The Hotel New Hampshire (25 page)

“If you’d rather be out running, John-O,” Ronda groaned, “go run.”

And when I looked out the window again, Egg was gone; Sorrow had gone with him. The efforts to bring Sorrow back from the grave were not over, I knew; I could only guess where the beast might reappear.

When Franny moved to Iowa Bob’s room, Mother rearranged the rest of us. She put Egg and me together, where Franny and Lilly had been, and she gave Lilly my old room
and
Egg’s adjoining room—as if, illogically, Lilly’s so-called dwarfism needed to be accommodated not only with privacy but with a larger space. I complained, but Father said I would have a “maturing” influence on Egg. Frank’s secret quarters were unchanged, and the barbells still resided in Iowa Bob’s room, which gave me more reason to visit Franny, who liked to watch me lift. So when I lifted, now, I was not thinking just of Franny—my only audience!—but with a little extra effort I could bring back Coach Bob. I was lifting for both of us.

I suppose that, by salvaging Sorrow from the inevitable journey to the dump, Egg might have been resurrecting Iowa Bob in the only way Egg could do it. What “maturing” influence I was expected to have on Egg remained a mystery to me, though it was tolerable sharing a room with him. His clothes bothered me most of all, or not his clothes but his habits with clothes: Egg didn’t dress himself, he costumed himself. He changed costumes several times a day, the discarded clothing always dominating a central area of our room and accumulating there, after several days, before Mother would rampage through the room and ask me if I couldn’t urge Egg to be more tidy. Perhaps Father meant “tidying” when he said “maturing.”

For my first week of sharing a room with Egg, I was less concerned with his messiness than I was anxious to discover where he had hidden Sorrow. I did not want to be startled by that shape of death again, although I think the shape of death is always startling to us—it is
meant
to be startling—and not even proper anticipation can prepare us enough for it. This, at least, was true of Egg and Sorrow.

The night before New Year’s Eve, with Iowa Bob not dead a week, and Sorrow missing from the garbage for only two days, I whispered across the darkness of our room to Egg; I knew he wasn’t asleep.

“Okay, Egg,” I whispered. “Where is he?” But it would always be a mistake to
whisper
to Egg.

“What?” Egg said. Mother and Dr. Blaze said that Egg’s hearing was improving, although Father referred to Egg’s “deafness,” not to his “hearing,” and concluded that Dr. Blaze must be deaf himself to think of Egg’s condition as “improving.” It was rather like Dr. Blaze’s opinion of Lilly’s dwarfism: that it was improving, too, because Lilly
had
grown (a little). But everyone else had grown much more, and the impression, therefore, was that Lilly was growing
smaller
.

“Egg,” I said more loudly. “Where is Sorrow?”

“Sorrow is dead,” Egg said.

“I know he’s dead, damn it,” I said, “but
where
, Egg? Where is Sorrow?”

“Sorrow is with Grandpa Bob,” said Egg, who was right about that, of course, and I knew there would be no cajoling the whereabouts of the stuffed terror out of Egg.

“Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve,” I said.

“Who?” Egg said.

“New Year’s Eve!” I said. “We’re having a party.”

“Where?” he asked.

“Here,” I said. “In the Hotel New Hampshire.”

“What room?” he said

“The
main
room,” I said. “The big room. The restaurant, dummy.”

“We’re not having a party in this room,” Egg said.

With Egg’s costumes all around, there was hardly room for a party in our room, I knew, but I let this observation pass. I was almost asleep when Egg spoke again.

“How would you dry something that’s wet?” Egg asked.

And I thought to myself of the likely
condition
of Sorrow, after God knows how many hours in the open trash barrel, in the rain and snow.

“What is it that’s wet, Egg?” I asked.

“Hair,” he said. “How would you dry hair?”

“
Your
hair, Egg?”

“Anybody’s hair,” Egg said. “Lots of hair. More hair than mine.”

“Well, with a hair dryer, I suppose,” I said.

“That thing Franny has?” Egg asked.

“Mother has one, too,” I told him.

“Yeah,” he said, “but Franny’s is bigger. I think it’s
hotter
, too.”

“Got a lot of hair to dry, huh?” I said.

“What?” Egg said. But it wasn’t worth repeating; an aspect of Egg’s deafness was Egg’s ability to choose when not to hear.

In the morning I watched him take off his pajamas, under which he wore—and had slept in—a full suit of clothes.

“It’s good to be ready—right, Egg?” I asked.

“Ready for what?” he asked. “There isn’t any school today—it’s still vacation.”

“Then why’d you wear your clothes to bed?” I asked him, but he let that pass; he was rummaging through various piles of costumes. “What are you looking for?” I asked him. “You’re already dressed.” But whenever Egg detected that the tone I took toward him was a teasing one, he ignored me.

“See you at the party,” he said.

Egg loved the Hotel New Hampshire; perhaps he loved it even more than Father, because Father loved most of all the idea of it; in fact, Father seemed daily more and more unsure of the actual success of his venture. Egg loved all the rooms, the stairwells, the great unoccupied emptiness of the former all-girls’ school. Father knew we were unoccupied a little too much of the time, but that was fine with Egg.

Guests would occasionally bring odd things they had found in their rooms to breakfast. “The room was very clean,” they would begin, “but someone must have left this ... this
something
. “ The right rubber arm of a cowboy; the wrinkled, webbed foot of a dried toad. A playing card, with a face drawn over the face of the jack of diamonds; the five of clubs with the word “Yuck” written across it. A small sock with six marbles in it. A costume change (Egg’s policeman badge pinned to his baseball uniform) hanging in the closet of 4G.

On the day of New Year’s Eve, the weather was that thawing kind—a mist spreading over Elliot Park, and yesterday’s snow already melting and revealing the gray snow of a week ago. “Where were you this morning, John-O?” Ronda Ray asked me, as we were fussing with the restaurant for the New Year’s Eve party.

“It wasn’t raining,” I pointed out. A weak excuse, I knew—and she knew. I was hardly being unfaithful to Ronda—there was no one to be unfaithful with—but I dreamed of an imaginary someone else, about Franny’s age, all the time. I had even asked Franny for a date with one of her friends, someone she would recommend—although Franny was in the habit of saying that her friends were too old for me, now; by which she meant that they were sixteen.

“No weight lifting this morning?” Franny asked me. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll get out of shape?”

“I’m in training for the party,” I said.

For the party, we expected that three or four Dairy students (who were cutting their Christmas break short) would be spending the night in the hotel, among them Junior Jones, who was Franny’s date, and a sister of Junior Jones, who was
not
a Dairy student. Junior was bringing her with him for me—I was terrified that Junior Jones’s sister was going to be as big as Junior Jones, and I was also eager to know if this was the sister who’d been raped, as Harold Swallow had told me; it seemed unjustly important to know. Was I to have a large, raped girl for a date or a large,
un
raped girl?—for either way, I was sure, she would have to be huge.

“Don’t be nervous,” Franny said to me.

We dismantled the Christmas tree, which brought tears to my father’s eyes, because it had been Iowa Bob’s tree; Mother had to leave the room. The funeral had seemed so subdued to us children—it was the first funeral we had ever seen, being too young to remember what was done about Latin Emeritus and my mother’s mother; the bear called State o’ Maine had not been given a funeral. I think that considering the noise attached to the death of Iowa Bob, we expected the funeral to be louder, too—“at least the sound of barbells falling,” I said to Franny.

“Be serious,” she said. She seemed to think she was growing much older than me, and I was afraid she was right.

“Is this the sister who was raped?” I asked Franny suddenly. “I mean, which sister is Junior bringing?” By Franny’s look at me, I guessed that this question also put years between us.

“He only has one sister,” Franny said, looking straight at me. “Does it matter to you that she was raped?”

Of course I didn’t know what to say: that it
did
? That one would not discuss rape with someone who’d been raped, as opposed to launching into the subject right away with someone who hadn’t? That one would look for the lasting scars in the personality, or not look for them? That one would
assume
lasting scars in the personality, and speak to the person as to an invalid? (And how did one speak to an invalid?) That it didn’t matter? But it did. I knew why, too. I was fourteen. In my inexpert years (and I would always be inexpert on the subject of rape), I imagined that one would
touch
a person who’d been raped a little differently, or a little less; or that one would not touch her at all. I said that to Franny, finally, and she stared at me.

“You’re wrong,” she said, but it was the way she said to Frank, “You’re an asshole,” and I felt that I would probably always be fourteen, too.

“Where is Egg?” Father bellowed. “Egg!”

“Egg never does any work,” Frank complained, sweeping the dead needles from the Christmas tree aimlessly about the restaurant.

“Egg is a little boy, Frank,” Franny said.

“Egg could be more mature than he is,” Father said. And I (who was to be the maturing influence) ... I knew very well why Egg was out of earshot. He was in some empty room of the Hotel New Hampshire, contemplating the terrible mass of wet black Labrador retriever, which was Sorrow.

When the last of Christmas had been swept and dragged out of the Hotel New Hampshire, we considered what decorations would be appropriate for New Year’s Eve.

“No one feels very much like New Year’s Eve,” Franny said. “Let’s not decorate anything at all.”

“A party is a party,” said Father, gamely, although we suspected he felt the least like a party of us all. Everyone knew whose idea a New Year’s Eve party had been: Iowa Bob’s.

“There won’t be anybody coming, anyway,” Frank said.

“Well, speak for yourself, Frank,” Franny said. “I have some friends coming.”

“There could be a hundred people here and you’d still stay in your room, Frank,” I said.

“Go eat another banana,” Frank said. “Go take a run—to the moon.”

“Well, I like having a party,” Lilly said, and everyone looked at her—because, of course, we had not seen her until she spoke; she was getting so small. Lilly was almost eleven, but she now seemed substantially smaller than Egg; she barely came up to my waist and she weighed less than forty pounds.

So we all rallied to the occasion: as long as Lilly was looking forward to a party, we would try to get in the mood.

“So how should we decorate the restaurant, Lilly?” Frank asked her; he had a way of bending over when he spoke to Lilly, as if he were addressing a baby in a carriage and what he had to say were pure gibberish.

“Let’s not decorate anything at all,” Lilly said. “Let’s just have a good time.”

We all stood still, facing this prospect as we might face a death sentence, but Mother said, “That’s a wonderful idea! I’m going to call the Matsons!”

“The Matsons?” Father said.

“And the Foxes, and maybe the Calders,” Mother said.

“Not the Matsons!” Father said. “And the Calders already asked
us
to a party—they have a New Year’s party every year.”

“Well, we’ll just have a few friends,” Mother said.

“Well, there will be the usual customers, too,” Father said, but he didn’t look too sure, and we looked away from him. The “usual customers” were such a small cluster of cronies; for the most part, they were the drinking friends of Coach Bob. We wondered if they’d ever show up again—and on New Year’s Eve we doubted it.

Mrs. Urick didn’t know how much food to have on hand; Max wondered if the entire parking lot should be plowed, or just the usual few spaces. Ronda Ray seemed in the spirit for a New Year’s party of her own; she had a dress she wanted to wear she’d told me all about it. I already knew the dress: it was the sexy dress Franny had bought Mother for Christmas; Mother had given it to Ronda. Having seen Franny model it, I was anxious about how Ronda would ever cram herself into it.

Mother had arranged to have a live band. “An
almost
live band,” Franny said, because she’d heard the band before. They played to the Hampton Beach crowd in the summers, but during the regular year most of them were still in high school. The electric guitarist was a high school hood named Sleazy Wales; his mother was the lead singer and acoustic guitarist—a strapping, loud woman named Doris, whom Ronda Ray fervently called a slut. The band was named either after Doris or after the mild hurricane of some years before—which was also named Doris. The band was called, naturally, Hurricane Doris, and it featured Sleazy Wales and his mother and two of Sleazy’s high school pals; acoustic bass and drums. I think that the boys worked in the same auto garage after school, because the band’s uniforms consisted of garage mechanics’ clothes—on the boys—with their names sewn on the breast alongside the GULF insignia. Their names were Danny, Jake, Sleazy—and all of them were GULF. Doris wore whatever she wanted to—dresses that even Ronda Ray would have thought immodest. Frank, of course, called Hurricane Doris “disgusting.”

The band favored Elvis Presley numbers—“with lots of slow stuff if there’s a lot of grown-ups in the crowd,” Doris told my mother over the phone, “and the faster shit if the crowd’s young.”

“Oh boy,” Franny said. “I can’t wait to hear what Junior thinks of Hurricane Doris.”