“But even if I weren’t too ugly,” Susie protests, “I’m too old. I mean, after forty you can have all sorts of complications. I might not just have an ugly baby, I might not even
have
a baby—I might give birth to a kind of
banana
! After forty, it’s pretty risky.”
“Nonsense, Susie,” I tell her. “We’ll just get you in shape—a little light work with the weights, a little running. You’re young at heart, Susie,” I tell her. “The
bear in you
, Susie, is still a
cub
.”
“Convince me,” she tells me, and I know what that means. That’s our euphemism for it—whenever we want each other. She will just say, out of the blue, to me, “I need to be convinced.”
Or I will say to her, “Susie, you look in need of a little convincing.”
Or else Susie will just say “Earl!” to me, and I’ll know exactly what she means.
When we got married, that’s what she said when she came to her moment to say “I do.” Susie said, “Earl!”
“What?” the minister said.
“Earl!” Susie said, nodding.
“She
does
,” I told the minister. “That means she does.”
I suppose that neither Susie nor I will ever, quite, get over Franny, but we have our love for Franny in common, and that’s more to have in common than whatever thing it is that’s held in common by most couples. And if Susie was once Freud’s eyes, I now see for my father, so that Susie and I have the vision of Freud in common, too. “You got a marriage made in heaven, man,” Junior Jones has told me.
That morning after I’d first made love to Susie the bear I was a little late meeting Father in the ballroom for our weight-lifting session.
He was already lifting hard when I staggered in.
“Four hundred and sixty-four,” I said to him, because this was our traditional greeting. Recalling that old rogue, Schnitzler, Father and I thought it was a very funny way for two men living without women to greet each other.
“Four hundred and sixty-four, my eye!” Father grunted. “Four hundred and sixty-four—like hell! I had to listen to you half the night. Jesus God, I may be blind, but I can
hear
. By my count you’re down to about four hundred and fifty-eight. You haven’t got four hundred and sixty-four left in you—not anymore. Who the hell is she? I’ve never imagined such an
animal
!”
But when I told him I’d been with Susie the bear, and that I very much hoped she would stay and live with us, Father was delighted.
“That’s what we’ve been missing!” he cried. “That’s really perfect. I mean, you couldn’t ask for a better hotel. I think you’ve handled the hotel business brilliantly! But we need a bear. Everybody does! And now that you’ve got the bear, you’re home free, John. Now you’ve finally written the happy ending.”
Not quite, I thought. But, all things considered—given sorrow, given doom, given love—I knew things could be much worse.
So what is missing? Just a child, I think. A child is missing. I wanted a child, and I still want one. Given Egg, and given Lilly, children are all I am missing, now. I still might convince Susie the bear, of course, but Franny and Junior Jones will provide me with my first child. Even Susie is unafraid for
that
child.
“
That
child is going to be a beauty,” Susie says. “With Franny and Junior making it, how can it miss?”
“But how could
we
miss?” I ask her. “As soon as you have it, believe me, it will be beautiful.”
“But just think of the
color
,” Susie says. “I mean, with Junior and Franny making it, won’t it be an absolutely gorgeous fucking color?”
But I know, as Junior Jones has told me, that Franny and Junior’s baby might be
any
color—“I’ll give it a range between coffee and milk,” Junior likes to say.
“
Any
color baby is going to be a gorgeous-colored baby, Susie,” I tell her. “You know that.” But Susie just needs more convincing.
I think that when Susie
sees
Junior and Franny’s baby, it will make her want one, too. That’s what I hope, anyway—because I am almost forty, and Susie has already crossed that bridge, and if we’re going to have a baby, we shouldn’t wait much longer. I think that Franny’s baby will do the trick; even Father agrees—even Frank.
And isn’t it just like Franny to be so generous as to offer to have a baby for
me
? I mean, from that day in Vienna when she promised us all that she was going to take care of us, that she was going to be our mother, from that day forth, Franny has stuck to her guns, Franny has come through—the hero in her has kept pumping, the hero in Franny could lift a ballroom full of barbells.
It was just last winter, after the big snow, when Franny called me to say that she was going to have a baby—just for me. Franny was forty at the time; she said that having a baby was closing the door to a room she wouldn’t be coming back to. It was so early in the morning when the phone rang that both Susie and I thought it was the rape crisis center hot-line phone, and Susie jumped out of bed thinking she had another rape crisis on her hands, but it was just the regular telephone that was ringing, and it was Franny—all the way out on the West Coast. She and Junior were staying up late and having a party of two together; they hadn’t gone to bed, yet, they said—they pointed out that it was still night in California. They sounded a little drunk, and silly, and Susie was cross with them; she told them that no one but a rape victim ever called us that early in the morning and then she handed the phone to me.
I had to give Franny the usual report on how the rape crisis center was doing. Franny has donated quite a bit of money to the center, and Junior has helped us get good legal advice in our Maine area. Just last year Susie’s rape crisis center gave medical, psychological, and legal counsel to ninety-one victims of rape—or of rape-related abuse. “Not bad, for Maine,” as Franny says.
“In New York and L.A., man,” says Junior Jones, “there’s about ninety-one thousand victims a year. Of
everything
,” he adds.
It wasn’t hard to convince Susie that all those rooms in the Hotel New Hampshire could be used for something. We’re a more than adequate facility for a rape crisis center, and Susie has trained several of the women from the college in Brunswick, so we always have a woman here to answer the hot-line phone. Susie has instructed me never to answer the hot-line phone. “The last thing a rape victim wants to hear, when she calls for help,” Susie has told me, “is a fucking
man’s
voice.”
Of course it’s been a little complicated with Father, who can’t
see
which phone is ringing. So Father, when he’s caught off guard by a ringing phone, has developed this habit of yelling, “Telephone!” Even if he’s standing right next to it.
Surprisingly, although Father still thinks that the Hotel New Hampshire is a hotel, he is not bad at rape counseling. I mean, he knows that rape crisis is Susie’s business—he just doesn’t know that it’s our
only
business, and sometimes he starts a conversation with a rape victim who’s recovering herself with us at the Hotel New Hampshire, for a few days, and Father gets her confused with what he thinks is one of the “guests.”
He might happen upon the victim, just composing herself down on one of the docks, and my father will tap-tap-tap his Louisville Slugger out onto the dock, and Four will wag his tail to let my father know that someone is there, and Father will start chatting. “Hello, who’s here?” he’ll ask.
And maybe the rape victim will say, “It’s just me, Sylvia.”
“Oh yes, Sylvia!” Father will say, as if he’s known her all his life. “Well, how do you like the hotel, Sylvia?” And poor Sylvia will think that this is my father’s very polite and indirect way of referring to the rape crisis center—“the hotel”—and she’ll just go along with it.
“Oh, it’s meant a lot to me,” she’ll say. “I mean, I really needed to talk, but I didn’t want to feel I had to talk about anything until I was ready, and what’s nice here is that nobody pressures you, nobody tells you what you
ought
to feel or ought to do, but they help you get to those feelings more easily than you might get to them all by yourself. If you know what I mean,” Sylvia will say.
And Father will say, “Of course I know what you mean, dear. We’ve been in the business for years, and that’s just what a good hotel does: it simply provides you with the space, and with the atmosphere, for what it is you
need
. A good hotel turns space and atmosphere into something generous, into something sympathetic—a good hotel makes those gestures that are like touching you, or saying a kind word to you, just when (and
only
when) you need it. A good hotel is always there,” my father will say, the baseball bat conducting both his lyrics and his song, “but it doesn’t ever give you the feeling that it’s breathing down your neck.”
“Yeah, that’s it, I guess,” Sylvia will say; or Betsy, or Patricia, Columbine, Sally, Alice, Constance, or Hope will say. “It gets it all
out
of me, somehow, but not by force,” they’ll say.
“No, never by force, my dear,” Father will agree. “A good hotel forces nothing. I like to call it just a
sympathy
space,” Father will say, never acknowledging his debt to Schraubenschlüssel and his sympathy bomb.
“And,” Sylvia will say, “everyone’s nice here.”
“Yes, that’s what I like about a good hotel!” Father will say, excitedly. “Everyone
is
nice. In a
great
hotel,” he’ll tell Sylvia, or anybody who’ll listen to him, “you have a right to
expect
that niceness. You come to us, my dear—and please forgive me for saying so—like someone who’s been maimed, and we’re your doctors and your nurses.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Sylvia will say.
“If you come to a great hotel in
parts
, in broken pieces,” my father will go on and on, “when you leave the great hotel, you’ll leave it
whole
again. We simply put you back together again, but this is almost mystically accomplished—his is the sympathy space I’m talking about—because you can’t
force
anyone back together again; they have to grow their own way. We provide space,” Father will say, the baseball bat blessing the rape victim like a magic wand. “The space and the
light
,” my father will say, as if he were a holy man blessing some other holy person.
And that’s how you should treat a rape victim, Susie says; they are holy, and you treat them as a great hotel treats every guest. Every guest at a great hotel is an honored guest, and every rape victim at the Hotel New Hampshire is an honored guest—and holy.
“It’s actually a good name for a rape crisis center,” Susie agrees. “The Hotel New Hampshire—that’s got a little class to it.”
And with the support of the county authorities, and a wonderful organization of women doctors called the Kennebec Women’s Medical Associates, we run a real rape crisis center in our unreal hotel. Susie sometimes tells me that Father is the best counselor she’s got.
“When someone’s really fucked up,” Susie confides to me, “I send them down to the docks to see the blind man and Seeing Eye Dog Number Four. Whatever he tells them must be working,” Susie concludes. “At least, so far, nobody’s jumped off.”
“Keep passing the open windows, my dear,” my father will tell just about anyone. “That’s the important thing, dear,” he adds. No doubt it is Lilly who lends such authority to my father’s advice. He was always good at advising us children—even when he knew absolutely nothing about what was wrong. “Maybe
especially
when he knows absolutely nothing,” Frank says. “I mean, he
still
doesn’t know I’m queer and he gives me good advice all the time.” What a knack!
“Okay, okay,” Franny said to me on the phone, just last winter, just after the big snow. “I didn’t call you to hear the ins and outs of every rape in Maine—not
this
time, kid,” Franny told me. “Do you still want a baby?”
“Of
course
I do,” I told her. “I’m trying to convince Susie of it, every day.”
“Well,” Franny said, “how’d you like a baby of mine?”
“But
you
don’t want a baby, Franny,” I reminded her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean Junior and I got a little sloppy,” Franny said. “And rather than do the modern thing, we thought we knew the perfect mother and father for a baby.”
“Especially these days, man,” Junior said, on his end of the phone. “I mean, Maine may be the last hideout.”
“Every kid should grow up in a weird hotel, don’t you agree?” Franny asked.
“What I thought, man,” said Junior Jones, “was that every kid should have at least one parent who does
nothing
. I don’t mean to insult you, man,” Junior said to me, “but you’re just a perfect sort of
caretaker
. You know what I mean?”
“He means, you look after everybody,” Franny said, sweetly. “He means, it’s kind of like your
role
. You’re a perfect father.”
“Or a mother, man,” Junior added.
“And when Susie’s got a baby around, perhaps she’ll see the light,” Franny said.
“Maybe she’ll get brave enough to give it a shot, man,” said Junior Jones. “So to speak,” he added, and Franny howled on her end of the phone. They’d obviously been cooking this phone call up together, for quite some time.
“Hey!” Franny said on the phone. “Cat got your tongue? Are you there? Hello, hello!”
“Hey, man,” said Junior Jones. “You passed out or something?”
“Has a bear got your balls?” Franny asked me. “I’m asking you, do you want my baby?”
“That’s not a frivolous question, man,” said Junior Jones.
“Yes or no, kid?” Franny said. “I love you, you know,” she added. “I wouldn’t have a baby for just
anybody
, you know, kid.” But I couldn’t speak, I was so happy.
“I’m offering you nine fucking months of my life! I’m offering you nine months of my beautiful
body
, kid!” Franny teased me. “Take it or leave it!”
“Man!” cried Junior Jones. “Your sister, whose body is desired by millions, is offering to change her
shape
for you. She’s willing to look like a fucking Coke bottle just to give you a baby, man. I don’t know exactly how I’m going to put up with it,” he added, “but we
both
love you, you know. What do you say? Take it or leave it.”
“I
love
you!” Franny added to me, fiercely. “I’m trying to give you what you
need
, John,” she told me.
But Susie the bear took the phone from me. “For Christ’s sake,” she said to Franny and Junior, “you wake us up with what I’m sure is another fucking rape and now you’ve got him all red in the face and unable to
speak
! What the fuck is going on this morning, anyway?”
“If Junior and I have a baby,” Franny asked Susie, “will you and John take care of it?”
“You bet your sweet ass, honey,” said my good Susie the bear.
And so the matter was decided. We’re still waiting. Leave it to Franny to take longer than anybody else. “Leave it to
me
, man,” says Junior Jones. “This baby’s going to be so big it needs a little more time in the cooker than most.”
He must be right, because Franny’s been carrying my baby for almost ten months now. “She’s big enough to play for the Browns,” Junior Jones complains; I call him every night for a progress report.
“Jesus God,” Franny says to me. “I just lie in bed all day, waiting to
explode
. I’m so bored. The things I suffer for you, my love,” she tells me—and we share a private laugh over that.
Susie goes around singing “Any Day Now,” and Father is lifting more and more weight; Father is weight lifting with a frenzy these days. He is convinced the baby will be
born
a weight lifter, and Father says he’s got to get in shape to handle it. And all the rape crisis women are being very patient with me—about the way I lunge for the phone when it rings (toward
either
phone). “It’s just the hot line,” they tell me. “Relax.”
“It’s probably just another rape, honey,” Susie reassures me. “It’s not your baby. Calm down.”
It’s not at all that I’m anxious to discover if it will be a boy or a girl. For once I agree with Frank. It doesn’t matter. Nowadays, of course, with the precautionary tests they take—especially with a woman Franny’s age—they already
know
the sex of the child; or
someone
knows. Not Franny—she didn’t want to know. Who wants to know such things in advance? Who doesn’t know that half of pleasure lies in the wonder of anticipation?
“Whatever it is, it’s going to be bored,” Frank says.
“
Bored
, Frank!” Franny howls. “How
dare
you say my baby will be bored?”
But Frank is just expressing a typical New York City opinion of growing up in Maine. “If the baby grows up in Maine,” Frank insists, “it will
have
to be bored.”
But I point out to Frank that life is never boring in the Hotel New Hampshire. Not in the lighthearted first Hotel New Hampshire, not in the darkness of the dream that was the second Hotel New Hampshire, and not in our third Hotel New Hampshire, either—not in the
great
hotel we have at last become. No one is bored. And Frank finally agrees; he is a frequent and ever-welcome guest here, after all. He takes over the library on the second floor the way Junior Jones dominates the barbells in the ballroom when
he
is visiting, the way Franny’s beauty graces every room when
she
is here—the good Maine air and the cold Maine sea: Franny graces it all. I fully expect that Franny’s child will have a similar good influence.
To comfort her, I tried to read Franny a Donald Justice poem over the phone, the one called “To a Ten-Months’ Child.”
Late arrival, no
One would think of blaming you
For hesitating so.
Who, setting his hand to knock
At a door so strange as this one,
Might not draw back?
“Hold it right there,” Franny interrupted me. “No more fucking Donald Justice, please. I’ve heard enough Donald Justice poems to get
pregnant
from them, or at least sick to my stomach.”
But Donald Justice is right, as usual. Who
wouldn’t
hesitate to come into this world? Who wouldn’t put off this fairy tale as long as possible? Already, you see, Franny’s child is indicating a remarkable insight, a rare sensitivity.
And yesterday it snowed; in Maine we learn to take weather personally. Susie was investigating the alleged rape of a waitress in Bath, and I was worried about her driving back in the storm, but Susie was safely home before dark and we both said how this storm reminded us of the big snow of last winter, of the day Franny called to tell us about her coming gift.
Father plays like a child in the snow. “Snow is quite a wonder to the blind,” he said just yesterday, coming into the kitchen all covered with it; he’d been out in the drifts, literally rolling around with Seeing Eye Dog Number Four—they were both covered with it. It was a wild storm; by three-thirty in the afternoon we had to turn all the lights on. I stoked up the fires in two of the woodstoves. A bird, blinded by the snow, had flown through a windowpane in the ballroom and broken its neck. Four found it lying by the barbells and carried it all around the hotel before Susie could get it away from the dog. The snow melted off Father’s boots and made the kitchen slippery. Father slipped in a puddle and whacked me in the ribs with the Louisville Slugger—which he always waves wildly whenever he is thrown off balance. We had a little argument about that. Just like a child, he won’t knock the snow off his boots
before
he comes inside.
“I can’t
see
the snow!” he complains, childishly. “How the fuck do I knock it off if I can’t see it?”
“Shut up, both of you,” Susie the bear told us. “When there’s a child in the house, you’ll both have to stop
yelling
.”
I made some fresh pasta with a neat machine Frank brought from New York; it flattens the dough in sheets and cuts the pasta into any shape you want. It’s important to have toys like that, if you live in Maine. Susie made a mussel sauce for the pasta. Father chopped up the onion for her; an onion never seems to bother Father’s eyes. When we heard Four bark, we thought he’d found another poor bird. We saw a Volkswagen bus trying to make its way up our driveway in the storm; the bus was slithering and sliding. Whoever was driving the bus was either excited (“Another fucking rape,” said Susie, instinctively), or else it was someone from out of state. No Maine driver would have so much trouble driving in the snow, I thought, but it was hardly the tourist time of year at the Hotel New Hampshire. The bus couldn’t make it all the way to the parking lot, but it got close enough for me to see the Arizona license plate.
“No wonder they can’t drive,” I said—which is a typical Maine point of view toward out-of-staters.
“Yeah, well,” Susie said. “You’d probably look like an idiot in an Arizona desert.”
“What’s a desert?” Father asked, and Susie laughed.
The driver of the Arizona bus was walking through the snow toward us; he didn’t even know how to walk in the snow—he kept falling down.
“They’ve had a rape all the way out in Arizona, Susie,” I told her. “And you’re so famous, they’ll only talk to
you
.”
“Don’t they know we’re a
resort
hotel?” Father asked, peevishly. “I’ll tell whoever it is that we’re closed for the season.”
The man from Arizona was sorry to hear that. He explained that he thought he was headed for the mountains, for some skiing—which he and his family had never tried before—but that he’d been given some bad directions or he got lost in the storm, and here he was at the ocean, instead.
“Wrong season for the ocean,” Father pointed out. The man could see that. He looked nice, but awfully tired.
“We
do
have enough room,” Susie whispered to me.
I didn’t want to start taking in guests; in fact, what I loved best about
this
Hotel New Hampshire was that the only guests were in Father’s mind. But when I saw all the little kids pile out of the Volkswagen bus and start playing in the snow, I had a change of heart. The mother looked awfully tired, too—nice but tired.
“What’s
that
?” one of the kids was screaming.
“It’s an ocean, I think,” the mother said.
“An
ocean
!” the children shouted.
“Is there a beach, too?” one of the kids cried.
“Under all that snow, I guess,” the mother told them.
So we invited the man and his wife and his four little children to be our guests in the Hotel New Hampshire, even though we were “closed for the season.” It’s easy to make more pasta; it’s easy to stretch a mussel sauce.
Father got a little confused, showing our guests to their rooms. It was the first time he’d had to show a guest to a room in
this
Hotel New Hampshire, and it occurred to him, as he was hunting for linen in the library, that he didn’t know where anything was. I had to help him, naturally, and I did a fair job of pretending that I showed guests to their rooms all the time.
“You’ll have to forgive “us if we seem a little unprofessional,” I told the father of the nice young family. “When we’re closed for the season, we get a little out of practice.”
“It’s sweet of you to take us in,” the nice young mother said. “The kids were disappointed not to see the skiing, but they’ve never seen an ocean, either, so it’s a treat for them. And they can get to the skiing tomorrow,” she added. She sounded like a good mother to me.
“I’m expecting a child myself,” I told her. “Any day now.” And only later did Susie point out to me that my remark must have seemed odd, since even Susie was clearly not pregnant.
“What the hell must they have thought you
meant
, you moron!” Susie said.
But everything was fine. The kids had wonderful appetites, and after dinner I showed them how to make an apple pie. And while the pie was baking, I took them for a scary, wintry walk down to the snow-blown beach and the drifted-over docks; I showed them the violent waves bashing through the laces of ice that fringed the shore, I showed them that the sea in a storm is a great gray swell of water rolling, forever rolling. My father, of course, told the young husband and wife from Arizona all about the fabulous space for sympathy that a truly great hotel provides; he described our hotel to the nice people from Arizona, Susie told me, as if he were describing the Sacher.
“But it’s as if we
are
the Sacher, to him,” my warm bear said in my arms that night, while the storm howled and the snow fell.
“Yes, my love,” I told her.
It was wonderful to lie in bed in the morning and hear the voices of the children; they had discovered the barbells in the ballroom, and Father was giving them pointers. Iowa Bob would have loved
this
Hotel New Hampshire, I thought.
That was when I woke up Susie and asked her to get into the bear suit.
“
Earl
!” she complained. “I’m too old to be a bear anymore.” She is a bit of a bear in the early morning—my dear Susie.
“Come on, Susie,” I said. “Do it for the kids. Think of what it will mean to them.”
“What?” Susie said. “You want me to scare children?”
“No, no, Susie,” I said. “Not
scare
them.” All I wanted her to do was dress up in the bear suit and walk outside, in the snow, around the hotel, and I would suddenly call out, “Look!
Bear
tracks in the snow! And they’re
fresh
!”
And the people, big and small, from Arizona would all come out and wonder over the
wilderness
they had stumbled upon, as if in a dream, and then I would cry, “Look! There’s the bear! Going around the woodpile!” And Susie would pause there—perhaps I could persuade her to give us a good
Earl
! or two—and she would disappear behind the woodpile, in her bear-like fashion, and slip in one of the back doors, and slip out of her disguise, and come into the kitchen, saying, “What’s all this about a bear? You rarely see a bear around here anymore.”
“You want me to go outside in the fucking snow?” Susie asked.
“For the kids, Susie,” I said. “What a treat it would be for them. First they see the ocean and then they see a
bear
. Everyone should see a bear, Susie,” I said. Of course she agreed. She was grouchy about it, but that made her performance all the better; Susie was always superb as a bear, and now she is getting convinced that she’s a lovely human being, too.
And so we gave the strangers from Arizona a vision of a bear to take away with them. Father waved good-bye to them from the ballroom, after which he said to me, “A bear, huh? Susie will catch her death, or at least pneumonia. And no one should be sick—no one should even have a cold—when the baby comes. I know more about babies than you do, you know. A
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