The Hotel New Hampshire

comes Sigmund Freud, Father thought: he was falling in love, so anything was possible.

But this was not that Freud, of course; it was the year when that Freud died. This Freud was a Viennese Jew with a limp and an unpronounceable name, who in the summers since he had been working at the Arbuthnot {since 1933, when he’d left his native Austria) had earned the name Freud for his abilities to soothe the distress of the staff and guests alike; he was an entertainer, and since he came from Vienna and was a Jew, “Freud” seemed only natural to some of the odd, foreign wits at the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea. The name seemed especially appropriate when, in 1937, Freud arrived for the summer on a new Indian motorcycle with a sidecar he’d made all by himself.

“Who gets to ride behind and who gets to ride in the sidecar, Freud?” the working girls at the hotel teased him—because he was so frightfully scarred and ugly with pockmarks (“holes from the boils!” he called them) that no woman would ever love him.

“Nobody rides with me but State o’Maine,” Freud said, and he unsnapped the canvas canopy from the sidecar. In the sidecar sat a bear, black as exhaust, thicker with muscles than Iowa Bob, warier than any stray dog. Freud had retrieved this bear from a logging camp in the north of the state and had convinced the management of the Arbuthnot that he could train the beast to entertain the guests. Freud, when he emigrated from Austria, had arrived in Boothbay Harbor, by boat, from New York, with two job descriptions in capital letters on his work papers: EXPERIENCE AS ANIMAL TRAINER AND KEEPER; GOOD MECHANICAL APTITUDE. There being no animals available, he fixed the vehicles at the Arbuthnot and properly put them to rest for the non-tourist months, when he travelled to the logging camps and the paper mills as a mechanic.

All that time, he later told my father, he’d been looking for a bear. Bears, Freud said, were where the money was.

When my father saw the man dismount from the motorcycle under the ballroom porch, he wondered at the cheers from the veteran members of the staff; when Freud helped the figure from the sidecar, my mother’s first thought was that the passenger was an old, old woman—the motorcyclist’s mother, perhaps (a stout woman wrapped in a dark blanket).

“State o’Maine!” yelled someone in the band, and blew his horn.

My mother and father saw the bear begin to dance. He danced away from Freud on his hind legs; he dropped to all fours and did a short lap or two around the motorcycle. Freud stood on the motorcycle and clapped. The bear called State o’Maine began to clap, too. When my mother felt my father take her hand into his—they were not clapping—she did not resist him; she gave back equal pressure, both of them never taking their eyes from the bulky bear performing below them, and my mother thought: I am nineteen and my life is just beginning.

“You felt that, really?” Franny always asked.

“Everything is relative,” Mother would say. “But that’s what I felt, yes. I felt my life start.”

“Holy cow,” said Frank.

“Was it me or the bear you liked?” Father asked.

“Don’t be silly,” Mother said. “It was the whole thing. It was the start of my life.”

And that line had the same fix-me-to-the-spot quality of Father’s line about the bear (“He was too old to be a bear anymore”). I felt rooted to the story when my mother said that this was the start of her life; it was as if I could see Mother’s life, like the motorcycle, after long revving, finally chunk into gear and lurch forward.

And what must my father have imagined, reaching for her hand just because a bear was brought by a lobster boat into his life?

“I knew it would be my bear,” Father told us. “I don’t know how.” And perhaps it was this knowledge—that he saw something that would be his—that made him reach for my mother, too.

You can see why we children asked so many questions. It is a vague story, the kind parents prefer to tell.

That first night they saw Freud and his bear, my father and mother did not even kiss. When the band broke up, and the help retired to the male and female dormitories—the slightly less elegant buildings separate from the main hotel—my father and mother went down to the docks and watched the water. If they talked, they never told us children what they said. There must have been a few classy sailboats there, and even the private piers in Maine were sure to have a lobster boat or two moored off them. There was probably a dinghy, and my father suggested borrowing it for a short row; my mother probably refused. Fort Popham was a ruin, then, and not the tourist attraction it is today; but if there were any lights on the Fort Popham shore, they would have been visible from the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea. Also, the broad mouth of the Kennebec River, at Bay Point, had a bell buoy and a light, and there might have been a lighthouse on Stage Island as long ago as 1939—my father never remembered.

But generally, in those days, it would have been a dark coast, so that when the white sloop sailed toward them—out of Boston, or New York: out of the southwest and civilization, anyway—my mother and father must have seen it very clearly and watched it undistracted for the time it took to come alongside the dock. My father caught the mooring line; he always told us he was at the point of panic about what to do with the rope—tie it up to something or tug it—when the man in the white dinner jacket, black slacks, and black dress shoes stepped easily off the deck and climbed the ladder up to the dock and took the rope from my father’s hands. Effortlessly, the man guided the sloop past the end of the dock before he threw the rope back on board. “You’re free!” he called to the boat, then. My mother and father claimed they saw no sailors on board, but the sloop slipped away, back to the sea—its yellow lights leaving like sinking glass—and the man in the dinner jacket turned to my father and said, “Thanks for the hand. Are you new here?”

“Yes, we both are,” Father said.

The man’s perfect clothes were unaffected by his voyage. For so early in the summer he was very tanned, and he offered my mother and father cigarettes from a handsome flat black box. They didn’t smoke. “I’d hoped to catch the last dance,” the man said, “but the band has retired?”

“Yes,” my mother said. At nineteen, my mother and father had never seen anyone quite like this man. “He had obscene confidence,” my mother told us.

“He had money,” Father said.

“Have Freud and the bear arrived?” the man asked.

“Yes,” Father said. “And the motorcycle.”

The man in the white dinner jacket smoked hungrily, but neatly, while he looked at the dark hotel; very few rooms were lit, but the outdoor lights strung to illuminate the paths, the hedgerows, and the docks shone on the man’s tanned face and made his eyes narrow and were reflected on the black, moving sea. “Freud’s a Jew, you know,” the man said. “It’s a good thing he got out of Europe when he did, you know. Europe’s going to be no place for Jews. My broker told me.”

This solemn news must have impressed my father, eager to enter Harvard—and the world—and not yet aware that a war would interrupt his plans for a while, the man in the white dinner jacket caused my father to take my mother’s hand into his, for the second time that evening, and again she gave equal pressure as they politely waited for the man to finish his cigarette, or say good night, or go on.

But all he said was, “And the world’s going to be no place for bears!” His teeth were as white as his dinner jacket when he laughed, and with the wind my father and mother didn’t hear the hiss of his cigarette entering the ocean—or the sloop coming alongside again. Suddenly the man stepped to the ladder, and only when he slipped quickly down the rungs did Mary Bates and Win Berry realize that the white sloop was gliding under the, ladder and the man was perfectly in time to drop to its deck. No rope passed bands. The sloop, not under sail but chugging slowly under other power, turned southwest (toward Boston, or New York, again)—unafraid of night travel—and what the man in the white dinner jacket last called to them was lost in the sputter of the engine, the slap of the hull on the sea, and the wind that blew the gulls by (like party hats, with feathers, bobbing in the water after drunks had thrown them there). All his life my father wished he’d heard what the man had to say.

It was Freud who told my father that he’d seen the owner of the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea.

“Ja, that was him, all right,” Freud said. “That’s how he comes, just a couple of