The Hotel New Hampshire

They should burn it,” Mother suggested, “and turn the whole area into a park.”

It was something of a park, anyway—a high plot of ground, maybe two acres, in the dilapidated heart of the town of Dairy. Old clapboard houses, once for large families and now rented piecemeal to widows and widowers— and to the retired Dairy School faculty—surrounded by dying elms, which surrounded the four-story brick monster of a school building, which was named after Ethel Thompson. Miss Thompson had been an Episcopal minister who had successfully masqueraded as a man until her death (the Reverend Edward Thompson, she’d been called, rector of the Dairy Episcopal parish and notorious for hiding runaway slaves in the rectory). The discovery that she was a woman (following an accident in which she was crushed while changing a wheel of her carriage) came as no surprise to a few of the Dairy menfolk who had taken their problems to her at the height of her popularity as rector. She had somehow acquired a lot of money, not a penny of which was left to the church; it was all left to found a female seminary—“until,” Ethel Thompson wrote, “that abomination of a boys’ academy is forced to take in girls.”

My father would have agreed that the Dairy School was an abomination. Although we children loved playing on its athletic fields, Father never ceased reminding us that Dairy was not a “real” school. Just as the town of Dairy had once been dairy land, so had the athletic fields of the school been a pasture for cows; and when the school had been founded, in the early 1800s, the old barns were allowed to stand beside the newer school buildings, and the old cows were allowed, like the students, to wander freely about the school. Modern landscaping had improved the fields for sports, but the barns, and the first of the original buildings, still occupied the scruffy centre of the campus; some token cows still occupied the barns. It had been the school’s “game plan,” as Coach Bob called it, to have the students care for the dairy farm while going to school—a plan that led to a lax education and poorly cared-for cows, a plan that was abandoned before the First World War. There were still those on the Dairy School faculty—and many of them were the newer, younger faculty—who believed that this combination of a school and a farm should be returned to.

My father resisted the plan to return the Dairy School to what he called “a barnyard-experiment in education.”

“When my kids are old enough to go to this wretched school,” he would rage to my mother, and to Coach Bob, “they will no doubt be given academic credit for planting a garden.”

“And varsity letters for shovelling shit!” said Iowa Bob.

The school, in other words, was in search of a philosophy. It was now firmly second-rate among conventional prep schools; although it modelled its curriculum on the acquiring of academic skills, the school’s faculty grew less and less able to teach such skills and, conveniently, less convinced of the need for such skills— after all, the student body was decreasingly receptive. Admissions were down, hence admission standards fell even lower; the school became one of those places you could get into almost immediately upon being thrown out of another school. A few of the faculty, like my father, who believed in teaching people how to read and write—and even punctuate—despaired that such skills were largely wasted on students like these. “Pearls before swine,” Father ranted. “We might as well teach them how to rake hay and milk cows.”

“They can’t play football, either,” Coach Bob mourned. “They won’t block for each other.”

“They won’t even run,” Father said.

“They won’t hit anybody,” said Iowa Bob.

“Oh yes they will,” said Frank, who was always picked on.

“They broke into the greenhouse and vandalized all the plants,” said Mother, who read of this incident in the school paper, which was, Father said, illiterate.

“One of them showed me his thing,” Franny said, to cause trouble.

“Where?” Father said.

“Behind the hockey rink,” Franny said.

“What were you doing behind the hockey rink, anyway?” Frank said, disgusted as usual.

“The hockey rink is warped,” Coach Bob said. “There’s been no maintenance since that man, whatever his name was, retired.”

“He didn’t retire, he died,” Father said. Father was often exasperated with his father, now that Iowa Bob was getting older.

In 1950 Frank was ten, Franny was nine, I was eight, and Lilly was four; Egg had just been born, and in his ignorance was spared our dread that we would one day be expected to attend the much accused Dairy School. Father was sure that by the time Franny was old enough, they would be admitting girls.

“Not out of anything resembling a progressive instinct,” he claimed, “but purely to avoid bankruptcy.”

He was right, of course. By 1952 the Dairy School’s academic standards were in question; its admissions were steadily falling, and its admission standards were even further in question. And when the admissions continued to go down, the tuition went up, which turned away even more students, which meant some faculty had to be let go—and others, the ones with principles and other means, resigned.

The 1953 football team went 1-9 for the season; Coach Bob thought that the school couldn’t wait for him to retire so that they could drop football altogether—it was too costly, and the alumni, who had once supported it (and the entire athletic programme), were too ashamed to come back and see the games anymore.

“It’s the damn uniforms,” Iowa Bob said, and Father rolled his eyes and tried to look tolerant of Bob’s approaching senility. Father had learned of senility from Earl. But Coach Bob, to be fair, had a point about the uniforms.

The colours of the Dairy School, perhaps modelled on a now-vanished breed of cow, were meant to be a deep chocolate brown and a luminous silver. But with the years, and the increasingly synthetic quality of the fabrics, this rich cocoa and silver had become dingy and sad.

The colour of mud and clouds,” my father said.

The students at the Dairy School, who played with us kids—when they were not showing Franny their “things”—informed us of the other names for these colours, which were in vogue at the school. There was an older kid named De Meo—Ralph De Meo, one of Iowa Bob’s few stars, and the star sprinter on Father’s winter and spring track teams—who told Frank, Franny, and me what the Dairy School colours really were. “Grey like the pallor of a dead man’s face,” De Meo said. I was ten and scared of him; Franny was eleven, but behaved older with him; Frank was twelve and afraid of everybody.

“Grey like the pallor of a dead man’s face,” De Meo repeated slowly, for me. “And brown—cow-brown, like manure,” he said. “That’s shit to you, Frank.”

“I know,” said Frank.

“Show it to me again,” Franny said to De Meo; she meant his thing.

Thus shit and death were the colours of the dying Dairy School. The board of trustees, labouring under this curse—and others, going back to the barnyard history of the school and the less-than-quaint New Hampshire town the school was plopped down in—decided to admit women to the student body.

That, at least, would raise admissions.

“That will be the end of football,” said old Coach Bob.

The girls will play better football than most of your boys,” Father said.

“That’s what I mean,” said Iowa Bob.

“Ralph De Meo plays pretty good,” Franny said.

“Plays with what pretty good,” I said, and Franny kicked me under the table. Frank sat sullen and larger than any of us, dangerously close to Franny and across from me.

“De Meo is at least fast,” Father said.

“De Meo is at least a hitter,” Coach Bob said.

“He sure is,” Frank said; Frank had been hit by Ralph De Meo several times.

It was Franny who protected me from Ralph. One day when we were watching them paint the yard-line stripes on the football field—just Franny and I; we were hiding from Frank (we were often hiding from Frank)—De Meo came up to us and pushed me into the blocking sled. He was wearing his scrimmage uniform: shit and death Number 19 (his age). He took his helmet off and spit his mouthpiece out across the cinder track, letting his teeth gleam at Franny. “Beat it,” he said to me, still looking at Franny. “I got to talk to your sister in the worst way.”

“You don’t have to push him,” Franny said.

“She’s only twelve,” I said.