The Hotel New Hampshire

'You know,' he said, and closed the door. I heard Sorrow barking at the night, at everything in it, at nothing at all.

And I knew that if a white sloop had pulled up to the front porch and the trellises of the old Bates family house, my mother and father would not have been surprised. If the man in the white dinner jacket, who owned the once exotic Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea, had been there to greet them, they wouldn't have blinked an eye. If he'd been there, smoking, tanned and impeccable, and if he'd said to them, 'Welcome aboard!' -- they would have set out to sea on the white sloop there and then.

And when they walked up Pine Street to Elliot Park and turned past the last row of the houses lived in by the widows and widowers, the wretched Thompson Female Seminary must have shone in the night to them like a chateau, or a villa, throwing a gala for the rich and famous -- although there couldn't have been a light on, and the only soul around would have been the old policeman in his squad car, cruising every hour or so to break up the teen-agers who went there to neck. There was just one streetlight in Elliot Park; Franny and I would never cross the park after dark in our bare feet for fear of stepping on

beer bottle glass -- or used condoms.

But how Father must have painted a different picture! How he must have taken Mother past the stumps of long-dead elms -- the glass crunching underfoot must have imitated the sound of pebbles on an expensive beach, to them -- and how he must have said, 'Can't you just imagine it? A family-run hotel! We'd have it to ourselves most of the time. With the killing we'd make on the big school weekends, we wouldn't even have to advertise -at least, not much. Just keep the restaurant and bar open during the week, to attract the businessmen -- the lunch and cocktail crowd.'

'Businessmen?' my mother might have wondered aloud. 'What lunch and cocktail crowd?'

But even when Sorrow flushed the teen-agers from the bushes, even when the squad car stopped Father and Mother and asked them to identify themselves, my father must have been convincing. 'Oh, it's you, Win Berry,' the policeman must have said. Old Howard Tuck drove the night car; he was a moron and smelled of cigars extinguished in puddles of beer. Sorrow must have growled at him: here was an odour to conflict with the dog's own highly developed smell. 'Poor Bob's having a rough season,' old Howard Tuck probably said, because everyone knew my father was Iowa Bob's son; Father had been a backup quarterback for one of Coach Bob's old Dairy teams -- the teams that used to win.

'Another rough season,' my father must have joked.

'Wutcha doin' here?' old Howard Tuck must have asked them.

And my father, without a doubt, must have said, 'Well, Howard, between you and me, we're going to buy this place.'

'You are?'

'You betcha,' Father would have said. 'We're going to turn this place into a hotel.'

'A hotel?'

'That's right,' Father would have said. 'And a restaurant, with a bar, for the lunch and cocktail crowd.'

'The lunch and cocktail crowd,' Howard Tuck would have repeated.

'You've got the picture,' Father would have said. The finest hotel in New Hampshire!'

'Holy cow,' the cop could only have replied.

Anyway, it was the night-duty town patrolman, Howard Tuck, who asked my father, 'Wutcha gonna call it?'

Remember: it was night, and the night inspired my father. He had first seen Freud and his bear at night; he had fished with State o' Maine at night; nighttime was the only time the man in the white dinner jacket made an appearance; it was after dark when the German and his brass band arrived at the Arbuthnot to spill a little blood; it must have been dark when my father and mother first slept together; and Freud's Europe was in total darkness now. There in Elliot Park, with the patrol car's spotlight on him, my father looked at the four-storey brick school that indeed resembled a county jail -- the rust-iron fire escapes crawled all over it, like scaffolding on a building trying to become something else. No doubt he took my mother's hand. In the darkness, where the imagination is never impeded, my father felt the name of his future hotel, and our future, coming to him.

'Wutcha gonna call it?' asked the old cop.

'The Hotel New Hampshire,' my father said.

'Holy cow,' said Howard Tuck.

'Holy cow' might have been a better name for it, but the matter was decided: the Hotel New Hampshire it would be.

I was still awake when Mother and Father came home -- they were gone much longer than fifteen minutes, so I knew that they'd encountered at least the white sloop, if not Freud and the man in the white dinner jacket, along the way.

'My God, Sorrow,' I heard Father say. 'Couldn't you have done that outside?'

The vision of them coming home was clear to me: Sorrow snorting through the hedges alongside the clapboard buildings of the town, rousing the light-sleeping elderly from their beds. Confused with time, these old people might have looked out and seen my father with my mother, hand in hand, unaware of the years gone by, they would have gone back to bed, muttering, 'It's Iowa Bob's boy, with the Bates girl and that old bear, again.'

'Just one thing I don't understand,' my mother was saying. 'Will we have to sell this house, and move out of it, before we're ready to move in there?'

Because that was the only way he could afford to convert a school into a hotel, of course. The town would be glad to let him have the Thompson Female Seminary, dirt-cheap. Who wanted to have the eye-sore left empty, where children could get hurt, smashing the windows and climbing the fire escapes? But it was my mother's family house -- the lush Bates family house -- that would have to pay for the restoration. Perhaps this was what Freud meant: what Mother must forgive Father for.

'We may have to sell it before we move there,' Father said, 'but we may not have to move out. Those are just details.'

Those details (and others) would take us years, and would cause Franny to say, long after the stitches were out of her lip and the scar was so thin that you thought you could brush it away with your finger -- or that one good kiss would erase the mark from her mouth -- 'If Father could have bought another bear, he wouldn't have needed to buy a hotel.' But the first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels.