The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving

the chips were down. Frank was suddenly all arms and legs jerking, and a moan so blue escaped him that I shivered. Father slapped Franny in the face, but she wouldn’t let go; he had to claw her fingers open. Coach Bob dragged Frank free of her, but Franny took a last kick with her long leg and Father was forced to slap her, hard, across the mouth. That ended it.
    Father sat on the dining room carpet, holding Franny’s head against his chest and rocking her in his arms while she cried. “Franny, Franny,” he said to her softly. “Why does everyone have to hurt you to stop you?”
    “Easy, son, just breathe easy,” Coach Bob told Frank, who lay on his side with his knees up to his chest, his face as gray as one of the Dairy School colors; old Iowa Bob knew how to console somebody who’d been felled by a blow to the balls. “Feel kind of sick, don’t you?” Coach Bob inquired, gently. “Just breathe easy, lie still. It goes away.”
    Mother cleared the table, picked up the fallen chairs; her determined disapproval of her family’s inner violence registered on her face as enforced silence, bitter and hurt and full of dread.
    “Try a deeper breath, now,” Coach Bob advised Frank; Frank tried and coughed. “Okay, okay,” said Iowa Bob. “Stick with the little breaths awhile longer.” Frank moaned.
    Father examined Franny’s lower lip while her tears streamed down her face and she made those gagging kinds of sobs, half strangled in her chest. “I think you need some stitches, darling,” he said, but Franny shook her head furiously. Father held her head tightly between his hands and kissed her just above her eyes, twice. “I’m sorry, Franny,” he said, “but what can I do with you, what can I do ?”
    “I don’t need stitches,” Franny mourned. “No stitches. No way.”
    But on her lower lip a jagged flap protruded and Father had to cup his hand under Franny’s chin to catch her blood. Mother brought a washcloth full of ice.
    I went back to my room and coaxed Lilly out of the closet; she wanted to stay with me and I let her. She fell right asleep, but I lay in bed thinking that every time someone said “Hotel,” there would be blood and sudden sorrow. Father and Mother drove Franny to the Dairy School infirmary, where someone would stitch her lip together; no one would blame Father—least of all Franny. Franny would blame Frank, of course, which—in those days—was my tendency, too. Father would not blame himself—or at least not for long—and Mother would blame herself, inexplicably, for some while longer.
    Whenever we fought, Father usually cried at us, “Do you know how this upsets your mother and me? Imagine that we fought all the time, and you had to live with it? But do your mother and I fight? Do we? Would you like it if we did?”
    We would not, of course; and they didn’t—most of the time. There was only the old argument, the living-in-the-future-and-not-enjoying-today argument, which Coach Bob expressed more vehemently than Mother, though we knew it was her opinion of my father, too (that, and that Father couldn’t help it).
    It didn’t seem like a big thing, to us kids. I rolled Lilly on her side so that I could stretch out flat on my back with both my ears off the pillow, so that I could hear Iowa Bob coaching Frank upstairs. “Easy, boy, just lean on me,” Bob was saying. “The secret’s in the breathing.” Frank blubbered something and Coach Bob said, “But you can’t grab a girl’s tit, boy, and not expect to take a shot in the balls, now, can you?”
    But Frank blubbered on: how Franny was terrible to him, how she never let him alone, how she was always turning the other kids against him, how he tried to avoid her but she was always there. “She’s in the middle of everything bad that happens to me!” he cried. “You don’t know !” he croaked. “You don’t know how she teases me.”
    I thought I knew, and Frank was right; he was also rather unlikable, and