Read Online The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving - Free Book Online Page B

We’d been told we were going to a resort hotel, and if this was what a hotel was, we knew we wouldn’t like it. Great clots of grass had pushed their way through the ruptured clay of the tennis courts, and the lawn for croquet was knee-high, to my father, with a saw-edged kind of marsh grass that grows wildly by salt water. Frank cut himself on an old wicket and began to snivel. Franny insisted on Father’s carrying her. I hung to my mother’s hips. Earl, whose arthritis affected him disagreeably, refused to move away from the motorcycle and threw up in his muzzle. When Father took his muzzle off, Earl found something in the dirt and tried to eat it; it was an old tennis ball, which Father took from him and tossed far away, toward the sea. Gamely, Earl started to retrieve the ball; then the old bear seemed to forget what he was doing and just sat there squinting at the docks. Probably he could barely see them.
    The hotel piers were sagging. The boathouse had been washed out to sea in a hurricane during the war. The fishermen had tried to use the old docks to bolster up their fishing weirs, which were strung together down at the lobstermen’s dock at Bay Point, where a man or a boy appeared to be standing guard with a rifle. He was stationed there to shoot seals, Father had to explain—because the far-off figure with the gun startled my mother. Seals were the number one reason why weir fishing would never be too successful in Maine: the seals broke into the weirs, gorged themselves on the trapped fish, and then broke out. They ate a lot of fish this way, and destroyed the nets in the process, and the fishermen shot them whenever they could.
    “It’s what Freud would have called ‘one of the gross rules of nature,’ ” Father said. He insisted on showing us the dormitories where he and Mother had stayed.
    It must have been depressing to both of them-it was simply uncomfortable and foreign to us children—but I think my mother was more upset at Father’s reaction to the fall of the Arbuthnot than she was upset by what had happened to the once great resort.
    “The war changed a lot of things,” Mother said, showing us her famous shrug.
    “Jesus God,” Father kept saying. “Think of what it could have been!” he cried. “How could they have blown it? They weren’t democratic enough,” he told us baffled kids. “There ought to be a way to have standards, to have good taste, and still not be so exclusive that you go under. There ought to be a livable compromise between the Arbuthnot and some hole like Hampton Beach. Jesus God!” he kept calling out. “Jesus God.”
    We followed him around the beaten buildings, the mangled and grown-amok lawns. We found the old bus that the band members had traveled in, and the truck the grounds crew had used—it was full of rusty golf clubs. They were the vehicles Freud had fixed and kept running; they wouldn’t run anymore.
    “Jesus God,” Father said.
    We heard Earl calling to us from far away. “Earl!” he called.
    We heard two shots from the rifle, from far away—down on the Bay Point dock. I think we all knew that it was not the sound of a seal being shot. It was Earl.
    “Oh no, Win,” my mother said. She picked me up and started running; Frank ran in agitated circles around her. Father ran with Franny in his arms.
    “State o’ Maine!” he cried.
    “I shot a bear!” the boy on the dock was calling. “I shot a whole bear!” He was a boy in dungaree coveralls and a soft flannel shirt; both knees were gone out of the coveralls and his carrot-colored hair was stiff and shiny from saltwater spray; he had a curious rash on his pale face; he had very poor teeth; he was only thirteen or fourteen years old. “I shot a bear!” he screamed. He was very excited, and the fishermen out on the sea must have wondered what he was yelling about. They couldn’t hear him, over their trolling motors and the wind off the water, but they slowly gathered their boats around