up for sale, and that the circus might need to seek other lodgings. I don't know if the circus called Fritz's Act made my father a good offer, but it was the first offer, and Father took it.
'Vienna?' said Junior Jones. 'Holy cow.'
Franny might have protested the move, for fear that she would miss Junior, but Franny had discovered Junior's infidelity (with Ronda Ray on New Year's Eve), and she was being cool to him.
'Tell her I was just horny, man,' Junior told me.
'He was just horny, Franny,' I said.
'Clearly,' Franny said. 'And you surely know all about what that's like.'
'Vienna,' said Ronda Ray, sighing under me -- probably from boredom. 'I'd like to go to Vienna,' she said. 'But I suppose I have to stay here -- where I might be out of a job. Or else work for that bald midget.'
Frederick 'Fritz' Worter was the bald midget, a runt figure who visited us one snowy weekend; he was especially impressed with the size of the fourth-floor bathroom facilities -- and with Ronda Ray. Lilly, of course, was
most impressed with Fritz. He was only a little bigger than Lilly, although we tried to assure Lilly (and, mainly, ourselves) that she would continue to grow -- a little -- and that her features (we hoped) would not ever appear so out of proportion. Lilly was pretty: tiny but nice. But Fritz had a head several sizes too large for his body; his forearms sagged like slack calf muscles obscenely grafted to the wrong limbs; his fingers were sawed-off salamis; his ankles were swollen over his little doll's feet -- like socks with wrecked elastic.
'What kind of circus do you have?' Lilly asked him, boldly.
'Weird acts, weird animals,' Franny whispered in my ear, and I shivered.
'Little acts, little animals,' Frank mumbled.
'We're just a small circus,' Fritz told Lilly, meaningfully.
'Meaning,' said Max Urick -- after Fritz was gone -'that they'll all fit just fine on the fucking fourth floor.'
'If they're all like him,' said Mrs. Urick, 'they won't eat very much.'
'If they're all like him,' said Ronda Ray, and rolled her eyes -- but she didn't continue; she decided to let it pass.
'I think he's cute,' said Lilly.
But Fritz of Fritz's Act gave Egg nightmares -- great shrieks that stiffened my back and tore muscles in my neck; Egg's arm lashed out and bashed the bedside lamp, his legs thrashed under the sheets, as if the bedclothes were drowning him.
'Egg!' I cried. 'It's just a dream! You're having a dream!'
'A what?' he screamed.
'A dream!' I yelled.
'Midgets!' Egg shouted. 'They're under the bed! They're crawling all around! They're all over, everywhere!' he howled.
'Jesus God,' Father said. 'If they're just midgets, why does he get so upset?'
'Hush,' Mother said, ever fearful of hurting Lilly's little feelings.
And I lay under the barbell in the morning, sneaking a look at Franny getting out of bed -- or getting dressed -- and thinking of Iowa Bob. What would he have said about going to Vienna? About Freud's hotel that somehow needed a smart Harvard boy? About the differences a smart bear might make -- to anyone's prospects for success? I lifted and thought. 'It doesn't matter,' Iowa Bob would have said. 'Whether we go to Vienna or stay here, it won't matter.' Under all that weight, that's what I thought Coach Bob would have said. 'Here or there,' Bob would have said, 'we're screwed down for life.' It would be Father's hotel -- whether in Dairy or in Vienna. Would nothing, ever, make us more or less exotic than we were? I wondered, with the weight wonderfully taut and rising, and Franny in the corner of my eye.
