The Hotel New Hampshire

“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