The Hotel New Hampshire

Harold Swallow had screamed in the woods, and when Lenny let go of Franny’s arms, Chester Pulaski slipped out of my sister and made a break for it, too. He was completely undressed, however, and on his tender bare feet he trotted slowly between the trees, not striking them. Every twenty yards or so, he was scared to death by the Black Arm of the Law, the black athletes who crept through the woods, swishing the trees, snapping sticks, and humming their tune. It had been Chester Pulaski’s first gang bang, and the jungle ritual had completely coloured the night for him—he thought the woods were suddenly full of natives! (cannibals! he imagined)—and he stumbled whimpering and bent over, appropriate to my imagination of Early Man, not quite upright, mostly on all fours, when he arrived at the dormitory apartment of the Dean of Men.

The Dean of Men had not been happy at the Dairy School since the school had admitted women. Before then he’d been Dean of Students—a prim, fit man with a pipe and a fondness for racquet sports, he had a pert, fit wife of the youthful, cheerleader variety, her age betrayed only by an alarming pouchiness about her eyes; they had no children. The boys,” the Dean of Students liked to say, “are all my children.”

When the “girls” arrived, he never felt the same about them and quickly appointed, to assist himself, his wife in the role of Dean of Women. His new title, Dean of Men, pleased him, but he despaired at all the new sorts of trouble his boys got into now that there were girls at Dairy.

“Oh no,” he probably said, when he heard Chester Pulaski clawing at his door. “I hate Halloween.”

“I’ll get it,” his wife said, and the Dean of Women went to open the door. “I know, I know,” she said, cheerfully, “trick or treat!”

And there was a naked and cringing Chester Pulaski, the blocking back—blazing with boils, smelling of sex.

The scream of the Dean of Women was said to have awakened the bottom two floors of the dorm the two deans lived in—and even Mrs. Butler, the night nurse, who was sleeping at her desk in the infirmary next door. “I hate Halloween,” she probably said to herself. She went to the infirmary door and saw Junior Jones and Harold Swallow and me; Junior was carrying Franny.

I had helped Franny get dressed in the ferns and Junior Jones had tried to untangle her hair while she cried and cried, and finally he’d said to her, “You want to walk or ride?” It was a question Father used to ask us children when we were years younger, which meant did we want to walk or did we want to take the car. Junior, of course, meant he would carry her, and that’s what Franny wanted—so he did.

He carried her past the spot in the ferns where Lenny Metz was being lashed to a lacrosse stick and prepared for a different land of travel. Franny cried and cried, and Junior said, “Hey, you’re a good girl, I have very good judgement about that.” But Franny kept crying. “Hey, listen,” said Junior Jones. “You know what? When someone touches you and you don’t want to be touched, that’s not really being touched—you got to believe me. It’s not you they touch when they touch you that way; they don’t really get you, you understand. You’ve still got you inside you. Nobody’s touched you—not really. You’re a really good girl, you believe me? You’ve still got you inside you, you believe that?”

“I don’t know,” Franny whispered, and went on crying. One of her arms lolled down Junior’s side and I took her hand; she squeezed; I squeezed back. Harold Swallow, darting through the trees, guiding us like a hush up the path, found the infirmary and opened the door.

“What’s all this?” said the night nurse, Mrs. Butler.

“I’m Franny Berry,” said my sister, “and I’ve been beaten up.”

“Beaten up” would remain Franny’s euphemism for it, although everyone knew she had been raped. “Beaten up” was all Franny would admit to, although no one missed the point; this way it would never be a legal point, however.

“She means she was raped,” Junior Jones told Mrs. Butler. But Franny kept shaking her head. I think that her way of interpreting Junior’s kindness to her, and his version of how the her in her had not been touched, was to convert her sexual abuse into the terms of a mere fight she had lost. She whispered to him —he still held her against his chest and in his arms—and then he put her down on her feet and said to Mrs. Butler, “Okay, she was beaten up.” Mrs. Butler knew what was meant.

“She was beaten up and raped,” said Harold Swallow, who couldn’t stand still, but Junior Jones cooled him down with a look and said to him, “Why don’t you fly away, Harold? Why don’t you fly off and find Mr. Dove?” That put the gleam back in Harold’s eye, and he flew away.

I called Father, before I remembered there was no working phone in the Hotel New Hampshire. Then I called Campus Security and asked them to give Father the message: Franny and I were at the Dairy School Infirmary; Franny had been “beaten up.”

“It’s just another Halloween, kid,” Franny said, holding my hand.

“The worst one, Franny,” I said to her.

The worst one so far,” she said.

Mrs. Butler took Franny off, to fix her—among other things—a bath, and Junior Jones explained to me that if Franny cleaned herself there would be no evidence that she was raped, and I went after Mrs. Butler to explain it to her, but Mrs. Butler had already explained this to Franny, who wanted to let it go. “I’ve been beaten up,” she said, although she would listen to Mrs. Butler’s advice about checking, later, to see if she was pregnant (she wasn’t)—or infected with a venereal disease (someone had passed on a little something, which was eventually cured).

When Father arrived at the infirmary, Junior Jones had gone to lend his assistance to the delivery of Lenny Metz to the Dean, Harold Swallow was combing the campus, like a hawk, looking for a dove—and I was sitting in an all-white hospital room with Franny, fresh from her bath, her hair in a towel, an ice pack on her left cheekbone, her right ring finger bandaged (she’d torn out a nail); she wore a white hospital smock and was sitting up in bed. “I want to go home,” she told Father. “Tell Mother I just need some clean clothes.”

“What did they do to you, darling?” Father asked her, and sat beside her on the bed.

“They beat me up,” Franny said.

“Where were you?” Father asked me.

“He got help,” Franny said.

“Did you see what happened?” Father asked me.

“He didn’t see anything,” Franny said.

I saw the Third Act, I wanted to tell Father, but although we all knew what “beaten up” meant, I would remain faithful to Franny’s term for it.

“I just want to go home,” Franny said, although the Hotel New Hampshire seemed, to me, to be a large and unfamiliar place to curl up in. Father went to get her clothes.

It was a pity he missed seeing Lenny Metz trussed up on the lacrosse stick and carried through the campus to the Dean like a poorly prepared piece of meat on a spit. And a pity Father didn’t witness the precociousness of Harold Swallow searching for Dove, gliding up to every dorm room like a shadow. Until Harold ascertained that Chipper Dove could only be in the girls” dorm. After that, he thought, it would be just a matter of time until he found whose room Dove was hiding in.

The Dean of Men, covering Chester Pulaski with his wife’s camel’s-hair coat—it was the nearest thing handy—cried out, “Chester, Chester, my boy! Why? Only a week before the Exeter game!”

“The woods are full of niggers,” Chester Pulaski said, mournfully. “They’re taking over. Run for your life.”

The Dean of Women had locked herself in the bathroom, and when the second set of clawing sounds, and banging, reached her ears, she cried to her husband. “You can answer the goddamned door this time!”

“It’s the niggers, don’t let them in!” Chester Pulaski cried, clutching the Dean of Women’s coat around him. The Dean of Men bravely opened the door; for some time he’d had an arrangement with Junior Jones’s secret police, which was Dairy’s highly underground and very good arm of the law.

“For God’s sake, Junior,” the Dean said. “This is going too far.”

“Who is it?” cried the Dean of Women from the bathroom, as Lenny Metz was brought into the Deans’ living room and stretched out on the hearth before the fireplace; his broken collarbone was killing him, and when he saw the fire he must have thought it was meant for him.