The Hotel New Hampshire

Even Frank laughed; I think it was the first time I'd heard Frank laugh since the time Father discovered the size of the fourth-floor toilets in the Hotel New Hampshire -- our fourth-floor 'outhouse for elves.'

We sometimes wondered if living in the Hotel New Hampshire would always be like this.

What seemed more important to know was who would come to stay in our hotel after we moved in and opened it for business. As that time approached, Father became more emphatic about his theories for the perfect hotel. He had seen an interview, on television, with the head of a hotel-management school -- in Switzerland. The man said that the secret to success was how quickly a new hotel could establish a pattern of advance bookings.

'Advance Bookings!' Father wrote on a shirt cardboard and stuck it to the refrigerator of Mother's soon-to-be-abandoned family house.

'Good morning, Advance Bookings!' we would greet each other at breakfast, to tease Father, but he was rather serious about it.

'You laugh,' he told us one morning. 'Well, I already have two.'

'Two what?' Egg asked.

'Two advance bookings,' Father said, mysteriously.

We were planning to open the weekend of the Exeter game. We knew that was the first 'advance booking.' Every year the Dairy School concluded its miserable football season by losing to one of the big schools, like Exeter or Andover, by a big score. It was always worse when we had to travel to those schools and play them on their own well-kept turf. Exeter, for example, had a real stadium; both Exeter and Andover had smart uniforms; they were both all-boys' schools then -- and the students wore coats and ties to classes. Some'of them even wore coats and ties to the football games, but even if they were informally attired, they looked bette

r than we did. It made us feel terrible to see students like that -- altogether clean and cocky. And every year our team stumbled out on the field, looking like shit and death -- and when the game was over, that was how we all felt.

Exeter and Andover traded us off; each one liked to use us for their next-to-last game -- a kind of warm-up exercise -- because their last game of the season was with each other.

But for Iowa Bob's winning season we were playing at home, and this year it would be Exeter. Win or lose, it would be a winning season, but most people -- even my father and Coach Bob -- thought that this year's Dairy team had a chance of going all the way; undefeated, and with a last-game victory over Exeter, a team the Dairy School had never beaten. With a winning season, even the alumni were coming back, and the Exeter game was made a parents' weekend. Coach Bob wished he had new uniforms to go with his imported backfield, and Junior Jones, but it pleased the old man to imagine that his tattered shit-and-death squad just might knock Exeter's crisp white uniforms with crimson letters, and crimson helmets, all over the field.

Exeter wasn't having too hot a year, anyway; they were poking along about 5-3 -- against better competition than we usually saw, to be sure, but it was not one of their great teams. Iowa Bob saw that he had a chance, and my father took the entire football season as a good omen for the Hotel New Hampshire.

The weekend of the Exeter game was booked in advance -- every room reserved, for two nights; and reservations for the restaurant on Saturday were already closed.

My mother was worried about the chef, as Father insisted on calling her; she was a Canadian from Prince Edward Island, where she'd cooked for a large shipping family for fifteen years. 'There's a difference between cooking for a family and cooking for a hotel' Mother warned Father.

'But it was a large family -- she said so,' Father said. 'And besides, we're a small hotel.'

'We're a full hotel for the Exeter weekend,' Mother said. 'And a full restaurant.'

The cook's name was Mrs. Urick; she was to be assisted by her husband, Max -- a former merchant seaman and galley cook who was missing the thumb and index finger of his left hand. An accident in the galley of a vessel called the Miss Intrepid, he told us children, with a salty wink. He had been distracted imagining what Mrs. Urick would do to him if she knew about his time ashore with an intrepid lady in Halifax.

'All at once I looked down,' Max told us -- Lilly never taking her eyes from his maimed hand. 'And there was my thumb and my finger amongst the bloody carrots, and the cleaver was hacking away with a will of its own.' Max flinched his claw of a hand, as if recoiling from the blade, and Lilly blinked. Lilly was ten, although she didn't seem to have grown much since she'd been eight. Egg, who was six, seemed less frail than Lilly -- and sturdily unimpressed with Max Urick's stories.

Mrs. Urick didn't tell stories. For hours she scrutinized crossword puzzles without filling in the squares; she hung Max's laundry in the kitchen, which had been the girls' locker room of the Thompson Female Seminary -- thus it was familiar with drying socks and underwear. Mrs. Urick and my father had decided that the most fetching menu for the Hotel New Hampshire would be family-style meals. By this Mrs. Urick meant a choice of two big roasts, or a New England boiled dinner; a choice of two pies -- and on Mondays a variety of meat pies, made from leftover roasts. For luncheons there would be soups and cold cuts; for breakfasts, griddle cakes, and so forth.

'Nothing fancy, but just plain good,' said Mrs. Urick, rather humorlessly; she reminded Franny and me of the kind of boarding-school dietician we were familiar with from the Dairy School -- a firm believer that food was no fun but, somehow, morally essential. We shared Mother's anxieties about the cooking -- since it would be our standard fare, too -- but Father was sure Mrs. Urick would manage.

She was given a basement room of her own, 'to be close to my kitchen,' she said; she expected her stockpots to simmer overnight. Max Urick had a room of his own, too -- on the fourth floor. There was no elevator, and my father was happy to use up a fourth-floor room. The fourth-floor rooms had the child-sized toilets and sinks, but since Max had done his bathroom business for so many years in the cramped latrine of the Miss Intrepid, he was not insulted by the dwarf facilities.

'Good for my heart,' Max told us. 'Good for pumping the blood -- all that stair-climbing,' he said, and whacked his stringy gray chest with his damaged hand. But we thought that Max would go to great lengths to keep as far from Mrs. Urick as possible; he would even climb stairs -- he would pee and wash in anything. He claimed to be 'handy,' and when he wasn't helping Mrs. Urick in the kitchen he was supposed to be fixing things. 'Everything from toilets to locks!' he claimed; he could click his tongue like a key turning in a lock, and he could make a terrible whooshing sound -- like the tiny fourth-floor toilets in the Hotel New Hampshire sending their matter on an awesome, long voyage.

'What's the second advance booking?' I asked Father.

We knew there'd be a Dairy School graduation weekend, in the spring; and maybe a big hockey-game weekend in the winter. But the small, if steady, visits from parents of students at the Dairy School would hardly require any booking in advance.

'Graduation, right?' Franny asked. But Father shook his head.

'A giant wedding!' Lilly cried, and we stared at her.

'Whose wedding?' Frank asked.

'I don't know,' Lilly said. 'But a giant one -- a really big one. The biggest wedding in New England.'

We never knew where Lilly thought up the things she thought up; Mother looked worriedly at her, then she spoke to Father.