The Hotel New Hampshire

“I confess!” he cried.

“You bet you do,” said Junior Jones.

“I did it!” cried Lenny Metz.

“You sure did,” said Junior Jones.

“I did it, too!” cried Chester Pulaski.

“And who did it first?” asked Junior Jones.

“Chipper Dove!” sang the boys in the backfield. “Dove did it first!”

“There you have it,” said Junior Jones to the Dean of Men. “You got the picture?”

“What did they do—and to whom?” the Dean asked.

They gang-banged Franny Berry,” said Junior Jones, just as the Dean of Women emerged from the bathroom; she saw the black athletes swaying in the doorway, like a choral society from an African country, and she screamed again; she shut herself back up in the bathroom.

“Now we’ll bring you Dove,” said Junior Jones.

“Gently, Junior!” cried the Dean. “For God’s sake, gently!”

I stayed with Franny; Mother and Father came to the infirmary with her clothes. Coach Bob was left to babysit with Lilly and Egg—like the old days, I thought. But where was Frank?

Frank was out on a “mission,” Father said mysteriously. When Father had heard that Franny was “beaten up,” he’d never doubted the worst. And he knew that Sorrow would be the first thing she’d ask for when she was home in her own bed. “I want to go home,” she would say; and then she’d say, “I want Sorrow to sleep with me.”

“Maybe it’s not too late,” Father had said; he’d left Sorrow at the vet’s before the football game. If it had been a busy day for the vet, perhaps the old farter was still alive in some cage. Frank had undertaken the mission to go and see.

But it was like the rescue mission of Junior Jones; Frank arrived too late. He woke up the vet with his pounding on the door. “I hate Halloween,” the vet probably said, but his wife told him it was one of the Berry boys asking about Sorrow. “Oh-oh,” the vet said. “I’m sorry, son,” the vet told Frank, “but your dog passed away this afternoon.”

“I want to see him,” Frank said.

“Oh-oh,” the vet said. “The dog is dead, son.”

“Have you buried him?” Frank asked.

“It’s so sweet,” the vet’s wife told her husband. “Let the boy bury his own dog, if that’s what he wants.”

“Oh-oh,” the vet said, but he led Frank to the hindmost room of the kennel, where Frank was treated to the sight of three dead dogs in a pile, with a pile of three dead cats beside them. “We don’t bury things on the weekends,” the vet explained. “Which one is Sorrow?”

Frank spotted the old evil-smeller instantly; Sorrow had begun to stiffen up, but Frank was still able to force the dead black Labrador into a large trash bag. The vet and his wife couldn’t have known that Frank had no intention of burying Sorrow.

“Too late,” Frank whispered to Father, when Mother and Father and Franny and I arrived home—at the Hotel New Hampshire.

“Jesus God, I can walk by myself, you know,” Franny said, because all of us were trying to walk next to her. “Here, Sorrow!” she called. “Come on, boy!”

Mother started to cry and Franny took her arm. “I’m okay, Mom,” she said. “Really I am. Nobody touched the me inside me, I guess.” Father started to cry and Franny took his arm, too. I had been crying all night, it seemed, and I was all cried out.

Frank pulled me aside.

“What the fuck is it, Frank?” I said.

“Come see,” he said.

Sorrow, still in the trash bag, was under the bed in Frank’s room.

“Jesus God, Frank!” I said.

“I’m going to fix him for Franny,” he said. “In time for Christmas!”

“Christmas, Frank?” I said. “Fix him?”

“I’m going to have Sorrow stuffed!” Frank said. Frank’s favourite course at the Dairy School was biology, a weird course taught by an amateur taxidermist named Foit. Frank, with Foit’s help, had already stuffed a squirrel and an odd orange bird.

“Holy cow, Frank,” I said, “I don’t know if Franny will like that.”

“It’s the next-best thing to being alive,” Frank said.

I didn’t know. By the sudden outburst we heard, from Franny, we knew that Father had broken the news to her. A slight distraction to Franny’s grief was caused by Iowa Bob. He insisted on going out and finding Chipper Dove himself, and it took some persuading to talk him out of it. Franny wanted another bath, and I lay in bed listening to the tub filling. Then I got up and went to the bathroom door and asked her if there was anything I could get her.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Just go out and get me yesterday and most of today,” she said. “I want them back.”

“Is that all?” I said. “Just yesterday and today?”

“That’s all,” she said. “Thank you.”

“I would if I could, Franny,” I told her.

“I know,” she said. I heard her sinking slowly in the tub. “I’m okay,” she whispered. “Nobody got the fucking me in me.”

“I love you,” I whispered.

She didn’t answer me, and I went back to bed.

I heard Coach Bob, in his rooms above us—doing push-ups, and then some sit-ups, and then a little work with the one-arm curls (the bar-bells” rhythmic clanks and the old man’s enraged breaths)—and I wished he had been allowed to find Chipper Dove, who would have been no match for the old Iowa lineman.

Unfortunately, Dove was a match for Junior Jones and the Black Arm of the Law. Dove had gone straight to the girls” dorm, and to the room of a doting cheerleader named Melinda Mitchell. She was called Mindy and she was gaga over Dove. He told her he’d been “fooling around” with Franny Berry, but that when she started fooling around with Lenny Metz and Chester Pulaski, too, it had put him off. “A cock tease,” he called my sister, and Mindy Mitchell agreed. She had been jealous of Franny for years.

“But now Franny’s got the black bunch after me,” Dove told Mindy. “She’s pals with them. Especially Junior Jones,” Dove said, “—that goody-goody spade who’s a fink for the Dean.” So Mindy Mitchell tucked Dove into her bed with her, and when Harold Swallow came whispering at her door (“Dove, Dove—have you seen Dove? Black Arm of the Law wants to know”), she said she didn’t let any boy into her room and she wouldn’t let Harold in, either.

So they didn’t find him. He was expelled from the Dairy School in the morning—along with Chester Pulaski and Lenny Metz. The parents of the gang-bangers, when they heard the story, were grateful enough that nothing criminal was being charged that they accepted the expulsion from school rather graciously. Some of the faculty, and most of the trustees, were upset that the incident couldn’t have been suppressed until after the Exeter game, but it was pointed out that Iowa Bob’s backfield was a less embarrassing loss than losing Iowa Bob himself—for the old man surely would have refused to coach in a game with those three still on his team.

It was an incident that was hushed up in the best private school tradition; it was remarkable, really, how a school as unsophisticated as the Dairy School could at times imitate exactly the decorum of silence in dealing with distasteful matters that the more sophisticated schools had learned like a science.

For “beating up” Franny Berry—in what was implied to be merely an extension of the general roughhouse quality of a Dairy School Halloween—Chester Pulaski, Lenny Metz, and Chipper Dove were expelled. Dove, it appeared to me, got off scot-free. But Franny and I had not seen the last of him, and perhaps Franny already knew that. We had not seen the last of Junior Jones, either; he became Franny’s friend, if not exactly her bodyguard, for the duration of his stay at Dairy. They went everywhere together, and it was clear to me that Junior Jones was responsible for helping Franny feel that she was, indeed, a good girl—as he was always telling her. We had not seen