“There’s more of them in Maine than there used to be,” Frank teased him.
“In L.A., too,” I said.
“I’m dying, anyway,” Arbuthnot said. “Thank God.” He signed the documents on his chest and his lawyer handed them over to us. And that was how, in 1965, Frank bought the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea and twenty-five acres on the coast of Maine. “For a song,” as Franny would say.
An almost sky-blue mole was sprouting on old Arbuthnot’s face and both his ears were painted a vivid purple with gentian violet, an old-fashioned fungicide. It was as if a giant fungus were consuming Arbuthnot from the inside out. “Wait a minute,” he said, as we were leaving—his chest made a watery echo of his words. His nurse plumped up his pillows again; his lawyer snapped a briefcase shut; the cold of the room, from all the purring air-conditioners, made the place feel, to Frank and me, like the tomb—the
Kaisergruft
—for the heartless Hapsburgs in Vienna. “What are your plans?” Arbuthnot asked us. “What in hell are you going to
do
with that place?”
“It’s going to be a Special Commando Training Camp,” Frank told old Arbuthnot. “For the Israeli Army.”
I saw Arbuthnot’s lawyer crack a smile; it was the special sort of smile that would make Frank and me later look up the lawyer’s name on the documents that had been handed over to us. The lawyer’s name was Irving Rosenman, and despite the fact that he came from Los Angeles, Frank and I were pretty sure he was Jewish.
Old Arbuthnot didn’t crack a smile. “Israeli commandos?” he said.
“
Ratta-tat-tat-tat-tat
!” said Frank, imitating a machine gun. We thought that Irving Rosenman was going to throw himself into the air-conditioners to keep himself from laughing.
“The bears will get them,” Arbuthnot said, strangely. “The bears will get
all
the Jews, in the end,” he said—the mindless hatred in his old face was as old-fashioned and as vivid as the gentian violet in his ears.
“Have a nice death,” Frank told him.
Arbuthnot started coughing; he tried to say something more but he couldn’t stop coughing. He motioned the nurse over to him and she seemed to interpret his coughing without very much difficulty; she was used to it; she motioned us out of Arbuthnot’s room, then she came outside and told us what Arbuthnot had told her to tell us.
“He said he’s going to have the best death money can buy,” she told us, which—Arbuthnot had added—was more than Frank and I were going to get.
And Frank and I could think of no message to give the nurse to pass on to old Arbuthnot. We were content to leave him with the idea of Israeli commandos in Maine. Frank and I said good-bye to Arbuthnot’s nurse and to Irving Rosenman and we flew back to New York with the third Hotel New Hampshire in Frank’s pocket.
“That’s just where you should keep it, Frank,” Franny told him. “In your pocket.”
“You’ll never make that old place into a hotel again,” Lilly told Father. “It’s had its chance.”
“We’ll start out modestly,” Father assured Lilly.
Father and I were the “we” Father meant. I told him I’d go to Maine with him and help him get started.
“Then you’re as crazy as he is,” Franny had told me.
But I had an idea I would never share with Father. If, as Freud says, a dream is the fulfillment of a wish, then—as Freud also says—the same holds true for jokes. A joke is also the fulfillment of a wish. I had a joke to play on Father. And I have been playing it, now, for more than fifteen years. Since Father is more than sixty years old now, I think it’s fair to say that the joke “came off”; it’s fair to say that I have gotten away with it.
The last Hotel New Hampshire was never—and never will be—a hotel. That is the joke I have played on Father for all these years. Lilly’s first book,
Trying to Grow
, would make enough money so that we
could
have restored the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea; and when they made the movie version, we could have bought back the Gasthaus Freud, too. Maybe, by then, we could have afforded the Sacher; at least we could have bought the Stanhope. But I knew it wasn’t necessary that the third Hotel New Hampshire be a
real
hotel.
“After all,” as Frank would say, “the first two weren’t
real
hotels, either.” The truth is, Father had always been blind, or Freud’s blindness had proved to be contagious.
We had the debris cleaned off the beach. We had the “grounds” more or less restored, which is to say we mowed the lawn again, and we even made an effort with one of the tennis courts. Many years later we put in a swimming pool, because Father liked to swim and it made me nervous to watch him in the ocean; I was always afraid he’d make a wrong turn and head out to sea. And the buildings that had been dormitories for the staff—where Mother and Father and Freud had once resided? We simply removed them; we had the wreckers come and drag them away. We had the ground leveled, and we paved it. We told Father it was a parking lot, although we never had very many cars around.
We put our hearts into the main building. We put a bar where the reception desk had been; we turned that lobby into a huge game room. We were thinking of the dart board and the billiard tables in the Kaffee Mowatt, so I suppose it’s accurate to say—as Franny says—that we converted the lobby to a Viennese coffeehouse. It led into what had been the hotel restaurant, and the kitchen; we just knocked down some walls and made the whole thing into what the architect called “a kind of country kitchen.”
“A huge kind,” Lilly said.
“A weird kind,” said Frank.
It was Frank’s idea to restore the ballroom. “In case we have a big party,” he argued, though we would never have a party so large that the so-called country kitchen couldn’t handle it. Even with eliminating many of the bathrooms, even with turning the top floor into storage space, and the second floor into a library, we could sleep thirty-odd people—in complete privacy—if we’d ever gone through with it and bought enough beds.
At first Father seemed puzzled by how quiet it was: “Where are the guests?” he’d ask, especially in summer, with the windows open, when you would expect to hear the children—their high, light voices swept up from the beach and mingled with the cries of gulls and terns. I explained to Father that we did well enough in the summers to not even need to bother to stay open for business in the winter, but some summers he would question me about the surrounding silence orchestrated by the steady percussion of the sea. “By my count, I can’t imagine there’s more than two or three guests around here,” Father would say, “unless I’m going
deaf
, too,” he would add.
But we’d all explain to him how we were such a first-class
resort
hotel that we didn’t really need to fill the place; we were getting such a stiff price for a room, we didn’t need to fill every room to be making a bundle.
“Isn’t that fantastic?” he’d say. “It’s what I knew this place
could
be,” he’d remind us. “It needed only that proper combination of class and democracy. I always knew it could be
special
.”
Well, my family was a model of democracy, of course; first Lilly made the money, then Frank went to work with the money, and so the third Hotel New Hampshire had lots of
un
paying guests. We wanted as many people around as possible, because the presence of people, both their merry and quarrelsome sounds, helped further my father’s illusions that we were at last a joint of distinction, operating wholly in the black. Lilly came and stayed as long as she could stand it. She never liked working in the library, although we offered her—virtually—the entire second floor. “Too many books in the library,” she said; she felt, when she was writing, that the presence of other books dwarfed her little efforts. Lilly even tried writing in the ballroom, once—that vast space awaiting music and graceful feet. Lilly would write and write in there, but her tiny pecks upon her typewriter would never fill the empty dance floor—though she tried. How Lilly tried.
And Franny would come and stay, out of the public’s scrutiny; Franny would use our third Hotel New Hampshire to collect herself. Franny would be famous—more famous than Lilly, too, I’m afraid. In the movie version of
Trying to Grow
, Franny got the part of playing herself. After all, she
is
the hero of the first Hotel New Hampshire. In the movie version, of course, she’s the only one of us who seems authentic. They made Frank into your stereotypical homosexual cymbalist and taxidermist; they made Lilly “cute,” but Lilly’s smallness was never cute to us. Her size, I’m afraid, always seemed like a failed effort—no cuteness involved in the struggle, or in the result. And they overplayed Egg: Egg the heartbreaker—Egg really was “cute.”
They found some veteran Western actor to play Iowa Bob (Frank and Franny and I all remembered seeing this old duffer shot off a horse a million times); he had a way of lifting weights as if he were wolfing down a plate of flapjacks—he was completely unconvincing. And, of course, they cut out all the swearing. Some producer actually told Franny that profanity revealed a poor vocabulary and a lack of imagination. And Frank and Lilly and Father and I all loved to shout at Franny, then, and ask her what she had said to
that
. “What an anal crock of shit, you dumb asshole!” she’d told the producer. “Up yours—and in your ear, too!”
But even with the limitation imposed upon her language, Franny came across in
Trying to Grow
. Even though they cast Junior Jones in such a way that he came on like some self-conscious buffoon auditioning for a jazz band; even though the people playing Mother and Father were insipid and vague; and the one who was supposed to be
me
!—well, Jesus God. Even with these handicaps, Franny shone through. She was in her twenties when they shot the movie, but she was so pretty that she played sixteen just fine.
“I think the oaf they got to play
you
,” Franny told me, “was supposed to exude an absolutely lifeless combination of sweetness and stupidity.”
“Well, I don’t know, that’s what you
do
exude, every now and then,” Frank would tease me.
“Like a kind of weight-lifting maiden aunt,” Lilly said to me. “That’s how they cast you.”
But in my first few years of looking after Father at the third Hotel New Hampshire, that is rather what I felt like much of the time: a kind of weight-lifting maiden aunt. With a degree in American literature from Vienna, I could do worse than become the caretaker of my father’s illusions.
“You need a nice woman,” Franny said to me, long distance—from New York, from L.A., from the viewpoint of her rising stardom.
Frank would argue with her that perhaps what I needed was a nice
man
. But I was wary. I was happy setting up my father’s fantasy. In the tradition established by the doomed Fehlgeburt, I would especially enjoy reading to Father in the evenings; reading aloud to someone is one of this world’s pleasures. I would even succeed in interesting Father in lifting weights. You don’t have to see to do it. And in the mornings, now, Father and I have a wonderful time in the old ballroom. We’ve got mats spread out everywhere, and a proper bench for the bench presses. We’ve got barbells and dumbbells for every occasion—and we have the ballroom’s splendid view of the Atlantic Ocean. If Father hasn’t the means to see the view, he is content to feel the sea breeze wash over him as he lies lifting. Ever since squeezing Arbeiter, as I’ve said, I don’t put quite as much into the weights, and Father has become sophisticated enough as a weight lifter to realize this; he chides me a little bit About it, but I enjoy just taking a light workout with him. I leave him to do the heavy lifting, now.
“Oh, I know you’re still in shape,” he teases me, “but you’re no match for what you were in the summer of sixty-four.”
“You can’t be twenty-two all your life,” I remind him, and we lift and lift for a while. On those mornings, with the Maine mist not yet burned off, and the sea damp settled upon us, I can imagine that I’m just starting the voyage all over again—I can believe I’m lying on the rug old Sorrow liked to lie on, and it’s Iowa Bob beside me, instructing me, instead of me instructing my father.
I would be sneaking up on forty before I would try living with a woman.
For my thirtieth birthday, Lilly sent me a Donald Justice poem. She liked the ending and thought it applied to me. I was feeling cross at the time and fired back a note to Lilly, saying, “Who is this Donald Justice and how come everything he says applies to
us
?” But it’s a nice ending to any poem, and I
did
feel just like this at thirty.
Thirty today, I saw
The trees flare briefly like
The candles upon a cake
As the sun went down the sky,
A momentary flash,
Yet there was time to wish
Before the light could die,
If I had known what to wish,
As once I must have known,
Bending above the clean,
Candlelit tablecloth
To blow them out with a breath.
And, when Frank was forty, I would send him a birthday greeting with Donald Justice’s “Men at Forty” poem enclosed.
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
Frank fired me back a note saying he stopped reading the damn poem right there. “Close your own doors!” Frank snapped. “You’ll be forty soon enough. As for me, I bang the damn doors and come back to them all the fucking time!”
Bravo, Frank! I thought. He has always kept passing the open windows without the slightest trace of fear. It’s what all the great agents do: they make the most incredible and illogical advice sound reasonable, they make you go ahead without fear, and that way you get it, you get more or less what you want, or you get something, anyway; at least you don’t end up with nothing when you go ahead without fear, when you lunge into the darkness as if you were operating on the soundest advice in the world. Who would have thought Frank would have ended up so lovable? (He was such a rotten kid.) And I do not blame Frank for pushing Lilly too hard. “It was
Lilly
,” Franny always said, “who pushed Lilly too hard.”
When the damn reviewers liked her
Trying to Grow
—when they condescended to her with their superior forms of praise, saying how
in spite of
who she was,
the
Lilly Berry of that famous opera-saving family, she was really “not a bad writer,” she was really very “promising”—when they prattled on and on about the
freshness
of her
voice
, all it meant to Lilly was that now she had to get going; now she had to get serious.
But our little Lilly wrote her first book almost by accident; that book was only a euphemism for trying to grow, yet it insisted to her that she
was
a writer, when perhaps she was only a sensitive and loving reader, a lover of literature who thought she
wanted
to write. I think it was the writing that killed Lilly, because writing can do that. It just burned her up; she wasn’t big enough to take the self-abuse of it, to take the constant chipping away—of herself. After the movie version of
Trying to Grow
made Franny famous, and after the TV series of “The First Hotel New Hampshire” made Lilly Berry a household word, I suppose that Lilly wanted to “just write,” as one is always hearing writers say. I suppose she just wanted to be free to write
her
book, now. The problem was, it wasn’t a very good book—the second one. It was called
The Evening of the Mind
, from a line she stole from her guru, Donald Justice.
Now comes the evening of the mind.
Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood;
and so on. She might have been wiser to take her title and make her book from another Donald Justice line:
Time a bow bent with his certain failure.
She might have called her book
Certain Failure
, because it was just that. It was more than she could handle; it was over her head. It was about the death of dreams, it was about how hard the dreams die. It was a brave book, in that it departed from anything directly relatable to Lilly’s little autobiography, but it departed to a country too foreign for her to grasp; she wrote a
vague
book that reflected how foreign the language she was only visiting was to her. When you write vaguely, you are always vulnerable. She was easily wounded when the critics—when the damn reviewers, with their dull, plodding cunning—jumped on her.
According to Frank, who was usually right about Lilly, she suffered the further embarrassment of writing a bad book that was adopted as
heroic
by a rather influential group of bad readers. A certain illiterate kind of college student was
attracted
to the vagueness of
The Evening of the Mind
; this kind of college student was relieved to discover that absolute obscurity was not only publishable but seemingly identified with seriousness. What some of the students liked best in her book, Frank pointed out, was. what Lilly hated most about it—its self-examinations that led nowhere, its plotlessness, its people fading in and out of character, its absence of story. Somehow, among a certain university population, the obvious failure to be clear confirms that what any fool knows is a vice can be rearranged, by art, to resemble a virtue.
“Where in hell do these college kids
get
such an idea!” Franny would complain.
“Not
all
of them have this idea,” Frank would point out. “They think what’s forced and strained and
difficult
with a fucking capital D is
better
than what’s straightforward, fluent, and comprehensible!” Franny shouted. “What the fuck’s
wrong
with these people?”
“Only some of them are like that, Franny,” Frank would say.
“Just the ones who’ve made a cult out of Lilly’s failure?” Franny asked.
“Just the ones who listen to their teachers,” Frank said, smugly—happily at home in one of his anti-everything moods. “I mean, where do you think the college students
learn
to think that way, Franny?” Frank asked her. “From their teachers.”
“Jesus God,” Franny would say.
She would not ask for a part in
The Evening of the Mind
; there was no way to make that book into a movie, anyway. Franny became a star with so much more ease than Lilly became a writer. “Being a star is easier,” Franny would say. “You don’t have to do anything but be relaxed about who you are and trust that people will like you; you just trust that they’ll get the
you in you
, Franny said. “You just be relaxed and hope that the
you in you
comes across.”
For a writer, I guess, the
you in you
needs more nourishment to emerge. I always wanted to write Donald Justice a letter about that, but I think that seeing him—only once, and from a distance—should suffice. If what’s best and clearest in him
isn’t
in his poems, he wouldn’t be a very good writer. And since something good and strong in him
emerges
in his poems, it would probably be disappointing to meet him. Oh, I don’t mean that he’d be a bum. He’s probably a wonderful man. But he couldn’t be as precise as his poems; his poems are so stately, he’d have to be a letdown. In Lilly’s case, of course, her work was a letdown—and she knew it. She knew her work wasn’t as lovable as she was, and Lilly would have preferred it the other way around.
What saved Franny was not just that being a star is easier than being a writer. What saved Franny, too, was that she didn’t have to be a star alone. What Donald Justice knows is that you have to be a writer all alone, whether you
live
alone or not.
You would not recognize me.
Mine is the face which blooms in
The dank mirrors of washrooms
As you grope for the light switch.
My eyes have the expression
Of the cold eyes of statues
Watching their pigeons return
From the feed you have scattered.
“Jesus God,” as Franny has said. “Who’d want to meet
him
?”
But Lilly was lovely to know—except, perhaps, to herself. Lilly wanted her words to be lovely, but her words let her down.
It’s remarkable how Franny and I once thought of Frank as the King of Mice; we had Frank figured all wrong. We underestimated Frank, from the beginning. He was a hero, but he needed to get to that point in time when he would be signing all our checks, and telling us how much we could spend on this or that, in order for us to recognize the hero that Frank had always been.
No, Lilly was our King of Mice. “We should have known!” Franny would wail, and wail. “She was just too small!”
And so Lilly is lost to us, now. She was the sorrow we never quite understood; we never saw through her disguises. Perhaps Lilly never grew quite large enough for us to see.
She authored one masterpiece, which she never gave herself enough credit for. She wrote the screenplay for the movie starring Chipper Dove; she was the writer and director of that opera, in the grand tradition of
Schlagobers
and blood. She knew just how far to go with that story. It was
The Evening of the Mind
that didn’t live up to her own expectations, and the difficulty she had trying to begin again—trying to write the book that would have been called, ambitiously,
Everything After Childhood
. That isn’t even a Donald Justice line; that was Lilly’s own idea, but she couldn’t live up to it, either.
When Franny drinks too much, she gets pissed off at the power Donald Justice had over Lilly; Franny sometimes gets drunk enough to blame poor Donald Justice for what happened to Lilly. But Frank and I are always the first to assure Franny that it was
quality
that killed Lilly; it was the end of
The Great Gatsby
, which was not her ending, which was not an ending within her grasp. And once Lilly said, “
Damn
that Donald Justice, anyway! He’s written all the good lines!”
He may have written the last line my sister Lilly read. Frank found Lilly’s copy of Donald Justice’s
Night Light
, opened to page 20, the page dog-eared many times, and the one line at the top of the page was circled and circled—in lipstick, once, and in several different tones of ink from several different ballpoint pens; even in lowly pencil.
I do not think the ending can be right.
That might have been the line that drove Lilly to it.
It was a February night. Franny was out on the West Coast; Franny couldn’t have saved her. Father and I were in Maine; Lilly knew we went to bed early. Father was on his third Seeing Eye dog at the time. Sacher was gone, a victim of overeating. The little blond dog with the perky, yapping bark, the one that was hit by a car—its vice was chasing cars, fortunately
not
when Father was attached—that one was gone too; Father called her Schlagobers because she had a disposition like whipped cream. The third one was a farter, but only in this way did he bear an unpleasant resemblance to Sorrow; it was another German shepherd, but a male this time, and Father insisted that his name be Fred. That was also the name of the handyman at the third Hotel New Hampshire—a deaf retired lobsterman named Fred. Whenever Father called
any
dog—when he called Sacher, when he called Schlagobers—Fred the handyman would cry, “What?” from whatever part of the hotel he was working in. The whole thing irritated Father so much (and so much, unspokenly, reminded us both of Egg) that Father always threatened to name the
next
dog Fred.
“Since that old fool Fred will answer whenever I call the dog, anyway, no matter
what
name I’m calling!” Father shouted. “Jesus God, if he’s going to be calling out ‘What?’ all the time, we might as well get the name right.”
So Seeing Eye Dog Number Three was Fred. His only bad habit was that he tried to hump the cleaning woman’s daughter whenever the little girl strayed from her mother’s side. Fred would goofily pin the little girl to the ground, and start humping her, and the little girl would scream, “No, Fred!” And the cleaning woman would holler, “Cut it out, Fred!” and whack Fred with a mop or a broom, or with whatever was handy. And Father would hear the fracas and know what was going on, and he’d yell, “Goddamn it, Fred, you horny bastard! Get your ass over here, Fred!” And the deaf handyman, the retired lobsterman, our
other
Fred, would cry out, “What? What?” And I’d have to go find him (because Father refused) and tell him, “NOT
YOU
, FRED! NOTHING, FRED!”
“Oh,” he’d say, going back to work. “Thought somebody called.”
So it would have been hopeless for Lilly to call us in Maine. We wouldn’t have been able to do much more for her than yell “Fred!” a few times.
What Lilly tried to do was call Frank. Frank wasn’t that far from her; he might have helped. We tell him, now, that he might have helped her
that
time, but in the long run, we know, doom floats. Lilly got Frank’s answering service, anyway. Frank had replaced his live answering service with one of those mechanical services, with one of those infuriating recordings of himself.
HI! FRANK HERE—BUT ACTUALLY I’M
NOT
HERE (HA HA). ACTUALLY, I’M
OUT
. WANT TO LEAVE A MESSAGE? WAIT FOR THE LITTLE SIGNAL AND TALK YOUR HEART OUT.
Franny left many messages that made Frank cross. “Go fuck a doughnut, Frank!” Franny would scream into the infuriating machine. “It costs me
money
every time that fucking device answers me—I’m in fucking
Los Angeles
, Frank, you moron, you dip-shit, you turd in a birdbath!” And then she’d make all sorts of farting sounds, and very liquid kisses, and Frank would call me, disgusted, as usual.
“Honestly,” he’d say. “I don’t understand Franny at all. She just left the most disgusting message on my tape recorder! I mean, I
know
she thinks she’s being funny, but doesn’t she know that we’ve all heard quite enough of her vulgarity? At her age, it hardly becomes her any longer—if it ever did. You’ve cleaned up
your
language, I wish you’d make an effort to clean up
hers
.”
And on and on.
Lilly’s message must have scared Frank. And he probably didn’t come in from his evening date very long after she had called; he put the machine on and listened to his messages as he was brushing his teeth, getting ready to go to bed.
They were mostly business things. The tennis player he represents had gotten in some difficulty over a deodorant commercial. A screenwriter called to say that a director was “manipulating” him, and Frank made a fast mental note—to the effect that this writer
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