The Hotel New Hampshire

“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