The Hotel New Hampshire Read Online Free PDF

course, was from a motorcycle accident; the leg had been set improperly. “Discrimination,” Freud claimed.
    Freud was small, strong, alert as an animal, a peculiar color (like a green olive cooked slowly until it almost browned). He had glossy black hair, a strange patch of which grew on his cheek, just under one eye: it was a silky-soft spot of hair, bigger than most moles, at least the size of an average coin, more distinctive than any birthmark, and as naturally a part of Freud’s face as a limpet attached to a Maine rock.
    “It’s because my brain is so enormous,” Freud told Mother and Father. “My brain don’t leave room on my head for hair, so the hair gets jealous and grows a little where it shouldn’t.”
    “Maybe it was bear hair,” Frank said once, seriously, and Franny screamed and hugged me around the neck so hard that I bit my tongue.
    “Frank is so weird!” she cried. “Show us your bear hair, Frank.” Poor Frank was approaching puberty at the time; he was ahead of his time, and he was very embarrassed about it. But not even Franny could distract us from the mesmerizing spell of Freud and his bear; we children were as caught up with them as my father and mother must have been that summer of 1939.
    Some nights, Father told us, he would walk my mother to her dorm and kiss her good night. If Freud was asleep, Father would unchain State o’ Maine from the motorcycle and slip his muzzle off so the bear could eat. Then my father would take him fishing. There was a tarp staked low over the motorcycle, like an open tent, which protected State o’ Maine from the rain, and Father would leave his fishing gear wrapped in the flap of that tarp for these occasions.
    The two of them would go to the Bay Point dock; it was beyond the row of hotel piers, and choppy with lobster boats and fishermen’s dinghies. Father and State o’ Maine would sit on the end of the dock while Father cast what he called spooners, for pollack. He would feed the pollack live to State o’ Maine. There was only one evening when there was an altercation between them. Father usually caught three or four pollack; that was enough—for both Father and State o’ Maine—and then they’d go home. But one evening the pollack weren’t running, and after an hour without a nibble Father got up off the dock to take the bear back to his muzzle and chain.
    “Come on,” he said. “No fish in the ocean tonight.”
    State o’ Maine wouldn’t leave.
    “Come on!” Father said. But State o’ Maine wouldn’t let Father leave the dock, either.
    “Earl!” the bear growled. Father sat down and kept fishing. “Earl!” State o’ Maine complained. Father cast and cast, he changed spooners, he tried everything. If he could have dug for clam worms down on the mud flats, he could have bottom-fished for flounder, but State o’ Maine became unfriendly whenever Father attempted to leave the dock. Father contemplated jumping in and swimming ashore; he could sneak back to the dorm for Freud, then, and they could come recapture State o’ Maine with food from the hotel. But after a while Father got into the spirit of the evening and said, “All right, all right, so you want fish? We’ll catch a fish, goddamn it!”
    A little before dawn a lobsterman came down to the dock to put out to sea. He was going to pull his traps and he had some new traps with him to drop, and—unfortunately—he had bait with him, too. State o’ Maine smelled the bait. “Better give it to him,” Father said.
    “Earl!” said State o’ Maine, and the lobsterman gave the bear all his baitfish.
    “We’ll repay you,” Father said. “First thing.”
    “I know what I’d like to do, ‘first thing,’ ” the lobsterman said. “I’d like to put that bear in my traps and use him for bait. I’d like to see him et up by lobsters!”
    “Earl!” said State o’ Maine.
    “Better not tease him,” Father told the lobsterman, who agreed.
    “ Ja , he’s not so smart,