There were thirty rooms over four floors, and our family occupied seven rooms in the southeast corner, covering two floors. One room in the basement was dominated by Mrs. Urick; that meant that, together with the fourth-floor resting place of Max, there were twenty-two rooms for guests. But the headwaitress and head maid, Ronda Ray, had a day-room on the second floor—to gather herself together, she’d said to Father. And two southeast-corner rooms on the third floor—just above us—were reserved for Iowa Bob. That left only nineteen rooms for guests, and only thirteen of those came with their own baths; six of the rooms came with the midget facilities.
“It’s more than enough,” Father said. “This is a small town. And not popular.”
It was more than enough for the circus called Fritz’s Act, perhaps, but we were anxious how we were going to handle the full house we expected for the Exeter weekend.
That Saturday we moved in, Franny discovered the intercom system and switched on the “Receiving” buttons in all the rooms. They were all empty, of course, but we tried to imagine listening to the first guests moving into them. The squawk-box system, as Father called it, had been left over from the Thompson Female Seminary, of course—the principal could announce fire drills to the various classrooms, and teachers who were out of their homerooms could hear if the kids were fooling around. Father thought that keeping the intercom system would make it unnecessary to have phones in the rooms.
“They can call for help on the intercom,” Father said.
“Or we can wake them for breakfast. And if they want to use the phone, they can use the phone at the main desk.” But of course the squawk-box system also meant that it was possible to listen to the guests in their rooms.
“Not ethically possible,” Father said, but Franny and I couldn’t wait.
That Saturday we moved in, we were without even the main-desk phone—or a phone in our family’s apartment—and we were without linen, because the linen service that was going to handle the hotel laundry had also been contracted to do ours. They weren’t starting service until Monday, Ronda Ray wasn’t starting until Monday, either, but she was there—in the Hotel New Hampshire—looking over her dayroom when we arrived.
“I just need it, you know?” she asked Mother. “I mean, I can’t change sheets in the morning, after I wait on the breakfast eaters—and before I serve lunch to the lunch eaters—without having no place to lay down. And between lunch and supper, if I don’t lay down, I get feeling nasty—all over. And if you lived where I lived, you wouldn’t wanna go home.”
Ronda Ray lived at Hampton Beach, where she waitressed and changed sheets for the summer crowd. She’d been looking for a year-round arrangement for her hotel career—and, my mother guessed, a way to get out of Hampton Beach, forever. She was about my mother’s age, and in fact claimed to remember seeing Earl perform in Earl’s casino years. She had not seen his ballroom dancing performance, though; it was the bandstand she remembered, and the act called “Applying for a Job.”
“But I never believed it was a real bear,” she told Franny and me, as we watched her unpack a small suitcase in her dayroom. “I mean,” Ronda Ray said, “I thought nobody would get a kick out of undressing no real bear.”
We wondered why she was unpacking night clothes from the suitcase, if this day room was not where she intended to spend the night; she was a woman Franny was curious about—and I thought she was even exotic. She had dyed hair; I can’t say what colour it was because it wasn’t a real colour. It wasn’t red, it wasn’t blonde; it was the colour of plastic, or metal, and I wondered how it felt. Ronda Ray had a body that I imagined was formerly as strong as Franny’s but had grown a little thick—still powerful, but straining. It is hard to say what she smelled like, although—after we left Ronda—Franny tried.
“She put perfume on her wrist two days ago,” Franny said. “You following me?”
“Yes,” I said.
“But her watchband wasn’t there then—her brother was wearing her watch, or her father,” Franny said. “Some man, anyway, and he really sweated a lot.”
“Yes,” I said.
Then Ronda put the watchband on, over the perfume, and she wore it for a day while she was stripping beds,” Franny said.
“What beds?” I said.
Franny thought a minute. “Beds very strange people had slept in,” she said.
“The circus called Fritz’s Act slept in them!” I said.
“Right!” said Franny.
“The whole summer!” we said, in unison.
“Right,” Franny said. “And what we smell when we smell Ronda is what Ronda’s watchband smells like—after all that.”
That was coming close to it, but I thought it was a slightly better smell than that—just slightly. I thought of Ronda Ray’s stockings, which she hung in the closet of her dayroom; I thought that if I sniffed just behind the knee of the pair of stockings she was wearing I would catch the true essence of her.
“You know why she wears them?” Franny asked me.
“No,” I said.
“Some man spilled hot coffee on her legs,” Franny said. “He did it on purpose. He tried to boil her.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I’ve seen the scars,” Franny said. “And she told me.”
At the squawk-box controls, we switched off all the rooms and listened to Ronda Ray’s room. She was humming. Then we heard her smoke. We imagined how she’d sound with a man.
“Noisy,” Franny said. We listened to Ronda’s breathing, intermixed with the crackles of the intercom system—an ancient system that ran on the power from an automobile battery, like a clever electric fence.
When Lilly and Egg and Father came home from the game, Franny and I put Egg in the dumbwaiter and hauled him up and down the four-storey shaft until Frank ratted on us and Father told us that the dumbwaiter would be used only for removing linen and dishes and other things—not humans—from the rooms.
It wasn’t safe. Father said. If we let go of the rope, the dumbwaiter fell at the speed imposed by its own response to gravity. That was fast—if not for a thing, at least for a human.
“But Egg is so light,” Franny argued. “I mean, we’re not going to try it with Frank.”
“You’re not going to try it at all!” Father said.
Then Lilly got lost and we stopped unpacking for almost an hour, trying to find her. She was sitting in the kitchen with Mrs. Urick, who had seized Lilly’s attention by telling her stories of the various ways she’d been punished when she’d been a girl. Her hair had been cut out in hunks, to humiliate her, when she forgot to wash before supper; she’d been told to go stand barefoot in the snow whenever she swore; when she’d “snitched” food, she’d been force to eat a tablespoon of salt.
“If you and Mother go away,” Lilly said to Father, “you won’t leave us with Mrs. Urick, will you?”
Frank had the best room and Franny complained; she had to share a room with Lilly. A doorway without a door connected my room to Egg’s. Max Urick dismantled his intercom; when we listened to his room, all we heard was static—as if the old sailor were still far out to sea. Mrs. Urick’s room bubbled like the stockpots on the back of her stove—the sound of life held steadily at a simmer.
We were so restless for more guests, and for the Hotel New Hampshire to actually be open, that we couldn’t keep still.
Father paced us through two fire drills, to tire us out, but it only roused us to wanting more action. When it was dark, we realized the electricity hadn’t been turned on—so we hid from each other, and searched for each other, through the empty rooms with candles.
I hid in Ronda Ray’s dayroom on the second floor. I blew my candle out and, with my sense of smell, located the drawers where she’d put her nightclothes away. I heard Frank scream from the third floor—he’d put his hand on a plant in the dark—and what could only be Franny laughing in the echo chamber that the stairwell was.