The Hotel New Hampshire

Freud claimed.

Freud was small, strong, alert as an animal, a peculiar colour (like a green olive cooked slowly until it almost browned). He had glossy black hair, a strange patch of which grew on his cheek, just under one eye: it was a silky- soft spot of hair, bigger than most moles, at least the size of an average coin, more distinctive than any birthmark, and as naturally a part of Freud’s face as a limpet attached to a Maine rock.

“It’s because my brain is so enormous,” Freud told Mother and Father. “My brain don’t leave room on my head for hair, so the hair gets jealous and grows a little where it shouldn’t.”

“Maybe it was bear hair,” Frank said once, seriously, and Franny screamed and hugged me around the neck so hard that I bit my tongue.

“Frank is so weird!” she cried. “Show us your bear hair, Frank.” Poor Frank was approaching puberty at the time; he was ahead of his time, and he was very embarrassed about it. But not even Franny could distract us from the mesmerizing spell of Freud and his bear; we children were as caught up with them as my father and mother must have been that summer of 1939.

Some nights, Father told us, he would walk my mother to her dorm and kiss her good night. If Freud was asleep, Father would unchain State o’Maine from the motorcycle and slip his muzzle off so the bear could eat. Then my father would take him fishing. There was a tarp staked low over the motorcycle, like an open tent, which protected State o’Maine from the rain, and Father would leave his fishing gear wrapped in the flap of that tarp for these occasions.

The two of them would go to the Bay Point dock; it was beyond the row of hotel piers, and choppy with lobster boats and fishermen’s dinghies. Father and State o’Maine would sit on the end of the dock while Father cast what he called spooners, for pollack. He would feed the pollack live to State o’Maine. There was only one evening when there was an altercation between them. Father usually caught three or four pollack; that was enough—for both Father and State o’Maine—and then they’d go home. But one evening the pollack weren’t running, and after an hour without a nibble Father got up off the dock to take the bear back to his muzzle and chain.

“Come on,” he said. “No fish in the ocean tonight.”

State o’Maine wouldn’t leave.

“Come on!” Father said. But State o’Maine wouldn’t let Father leave the dock, either.

“Earl!” the bear growled. Father sat down and kept fishing. “Earl!” State o’Maine complained. Father cast and cast, he changed spooners, he tried everything. If he could have dug for clam worms down on the mud flats, he could have bottom-fished for flounder, but State o’Maine became unfriendly whenever Father attempted to leave the dock. Father contemplated jumping in and swimming ashore; he could sneak back to the dorm for Freud, then, and they could come recapture State o’Maine with food from the hotel. But after a while Father got into the spirit of the evening and said, “All right, all right, so you want fish? We’ll catch a fish, goddamn it!”

A little before dawn a lobsterman came down to the dock to put out to sea. He was going to pull his traps and he had some new traps with him to drop, and—unfortunately—he had bait with him, too. State o’Maine smelled the bait.

“Better give it to him,” Father said.

“Earl!” said State o’Maine, and the lobsterman gave the bear all his baitfish.

“We’ll repay you,” Father said. “First thing.”

“I know what I’d like to do, ‘first thing,’” the lobsterman said. “I’d like to put that bear in my traps and use him for bait. I’d like to see him et up by lobsters!”

“Earl!” said State o’Maine.

“Better not tease him,” Father told the lobsterman, who agreed.

“Ja, he’s not so smart, that bear,” Freud told Father. “I should have warned you. He can be funny about food. They fed him too much at the logging camps; he ate all the time—lots of junk. And sometimes, now, he just decides he’s not eating enough—or he wants a drink, or something. You got to remember: don’t ever sit down to eat yourself if you haven’t fed him first. He don’t like that.”

So State o’Maine was always well fed before he performed at the lawn parties—for the white linen tablecloths were everywhere burdened with hors d’oeuvres, fancy raw fish, and grilled meats, and if State o’Maine had been hungry, there might have been trouble. But Freud stuffed State o’Maine before the act, and the bloated bear drove the motorcycle calmly. He was placid, even bored, at the handlebars, as if the greatest physical need soon to seize him would be an awesome belch, or the need to move his great bear’s bowels.

“It’s a dumb act and I’m losing money,” Freud said. “This place is too fancy. There’s only snobs who come here. I should be someplace with a little cruder crowd, someplace where there’s bingo games—not just dancing. I should be places that are more democratic—places where they bet on dog fights, you know?”

My father didn’t know, but he must have marvelled at such places—rougher than the Weirs at Laconia, or even Hampton Beach. Places where there were more drunks, and more careless money for an act with a performing bear. The Arbuthnot was simply too refined a crowd for a man like Freud and a bear like State o’Maine. It was too refined, even, to appreciate that motorcycle: the 1937 Indian.

But my father realized that Freud felt no ambition drawing him away. Freud had an easy summer at the Arbuthnot; the bear simply hadn’t turned out to be the gold mine Freud had hoped for. What Freud wanted was a different bear.

“With a bear this dumb,” he told my mother and father, “there’s no point in trying to better my take. And you got other problems when you hustle them cheap resorts.”

My mother took my father’s hand and gave it firm, warning pressure—perhaps because she saw him imagining those “other problems,” those “cheap resorts.” But my father was thinking of his tuition at Harvard; he liked the 1937 Indian and the bear called State o’Maine. He hadn’t seen Freud put the slightest effort into training the bear, and Win Berry was a boy who believed in himself; Coach Bob’s son was a young man who imagined he could do anything he could imagine.

He had earlier planned that, after the summer at the Arbuthnot, he would go to Cambridge, take a room, and find a job—perhaps in Boston. He would get to know the area around Harvard and get employed in the vicinity, so that as soon as there was money for tuition, he could enroll. This way, he imagined, he might even be able to keep a part-time job and go to Harvard. My mother, of course, had liked this plan because Boston to Dairy, and back again, was an easy trip on the Boston & Maine—the trains ran regularly then. She was already imagining the visits from my father—long weekends—and perhaps the occasional, though proper, visits she might make to Cambridge or Boston to see him.

“What do you know about bears, anyway?” she asked. “Or motorcycles?”

She didn’t like, either, his idea that—if Freud was unwilling to part with his Indian or his bear—Father would travel the logging camps with Freud. Win Berry was a strong boy, but not vulgar. And Mother imagined the camps to be vulgar places, from which Father would not emerge the same—or would not emerge at all.

She needn’t have worried. That summer and how it would end were obviously planned more hugely and inevitably than any trivial arrangements my father and mother could imagine ahead of them. That summer of ’39 was as inevitable as the war in Europe, as it would soon be called, and all of them—Freud, Mary Bates, and Winslow Berry—were as lightly tossed along by the summer as the gulls knocked about in the rough currents at the mouth of the Kennebec.

One night in late August, when Mother had served at the evening meal and had only just had time to change into her saddle shoes and the long skirt she played croquet in, Father was called from his room to assist with an injured man. Father ran past the lawn for croquet where Mother was waiting for him. She held a mallet over her shoulder. The Christmas-like light bulbs strung in the trees lit the lawn for croquet in such a ghostly way that—to my father—my mother “looked like an angel holding a club.”

“I’ll be right with you,” Father said to her. “Someone’s been hurt.”

She came with him, and some other running men, and they ran down to the hotel piers. Alongside the dock was a throbbing big ship aglow with lights. A band with too much brass was playing on board, and the strong fuel smell and motor exhaust in the salt air mixed with the smell of crushed fruit. It appeared that some enormous bowl