The Hotel New Hampshire (29 page)

“Egg, Egg,” Frank reasoned with the sobbing child. “
I
can make him nice again. You should have let me. I can make him
anything
,” Frank claimed. “I
still
can,” he said. “You want him nice, Egg? I’ll make him nice.” But Franny and I stared into the bathtub and felt great doubt. That Frank had taken a harmless, farting Labrador retriever and made him a killer was one thing; but to reassemble this truly disgusting body, matted and burned and bloated in the bathtub, was a miracle of perversion that we doubted even Frank was capable of.

Father, on the other hand, was ever the optimist; he seemed to think all of this would be excellent “therapy” for Frank—and, no doubt, a further maturing influence on Egg.

“If you can restore the dog, and make him nice, son,” Father told Frank, with inappropriate solemnity, “that would make us all very happy.”

“I think we should throw it away,” Mother said.

“Ditto,” said Franny.

“I
tried
,” Max Urick complained.

But Egg and Frank began to whoop and cry. Perhaps Father saw that in the restoration of Sorrow lay Frank’s forgiveness; salvaging Sorrow could possibly restore Frank’s self-esteem; and perhaps by refashioning Sorrow, for Egg—by making Sorrow “nice”—Father thought that a bit of Iowa Bob would be returned to us all. But as Franny would say, years later, there was never any such thing as “nice sorrow”; by definition, sorrow would never be nice.

Could I blame my father for trying? Or Frank for being the agent of such depressing optimism? And there was no blaming Egg, of course; we would, none of us, ever blame Egg.

Only Lilly had slept through it all, perhaps already inhabiting a world not quite like ours. Doris Wales and Ronda Ray had not climbed four flights of stairs to see the body, but when we found them in the restaurant, they seemed almost sobered by the experience—even second-hand. Whatever hopes for even a mini-seduction that might have been on Junior Jones’s mind were dashed by the interruption to the music; Franny kissed Junior good night and went to her own room. And Bitty Tuck, although she loved my kisses, could not forgive the intrusion upon her privacy in the bathroom—both Sorrow’s and mine. I suppose she resented, most of all, the ungainly position I’d discovered her in—“Fainted while diaphragming herself!” as Franny would later characterize the scene.

I found myself alone with Junior Jones at the delivery entrance, drinking up the cold beer and watching out into Elliot Park for any other New Year’s Eve survivors. Sleazy Wales and the boys in the band had gone home; Doris and Ronda were draped upon the bar—a kind of camaraderie had suddenly risen, in a blurry fashion, between them. And Junior Jones said, “No offense to your sister, man, but I am very horny.”

“Ditto,” I said, “and no offense to yours.”

The laughter of the women in the restaurant reached us, and Junior said, “Want to try to hustle them ladies at the bar?” I didn’t dare tell Junior the repugnance of that idea, to me—having already been hustled by one of them—but I felt badly later at how quickly I was willing to betray Ronda Ray. I told Junior that she could be hustled very easily, and it would only cost him money.

Later, I drank another beer and listened to Junior carrying Ronda to the stairwell at the hall’s far end, away from me. And after another beer, or two, I heard Doris Wales, all alone, start to sing “Heartbreak Hotel,” without the music, and occasionally forgetting the words of her religion—and occasionally slurring the rest. Lastly came the unmistakable sound of her throwing up in the bar sink.

After a while she found me in the lobby, at the open door to the delivery entrance, and I offered her the last cold beer. “Sure, why not?” she said. “It helps to cut the phlegm. That damn ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’ ” she added. “It always moves me too much.”

Doris Wales was wearing her knee-high cowboy boots and carrying her thin-strapped green high heels in her hand; in her other hand she dallied her coat, a sad-flecked tweed with a skimpy fur collar. “It’s just muskrat,” she said, rubbing it against my cheek. She gripped the throat of her beer bottle in the hand with her high-heeled shoes and drank nearly all of it down. The hickey on her tilted throat appeared to have been made by a red-hot fifty-cent piece. She dropped her beer bottle at her feet and kicked it out the door, where it rolled toward the trash barrels at the delivery entrance. She stepped closer to me and thrust her thigh between my legs; she kissed me on the mouth, a kiss like nothing Sabrina Jones had shown me; it was a kiss like a wedge of soft fruit being mashed past my teeth and tongue until I gagged; her kiss tasted, lingeringly, of vomit and beer.

“I’m picking Sleazy up at this party,” she said. “Wanna come?”

It reminded me of when Sleazy offered to force-feed me the ball of bread or poke out my eyes with the nail in the movies. “No thanks,” I said.

“Chicken shit,” she said, and belched sharply. “Kids today have no
spunk
.” Then she slammed me to her chest and hugged me to her body, hard as a man’s but with her breasts sliding between us like two fresh-caught fish in loose bags; her tongue lolled along my jawline before skidding into my ear. “You squirrel dink,” she whispered, then pushed me from her.

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 in 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, 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 teenager—in fact, he looked older than my father, to me. And when I searched him for 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 gray, 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. “Good-bye,” 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 occurred 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 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.