The Hotel New Hampshire

“What?” said Egg.

“Don’t shout at Egg!” Lilly said, and drew Egg aside in her irritating, motherly fashion. We noticed that Lilly had taken an interest in mothering Egg as soon as Egg grew bigger than she was. Frank followed them into a corner of the room, hissing at Egg like a barrel of snakes.

“I know you’ve got him, Egg,” Frank was hissing.

“What?” Egg said.

Frank didn’t dare say “Sorrow” with Father in the restaurant, and none of us would allow Egg to be bullied; Egg was safe, and he knew it. Egg was wearing his infantry combat uniform; Franny had told me that she thought Frank probably wished he had a uniform like that, and that it made Frank mad every time Egg wore a uniform—and Egg had several. If Frank’s love of uniforms seemed odd, it seemed natural enough for Egg to love them; no doubt Frank resented this.

Then I asked Franny how Junior Jones’s sister was going to get back to Philadelphia once New Year’s was over and the Dairy School started again. Franny looked puzzled, and I explained that I didn’t think Junior was going to drive his sister all the way back to Philadelphia, and then come right back to Dairy for school, and he wouldn’t be allowed to keep a car at Dairy. That was against school rules.

“She’ll drive herself back, I suppose,” Franny said. “I mean, it’s her car—or I think it is.”

Then it dawned on me that Junior Jones’s sister, since they were bringing her car, had to be old enough to drive. “She’s got to be at least sixteen!” I said to Franny.

“Don’t be frightened,” Franny said. “How old do you guess Ronda is?” she whispered.

But the thought of an older girl was intimidating enough without imagining a huge older girl: a bigger, older, once-raped girl.

“It’s reasonable to assume that she’ll be black, too,” Franny said to me. “Or didn’t that occur to you, either?”

“That doesn’t bother me,” I said.

“Oh, everything bothers you,” Franny said. “Titsie Tuck is eighteen and she bothers the hell out of you, and she’ll be here, too.”

That was true: Titsie Tuck referred to me, publicly, as “cute”—in her rich, rather condescending way. But I don’t mean that; she was nice—she just never regarded me at all, unless it was to joke with me; she was intimidating to me in the way someone who never remembers your name can be intimidating. “In this world,” Franny once observed, “just when you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that they’ve met you.”

It was an up-and-down day at the Hotel New Hampshire, getting ready for New Year’s Eve: I remember that something more pronounced than even the usual weave of silliness and sadness seemed to hang over us all, as if we’d be conscious, from time to time, of hardly mourning for Iowa Bob at all—and conscious, at other times, that our most necessary responsibility (not just in spite of but because of Iowa Bob) was to have fun. It was perhaps our first test of a dictum passed down to my father from old Iowa Bob himself; it was a dictum Father preached to us, over and over again. It was so familiar to us, we wouldn’t dream of not behaving as if we believed it, although we probably never knew—until much later—whether we believed it or not.

The dictum was connected with Iowa Bob’s theory that we were all on a big ship—“on a big cruise, across the world.” And in spite of the danger of being swept away, at any time, or perhaps because of the danger, we were not allowed to be depressed or unhappy. The way the world worked was not cause for some sort of blanket cynicism or sophomoric despair; according to my father and Iowa Bob, the way the world worked—which was badly—was just a strong incentive to live purposefully, and to be determined about living well.

“Happy fatalism,” Frank would speak of their philosophy, later; Frank, as a troubled youth, was not a believer.

And one night, when we were watching a wretched melodrama on the TV above the bar in the Hotel New Hampshire, my mother said, “I don’t want to see the end of this. I like happy endings.”

And Father said, “There are no happy endings.”

“Right!” cried Iowa Bob—an odd mixture of exuberance and stoicism in his cracked voice. “Death is horrible, final, and frequently premature,” Coach Bob declared.

“So what?” my father said.

“Right!” cried Iowa Bob. “That’s the point: So what?”

Thus the family maxim was that an unhappy ending did not undermine a rich and energetic life. This was based on the belief that there were no happy endings. Mother resisted this, and Frank was morose about it, and Franny and I were probably believers of this religion—or if, at times, we doubted Iowa Bob, the world would always come up with something that seemed to prove the old lineman right. We never knew what Lilly’s religion was (no doubt it was a small idea, kept to herself), and Egg would be the retriever of Sorrow, in more than one sense. Retrieving Sorrow is a kind of religion, too.

The board that Frank had found with the paw prints on it and the Sorrow holes in it, looking like the abandoned crucifix of a four-footed Christ, seemed ominous to me. I talked Franny into a bed check, although she said Frank and I were nuts—Egg, she said, had probably wanted to keep the board and had thrown the dog away. Of course the intercom revealed nothing, since Sorrow— whether he was thrown away or hidden—was no longer breathing. There was a strange blowing sound, like the rushing of air, from 4A—at the opposite end of the hall from Max Urick’s static—but Franny said there was probably a window open: Ronda Ray had made up that bed for Bitty Tuck, and the room had probably been stuffy.

“Why are we putting Bitty way up on the fourth floor?” I asked.

“Because Mother thought she’d be here with Nasty,” Franny said, “and that way—stuck up on the fourth floor—they could have some privacy from you kids.”

“From us kids, you mean,” I said. “Where’s Junior sleeping?”

“Not with me,” Franny said crisply. “Junior and Sabrina have their own rooms on the second floor.”

“Sa-bree –na?” I said.

“That’s it,” Franny said.

Sabrina Jones! I thought, and experienced a catacylsmic closing of the throat. Seventeen and six-foot-six, I imagined; goes about 185, stripped and towel-dried—and she can bench-press 200 pounds.

“They’re here,” Lilly came and told us at the switchboard, in her wispy voice. The sight of the size of Junior Jones always took Lilly’s breath away.

“How big is she?” I asked Lilly, but of course everyone looked enormous to Lilly; I would have to see Sabrina Jones for myself.

Frank, indulging in a moment of overt self-consciousness, had dressed himself in his bus driver’s uniform and was playing doorman at the Hotel New Hampshire. He was carrying Bitty Tuck’s luggage into the lobby; Bitty Tuck was the kind of girl who had luggage. She wore a sort of man’s suit, but it had been tailored for a woman, and even a sort of man’s dress shirt, with a button-down collar and tie, and everything—except the breasts, which were extraordinary, as Junior Jones had observed: they were impossible to conceal even in the most mannish costume. She flounced into the lobby behind Frank, who was sweating with her luggage.

“Hi, John-John!” she said.

“Hi, Titsie,” I said, not meaning to let her nickname slip out, because only Junior and Franny could call her Titsie and not receive her scorn. She looked at me scornfully and rushed past me, embracing Franny with the strange shrieks her kind of girl seems to have been born making.

“The bags go to 4A, Frank,” I said.

“Jesus, not now they don’t,” Frank said, collapsing with Bitty’s luggage in the lobby. “It will take a team effort,” he said. “Maybe some of you fools will get excited enough to actually have fun doing it, during the party.”

Junior Jones loomed in the lobby, looking capable of hurling Bitty Tuck’s luggage up four floors—including Frank with the bags, I thought.

“Hey, the fun is here,” said Junior Jones. “Here’s the fun, man.”

I tried to see past him, or around him, to the doorway. For a terrified second I actually looked above him, as if his sister, Sabrina, might be towering there.