The Hotel New Hampshire

It was on Egg that we lavished the most presents, because he was the only one of us who was the prime age for Christmas that year. And Egg was very fond of things. Everyone got him animals and balls and tub toys and outdoor equiment—most of it junk that would be lost or outgrown or broken or under the snow before the winter was over.

Franny and I found a jar of chimpanzee teeth in an antique store in Dairy, and we bought the teeth for Frank.

“He can use them in one of his stuffing experiments,” Franny said.

I was just as glad that we would not be giving Frank the teeth before Christmas, because I feared that Frank might try to use them in his version of Sorrow.

“Sorrow!” Iowa Bob screamed aloud one night, just before Christmas, and we all sat up in our beds with our hair itching. “Sorrow!” the old man called and we heard him bellow down the deserted third-floor hall. “Sorrow!” he called.

“The old fool is having a bad dream,” Father said, thumping upstairs in his bathrobe, but I went into Frank’s room and stared at him.

“Don’t look at me,” Frank said. “Sorrow’s still down at the lab. He’s not finished.”

And we all went upstairs to see what was the matter with Iowa Bob.

He had “seen” Sorrow, he said. Coach Bob had smelled the old dog in his sleep, and when he woke up, Sorrow was standing on the old oriental rug—his favourite—in Bob’s room. “But he looked at me with such menace,” old Bob said. “He looked like he was going to attack!”

I stared at Frank again, but Frank shrugged. Father rolled his eyes.

“You were having a nightmare,” he told his old dad.

“Sorrow was in this room!” Coach Bob said. “But he didn’t look like Sorrow. He looked like he wanted to kill me.”

“Hush, hush,” Mother said, and Father waved us out of the room; I heard him start talking to Iowa Bob that way I’d heard Father talk to Egg, or to Lilly—or to any of us children, when we were younger—and I realized that Father often talked to Bob that way, as if he thought his father was a child.

“It’s that old rug,” Mother whispered to us kids. “It’s got so much dog hair on it that your grandfather can still smell Sorrow in his sleep.”

Lilly looked frightened, but Lilly often looked frightened. Egg was staggering around as if he were asleep on his feet.

“Sorrow is dead, isn’t he?” Egg asked.

“Yes, yes,” Franny said.

“What?” Egg said, in such a loud voice that Lilly jumped.

“Okay, Frank,” I whispered in the stairwell. “What pose did you put Sorrow in?”

“Attack,” he said, and I shuddered.

I thought that the old dog, in resentment for the terrible pose he’d been condemned to, had come back to haunt the Hotel New Hampshire. He’d gone to Iowa Bob’s room because Bob had Sorrow’s rug.

“Let’s put Sorrow’s old rug in Frank’s room,” I suggested, at breakfast.

“I don’t want that old rug,” Frank said.

“I do want that old rug,” said Coach Bob. “It’s perfect for my weights.”

“That was some dream you had last night,” Franny ventured to say.

“That was no dream, Franny,” Bob said, grimly. “That was Sorrow—in the flesh,” said the old coach, and Lilly shivered so hard at the word “flesh” that she dropped her cereal spoon with a clatter.

“What is flesh?” Egg asked.

“Look, Frank,” I said to Frank, out in frozen Elliot Park—the day before Christmas. “I think you better let Sorrow stay down at the lab.”

Frank looked ready to “attack” at this suggestion. “He’s all ready,” Frank said, “and he’s coming home tonight.”

“Do me a favour and don’t gift-wrap him, okay?” I said.

“Gift-wrap him?” Frank said, with only mild disgust. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

I didn’t answer him, and he said, “Look, don’t you understand what’s going on? I’ve done such a good job with Sorrow that Grandfather has had a premonition that Sorrow’s come home,” Frank said.

It would always amaze me, how Frank could make pure idiocy sound logical.

And so we came to the night before Christmas. Not a creature was stirring, as they say. Just a stockpot or two. Max Urick’s ever-present static. Ronda Ray was in her room. And there was a Turk in 2B—a Turkish diplomat visiting his son at the Dairy School; he was the only student at the Dairy School who had not gone home (or to someone’s home) for Christmas. All the presents were hidden with care. It was our family tradition to bring everything out and put it under the bare tree on Christmas morning.

Mother and Father, we knew, had hidden all our presents in 3E—a room they visited happily and often. Iowa Bob had stored his gifts in one of the tiny fourth-floor bathrooms, which were not called “fit for dwarfs,” not anymore—not since the dubious diagnosis of Lilly’s possible affliction. Franny showed me all the presents she got— including modelling, for me, the sexy dress she bought for Mother. That prompted me to show her the nightgown I bought for Ronda Ray, and Franny promptly modelled it. When I saw it on her, I knew I should have gotten it for Franny. It was snow-white, a colour not available in Ronda’s collection.

“You should have gotten this for me!” Franny said. “I love it!”

But I would never catch on to what I should do about Franny, in time; as Franny said, “I’ll always be a year ahead of you, kid.”

Lilly hid her gifts in a small box; all her gifts were small. Egg didn’t get anyone any gifts, but he searched endlessly through the Hotel New Hampshire for all the gifts people had gotten for him. And Frank hid Sorrow in Coach Bob’s closet.

“Why?” I would ask him, and ask him, later.

“It was just for one night,” Frank said. “And I knew that Franny would never look there.”

On Christmas Eve, 1956, everyone went to bed early and no one slept—another family tradition. We heard the ice groaning under the snow in Elliot Park. There were times when Elliot Park could creak like a coffin changing temperature—being lowered into the ground. Why is it that even the Christmas of 1956 felt a little like Halloween?

There was even a dog barking, late at night, and although the dog could not have been Sorrow, all of us who were awake thought of Iowa Bob’s dream—or his “premonition,” as Frank called it.

And then it was Christmas morning—clear, windy, and cold—and I ran my forty or fifty wind sprints across Elliot Park. Naked, I was no longer as “chubby” as I looked with my running clothes on—as Ronda Ray was always telling me. Some of the bananas were turning hard. And Christmas morning or no Christmas morning, a routine is a routine: I joined Coach Bob for a little weight lifting before the family gathered for Christmas breakfast.

“You do your curls while I do my neck bridges,” Iowa Bob told me.

“Yes, Grandfather,” I said, and I did as I was told. Feet to feet on Sorrow’s old rug, we did our sit-ups; head to head, our push-ups. There was only one long barbell, and the two short dumbbells for the one-arm curls. We traded the weights back and forth—it was a kind of wordless morning prayer for us.

“Your upper arms, your chest, your neck—that all looks pretty good,” Grandpa Bob told me, “but your forearms could stand some work. And put maybe a flat twenty-five-pounder on your chest when you do your sit- ups—you’re doing them too easily. And bend your knees.”

“Yup,” I said, out of breath in my Ronda Ray way.

Bob put the long barbell up; he cleaned it neatly about ten times, then he pumped a few standing presses with it—it seemed to me he had about 160 or 180 on the bar when the weights slid off one end and I got out of their way, and then about fifty or seventy-five pounds came sliding off the other end of the bar, and old Iowa Bob cried, “Shit! Goddamn thing!” The weights rolled across the room. Father, downstairs, hollered up at us.