The Hotel New Hampshire (6 page)

“A she-bear with young cubs,” Freud explained. “
Sehr
treacherous at this time of year.”

But the management of the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea would not allow the matter to be dismissed so easily; Freud knew that.

“I’m leaving before I have to talk with
him
again,” Freud told Father and Mother. They knew that Freud meant the owner of the Arbuthnot, the man in the white dinner jacket who occasionally showed up for the last dance. “I can just hear him, the big shot: ‘Now, Freud, you knew the risk—we discussed it. When
I
agreed to have the animal here,
we
agreed he would be
your
responsibility.’ And if he tells me I’m a lucky Jew—to be in his fucking America in the first place—I will let State o’ Maine
eat
him!” Freud said. “Him and his fancy cigarettes, I don’t need. This isn’t my kind of hotel, anyway.”

The bear, nervous at being confined in the laundry room and worried to see Freud packing his clothes as fast as they came out of the wash—still wet—began to growl to himself. “Earl!” he whispered.

“Oh, shut up!” Freud yelled. “You’re not my kind of bear, either.”

“It was my fault,” my mother said. “I shouldn’t have taken his muzzle off.”

“Those were just love bites,” Freud said. “It was the brute’s claws that really carved that fucker up!”

“If he hadn’t tried to pull State o’ Maine’s fur,” Father said, “I don’t think it would have gotten so bad.”

“Of course it wouldn’t have!” Freud said. “Who likes to have hair pulled?”

“Earl!” complained State o’ Maine.

“That should be your name: ‘Earl!”’ Freud told the bear. “You’re so stupid, that’s all you ever say.”

“But what will you do?” Father asked Freud. “Where can you go?”

“Back to Europe,” Freud said. “They got smart bears there.”

“They have Nazis there,” Father said.

“Give me a smart bear and fuck the Nazis,” Freud said.

“I’ll take care of State o’ Maine,” Father said.

“You can do better than that,” Freud said. “You can
buy
him. Two hundred dollars, and what you got for clothes.
These
are all wet!” he shouted, throwing his clothes.

“Earl!” said the bear, distressed.

“Watch your language, Earl,” Freud told him.

“Two hundred dollars?” Mother asked.

“That’s all they’ve paid me, so far,” Father said.

“I know what they pay you,” Freud said. “That’s why it’s only two hundred dollars. Of course, it’s for the motorcycle, too. You’ve seen why you need to keep the Indian,
ja
? State o’ Maine don’t get in cars; they make him throw up. And some woodsman chained him in a pickup once—I saw that. The dumb bear tore the tailgate off and beat in the rear window and mauled the guy in the cab. So don’t
you
be dumb. Buy the Indian.”

“Two hundred dollars,” Father repeated.

“Now for your clothes,” Freud said. He left his own wet things on the laundry room floor. The bear tried to follow them to my father’s room, but Freud told my mother to take State o’ Maine outside and chain him to the motorcycle.

“He knows you’re leaving and he’s nervous, poor thing,” Mother said.

“He just misses the motorcycle,” Freud said, but he let the bear come upstairs—although the Arbuthnot had asked him not to allow this.

“What do I care now what they allow?” Freud said, trying on my father’s clothes. My mother watched up and down the hall; bears
and
women were not allowed in the men’s dorm.

“My clothes are all too
big
for you,” my father told Freud when Freud had dressed himself.

“I’m still growing,” said Freud, who must have been at least forty then. “If I’d had the right clothes, I’d be bigger now.” He wore three of my father’s suit pants, one pair right over the other; he wore two suit jackets, the pockets stuffed with underwear and socks, and he carried a third jacket over his shoulder. “Why trouble with suitcases?” he asked.

“But how will you
get
to Europe?” Mother whispered into the room.

“By crossing the Atlantic Ocean,” Freud said. “Come in here,” he said to Mother; he took my mother’s and father’s hands and joined them together. “You’re only teen-agers,” he told them, “so listen to me: you are in love. We start from this assumption,
ja
?” And although my mother and father had never admitted any such thing to each other, they both nodded while Freud held their hands. “Okay,” Freud said. “Now, three things from this follow. You promise me you will agree to these three things?”

“I promise,” said my father.

“So do I,” Mother said.

“Okay,” said Freud. “Here’s number one: you get married, right away, before some clods and whores change your minds. Got it? You get married, even though it will cost you.”

“Yes,” my parents agreed.

“Here’s number two,” Freud said, looking only at my father. “You
go
to Harvard—you promise me—even though it will cost you.”

“But I’ll already be married,” my father said.

“I said it will cost you, didn’t I?” Freud said. “You promise me: you’ll go to Harvard. You take
every
opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day the opportunities stop, you know?”

“I want you to go to Harvard, anyway,” Mother told Father.

“Even though it will cost me,” Father said, but he agreed to go.

“We’re up to number three,” Freud said. “You ready?” And he turned to my mother; he dropped my father’s hand, he even shoved it away from him so that he was holding Mother’s hand all alone. “Forgive him,” Freud told her, “even though it will cost you.”

“Forgive me for what?” Father said.

“Just forgive him,” Freud said, looking only at my mother. She shrugged.

“And
you
!” Freud said to the bear, who was sniffing around under Father’s bed. Freud startled State o’ Maine, who’d found a tennis ball under the bed and put it in his mouth.

“Urp!” the bear said. Out came the tennis ball.

“You,” Freud said to the bear. “May you one day be grateful that you were rescued from the disgusting world of
nature
!”

That was all. It was a wedding and a benediction, my mother always said. It was a good old-fashioned Jewish service, my father always said; Jews were a mystery to him—of the order of China, India, and Africa, and all the exotic places he’d never been.

Father chained the bear to the motorcycle. When he and Mother kissed Freud good-bye, the bear tried to butt his head between them.

“Watch out!” Freud cried, and they scattered apart. “He thought we were eating something,” Freud told Mother and Father. “Watch out how you kiss around him; he don’t understand kissing. He thinks it’s
eating
.”

“Earl!” the bear said.

“And please, for me,” Freud said, “call him Earl—that’s all he ever says, and State o’ Maine is such a dumb name.”

“Earl?” my mother said.

“
Earl
!” the bear said.

“Okay,” Father said. “
Earl
it is.”

“Good-bye, Earl,” Freud said. “
Auf Wiedersehen
!”

They watched Freud for a long time, waiting on the Bay Point dock for a boat going to Boothbay, and when a lobsterman finally took him—although my parents knew that in Boothbay Freud would be boarding a larger ship—they thought how it
looked
as if the lobster boat were taking Freud to Europe, all the way across the dark ocean. They watched the boat chug and bob until it seemed smaller than a tern or even a sandpiper on the sea; by then it was out of hearing.

“Did you do it for the first time that night?” Franny always asked.

“Franny!” Mother said.

“Well, you said you
felt
married,” Franny said.

“Never mind when we did it,” Father said.

“But you
did
, right?” Franny said.

“Never mind that,” Frank said.

“It doesn’t matter
when
,” Lilly said, in her weird way.

And that was true—it didn’t really matter
when
. When they left the summer of 1939 and the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea, my mother and father were in love—and in
their
minds, married. After all, they had promised Freud. They had his 1937 Indian and his bear, now named Earl, and when they arrived home in Dairy, New Hampshire, they drove first to the Bates family house.

“Mary’s home!” my mother’s mother called.

“What’s that
machine
she’s on?” said old Latin Emeritus. “Who’s that with her?”

“It’s a motorcycle and that’s Win Berry!” my mother’s mother said.

“No, no!” said Latin Emeritus. “Who’s the
other
one?” The old man stared at the bundled figure in the sidecar.

“It must be Coach Bob,” said my mother’s mother.

“That moron!” Latin Emeritus said. “What in hell is he wearing in this weather? Don’t they know how to dress in Iowa?”

“I’m going to marry Win Berry!” my mother rushed up and told her parents. “That’s his motorcycle. He’s going to Harvard. And this ... is Earl.”

Coach Bob was more understanding. He liked Earl.

“I’d love to know what he could bench-press,” the former Big Ten lineman said. “But can’t we cut his nails?”

It was silly to have another wedding; my father thought that Freud’s service would suffice. But my mother’s family insisted that they be married by the Congregational minister who had taken Mother to her graduation dance, and so they were.

It was a small, informal wedding, where Coach Bob played the best man and Latin Emeritus gave his daughter away, with only an occasional mumbling of an odd Latin phrase; my mother’s mother wept, full of the knowledge that Win Berry was
not
the Harvard man destined to whisk Mary Bates back to Boston—at least, not right away. Earl sat out the whole service in the sidecar of the ’37 Indian, where he was pacified with crackers and herring.

My mother and father had a brief honeymoon by themselves.

“
Then
you surely must have done it!” Franny always cried. But they probably didn’t; they didn’t stay anywhere overnight. They took an early train to Boston and wandered around Cambridge, imagining themselves living there, one day, and Father attending Harvard; they took the milk train back to New Hampshire, arriving at dawn the next day. Their first nuptial bed would have been the single bed in my mother’s girlhood room in the house of Latin Emeritus—which was where my mother would still reside, while Father sought his fortune for Harvard.

Coach Bob was sorry to see Earl leave. Bob was sure the bear could be taught to play defensive end, but my father told Iowa Bob that the bear was going to be his family’s meal ticket and his tuition. So one evening (after the Nazis took Poland), with the earliest nip of fall in the air, my mother kissed my father good-bye on the athletic fields of the Dairy School, which rolled right up to Iowa Bob’s back door.

“Look after your parents,” my father told Mother, “and I’ll be back to look after you.”

“Yuck!” Franny always groaned; for some reason, this part bothered her. She never believed it. Lilly, too, shivered and turned up her nose.

“Shut up and listen to the story,” Frank always said.

At least I’m not opinionated to the degree of my brothers and sisters. I could simply see how Mother and Father must have kissed:
carefully
—Coach Bob amusing the bear with some game, so that Earl would not think my mother and father were eating something that they weren’t sharing with him. Kissing would always be hazardous around Earl.

My mother told us that she knew my father would be faithful to her because the bear would maul him if he kissed anybody.

“And
were
you faithful?” Franny asked Father, in her terrible way.

“Why, of course,” Father said.

“I’ll bet,” Franny said. Lilly always looked worried—Frank looked away.

That was the fall of 1939. Although she didn’t know it, my mother was already pregnant—with Frank. My father would motorcycle down the East Coast, his exploration of resort hotels—the big-band sounds, the bingo crowds, and the casinos—taking him farther and farther south as the seasons changed. He was in Texas in the spring of 1940 when Frank was born; Father and Earl were at that time touring with an outfit called the Lone Star Brass Band. Bears were popular in Texas—although some drunk in Fort Worth had tried to steal the 1937 Indian, unaware that Earl slept chained to it. Texas law charged Father for the man’s hospitalization, and it cost Father some more of his earnings to drive all the way East to welcome his first child into the world.

My mother was still in the hospital when Father returned to Dairy. They called Frank “Frank” because my father said that was what they would always be to each other and to the family: “frank.”

“Yuck!” Franny used to say. But Frank was quite proud of the origins of his name.

Father stayed with my mother in Dairy only long enough to get her pregnant again. Then he and Earl hit Virginia Beach and the Carolinas. They were banned from Falmouth, Cape Cod, on the Fourth of July, and back home with Mother in Dairy—to recover—soon after their disaster. The 1937 Indian had thrown a bearing in the Falmouth Independence Day Parade, and Earl had run amok when a fireman from Buzzards Bay tried to help Father with the ailing motorcycle. The fireman was unfortunately accompanied by two Dalmatian dogs, a breed not known for intelligence; doing nothing to disprove their reputation, the Dalmatians attacked Earl in the sidecar. Earl beheaded one of them quite cleanly, then chased the other one into the marching unit of the Osterville Men’s Softball Team, where the foolish dog attempted to conceal himself. The parade was thus scattered, the grieving fireman from Buzzards Bay refused my father any more help with the Indian, and the sheriff of Falmouth escorted Father and Earl to the city limits. Since Earl refused to ride in cars, this had been a most tedious escort, Earl sitting in the sidecar of the motorcycle, which had to be towed. They were five days finding parts to rebuild the engine.