Father plays like a child in the snow. “Snow is quite a wonder to the blind,” he said just yesterday, coming into the kitchen all covered with it; he’d been out in the drifts, literally rolling around with Seeing Eye Dog Number Four—they were both covered with it. It was a wild storm; by three-thirty in the afternoon we had to turn all the lights on. I stoked up the fires in two of the woodstoves. A bird, blinded by the snow, had flown through a windowpane in the ballroom and broken its neck. Four found it lying by the barbells and carried it all around the hotel before Susie could get it away from the dog. The snow melted off Father’s boots and made the kitchen slippery. Father slipped in a puddle and whacked me in the ribs with the Louisville Slugger—which he always waves wildly whenever he is thrown off balance. We had a little argument about that. Just like a child, he won’t knock the snow off his boots before he comes inside.
“I can’t see the snow!” he complains, childishly. “How the fuck do I knock it off if I can’t see it?”
“Shut up, both of you,” Susie the bear told us. “When there’s a child in the house, you’ll both have to stop yelling.”
I made some fresh pasta with a neat machine Frank brought from New York; it flattens the dough in sheets and cuts the pasta into any shape you want. It’s important to have toys like that, if you live in Maine. Susie made a mussel sauce for the pasta. Father chopped up the onion for her; an onion never seems to bother Father’s eyes. When we heard Four bark, we thought he’d found another poor bird. We saw a Volkswagen bus trying to make its way up our driveway in the storm; the bus was slithering and sliding. Whoever was driving the bus was either excited (“Another fucking rape,” said Susie, instinctively), or else it was someone from out of state. No Maine driver would have so much trouble driving in the snow, I thought, but it was hardly the tourist time of year at the Hotel New Hampshire. The bus couldn’t make it all the way to the parking lot, but it got close enough for me to see the Arizona license plate.
“No wonder they can’t drive,” I said—which is a typical Maine point of view toward out-of-staters.
“Yeah, well,” Susie said. “You’d probably look like an idiot in an Arizona desert.”
“What’s a desert?” Father asked, and Susie laughed.
The driver of the Arizona bus was walking through the snow toward us; he didn’t even know how to walk in the snow—he kept falling down.
“They’ve had a rape all the way out in Arizona, Susie,” I told her. “And you’re so famous, they’ll only talk to you.”
“Don’t they know we’re a resort hotel?” Father asked, peevishly. “I’ll tell whoever it is that we’re closed for the season.”
The man from Arizona was sorry to hear that. He explained that he thought he was headed for the mountains, for some skiing—which he and his family had never tried before—but that he’d been given some bad directions or he got lost in the storm, and here he was at the ocean, instead.
“Wrong season for the ocean,” Father pointed out. The man could see that. He looked nice, but awfully tired.
“We do have enough room,” Susie whispered to me.
I didn’t want to start taking in guests; in fact, what I loved best about this Hotel New Hampshire was that the only guests were in Father’s mind. But when I saw all the little kids pile out of the Volkswagen bus and start playing in the snow, I had a change of heart. The mother looked awfully tired, too—nice but tired.
“What’s that?” one of the kids was screaming.
“It’s an ocean, I think,” the mother said.
“An ocean!” the children shouted.
“Is there a beach, too?” one of the kids cried.
“Under all that snow, I guess,” the mother told them.
So we invited the man and his wife and his four little children to be our guests in the Hotel New Hampshire, even though we were “closed for the season.” It’s easy to make more pasta; it’s easy to stretch a mussel sauce.
Father got a little confused, showing our guests to their rooms. It was the first time he’d had to show a guest to a room in this Hotel New Hampshire, and it occurred to him, as he was hunting for linen in the library, that he didn’t know where anything was. I had to help him, naturally, and I did a fair job of pretending that I showed guests to their rooms all the time.
“You’ll have to forgive “us if we seem a little unprofessional,” I told the father of the nice young family. “When we’re closed for the season, we get a little out of practice.”
“It’s sweet of you to take us in,” the nice young mother said. “The kids were disappointed not to see the skiing, but they’ve never seen an ocean, either, so it’s a treat for them. And they can get to the skiing tomorrow,” she added. She sounded like a good mother to me.
“I’m expecting a child myself,” I told her. “Any day now.” And only later did Susie point out to me that my remark must have seemed odd, since even Susie was clearly not pregnant.
“What the hell must they have thought you meant, you moron!” Susie said.
But everything was fine. The kids had wonderful appetites, and after dinner I showed them how to make an apple pie. And while the pie was baking, I took them for a scary, wintry walk down to the snow-blown beach and the drifted-over docks; I showed them the violent waves bashing through the laces of ice that fringed the shore, I showed them that the sea in a storm is a great gray swell of water rolling, forever rolling. My father, of course, told the young husband and wife from Arizona all about the fabulous space for sympathy that a truly great hotel provides; he described our hotel to the nice people from Arizona, Susie told me, as if he were describing the Sacher.
“But it’s as if we are the Sacher, to him,” my warm bear said in my arms that night, while the storm howled and the snow fell.
“Yes, my love,” I told her.
It was wonderful to lie in bed in the morning and hear the voices of the children; they had discovered the barbells in the ballroom, and Father was giving them pointers. Iowa Bob would have loved this Hotel New Hampshire, I thought.
That was when I woke up Susie and asked her to get into the bear suit.
“Earl!” she complained. “I’m too old to be a bear anymore.” She is a bit of a bear in the early morning—my dear Susie.
“Come on, Susie,” I said. “Do it for the kids. Think of what it will mean to them.”
“What?” Susie said. “You want me to scare children?”
“No, no, Susie,” I said. “Not scare them.” All I wanted her to do was dress up in the bear suit and walk outside, in the snow, around the hotel, and I would suddenly call out, “Look! Bear tracks in the snow! And they’re fresh!”
And the people, big and small, from Arizona would all come out and wonder over the wilderness they had stumbled upon, as if in a dream, and then I would cry, “Look! There’s the bear! Going around the woodpile!” And Susie would pause there—perhaps I could persuade her to give us a good Earl! or two—and she would disappear behind the woodpile, in her bear-like fashion, and slip in one of the back doors, and slip out of her disguise, and come into the kitchen, saying, “What’s all this about a bear? You rarely see a bear around here anymore.”
“You want me to go outside in the fucking snow?” Susie asked.
“For the kids, Susie,” I said. “What a treat it would be for them. First they see the ocean and then they see a bear. Everyone should see a bear, Susie,” I said. Of course she agreed. She was grouchy about it, but that made her performance all the better; Susie was always superb as a bear, and now she is getting convinced that she’s a lovely human being, too.