The Hotel New Hampshire (15 page)

“It’s going to be a meeting of all the great writers and artists of Europe,” Lilly guessed, and Franny and I kicked each other under the table and rolled our eyes; our eyes said: Lilly is weird, and Frank is queer, and Egg is only six. Our eyes said: We’re all alone in this family—just the two of us.

“It’s going to be the
circus
,” said Egg.

“How’d you know?” Father snapped at him.

“Oh no, Win,” Mother said. “It
is
a circus?”

“Just a little one,” Father said.

“Not the descendants of P. T. Barnum?” said Iowa Bob.

“Of course not,” Father said.

“The King Brothers!” Frank said; he had a King Brothers tiger-act poster in his room.

“No, I mean
really
small,” Father said. “A sort of
private
circus.”

“One of those second-rate ones, you mean,” Coach Bob said.

“Not the kind with freaky animals!” Franny said.

“Certainly not,” said Father.

“What do you mean, ‘freaky animals’?” Lilly asked.

“Horses with not enough legs,” said Frank. “A cow with an extra head—growing out of her back.”

“Where’d you see that?” I asked.

“Will there be tigers and lions?” Egg asked.

“Just so they’re on the
fourth
floor,” said Iowa Bob.

“No, put them with Mrs. Urick!” Franny said.

“Win,” my mother said. “
What
circus?”

“Well, they can use the
field
, you see,” Father said. “They can pitch their tents on the old playground, they can eat in the restaurant, and some of them might actually stay in the hotel, too—although most of those people have their own trailers, I think.”

“What will the animals be?” Lilly asked.

“Well,” said Father, “I don’t think they have too many animals. It’s
small
, you see. Probably just a few animals. I think they have some special
acts
, you know—but I’m not sure what animals.”

“What
acts
?” said Iowa Bob.

“It’s probably one of those
awful
circuses,” Franny said. “The kind with goats and chickens and those everyday junky animals everyone’s seen—some dumb reindeers, a talking crow. But nothing big, you know, and nothing exotic.”

“It’s the exotic ones I’d just as soon
not
have around here,” Mother said.

“
What
acts?” said Iowa Bob.

“Well,” Father said. “I’m not sure. Trapeze, maybe?”

“You don’t know what animals,” Mother said. “And you don’t know what acts, either. What
do
you know?”

“They’re
small
,” Father said. “They just wanted to reserve some rooms, and maybe half the restaurant. They take Mondays off.”

“Mondays off?” said Iowa Bob. “How long did you book them for?”

“Well,” Father said.

“Win!” my mother said. “How many weeks will they be here?”

“They’ll be here the whole summer,” Father said.

“Wow!” cried Egg. “The circus!”

“A circus,” said Franny. “A weirdo circus.”

“Dumb acts, dumb animals,” I said.

“Weird acts, weird animals,” Frank said.

“Well, you’ll fit right in, Frank,” Franny told him.

“Stop it,” Mother said.

“There’s no reason to get anxious,” Father said. “It’s just a small, private circus.”

“What’s its name?” Mother asked.

“Well,” said Father.

“You don’t know its name?” asked Coach Bob.

“Of course I know its name!” Father said.

“It’s called Fritz’s Act.”

“Fritz’s
act
?” Frank said.

“What’s the act?” I asked.

“Well,” Father said. “That’s just a
name
. I’m sure there’s more than one act.”

“It sounds very modern,” Frank said.

“
Modern
, Frank?” Franny said.

“It sounds kinky,” I said.

“What’s kinky?” said Lilly.

“A kind of animal?” Egg asked.

“Never mind,” said Mother.

“I think we should concentrate on the Exeter weekend,” Father said.

“Yes, and getting yourselves, and me, all moved in,” said Iowa Bob. “There’s lots of time to discuss the summer.”

“The whole summer is booked in advance?” Mother asked.

“You see?” Father said. “Now,
that’s
good business! Already we’ve taken care of the summer,
and
the Exeter weekend. First things first. Now all we have to do is move in.”

That happened a week before the Exeter game; it was the weekend when Iowa Bob’s ringers rang up nine touchdowns—to match their ninth straight victory, against no defeats. Franny didn’t get to see it; she had decided not to be a cheerleader anymore. That Saturday Franny and I helped Mother move the last things that the moving vans hadn’t already taken to the Hotel New Hampshire; Lilly and Egg went with Father and Coach Bob to the game; Frank, of course, was in the band.

There were thirty rooms over four floors, and our family occupied seven rooms in the southeast corner, covering two floors. One room in the basement was dominated by Mrs. Urick; that meant that, together with the fourth-floor resting place of Max, there were twenty-two rooms for guests. But the headwaitress and head maid, Ronda Ray, had a day-room on the second floor—to gather herself together, she’d said to Father. And two southeast-corner rooms on the third floor—just above us—were reserved for Iowa Bob. That left only nineteen rooms for guests, and only thirteen of those came with their own baths; six of the rooms came with the midget facilities.

“It’s more than enough,” Father said. “This is a small town. And not popular.”

It was more than enough for the circus called Fritz’s Act, perhaps, but we were anxious how we were going to handle the full house we expected for the Exeter weekend.

That Saturday we moved in, Franny discovered the intercom system and switched on the “Receiving” buttons in all the rooms. They were all empty, of course, but we tried to imagine listening to the first guests moving into them. The squawk-box system, as Father called it, had been left over from the Thompson Female Seminary, of course—the principal could announce fire drills to the various classrooms, and teachers who were out of their homerooms could hear if the kids were fooling around. Father thought that keeping the intercom system would make it unnecessary to have phones in the rooms.

“They can call for help on the intercom,” Father said. “Or we can wake them for breakfast. And if they want to use the phone, they can use the phone at the main desk.” But of course the squawk-box system also meant that it was possible to listen to the guests in their rooms.

“Not
ethically
possible,” Father said, but Franny and I couldn’t wait.

That Saturday we moved in, we were without even the main-desk phone—or a phone in our family’s apartment—and we were without linen, because the linen service that was going to handle the hotel laundry had also been contracted to do ours. They weren’t starting service until Monday. Ronda Ray wasn’t starting until Monday, either, but
she
was there—in the Hotel New Hampshire—looking over her dayroom when we arrived.

“I just need it, you know?” she asked Mother. “I mean, I can’t change sheets in the morning,
after
I wait on the breakfast eaters—and
before
I serve lunch to the lunch eaters—without having no place to lay down. And between lunch and supper, if I don’t lay down, I get feeling nasty—all over. And if you lived where I lived, you wouldn’t wanna go home.”

Ronda Ray lived at Hampton Beach, where she waitressed and changed sheets for the summer crowd. She’d been looking for a year-round arrangement for her hotel career—and, my mother guessed, a way to get out of Hampton Beach, forever. She was about my mother’s age, and in fact claimed to remember seeing Earl perform in Earl’s casino years. She had not seen his ballroom dancing performance, though; it was the bandstand she remembered, and the act called “Applying for a Job.”

“But I never
believed
it was a real bear,” she told Franny and me, as we watched her unpack a small suitcase in her dayroom. “I mean,” Ronda Ray said, “I thought
nobody
would get a kick out of undressing no
real
bear.”

We wondered why she was unpacking
night
clothes from the suitcase, if this
day
room was not where she intended to spend the night; she was a woman Franny was curious about—and I thought she was even exotic. She had dyed hair; I can’t say what color it was because it wasn’t a real color. It wasn’t red, it wasn’t blond; it was the color of plastic, or metal, and I wondered how it felt. Ronda Ray had a body that I imagined was formerly as strong as Franny’s but had grown a little thick—still powerful, but straining. It is hard to say what she smelled like, although—after we left Ronda—Franny tried.

“She put perfume on her wrist two days ago,” Franny said. “You following me?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But her watchband wasn’t there then—her brother was wearing her watch, or her father,” Franny said. “Some man, anyway, and he really
sweated
a lot.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then Ronda put the watchband on, over the perfume, and she wore it for a day while she was stripping beds,” Franny said.

“What beds?” I said.

Franny thought a minute. “Beds very strange people had slept in,” she said.

“The circus called Fritz’s Act slept in them!” I said.

“Right!” said Franny.

“The whole summer!” we said, in unison.

“Right,” Franny said. “And what
we
smell when we smell Ronda is what Ronda’s watchband smells like—after all that.”

That was coming close to it, but I thought it was a slightly better smell than that—just slightly. I thought of Ronda Ray’s stockings, which she hung in the closet of her dayroom; I thought that if I sniffed just behind the knee of the pair of stockings she was wearing I would catch the true essence of her.

“You know why she wears them?” Franny asked me.

“No,” I said.

“Some man spilled hot coffee on her legs,” Franny said. “He did it on purpose. He tried to boil her.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I’ve seen the scars,” Franny said. “And she told me.”

At the squawk-box controls, we switched off all the rooms and listened to Ronda Ray’s room. She was humming. Then we heard her smoke. We imagined how she’d sound with a man.

“Noisy,” Franny said. We listened to Ronda’s breathing, intermixed with the crackles of the intercom system—an ancient system that ran on the power from an automobile battery, like a clever electric fence.

When Lilly and Egg and Father came home from the game, Franny and I put Egg in the dumbwaiter and hauled him up and down the four-story shaft until Frank ratted on us and Father told us that the dumbwaiter would be used only for removing linen and dishes and other
things
—not humans—from the rooms.

It wasn’t safe, Father said. If we let go of the rope, the dumbwaiter fell at the speed imposed by its own response to gravity. That was fast—if not for a
thing
, at least for a human.

“But Egg is so light,” Franny argued. “I mean, we’re not going to try it with
Frank
.”

“You’re not going to try it at
all
!” Father said.

Then Lilly got lost and we stopped unpacking for almost an hour, trying to find her. She was sitting in the kitchen with Mrs. Urick, who had seized Lilly’s attention by telling her stories of the various ways she’d been punished when she’d been a girl. Her hair had been cut out in hunks, to humiliate her, when she forgot to wash before supper; she’d been told to go stand barefoot in the snow whenever she swore; when she’d “snitched” food, she’d been forced to eat a tablespoon of salt.

“If you and Mother go away,” Lilly said to Father, “you won’t leave us with Mrs. Urick, will you?”

Frank had the best room and Franny complained; she had to share a room with Lilly. A doorway without a door connected my room to Egg’s. Max Urick dismantled his intercom; when we listened to his room, all we heard was static—as if the old sailor were still far out to sea. Mrs. Urick’s room bubbled like the stockpots on the back of her stove—the sound of life held steadily at a simmer.

We were so restless for more guests, and for the Hotel New Hampshire to actually be open, that we couldn’t keep still.

Father paced us through two fire drills, to tire us out, but it only roused us to wanting more action. When it was dark, we realized the electricity hadn’t been turned on—so we hid from each other, and searched for each other, through the empty rooms with candles.

I hid in Ronda Ray’s dayroom on the second floor. I blew my candle out and, with my sense of smell, located the drawers where she’d put her nightclothes away. I heard Frank scream from the third floor—he’d put his hand on a plant in the dark—and what could only be Franny laughing in the echo chamber that the stairwell was.

“Have your fun now!” Father roared from our apartment. “When there are
guests
here, you can’t have the run of the place.”

Lilly found me in Ronda Ray’s room and helped me put Ronda’s clothes back in the chest of drawers. Father caught us leaving Ronda’s room and took Lilly back to our apartment and put her to bed; he was irritable because he’d just tried to call the electric company to complain that the power was off and had discovered that our phones weren’t connected, either. Mother had volunteered to take a walk with Egg and make the call from the railroad station.

I went looking for Franny, but she had made it back to the lobby, undetected; she switched all the intercoms to “Broadcasting” and broadcast an announcement throughout the hotel.

“Now hear this!” Franny boomed. “Now hear this! Everyone out of bed for a sex check!”

“What’s a sex check?” I wondered, running down the stairwell to the lobby.

Frank fortunately missed the message; he was hiding in the fourth-floor utility closet, where there was no squawk box installed: when he heard Franny’s announcement, the message was garbled. He probably thought that Father was pacing us through another fire drill; in his haste to leave the utility closet, Frank stepped in a pail and fell on all fours, his head hitting the floor and one hand touching, this time, a dead mouse.