The House at Royal Oak (15 page)

Five minutes before ten I opened the dining room door, went into the front hall and listened. It was quiet except for the sound of water running. That was encouraging. The guests were getting ready to come down for breakfast. I opened the front door, went out on the porch, and saw someone hurrying up the road. As she got closer, I recognized the bride, her long hair flying, in jeans and sweatshirt.

Breathless, she came through the gate and up onto the porch. “The bridesmaids and groomsmen are coming over to help put the program together, if that's okay?” I nodded.

After the rehearsal dinner, she explained, she and her friends had driven back across the Bay Bridge to an all-night copy center in Annapolis, the closest place to get two hundred programs copied. All were now impressively stacked on tables in the parlor. The bride started to collate pages, but her hands shook and it took her half a minute to get the first one together and put a paper fastener through the punched-out holes. The program, I saw at a glance, consisted of two different religious ceremonies separated by a jazz concert and ran to eight pages. Two programs assembled a minute, a hundred minutes, I thought, sitting down to help her. She threw me a look that said a thousand thank-yous.

Next, her mother called down the stairs that the towels hadn't been changed since yesterday. Less than twenty-four hours after they arrived, it had not occurred to me to change the towels. This was supposed to be a bed-and-breakfast, after all, and I thought it an unreasonable request. What were they doing with all the new, extra-thick towels anyway? Thinking rude thoughts, I hurried to get her some.

When her mother appeared, I served breakfast while the bridal party assembled programs and the wedding photographer took pictures of everyone. It was 11:40. After serving seconds of coffee and tea, I went into the back room and called Hugo.

“What am I supposed to do now? It looks like they're going to stay all day. Check-out was at eleven.” Other innkeepers had warned us that you need to hold your ground
because if you make things pleasant enough, some guests just won't leave. It took me a while to get the point and months later, with a group of guests who wanted to linger, I actually made and served five pots of coffee.

Hugo suggested reminding our guests about checkout time and if that didn't work, telling them that new guests are arriving.

I pointed out that no new guests were expected.

“Doesn't matter. Bookings could materialize at any time.”

The new life is a sitcom, I told him. Sitting on the floor of my own house in a sea of hole punches, I was collating wedding programs for a complete stranger. Another warning I'd heard, that some bed-and-breakfast owners have trouble sharing their turf—telltale signs are too many rules posted and hosts that seem to be watching the guests around every corner—didn't apply here because we set up as an inn from the beginning. It was just on principle that I thought guests should leave on time. Aside from that, I had to admit it was fun. With the kids far away for school and jobs, it was a relief to be in a house again that reverberated with happy activity, and be part of it. The bride invited me to the wedding.

Back in the dining room, the guests had finished breakfast but showed no sign of getting ready to leave. They seemed to be settling in. I tried dropping a hint by clearing the table, without results. There was nothing to do but approach the bride, now deep in conversation with her mother. I apologized for rushing them, but having a checkout time was to allow us to get ready for the next guests.

It worked. Half an hour later they were gone and I surveyed for damages. They had picked up the hundreds of hole punches and aside from a paper cup of cold coffee in the parlor, the place was spotless. Taking leftover juice, toast, and a cup of coffee to the table, I opened the guest book. I needed comfort to read what, if anything, our first guests thought. I had given my best for Hugo's new business and if it didn't please, it was not for lack of trying.

Beautiful house. Can't wait to come back for the warm hospitality.

I called up Hugo, who was driving back from New Jersey, and read it to him twice, jubilant because she touched on what I cared about most and thankful that I had kept my mouth shut about the towels and overstaying.

He said he was bringing gifts, rugs, photo albums, silver, and other antiques. More would arrive next week by moving van.

Very nice, I said, but I was thinking about a trip or a series of favors or—I suddenly knew what the payback would be.

We ate Italian food and discussed it while eating. We listened to Caruso and Pavarotti at Sunday dinner. A trip always meant Italy. All delightful, but as the novelty of marrying into an Italian family wore off, I began to miss my own family traditions and yearned to revisit them before they faded to vague or forgotten memories.

The payback was equal time for my heritage. A visit to the farm at Antietam and the little Dunker church where my great-great-grandfather had preached the evening before the Civil War battle. I also wanted to see the gravesite of my
half-Indian ancestor and the Seneca lands in New York State. This ancestry represented an unspeakable embarrassment to my German-Huguenot family and was never discussed. In a neatly typed family history, a tiny, cramped hand noted the fact as an afterthought. We would visit Antietam and Seneca territory and we would start cooking and eating American Indian foods.

Hugo agreed to consider the idea more after the upcoming, fully booked weekend at the bed-and-breakfast. In two weeks, all three rooms were reserved for the first time and for two nights. These bookings also came from The Oaks, which was hosting another wedding. Six room nights in the lingo, a big step up. Twelve breakfasts and twelve teas to plan, cook, and serve. The third room was almost ready.

With ten days to go until the big weekend and with two more bookings before that, I decided to go away. This would allow Hugo to experience running the place by himself as I had, and would help him understand it better. I missed Lucy and Amanda and it was my only chance of seeing them anytime soon. So the plan was only half revenge.

Returning from the all-girls holiday, Hugo met me at the airport. “It was a lot of work, running the B&B without you.” He picked up my suitcase.

Tell me all about it, I said, giving him a light kiss.

Listening just enough to gather that all went well with a couple and a single lady who had stayed, I gazed out the truck window at the wide, green fields and lines of oaks, pines, and flowering pear as we approached the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and the Eastern Shore. I missed Amanda and Lucy, but with
Hugo beside me and the clean, grassy fragrance of springtime fields mixing with the briny breezes, I felt something almost like coming home.

Home. A complicated concept. A bed-and-breakfast done right is an idealized kind of home, more homey somehow than a real one. We evidently had gotten that part right. But a true home for us, I had to admit, seemed stubbornly elusive, quite imaginable but not exactly within reach.

Hugo was still listing everything that needed doing as we pulled into the driveway. The door to the secret backstairs, which would be used for the first time by guests staying in the small, romantic room at the top of those stairs, needed work. This rickety handmade door was definitely quaint, but the peeling brown paint, which showered chips all over the landing when the door opened or closed and the wind blew around like confetti, definitely was not. The door needed scraping, filling, sanding, and painting. If there was time, the battered wooden stairs needed the same. We started in.

By dusk, both door and stairs were ready for undercoating. Hugo disappeared into the kitchen and I heard the uplifting clink of ice against glass—grown-ups' school bell. Workday's over. We walked outside, past tools, paint buckets, ladders, and refuse, to the lawn. From here you could look out to Oak Creek and see lights coming on. A party was in progress somewhere. A jazz group started up.

Stars came out. A wispy breeze drifted off the creek. Behind us the house in its new white paint glowed in the afterlight of the day. Hugo took my hand and we did an easy two-step.

It lasted less than five minutes, but for once I made a point of noticing, and memorizing the moment. The house with its promise of a new life, the grass, the breeze, the music, us dancing. A time of perfect happiness that nothing could ever take away.

A BRIGHT, ENERGIZING MID-MAY MORNING. WE MADE
a quick trip to the Western Shore so Hugo could buy last-minute supplies and I could keep a doctor's appointment. The office headaches were getting worse, although they rarely struck on weekends when I was at the bed-and-breakfast. The doctor thought environmental factors might be responsible and tried tests, diet, medications. Nothing helped. He ruled out a brain tumor because brain tumors, he said, don't clear up on weekends. After the appointment, I did office work at our house which still served as base camp until we would move full time to the bed-and-breakfast.

Hugo set out around two-thirty that afternoon for the Eastern Shore, late considering all that needed doing in forty-eight hours. Before he left I stood in the driveway next to his truck, where he sat ready to start the engine. We congratulated each other on being really prepared to run a bed-and-breakfast. Each of us had done it alone. This could only be easy. It represented the culmination of all the dreams
and work, all the past disappointments set aside, the curtain rising on a brand-new life. Apparently, the stresses hadn't even dented our marriage. They might have had an opposite effect, Hugo pointed out as he leaned back on the truck seat to catch the sunlight on his face, because this start-a-new-life-on-a-shoestring business was too fragile to survive serious disagreement—and we both knew it.

Little fights were allowed and we took a minute to replay the one about the color for the front door. I had chosen grass-green, as described by Mr. Don Harper, whose family opened the Pasadena Inn across the street in 1902 and he grew up there. A centenarian when I met him at a summer picnic, Mr. Harper said the front door and shutters of our house were always green with cherry red trim on the window sashes.

Wanting to evoke bay surroundings, Hugo insisted on maritime blue. When I consented to blue to make peace and sanded, primed, and painted the door with two glossy coats of a color called Welcome Blue and it turned out not to be the blue he saw in his mind's eye, this caused almost as much trouble as the blackberry muffins. Hugo glanced at his watch. Time was up.

His to-do list for Thursday and Friday was taped to the dashboard:

1.
Mow lawn

2.
Backstairs, final blue paint & do ahead so no fumes

3.
Plane sticking front door

4.
Clean up junk, gravel, mulch, 2-x-4s, bags cement

5.
Lay timbers in driveway so guests know where to park

6.
Test cream waffle recipe for Sunday

7.
Food shop, two breakfasts, two teas

8.
Buy guest soaps, shampoos etc.

9.
Laundry!!

Everyone who's “been there” warns that the worst part of running a bed-and-breakfast is the laundry. You can't run the washer and dryer when guests are in our house or out on the lawn because it might interfere with the bucolic serenity they expect. But in a small bed-and-breakfast it's only a problem, I discovered, if you fall behind. Naturally, we were behind after only two weeks. With laundry stacked on the desk and bed, there was nowhere to eat, sleep, or pay bills. We weren't even close to having the housekeeping help we promised ourselves once the business picked up. So Hugo planned to get right on it.

My plan called for finishing up the week at the office and arriving Friday night, after Hugo checked in the guests and served the first afternoon tea. I would help out on Saturday and Sunday.

When I'm working and need to concentrate, I usually let the phone ring and return calls later. Maybe this time I needed a break. When the phone rang, I answered.

No one seemed to be on the line.

As I started to hang up, a rasp came from the phone. I couldn't be sure. It sounded like Hugo and it didn't sound like him. I had never heard this voice before and went cold. The undertoad, I thought, the unexpected thing John Irving called it, that always gets you when you're looking the other way.

“What's up?” I asked. “Where are you?”

“Sick,” he said.

I thought it must be an accident because he was never sick.

“Are you in the truck?”

“Can't talk . . .”

“Where are you?”

“Fifty.”

“Route 50?”

“Yes.”

“Where on Route 50?”

“Can't see . . .”

“You have to see. Look, and tell me where you are.”

He said something about Hess Road. I vaguely remembered an exit from Route 50. Did he mean that? Yes, he said.

I told him to call 911 while I called them, too. Minutes later when I called him back, his phone clicked on and I heard a siren.

“They're here” was all he said.

The siren got loud and I heard walkie-talkies and voices, but I couldn't make out what they were saying.