At Frank’s, the dog slept on the rug between Father’s bed and mine, and I sometimes wondered, in my sleep, if it was Sacher I heard dreaming, or Father.
“So you dreamed about the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea,” Franny said to Father. “So what else is new?”
“No,” Father said. “It wasn’t one of the old dreams. I mean, your mother wasn’t there. We weren’t young again, or anything like that.”
“No man in a white dinner jacket, Daddy?” Lilly asked him.
“No, no,” Father said. “I was old. In the dream I was even older than I am now,” he said; he was forty-five. “In the dream,” Father said, “I was just walking along the beach with Sacher; we were just taking a stroll over the grounds—around the hotel,” he said.
“All around the ruins, you mean,” Franny said.
“Well,” Father said, slyly, “of course I couldn’t actually see if the Arbuthnot was still a ruin, but I had the feeling it was restored—I had the feeling it was all fixed up,” Father said, shoveling food off his plate and into his lap—and into Sacher. “It was a brand-new hotel,” Father said, impishly.
“And you owned it, I’ll bet,” Lilly said to him.
“You did say I could do anything, didn’t you, Frank?” Father asked.
“In the dream you owned the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea?” Frank asked him. “And it was all fixed up?”
“Open for business as usual, Pop?” Franny asked him.
“Business as usual,” Father said, nodding; Sacher nodded, too.
“Is that what you want to do?” I asked Father. “You want to own the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea?”
“Well,” Father said. “Of course we’d have to change the name.”
“Of course,” Franny said.
“The third Hotel New Hampshire!” Frank cried. “Lilly!” he shouted. “Just think of it! Another TV series!”
“I haven’t really been working on the first series,” Lilly said, worriedly.
Franny knelt beside Father; she put her hand on his knee; Sacher licked Franny’s fingers. “You want to do it again?” Franny asked Father. “You want to start all over again? You understand that you don’t have to.”
“But what else would I do, Franny?” he asked her, smiling. “It’s the last one—I promise you,” he said, addressing all of us. “If I can’t make the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea into something special, then I’ll throw in the towel.”
Franny looked at Frank and shrugged; I shrugged, too, and Lilly just rolled her eyes. Frank said, “Well, I guess it’s simple enough to inquire what it costs, and who owns it.”
“I don’t want to see him—if he still owns it,” Father said. “I don’t want to see the bastard.” Father was always pointing out to us the things he didn’t want to “see,” and we were usually restrained enough to resist pointing out to him that he couldn’t “see” anything.
Franny said she didn’t want to see the man in the white dinner jacket, either, and Lilly said she saw him all the time—in her sleep; Lilly said she was tired of seeing him.
It would be Frank and I who would rent a car and drive all the way to Maine; Frank would teach me how to drive along the way. We would see the ruin that was the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea again. We would note that ruins don’t change a lot: what capacity for change is in a ruin has usually been. exhausted in the considerable process of change undergone in order for the ruin to become a ruin. Once becoming a ruin, a ruin stays pretty much the same. We noted some more vandalism, but it’s not much fun vandalizing a ruin, we supposed, and so the whole place looked almost exactly as it had looked to us in the fall of 1946 when we had all come to the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea to watch Earl die.
We had no trouble recognizing the dock where old State o’Maine was shot, although that dock—and the surrounding docks—had been rebuilt, and there were a lot of new boats in the water. The Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea looked like a small ghost town, but what had once been a quaint fishing and lobstering village—alongside the hotel grounds—was now a scruffy little tourist town. There was a marina where you could rent boats and buy clam worms, and there was a rocky public beach within sight of the private beach belonging to the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea. Since no one was around to care, the “private” beach was hardly private anymore. Two families were having a picnic there when Frank and I visited the place; one of the families had arrived by boat, but the other family had driven right down to the beach in their car. They’d driven up the same “private” driveway that Frank and I had driven up, past the faded sign that still said: CLOSED FOR THE SEASON!
The chain that once had blocked that driveway had long ago been torn down and dragged away.
“It would cost a fortune to even make the place habitable,” Frank said.
“Provided they even want to sell it,” I said.
“Who in God’s name would want to keep it?” Frank asked.
It was at the realty office in Bath, Maine, that Frank and I found out that the man in the white dinner jacket still owned the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea—and he was still alive.
“You want to buy old Arbuthnot’s place!” the shocked realtor asked.
We were delighted to learn that there was an “old Arbuthnot.”
“I only hear from his lawyers,” the realtor said. “They’ve been trying to unload the place, for years. Old Arbuthnot lives in California,” the realtor told us, “but he’s got lawyers all over the country. The one I deal with most of the time is in New York.”
We thought, then, that it would simply be a matter of letting the New York lawyer know that we wanted it, but—back in New York—Arbuthnot’s lawyer told us that Arbuthnot wanted to see us.
“We’ll have to go to California,” Frank said. “Old Arbuthnot sounds as senile as one of the Hapsburgs, but he won’t sell the place unless he gets to meet us.”
“Jesus God,” Franny said. “That’s an expensive trip to make just to meet someone!”
Frank informed her that Arbuthnot was paying our way.
“He probably wants to laugh in your faces,” Franny told us.
“He probably wants to meet someone who’s crazier than he is,” Lilly said.
“I can’t believe I’m so lucky!” Father cried. “To imagine that it’s still available!” Frank and I saw no reason to describe the ruins—and the seedy new tourism surrounding his cherished Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea.
“He won’t see any of it, anyway,” Frank whispered.
And I am glad that Father never got the chance to see old Arbuthnot, a terminal resident of the Beverly Hills Hotel. When Frank and I arrived at the Los Angeles airport, we rented our second car of that week and drove ourselves to meet the aged Arbuthnot.
In a suite with its own palm garden, we found the old man with an attending nurse, an attending lawyer (this one was a California lawyer), and what would prove to be a fatal case of emphysema. He sat propped up in a fancy hospital bed—he sat breathing very carefully alongside a row of air-conditioners.
“I like L.A.,” Arbuthnot gasped. “Not so many Jews here as there are in New York. Or else I’ve finally gotten immune to Jews,” he added. Then he was flung off at a sharp angle on his hospital bed by a cough that seemed to attack him by surprise (and from the side); he sounded as if he were choking on a whole turkey leg—it seemed impossible he would recover, it seemed his persistent anti-Semitism would finally be the death of him (I’m sure that would have made Freud happy), but just as suddenly as the attack had seized him, the attack left him and he was calm. His nurse plumped up his pillows for him; his lawyer placed some important-looking documents upon the old man’s chest and produced a pen for old Arbuthnot to hold in his trembling hand.