The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving Page B

Rye.
    “He thinks I’m taking him fishing,” Father said. “Look, Earl, I’ve got no gear—no bait, no spooners, no pole —dummy,” Father said to the bear, holding out his empty hands. Earl looked bewildered; they realized the bear was nearly blind. They talked Earl out of fishing and took him home.
    “How did he get so old?” my mother asked my father.
    “He’s started peeing in the sidecar,” Father said.

    My mother was quite pregnant, this time with Franny, when Father left for the winter season in the fall of 1940. He had decided on Florida, and Mother first heard from him in Clearwater, and then from Tarpon Springs. Earl had acquired an odd skin disease—an ear infection, some fungus peculiar to bears—and business was slow.
    That was shortly before Franny was born, late in the winter of 1941. Father was not home for this birth, and Franny never forgave him for it.
    “I suspect he knew I would be a girl,” Franny was fond of saying.
    It was the summer of ’41 before Father was back in Dairy again; he promptly impregnated my mother with me.
    He promised he would not have to leave her again; he had enough money from a successful circus stint in Miami to start Harvard in the fall. They could have a relaxed summer, playing Hampton Beach only when they felt like it. He would commute on the train to Boston for his classes, unless a cheap place in Cambridge turned up.
    Earl was getting older by the minute. A pale blue salve, the texture of the film on a jellyfish, had to be put in his eyes every day; Earl rubbed it off on the furniture. My mother noticed alarming absences of hair from much of his body, which seemed shrunken and looser. “He’s lost his muscle tone,” Coach Bob worried. “He ought to be lifting weights, or running.”
    “Just try to get away from him on the Indian,” my father told his father. “He’ll run.” But when Coach Bob tried it, he got away with it. Earl didn’t run; he didn’t care.
    “With Earl,” Father said, “familiarity does breed a little contempt.” He had worked with Earl long and hard enough to understand Freud’s exasperation with the bear.
    My mother and father rarely talked of Freud; with “the war in Europe,” it was too easy to imagine what could have happened to him.

    The liquor stores in Harvard Square sold Wilson’s “That’s All” rye whiskey, very cheap, but my father was not a drinker. The Oxford Grill in Cambridge used to dispense draft beer in a glass container the shape of a brandy snifter and holding a gallon. If you could drink this within some brief amount of time, you got a free one. But Father drank one regular beer there, when his week’s classes were over, and he’d hurry to the North Station to catch the train to Dairy.
    He accelerated his courses as much as possible, to graduate sooner; he was able to do this not because he was smarter than the other Harvard boys (he was older, but not smarter, than most of them) but because he spent little time with friends. He had a pregnant wife and two babies; he hardly had time for friends. His only recreation, he said, was listening to professional baseball games on the radio. Just a few months after the World Series, Father listened to the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
    I was born in March of 1942, and named John—after John Harvard. (Franny had been called Franny because it somehow went with Frank.) My mother was not only busy taking care of us; she was busy taking care of old Latin Emeritus, and helping Coach Bob with the aged Earl; she didn’t have time for friends, either.
    By the end of the summer of 1942, the war had really obtruded on everyone; it was no longer just “the war in Europe.” And although it used very little gas, the 1937 Indian was retired to the status of living quarters for Earl; it was no longer used for transportation. Patriotic mania spread across the nation’s campuses. Students were allowed to receive sugar stamps, which most students gave to their