The Hotel New Hampshire (8 page)

The first thing he did with us, in the fall of 1946, was to take us to Maine, where we’d never been before, to visit the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea. Of course, it was a romantic pilgrimage for my father and mother—an expedition for old times’ sake. Lilly was too young to travel and Earl was too old, but Father insisted that Earl come with us.

“The Arbuthnot is his place, too, for God’s sake,” Father told Mother. “It wouldn’t be the same—to be at the Arbuthnot without old State o’ Maine!”

So Lilly was left with Coach Bob, and Mother drove the 1940 Chevy coupe, with Frank, Franny, and me, a big basket of picnic food, and a mountain of blankets. Father got the 1937 Indian running; he drove it, with Earl in the sidecar. That was how we traveled, unbelievably slowly, up the torturous coast highway, many years before there was a Maine Turnpike. It took hours to get to Brunswick; it took another hour past Bath. And then we saw the rough, moving, bruise-colored water that was the mouth of the Kennebec meeting the sea, Fort Popham, and the fishing shacks at Bay Point—and the chain drawn across the driveway to the Arbuthnot. The sign said:

CLOSED FOR THE SEASON!

The Arbuthnot had been closed for many seasons. Father must have realized this soon after he took down the chain and our caravan drove up to the old hotel. Bleached colorless as bones, the buildings stood abandoned and boarded-up; every window that was showing had been smashed or shot out. The faded flag for the eighteenth green had been stabbed into a crack between the floorboards of the overhanging porch, where the ballroom was; the flag drooped from the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea as if to indicate that this had been a castle taken by siege.

“Jesus God,” Father said. We children huddled around my mother and complained. It was cold; it was foggy; the place scared us. We’d been told we were going to a resort hotel, and if this was what a
hotel
was, we knew we wouldn’t like it. Great clots of grass had pushed their way through the ruptured clay of the tennis courts, and the lawn for croquet was knee-high, to my father, with a saw-edged kind of marsh grass that grows wildly by salt water. Frank cut himself on an old wicket and began to snivel. Franny insisted on Father’s carrying her. I hung to my mother’s hips. Earl, whose arthritis affected him disagreeably, refused to move away from the motorcycle and threw up in his muzzle. When Father took his muzzle off, Earl found something in the dirt and tried to eat it; it was an old tennis ball, which Father took from him and tossed far away, toward the sea. Gamely, Earl started to retrieve the ball; then the old bear seemed to forget what he was doing and just sat there squinting at the docks. Probably he could barely see them.

The hotel piers were sagging. The boathouse had been washed out to sea in a hurricane during the war. The fishermen had tried to use the old docks to bolster up their fishing weirs, which were strung together down at the lobstermen’s dock at Bay Point, where a man or a boy appeared to be standing guard with a rifle. He was stationed there to shoot seals, Father had to explain—because the far-off figure with the gun startled my mother. Seals were the number one reason why weir fishing would never be too successful in Maine: the seals broke into the weirs, gorged themselves on the trapped fish, and then broke out. They ate a lot of fish this way, and destroyed the nets in the process, and the fishermen shot them whenever they could.

“It’s what Freud would have called ‘one of the gross rules of nature,’ ” Father said. He insisted on showing us the dormitories where he and Mother had stayed.

It must have been depressing to both of them-it was simply uncomfortable and foreign to us children—but I think my mother was more upset at Father’s reaction to the fall of the Arbuthnot than she was upset by what had happened to the once great resort.

“The war changed a lot of things,” Mother said, showing us her famous shrug.

“Jesus God,” Father kept saying. “Think of what it
could
have been!” he cried. “How could they have blown it? They weren’t
democratic
enough,” he told us baffled kids. “There ought to be a way to have standards, to have good taste, and still not be so exclusive that you go under. There ought to be a livable compromise between the Arbuthnot and some hole like Hampton Beach. Jesus God!” he kept calling out. “Jesus God.”

We followed him around the beaten buildings, the mangled and grown-amok lawns. We found the old bus that the band members had traveled in, and the truck the grounds crew had used—it was full of rusty golf clubs. They were the vehicles Freud had fixed and kept running; they wouldn’t run anymore.

“Jesus God,” Father said.

We heard Earl calling to us from far away. “Earl!” he called.

We heard two shots from the rifle, from far away—down on the Bay Point dock. I think we all knew that it was not the sound of a seal being shot. It was Earl.

“Oh no, Win,” my mother said. She picked me up and started running; Frank ran in agitated circles around her. Father ran with Franny in his arms.

“State o’ Maine!” he cried.

“I shot a bear!” the boy on the dock was calling. “I shot a whole bear!” He was a boy in dungaree coveralls and a soft flannel shirt; both knees were gone out of the coveralls and his carrot-colored hair was stiff and shiny from saltwater spray; he had a curious rash on his pale face; he had very poor teeth; he was only thirteen or fourteen years old. “I shot a bear!” he screamed. He was very excited, and the fishermen out on the sea must have wondered what he was yelling about. They couldn’t hear him, over their trolling motors and the wind off the water, but they slowly gathered their boats around the dock and came bobbing in to land, to see what the matter was.

Earl lay on the dock with his big head on a coil of tarred rope, his hind paws crumpled under him, and one heavy forepaw only inches from a bucket of baitfish. The bear’s eyes had been so bad for so long, he must have mistaken the boy with the rifle for Father with a fishing pole. He might even, dimly, have remembered eating lots of pollack off that dock. And when he wandered down there, and got close to the boy, the old bear’s
nose
was still good enough to smell the bait. The boy, watching out to sea—for seals—had no doubt been frightened by the way the bear had greeted him. He was a good shot, although at that range even a poor shot would have hit Earl; the boy shot the bear twice in the heart.

“Gosh, I didn’t know he
belonged
to anybody,” the boy with the rifle told my mother, “I didn’t know he was a
pet
.”

“Of course you didn’t,” my mother soothed him.

“I’m sorry, mister,” the boy told Father, but Father didn’t hear him. He sat beside Earl on the dock and raised the dead bear’s head into his lap; he hugged Earl’s old face to his stomach and cried and cried. He was crying for more than Earl, of course. He was crying for the Arbuthnot, and Freud, and for the summer of ’39; but we were very worried, we children—because, at that time, we had known Earl longer, and better, than we really knew our father. It was very confusing to us—why this man, home from Harvard, and home from the war, should be dissolved in tears, hugging our old bear. We were, all of us, really too young to have
known
Earl, but the bear’s presence—the stiff feel of his fur, the heat of his fruity and mud-like breath, the dead-geranium and urine smell of him—was more memorable to us, for example, than the ghosts of Latin Emeritus and my mother’s mother.

I truly remember this day on the dock below the ruined Arbuthnot. I was four, and I sincerely believe that this is my first memory of life itself—as opposed to what I was told happened, as opposed to the pictures other people have painted for me. The man with the strong body and the gentleman’s face was my father, who had come to live with us; he sat sobbing with Earl in his arms—on a rotting dock, over dangerous water. Little boats chugged nearer and nearer. My mother hugged us to her, as tightly as Father held fast to Earl.

“I think the dumb kid shot someone’s dog,” a man in one of the boats said.

Up the dock’s ladder came an old fisherman in a dirty-yellow oilskin slicker, his face a mottled tan beneath a dirty-white and spotty beard. His wet boots sloshed and he smelled more strongly of fish than the bucket of bait by Earl’s curled paw. He was plenty old enough to have been active in the vicinity in the days when the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea had been the grand hotel it was. The fisherman, too, had seen better days.

When this old man saw the dead bear, he took off his broad sou’wester hat and held it in one hand, which was big and hard as a gaff. “Holy cow,” he said, reverently, wrapping an arm around the shoulders of the shaken boy with the rifle. “Holy cow. You kilt State o’ Maine.”

2

The First Hotel New Hampshire

The first Hotel New Hampshire came about this way: when the Dairy School realized it had to admit women to its student body, in order to survive, the Thompson Female Seminary was put out of business; there was suddenly a large, unusable piece of real estate on the Dairy market—a market that was forever depressed. No one knew what to do with the huge building that had once been an all-girls’ school.

“They should burn it,” Mother suggested, “and turn the whole area into a park.”

It was something of a park, anyway—a high plot of ground, maybe two acres, in the dilapidated heart of the town of Dairy. Old clapboard houses, once for large families and now rented piecemeal to widows and widowers—and to the retired Dairy School faculty—surrounded by dying elms, which surrounded the four-story brick monster of a school building, which was named after Ethel Thompson. Miss Thompson had been an Episcopal minister who had successfully masqueraded as a man until her death (the Reverend
Edward
Thompson, she’d been called, rector of the Dairy Episcopal Parish and notorious for hiding runaway slaves in the rectory). The discovery that she was a woman (following an accident in which she was crushed while changing a wheel of her carriage) came as no surprise to a few of the Dairy menfolk who had taken their problems to her at the height of her popularity as rector. She had somehow acquired a lot of money, not a penny of which was left to the church; it was all left to found a female seminary—“until,” Ethel Thompson wrote, “that abomination of a boys’ academy is forced to take in girls.”

My father would have agreed that the Dairy School was an abomination. Although we children loved playing on its athletic fields, Father never ceased reminding us that Dairy was not a “real” school. Just as the town of Dairy had once been dairy land, so had the athletic fields of the school been a pasture for cows; and when the school had been founded, in the early 1800s, the old barns were allowed to stand beside the newer school buildings, and the old cows were allowed, like the students, to wander freely about the school. Modern landscaping had improved the fields for sports, but the barns, and the first of the original buildings, still occupied the scruffy center of the campus; some token cows still occupied the barns. It had been the school’s “game plan,” as Coach Bob called it, to have the students care for the dairy farm while going to school—a plan that led to a lax education and poorly cared-for cows, a plan that was abandoned before the First World War. There were still those on the Dairy School faculty—and many of them were the newer, younger faculty—who believed that this combination of a school and a farm should be returned to.

My father resisted the plan to return the Dairy School to what he called “a barnyard-experiment in education.”

“When my kids are old enough to go to this wretched school,” he would rage to my mother, and to Coach Bob, “they will no doubt be given academic credit for planting a garden.”

“And varsity letters for shoveling shit!” said Iowa Bob.

The school, in other words, was in search of a philosophy. It was now firmly second-rate among conventional prep schools; although it modeled its curriculum on the acquiring of academic skills, the school’s faculty grew less and less able to teach such skills and, conveniently, less convinced of the need for such skills—after all, the student body was decreasingly receptive. Admissions were down, hence admission standards fell even lower; the school became one of those places you could get into almost immediately upon being thrown out of another school. A few of the faculty, like my father, who believed in teaching people how to read and write—and even punctuate—despaired that such skills were largely wasted on students like these. “Pearls before swine,” Father ranted. “We might as well teach them how to rake hay and milk cows.”

“They can’t play football, either,” Coach Bob mourned. “They won’t
block
for each other.”

“They won’t even run,” Father said.

“They won’t
hit
anybody,” said Iowa Bob.

“Oh yes they will,” said Frank, who was always picked on.

“They broke into the greenhouse and vandalized all the plants,” said Mother, who read of this incident in the school paper, which was, Father said, illiterate.

“One of them showed me his thing,” Franny said, to cause trouble.

“Where?” Father said.

“Behind the hockey rink,” Franny said.

“What were you doing behind the hockey rink, anyway?” Frank said, disgusted as usual.

“The hockey rink is warped,” Coach Bob- said. “There’s been no maintenance since that man, whatever his name was, retired.”

“He didn’t retire, he
died
,” Father said. Father was often exasperated with his father, now that Iowa Bob was getting older.

In 1950 Frank was ten, Franny was nine, I was eight, and Lilly was four; Egg had just been born, and in his ignorance was spared
our
dread that we would one day be expected to attend the much accused Dairy School. Father was sure that by the time Franny was old enough, they would be admitting girls.

“Not out of anything resembling a progressive instinct,” he claimed, “but purely to avoid bankruptcy.”

He was right, of course. By 1952 the Dairy School’s academic standards were in question; its admissions were steadily falling, and its admission standards were even further in question. And when the admissions continued to go down, the tuition went up, which turned away even more students, which meant some faculty had to be let go—and others, the ones with principles
and
other means, resigned.