The Hotel New Hampshire

suitcases?” he asked.

“But how will you get to Europe?” Mother whispered into the room.

“By crossing the Atlantic Ocean,” Freud said. “Come in here,” he said to Mother; he took my mother’s and father’s hands and joined them together. “You’re only teen-agers,” he told them, “so listen to me: you are in love. We start from this assumption, ja?” And although my mother and father had never admitted any such thing to each other, they both nodded while Freud held their hands. “Okay,” Freud said. “Now, three things from this follow. You promise me you will agree to these three things?”

“I promise,” said my father.

“So do I,” Mother said.

“Okay,” said Freud. “Here’s number one: you get married, right away, before some clods and whores change your minds. Got it? You get married, even though it will cost you.”

“Yes,” my parents agreed.

“Here’s number two,” Freud said, looking only at my father. “You go to Harvard— you promise me—even though it will cost you.”

“But I’ll already be married,” my father said.

“I said it will cost you, didn’t I?” Freud said. “You promise me: you’ll go to Harvard. You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day the opportunities stop, you know?”

“I want you to go to Harvard, anyway,” Mother told Father.

“Even though it will cost me,” Father said, but he agreed to go.

“We’re up to number three,” Freud said. “You ready?” And he turned to my mother; he dropped my father’s hand, he even shoved it away from his so that he was holding Mother’s hand all alone. “Forgive him,” Freud told her, “even though it will cost you.”

“Forgive me for what?” Father said.

“Just forgive him,” Freud said, looking only at my mother. She shrugged.

“And you!” Freud said to the bear, who was sniffing around under Father’s bed. Freud startled State o’Maine, who’d found a tennis ball under the bed and put it in his mouth.

“Urp!” the bear said. Out came the tennis ball.

“ You,” Freud said to the bear. “May you one day be grateful that you were rescued from the disgusting world of nature!”

That was all. It was a wedding and a benediction, my mother always said. It was a good old-fashioned Jewish service, my father always said; Jews were a mystery to him—of the order of China, India, and Africa, and all the exotic places he’d never been.

Father chained the bear to the motorcycle. When he and Mother kissed Freud good-bye, the bear tried to butt his head between them.

“Watch out!” Freud cried, and they scattered apart. “He thought we were eating something,” Freud told Mother and Father. “Watch out how you kiss around him; he don’t understand kissing. He thinks it’s eating.”

“Earl!” the bear said.

“And please, for me,” Freud said, “call him Earl—that’s all he ever says, and State o’Maine is such a dumb name.”

“Earl?” my mother said.

“Earl!” the bear said.

“Okay,” Father said. “Earl it is.”

“Good-bye, Earl,” Freud said. “Auf Wiedersehen!”

They watched Freud for a long time, waiting on the Bay Point dock for a boat going to Boothbay, and when a lobsterman finally took him—although my parents knew that in Boothbay Freud would be boarding a larger ship— they thought how it looked as if the lobster boat were taking Freud to Europe, all the way across the dark ocean. They watched the boat chug and bob until it seemed smaller than a tern or even a sandpiper on the sea; but then it was out of hearing.

“Did you do it for the first time that night?” Franny always asked.

“Franny!” Mother said.

“Well, you said you felt married,” Franny said.

“Never mind when we did it,” Father said.

“But you did, right?” Franny said.

“Never mind that,” Frank said.

“It doesn’t matter when,” Lilly said, in her weird way.

And that was true—it didn’t really matter when. When they left the summer of 1939 and the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea, my mother and father were in love—and in their minds, married. After all, they had promised Freud. They had his 1937 Indian and his bear, now named Earl, and when they arrived home in Dairy, New Hampshire, they drove first to the Bates family house.

“Mary’s home!” my mother’s mother called.

“What’s that machine she’s on?” said old Latin Emeritus. “Who’s that with her?”

“It’s a motorcycle and that’s Win Berry!” my mother’s mother said.

“No, no!” said Latin Emeritus. “Who’s the other one?” The old man stared at the bundled figure in the sidecar.

“It must be Coach Bob,” said my mother’s mother.

That moron!” Latin Emeritus said. “What in hell is he wearing in this weather? Don’t they know how to dress in Iowa?”

“I’m going to marry Win Berry!” my mother rushed up and told her parents. “That’s his motorcycle. He’s going to Harvard. And this... is Earl.”

Coach Bob was more understanding. He liked Earl.

“I’d love to know what he could bench-press,” the former Big Ten lineman said. “But can’t we cut his nails?”

It was silly to have another wedding; my father thought that Freud’s service would suffice. But my mother’s family insisted that they be married by the Congregational minister who had taken Mother to her graduation dance, and so they were.

It was a small, informal wedding, where Coach Bob played the best man and Latin Emeritus gave his daughter away, with only an occasional mumbling of an odd Latin phrase; my mother’s mother wept, full of the knowledge that Win Berry was not the Harvard man destined to whisk Mary Bates back to Boston—at least, not right away. Earl sat out the whole service in the sidecar of the” 37 Indian, where he was pacified with crackers and herring.

My mother and father had a brief honeymoon by themselves.

“Then you surely must have done it!” Franny always cried. But they probably didn’t; they didn’t stay anywhere overnight. They took an early train to Boston and wandered around Cambridge, imagining themselves living there, one day, and Father attending Harvard; they took the milk train back to New Hampshire, arriving at dawn the next day. Their first nuptial bed would have been the single bed in my mother’s girlhood room in the house of Latin Emeritus—which was where my mother would still reside, while Father sought his fortune for Harvard.

Coach Bob was sorry to see Earl leave. Bob was sure the bear could be taught to play defensive end, but my father told Iowa Bob that the bear was going to be his family’s meal ticket and his tuition. So one evening (after the Nazis took Poland), with the earliest nip of fall in the air, my mother kissed my father good-bye on the athletic fields of the Dairy School, which rolled right up to Iowa Bob’s back door.

“Look after your parents,” my father told Mother, “and I’ll be back to look after you.”

“Yuck!” Franny always groaned for some reason, this part bothered her. She never believed it. Lilly, too, shivered and turned up her nose.

“Shut up and listen to the story,” Frank always said.