The Hotel New Hampshire

The desk manager whispered to Father, 'Get Freud.'

'Stitches?' Freud said. 'The doctor lives all the way in Bath, and he's a drunk. But I know how to stitch anybody.'

The desk manager ran out to the dorm and shouted for Freud.

'Get on your Indian and bring old Doc Todd here! We'll sober him up when he arrives,' the manager said. 'But for God's sake, get going!'

'It will take an hour, if I can find him,' Freud said. 'You know I can handle stitching. Just get me the proper clothes.'

This is different,' the desk manager said. 'I think it's different, Freud -- I mean, the guy. He's a German, Freud. And it's his face that's cut.'

Freud stripped his work clothes off his pitted, olive body; he began to comb his damp hair. The clothes,' he said. 'Just bring them. It's too complicated to get old Doc Todd.'

The wound is on his face, Freud,' Father said.

'So what's a face?' said Freud. 'Just skin, ja? Like on the hands or foots. I've sewn up lots of foots before. Axel and saw cuts -- them stupid loggers.'

Outside, the other Germans from the ship were bringing trunks and heavy luggage the shortest distance from the pier to the entranceway -- across the eighteenth green. 'Look at those swine,' Freud said. 'Putting dents where the little white ball will get caught.'

The headwaiter came into Freud's room. It was the best room in the men's dorm -- no one knew how Freud ended up with it. The headwaiter began to undress.

'Everything but your jacket, dummy,' Freud said to him. 'Doctors don't wear waiters' jackets.'

Father had a black tuxedo jacket that more or less agreed with the waiter's black pants, and he brought it to Freud.

'I've told them, a million times,' the headwaiter said -- although he looked strange saying this with any authority, while he was naked. There should be a doctor who actually lives at the hotel.'

When Freud was all dressed, he said, There is.' The desk manager ran back to the main hotel ahead of him. Father watched the headwaiter looking helplessly at Freud's abandoned clothes; they were not very clean and they smelled strongly of State o' Maine; the waiter, clearly, did not want to put them on. Father ran to catch up with Freud.

The Germans, now in the driveway outside the entrance, were grinding a large trunk across the gravel; someone would have to rake the stones in the morning. 'Is der not enough help at dis hotel to help us?' one of the Germans yelled.

On the spotless counter, in the serving room between the main dining hall and the kitchen, the big German with the gashed cheek lay like a corpse, his pale head resting on his folded-up dinner jacket, which would never be white again; his propeller of a dark tie sagged limply at his throat, his cummerbund heaved.

'It'z a goot doctor?' he asked the desk manager. The young giantess in the gown with the yellow ruching held the German's hand.

'An excellent doctor,' the desk manager said.

'Especially at stitching,' my father said. My mother held his hand.

'It'z not too civilized a hotel, I tink,' the German said.

'It'z in der vilderness,' the tawny, athletic woman said, but she dismissed herself with a laugh. 'But it'z nicht so bad a cut, I tink,' she told Father and Mother, and the desk manager. 'We don't need too goot a doctor to fix it up, I tink.'

'Just so it'z no Jew,' the German said. He coughed. Freud was in the small room, though none of them had seen him; he was having trouble threading a needle.

'It'z no Jew, I'm sure.' The tawny princess laughed. They haf no Jews in Maine!' When she saw Freud, she didn't look so sure.

'Guten Abend, meine Dame und Herr,' Freud said. 'Was ist los?'

My father said that Freud, in the black tuxedo, was a figure so runted and distorted by his boil scars that he immediately looked as if he had stolen his clothes; the clothes appeared to have been stolen from at least two different people. Even his most visible instrument was black -- a black spool of thread, which Freud grasped in the grey-rubber kitchen gloves the dishwashers wore. The best needle to be found in the laundry room of the Arbuthnot looked too large in Freud's small hand, as if he'd grabbed the needle used to sew the sails for the racing boats. Perhaps he had.

'Herr Doktor?' the German asked, his face whitening. His wound appeared to stop bleeding, instantly.

'Herr Doktor Professor Freud,' Freud said, moving in close and leering at the wound.

'Freud?' the woman said.

'Ja,' Freud said.