The Hotel New Hampshire

“Can I be in it?” Frank asked.

“You’re not a woman, Frank,” I pointed out. “Maybe Lilly wants all women.”

“Well, I’m a fag,” Frank said, huffily. “And Chipper Dove knows that.”

“I can get a great costume for Frank,” Susie told Lilly.

“You can?” Frank asked, excitedly. He hadn’t had a chance to dress up in a while.

“Let me work on it,” Lilly said. Lilly the worker: she would always work a little too hard. “It will have to be just perfect,” Lilly said. “To be believable,” Lilly said, “we’ll have to get everything just right.”

And Franny asked, suddenly, “Will I have to be in it, Lilly?” We could see she didn’t want to be, or she was frightened to be in it; she wanted it to happen—she thought she wanted to see it, but she didn’t know if she could actually take a part.

I held Franny’s hand. “You’ll have to call him, Franny,” I said, and she shivered again.

“You’ll just have to invite him here,” Lilly said. “Once you get him here, you won’t have to say much. You won’t have to do anything, I promise,” Lilly said. “But it’s got to be you who calls him up.”

Franny looked out the window again. I rubbed her shoulders so she wouldn’t be cold. Frank patted her hair; Frank had an irritating habit of showing his affection for human beings by patting them as if they were dogs.

“Come on, Franny,” Frank said. “You can do it, Franny.”

“You got to, honey,” Susie the bear told her softly, putting her friendly paw on Franny’s arm.

“It’s now or never, Franny. Remember?” I whispered to her. “Let’s just get this over with,” I told her, “and then we can all return to the rest of the business—to the rest of our lives.”

“The rest of our lives,” Franny said, pleased. “Okay,” she whispered. “If Lilly can write the script,” Franny said, “I can make the fucking phone call.”

“Then all of you get out of here,” Lilly said. “I’ve got to get to work,” she said, worriedly.

We all went to Frank’s to have a party with Father. “Not a word about this to Father,” Franny said. “Let’s keep Father out of it.”

Father, I knew, was out of it most of the time. But when we arrived at Frank’s, Father had come to a small decision. From the myriad options in front of him, Father had failed to come up with what Iowa Bob would have called a game plan; he still didn’t know what he wanted to do. Good fortune was an option unfamiliar to my father. But when we arrived at Frank’s in a party mood, Father had at least accomplished a mini-decision.

“I want one of those Seeing Eye dogs,” Father said.

“But you’ve got us, Pop,” Frank told him.

“There’s always someone around to take you anywhere you want,” I told him.

“It’s not just that,” Father said. “I need an animal around,” he said.

“Oh boy,” Franny said. “Why not hire Susie?”

“Susie’s got to stop being a bear,” Father said. “We shouldn’t keep encouraging her.” We all looked a little guilty, and Susie beamed—of course, Father couldn’t see our faces. “And besides,” Father said, “New York is a terrible place for a bear. I’m afraid the bear days are over,” he sighed. “But a good old Seeing Eye dog,” Father said. “Well, you see,” he said, almost a little embarrassed to admit his loneliness, “it would be someone for me to talk to. I mean, you have your own lives—or you will have,” Father said. “I’d just like a dog, really. The Seeing Eye part of the dog isn’t really what matters. I’d just like to have a nice dog. Can I?” he asked.

“Sure, Pop,” Frank said.

Franny kissed Father and told him we’d get him a dog for Christmas.

“So soon?” Father asked. “I don’t think you can rush getting a Seeing Eye dog,” Father said. “I mean, it would be a problem to get a badly trained one.”

“Anything’s possible, Pop,” Frank said. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Frank,” Franny said. “We’ll all get him a dog, if you don’t mind.”

“One thing,” Father said. Susie the bear put her paw on my hand, as if even Susie knew what was coming. “Just one thing,” Father said. We were very quiet, waiting for this. “It mustn’t look like Sorrow,” Father said. “And you’ve got the eyes, so you’ve got to pick out the dog. Just make sure it in no way resembles Sorrow.”

And Lilly wrote the necessary fairy tale, and we each acted our parts. According to the fairy tale that Lilly wrote, we were perfect. On the last working day before Christmas, 1964, Franny took a deep breath and called Chipper Dove at his “firm.”

“Hi, it’s me!” she said to him, brightly. “I absolutely need to have lunch with you, in the worst way,” Franny said to Chipper Dove. “Yes; it’s Franny Berry—and you can pick me up, anytime,” Franny said. “Yes, at the Stanhope—Suite fourteen-oh-one.”

Then Lilly grabbed the phone away from Franny and said to Franny in a voice as crabby as any crabby nurse’s voice—and plenty loud enough for Chipper Dove to hear—“Who are you making phone calls to now? You’re not supposed to make any more phone calls!” Then Lilly hung up the phone and we waited.

Franny went into the bathroom and threw up. She was okay when she came back out. She looked awful, but she was supposed to look awful. The two women from the West Village Workshop had done the makeup job on Franny; those women can work wonders. They took a beautiful woman and they ravaged her; they gave Franny a face with the lifelessness of chalk; they gave her a mouth like a gash, they gave my sister needles for eyes. And they dressed her all in white, like a bride. We were worried that Lilly’s script might be too theatrical.

Frank stood looking out the window in his black leotard and lime-green caftan. He had just a little lipstick on.

“I don’t know,” Frank said, worriedly. “What if he doesn’t come?”

Susie’s two friends were there—the wounded women from the West Village Workshop. It had been men, Susie had told us, who had wounded them. The black one was named Ruthie: she resembled a near-perfect cloning of Junior Jones. Ruthie wore a sleeveless sheepskin vest, over nothing at all, and a pair of bright green bell-bottoms above which her belly wobbled. She had a long silver nail, almost as thick as a railroad spike, jabbed into her crazy hair. She held a long leather leash in one of her big black hands; at the end of the leash was Susie the bear.

It was a bear suit that was a victory of animal imagination. Especially the mouth, as Frank had pointed out; especially the fangs. Their wet look. And the sad insanity of the eyes. (Susie actually “saw” out of the mouth.)

The claws were a nice touch, too; they were the real thing, Susie proudly pointed out—the whole paws were the real thing. It somehow enhanced the reality of everything that Susie wore a muzzle. We’d bought the muzzle in an accessory shop for Seeing Eye dogs; it was a real muzzle.

We’d turned the thermostat on the heat register up as high as it would go because Franny complained of being cold. Susie said she liked the heat; she felt more like a bear if she sweated a lot, and inside the bear suit, we could tell, she was hot and dripping. “I’ve never felt so much like a bear,” Susie said to us, pacing, down on all fours.

“You’re all bear today, Susie,” I said to her.

“The bear in you gets out today, Susie,” Lilly told her.

Franny sat in the bridal dress on the couch, the candle burning in a sickly way on the table beside her. There were candles lit throughout the suite, and all the window shades were drawn. Frank had lit a little incense, so the whole suite smelled truly terrible.

The other woman from the West Village Workshop was a pale, plain-looking, very girlish type with straw- blond hair. She was dressed in the conventional uniform of a hotel maid, the same uniform worn by all the Stanhope