The Hotel New Hampshire

Patrolman Tuck that there were ghosts of old Thompson Female Seminary students haunting the hotel. But Howard parked the patrol car behind the most obvious pile of construction rubble and shut off his engine and his lights.

We saw the head of his cigar, like the shimmering red eye of an animal, in the dark car.

We saw Mother and Egg crossing the playground undetected. They came out of the darkness, and out of the scant light, as if their time on earth were that brief and that dimly illuminated; it gave me a twinge, to see them like that, and I felt Franny shudder beside me.

“Let’s go turn all the lights on,” Franny suggested. “In all the rooms.”

“But the electricity is out,” I said.

“It is now, dummy,” she said, “but if we turn on all the lights, the whole hotel will light up when they turn the power on.”

That sounded like a fine idea, so I helped her do it—even the hall lights outside Max Urick’s room—and the outdoor floodlights, which would one day illuminate a patio extending from the restaurant but now would shine only on the backhoe, and a yellow steel hard hat that dangled by its chin strap from a small tree the back-hoe had left alone. The workman whose hat it was seemed gone forever.

The abandoned hat reminded me of Struthers, strong and dull; I knew Franny hadn’t seen him in a while. I knew she had no favourite boyfriends, and she seemed sullen on the subject. Franny was a virgin, she’d told me, not because she wanted to be but because there wasn’t a boy at the Dairy School who was (as she put it) “worth it.”

“I don’t mean I think I’m so great,” she told me, “but I don’t want some clod ruining it for me, and I don’t want someone who’d laugh at me, either. It’s very important, John,” she told me, “especially the first time.”

“Why?” I asked.

It just is,” Franny said. “It’s the first time, that’s why. It stays with you forever.”

I doubted it; I hoped not. I thought of Ronda Ray: what had the first time meant to her? I thought of her night-clothes, smelling—ambiguously—like her wrist under her watchband, like the back of her knee.

Howard Tuck and the patrol car hadn’t moved by the time Franny and I accomplished turning on all the lights. We snuck outdoors; when the power went on, we wanted to see the whole hotel ablaze. We climbed into the driver’s seat of the backhoe and waited.

Howard Tuck sat so still in the squad car, he looked as if he were waiting for his retirement. In fact, Iowa Bob was fond of saying that Howard Tuck always looked “at death’s door.”

When Howard Tuck cranked the ignition of the squad car, the hotel lit up as if he’d done it. When the patrol car’s headlights bunked on, every light in the hotel came to life, and Howard Tuck seemed to lurch the car forward and stall—as if the sight of the bright hotel had dazed him and his foot had slipped off the gas or off the clutch. Actually, the sight of the Hotel New Hampshire blazing with light the instant he started his car had been too much for old Howard Tuck. His life in Elliot Park had been less illuminated—only occasional sexual discoveries, inexpert teen-agers caught in his spotlight, and the odd vandal interested in doing trivial damage to the Thompson Female Seminary. Once the Dairy School students had stolen one of the school’s token cows and tied it to the goal at one end of the field-hockey field.

What Howard Tuck saw when he started his car had been a four-storey shock of light—the way the Hotel New Hampshire might look the precise second it was bombed. Max Urick’s radio came on with a blast of music that caused Max to shriek in alarm; a stove tuner chimed in Mrs. Urick’s underground kitchen; Lilly cried out in her sleep; Frank came to life in the dark mirror; Egg, anxious at the hum of electricity he felt throb through the hotel, shut his eyes; Franny and I, in the backhoe, held our hands over our ears—as if the sight of this much sudden light could only be accompanied by an explosion. And the old patrolman, Howard Tuck, felt his foot slip off the clutch at the moment his heart stopped and he departed a world where hotels could spring to life so easily.

Franny and I were the first to get to the squad car. We saw the policeman’s body slumped against the steering wheel and heard the horn blaring. Father and Mother and Frank ran out of the Hotel New Hampshire, as if the police car were sounding the signal for another fire drill.

“Jesus, Howard, you’re dead!” Father said to the old man, shaking him.

“We didn’t mean to, we didn’t mean to,” Franny said.

Father thumped old Howard Tuck on the chest and stretched him out on the police car’s front seat; then he struck him on the chest again.

“Call somebody!” Father said, but there was no working phone in our unlikely house. Father looked at the puzzling maze of wires and switches and ear—and mouthpieces in the squad car. “Hello? Hello!” he said into something, pushing something else. “How the fuck does this thing work?” he cried.

“Who’s this?” said a voice out of the tubes of the car.

“Get an ambulance to Elliot Park!” my father said.

“Halloween alert?” said the voice. “Halloween trouble? Hello. Hello.”

“Jesus God, it’s Halloween!” Father said. “Goddamn silly machine!” he cried, slamming the dashboard of the squad car with one hand; he gave a fairly hard thump to the quiet chest of Howard Tuck with his other hand.

“We can get an ambulance!” Franny said. “The school ambulance!”

And I ran with her through Elliot Park, which was now glowing in the stunning light that poured from the Hotel New Hampshire. “Holy cow,” said Iowa Bob, when we ran into him at the Pine Street entrance to the park; he was looking at the bright hotel as if the place had opened for business without him. In the unnatural light, Coach Bob looked years older to me, but I suppose he really looked only as old as he was—a grandfather and a retiring coach with one more game to play.

“Howard Tuck had a heart attack!” I told him, and Franny and I ran on toward the Dairy School—which was always up to heart-attack tricks of its own, especially on Halloween.

4 Franny Loses a Fight

On Halloween, the Police Department of the town of Dairy sent old Howard Tuck to Elliot Park, as usual, but the State Police sent two cars to cruise the campus of the Dairy School, and the campus security force was doubled; although short on tradition, the Dairy School had a considerable Halloween reputation.

It had been Halloween when one of the token cows had been tied to the goal at the Thompson Female Seminary. It had been another Halloween when another cow had been led to the Dairy School field house and indoor swimming pool, where the beast suffered a violent reaction to the chlorine in the water and drowned.

It had been Halloween when four little kids from the town had made the mistake of going trick-or-treating in one of the Dairy dorms. The children were kidnapped for the night; they had their heads shaved by a student costumed as an executioner, and one child was unable to speak for a week.

“I hate Halloween,” Franny said, as we noted there were few trick-or-treaters on the streets; the little kids of Dairy were frightened of Halloween. An occasional cringing child, with a paper bag or a mask on its head, cowered as Franny and I ran by; and a group of small children—one dressed as a witch, one as a ghost, and two as robots from a recent film about a Martian invasion—fled into the safety of a lit doorway as we charged up the sidewalk toward them.

Cars with anxious parents were parked here and there along the street—spotting for would-be attackers as their children cautiously approached a door to ring a bell. The usual anxieties about the razor blades in apples, the arsenic in the chocolate cookies, were no doubt passing through the parked parents” minds. One such anxious father put his headlights on Franny and me and leaped from his car to give chase. “Hey, you!” he yelled.

“Howard Tuck had a heart attack!” I called to him, and that seemed to stop him—cold. Franny and I ran through the open gate, like the gate to a cemetery, that admitted us to the playing fields of the Dairy School; past the pointed iron bars, I tried to imagine the gate for the Exeter weekend—when they would be selling pennants and blankets and cowbells to bash together at the game. It was a rather cheerless gate, now, and as we ran in, a small