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On July 18, 1980 the Stanhope Hotel on Eighty-first and Fifth Avenue changed ement and ownership and became the American Stanhope -- a fine hotel currently not beset by the problems of the Stanhope described in this fiction

The Hotel New Hampshire

1 The Bear Called State O' Maine

The suht the bear, none of us was born -- eren't even conceived: not Frank, the oldest; not Franny, the loudest; notMy father and mother were hometown kids who knew each other all their lives, but their 'union,' as Frank always called it, hadn't taken place when Father bought the bear

'Their "union," Frank?' Franny used to tease hier than Franny, to me, and Franny always treated him as if he were a baby 'What you mean, Frank,' Franny said, 'is that they hadn't started screwing'

They hadn't consuh she was younger than any of us, except Egg, Lilly behaved as if she were everyone's older sister -- a habit Franny found irritating

' "Consummated"?' Franny said I don't re was not old enough to hear talk like this: 'Mother and Father siot that bear,' Franny said 'That bear gave the trees and playing with his'

'He ust 'He didn't rape dogs'

'He tried to,' Franny said 'You know the story'

'Father's story,' Lilly would then say, with a disgust slightly different frousted with, but Lilly was disgusted with Father

And so it's up to me -- the middle child, and the least opinionated -- to set the record straight, or nearly straight We were a family whose favourite story was the story of ht the bear, how Mother and Father fell in love and had, in rapid succession, Frank, Franny, and !' as Franny would say); and, after a brief rest, how they then had Lilly and Egg (Pop and Fizzle,' Franny says) The story ere told as children, and retold to each other ere growing up, tends to focus on those years we couldn't have known about and can see now only through our parents' many versions of the tale I tend to see my parents in those years more clearly than I see them in the years I actually can remember, because those times I was present, of course, are coloured by the fact that they were up-and-down times -- about which I have up-and-down opinions Toward the faic of my mother and father's courtship, I can allow myself a more consistent point of view

When Father would stu us the story -when he would contradict an earlier version, or leave out our favourite parts of the tale -- ould shriek at him like violent birds

'Either you're lying now or you lied the last time,' Franny (always the harshest of us) would tell him, but Father would shake his head, innocently

'Don't you understand?' he would ask us 'You iine the story better than I remember it'

'Go get Mother,' Franny would orderme off the couch Or else Frank would lift Lilly off his lap and whisper to her, 'Go get Mother' And our mother would be summoned as witness to the story we suspected Father of fabricating

'Or else you're leaving out the juicy parts on purpose,' Franny would accuse hi to hear about all the screwing around'

'There was no screwing around,' Mother would say There was not the proirl went off and spent the night or weekend with soht her a trairl after that "Her kind sticks together," we used to say And "Water seeks its own level" ' And Franny, whether she was eight or ten or fifteen or twenty-five, would always roll her eyes and elbow me, or tickle me, and whenever I tickled her back she'd holler, 'Pervert! Feeling up his own sister!' And whether he was nine or eleven or twenty-one or forty-one, Frank always hated sexual conversations and demonstrations of Franny's kind; he would say quickly to Father, 'Never mind that What about the motorcycle?'

'No, go on about the sex,' Lill

y would tell Mother, very huue in ainst my neck