“I’m dying,” Arbuthnot said to Frank and me, as if this hadn’t been obvious from our first glimpse of him. He wore white silk pajamas; he looked about one hundred years old; he couldn’t have weighed more than fifty pounds.
“They say they’re not Jews,” the lawyer told Arbuthnot, indicating Frank and me.
“Is that why you wanted to meet us?” Frank asked the old man. “You could have found that out over the phone.”
“I may be dying,” he said, “but I’m not selling out to the Jews.”
“My father,” I told Arbuthnot, “was a dear friend of Freud.”
“Not the Freud,” Frank said to Arbuthnot, but the old man had begun coughing again and he didn’t hear what Frank had to say.
“Freud?” Arbuthnot said, hacking and spewing. “I knew a Freud, too! He was a Jewish animal trainer. The Jews aren’t good with animals, though,” Arbuthnot confided to us. “Animals can tell, you know,” he said. “They can always sense anything funny about you,” he said. “This Freud I knew was a dumb Jewish animal trainer. He tried to train a bear, but the bear ate him!” Arbuthnot howled with delight—which brought on more coughing.
“A sort of anti-Semitic bear?” Frank asked, and Arbuthnot laughed so hard I thought his subsequent coughing would kill him.
“I was trying to kill him,” Frank said later.
“You must be crazy to want that place,” Arbuthnot told us. “I mean, don’t you know where Maine is? It’s nowhere! There’s no decent train service, and there’s no decent flying service. It’s a terrible place to drive to—it’s too far from both New York and Boston—and when you do get there, the water’s too cold and the bugs can bleed you to death in an hour. None of the really class sailors sail there anymore—I mean the sailors with money,” he said. “If you have a little money,” Arbuthnot said, “there’s absolutely nothing to spend it on in Maine! They don’t even have whores there.”
“We like it anyway,” Frank told him.
“They’re not Jews, are they?” Arbuthnot asked his lawyer.
“No,” the lawyer said.
“It’s hard to tell, looking at them,” Arbuthnot said. “I used to be able to spot a Jew at first glance,” he explained to us. “But I’m dying now,” he added.
“Too bad,” Frank said.
“Freud wasn’t eaten by a bear,” I told Arbuthnot.
“The Freud I knew was eaten by a bear,” Arbuthnot said.
“No,” said Frank, “the Freud you knew was a hero.”
“Not the Freud I knew,” old Arbuthnot argued, petulantly. His nurse caught some spittle dribbling off his chin and wiped him as absentmindedly as she might have dusted a table.
“The Freud we both know,” I said, “saved the Vienna State Opera.”
“Vienna!” Arbuthnot cried. “Vienna is full of Jews!” he yelled.
“There’s more of them in Maine than there used to be,” Frank teased him.
“In L.A., too,” I said.
“I’m dying, anyway,” Arbuthnot said. “Thank God.” He signed the documents on his chest and his lawyer handed them over to us. And that was how, in 1965, Frank bought the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea and twenty-five acres on the coast of Maine. “For a song,” as Franny would say.
An almost sky-blue mole was sprouting on old Arbuthnot’s face and both his ears were painted a vivid purple with gentian violet, an old-fashioned fungicide. It was as if a giant fungus were consuming Arbuthnot from the inside out. “Wait a minute,” he said, as we were leaving—his chest made a watery echo of his words. His nurse plumped up his pillows again; his lawyer snapped a briefcase shut; the cold of the room, from all the purring air-conditioners, made the place feel, to Frank and me, like the tomb—the Kaisergruft—for the heartless Hapsburgs in Vienna. “What are your plans?” Arbuthnot asked us. “What in hell are you going to do with that place?”
“It’s going to be a Special Commando Training Camp,” Frank told old Arbuthnot. “For the Israeli Army.”
I saw Arbuthnot’s lawyer crack a smile; it was the special sort of smile that would make Frank and me later look up the lawyer’s name on the documents that had been handed over to us. The lawyer’s name was Irving Rosenman, and despite the fact that he came from Los Angeles, Frank and I were pretty sure he was Jewish.
Old Arbuthnot didn’t crack a smile. “Israeli commandos?” he said.
“Ratta-tat-tat-tat-tat!” said Frank, imitating a machine gun. We thought that Irving Rosenman was going to throw himself into the air-conditioners to keep himself from laughing.
“The bears will get them,” Arbuthnot said, strangely. “The bears will get all the Jews, in the end,” he said—the mindless hatred in his old face was as old-fashioned and as vivid as the gentian violet in his ears.
“Have a nice death,” Frank told him.
Arbuthnot started coughing; he tried to say something more but he couldn’t stop coughing. He motioned the nurse over to him and she seemed to interpret his coughing without very much difficulty; she was used to it; she motioned us out of Arbuthnot’s room, then she came outside and told us what Arbuthnot had told her to tell us.
“He said he’s going to have the best death money can buy,” she told us, which—Arbuthnot had added—was more than Frank and I were going to get.
And Frank and I could think of no message to give the nurse to pass on to old Arbuthnot. We were content to leave him with the idea of Israeli commandos in Maine. Frank and I said good-bye to Arbuthnot’s nurse and to Irving Rosenman and we flew back to New York with the third Hotel New Hampshire in Frank’s pocket.
“That’s just where you should keep it, Frank,” Franny told him. “In your pocket.”
“You’ll never make that old place into a hotel again,” Lilly told Father. “It’s had its chance.”
“We’ll start out modestly,” Father assured Lilly.
Father and I were the “we” Father meant. I told him I’d go to Maine with him and help him get started.
“Then you’re as crazy as he is,” Franny had told me.
But I had an idea I would never share with Father. If, as Freud says, a dream is the fulfillment of a wish, then—as Freud also says—the same holds true for jokes. A joke is also the fulfillment of a wish. I had a joke to play on Father. And I have been playing it, now, for more than fifteen years. Since Father is more than sixty years old now, I think it’s fair to say that the joke “came off”; it’s fair to say that I have gotten away with it.
The last Hotel New Hampshire was never—and never will be—a hotel. That is the joke I have played on Father for all these years. Lilly’s first book, Trying to Grow, would make enough money so that we could have restored the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea; and when they made the movie version, we could have bought back the Gasthaus Freud, too. Maybe, by then, we could have afforded the Sacher; at least we could have bought the Stanhope. But I knew it wasn’t necessary that the third Hotel New Hampshire be a real hotel.