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yellow jackets when Franny pushed him into a nest.
    Harvard life had changed; the rooms were overcrowded; the Crimson had a new crew. The Slavic studies students claimed responsibility for the American discovery of vodka; no one mixed it with anything—you drank it Russian style, cold and straight in little stemmed glasses—but my father stuck with beer and changed his major to English literature. That way he tried, once again, to accelerate his graduation.
    There were not many of the big bands around. Ballroom dancing was declining as a sport and pastime. And Earl was too decrepit to perform anymore; my father’s first Christmas out of the Air Force, he worked in the toy department of Jordan Marsh and made my mother pregnant, again. This time, it would be Lilly. As concrete as the reasons were for calling Frank Frank and Franny Franny and me John, there was no specific reason for calling Lilly Lilly—a fact that would bother Lilly, perhaps more than we knew; maybe for all her life.
    Father graduated with the Harvard class of 1946. The Dairy School had just hired a new headmaster, who interviewed my father at the Harvard Faculty Club and offered him a job—to teach English and coach two sports—for a starting salary of twenty-one hundred dollars. Coach Bob had probably put the new headmaster up to it. My father was twenty-six: he accepted the position at the Dairy School, although it hardly struck him as his life’s calling. It would simply mean he could finally live with my mother and us children, in the Bates family house in Dairy, near to his father and near to Earl—his ancient bear. At this phase in his life, my father’s dreams were clearly more important to him than his education, perhaps even more important to him than we children, certainly more important to him than World War II. (“At every phase of his life,” Franny would say.)
    Lilly was born in 1946, when Frank was six, Franny was five, and I was four. We suddenly had a father—as if for the first time, really; he had been at war, at school, and on the road with Earl all our lives, so far. He was a stranger to us.
    The first thing he did with us, in the fall of 1946, was to take us to Maine, where we’d never been before, to visit the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea. Of course, it was a romantic pilgrimage for my father and mother—an expedition for old times’ sake. Lilly was too young to travel and Earl was too old, but Father insisted that Earl come with us.
    “The Arbuthnot is his place, too, for God’s sake,” Father told Mother. “It wouldn’t be the same—to be at the Arbuthnot without old State o’ Maine!”
    So Lilly was left with Coach Bob, and Mother drove the 1940 Chevy coupe, with Frank, Franny, and me, a big basket of picnic food, and a mountain of blankets. Father got the 1937 Indian running; he drove it, with Earl in the sidecar. That was how we traveled, unbelievably slowly, up the torturous coast highway, many years before there was a Maine Turnpike. It took hours to get to Brunswick; it took another hour past Bath. And then we saw the rough, moving, bruise-colored water that was the mouth of the Kennebec meeting the sea, Fort Popham, and the fishing shacks at Bay Point—and the chain drawn across the driveway to the Arbuthnot. The sign said:

    CLOSED FOR THE SEASON!

    The Arbuthnot had been closed for many seasons. Father must have realized this soon after he took down the chain and our caravan drove up to the old hotel. Bleached colorless as bones, the buildings stood abandoned and boarded-up; every window that was showing had been smashed or shot out. The faded flag for the eighteenth green had been stabbed into a crack between the floorboards of the overhanging porch, where the ballroom was; the flag drooped from the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea as if to indicate that this had been a castle taken by siege.
    “Jesus God,” Father said. We children huddled around my mother and complained. It was cold; it was foggy; the place scared us.