Free The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving

the dock and came bobbing in to land, to see what the matter was.
    Earl lay on the dock with his big head on a coil of tarred rope, his hind paws crumpled under him, and one heavy forepaw only inches from a bucket of baitfish. The bear’s eyes had been so bad for so long, he must have mistaken the boy with the rifle for Father with a fishing pole. He might even, dimly, have remembered eating lots of pollack off that dock. And when he wandered down there, and got close to the boy, the old bear’s nose was still good enough to smell the bait. The boy, watching out to sea—for seals—had no doubt been frightened by the way the bear had greeted him. He was a good shot, although at that range even a poor shot would have hit Earl; the boy shot the bear twice in the heart.
    “Gosh, I didn’t know he belonged to anybody,” the boy with the rifle told my mother, “I didn’t know he was a pet .”
    “Of course you didn’t,” my mother soothed him.
    “I’m sorry, mister,” the boy told Father, but Father didn’t hear him. He sat beside Earl on the dock and raised the dead bear’s head into his lap; he hugged Earl’s old face to his stomach and cried and cried. He was crying for more than Earl, of course. He was crying for the Arbuthnot, and Freud, and for the summer of ’39; but we were very worried, we children—because, at that time, we had known Earl longer, and better, than we really knew our father. It was very confusing to us—why this man, home from Harvard, and home from the war, should be dissolved in tears, hugging our old bear. We were, all of us, really too young to have known Earl, but the bear’s presence—the stiff feel of his fur, the heat of his fruity and mud-like breath, the dead-geranium and urine smell of him—was more memorable to us, for example, than the ghosts of Latin Emeritus and my mother’s mother.
    I truly remember this day on the dock below the ruined Arbuthnot. I was four, and I sincerely believe that this is my first memory of life itself—as opposed to what I was told happened, as opposed to the pictures other people have painted for me. The man with the strong body and the gentleman’s face was my father, who had come to live with us; he sat sobbing with Earl in his arms—on a rotting dock, over dangerous water. Little boats chugged nearer and nearer. My mother hugged us to her, as tightly as Father held fast to Earl.
    “I think the dumb kid shot someone’s dog,” a man in one of the boats said.
    Up the dock’s ladder came an old fisherman in a dirty-yellow oilskin slicker, his face a mottled tan beneath a dirty-white and spotty beard. His wet boots sloshed and he smelled more strongly of fish than the bucket of bait by Earl’s curled paw. He was plenty old enough to have been active in the vicinity in the days when the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea had been the grand hotel it was. The fisherman, too, had seen better days.
    When this old man saw the dead bear, he took off his broad sou’wester hat and held it in one hand, which was big and hard as a gaff. “Holy cow,” he said, reverently, wrapping an arm around the shoulders of the shaken boy with the rifle. “Holy cow. You kilt State o’ Maine.”

2
    The First Hotel New Hampshire
    The first Hotel New Hampshire came about this way: when the Dairy School realized it had to admit women to its student body, in order to survive, the Thompson Female Seminary was put out of business; there was suddenly a large, unusable piece of real estate on the Dairy market—a market that was forever depressed. No one knew what to do with the huge building that had once been an all-girls’ school.
    “They should burn it,” Mother suggested, “and turn the whole area into a park.”
    It was something of a park, anyway—a high plot of ground, maybe two acres, in the dilapidated heart of the town of Dairy. Old clapboard houses, once for large families and now rented piecemeal to widows and widowers—and to the retired Dairy School