The Hotel New Hampshire

'Never mind that,' Frank said.

'It doesn't matter when,' Lilly said, in her weird way.

And that was true -- it didn't really matter when. When they left the summer of 1939 and the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea, my mother and father were in love -- and in their minds, married. After all, they had promised Freud. They had his 1937 Indian and his bear, now named Earl, and when they arrived home in Dairy, New Hampshire, they drove first to the Bates family house.

'Mary's home!' my mother's mother called.

'What's that machine she's on?' said old Latin Emeritus. 'Who's that with her?'

'It's a motorcycle and that's Win Berry!' my mother's mother said.

'No, no!' said Latin Emeritus. 'Who's the other one?' The old man stared at the bundled figure in the sidecar.

'It must be Coach Bob,' said my mother's mother.

That moron!' Latin Emeritus said. 'What in hell is he wearing in this weather? Don't they know how to dress in Iowa?'

'I'm going to marry Win Berry!' my mother rushed up and told her parents. That's his motorcycle. He's going to Harvard. And this . . . is Earl.'

Coach Bob was more understanding. He liked Earl.

'I'd love to know what he could bench-press,' the former Big Ten lineman said. 'But can't we cut his nails?'

It was silly to have another wedding; my father thought that Freud's service would suffice. But my mother's family insisted that they be married by the Congregational minister who had taken Mother to her graduation dance, and so they were.

It was a small, informal wedding, where Coach Bob played the best man and Latin Emeritus gave his daughter away, with only an occasional mumbling of an odd Latin phrase; my mother's mother wept, full of the knowledge that Win Berry was not the Harvard man destined to whisk Mary Bates back to Boston -- at least, not right away. Earl sat out the whole service in the sidecar of the' 37 Indian, where he was pacified with crackers and herring.

My mother and father had a brief honeymoon by themselves.

'Then you surely must have done it!' Franny always cried. But they probably didn't; they didn't stay anywhere overnight. They took an early train to Boston and wandered around Cambridge, imagining themselves living there, one day, and Father attending Harvard; they took the milk train back to New Hampshire, arriving at dawn the next day. Their first nuptial bed would have been the single bed in my mother's girlhood room in the house of Latin Emeritus -- which was where my mother would still reside, while Father sought his fortune for Harvard.

Coach Bob was sorry to see Earl leave. Bob was sure the bear could be taught to play defensive end, but my father told Iowa Bob that the bear was going to be his family's meal ticket and his tuition. So one evening (after the Nazis took Poland), with the earliest nip of fall in the air, my mother kissed my father good-bye on the athletic fields of the Dairy School, which rolled right up to Iowa Bob's back door.

'Look after your parents,' my father told Mother, 'and I'll be back to look after you.'

'Yuck!' Franny always groaned for some reason, this part bothered her. She never believed it. Lilly, too, shivered and turned up her nose.

'Shut up and listen to the story,' Frank always said.

At least I'm not opinionated to the degree of my brothers and sisters. I could simply see how Mother and Father must have kissed: carefully -- Coach Bob amusing the bear with some game, so that Earl would not think my mother and father were eating something that they weren't sharing with him. Kissing would always be hazardous around Earl.

My mother told us that she knew my father would be faithful to her because the bear would maul him if he kissed anybody.

'And were you faithful?' Franny asked Father, in her terrible way.

'Why, of course,' Father said.

'I'll bet,' Franny said. Lilly always looked worried -- Frank looked away.

That was the fall of 1939. Although she didn't know it, my mother was already pregnant -- with Frank. My father would motorcycle down the East Coast, his exploration of resort hotels -- the big-band sounds, the bingo crowds, and the casinos -- taking him farther and farther south as the seasons changed. He was in Texas in the spring of 1940 when Frank was born; Father and Earl were at that time touring with an outfit called the Lone Star Brass Band. Bears were popular in Texas -although some drunk in Fort Worth had tried to steal the 1937 Indian, unaware that Earl slept chained to it. Texas law charged Father for the man's hospitalization, and it cost Father some more of his earnings to drive all the way East to welcome his first child into the world.

My mother was still in the hospital when Father returned to Dairy. They called Frank 'Frank' because my father said that was what they would always be to each other and to the family: 'frank.'

'Yuck!' Franny used to say. But Frank was quite proud of the origins of his name.

Father stayed with my mother in Dairy only long enough to get her pregnant again. Then he and Earl hit Virginia Beach and the Carolinas. They were banned from Falmouth, Cape Cod, on the Fourth of July, and back home with Mother in Dairy -- to recover -- soon after their disaster. The 1937 Indian had thrown a bearing in the Falmouth Independence Day Parade, and Earl had run amok when a fireman from Buzzards Bay tried to help Father with the ailing motorcycle. The fireman was unfortunately accompanied by two Dalmatian dogs, a breed not known for intelligence; doing nothing to disprove their reputation, the Dalmatians attacked Earl in the sidecar. Earl beheaded one of them quite cleanly, then chased the other one into the marching unit of the Osterville Men's Softball Team, where the foolish dog attempted to conceal himself. The parade was thus scattered, the grieving fireman from Buzzards Bay refused my father any more help with the Indian, and the sheriff of Falmouth escorted Father and Earl to the city limits. Since Earl refused to ride in cars, this had been a most tedious escort, Earl sitting in the sidecar of the motorcycle, which had to be towed. They were five days finding parts to rebuild the engine.

Worse, Earl had developed a taste for dogs. Coach Bob tried to train him out of this maiming habit by teaching him other sports: retrieving balls, perfecting the forward roll -- even sit-ups -- but Earl was already old, and not blessed with the belief in vigorous exercise that possessed Iowa Bob. Slaughtering dogs didn't even require much running, Earl discovered; if he was sly -- and Earl was sly -- the dogs would come right up to him. 'And then it's all over,' Coach Bob observed. 'What a hell of a linebacker he could have been!'