The Hotel New Hampshire

opener on the braid of twine was littered with beer-bottle caps. As I lifted Bitty Tuck’s luggage in my arms, she said, “Aren’t you going to make two trips?” I heard Frank’s sharp belch, a primitive gong announcing that the turn of the year was past, and I seized the luggage tighter and started climbing—four storeys up, Bitty following.

“Geez,” she said. “I knew you were strong, John-John, but you could get a job on television—kissing like that.” And I wondered what she imagined: my mouth as an advertisement, smooching a camera, point-blank?

I thus distracted myself from my lower-back pain, was grateful I had skipped this morning’s bench presses and one-arm curls, and bore Bitty Tuck’s luggage to 4A. The windows were open, but I couldn’t hear the rushing- of-air sound I had heard over the intercom hours before; I guessed that the wind had dropped. The luggage seemed to explode from my arms, which felt pounds lighter, and Bitty Tuck angled me toward her bed.

“Do it again,” she said. “I bet you can’t. I bet it was beginner’s luck.” So I kissed her again, encouraging a little more tooth contact, and more mischief with the tongue.

“Jesus,” mumbled Bitty Tuck, touching me. “Get your hands out of your pockets!” she said. “Oh, wait, I have to use the bathroom.” And when she flicked on the bathroom light, she said, “Oh, it was nice of Franny to leave me her hair dryer!” And I, for the first time, smelled the room—an odor more distinctive than a swamp: it was a burnt smell, yet strangely wet, as if fire and water had joined unpleasantly. I knew that the rushing-of-air sound I had heard on the intercom had been the hair dryer, but before I could get to the bathroom to prevent Bitty Tuck from looking farther, she said, “What’s that wrapped up in the shower curtain? Gaaaaaaaaa!” Her scream froze me in motion between her bed and the bathroom door. Even Doris Wales, four floors below and wailing her way through “You’re a Heartbreaker,” must have heard it. Sabrina Jones told me later that her book flew from her hands. Ronda Ray jerked bolt upright on the barstool, for at least a passing second; Sleazy Wales, Junior Jones told me, thought the source of the scream was his amplifier, but nobody else was fooled.

“Titsie!” Franny cried.

“Jesus God!” said Father.

“Holy cow!” said Junior Jones.

I was the first to get Bitty out of the bathroom. She had fainted sideways against the child-sized toilet and had wedged herself under the child-sized sink. The grown-up-sized bathtub, half-full of water, had caught her eye as she was inserting her diaphragm—which, in those days, was very sophisticated. Floating in the tub of water was the shower curtain, and Bitty had leaned forward and raised the curtain just enough to sue the grizzly, submerged head of Sorrow—looking like a murder victim: a drowned dog, the ghastly fierceness of his last snarling fight with death slipping from his face under the water.

The discoverer of the body is rarely spared. It was fortunate Bitty’s heart was young and strong; I could feel it pounding through her bosom when I put her on the bed. Thinking it a plausible way to revive her, I kissed her, and although it roused her eyes open for a bright moment, she only screamed again—even louder.

“It’s just Sorrow,” I told her, as if this would explain everything.

Sabrina Jones was the first to get to 4A, since she was only travelling from the second floor. She glared at me, as if I’d been clearly a part of a rape case, and she said to me, “You must have done something I never showed you!” She no doubt thought Bitty was the victim of bad kissing.

It had been Egg who’d done the wrong, of course. He had turned the hair dryer on Sorrow in Bitty’s bathroom, and the terrible dog had caught fire. In a panic, Egg had thrown the burning beast in the bathtub and covered it with water. The fire thus extinguished, Egg had opened the windows to clear the scorched smell from the room, and at the peak of his tiredness, just before midnight—and fearing capture from the ever-prowling Frank— Egg had covered the carcass with the shower curtain, for the sodden dog was now too heavy with water for Egg to be able to lift him; Egg had gone to our room and changed into ordinary clothes to await his eventual punishment.

“My God,” Frank said, morosely, when he saw Sorrow, “I think he’s really ruined; I think he’s beyond repair.”

Even the boys from Hurricane Doris trooped into Bitty’s bathroom to pay their respects to the dreadful Sorrow.

“I wanted to make him nice again!” Egg cried. “He was nice once,” Egg insisted, “and I wanted him to be nice again.”

Frank, with a sudden wealth of pity, seemed to understand something about taxidermy for the first time.

“Egg, Egg,” Frank reasoned with the sobbing child. “I can make him nice again. You should have let me. I can make him anything,” Frank claimed. “I still can,” he said. “You want him nice, Egg? I’ll make him nice.” But Franny and I stared into the bathtub and felt great doubt. That Frank had taken a harmless, farting Labrador retriever and made him a killer was one thing; but to reassemble this truly disgusting body, matted and burned and bloated in the bathtub, was a miracle of perversion that we doubted even Frank was capable of.

Father, on the other hand, was ever the optimist; he seemed to think all of this would be excellent “therapy” for Frank—and, no doubt, a further maturing influence on Egg.

“If you can restore the dog, and make him nice, son,” Father told Frank, with inappropriate solemnity, “that would make us all very happy.”

“I think we should throw it away,” Mother said.

“Ditto,” said Franny.

“I tried,” Max Urick complained.

But Egg and Frank began to whoop and cry. Perhaps Father saw that in the restoration of Sorrow lay Frank’s forgiveness; salvaging Sorrow could possibly restore Frank’s self-esteem; and perhaps by refashioning Sorrow, for Egg—by making Sorrow “nice”—Father thought that a bit of Iowa Bob would be returned to us all. But as Franny would say, years later, there was never any such thing as “nice sorrow”; by definition, sorrow would never be nice.

Could I blame my father for trying? Or Frank for being the agent of such depressing optimism? And there was no blaming Egg, of course; we would, none of us, ever blame Egg.

Only Lilly had slept through it all, perhaps already inhabiting a world not quite like ours. Doris Wales and Ronda Ray had not climbed four flights of stairs to see the body, but when we found them in the restaurant, they seemed almost sobered by the experience—even secondhand. Whatever hopes for even a mini-seduction that might have been on Junior Jones’s mind were dashed by the interruption to the music; Franny kissed Junior good night and went to her own room. And Bitty Tuck, although she loved my kisses, could not forgive the intrusion upon her privacy in the bathroom—both Sorrow’s and mine. I suppose she resented, most of all, the ungainly position I’d discovered her in—“Fainted while diaphragming herself!” as Franny would later characterize the scene.

I found myself alone with Junior Jones at the delivery entrance, drinking up the cold beer and watching out into Elliot Park for any other New Year’s Eve survivors. Sleazy Wales and the boys in the band had gone home; Doris and Ronda were draped upon the bar—a kind of camaraderie had suddenly risen, in a blurry fashion, between them. And Junior Jones said, “No offence to your sister, man, but I am very horny.”

“Ditto,” I said, “and no offence to yours.”

The laughter of the women in the restaurant reached us, and Junior said, “Want to try to hustle them ladies at the bar?” I didn’t dare tell Junior the repugnance of that idea, to me—having already been hustled by one of them—but I felt badly later at how quickly I was willing to betray Ronda Ray. I told Junior that she could be hustled very easily, and it would only cost him money.

Later, I drank another beer and listened to Junior carrying Ronda to the stairwell at the hall’s far end, away from me. And after another beer, or two, I heard Doris Wales, all alone, start to sing “Heartbreak Hotel,” without the music, and occasionally forgetting the words of her religion—and occasionally slurring the rest. Lastly came the unmistakable sound of her throwing up in the bar sink.

After a while she found me in the lobby, at the open door to the delivery entrance, and I offered the last cold beer. “Sure, why not?” she said. “It helps to cut the phlegm. That damn ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’” she added. “It always moves me too much.”

Doris Wales was wearing her knee-high cowboy boots and carrying her thin-strapped green high heels in her hand; in her other hand she dallied her coat, a sad-flecked tweed with a skimpy fur collar. “It’s just muskrat,” she