Free The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving Page A

faculty—surrounded by dying elms, which surrounded the four-story brick monster of a school building, which was named after Ethel Thompson. Miss Thompson had been an Episcopal minister who had successfully masqueraded as a man until her death (the Reverend Edward Thompson, she’d been called, rector of the Dairy Episcopal Parish and notorious for hiding runaway slaves in the rectory). The discovery that she was a woman (following an accident in which she was crushed while changing a wheel of her carriage) came as no surprise to a few of the Dairy menfolk who had taken their problems to her at the height of her popularity as rector. She had somehow acquired a lot of money, not a penny of which was left to the church; it was all left to found a female seminary—“until,” Ethel Thompson wrote, “that abomination of a boys’ academy is forced to take in girls.”
    My father would have agreed that the Dairy School was an abomination. Although we children loved playing on its athletic fields, Father never ceased reminding us that Dairy was not a “real” school. Just as the town of Dairy had once been dairy land, so had the athletic fields of the school been a pasture for cows; and when the school had been founded, in the early 1800s, the old barns were allowed to stand beside the newer school buildings, and the old cows were allowed, like the students, to wander freely about the school. Modern landscaping had improved the fields for sports, but the barns, and the first of the original buildings, still occupied the scruffy center of the campus; some token cows still occupied the barns. It had been the school’s “game plan,” as Coach Bob called it, to have the students care for the dairy farm while going to school—a plan that led to a lax education and poorly cared-for cows, a plan that was abandoned before the First World War. There were still those on the Dairy School faculty—and many of them were the newer, younger faculty—who believed that this combination of a school and a farm should be returned to.
    My father resisted the plan to return the Dairy School to what he called “a barnyard-experiment in education.”
    “When my kids are old enough to go to this wretched school,” he would rage to my mother, and to Coach Bob, “they will no doubt be given academic credit for planting a garden.”
    “And varsity letters for shoveling shit!” said Iowa Bob.
    The school, in other words, was in search of a philosophy. It was now firmly second-rate among conventional prep schools; although it modeled its curriculum on the acquiring of academic skills, the school’s faculty grew less and less able to teach such skills and, conveniently, less convinced of the need for such skills—after all, the student body was decreasingly receptive. Admissions were down, hence admission standards fell even lower; the school became one of those places you could get into almost immediately upon being thrown out of another school. A few of the faculty, like my father, who believed in teaching people how to read and write—and even punctuate—despaired that such skills were largely wasted on students like these. “Pearls before swine,” Father ranted. “We might as well teach them how to rake hay and milk cows.”
    “They can’t play football, either,” Coach Bob mourned. “They won’t block for each other.”
    “They won’t even run,” Father said.
    “They won’t hit anybody,” said Iowa Bob.
    “Oh yes they will,” said Frank, who was always picked on.
    “They broke into the greenhouse and vandalized all the plants,” said Mother, who read of this incident in the school paper, which was, Father said, illiterate.
    “One of them showed me his thing,” Franny said, to cause trouble.
    “Where?” Father said.
    “Behind the hockey rink,” Franny said.
    “What were you doing behind the hockey rink, anyway?” Frank said, disgusted as usual.
    “The hockey rink is warped,” Coach Bob- said. “There’s been