The Hotel New Hampshire (26 page)

And I dropped several glass ashtrays that I was supposed to be distributing to the tables, because
I
couldn’t wait to see what Junior Jones’s sister would think of
me
.

“How old is she?” I asked Franny.

“If you’re lucky, kid,” Franny teased me, “she’ll be about twelve.”

Frank had returned the mop and broom to the first-floor utility closet and had discovered, in the closet, a clue to the existence of Sorrow. It was the board, the cut-to-size plank, upon which Sorrow had been mounted in his attack pose. There were four neat screw holes in the board, and the trace of the dog’s paw prints; he’d been screwed by his paws to the plank.

“Egg!” Frank screamed. “You little thief, Egg!”

So Egg had removed Sorrow from his stand, and was perhaps at this very moment refashioning Sorrow’s pose into something closer to his own version of our old pet.

“It’s a good thing Egg never got hold of State o’ Maine,” Lilly said.

“It’s a good thing
Frank
didn’t get hold of State o’ Maine,” Franny noted.

“There’s not going to be much room for dancing,” said Ronda Ray, wearily. “We can’t move any of the chairs out of the way.”

“We’ll dance around the chairs!” Father cried, optimistically.

“Screwed down for life,” Franny murmured, but Father heard her, and he wasn’t ready to hear any of Iowa Bob’s old lines played back to him—not just yet. He looked very hurt, then he looked away. I remember New Year’s Eve of 1956 as a time when everyone did a lot of “looking away.”

“Oh, damn,” Franny whispered to me, and looked—actually—ashamed.

Ronda Ray gave Franny a quick hug. “You just got to grow up a little, honey,” she said to her. “You got to find out: grown-ups don’t bounce back as fast as kids.”

We could hear Frank wailing for Egg in the stairwell. Frank didn’t “bounce back” so well, either, I thought. But Frank, in a way, was never a kid.

“Shut up your noise!” yelled Max Urick from the fourth floor.

“Come down and help us with the party—both of you!” Father cried.

“Kids!” Max bellowed.

“What does he know about kids?” Mrs. Urick grumbled. Then Harold Swallow called from Detroit. He wasn’t coming back to Dairy early, after all; he was going to miss the party. He said that he just remembered that New Year’s Eve depressed him and he always ended up watching the whole thing on television. “I might as well do that in Detroit,” he said. “I don’t have to take no airplane to Boston and ride in no car with Junior Jones and a whole crowd, just to stay in a funny hotel to watch New Year’s Eve on TV.”

“We won’t turn on the TV,” I told him. “It would conflict with the band, anyway.”

“Well,” he said. “Then I’d miss it. I better stay in Detroit.” There was never very much logic to the conversations one . had with Harold Swallow; I never knew what to say next to him.

“Sorry about Bob,” Harold said, and I thanked him and reported to the others.

“Nasty isn’t coming, either;” Franny said. “Nasty” was the Boston boyfriend of Franny’s friend Ernestine Tuck of Greenwich, Connecticut. Ernestine was called Bitty by everyone but Franny and Junior Jones. Apparently her mother had called her a “little bitty” one terrible night and the name, as they say, stuck. Ernestine didn’t seem to mind it, and she tolerated Junior Jones’s version of her name, too: she had wondrous breasts and Junior called her
Titsie
Tuck, and Franny did, too. Bitty Tuck idolized Franny so much that she would endure any insult from her; and everyone in the world, I used to think, would simply have to accept insults from Junior Jones. Bitty Tuck was rich and pretty and eighteen, and not a bad person—she was just so easy to tease—and she was coming for New Year’s Eve because she was what Franny called a party girl, and Franny’s only female friend at the Dairy School. At eighteen, Bitty was very sophisticated—in Franny’s opinion. The plan, Franny explained to me, was that Junior Jones and his sister were driving their own car from Philadelphia; they would pick up Titsie Tuck in Greenwich, en route, and then pick up Titsie’s boyfriend, Peter (“Nasty”) Raskin, in Boston. But now, Franny said, Nasty was not allowed to come—because he had insulted an aunt at a family wedding. Titsie had decided to come with Junior and his sister, anyway.

“Then there will be an extra girl—for Frank,” Father said, in his well-meaning way, and several shapes of death passed above us all, in silence.

“Just so there isn’t a girl for me,” said Egg.

“Egg!” Frank yelled, making us all jump. None of us knew that Egg was with us, or when he’d arrived, but he had changed his costume and was pretending to straighten up things in a busy fashion about the restaurant, as if he’d been working right along with the rest of us, all day.

“I want to talk to you, Egg,” Frank said.

“What?” said Egg.

“Don’t shout at Egg!” Lilly said, and drew Egg aside in her irritating, motherly fashion. We noticed that Lilly had taken an interest in mothering Egg as soon as Egg grew bigger than she was. Frank followed them into a corner of the room, hissing at Egg like a barrel of snakes.

“I know you’ve got him, Egg,” Frank was hissing.

“What?” Egg said.

Frank didn’t dare say “Sorrow” with Father in the restaurant, and none of us would allow Egg to be bullied; Egg was safe, and he knew it. Egg was wearing his infantry combat uniform; Franny had told me that she thought Frank probably wished he had a uniform like that, and that it made Frank mad every time Egg wore a uniform—and Egg had several. If Frank’s love of uniforms seemed odd, it seemed natural enough for Egg to love them; no doubt Frank resented this.

Then I asked Franny how Junior Jones’s sister was going to get back to Philadelphia once New Year’s was over and the Dairy School started again. Franny looked puzzled, and I explained that I didn’t think Junior was going to drive his sister all the way back to Philadelphia, and then come right back to Dairy for school, and he wouldn’t be allowed to keep a car at Dairy. That was against school rules.

“She’ll drive herself back, I suppose,” Franny said. “I mean, it’s her car—or I think it is.”

Then it dawned on me that Junior Jones’s sister, since they were bringing
her
car, had to be old enough to drive. “She’s got to be at least sixteen!” I said to Franny.

“Don’t be frightened,” Franny said. “How old do you guess Ronda is?” she whispered.

But the thought of an older girl was intimidating enough without imagining a
huge
older girl: a bigger, older, once-raped girl.

“It’s reasonable to assume that she’ll be black, too,” Franny said to me. “Or didn’t that occur to you, either?”

“That doesn’t bother me,” I said.

“Oh,
every
thing bothers you,” Franny said. “Titsie Tuck is eighteen and she bothers the hell out of you, and she’ll be here, too.”

That was true: Titsie Tuck referred to me, publicly, as “cute”—in her rich, rather condescending way. But I don’t mean that; she was nice—she just never regarded me at all, unless it was to joke with me; she was intimidating to me in the way someone who never remembers your name can be intimidating. “In this world,” Franny once observed, “just when you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that they’ve met you.”

It was an up-and-down day at the Hotel New Hampshire, getting ready for New Year’s Eve: I remember that something more pronounced than even the usual weave of silliness and sadness seemed to hang over us all, as if we’d be conscious, from time to time, of hardly mourning for Iowa Bob at all—and conscious, at other times, that our most necessary responsibility (not just in spite of but
because
of Iowa Bob) was to have fun. It was perhaps our first test of a dictum passed down to my father from old Iowa Bob himself; it was a dictum Father preached to us, over and over again. It was so familiar to us, we wouldn’t dream of not behaving as if we believed it, although we probably never knew—until much later—whether we believed it or not.

The dictum was connected with Iowa Bob’s theory that we were all on a big ship—“on a big cruise, across the world.” And in spite of the danger of being swept away, at any time, or perhaps because of the danger, we were not
allowed
to be depressed or unhappy. The way the world worked was
not
cause for some sort of blanket cynicism or sophomoric despair; according to my father and Iowa Bob, the way the world worked—which was badly—was just a strong-incentive to live purposefully, and to be determined about living well.

“Happy fatalism,” Frank would speak of their philosophy, later; Frank, as a troubled youth, was not a believer.

And one night, when we were watching a wretched melodrama on the TV above the bar in the Hotel New Hampshire, my mother said, “I don’t want to see the end of this. I like happy endings.”

And Father said, “There are no happy endings.”

“Right!” cried Iowa Bob—an odd mixture of exuberance and stoicism in his cracked voice. “Death is horrible, final, and frequently premature,” Coach Bob declared.

“So what?” my father said.

“Right!” cried Iowa Bob. “That’s the point: So what?”

Thus the family maxim was that an unhappy ending did not undermine a rich and energetic life. This was based on the belief that there
were
no happy endings. Mother resisted this, and Frank was morose about it, and Franny and I were probably believers of this religion—or if, at times, we doubted Iowa Bob, the world would always come up with something that seemed to prove the old lineman right. We never knew what Lilly’s religion was (no doubt it was a small idea, kept to herself), and Egg would be the retriever of Sorrow, in more than one sense. Retrieving Sorrow is a kind of religion, too.

The board that Frank had found with the paw prints on it and the Sorrow holes in it, looking like the abandoned crucifix of a four-footed Christ, seemed ominous to me. I talked Franny into a bed check, although she said Frank and I were nuts—Egg, she said, had probably wanted to keep the
board
and had thrown the
dog
away. Of course the intercom revealed nothing, since Sorrow—whether he was thrown away or hidden—was no longer breathing. There was a strange blowing sound, like the rushing of air, from 4A—at the opposite end of the hall from Max Urick’s static—but Franny said there was probably a window open: Ronda Ray had made up that bed for Bitty Tuck, and the room had probably been stuffy.

“Why are we putting Bitty way up on the fourth floor?” I asked.

“Because Mother thought she’d be here with Nasty,” Franny said, “and that way—stuck up on the fourth floor—they could have some privacy from you kids.”

“From
us
kids, you mean,” I said. “Where’s Junior sleeping?”

“Not with me,” Franny said crisply. “Junior and Sabrina have their own rooms on the second floor.”

“Sa-
bree
-na?” I said.

“That’s it,” Franny said.

Sabrina Jones! I thought, and experienced a cataclysmic closing of the throat. Seventeen and six-foot-six, I imagined; goes about 185, stripped and towel dried—and she can bench-press 200 pounds.

“How big is she?” I asked Lilly, but of course everyone looked enormous to Lilly; I would have to see Sabrina Jones for myself.

“They’re here,” Lilly came and told us at the switchboard, in her wispy voice. The sight of the size of Junior Jones always took Lilly’s breath away.

Frank, indulging in a moment of overt self-consciousness, had dressed himself in his bus driver’s uniform and was playing doorman at the Hotel New Hampshire. He was carrying Bitty Tuck’s luggage into the lobby; Bitty Tuck was the kind of girl who had luggage. She wore a sort of man’s suit, but it had been tailored for a woman, and even a sort of man’s dress shirt, with a button-down collar and tie, and everything—except the breasts, which were extraordinary, as Junior Jones had observed: they were impossible to conceal even in the most mannish costume. She flounced into the lobby behind Frank, who was sweating with her luggage.

“Hi, John-John!” she said.

“Hi, Titsie,” I said, not meaning to let her nickname slip out, because only Junior and Franny could call her Titsie and not receive her scorn. She looked at me scornfully and rushed past me, embracing Franny with the strange shrieks her kind of girl seems to have been born making.

“The bags go to 4A, Frank,” I said.

“Jesus, not now they don’t,” Frank said, collapsing with Bitty’s luggage in the lobby. “It will take a team effort,” he said. “Maybe some of you fools will get excited enough to actually have
fun
doing it, during the party.”

Junior Jones loomed in the lobby, looking capable of
hurling
Bitty Tuck’s luggage up four floors—including Frank with the bags, I thought.

“Hey, the fun is here,” said Junior Jones. “Here’s the fun, man.”

I tried to see past him, or around him; to the doorway. For a terrified second I actually looked
above
him, as if his sister, Sabrina, might be towering there.

“Hey, Sabrina,” said Junior Jones. “Here’s your weight lifter.”

In the doorway was a slender Negress, about my height; her high, floppy-brimmed hat perhaps made her appear a little taller—and she wore heels. Her suit—a woman’s suit—was every ounce as fashionable as Bitty Tuck’s attire; she wore a cream-colored silky blouse with a wide collar, and it was open down her long throat to just a glimpse of the red lace of her bra; she wore rings on every finger, and bracelets, and she was a wondrous bitter-chocolate color, with wide bright eyes and a wide mouth smiling, full of strange but handsome teeth; she smelled so nice, and from so far away, that even Bitty Tuck’s shrieks were diminished by the scent of Sabrina Jones. She was, I guessed, about twenty-eight or thirty, and she looked a little surprised to be introduced to me. Junior Jones, who was awfully quick for his size, moved far away from us fast.

“
You’re
the weight lifter?” said Sabrina Jones.

“I’m only fifteen years old,” I lied; I would be fifteen very soon, after all.