The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving Page A

that was the problem. Franny was awful to him, but Franny was not awful; and Frank was not really awful to any of us, except he (himself) was, somehow, awful. It bewildered me, lying there. Lilly began to snore. I heard Egg snuffle down the hall and wondered how Coach Bob would handle it if Egg woke up hollering for Mother. Bob had his hands full with Frank in the bathroom.
    “Go on,” Bob said. “Just let me see you do it.” Frank sobbed. “’There!” cried Iowa Bob, as if he’d just discovered a fumble in the end zone. “See? No blood, boy—just piss. You’re okay.”
    “You don’t know,” Frank kept saying. “You don’t know.”
    I went to see what Egg wanted; being three, he wanted something unobtainable, I thought, but I was surprised that he was cheerful when I came into his room. He was obviously surprised to see me, and when I returned all the soft animals to his bed—he had thrown them all over his room—he proceeded to introduce me to each of them: the frayed squirrel he had vomited on, many times; the worn elephant with one ear; the orange hippopotamus. He was upset whenever I tried to leave him, so I took him into my room and put him in my bed with Lilly. Then I carried Lilly back to her room, although that was a long way for me to carry her and she woke up and became irritable before I got her in her own bed.
    “I never get to stay in your room,” she said; then she was asleep again, instantly.
    I went back to my room and got in bed with Egg, who was wide-awake and talking nonsense. He was happy, though, and I heard Coach Bob talking downstairs—at first, I thought, to Frank, but then I realized Bob was talking to our old dog, Sorrow. Frank must have gone off to sleep, or at least gone off to sulk.
    “You smell worse than Earl,” Iowa Bob was telling the dog. And, in truth, Sorrow was dreadful to smell; not only his farting but his halitosis could kill you if you weren’t careful, and the old black Labrador retriever seemed viler to me, too, than my faint memory of the foul odors of Earl. “What are we going to do with you?” Bob mumbled to the dog, who enjoyed lying under the dining room table and farting all through mealtimes.
    Iowa Bob opened windows downstairs. “Come on, boy,” he called to Sorrow. “Jesus,” Bob said, under his breath. I heard the front door open; presumably Coach Bob had put Sorrow out.
    I lay awake with Egg crawling all over me, waiting for Franny to get back; if I was awake, I knew she’d come and show me her stitches. When Egg finally fell asleep, I carried him back to his room and his animals.
    Sorrow was still outside when Father and Mother drove Franny home; if his barking hadn’t woken me up, I’d have missed them. “Well, that looks pretty good,” Coach Bob was saying, obviously approving of Franny’s lip job. “That won’t leave any scar at all, after a while.”
    “Five of them,” Franny said, thickly, as though they had given her an additional tongue.
    “Five!” Iowa Bob cried. “Terrific!”
    “That dog’s been farting in here again,” Father said; he sounded grouchy and tired, as if they’d been talking, talking, talking nonstop since they’d left for the infirmary.
    “Oh, he’s so sweet,” Franny said, and I heard Sorrow’s hard tail wagging against a chair or the sideboard— whack, whack, whack . Only Franny could lie next to Sorrow for hours and be unaffected by the dog’s various stenches. Of course, Franny seemed to notice smell, in general, less than the rest of us. She had never objected to changing Egg’s diapers—or even Lilly’s, when we were all much younger. And when Sorrow, in his senility, would have an accident overnight, Franny never found the dog shit displeasing; she had a cheerful curiosity about strong things. She could go the longest, of any of us, without a bath.
    I heard all the grown-ups kiss Franny good night and I thought: Families must be like this—gore one minute, forgiveness the next. Just