The Hotel New Hampshire (14 page)

The terrible noise made Sorrow bark and, probably, fart. Mother would drop things. Franny would run to Frank’s door and pound on it. I would imagine the sound differently: it was remindful of the suddenness of a gun, to me, and I always thought, for an instant, that we had just been startled by the sound of Frank’s suicide.

On the path where the backfield had ambushed him, Frank dragged his muddy cymbals from the bushes, clanking them under his arm.

“Where can we go?” Chip Dove asked Franny. “To be
alone
.”

“I know a place,” she said. “Nearby,” she added. “It’s a place I’ve known forever.” And I knew, of course, that she meant the ferns—
our
ferns. To my knowledge, Franny hadn’t even taken Struthers there. I thought she could only be mentioning them this clearly so that Frank and I would know where to find her, and rescue her, but Frank was already heading home, stomping down the path without a word to Franny, or one look at her, and Chip Dove smiled at me with his ice-blue eyes and said, “Beat it, kid.”

Franny took him by the hand and pulled him off the path, but I caught up to Frank in no time. “Jesus, Frank,” I said, “where are you going? We’ve got to help her.”

“Help Franny?” he said.

“She helped you,” I said to him. “She saved your ass.”

“So what?” he said, and then he started to cry. “How do you know she
wants
our help?” he said, sniveling. “Maybe she
wants
to be alone with him.”

That was too terrible a thought for me—it was almost as bad as imagining Chipper Dove doing things to Franny that she didn’t want done to her—and I grabbed Frank by his one remaining epaulette and dragged him after me.

“Stop crying,” I said, because I didn’t want Dove to hear us coming.

“I want to talk with you, just
talk
!” we heard Franny screaming. “You rat’s asshole!” she yelled. “You could have been so nice, but you had to go and be such a super shit of a human being. I
hate
you!” she cried. “Cut it
out
!” she screamed.

“I think you
like
me,” we heard Chipper Dove say.

“I might have,” Franny said, “but not now. Not
ever
,” we heard her say, but she stopped sounding angry; suddenly she was crying.

When Frank and I reached the ferns, Dove had his football pants down at the knees. He was having the same trouble with the thigh pads that Franny and I had observed, years ago, while spying on the crapping posture of the fat football player named Poindexter. Franny had
her
clothes
on
, but she seemed curiously passive, to me—sitting in the ferns (where he’d pushed her, she told me later) with her hands over her face. Frank clashed his damn cymbals together—so startlingly loud that I thought an airplane was flying into another airplane above us. Then he swung the right-hand cymbal smack into Chip Dove’s face. It was the hardest hit the quarterback had taken all season; we could tell he wasn’t used to it. Clearly, too, he was impeded by the position of his pants. I dropped straight on him as soon as he was down. Frank continued to clash his cymbals together—as if this were a ritual dance that our family always practiced prior to slaughtering an enemy.

Dove threw me off him, the way old Sorrow could still knock Egg down—with a good toss of his big head—but the clamor Frank was making seemed to paralyze the quarterback. It seemed to awaken Franny from her moment of passivity, too. She made her usual unbeatable move for the private parts of Chipper Dove, and he made the sickly motions of quitting this life, forever, that surely Frank must have recognized—and, of course,
I
remembered from the days of Ralph De Meo. She really grabbed him good, and when he was still on his hip in the pine needles, with his football pants still around his knees, Franny pulled his jock and cup halfway down his thighs before releasing it with a snap. For just a second, Frank, Franny and I got to see Dove’s small, frightened private parts. “Big deal!” Franny screamed at Dove. “You’re such a big deal!”

Then Franny and I had to restrain Frank from going on and on with his banging cymbals; it seemed that the sound might kill the trees and drive small animals from the forest. Chipper Dove lay on his side with one hand cupping his balls and the other hand holding one ear shut against the noise; his other ear was pressed to the ground.

I saw Dove’s helmet in the ferns and took it with me when we left him there to recover himself. Back at the mud puddle, on the path, Frank and Franny filled the quarterback’s helmet with mud. We left it brimming full for him.

“Shit and death,” Franny said, darkly.

Frank couldn’t stop tapping his cymbals together, he was so excited.

“Jesus, Frank,” Franny said. “Please cut it out.”

“I’m sorry,” he told us. And when we were nearer home, he said, “Thank you.”

“Thank you, too,” Franny said. “Both of you,” she said, squeezing my arm.

“I really
am
queer, you know,” Frank mumbled.

“I guess I knew,” Franny said.

“It’s okay, Frank,” I said, because what else could a brother say?

“I was thinking of a way to tell you,” Frank said.

And Franny said, “
This
was a quaint way.”

Even Frank laughed; I think it was the first time I’d heard Frank laugh since the time Father discovered the size of the fourth-floor toilets in the Hotel New Hampshire—our fourth-floor “outhouse for elves.”

We sometimes wondered if living in the Hotel New Hampshire would always be like this.

What seemed more important to know was who would come to stay in our hotel after we moved in and opened it for business. As that time approached, Father became more emphatic about his theories for the perfect hotel. He had seen an interview, on television, with the head of a hotel-management school—in Switzerland. The man said that the secret to success was how quickly a new hotel could establish a pattern of advance bookings.

“Advance Bookings!” Father wrote on a shirt cardboard and stuck it to the refrigerator of Mother’s soon-to-be-abandoned family house.

“Good morning, Advance Bookings!” we would greet each other at breakfast, to tease Father, but he was rather serious about it.

“You laugh,” he told us one morning. “Well, I already have two.”

“Two what?” Egg asked.

“Two advance bookings,” Father said, mysteriously.

We were planning to open the weekend of the Exeter game. We knew that was the first “advance booking.” Every year the Dairy School concluded its miserable football season by losing to one of the big schools, like Exeter or Andover, by a big score. It was always worse when we had to travel to those schools and play them on their own well-kept turf. Exeter, for example, had a real stadium; both Exeter and Andover had smart uniforms; they were both all-boys’ schools then—and the students wore coats and ties to classes. Some of them even wore coats and ties to the football games, but even if they were informally attired, they looked better than we did. It made us feel terrible to see students like that—altogether clean and cocky. And every year our team stumbled out on the field, looking like shit and death—and when the game was over, that was how we all felt.

Exeter and Andover traded us off; each one liked to use us for their next-to-last game—a kind of warm-up exercise—because their last game of the season was with each other.

But for Iowa Bob’s winning season we were playing at home, and this year it would be Exeter. Win or lose, it would be a winning season, but most people—even my father and Coach Bob—thought that this year’s Dairy team had a chance of going all the way: undefeated, and with a last-game victory over Exeter, a team the Dairy School had never beaten. With a winning season, even the alumni were coming back, and the Exeter game was made a parents’ weekend. Coach Bob wished he had new uniforms to go with his imported backfield, and Junior Jones, but it pleased the old man to imagine that his tattered shit-and-death squad just might knock Exeter’s crisp white uniforms with crimson letters, and crimson helmets, all over the field.

Exeter wasn’t having too hot a year, anyway; they were poking along about 5-3—against better competition than we usually saw, to be sure, but it was not one of their
great
teams. Iowa Bob saw that he had a chance, and my father took the entire football season as a good omen for the Hotel New Hampshire.

The weekend of the Exeter game was booked in advance—every room reserved, for two nights; and reservations for the restaurant on Saturday were already closed.

My mother was worried about the chef, as Father insisted on calling her;
she
was a Canadian from Prince Edward Island, where she’d cooked for a large shipping family for fifteen years. “There’s a difference between cooking for a family and cooking for a hotel,” Mother warned Father.

“But it was a
large
family—she said so,” Father said. “And besides, we’re a small hotel.”

“We’re a
full
hotel for the Exeter weekend,” Mother said. “And a full restaurant.”

The cook’s name was Mrs. Urick; she was to be assisted by her husband, Max—a former merchant seaman and galley cook who was missing the thumb and index finger of his left hand. An accident in the galley of a vessel called the
Miss Intrepid
, he told us children, with a salty wink. He had been distracted imagining what Mrs. Urick would do to him if she knew about his time ashore with an intrepid lady in Halifax.

“All at once I looked down,” Max told us—Lilly never taking her eyes from his maimed hand. “And there was my thumb and my finger amongst the bloody carrots, and the cleaver was hacking away with a will of its own.” Max flinched his claw of a hand, as if recoiling from the blade, and Lilly blinked. Lilly was ten, although she didn’t seem to have grown much since she’d been eight. Egg, who was six, seemed less frail than Lilly—and sturdily unimpressed with Max Urick’s stories.

Mrs. Urick didn’t tell stories. For hours she scrutinized crossword puzzles without filling in the squares; she hung Max’s laundry in the kitchen, which had been the girls’ locker room of the Thompson Female Seminary—thus it was familiar with drying socks and underwear. Mrs. Urick and my father had decided that the most fetching menu for the Hotel New Hampshire would be family-style meals. By this Mrs. Urick meant a choice of two big roasts, or a New England boiled dinner; a choice of two pies—and on Mondays a variety of meat pies, made from leftover roasts. For luncheons there would be soups and cold cuts; for breakfasts, griddle cakes, and so forth.

“Nothing fancy, but just plain good,” said Mrs. Urick, rather humorlessly; she reminded Franny and me of the kind of boarding-school dietician we were familiar with from the Dairy School—a firm  believer that food was no fun but, somehow, morally essential. We shared Mother’s anxieties about the cooking—since it would be our standard fare, too—but Father was sure Mrs. Urick would manage.

She was given a basement room of her own, “to be close to my kitchen,” she said; she expected her stockpots to simmer overnight. Max Urick had a room of his own, too—on the fourth floor. There was no elevator, and my father was happy to use up a fourth-floor room. The fourth-floor rooms had the child-sized toilets and sinks, but since Max had done his bathroom business for so many years in the cramped latrine of the
Miss Intrepid
, he was not insulted by the dwarf facilities.

“Good for my heart,” Max told us. “Good for pumping the blood—all that stair-climbing,” he said, and whacked his stringy gray chest with his damaged hand. But we thought that Max would go to great lengths to keep as far from Mrs. Urick as possible; he would even climb stairs—he would pee and wash in anything. He claimed to be “handy,” and when he wasn’t helping Mrs. Urick in the kitchen he was supposed to be fixing things. “Everything from toilets to locks!” he claimed; he could click his tongue like a key turning in a lock, and he could make a terrible whooshing sound—like the tiny fourth-floor toilets in the Hotel New Hampshire sending their matter on an awesome, long voyage.

“What’s the
second
advance booking?” I asked Father.

We knew there’d be a Dairy School graduation weekend, in the spring; and maybe a big hockey-game weekend in the winter. But the small, if steady, visits from parents of students at the Dairy School would hardly require any booking in advance.

“Graduation, right?” Franny asked. But Father shook his head.

“A giant wedding!” Lilly cried, and we stared at her.

“Whose wedding?” Frank asked.

“I don’t know,” Lilly said. “But a
giant
one—a really big one. The biggest wedding in New England.”

We never knew where Lilly thought up the things she thought up; Mother looked worriedly at her, then she spoke to Father.

“Don’t be secretive,” she said. “We all want to know: what’s the second advance booking?”

“It’s not until summer,” he said. “There’s a lot of time to get ready for it. We have to concentrate on the Exeter weekend. First things first.”

“It’s probably a convention for the blind,” Franny said to Frank and me, when we were walking to our classes in the morning.

“Or a leprosy clinic,” I said.

“It will be all right,” Frank said, worriedly.

We didn’t take the path through the woods behind the practice field anymore. We walked straight across the soccer fields, sometimes throwing our apple cores into the goals, or else we walked down the main path that bisected the campus dormitories. We were concerned that we continue to avoid Iowa Bob’s backfield; none of us wanted to be caught alone with Chipper Dove. We hadn’t told Father of the incident—Frank had asked Franny and me not to tell him.

“Mother already knows,” Frank told us. “I mean, she knows I’m queer.”

This surprised Franny and me only for a moment; when we thought of it, it made perfect sense, really. If you had a secret, Mother would keep it; if you wanted a democratic debate, and a family discussion lasting for hours, maybe weeks—perhaps months—then you brought up whatever it was with Father. He was not very patient with secrets, although he was being silent enough about his second advance booking.