The Hotel New Hampshire

by John Irving

  'I love you!' Franny added to me, fiercely. 'I'm trying to give you what you need, John,' she told me.

  But Susie the bear took the phone from me. 'For Christ's sake,' she said to Franny and Junior, 'you wake us up with what I'm sure is another fucking rape and now you've got him all red in the face and unable to speak! What the fuck is going on this morning, anyway?'

  'If Junior and I have a baby,' Franny asked Susie, 'will you and John take care of it?'

  'You bet your sweet ass, honey,' said my good Susie the bear.

  And so the matter was decided. We're still waiting. Leave it to Franny to take longer than anybody else. 'Leave it to me, man,' says Junior Jones. 'This baby's going to be so big it needs a little more time in the cooker than most.'

  He must be right, because Franny's been carrying my baby for almost ten months now. 'She's big enough to play for the Browns,' Junior Jones complains; I call him every night for a progress report.

  'Jesus God,' Franny says to me. 'I just lie in bed all day, waiting to explode. I'm so bored. The things I suffer for you, my love,' she tells me -- and we share a private laugh over that.

  Susie goes around singing 'Any Day Now,' and Father is lifting more and more weight; Father is weight lifting with a frenzy these days. He is convinced the baby will be born a weight lifter, and Father says he's got to get in shape to handle it. And all the rape crisis women are being very patient with me -- about the way I lunge for the phone when it rings (toward either phone). 'It's just the hot line,' they tell me. 'Relax.'

  'It's probably just another rape, honey,' Susie reassures me. 'It's not your baby. Calm down.'

  It's not at all that I'm anxious to discover if it will be a boy or a girl. For once I agree with Frank. It doesn't matter. Nowadays, of course, with the precautionary tests they take -- especially with a woman Franny's age -- they already know the sex of the child; or someone knows. Not Franny -- she didn't want to know. Who wants to know such things in advance? Who doesn't know that half of pleasure lies in the wonder of anticipation?

  'Whatever it is, it's going to be bored,' Frank says.

  'Bored, Frank!' Franny howls. 'How dare you say my baby will be bored?'

  But Frank is just expressing a typical New York City opinion of growing up in Maine. 'If the baby grows up in Maine,' Frank insists, 'it will have to be bored.'

  But I point out to Frank that life is never boring in the Hotel New Hampshire. Not in the lighthearted first Hotel New Hampshire, not in the darkness of the dream that was the second Hotel New Hampshire, and not in our third Hotel New Hampshire, either -- not in the great hotel we have at last become. No one is bored. And Frank finally agrees; he is a frequent and ever-welcome guest here, after all. He takes over the library on the second floor the way Junior Jones dominates the barbells in the ballroom when he is visiting, the way Franny's beauty graces every room when she is here -- the good Maine air and the cold Maine sea: Franny graces it all. I fully expect that Franny's child will have a similar good influence.

  To comfort her, I tried to read Franny a Donald Justice poem over the phone, the one called 'To a Ten-Months' Child.'

  Late arrival, no

  One would think of blaming you

  For hesitating so.

  Who, setting his hand to knock

  At a door so strange as this one,

  Might not draw back?

  'Hold it right there,' Franny interrupted me. 'No more fucking Donald Justice, please. I've heard enough Donald Justice poems to get pregnant from them, or at least sick to my stomach.'

  But Donald Justice is right, as usual. Who wouldn't hesitate to come into this world? Who wouldn't put off this fairy tale as long as possible? Already, you see, Franny's child is indicating a remarkable insight, a rare sensitivity.

  And yesterday it snowed; in Maine we learn to take weather personally. Susie was investigating the alleged rape of a waitress in Bath, and I was worried about her driving back in the storm, but Susie was safely home before dark and we both said how this storm reminded us of the big snow of last winter, of the day Franny called to tell us about her coming gift.

  Father plays like a child in the snow. 'Snow is quite a wonder to the blind,' he said just yesterday, coming into the kitchen all covered with it; he'd been out in the drifts, literally rolling around with Seeing Eye Dog Number Four -- they were both covered with it. It was a wild storm; by three-thirty in the afternoon we had to turn all the lights on. I stoked up the fires in two of the woodstoves. A bird, blinded by the snow, had flown through a windowpane in the ballroom and broken its neck. Four found it lying by the barbells and carried it all around the hotel before Susie could get it away from the dog. The snow melted off Father's boots and made the kitchen slippery. Father slipped in a puddle and whacked me in the ribs with the Louisville Slugger -- which he always waves wildly whenever he is thrown off balance. We had a little argument about that. Just like a child, he won't knock the snow off his boots before he comes inside.

  'I can't see the snow!' he complains, childishly. 'How the fuck do I knock it off if I can't see it?'

  'Shut up, both of you,' Susie the bear told us. 'When there's a child in the house, you'll both have to stop yelling.'

  I made some fresh pasta with a neat machine Frank brought from New York; it flattens the dough in sheets and cuts the pasta into any shape you want. It's important to have toys like that, if you live in Maine. Susie made a mussel sauce for the pasta. Father chopped up the onion for her; an onion never seems to bother Father's eyes. When we heard Four bark, we thought he'd found another poor bird. We saw a Volkswagen bus trying to make its way up our driveway in the storm; the bus was slithering and sliding. Whoever was driving the bus was either excited ('Another fucking rape,' said Susie, instinctively), or else it was someone from out of state. No Maine driver would have so much trouble driving in the snow, I thought, but it was hardly the tourist time of year at the Hotel New Hampshire. The bus couldn't make it all the way to the parking lot, but it got close enough for me to see the Arizona license plate.

  'No wonder they can't drive,' I said -- which is a typical Maine point of view toward out-of-staters.

  'Yeah, well,' Susie said. 'You'd probably look like an idiot in an Arizona desert.'

  'What's a desert?' Father asked, and Susie laughed.

  The driver of the Arizona bus was walking through the snow toward us; he didn't even know how to walk in the snow -- he kept falling down.

  'They've had a rape all the way out in Arizona, Susie,' I told her. 'And you're so famous, they'll only talk to you.'

  'Don't they know we're a resort hotel?' Father asked, peevishly. 'I'll tell whoever it is that we're closed for the season.'

  The man from Arizona was sorry to hear that. He explained that he thought he was headed for the mountains, for some skiing -- which he and his family had never tried before -- but that he'd been given some bad directions or he got lost in the storm, and here he was at the ocean, instead.

  'Wrong season for the ocean,' Father pointed out. The man could see that. He looked nice, but awfully tired.

  'We do have enough room,' Susie whispered to me.

  I didn't want to start taking in guests; in fact, what I loved best about this Hotel New Hampshire was that the only guests were in Father's mind. But when I saw all the little kids pile out of the Volkswagen bus and start playing in the snow, I had a change of heart. The mother looked awfully tired, too -- nice but tired.

  'What's that?' one of the kids was screaming.

  'It's an ocean, I think,' the mother said.

  'An ocean!' the children shouted.

  'Is there a beach, too?' one of the kids cried.

  'Under all that snow, I guess,' the mother told them.

  So we invited the man and his wife and his four little children to be our guests in the Hotel New Hampshire, even though we were 'closed for the season.' It's easy to make more pasta; it's easy to stretch a mussel sauce.

  Father got a little confused, showin
g our guests to their rooms. It was the first time he'd had to show a guest to a room in this Hotel New Hampshire, and it occurred to him, as he was hunting for linen in the library, that he didn't know where anything was. I had to help him, naturally, and I did a fair job of pretending that I showed guests to their rooms all the time.

  'You'll have to forgive 'us if we seem a little unprofessional,' I told the father of the nice young family. 'When we're closed for the season, we get a little out of practice.'

  'It's sweet of you to take us in,' the nice young mother said. 'The kids were disappointed not to see the skiing, but they've never seen an ocean, either, so it's a treat for them. And they can get to the skiing tomorrow,' she added. She sounded like a good mother to me.

  'I'm expecting a child myself,' I told her. 'Any day now.' And only later did Susie point out to me that my remark must have seemed odd, since even Susie was clearly not pregnant.

  'What the hell must they have thought you meant, you moron!' Susie said.

  But everything was fine. The kids had wonderful appetites, and after dinner I showed them how to make an apple pie. And while the pie was baking, I took them for a scary, wintry walk down to the snow-blown beach and the drifted-over docks; I showed them the violent waves bashing through the laces of ice that fringed the shore, I showed them that the sea in a storm is a great gray swell of water rolling, forever rolling. My father, of course, told the young husband and wife from Arizona all about the fabulous space for sympathy that a truly great hotel provides; he described our hotel to the nice people from Arizona, Susie told me, as if he were describing the Sacher.

  'But it's as if we are the Sacher, to him,' my warm bear said in my arms that night, while the storm howled and the snow fell.

  'Yes, my love,' I told her.

  It was wonderful to lie in bed in the morning and hear the voices of the children; they had discovered the barbells in the ballroom, and Father was giving them pointers. Iowa Bob would have loved this Hotel New Hampshire, I thought.

  That was when I woke up Susie and asked her to get into the bear suit.

  'Earl!' she complained. 'I'm too old to be a bear anymore.' She is a bit of a bear in the early morning -- my dear Susie.

  'Come on, Susie,' I said. 'Do it for the kids. Think of what it will mean to them.'

  'What?' Susie said. 'You want me to scare children?'

  'No, no, Susie,' I said. 'Not scare them.' All I wanted her to do was dress up in the bear suit and walk outside, in the snow, around the hotel, and I would suddenly call out, 'Look! Bear tracks in the snow! And they're fresh!'

  And the people, big and small, from Arizona would all come out and wonder over the wilderness they had stumbled upon, as if in a dream, and then I would cry, 'Look! There's the bear! Going around the woodpile!' And Susie would pause there -- perhaps I could persuade her to give us a good Earl! or two -- and she would disappear behind the woodpile, in her bearlike fashion, and slip in one of the back doors, and slip out of her disguise, and come into the kitchen, saying, 'What's all this about a bear? You rarely see a bear around here anymore.'

  'You want me to go outside in the fucking snow?' Susie asked.

  'For the kids, Susie,' I said. 'What a treat it would be for them. First they see the ocean and then they see a bear. Everyone should see a bear, Susie,' I said. Of course she agreed. She was grouchy about it, but that made her performance all the better; Susie was always superb as a bear, and now she is getting convinced that she's a lovely human being, too.

  And so we gave the strangers from Arizona a vision of a bear to take away with them. Father waved good-bye to them from the ballroom, after which he said to me, 'A bear, huh? Susie will catch her death, or at least pneumonia. And no one should be sick -- no one should even have a cold -- when the baby comes. I know more about babies than you do, you know. A bear,' he repeated, shaking his head, but I knew that the people from Arizona had been convinced; Susie the bear is a masterpiece of conviction.

  The bear that paused by the woodpile, its breath a fog upon the bright, cold morning, its paws softly denting the fresh, untouched snow -- as if it were the first bear on, earth, and this the planet's first snow -- all of it had been convincing. As Lilly knew, everything is a fairy tale.

  So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone's older brother, and someone's older sister -- they become our heroes, too. We invent what we love, and what we fear. There is always a brave, lost brother -- and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them.

  In the Hotel New Hampshire, we're screwed down for life -- but what's a little air in the pipes, or even a lot of shit in the hair, if you have good memories?

  I hope this is a proper ending for you, Mother -- and for you, Egg. It is an ending conscious of the manner of your favorite ending, Lilly -- the one you never grew big enough to write. There may not be enough barbells in this ending to satisfy Iowa Bob, and not enough fatalism for Frank. There may not be enough of the nature of dreams in this ending for either Father or Freud. And not enough resilience for Franny. And I suppose it's not ugly enough for Susie the bear. It's probably not big enough for Junior Jones, and I know it's not nearly violent enough to please some of the friends and foes from our past; it might not merit so much as a moan from Screaming Annie -- wherever she lies screaming now.

  But this is what we do: we dream on, and our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them. That's what happens, like it or not. And because that's what happens, this is what we need: we need a good, smart bear. Some people's minds are good enough so that they can live all by themselves -- their minds can be their good, smart bears. That's the case with Frank, I think: Frank has a good, smart bear for a mind. He is not the King of Mice I fast mistook him for. And Franny has a good, smart bear named Junior Jones. Franny is also skilled at keeping sorrow at bay. And my father has his illusions; they are powerful enough. My father's illusions are his good, smart bear -- at last. And that leaves me, of course, with Susie the bear -- with her rape crisis center and my fairy-tale hotel -- so I'm all right, too. You have to be all right if you're expecting a baby.

  Coach Bob knew it all along: you've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. You have to keep passing the open windows.

  The End