The Hotel New Hampshire

Ronda Ray lived at Hampton Beach, where she waitressed and changed sheets for the summer crowd. She’d been looking for a year-round arrangement for her hotel career—and, my mother guessed, a way to get out of Hampton Beach, forever. She was about my mother’s age, and in fact claimed to remember seeing Earl perform in Earl’s casino years. She had not seen his ballroom dancing performance, though; it was the bandstand she remembered, and the act called “Applying for a Job.”

“But I never believed it was a real bear,” she told Franny and me, as we watched her unpack a small suitcase in her dayroom. “I mean,” Ronda Ray said, “I thought nobody would get a kick out of undressing no real bear.”

We wondered why she was unpacking night clothes from the suitcase, if this day room was not where she intended to spend the night; she was a woman Franny was curious about—and I thought she was even exotic. She had dyed hair; I can’t say what colour it was because it wasn’t a real colour. It wasn’t red, it wasn’t blonde; it was the colour of plastic, or metal, and I wondered how it felt. Ronda Ray had a body that I imagined was formerly as strong as Franny’s but had grown a little thick—still powerful, but straining. It is hard to say what she smelled like, although—after we left Ronda—Franny tried.

“She put perfume on her wrist two days ago,” Franny said. “You following me?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But her watchband wasn’t there then—her brother was wearing her watch, or her father,” Franny said. “Some man, anyway, and he really sweated a lot.”

“Yes,” I said.

Then Ronda put the watchband on, over the perfume, and she wore it for a day while she was stripping beds,” Franny said.

“What beds?” I said.

Franny thought a minute. “Beds very strange people had slept in,” she said.

“The circus called Fritz’s Act slept in them!” I said.

“Right!” said Franny.

“The whole summer!” we said, in unison.

“Right,” Franny said. “And what we smell when we smell Ronda is what Ronda’s watchband smells like—after all that.”

That was coming close to it, but I thought it was a slightly better smell than that—just slightly. I thought of Ronda Ray’s stockings, which she hung in the closet of her dayroom; I thought that if I sniffed just behind the knee of the pair of stockings she was wearing I would catch the true essence of her.

“You know why she wears them?” Franny asked me.

“No,” I said.

“Some man spilled hot coffee on her legs,” Franny said. “He did it on purpose. He tried to boil her.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I’ve seen the scars,” Franny said. “And she told me.”

At the squawk-box controls, we switched off all the rooms and listened to Ronda Ray’s room. She was humming. Then we heard her smoke. We imagined how she’d sound with a man.

“Noisy,” Franny said. We listened to Ronda’s breathing, intermixed with the crackles of the intercom system—an ancient system that ran on the power from an automobile battery, like a clever electric fence.

When Lilly and Egg and Father came home from the game, Franny and I put Egg in the dumbwaiter and hauled him up and down the four-storey shaft until Frank ratted on us and Father told us that the dumbwaiter would be used only for removing linen and dishes and other things—not humans—from the rooms.

It wasn’t safe. Father said. If we let go of the rope, the dumbwaiter fell at the speed imposed by its own response to gravity. That was fast—if not for a thing, at least for a human.

“But Egg is so light,” Franny argued. “I mean, we’re not going to try it with Frank.”

“You’re not going to try it at all!” Father said.

Then Lilly got lost and we stopped unpacking for almost an hour, trying to find her. She was sitting in the kitchen with Mrs. Urick, who had seized Lilly’s attention by telling her stories of the various ways she’d been punished when she’d been a girl. Her hair had been cut out in hunks, to humiliate her, when she forgot to wash before supper; she’d been told to go stand barefoot in the snow whenever she swore; when she’d “snitched” food, she’d been force to eat a tablespoon of salt.

“If you and Mother go away,” Lilly said to Father, “you won’t leave us with Mrs. Urick, will you?”

Frank had the best room and Franny complained; she had to share a room with Lilly. A doorway without a door connected my room to Egg’s. Max Urick dismantled his intercom; when we listened to his room, all we heard was static—as if the old sailor were still far out to sea. Mrs. Urick’s room bubbled like the stockpots on the back of her stove—the sound of life held steadily at a simmer.

We were so restless for more guests, and for the Hotel New Hampshire to actually be open, that we couldn’t keep still.

Father paced us through two fire drills, to tire us out, but it only roused us to wanting more action. When it was dark, we realized the electricity hadn’t been turned on—so we hid from each other, and searched for each other, through the empty rooms with candles.

I hid in Ronda Ray’s dayroom on the second floor. I blew my candle out and, with my sense of smell, located the drawers where she’d put her nightclothes away. I heard Frank scream from the third floor—he’d put his hand on a plant in the dark—and what could only be Franny laughing in the echo chamber that the stairwell was.

“Have your fun now!” Father roared from our apartment. “When there are guests here, you can’t have the run of the place.”

Lilly found me in Ronda Ray’s room and helped me put Ronda’s clothes back in the chest of drawers. Father caught us leaving Ronda’s room and took Lilly back to our apartment and put her to bed; he was irritable because he’d just tried to call the electric company to complain that the power was off and had discovered that our phones weren’t connected, either. Mother had volunteered to take a walk with Egg and make the call from the railroad station.

I went looking for Franny, but she had made it back to the lobby, undetected; she switched all the intercoms to “Broadcasting” and broadcast an announcement throughout the hotel.

“Now hear this!” Franny boomed. “Now hear this! Everyone out of bed for a sex check!”

“What’s a sex check?” I wondered, running down the stairwell to the lobby.

Frank fortunately missed the message; he was hiding in the fourth-floor utility closet, where there was no squawk box installed: when he heard Franny’s announcement, the message was garbled. He probably thought that Father was pacing us through another fire drill; in his haste to leave the utility closet, Frank stepped in a pail and fell on all fours, his head hitting the floor and one hand touching, this time, a dead mouse.

We heard him scream again, and Max Urick opened his door at the end of the fourth-floor hall and bellowed as if he were out to sea and going down.

“Shut up your God-awful screeching, or I’ll hang you by your little fingers off the fire escape!”

That put Frank in a bad mood; he declared that our games were “childish” and he went to his room. Franny and I watched out over Elliot Park from the big corner window in 3F; that would be Coach Bob’s bedroom, but Bob was out at an Athletic Department banquet, celebrating all but the last game—yet to be played.

Elliot Park was typically deserted, and the unused playground facilities stuck up like dead trees against the dull glow from the one streetlight. The last of the construction equipment was still there, the diesel machines and the workmen’s shack, but the Hotel New Hampshire was finished, now, except for landscaping, and the only machine that had been in use, for days, was the backhoe that crouched near the front flagstone path like a starving dinosaur. There were still a few stumps from the dead elms to dig out of the ground, and a few holes to fill around the periphery of the new parking lot. A soft, glossy light came from the windows of our apartment, where Father was putting Lilly to bed, by candlelight, and Frank was, no doubt, looking at himself in his band uniform in the mirror of his room.

Franny and I saw the squad car come into Elliot Park—like a shark cruising forsaken waters for an unlikely meal. We speculated that the old patrolman, Howard Tuck, would “arrest” Mother and Egg as they were walking back from the railroad station. We speculated that the candle-light in the Hotel New Hampshire would convince