The Hotel New Hampshire

weekend, to my mother’s and father’s irritation—and to Coach Bob’s amusement.

“Why don’t you call it the Hotel Male Semen?” Iowa Bob asked my father. “Then you’ll only have to change one letter.” Bob was in a good mood, because his team was winning and he knew he was about to get out of the wretched Dairy School.

If my father was in a bad mood, he rarely let it show. (He was full of energy—“Energy begets energy,” he would repeat and repeat to us, over our homework and at sports practices for the teams he coached.) He had not resigned from the Dairy School; he probably didn’t dare, or Mother wouldn’t let him. He was going ahead with the Hotel New Hampshire, but he was teaching three classes of English and coaching track winter and spring, so he was going ahead at half-speed.

Frank seemed to disappear at the Dairy School; he was like one of the token cows. You didn’t notice him after a while. He did his work—he seemed to find it hard—and he attended the required athletics, although he favoured no particular sport and wasn’t good enough for (or didn’t try to make) any of the teams. He was big and strong and as awkward as ever.

And (at sixteen) he grew a thin moustache on his upper lip, which made him look much older. There was something floppy and puppylike about him—a certain heavy cloddishness in his feet—that suggested he would one day be a very large and imposing dog; but Frank would wait forever for the poise that must attend imposing size in order for the animal to be imposing. He had no friends, but no one worried; Frank had never been much for having friends.

Franny, of course, had lots of boyfriends. Most of them were older than Franny, and one of them I liked: he was a tall, red-haired senior at the school—a strong, silent type who stroked the first boat of the varsity crew. His name was Struthers, he had grown up in Maine, and except for the blisters on his hands, which were painted a rust-brown with benzoin—to toughen them—and the fact that he smelled, at times, like wet socks, he was acceptable to everyone in our family. Even Frank. Sorrow growled at Struthers, but that was a smell thing: Struthers threatened Sorrow’s dominance of our house. I didn’t know if Struthers was Franny’s favourite boyfriend, but he was very fond of her, and nice to the rest of us.

Some of the others—one of them was the leader of that pack of Boston ringers who’d been hired to play for Coach Bob—were not so nice. In fact, the quarterback of that imported backfield was a boy who made Ralph De Meo look like a saint. His name was Sterling Dove, although he was called Chip, or Chipper, and he was a cruel, angular boy from one of the posher Boston suburban schools.

“He’s a natural leader, that Chip Dove,” Coach Bob said.

He’s a natural commander of someone’s secret police, I thought. Chipper Dove was blondly handsome, in a spotless, slightly pretty sort of way; we were a dark-haired family, except for Lilly, who was not so blond as she was washed-out—all over; even her hair was pale.

I would have enjoyed seeing Chip Dove play quarterback without a good line to protect him—and when he had to throw a lot of passes to catch up several touchdowns—but the admissions office had done a good job for Coach Bob; Dairy’s football team never fell behind. When they got the ball, they kept it, and Dove rarely had to pass. Although it was the first winning season that any of us children could remember, it was dull—watching them grind down the field, eating up the clock and scoring from three or four yards out. They were not flashy, they were simply strong and precise and well coached; their defence was not so strong—the other teams scored back on them, but not too often: the other teams rarely got to have the ball.

“Ball control,” crowed Iowa Bob. “First time I’ve had a ball-control team since the war.”

My only comfort in Franny’s relationship with Chipper Dove was that Dove was such a team boy he was rarely in Franny’s company without the rest of the Dairy backfield—and often a lineman or two. They menaced the campus that year like a horde, and Franny sometimes was seen in their camp; Dove was attracted to her—every boy, except Frank, seemed attracted to Franny. Girls were cautious in her company; she simply outshone them, and perhaps she was not a very good friend to them. Franny was always meeting more and newer people; she was probably too curious about strangers to be loyal in the way girls want their girl friends to be loyal.

I don’t know; I was kept in the dark about that. At times Franny would fix me up with a date, but the girls were usually older and it didn’t work out. “Everyone thinks you’re cute,” Franny said, “but you have to talk to people a little bit, you know—you can’t just start out necking.”

“I don’t start out necking,” I’d tell her. “I never get to the necking.”

“Well,” she said, “that’s because you just sit there waiting for something to happen. Everyone knows what you’re thinking.”

“You don’t,” I said. “Not always.”

“About me, you mean?” she asked, but I didn’t say anything. “Listen, kid,” Franny said. “I know you think about me too much—if that’s what you mean.”

It was at Dairy that she started calling me “kid,” although there was just a year’s difference between us. To my shame, the name stuck.

“Hey, kid,” Chip Dove said to me in the showers at the gym. “Your sister’s got the nicest ass at this school. Is she banging anybody?”

“Struthers,” I said, although I hoped it wasn’t true. Struthers was at least better than Dove.

“Struthers!” Dove said. “The fucking oarsman? The clod who rows?”

“He’s very strong,” I said; that much was true—oarsmen are strong, and Struthers was the strongest of them.

“Yeah, but he’s a clod,” Dove said.

“Just pulls his oar all day!” said Lenny Metz, a running back who was always—even in the showers—just to the right of Chip Dove’s hip, as if he expected, even there, to be handed the ball. He was as dumb as cement, and as hard.

“Well, kid,” said Chipper Dove. “You tell Franny I think she’s got the nicest ass at this school.”

“And tits!” cried Lenny Metz.

“Well, they’re okay,” Dove said. “But it’s the ass that’s really special.”

“She has a nice smile, too,” Metz said.

Chip Dove rolled his eyes at me, conspiratorially—as if to show me he knew how dumb Metz was, and he was much, much smarter. “Don’t forget to use a little soap, huh, Lenny?” Dove said, and passed him the slippery bar, which Metz, instinctively—a non-fumbler—slapped against his belly in his bearish grip.

I turned off my shower because some bigger person had moved under the stream of water with me. He shoved me out of his way altogether and turned the water back on.

“Move on, man,” he said, softly. It was one of the linemen who kept other football players from hurting Chipper Dove. His name was Samuel Jones, Jr., and he was called Junior Jones. Junior Jones was as black as any night in which my father’s imagination was inspired; he would go on to play college football at Penn State, and pro ball in Cleveland, until someone messed up his knee.

I was fourteen, in 1956, and Junior Jones was the largest organization of human flesh I had ever seen. I moved out of his way, but Chipper Dove said, “Hey, Junior, don’t you know this kid?”

“No, I haven’t met him,” said Junior Jones.

“Well, this is Franny Berry’s brother,” Chip Dove said.

“How do you do?” said Junior Jones.

“Hello,” I said.

“Old Coach Bob is this kid’s grandfather, Junior,” Dove said.

That’s nice,” said Junior Jones. He filled his mouth with a froth of lather from the tiny bar of soap in his hand, then tipped his head back and rinsed his mouth out in the downstream of the shower. Perhaps, I thought, this was what he did instead of brushing his teeth.

“We were talking,” Dove said, “about what it was we liked about Franny.”

“Her smile,” Metz said.

“You said her tits, too,” Chipper Dove said. “And I said she had the nicest ass at this school. We didn’t get to ask the kid, here, what he likes about his sister, but I thought we’d ask you first, Junior.”