John Irving - The Hotel New Hampshire

I had to give Franny the usual report on how the rape crisis center was doing. Franny has donated quite a bit of money to the center, and Junior has helped us get good legal advice in our Maine area. Just last year Susie’s rape crisis center gave medical, psychological, and legal counsel to ninety-one victims of rape—or of rape-related abuse. “Not bad, for Maine,” as Franny says.

“In New York and L.A., man,” says Junior Jones, “there’s about ninety-one thousand victims a year. Of everything ,” he adds.

It wasn’t hard to convince Susie that all those rooms in the Hotel New Hampshire could be used for something. We’re a more than adequate facility for a rape crisis center, and Susie has trained several of the women from the college in Brunswick, so we always have a woman here to answer the hot-line phone. Susie has instructed me never to answer the hot-line phone. “The last thing a rape victim wants to hear, when she calls for help,” Susie has told me, “is a fucking man’s voice.”

Of course it’s been a little complicated with Father, who can’t see which phone is ringing. So Father, when he’s caught off guard by a ringing phone, has developed this habit of yelling, “Telephone!” Even if he’s standing right next to it.

Surprisingly, although Father still thinks that the Hotel New Hampshire is a hotel, he is not bad at rape counseling. I mean, he knows that rape crisis is Susie’s business—he just doesn’t know that it’s our only business, and sometimes he starts a conversation with a rape victim who’s recovering herself with us at the Hotel New Hampshire, for a few days, and Father gets her confused with what he thinks is one of the “guests.”

He might happen upon the victim, just composing herself down on one of the docks, and my father will tap-tap-tap his Louisville Slugger out onto the dock, and Four will wag his tail to let my father know that someone is there, and Father will start chatting. “Hello, who’s here?” he’ll ask.

And maybe the rape victim will say, “It’s just me, Sylvia.”

“Oh yes, Sylvia!” Father will say, as if he’s known her all his life. “Well, how do you like the hotel, Sylvia?” And poor Sylvia will think that this is my father’s very polite and indirect way of referring to the rape crisis center—“the hotel”—and she’ll just go along with it.

“Oh, it’s meant a lot to me,” she’ll say. “I mean, I really needed to talk, but I didn’t want to feel I had to talk about anything until I was ready, and what’s nice here is that nobody pressures you, nobody tells you what you ought to feel or ought to do, but they help you get to those feelings more easily than you might get to them all by yourself. If you know what I mean,” Sylvia will say.

And Father will say, “Of course I know what you mean, dear. We’ve been in the business for years, and that’s just what a good hotel does: it simply provides you with the space, and with the atmosphere, for what it is you need . A good hotel turns space and atmosphere into something generous, into something sympathetic—a good hotel makes those gestures that are like touching you, or saying a kind word to you, just when (and only when) you need it. A good hotel is always there,” my father will say, the baseball bat conducting both his lyrics and his song, “but it doesn’t ever give you the feeling that it’s breathing down your neck.”

“Yeah, that’s it, I guess,” Sylvia will say; or Betsy, or Patricia, Columbine, Sally, Alice, Constance, or Hope will say. “It gets it all out of me, somehow, but not by force,” they’ll say.

“No, never by force, my dear,” Father will agree. “A good hotel forces nothing. I like to call it just a sympathy space,” Father will say, never acknowledging his debt to Schraubenschlüssel and his sympathy bomb.

“And,” Sylvia will say, “everyone’s nice here.”

“Yes, that’s what I like about a good hotel!” Father will say, excitedly. “Everyone is nice. In a great hotel,” he’ll tell Sylvia, or anybody who’ll listen to him, “you have a right to expect that niceness. You come to us, my dear—and please forgive me for saying so—like someone who’s been maimed, and we’re your doctors and your nurses.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Sylvia will say.

“If you come to a great hotel in parts , in broken pieces,” my father will go on and on, “when you leave the great hotel, you’ll leave it whole again. We simply put you back together again, but this is almost mystically accomplished—his is the sympathy space I’m talking about—because you can’t force anyone back together again; they have to grow their own way. We provide space,” Father will say, the baseball bat blessing the rape victim like a magic wand. “The space and the light ,” my father will say, as if he were a holy man blessing some other holy person.

And that’s how you should treat a rape victim, Susie says; they are holy, and you treat them as a great hotel treats every guest. Every guest at a great hotel is an honored guest, and every rape victim at the Hotel New Hampshire is an honored guest—and holy.

“It’s actually a good name for a rape crisis center,” Susie agrees. “The Hotel New Hampshire—that’s got a little class to it.”

And with the support of the county authorities, and a wonderful organization of women doctors called the Kennebec Women’s Medical Associates, we run a real rape crisis center in our unreal hotel. Susie sometimes tells me that Father is the best counselor she’s got.

“When someone’s really fucked up,” Susie confides to me, “I send them down to the docks to see the blind man and Seeing Eye Dog Number Four. Whatever he tells them must be working,” Susie concludes. “At least, so far, nobody’s jumped off.”

“Keep passing the open windows, my dear,” my father will tell just about anyone. “That’s the important thing, dear,” he adds. No doubt it is Lilly who lends such authority to my father’s advice. He was always good at advising us children—even when he knew absolutely nothing about what was wrong. “Maybe especially when he knows absolutely nothing,” Frank says. “I mean, he still doesn’t know I’m queer and he gives me good advice all the time.” What a knack!

“Okay, okay,” Franny said to me on the phone, just last winter, just after the big snow. “I didn’t call you to hear the ins and outs of every rape in Maine—not this time, kid,” Franny told me. “Do you still want a baby?”

“Of course I do,” I told her. “I’m trying to convince Susie of it, every day.”

“Well,” Franny said, “how’d you like a baby of mine?”

“But you don’t want a baby, Franny,” I reminded her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean Junior and I got a little sloppy,” Franny said. “And rather than do the modern thing, we thought we knew the perfect mother and father for a baby.”

“Especially these days, man,” Junior said, on his end of the phone. “I mean, Maine may be the last hideout.”

“Every kid should grow up in a weird hotel, don’t you agree?” Franny asked.

“What I thought, man,” said Junior Jones, “was that every kid should have at least one parent who does nothing . I don’t mean to insult you, man,” Junior said to me, “but you’re just a perfect sort of caretaker . You know what I mean?”

“He means, you look after everybody,” Franny said, sweetly. “He means, it’s kind of like your role . You’re a perfect father.”

“Or a mother, man,” Junior added.