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

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; by 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