The Hotel New Hampshire (63 page)

“You should
not
feed her at the table,” Lilly scolded Father, but we all liked the dog. She was a German shepherd with a particularly rich golden-brown color that liberally interrupted the black all over her body and dominated the tone of her gentle face; she was particularly long-faced and high-cheek-boned, so that her appearance was nothing like a Labrador retriever’s. Father had wanted to call her Freud, but we thought there was enough confusion among us concerning
which
Freud was meant—by this remark or that. A
third
Freud, we convinced Father, would have driven everyone crazy.

Lilly suggested we call the dog Jung.

“What? That traitor! That anti-Semite!” Frank protested. “Whoever heard of naming a
female
after
Jung
?” Frank asked. “That’s something only
Jung
would have thought of,” he said, fuming.

Lilly then suggested we call the dog Stanhope, because of Lilly’s fondness for the fourteenth floor; Father liked the idea of naming his first Seeing Eye dog after a hotel, but he said he preferred naming the dog after a hotel he really liked. We all agreed, then, that the dog would be called “Sacher.” Frau Sacher, after all, had been a woman.

Sacher’s only bad habit was putting her head in Father’s lap every time Father sat down to eat anything, but Father encouraged this—so it was really Father’s bad habit. Sacher was otherwise a model Seeing Eye dog. She did not attack other animals, thus dragging my father wildly out of control after her; she was especially smart about the habits of elevators—blocking the door from reclosing with her body until my father had entered or exited. Sacher barked at the doorman at the St. Moritz but was otherwise friendly, if a trifle aloof, with Father’s fellow pedestrians. These were the days before you had to clean up after your dog in New York City, so Father was spared that humiliating task—which would have been almost impossible for him, he realized. In fact, Father feared the passing of such a law years before anyone was talking about it. “I mean,” he’d say, “if Sacher shits in the middle of Central Park South, how am I supposed to
find
the crap? It’s bad enough to have to pick up dog shit, but if you can’t
see
it, it’s positively arduous. I won’t do it!” he would shout. “If some self-righteous citizen even
tries
to speak to me, even
suggests
that I am responsible for my dog’s messes, I think I’ll use the baseball bat!” But Father was safe—for a while. We wouldn’t be living in New York by the time they passed the dog shit law. As the weather got nice, Sacher and my father would walk, unaccompanied, between the Stanhope and Central Park South, and my father felt free to be blind to Sacher’s shitting.

At Frank’s, the dog slept on the rug between Father’s bed and mine, and I sometimes wondered, in my sleep, if it was Sacher I heard dreaming, or Father.

“So you dreamed about the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea,” Franny said to Father. “So what else is new?”

“No,” Father said. “It wasn’t one of the
old
dreams. I mean, your mother wasn’t there. We weren’t
young
again, or anything like that.”

“No man in a white dinner jacket, Daddy?” Lilly asked him.

“No, no,” Father said. “I was old. In the dream I was even older than I am now,” he said; he was forty-five. “In the dream,” Father said, “I was just walking along the beach with Sacher; we were just taking a stroll over the grounds—around the hotel,” he said.

“All around the
ruins
, you mean,” Franny said.

“Well,” Father said, slyly, “of course I couldn’t actually
see
if the Arbuthnot was still a ruin, but I had the feeling it was
restored
—I had the feeling it was all fixed up,” Father said, shoveling food off his plate and into his lap—and into Sacher. “It was a brand-new hotel,” Father said, impishly.

“And you
owned
it, I’ll bet,” Lilly said to him.

“You
did
say I could do
anything
, didn’t you, Frank?” Father asked.

“In the dream you
owned
the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea?” Frank asked him. “And it was all fixed up?”

“Open for business as usual, Pop?” Franny asked him.

“Business as usual,” Father said, nodding; Sacher nodded, too.

“Is
that
what you want to do?” I asked Father. “You want to own the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea?”

“Well,” Father said. “Of course we’d have to change the name.”

“Of course,” Franny said.

“The
third
Hotel New Hampshire!” Frank cried. “Lilly!” he shouted. “Just think of it!
Another
TV series!”

“I haven’t really been working on the first series,” Lilly said, worriedly.

Franny knelt beside Father; she put her hand on his knee; Sacher licked Franny’s fingers. “You want to do it
again
?” Franny asked Father. “You want to start all over again? You understand that you don’t
have
to.”

“But what
else
would I do, Franny?” he asked her, smiling. “It’s the
last
one—I promise you,” he said, addressing all of us. “If I can’t make the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea into something special, then I’ll throw in the towel.”

Franny looked at Frank and shrugged; I shrugged, too, and Lilly just rolled her eyes. Frank said, “Well, I guess it’s simple enough to inquire what it costs, and who owns it.”

“I don’t want to see him—if
he
still owns it,” Father said. “I don’t want to see the bastard.” Father was always pointing out to us the things he didn’t want to “see,” and we were usually restrained enough to resist pointing out to him that he couldn’t “see” anything.

Franny said she didn’t want to see the man in the white dinner jacket, either, and Lilly said she saw him all the time—in her sleep; Lilly said she was tired of seeing him.

It would be Frank and I who would rent a car and drive all the way to Maine; Frank would teach me how to drive along the way. We would see the ruin that was the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea again. We would note that ruins don’t change a lot: what capacity for change is in a ruin has usually been. exhausted in the considerable process of change undergone in order for the ruin to
become
a ruin. Once becoming a ruin, a ruin stays pretty much the same. We noted some more vandalism, but it’s not much fun vandalizing a ruin, we supposed, and so the whole place looked almost exactly as it had looked to us in the fall of 1946 when we had all come to the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea to watch Earl die.

We had no trouble recognizing the dock where old State o’ Maine was shot, although that dock—and the surrounding docks—had been rebuilt, and there were a lot of new boats in the water. The Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea looked like a small ghost town, but what had once been a quaint fishing and lobstering village—alongside the hotel grounds—was now a scruffy little tourist town. There was a marina where you could rent boats and buy clam worms, and there was a rocky public beach within sight of the private beach belonging to the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea. Since no one was around to care, the “private” beach was hardly private anymore. Two families were having a picnic there when Frank and I visited the place; one of the families had arrived by boat, but the other family had driven right down to the beach in their car. They’d driven up the same “private” driveway that Frank and I had driven up, past the faded sign that still said: CLOSED FOR THE SEASON!

The chain that once had blocked that driveway had long ago been torn down and dragged away.

“It would cost a fortune to even make the place habitable,” Frank said.

“Provided they even want to sell it,” I said.

“Who in God’s name would want to
keep
it?” Frank asked.

It was at the realty office in Bath, Maine, that Frank and I found out that the man in the white dinner jacket still owned the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea—and he was still alive.

“You want to buy old Arbuthnot’s place!” the shocked realtor asked.

We were delighted to learn that there was an “old Arbuthnot.”

“I only hear from his lawyers,” the realtor said. “They’ve been trying to unload the place, for years. Old Arbuthnot lives in California,” the realtor told us, “but he’s got lawyers all over the country. The one I deal with most of the time is in New York.”

We thought, then, that it would simply be a matter of letting the New York lawyer know that we wanted it, but—back in New York—Arbuthnot’s lawyer told us that Arbuthnot wanted to see us.

“We’ll have to go to California,” Frank said. “Old Arbuthnot sounds as senile as one of the Hapsburgs, but he won’t sell the place unless he gets to
meet
us.”

“Jesus God,” Franny said. “That’s an expensive trip to make just to meet someone!”

Frank informed her that Arbuthnot was paying our way.

“He probably wants to laugh in your faces,” Franny told us.

“He probably wants to meet someone who’s crazier than
he
is,” Lilly said.

“I can’t believe I’m so lucky!” Father cried. “To imagine that it’s still available!” Frank and I saw no reason to describe the ruins—and the seedy new tourism surrounding his cherished Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea.

“He won’t
see
any of it, anyway,” Frank whispered.

And I am glad that Father never got the chance to see old Arbuthnot, a terminal resident of the Beverly Hills Hotel. When Frank and I arrived at the Los Angeles airport, we rented our second car of that week and drove ourselves to meet the aged Arbuthnot.

In a suite with its own palm garden, we found the old man with an attending nurse, an attending lawyer (this one was a California lawyer), and what would prove to be a fatal case of emphysema. He sat propped up in a fancy hospital bed—he sat breathing very carefully alongside a row of air-conditioners.

“I like L.A.,” Arbuthnot gasped. “Not so many Jews here as there are in New York. Or else I’ve finally gotten
immune
to Jews,” he added. Then he was flung off at a sharp angle on his hospital bed by a cough that seemed to attack him by surprise (and from the side); he sounded as if he were choking on a whole turkey leg—it seemed impossible he would recover, it seemed his persistent anti-Semitism would finally be the death of him (I’m sure that would have made Freud happy), but just as suddenly as the attack had seized him, the attack left him and he was calm. His nurse plumped up his pillows for him; his lawyer placed some important-looking documents upon the old man’s chest and produced a pen for old Arbuthnot to hold in his trembling hand.

“I’m dying,” Arbuthnot said to Frank and me, as if this hadn’t been obvious from our first glimpse of him. He wore white silk pajamas; he looked about one hundred years old; he couldn’t have weighed more than fifty pounds.

“They say they’re not Jews,” the lawyer told Arbuthnot, indicating Frank and me.

“Is
that
why you wanted to meet us?” Frank asked the old man. “You could have found that out over the phone.”

“I may be dying,” he said, “but I’m not selling out to the Jews.”

“My father,” I told Arbuthnot, “was a dear friend of Freud.”

“Not
the
Freud,” Frank said to Arbuthnot, but the old man had begun coughing again and he didn’t hear what Frank had to say.

“Freud?” Arbuthnot said, hacking and spewing. “
I
knew a Freud, too! He was a Jewish animal trainer. The Jews aren’t good with animals, though,” Arbuthnot confided to us. “Animals can tell, you know,” he said. “They can always sense anything funny about you,” he said. “This Freud
I
knew was a dumb Jewish animal trainer. He tried to train a bear, but the bear ate him!” Arbuthnot howled with delight—which brought on more coughing.

“A sort of anti-Semitic bear?” Frank asked, and Arbuthnot laughed so hard I thought his subsequent coughing would kill him.

“I was
trying
to kill him,” Frank said later.

“You must be crazy to want that place,” Arbuthnot told us. “I mean, don’t you know where
Maine
is? It’s nowhere! There’s no decent train service, and there’s no decent flying service. It’s a terrible place to drive to—it’s too far from
both
New York and Boston—and when you
do
get there, the water’s too cold and the bugs can bleed you to death in an hour. None of the really
class
sailors sail there anymore—I mean the sailors with money,” he said. “If you have a little money,” Arbuthnot said, “there’s absolutely nothing to spend it on in Maine! They don’t even have
whores
there.”

“We like it anyway,” Frank told him.

“They’re not Jews, are they?” Arbuthnot asked his lawyer.

“No,” the lawyer said.

“It’s hard to tell, looking at them,” Arbuthnot said. “I used to be able to spot a Jew at first glance,” he explained to us. “But I’m dying now,” he added.

“Too bad,” Frank said.

“Freud
wasn’t
eaten by a bear,” I told Arbuthnot.

“The Freud
I
knew was eaten by a bear,” Arbuthnot said.

“No,” said Frank, “the Freud you knew was a
hero
.”

“Not the Freud I knew,” old Arbuthnot argued, petulantly. His nurse caught some spittle dribbling off his chin and wiped him as absentmindedly as she might have dusted a table.

“The Freud we
both
know,” I said, “saved the Vienna State Opera.”

“Vienna!” Arbuthnot cried. “Vienna is full of Jews!” he yelled.

“There’s more of them in Maine than there used to be,” Frank teased him.

“In L.A., too,” I said.

“I’m dying, anyway,” Arbuthnot said. “Thank God.” He signed the documents on his chest and his lawyer handed them over to us. And that was how, in 1965, Frank bought the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea and twenty-five acres on the coast of Maine. “For a song,” as Franny would say.

An almost sky-blue mole was sprouting on old Arbuthnot’s face and both his ears were painted a vivid purple with gentian violet, an old-fashioned fungicide. It was as if a giant fungus were consuming Arbuthnot from the inside out. “Wait a minute,” he said, as we were leaving—his chest made a watery echo of his words. His nurse plumped up his pillows again; his lawyer snapped a briefcase shut; the cold of the room, from all the purring air-conditioners, made the place feel, to Frank and me, like the tomb—the
Kaisergruft
—for the heartless Hapsburgs in Vienna. “What are your plans?” Arbuthnot asked us. “What in hell are you going to
do
with that place?”