The Hotel New Hampshire.

by John Irving.

1.

The Bear Called State O" Maine.

The summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born - we weren"t even conceived: not Frank, the oldest; not Franny, the loudest; not me, the next; and not the youngest of us, Lilly and Egg. My father and mother were hometown kids who knew each other all their lives, but their "union," as Frank always called it, hadn"t taken place when Father bought the bear.

"Their "union," Frank?" Franny used to tease him; although Frank was the oldest, he seemed younger than Franny, to me, and Franny always treated him as if he were a baby. "What you mean, Frank," Franny said, "is that they hadn"t started s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g."

They hadn"t consummated their relationship," said Lilly, one time; although she was younger than any of us, except Egg, Lilly behaved as if she were everyone"s older sister - a habit Franny found irritating.

" "Consummated"?" Franny said. I don"t remember how old Franny was at the time, but Egg was not old enough to hear talk like this: "Mother and Father simply didn"t discover s.e.x until after the old man got that bear," Franny said. "That bear gave them the idea - he was such a gross, h.o.r.n.y animal, humping trees and playing with himself and trying to rape dogs."

"He mauled mauled an occasional dog," Frank said, with disgust. "He didn"t an occasional dog," Frank said, with disgust. "He didn"t rape rape dogs." dogs."

"He tried to," Franny said. "You know the story."

"Father"s story," Lilly would then say, with a disgust slightly different from Frank"s disgust; it was story," Lilly would then say, with a disgust slightly different from Frank"s disgust; it was Franny Franny Frank was disgusted with, but Lilly was disgusted with Father. Frank was disgusted with, but Lilly was disgusted with Father.

And so it"s up to me - the middle child, and the least opinionated - to set the record straight, or nearly straight. We were a family whose favourite story was the story of my mother and father"s romance: how Father bought the bear, how Mother and Father fell in love and had, in rapid succession, Frank, Franny, and me ("Bang, Bang, Bang!" as Franny would say); and, after a brief rest, how they then had Lilly and Egg (Pop and Fizzle," Franny says). The story we were told as children, and retold to each other when we were growing up, tends to focus on those years we couldn"t have known about and can see now only through our parents" many versions of the tale. I tend to see my parents in those years more clearly than I see them in the years I actually can remember, because those times I was present, of course, are coloured by the fact that they were up-and-down times - about which I have up-and-down opinions. Toward the famous summer of the bear, and the magic of my mother and father"s courtship, I can allow myself a more consistent point of view.

When Father would stumble in telling us the story -when he would contradict an earlier version, or leave out our favourite parts of the tale - we would shriek at him like violent birds.

"Either you"re lying now or you lied the last time," Franny (always the harshest of us) would tell him, but Father would shake his head, innocently.

"Don"t you understand?" he would ask us. "You imagine the story better than I remember it."

"Go get Mother," Franny would order me, shoving me off the couch. Or else Frank would lift Lilly off his lap and whisper to her, "Go get Mother." And our mother would be summoned as witness to the story we suspected Father of fabricating.

"Or else you"re leaving out the juicy parts on purpose," Franny would accuse him, "just because you think Lilly and Egg are too young to hear about all the s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around."

"There was no s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around," Mother would say. There was not the promiscuity and freedom there is today. If a girl went off and spent the night or weekend with someone, even her peers thought her a tramp or worse; we really didn"t pay much attention to a girl after that. "Her kind sticks together," we used to say. And "Water seeks its own level." " And Franny, whether she was eight or ten or fifteen or twenty-five, would always roll her eyes and elbow me, or tickle me, and whenever I tickled her back she"d holler, "Pervert! Feeling up his own sister!" And whether he was nine or eleven or twenty-one or forty-one, Frank always hated s.e.xual conversations and demonstrations of Franny"s kind; he would say quickly to Father, "Never mind that. What about the motorcycle?"

"No, go on about the s.e.x," Lilly would tell Mother, very humorlessly, and Franny would stick her tongue in my ear or make a farting noise against my neck.

"Well," Mother said, "we did not talk freely of s.e.x in mixed company. There was necking and petting, light or heavy; it was usually carried on in cars. There were always secluded areas to park. Lots more dirt roads, of course, fewer people and fewer cars - and cars weren"t compact, then."

"So you could stretch out," Franny said.

Mother would frown at Franny and persevere with her version of the times. She was a truthful but boring storyteller - no match for my father - and whenever we called on Mother to verify a version of a story, we regretted it.

"Better to let the old man go on and on," Franny would say. "Mother"s so serious." Frank would frown. "Oh, go play with yourself, Frank, you"ll feel better," Franny would tell him.

But Frank would only frown harder. Then he"d say, "If you"d begin by asking Father about the motorcycle, or something concrete, you"d get a better answer than when you bring up such general things: the clothes, the customs, the s.e.xual habits."

"Frank, tell us what s.e.x is," Franny would say, but Father would rescue us all by saying, in his dreamy voice, "I can tell you: it couldn"t have happened today. You may think you have more freedom, but you also have more laws. That bear could not have happened today. He would not have been allowed allowed." And in that moment we would be silenced, all our bickering suddenly over. When Father talked, even Frank and Franny could be sitting together close enough to touch each other and they wouldn"t fight; I could even be sitting close enough to Franny to feel her hair against my face or her leg against mine, and if Father was talking I wouldn"t think about Franny at all. Lilly would sit deathly still (as only Lilly could) on Frank"s lap. Egg was usually too young to listen, much less understand, but he was a quiet baby. Even Franny could hold him on her lap and he"d be still; whenever I held him on my lap, he fell asleep.

"He was a black bear," Father said; "he weighed four hundred pounds and was a trifle surly."

"Ursus america.n.u.s," Frank would murmur. "And he was unpredictable."

"Yes," Father said, "but good-natured enough, most of the time."

"He was too old to be a bear anymore," Franny said, religiously.

That was the line Father usually began with - the line he began with the first time I remember being told the story. "He was too old to be a bear anymore." I was in my mother"s lap for this version, and I remember how I felt fixed forever to this time and place: Mother"s lap, Franny in Father"s lap beside me, Frank erect and by himself - sitting cross-legged on the shabby oriental with our first family dog, Sorrow (who would one day be put to sleep for his terrible farting). "He was too old to be a bear anymore," Father began. I looked at Sorrow, a witless and loving Labrador, and he grew on the floor to the size of a bear and then aged, sagging beside Frank in smelly dishevelment, until he was merely a dog again (but Sorrow would never be "merely a dog").

That first time I don"t remember Lilly or Egg - they must have been such babies that they were not present, in a conscious way. "He was too old to be a bear anymore," Father said. "He was on his last legs."

"But they were the only legs he had!" we would chant, our ritual response - learned by heart - Frank, Franny, and I all together. And when they got the story down pat, eventually Lilly and even Egg would join in.

The bear did not enjoy his role as an entertainer anymore," Father said. "He was just going through the motions. And the only person or animal or thing he loved was that motorcycle. That"s why I had to buy the motorcycle when I bought the bear. That"s why it was relatively easy for the bear to leave his trainer and come with me; the motorcycle meant more to that bear than any trainer."

And later, Frank would prod Lilly, who was trained to ask, "What was the bear"s name?"

And Frank and Franny and Father and I would shout, in unison, "State o" Maine!" That dumb bear was named State o" Maine, and my father bought him in the summer of 1939 - together with a 1937 Indian motorcycle with a homemade sidecar - for 200 dollars and the best clothes in his summer footlocker.

My father and mother were nineteen that summer; they were both born in 1920 and raised in Dairy, New Hampshire, and had more or less avoided each other through the years they were growing up. It is one of those logical coincidences upon which many good stories are founded that they - to their mutual surprise - ended up having summer jobs at the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea, a resort hotel that was, for them, far away from home, because Maine was far from New Hampshire (in those days, and to their thinking).

My mother was a chambermaid, although she dressed in her own clothes for serving dinner, and she helped serve c.o.c.ktails under the tents to the lawn parties (which were attended by the golfers, the tennis and croquet players, and the sailors home from racing on the sea). My father helped in the kitchen, carried luggage, hand-groomed the putting greens, and saw to it that the white lines on the tennis courts were fresh and straight and that the unsteady people who should not have been on board a boat in the first place were helped on and off at dockside with a minimum of injury or getting wet.

They were summer jobs both my mother"s and father"s parents approved of, although it was a humiliation to Mother and Father that they should discover each other there. It was their first summer away from Dairy, New Hampshire, and they no doubt imagined the posh resort as a place where they could present themselves - total strangers - as also somewhat glamorous. My father had just graduated from the Dairy School, the private boys" academy; he"d been admitted to Harvard for the fall. He knew it would be the fall of 1941 before he"d finally get to go, because he"d set himself the task of making money for his tuition; but at the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea in the summer of "39 my father would have been happy to let the guests and other help think he was headed for Harvard straight away. My mother being there, with her hometown knowledge of his circ.u.mstances, forced Father to tell the truth. He could go to Harvard when he made the money for what it would cost; it was some accomplishment that he could go at all, of course, and most of the people of Dairy, New Hampshire, had been surprised to learn he"d even been admitted to Harvard.

The son of the football coach at the Dairy School, my father, Winslow Berry, was not quite in the category of a faculty child. He was a jock"s only son, and his father, whom everyone called Coach Bob, was not a Harvard man - he was thought incapable, in fact, of producing Harvard material.

Robert Berry had come East from Iowa when his wife died in childbirth. Bob Berry was a little old to be single and a first-time father - he was thirty-two. He came searching for an education for his baby boy, for which he offered himself, in trade, for the process. He sold his physical education abilities to the best prep school that would promise to take his son when his son was old enough to go. The Dairy School was not a bastion of secondary school education.

It might have once wished for a status equal to Exeter"s or Andover"s, but it had settled, in the early 1900s, for a future of compromise. Near to Boston, it admitted a few hundred boys who had been turned down by Exeter and Andover, and a hundred more who shouldn"t have been admitted anywhere, and it gave them a curriculum that was standard and wise - and more rigorous than most of the faculty who were employed to teach there; most of them had been turned down elsewhere, too. But, even second-rate among New England prep schools, it was far better than the area public schools and especially better than the only high school in the town of Dairy.

The Dairy School was just the kind of school to make deals, like the one it made with Coach Bob Berry, for a piddling salary and the promise that Coach Bob"s son, Win, could be educated there (for free) when he was old enough. Neither Coach Bob nor the Dairy School was prepared for how bright a student my father, Win Berry, would turn out to be. Harvard accepted him among the first cla.s.s of applicants, but he was ranked below scholarship level. If he"d come to them from a better school than Dairy, he probably could have won some kind of Latin or Greek scholarship; he thought he was good at languages and at first wanted to major in Russian.

My mother, who (being a girl) could never go to the Dairy School, attended the private female seminary also in town. This was another second-rate education that was nonetheless an improvement over the public high school, and the only choice of the town"s parents who wished their daughters to be educated without the presence of boys. Unlike the Dairy School, which had dormitories - and 95 percent boarding students - the Thompson Female Seminary was only a private day school. My mother"s parents, who for some reason were even older than Coach Bob, wished that their daughter would a.s.sociate only with the Dairy School boys and not with the boys from the town - my mother"s father being a retired Dairy School teacher (everyone called him Latin Emeritus) and my mother"s mother being a doctor"s daughter from Brookline, Ma.s.sachusetts, who had married a Harvard man; she hoped her daughter might aspire to the same fate. Although my mother"s mother never complained that her Harvard man had whisked her away to the sticks, and out of Boston society, she did hope that - through meeting one of the proper Dairy School boys - my mother could be whisked back to Boston.

My mother, Mary Bates, knew that my father, Win Berry, was not the proper sort of Dairy boy her mother had in mind. Harvard or no Harvard, he was Coach Bob"s son - and a delayed admission was not the same thing as being there, or being able to afford to go.

Mother"s own plans, in the summer of "39, were hardly appealing to her. Her father, old Latin Emeritus, had suffered a stroke; drooling and addled, and muttering in Latin, he would totter about the Dairy house with his wife ineffectually worrying about him unless young Mary was there to look after them both. Mary Bates, at nineteen, had parents older than most people"s grandparents, and she had the sense of duty, if not the inclination, to pa.s.s up the possibility of her own college education to stay at home and care for them. She thought she would learn how to type and work in the town. This summer job, at the Arbuthnot, was really meant to be an exotic summer vacation for her before she settled into whatever drudgery the fall would bring. With every year, she looked ahead, the Dairy School boys would get younger and younger - until none of them would be interested in whisking her back to Boston.

Mary Bates had grown up with Winslow Berry, yet they had never given each other more than a nod or a grimace of recognition. "We seemed to be looking beyond each other, I don"t know why," Father told us children - until, perhaps, they first saw each other out of the familiar place where they"d both grown up; the motley town of Dairy and the barely less motley campus of the Dairy School.

When the Thompson Female Seminary graduated my mother in June of 1939, my mother was hurt to realize that the Dairy School had already had its graduation and was closed; the fancier, out-of-town boys had gone home, and her two or three "beaus" (as she called them) - who she might have hoped would ask her to her own graduation dance - were gone. She knew no local high school boys, and when her mother suggested Win Berry to her, my mother ran out of the dining room. "Or I suppose I could ask Coach Bob!" she shouted to her mother. Her father, Latin Emeritus, raised his head from the dinner table where he"d been napping.

"Coach Bob?" he said. "Is that moron here to borrow the sled again?"

Coach Bob, who was also called Iowa Bob, was no moron, but to Latin Emeritus, whose stroke seemed to have fuddled his sense of time, the hired jock from the Midwest was not in the same league with the academic faculty. And years ago, when Mary Bates and Win Berry had been children, Coach Bob had come to borrow an old sleigh, once notorious for standing three years, unmoved, in the Bates front yard.

"Does the fool have a horse for it?" Latin Emeritus had asked his wife.

"No, he"s going to pull it himself!" my mother"s mother said. And the Bates family watched out the window while Coach Bob put little Win in the driver"s seat, gripped the whiffletree in his hands behind his back, and heaved the sleigh into motion; the great sled skidded down the snowy yard and into the slippery street that was still lined with elms, in those days - "As fast as a horse could have pulled it!" my mother always said.

Iowa Bob had been the shortest ulterior lineman ever to play first-string football in the Big Ten. He once admitted to being so carried away he bit bit a running back after he tackled him. At Dairy, in addition to his duties with football, he coached the shot put and instructed those interested in weight lifting. But to the Bates family, Iowa Bob was too uncomplicated to be taken seriously: a funny, squat strongman with hair so short he looked bald, always jogging through the streets of town - "with a ghastly-coloured sweatband around his dome," Latin Emeritus used to say. a running back after he tackled him. At Dairy, in addition to his duties with football, he coached the shot put and instructed those interested in weight lifting. But to the Bates family, Iowa Bob was too uncomplicated to be taken seriously: a funny, squat strongman with hair so short he looked bald, always jogging through the streets of town - "with a ghastly-coloured sweatband around his dome," Latin Emeritus used to say.

Since Coach Bob would live a long time, he was the only grand-parent any of us children would remember.

"What"s that sound?" Frank would ask, in alarm, in the middle of the night when Bob had come to live with us.

What Frank heard, and what we often heard after Coach Bob moved in, was the creaking of push-ups and the grunting of sit-ups on the old man"s floor (our ceiling) above us.

"It"s Iowa Bob," Lilly whispered once. "He"s trying to stay in shape forever."

Anyway, it wasn"t Win Berry who took Mary Bates to her graduation dance. The Bates family minister, who was considerably older than my mother, but unattached, was kind enough to ask her. "That was a long night," Mother told us. "I felt depressed. I was an outsider in my own hometown. But in a very short while that same minister would marry your father and me!"

They could not even have imagined it when they were "introduced," together with the other summer help, on the unreal green of the pampered lawn at the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea. Even the staff introductions were formal, there. A girl was called out, by name, from a line of other girls and women; she would meet a boy called out from a line of boys and men, as if they were going to be dance partners.

"This is Mary Bates, just graduated from the Thompson Female Seminary! She"ll be helping in the hotel, and with hostessing. She likes sailing, don"t don"t you, Mary?" you, Mary?"

Waiters and waitresses, the grounds crew and caddies, the boat help and the kitchen staff, odd-jobbers, hostesses, chambermaids, laundry people, a plumber, and the members of the band. Ballroom dancing was very popular; the resorts farther south - like the Weirs at Laconia, and Hampton Beach - drew some of the big-name bands in the summers. But the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea had its own band, which imitated in a cold, Maine way the big-band sound.

"And this is Winslow Berry, who likes to be called Win! Don"t Don"t you, Win? He"s going to you, Win? He"s going to Harvard Harvard in the fall!" in the fall!"

But my father looked straight at my mother, who smiled and turned her face away - as embarra.s.sed for him as she was for herself. She"d never noticed what a handsome boy he was, really; he had a body as hard as Coach Bob"s, but the Dairy School had exposed him to the manners, the dress, and the way with his hair that Bostonians (not Iowans) were favouring. He looked as if he already went to Harvard, whatever that must have meant to my mother then. "Oh, I don"t know what it meant," she told us children. "Kind of cultured, I guess. He looked like a boy who knew how to drink without getting sick. He had the darkest, brightest eyes, and whenever you looked at him you were sure he"d just been looking at you - but you could never catch him."

My father maintained that latter ability all his life; we felt around him, always, the sense that he"d been observing us closely and affectionately - even if, when we looked at him, he seemed to be looking elsewhere, dreaming or making plans, thinking of something hard or faraway. Even when he was quite blind, to our schemes and lives, he seemed to be "observing" us. It was a strange combination of aloofness and warmth - and the first time my mother felt it was on that tongue of bright green lawn that was framed by the grey Maine sea.

STAFF INTRODUCTIONS: 4:00 P.M.

That was when she learned he was there.

When the introductions were over, and the staff was instructed to make ready for the first c.o.c.ktail hour, the first dinner, and the first evening"s entertainment, my mother caught my father"s eye and he came up to her.

"It will be two years before I can afford Harvard," he said, immediately, to her.

"So I thought," my mother said. "But I think it"s wonderful you got in," she added quickly.

"Why wouldn"t wouldn"t I have gotten in?" he asked. I have gotten in?" he asked.

Mary Bates shrugged, a gesture learned from never understanding her father (since his stroke had slurred his speech). She wore white gloves and a white hat with a veil; she was dressed for "serving" at the first lawn party, and my father admired how nicely her hair hugged her head - it was longer in back, swept away from her face, and clamped somehow to the hat and veil in a manner both so simple and mysterious that my father fell to wondering about her.

"What are you doing in the fall?" he asked her.

Again she shrugged, but maybe my father saw in her eyes, through her white veil, that my mother was hoping to be rescued from the scenario she imagined was her future.

"We were nice to each other, that first time, I remember that," Mother told us. "We were both alone in a new place and we knew things about each other n.o.body else knew." In those days, I imagine, that was intimate enough.

"There wasn"t any any intimacy, in those days," Franny said once. "Even intimacy, in those days," Franny said once. "Even lovers lovers wouldn"t fart in front of each other." wouldn"t fart in front of each other."

And Franny was forceful - I frequently believed her. Even Franny"s language was ahead of her time - as if she always knew where she was going; and I would never quite catch up to her.

That first evening at the Arbuthnot there was the staff band playing its imitation of the big-band sound, but there were very few guests, and even fewer dancers; the season was just beginning, and it begins slowly in Maine - it"s so cold there, even in the summer. The dance hall had a deck of hard-shined wood that seemed to extend beyond the open porches that overlooked the ocean. When it rained, they had to drop awnings over the porches because the ballroom was so open, on all sides, that the rain washed in and wet the polished dance floor.

That first evening, as a special treat to the staff - and because there were so few guests, and most of them had gone to bed, to get warm - the band played late. My father and mother, and the other help, were invited to dance for an hour or more. My mother always remembered that the ballroom chandelier was broken - it blinked dimly; uneven spots of colour dappled the dance floor, which looked so soft and glossy in the ailing light that the floor appeared to have the texture of a candle.

"I"m glad someone I know is here," my mother whispered to my father, who had rather formally asked her to dance and danced with her very stiffly.

"But you don"t know me," Father said.

"I said that," Father told us, "so that your mother would shrug again." And when she shrugged, thinking him impossibly difficult to talk to - and perhaps superior - my father was convinced that his attraction to her was not a fluke.

"But I want want you to know me," he told her, "and I want to know you." you to know me," he told her, "and I want to know you."

("Yuck," Franny always said, at this point in the story.) The sound of an engine was drowning out the band, and many of the dancers left the floor to see what the commotion was. My mother was grateful for the interruption: she couldn"t think of what to say to Father. They walked, not holding hands, to the porch that faced the docks; they saw, under the dock lights swaying on the overhead wires, a lobster boat putting out to sea. The boat had just deposited on the dock a dark motorcycle, which was now roaring - revving itself, perhaps to free its tubes and pipes of the damp salt air. Its rider seemed intent on getting the noise right before he put the machine in gear. The motorcycle had a sidecar attached, and in it sat a dark figure, hulking and still, like a man made awkward by too many clothes.

"It"s Freud," someone on the staff said. And other, older members of the staff cried out, "Yes! It"s Freud! It"s Freud and State o" Maine!"

My mother and father both thought that "State o" Maine" was the name of the motorcycle. But then the band stopped playing, seeing its audience was gone, and some of the band members, too, joined the dancers on the porch.

"Freud!" people yelled.

My father always told us he was amused to imagine that the Freud would any moment motor over beneath the porch and, in the high-strung lights lining the perfect gravel driveway, introduce himself to the staff. So here comes Sigmund Freud, Father thought: he was falling in love, so anything was possible.

But this was not that that Freud, of course; it was the year when Freud, of course; it was the year when that that Freud died. Freud died. This This Freud was a Viennese Jew with a limp and an unp.r.o.nounceable name, who in the summers since he had been working at the Arbuthnot {since 1933, when he"d left his native Austria) had earned the name Freud for his abilities to soothe the distress of the staff and guests alike; he was an entertainer, and since he came from Vienna and was a Jew, "Freud" seemed only natural to some of the odd, foreign wits at the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea. The name seemed especially appropriate when, in 1937, Freud arrived for the summer on a new Indian motorcycle with a sidecar he"d made all by himself. Freud was a Viennese Jew with a limp and an unp.r.o.nounceable name, who in the summers since he had been working at the Arbuthnot {since 1933, when he"d left his native Austria) had earned the name Freud for his abilities to soothe the distress of the staff and guests alike; he was an entertainer, and since he came from Vienna and was a Jew, "Freud" seemed only natural to some of the odd, foreign wits at the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea. The name seemed especially appropriate when, in 1937, Freud arrived for the summer on a new Indian motorcycle with a sidecar he"d made all by himself.

"Who gets to ride behind and who gets to ride in the sidecar, Freud?" the working girls at the hotel teased him - because he was so frightfully scarred and ugly with pockmarks ("holes from the boils!" he called them) that no woman would ever love him.

"n.o.body rides with me but State o" Maine," Freud said, and he unsnapped the canvas canopy from the sidecar. In the sidecar sat a bear, black as exhaust, thicker with muscles than Iowa Bob, warier than any stray dog. Freud had retrieved this bear from a logging camp in the north of the state and had convinced the management of the Arbuthnot that he could train the beast to entertain the guests. Freud, when he emigrated from Austria, had arrived in Boothbay Harbor, by boat, from New York, with two job descriptions in capital letters on his work papers: EXPERIENCE AS ANIMAL TRAINER AND KEEPER; GOOD MECHANICAL APt.i.tUDE. There being no animals available, he fixed the vehicles at the Arbuthnot and properly put them to rest for the non-tourist months, when he travelled to the logging camps and the paper mills as a mechanic.

All that time, he later told my father, he"d been looking for a bear. Bears, Freud said, were where the money was.

When my father saw the man dismount from the motorcycle under the ballroom porch, he wondered at the cheers from the veteran members of the staff; when Freud helped the figure from the sidecar, my mother"s first thought was that the pa.s.senger was an old, old woman - the motorcyclist"s mother, perhaps (a stout woman wrapped in a dark blanket).

"State o" Maine!" yelled someone in the band, and blew his horn.

My mother and father saw the bear begin to dance. He danced away from Freud on his hind legs; he dropped to all fours and did a short lap or two around the motorcycle. Freud stood on the motorcycle and clapped. The bear called State o" Maine began to clap, too. When my mother felt my father take her hand into his - they were not clapping - she did not resist him; she gave back equal pressure, both of them never taking their eyes from the bulky bear performing below them, and my mother thought: I am nineteen and my life is just beginning.

"You felt that, really really?" Franny always asked.