The Hotel New Hampshire

by John Irving

  'Think of it this way,' I told her. 'We'll just be going to another Hotel New Hampshire, Lilly. The same thing, but another country.' But Lilly cried and cried.

  'I'd rather stay with the circus called Fritz's Act,' she bawled. 'I'd rather stay with them, and I don't even know what they do!'

  Soon we would know what they did, of course. Too soon. It was summer, then, and before we were packed -- before we'd even made the airplane reservations -- the four-foot forty-one-year-old named Frederick 'Fritz' Worter paid us a visit. There were some papers to sign, and some of the other members of Fritz's Act wished to have a look at their future home.

  One morning, when Egg was sleeping beside Sorrow, I looked out our window at Elliot Park. At first nothing seemed strange; some men and women were getting out of a Volkswagen bus. They were all, more or less, the same size. We were still a hotel, after all, and I thought they might be guests. Then I realized that there were five women and eight men -- yet they quite comfortably spilled out of one Volkswagen bus -- and when I recognized Frederick 'Fritz' Worter as one of them, I realized that they were all the same size as him.

  Max Urick, who'd been shaving while looking out his fourth-floor window, screamed and cut himself. 'A fucking busload of midgets,' he told us later. 'It's not what you expect to see when you're just getting up.'

  It is impossible to say what Ronda Ray might have done, or said, if she had seen them; but Ronda was still in bed. Franny, and my barbells, were lying untouched in Franny's room; Frank -- whether he was dreaming, studying German, or reading about Vienna -- was in a world of his own. Egg was sleeping with Sorrow, and Mother and Father -- who would be embarrassed about it, later -- were having fun in old 3E.

  I ran into Lilly's room, knowing she would want to see the arrival of at least the human part of Fritz's Act, but Lilly was already awake and watching them through her window; she was wearing an old-fashioned nightgown that Mother had bought her in an antique store -- it completely enveloped Lilly -- and she was hugging her Raggedy Ann doll to her chest. 'It's a small circus, just like Mr. Worter said,' Lilly whispered, adoringly. In Elliot Park we watched the midgets gathering beside the Volkswagen bus; they were stretching and yawning; one of the men did a handstand; one of the women did a cartwheel. One of them started moving on all fours, like a chimpanzee, but Fritz clapped his hands, scolding such foolishness; they drew together, like a miniature football team having a huddle (with two extra players); then they started marching, in an orderly fashion, toward our lobby door.

  Lilly went to let them in; I went to the switchboard to make the announcement. To 3E, for example: 'New owners arriving -- all thirteen of them. Over and out.' To Frank: 'Guten Morgen! Fritz's Act ist hier angekommen. Wachs du auf!' And to Franny: 'Midgets! Go wake up Egg so he won't be frightened; he'll think he dreamed them. Tell him thirteen midgets are here, but it's safe!'

  Then I ran up to Ronda Ray's room; I was better at giving her messages in person. They're here!' I whispered, outside her door.

  'Keep running, John-O,' Ronda said.

  'There's thirteen of them,' I said. 'Only five women and eight men,' I said. There's at least three men for you!'

  'What size are they?' Ronda Ray asked.

  'That's a surprise,' I said. 'Come see.'

  'Keep running,' Ronda said. 'All of you -- keep running.'

  Max Urick went and hid with Mrs. Urick in the kitchen; they were shy about being introduced, but Father dragged them out to meet the midgets, and Mrs. Urick marched the midgets through her kitchen -- showing off her stockpots, and how plain-but-good everything smelled.

  'They are small,' Mrs. Urick conceded later, 'but there's a lot of them; they'll have to eat something.'

  'They'll never reach all the lights,' Max Urick said. 'I'll have to change all the switches.' Grumpily, he moved off the fourth floor. It was clear that the fourth floor was the one the midgets wanted -- 'suited to their tiny washing and tiny peeing,' Max grumbled, but not around Lilly. Franny thought Max was only angry that he was moving closer to Mrs. Urick; but he moved no nearer to her than the third floor, where, (I imagined), he would be forever blessed to hear the patter of little feet above him.

  'Where will the animals go?' Lilly asked Mr. Worter. Fritz explained that the circus would use the Hotel New Hampshire only for their summer quarters; the animals would stay outside.

  'What kind of animals are they?' Egg asked, clutching Sorrow to his chest.

  'Live ones,' said one of the lady midgets, who was about Egg's size and appeared to be intrigued with Sorrow; she kept patting him.

  It was the end of June when the midgets made Elliot Park look like a fairground; the once-brightly-colored canvases, now faded to pastels, flapped over the little stalls, fringed the merry-go-round, domed the big tent where the main acts would be performed. Kids from the town of Dairy came and hung around our park all day, but the midgets were in no hurry; they set up the stalls; they changed the position of the merry-go-round three times -- and refused to hook up the engine that ran it, even to test it out. One day a box arrived, the size of a dining-room table; it was full of large spools of different-coloured tickets, each spool as big as a tyre.

  And Frank drove carefully through the now crowded park, circling the little tents and the one big tent, telling the kids from the town to move on. 'It opens the Fourth of July, kids,' Frank would say, officiously -- his arm hanging out the window of the car. 'Come back then.'

  We would be gone by then; we hoped that the animals might arrive before we had to leave, but we knew, in advance, we were going to miss opening night.

  'We've seen all the things they do, anyway,' Franny said.

  'Mainly,' Frank said, 'they just go around looking small.'

  Lilly burned. She pointed out the handstands, the juggling acts, the water and fire dance, the eight-man standing pyramid, the blind baseball team skit; and the smallest of the lady midgets said she could ride bareback -- on a dog.

  'Show me the dog,' said Frank. He was sour because Father had sold Fritz the family car, and Frank now needed Fritz's permission to drive the car around Elliot Park; Fritz was generous about the car, but Frank hated to ask.

  Franny liked to take her driving lessons with Max Urick in the hotel pickup, because Max was nervy about Franny driving fast. 'Gun it,' he would encourage her. 'Pass that sucker -- you've got plenty of room.' And Franny would come back from a lesson, proud that she had laid nine feet of rubber around the bandstand or twelve feet around the corner of Front Street verging with Court. 'Laying rubber' was what we said in Dairy, New Hampshire, for leaving a black stain on the road with squealing tyres.

  'It's disgusting,' Frank said. 'Bad for the clutch, bad for the tyres, nothing but juvenile showing off -- you'll get in trouble, you'll get your learner's permit revoked, Max will lose his license (which he probably should), you'll run over someone's dog, or a small child, some dumb hoods from the town will try to drag-race you, or follow you home and beat the shit out of you. Or they'll beat the shit out of me,' Frank said, 'just because I know you.'

  'We're going to Vienna, Frank,' Franny said. 'Get in your licks at the town of Dairy while you can.'

  'Licks!' said Frank. 'Disgusting.'

  HI

  Freud wrote.

  YOU ALMOST HERE! GOOD TIME TO COME. PLENTY OF TIME FOR KIDS TO GET ADJUSTED BEFORE SCHOOL STARTS. EVERYONE LOOKING FORWARD TO YOU COMING. EVEN PROSTITUTES! HA HA! WHORES HAPPY TO TAKE MATERNAL INTEREST IN KIDS -- REALLY! I SHOW THEM ALL THE PICTURES. SUMMER A GOOD TIME FOR WHORES: LOTS OF TOURISTS, EVERYONE IN GOOD MOOD. EVEN EAST-WEST RELATIONS ASSHOLES SEEM CONTENT. THEY NOT SO BUSY IN SUMMER -- DON'T START TYPING UNTIL 11 A.M. POLITICS TAKE SUMMER VACATIONS, TOO. HA HA! IT NICE HERE. NICE MUSIC IN PARKS. NICE ICE CREAM. EVEN BEAR IS HAPPIER -- GLAD YOU COMING, TOO. BEAR'S NAME, BY THE WAY, IS SUSIE. LOVE FROM SUSIE AND ME, FREUD.

  'Susie?' Franny said.

  'A bear named Susie?' Frank said. He seemed irritated that it wasn't a German name, or that it was a female bear
. It was a disappointment to most of us, I think -- a kind of anticlimax before we'd really gotten started. But moving is like that. First the excitement, then the anxiety, then the letdown. First we took a cram course on Vienna, then we started missing the old Hotel New Hampshire -- in advance. Then there was a period of waiting -- interminable, and perhaps preparing us for some inevitable disappointment on that day of simultaneous departure and arrival, which the invention of the jet plane makes possible.

  On the first of July we borrowed the Volkswagen bus belonging to Fritz's Act. It had funny hand controls, for braking and acceleration, because the midgets couldn't reach the foot pedals; Father and Frank argued over who would be more dexterous at driving the unusual vehicle. Finally, Fritz offered to drive the first shift to the airport.

  Father, Frank, Franny, Lilly, and I were in the first shift. Mother and Egg would meet us in Vienna the next day; Sorrow would fly with them. But the morning we were leaving, Egg was up before me. He was sitting on his bed in a white dress shirt, and with his best dress pants and black dress shoes, and wearing a white linen jacket; he looked like one of the midgets -- in their skit about crippled waiters in a fancy restaurant. Egg was waiting for me to wake up so that I could help him tie his tie. On the bed beside him, the great grinning dog, Sorrow, sat with the frozen idiot glee of the truly insane.

  'You go tomorrow, Egg,' I said. 'We go today, but you and Mother don't go until tomorrow.'

  'I want to be ready,' Egg said, anxiously. I tied his tie for him -- to humour him. He was dressing up Sorrow -in an appropriate flying costume -- when I brought my bags down to the Volkswagen bus. Egg and Sorrow followed me downstairs.

  'If you've room,' Mother said to Father, 'I wish one of you would take the dead dog.'

  'No!' Egg said. 'I want Sorrow to stay with me!'

  'You know, you can check him through with the bags,' Fritz said. 'It's not necessary to carry him on board.'

  'He can sit in my lap,' Egg said. And that was that.

  The trunks had been sent ahead of us.

  The carry-on and check-through bags were packed.

  The midgets were waving.

  Hanging from the fire escape, at Ronda Ray's window, was her orange nightgown -- once shocking, now faded, like the canvas for Fritz's Act.

  Mrs. Urick and Max stood at the delivery entrance; Mrs. Urick had been scouring pans -- she had her rubber gloves on -- and Max was holding a leaf basket. 'Four hundred and sixty-four!' Max called.

  Frank blushed; he kissed Mother. 'See you soon,' he said.

  Franny kissed Egg. 'See you soon, Egg,' Franny said.

  'What?' said Egg. He had undressed Sorrow; the beast was naked.

  Lilly was crying.

  'Four hundred and sixty-four!' Max Urick screamed, witlessly.

  Ronda Ray was there, a little orange juice on her white waitress uniform. 'Keep running, John-O,' she whispered, but nicely. She kissed me -- she kissed everyone but Frank, who had crawled into the Volkswagen bus to avoid the contact.

  Lilly kept crying; one of the midgets was riding Lilly's old bicycle. And just as we were leaving Elliot Park, the animals for Fritz's Act arrived. We saw the long flat-bed trailers, the cages, and the chains. Fritz had to stop the bus for a moment; he ran around, giving everyone directions.

  In our own cage -- in the Volkswagen bus -- we peered at the animals; we had been wondering if they would be dwarf species.

  'Ponies,' Lilly said, blubbering. 'And a chimpanzee.' In a cage with red elephants painted on its side -- like a child's bedroom wallpaper -- a big ape was shrieking.

  'Perfectly ordinary animals,' Frank said.

  A sled dog circled the bus, barking. One of the lady midgets began to ride the dog.

  'No tigers,' said Franny, disappointed, 'no lions, no elephants.'

  'See the bear?' said Father. In a grey cage, with nothing painted on it, a dark figure sat swaying in place, rocking to some sad inner tune -- its nose too long, its rump too broad, its neck too thick, its paws too short to ever be happy.

  'That's a bear?' Franny said.

  There was a cage that looked full of geese, or chickens. It was mostly a dog and pony circus, it seemed -- with one ape and one disappointing bear: mere tokens toward the exotic hopefulness in us all.

  Looking back on them, in Elliot Park, as Fritz returned to the bus and drove us forward -- to the airport and to Vienna -- I saw that Egg still held in his arms the most exotic animal of them all. With Lilly crying beside me, I imagined I saw -- in the chaos of moving midgets and unloading animals -- a whole circus called Sorrow, instead of Fritz's Act. Mother waved, and Mrs. Urick and Ronda Ray waved with her. Max Urick was yelling, but we couldn't hear him. Franny's lips, in time with his, whispered, 'Four hundred and sixty-four!' Frank was already reading the German dictionary, and Father -- who was not a man for looking back -- sat up front with Fritz and talked rapidly about nothing at all. Lilly wept, but as harmlessly as rain. And Elliot Park disappeared: my last look caught Egg in motion, struggling to run among the midgets, Sorrow held like an idol above his head -- an animal for all those other, ordinary animals to worship. Egg was excited, and yelling, and Franny's lips -- in time with his -- whispered, 'What? What? What?'

  Fritz drove us to Boston, where Franny had to shop for what Mother called 'city underwear'; Lilly wept her way through the lingerie aisles; Frank and I cruised the escalators. We were at the airport much too early. Fritz apologized for not being able to wait with us; his animals needed him, he said, and Father wished him well -thanking him, in advance, for driving Mother and Egg to the airport tomorrow. Frank was 'approached' in the men's room at Logan International, but he refused to describe the incident to Franny and me; he continued to say only that he had been 'approached.' He was indignant about it, and Franny and I were furious with him for not spelling it out to us in more detail. Father bought Lilly a plastic carry-on flight bag, to cheer her up, and we boarded the plane before dark. I think we took off about 7 or 8 P.M.: the lights of Boston, on a summer night, were half on and half off, and there was enough daylight left to see the harbour clearly. It was our first time on an airplane, and we loved it.

  We flew all night across the ocean. Father slept the whole way. Lilly would not sleep; she watched the darkness, and reported sighting what she said were two ocean liners. I dozed and woke, dozed and woke again; with my eyes shut, I watched Elliot Park turning into a circus. Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy. I imagined returning to Dairy, and wondered if Fritz's Act would improve or run down the neighbourhood.

  We landed in Frankfurt at quarter to eight in the morning. Maybe it was quarter to nine.

  'Deutschland!' Frank said. He led us through the Frankfurt airport to our connecting flight to Vienna, reading all the signs out loud, speaking amiably to all the foreigners.

  'We're the foreigners,' Franny kept whispering.

  'Guten Tag!' Frank hailed all the passing strangers.

  'Those people were French, Frank,' Franny said. 'I'm sure of it.'

  Father almost lost the passports, so we attached them with two stout rubber bands to Lilly's wrist; then I carried Lilly, who seemed exhausted from her tears.

  We left Frankfurt at quarter to nine, or maybe quarter to ten, and arrived in Vienna about noon. It was a short, choppy flight in a smaller plane; Lilly saw some mountains and was frightened; Franny said she hoped it would be smoother weather, the next day, for Mother and Egg; Frank vomited twice.

  'Say it in German, Frank,' Franny said, but Frank felt too terrible to answer her.

  We had a day and a night and the next morning to get the Gasthaus Freud ready for Mother and Egg. Our flight had totaled about eight hours in the air -- about six or seven from Boston to Frankfurt, and another hour or so to Vienna. The flight that Mother and Egg were taking was supposed to leave Boston slightly later in the evening of the next day and fly to Zurich; their connecting flight, to Vienna, would take about an hour, and Boston to Zurich -- like our flight t
o Frankfurt -- was scheduled for about seven hours. But Mother and Egg -- and Sorrow -- landed short of Zurich. Less than six hours out of Boston, they struck the Atlantic Ocean a glancing blow -- off the coastline of that part of the continent called France. In my imagination, later (and illogically), it was some slight consolation to know that they did not fall in darkness, and to imagine that there might -- in their minds -- have been some hopefulness implied by the vision of solid ground in the distance {though they did not reach the ground). It is too unlikely to imagine that Egg was sleeping, although anyone would hope so; knowing Egg, he would have been wide-awake the whole way -- Sorrow jouncing on his knees. Egg would have had the window seat.

  What went wrong, we were told, went wrong quickly; but surely there would have been time to blurt out some advice -- in some language. And time for Mother to kiss Egg, and squeeze him; time for Egg to ask, 'What?'

  And though we had moved to the city of Freud, I must say that dreams are vastly overrated: my dream of Mother's death was inexact, and I would never dream it again. Her death -- by some considerable stretch of the imagination -- might have been initiated by the man in the white dinner jacket, but no pretty white sloop sailed her away. She shot from the sky to the bottom of the sea with her son beside her screaming, Sorrow hugged to his chest.

  It was Sorrow, of course, that the rescue planes saw. Searching for the sunken wreckage, trying to spot the first debris upon the surface of the grey morning water, someone saw a dog swimming. Closer examination convinced the rescue crew that the dog was just another victim; there were no survivors, and how could the rescue crew have known that this dog was already dead? This knowledge of what led the rescue crew to the bodies came as no surprise to my surviving family. We had learned this fact of Sorrow, previously, from Frank: Sorrow floats.

  It was Franny who said, later, that we must all watch out for whatever form Sorrow would take next; we must learn to recognize the different poses.