When Brody calls Hooper at the beginning of Chapter Ten, he tries to picture his room at the Abelard Arms. His imagination - like that of Dr Bill Harford - is fuelled by jealousy. However, the picture Brody's suspicious mind creates of his own possible cuckolding is no dream fantasy, but a vision of "a small dark garret, a rumpled bed, stains on the sheets, the smells of rut." This may be an accurate visual representation of the motel room where Ellen and Hooper had sex, but it surely cannot be an accurate picture of Amity's oldest and most prestigious hotel.
The Abelard Arms Inn may not be as recognisable in the popular consciousness as the Overlook Hotel, the Hotel Earle, the Hotel Del Coronado, or even the humble Bates Motel, but we learn quite a bit about this fine establishment over the pages of Benchley's novel. We are told that shark victim Morris Cater was staying there the weekend of the nineteenth and twentieth of June (Chapter 4), and when he got chewed up in the surf perhaps it was Matt Hooper who took his vacant room. We know that meals are included in the price of the room (Chapter 10) and it's unlikely that butterfly lamb or gazpacho are on the menu. We also learn that the inn has been run as a family business for three generations (Chapter 9) and, given that the current owner is "a frail old man" called Ned Thatcher, is soon likely to pass into the hands of a new proprietor. We are told by the night clerk that Hooper is staying in Room 405 and so we can suppose that the Abelard is of a reasonable size.We even know the hotel's telephone number of four descending figures (six-five-four-three) that Ellen Brody has committed to memory.
All this we can glean from the text, but there is one piece of information that is never stated. Was Benchley's choice of name for the hotel just a random selection, or was he attempting some sly symbolism when he named it after the medieval French scholar Peter Abelard? Are we supposed to see some echo of Ellen and Hooper's doomed love affair in the tragic story of Abelard and Heloise?
