'So I thought,' my mother said. 'But I think it's wonderful you got in,' she added quickly.
'Why wouldn't I have gotten in?' he asked.
Mary Bates shrugged, a gesture learned from never understanding her father (since his stroke had slurred his speech). She wore white gloves and a white hat with a veil; she was dressed for 'serving' at the first lawn party, and my father admired how nicely her hair hugged her head -- it was longer in back, swept away from her face, and clamped somehow to the hat and veil in a manner both so simple and mysterious that my father fell to wondering about her.
'What are you doing in the fall?' he asked her.
Again she shrugged, but maybe my father saw in her eyes, through her white veil, that my mother was hoping to be rescued from the scenario she imagined was her future.
'We were nice to each other, that first time, I remember that,' Mother told us. 'We were both alone in a new place and we knew things about each other nobody else knew.' In those days, I imagine, that was intimate enough.
'There wasn't any intimacy, in those days,' Franny said once. 'Even lovers wouldn't fart in front of each other.'
And Franny was forceful -- I frequently believed her. Even Franny's language was ahead of her time -- as if she always knew where she was going; and I would never quite catch up to her.
That first evening at the Arbuthnot there was the staff band playing its imitation of the big-band sound, but there were very few guests, and even fewer dancers; the season was just beginning, and it begins slowly in Maine -- it's so cold there, even in the summer. The dance hall had a deck of hard-shined wood that seemed to extend beyond the open porches that overlooked the ocean. When it rained, they had to drop awnings over the porches because the ballroom was so open, on all sides, that the rain washed in and wet the polished dance floor.
That first evening, as a special treat to the staff -- and because there were so few guests, and most of them had gone to bed, to get warm -- the band played late. My father and mother, and the other help, were invited to dance for an hour or more. My mother always remembered that the ballroom chandelier was broken -- it blinked di
mly; uneven spots of colour dappled the dance floor, which looked so soft and glossy in the ailing light that the floor appeared to have the texture of a candle.
'I'm glad someone I know is here,' my mother whispered to my father, who had rather formally asked her to dance and danced with her very stiffly.
'But you don't know me,' Father said.
'I said that,' Father told us, 'so that your mother would shrug again.' And when she shrugged, thinking him impossibly difficult to talk to -- and perhaps superior -- my father was convinced that his attraction to her was not a fluke.
'But I want you to know me,' he told her, 'and I want to know you.'
('Yuck,' Franny always said, at this point in the story.)
The sound of an engine was drowning out the band, and many of the dancers left the floor to see what the commotion was. My mother was grateful for the interruption: she couldn't think of what to say to Father. They walked, not holding hands, to the porch that faced the docks; they saw, under the dock lights swaying on the overhead wires, a lobster boat putting out to sea. The boat had just deposited on the dock a dark motorcycle, which was now roaring -- revving itself, perhaps to free its tubes and pipes of the damp salt air. Its rider seemed intent on getting the noise right before he put the machine in gear. The motorcycle had a sidecar attached, and in it sat a dark figure, hulking and still, like a man made awkward by too many clothes.
'It's Freud,' someone on the staff said. And other, older members of the staff cried out, 'Yes! It's Freud! It's Freud and State o' Maine!'
My mother and father both thought that 'State o' Maine' was the name of the motorcycle. But then the band stopped playing, seeing its audience was gone, and some of the band members, too, joined the dancers on the porch.
'Freud!' people yelled.
My father always told us he was amused to imagine that the Freud would any moment motor over beneath the porch and, in the high-strung lights lining the perfect gravel driveway, introduce himself to the staff. So here comes Sigmund Freud, Father thought: he was falling in love, so anything was possible.
But this was not that Freud, of course; it was the year when that Freud died. This Freud was a Viennese Jew with a limp and an unpronounceable name, who in the summers since he had been working at the Arbuthnot {since 1933, when he'd left his native Austria) had earned the name Freud for his abilities to soothe the distress of the staff and guests alike; he was an entertainer, and since he came from Vienna and was a Jew, 'Freud' seemed only natural to some of the odd, foreign wits at the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea. The name seemed especially appropriate when, in 1937, Freud arrived for the summer on a new Indian motorcycle with a sidecar he'd made all by himself.
'Who gets to ride behind and who gets to ride in the sidecar, Freud?' the working girls at the hotel teased him -- because he was so frightfully scarred and ugly with pockmarks ('holes from the boils!' he called them) that no woman would ever love him.
'Nobody rides with me but State o' Maine,' Freud said, and he unsnapped the canvas canopy from the sidecar. In the sidecar sat a bear, black as exhaust, thicker with muscles than Iowa Bob, warier than any stray dog. Freud had retrieved this bear from a logging camp in the north of the state and had convinced the management of the Arbuthnot that he could train the beast to entertain the guests. Freud, when he emigrated from Austria, had arrived in Boothbay Harbor, by boat, from New York, with two job descriptions in capital letters on his work papers: EXPERIENCE AS ANIMAL TRAINER AND KEEPER; GOOD MECHANICAL APTITUDE. There being no animals available, he fixed the vehicles at the Arbuthnot and properly put them to rest for the non-tourist months, when he travelled to the logging camps and the paper mills as a mechanic.
All that time, he later told my father, he'd been looking for a bear. Bears, Freud said, were where the money was.
When my father saw the man dismount from the motorcycle under the ballroom porch, he wondered at the cheers from the veteran members of the staff; when Freud helped the figure from the sidecar, my mother's first thought was that the passenger was an old, old woman -- the motorcyclist's mother, perhaps (a stout woman wrapped in a dark blanket).
'State o' Maine!' yelled someone in the band, and blew his horn.
My mother and father saw the bear begin to dance. He danced away from Freud on his hind legs; he dropped to all fours and did a short lap or two around the motorcycle. Freud stood on the motorcycle and clapped. The bear called State o' Maine began to clap, too. When my mother felt my father take her hand into his -- they were not clapping -- she did not resist him; she gave back equal pressure, both of them never taking their eyes from the bulky bear performing below them, and my mother thought: I am nineteen and my life is just beginning.
'You felt that, really?' Franny always asked.
'Everything is relative,' Mother would say. 'But that's what I felt, yes. I felt my life start.'