The Hotel New Hampshire

At least I’m not opinionated to the degree of my brothers and sisters. I could simply see how Mother and Father must have kissed: carefully—Coach Bob amusing the bear with some game, so that Earl would not think my mother and father were eating something that they weren’t sharing with him. Kissing would always be hazardous around Earl.

My mother told us that she knew my father would be faithful to her because the bear would maul him if he kissed anybody.

“And were you faithful?” Franny asked Father, in her terrible way.

“Why, of course,” Father said.

“I’ll bet,” Franny said. Lilly always looked worried—Frank looked away.

That was the fall of 1939. Although she didn’t know it, my mother was already pregnant—with Frank. My father would motorcycle down the East Coast, his exploration of resort hotels—the big-band sounds, the bingo crowds, and the casinos—taking him farther and farther south as the seasons changed. He was in Texas in the spring of 1940 when Frank was born; Father and Earl were at that time touring with an outfit called the Lone Star Brass Band. Bears were popular in Texas—although some drunk in Fort Worth had tried to steal the 1937 Indian, unaware that Earl slept chained to it. Texas law charged Father for the man’s hospitalization, and it cost Father some more of his earnings to drive all the way East to welcome his first child into the world.

My mother was still in the hospital when Father returned to Dairy. They called Frank “Frank” because my father said that was what they would always be to each other and to the family: “frank.”

“Yuck!” Franny used to say. But Frank was quite proud of the origins of his name.

Father stayed with my mother in Dairy only long enough to get her pregnant again. Then he and Earl hit Virginia Beach and the Carolinas. They were banned from Falmouth, Cape Cod, on the Fourth of July, and back home with Mother in Dairy—to recover—soon after their disaster. The 1937 Indian had thrown a bearing in the Falmouth Independence Day Parade, and Earl had run amok when a fireman from Buzzards Bay tried to help Father with the ailing motorcycle. The fireman was unfortunately accompanied by two Dalmatian dogs, a breed not known for intelligence; doing nothing to disprove their reputation, the Dalmatians attacked Earl in the sidecar. Earl beheaded one of them quite cleanly, then chased the other one into the marching unit of the Osterville Men’s Softball Team, where the foolish dog attempted to conceal himself. The parade was thus scattered, the grieving fireman from Buzzards Bay refused my father any more help with the Indian, and the sheriff of Falmouth escorted Father and Earl to the city limits. Since Earl refused to ride in cars, this had been a most tedious escort, Earl sitting in the sidecar of the motorcycle, which had to be towed. They were five days finding parts to rebuild the engine.

Worse, Earl had developed a taste for dogs. Coach Bob tried to train him out of this maiming habit by teaching him other sports: retrieving balls, perfecting the forward roll—even sit-ups—but Earl was already old, and not blessed with the belief in vigorous exercise that possessed Iowa Bob. Slaughtering dogs didn’t even require much running, Earl discovered; if he was sly—and Earl was sly—the dogs would come right up to him. “And then it’s all over,” Coach Bob observed. “What a hell of a linebacker he could have been!”

So Father kept Earl chained, most of the time, and tried to make him wear his muzzle. Mother said that Earl was depressed—she found the old bear increasingly sad—but my father said that Earl wasn’t depressed in the slightest. “He’s just thinking about dogs.” Father said. “And he’s perfectly happy to be attached to the motorcycle.”

That summer of ’40 Father lived at the Bates house in Dairy and worked the Hampton Beach crowd at night. He managed to teach Earl a new routine. It was called “Applying for a Job,” and it saved wear and tear on the old Indian.

Earl and Father performed in the outdoor bandstand at Hampton Beach. When the lights came on, Earl would be seated in a chair, wearing a man’s suit; the suit, radically altered, had once belonged to Coach Bob. After the laughter died down, my father entered the bandstand with a piece of paper in one hand.

“Your name?” Father would ask.

“Earl!” Earl said.

“Yes, Earl, I see,” Father said. “And you want a job, Earl?”

“Earl!” said Earl.

“Yes, I know it’s Earl, but you want ajob, right?” Father said. “Except it says here that you can’t type, you can’t even read—it says—and you have a drinking problem.”

“Earl,” Earl agreed.

The crowd occasionally threw fruit, but Father had fed Earl well; this was not the same kind of crowd that Father remembered from the Arbuthnot.

“Well, if all you can say is your own name,” Father said, “I would venture to say that either you’ve been drinking this very night or you’re too stupid to even know how to take off your own clothes.”

Earl said nothing.

“Well?” Father asked. “Let’s see if you can do it. Take off your own clothes. Go on!” And here Father would pull the chair out from under Earl, who would do one of the forward rolls Coach Bob had taught him.

“So you can do a somersault,” Father said. “Big deal. The clothes, Earl. Let’s see the clothes come off.”

For some reason it is silly for a crowd of humans to watch a bear undress: my mother hated this routine— she said it was unfair to Earl to expose him to such a rowdy, uncouth bunch. When Earl undressed, Father usually had to help him with his tie—without help, Earl would get frustrated and rip it off his neck.

“You sure are hard on ties, Earl,” Father would say then. The audience at Hampton Beach loved it.

When Earl was undressed, Father would say, “Well, come on—don’t stop now. Off with the bear suit.”

“Earl?” Earl would say.

“Off with the bear suit,” Father would say, and he’d pull Earl’s fur—just a little.

“Earl!” Earl would roar, and the audience would scream in alarm.

“My God, you’re a real bear!” Father would cry.

“Earl!” Earl would bellow, and chase Father around and around the chair—half the audience fleeing into the night, some of them stumbling through the soft beach sand and down to the water; some of them threw more fruit, and paper cups with warm beer.

A more gentle act, for Earl, was performed once a week in the Hampton Beach casino. Mother had refined Earl’s dancing style, and she would kick off the big band’s opening number by taking a turn with Earl around the empty floor, the couples crowded close and wondering at them—the short, bent, broad bear in Iowa Bob’s suit, surprisingly graceful on his hind paws, shuffling after my mother, who led.

Those evenings Coach Bob would baby-sit with Frank. Mother and Father and Earl would drive home along the coast road, stopping to watch the surf at Rye, where the homes of the rich were; the surf at Rye was called “the breakers.” The New Hampshire coast was both more civilized and more seedy than Maine, but the phosphore-.scence off the breakers at Rye must have reminded my parents of evenings at the Arbuthnot. They said they always paused there, before driving home to Dairy.

One night Earl did not want to leave the breakers at Rye.

“He thinks I’m taking him fishing,” Father said. “Look. Earl, I’ve got no gear—no bait, no spooners, no pole—dummy,” Father said to the bear, holding out his empty hands. Earl looked bewildered; they realized the bear was nearly blind. They talked Earl out of fishing and took him home.

“How did he get so old?” my mother asked my father.

“He’s started peeing in the sidecar,” Father said.

My mother was quite pregnant, this time with Franny, when Father left for the winter season in the fall of 1940. He had decided on Florida, and Mother first heard from him in Clearwater, and then from Tarpon Springs. Earl had acquired an odd skin disease—an ear infection, some fungus peculiar to bears—and business was slow.

That was shortly before Franny was born, late in the winter of 1941. Father was not home for this birth, and Franny never forgave him for it.

“I suspect he knew I would be a girl,” Franny was fond of saying.

It was the summer of ’41 before Father was back in Dairy again; he promptly impregnated my mother with me.