The Hotel New Hampshire Read Online Free PDF Page B

that bear,” Freud told Father. “I should have warned you. He can be funny about food. They fed him too much at the logging camps; he ate all the time—lots of junk. And sometimes, now, he just decides he’s not eating enough—or he wants a drink, or something. You got to remember: don’t ever sit down to eat yourself if you haven’t fed him first. He don’t like that.”
    So State o’ Maine was always well fed before he performed at the lawn parties—for the white linen tablecloths were everywhere burdened with hors d’oeuvres, fancy raw fish, and grilled meats, and if State o’ Maine had been hungry, there might have been trouble. But Freud stuffed State o’ Maine before the act, and the bloated bear drove the motorcycle calmly. He was placid, even bored, at the handlebars, as if the greatest physical need soon to seize him would be an awesome belch, or the need to move his great bear’s bowels.
    “It’s a dumb act and I’m losing money,” Freud said. “This place is too fancy. There’s only snobs who come here. I should be someplace with a little cruder crowd, someplace where there’s bingo games—not just dancing. I should be places that are more democratic —places where they bet on dog fights, you know?”
    My father didn’t know, but he must have marveled at such places—rougher than the Weirs at Laconia, or even Hampton Beach. Places where there were more drunks, and more careless money for an act with a performing bear. The Arbuthnot was simply too refined a crowd for a man like Freud and a bear like State o’ Maine. It was too refined, even, to appreciate that motorcycle: the 1937 Indian.
    But my father realized that Freud felt no ambition drawing him away. Freud had an easy summer at the Arbuthnot; the bear simply hadn’t turned out to be the gold mine Freud had hoped for. What Freud wanted was a different bear.
    “With a bear this dumb,” he told my mother and father, “there’s no point in trying to better my take. And you got other problems when you hustle them cheap resorts.”
    My mother took my father’s hand and gave it firm, warning pressure—perhaps because she saw him imagining those “other problems,” those “cheap resorts.” But my father was thinking of his tuition at Harvard; he liked the 1937 Indian and the bear called State o’ Maine. He hadn’t seen Freud put the slightest effort into training the bear, and Win Berry was a boy who believed in himself; Coach Bob’s son was a young man who imagined he could do anything he could imagine.
    He had earlier planned that, after the summer at the Arbuthnot, he would go to Cambridge, take a room, and find a job—perhaps in Boston. He would get to know the area around Harvard and get employed in the vicinity, so that as soon as there was money for tuition, he could enroll. This way, he imagined, he might even be able to keep a part-time job and go to Harvard. My mother, of course, had liked this plan because Boston to Dairy, and back again, was an easy trip on the Boston & Maine—the trains ran regularly then. She was already imagining the visits from my father—long weekends—and perhaps the occasional, though proper, visits she might make to Cambridge or Boston to see him.
    “What do you know about bears, anyway?” she asked. “Or motorcycles?”
    She didn’t like, either, his idea that— if Freud was unwilling to part with his Indian or his bear—Father would travel the logging camps with Freud. Win Berry was a strong boy, but not vulgar. And Mother imagined the camps to be vulgar places, from which Father would not emerge the same—or would not emerge at all.
    She needn’t have worried. That summer and how it would end were obviously planned more hugely and inevitably than any trivial arrangements my father and mother could imagine ahead of them. That summer of ’39 was as inevitable as the war in Europe, as it would soon be called, and all of them—Freud, Mary Bates, and Winslow Berry—were as