My father wrote home that basic training was a lesson in ruining the hotels of Atlantic City. They washed down the wood floors daily, and marched off down the boardwalk for rifle training on a sand dune. The bars on the boardwalk did a booming business with the trainees, except my father. No one inquired about age; the trainees, most of them younger than my father, wore all their marksman’s medals and drank on. The bars were full of office girls from Washington, and everyone smoked unfiltered cigarettes—except my father.
Father said everyone romanticized about “a last fling” before going overseas, although far fewer realized it than boasted of it; Father, at least, had his—with my mother, in a hotel in New Jersey. This time, fortunately, he did not make her pregnant, so Mother would not be adding to Frank, Franny, and me for a while.
From Atlantic City my father went to a former prep school north of New York, for cryptographic training. He was then sent to Chanute Field—Kearns, Utah—and then to Savannah, Georgia, where he’d earlier performed, with Earl, in the old DeSoto Hotel. Then it was Hampton Roads, Port of Embarkation, and my father went to “the war in Europe,” having a vague idea that he might find Freud there. Father felt confident that by leaving three offspring with my mother he was ensuring his safe return.
He had Air Force assignment at a bomber base in Italy, and the greatest danger was shooting someone when drunk, being shot by someone who was drunk, or falling into the latrine when drunk—which actually happened to a colonel my father knew; the colonel was crapped on several times before he was rescued. The only other danger involved acquiring a venereal disease from an Italian whore. And since my father did not drink or screw, he had a safe passage through World War II.
He left Italy via Navy transport and Trinidad to Brazil—“which is like Italy in Portuguese,” he wrote my mother. He flew back to the States with a shell-shocked pilot who buzzed a C-47 up the broadest street of Miami. From the air, my father recognized a parking lot where Earl had vomited after a performance.
My mother’s contribution to the war effort—although she did secretarial work for her alma mater, the Thompson Female Seminary—consisted of hospital training; she was in the second class the Dairy Hospital gave to prepare nurses” aides. She worked one eight-hour shift per week and was on call for substitutions, which were frequent (there being a great shortage of nurses). Her favourite stations were the maternity ward and the delivery room; she knew what it was like to have a baby in that hospital with no husband around. That was how my mother spent the war.
Just after the war, Father took Coach Bob to see a professional football game, which was played in Fenway Park, Boston. On their way to the North Station to take the train back home to Dairy, they met one of Father’s Harvard classmates, who sold them a 1940 Chevy coupe for 600 dollars—a bit more than it cost new, but it was in fair shape and gasoline was ridiculously cheap, maybe twenty cents a gallon; Coach Bob and my father split the cost of insurance, so at last our family had a car. While Father finished his degree at Harvard, my mother had a means to take Frank, Franny, and me to the beaches on the New Hampshire shore, and Iowa Bob drove us once to the White Mountains, where Frank was badly stung by yellow jackets when Franny pushed him into a nest.
Harvard life had changed; the rooms were overcrowded; the Crimson had a new crew. The Slavic studies students claimed responsibility for the American discovery of vodka; no one mixed it with anything—you drank it Russian style, cold and straight in little stemmed glasses—but my father stuck with beer and changed his major to English literature. That way he tried, once again, to accelerate his graduation.
There were not many of the big bands around. Ballroom dancing was declining as a sport and pastime. And Earl was too decrepit to perform anymore; my father’s first Christmas out of the Air Force, he worked in the toy department of Jordan Marsh and made my mother pregnant, again. This time, it would be Lilly. As concrete as the reasons were for calling Frank Frank and Franny Franny and me John, there was no specific reason for calling Lilly Lilly—a fact that would bother Lilly, perhaps more than we knew; maybe for all her life.
Father graduated with the Harvard class of 1946. The Dairy School had just hired a new headmaster, who interviewed my father at the Harvard Faculty Club and offered him a job—to teach English and coach two sports—for a starting salary of twenty-one hundred dollars. Coach Bob had probably put the new headmaster up to it. My father was twenty-six: he accepted the position at the Dairy School, although it hardly struck him as his life’s calling. It would simply mean he could finally live with my mother and us children, in the Bates family house in Dairy, near to his father and near to Earl—his ancient bear. At this phase in his life, my father’s dreams were clearly more important to him than his education, perhaps even more important to him than we children, certainly more important to him than World War II. (“At every phase of his life,” Franny would say.)
Lilly was born in 1946, when Frank was six, Franny was five, and I was four. We suddenly had a father—as if for the first time, really; he had been at war, at school, and on the road with Earl all our lives, so far. He was a stranger to us.
The first thing he did with us, in the fall of 1946, was to take us to Maine, where we’d never been before, to visit the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea. Of course, it was a romantic pilgrimage for my father and mother—an expedition for old times” sake. Lilly was too young to travel and Earl was too old, but Father insisted that Earl come with us.
“The Arbuthnot is his place, too, for God’s sake,” Father told Mother. “It wouldn’t be the same—to be at the Arbuthnot without old State o’Maine!”
So Lilly was left with Coach Bob, and Mother drove the 1940 Chevy coupe, with Frank, Franny, and me, a big basket of picnic food, and a mountain of blankets. Father got the 1937 Indian running; he drove it, with Earl in the sidecar. That was how we travelled, unbelievably slowly, up the tortuous coast highway, many years before there was a Maine Turnpike. It took hours to get to Brunswick; it took another hour past Bath. And then we saw the rough, moving, bruise-coloured water that was the mouth of the Kennebec meeting the sea, Fort Popham, and the fishing shacks at Bay Point—and the chain drawn across the driveway to the Arbuthnot. The sign said:
CLOSED FOR THE SEASON!
The Arbuthnot had been closed for many seasons. Father must have realized this soon after he took down the chain and our caravan drove up to the old hotel. Bleached colourless as bones, the buildings stood abandoned and boarded-up; every window that was showing had been smashed or shot out. The faded flag for the eighteenth green had been stabbed into a crack between the floorboards of the overhanging porch, where the ballroom was; the flag drooped from the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea as if to indicate that this had been a castle taken by siege.
“Jesus God,” Father said. We children huddled around my mother and complained. It was cold; it was foggy; the place scared us. We’d been told we were going to a resort hotel, and if this was what a hotel was, we knew we wouldn’t like it. Great clots of grass had pushed their way through the ruptured clay of the tennis courts, and the lawn for croquet was knee-high, to my father, with a saw-edged kind of marsh grass that grows wildly by salt water. Frank cut himself on an old wicket and began to snivel. Franny insisted on Father’s carrying her. I hung to my mother’s hips. Earl, whose arthritis affected him disagreeably, refused to move away from the motorcycle and threw up in his muzzle. When Father took his muzzle off, Earl found something in the dirt and tried to eat it; it was an old tennis ball, which Father took from him and tossed far away, toward the sea. Gamely, Earl started to retrieve the ball; then the old bear seemed to forget what he was doing and just sat there squinting at the docks. Probably he could barely see them.