The House at Royal Oak (19 page)

He had trouble separating dreams from reality and woke up shouting that the house was collapsing on Buck as he tried to jack it up. He dreamed that a hawk got Annabelle, our little black-and-white cat. Fully grown, she was the size of a large kitten and Hugo worried about her more than anything else. At least he's alive, I reminded myself, struggling to keep calm as I tried to think how I could juggle my day job and the bed-and-breakfast and look after Hugo. Because the doctors said he would recover completely, I went ahead and booked reservations, including a wedding party a year off, and sent out confirmations. Closing down the business, an obvious solution, could be bad for his psyche and his health. Most evenings Hugo sat down at the table where I worked and
watched. He looked at the reservation book and the unopened bills and rearranged the envelopes. Weak and tired, he was alternately euphoric about being alive and depressed.

“Do you know what warfarin is?” he asked me almost daily, referring to the blood-thinning medicine. “It's rat poison. I'm a fifty-two-year-old white male being kept alive on rat poison.”

As time passed, he said it more lightly and gradually I realized he meant it as humor. I laughed. At that he tried it out on the kids when they called. “I gather he's feeling better,” Ethan observed with relief in his voice.

A few weeks after that I went back to my day job. Returning home from the office, I discovered that Hugo had booked a room and noted it in the reservation book, albeit in barely legible writing. His bills, now opened, were organized by due date and he even paid a few. Casually looking over his shoulder at his checkbook, I saw that he had forgotten to record the checks, so I opened the envelopes, he recorded the amounts, and we taped the envelopes closed. His handwriting slanted up across the checkbook page far outside the lines, but it marked a change.

If he could do even a little, I prayed I could hold everything together until some part-time help turned up. The children were all too far away to come more than a couple of weekends a year. Linda and Rick were too busy professionally to be counted on for more than that, and the same was true of close friends who volunteered. Although friends said it sounded like fun and wanted to experience running a bed-and-breakfast, it was unrealistic to think there would be any steady help and I had no way to put them up. The fledgling
business could not support regular inn stays or even an inexpensive motel.

I longed for my mother, who at one time could have run the place all by herself. At ninety-two she was starting to feel her age and did not think she could travel. By phone she kept saying she only wished to be five years younger.

At least there wasn't a lot of time to worry because there was always something that needed doing. If the bed-and-breakfast didn't require attention, then Hugo did. He dreamed he heard coyotes yipping in the cornfield, then he started saying he heard coyotes for real. I thought it was his medications—until I started hearing them too.

One rainy dusk, a Saturday, he was watching TV while I made dinner. From the kitchen, I heard screams. It wasn't the TV. I went to the kitchen door. Unearthly screaming came from somewhere in the yard. In the deep shadows I made out Annabelle cornered between the magnolia and the brick path by a much larger cat or maybe a small collie. I ran outside, yelling and flailing my arms to chase it off. As it turned, I saw the distinctive, large straight-up ears, elongated muzzle, and bushy tail carried straight down of a coyote.

It gave me a long, cool stare before walking off along the formal path leading to the front of the house. Annabelle dashed for the kitchen door. That night, and every night after that, she refused to sleep downstairs and stayed outside our bedroom door where Hugo set a basket for her. I thought they were both overreacting until a few days later when I came downstairs in the morning to make coffee, found a rip in the screen door and long, tawny hairs caught in the jagged edge of the screen.

No one mentions coyotes unless you ask. “Ah, yes,” Scott said when Hugo asked if it could really be a coyote I saw. “There are coyotes and red foxes around, too, but the coyotes are chasing the foxes away.” It seems that coyotes expanded east of the Mississippi in the early twentieth century, though they did not arrive in Maryland until the 1970s. Based on their rate of increase in neighboring states like Virginia, coyotes are expected to increase here at a comparable rate of close to 30 percent a year.

Top-order predators, coyotes are secretive, wary, clever, and fast, and they are highly adaptable, especially in their food habits. They eat seasonally abundant plants, insects, mice, squirrels, birds, rabbits, deer, and livestock and have acquired a special taste for domestic cat.

AT FIRST I KEPT THE KITCHEN EXACTLY AS HUGO
had it. Over time I began reorganizing his domain, out of necessity, moving basic equipment down to the lower shelves where I could reach it without a stepladder and clearing the countertops. I stacked cartons full of sauciers, mixing bowls, ladles, immersion blenders, and three extra cast-iron pans, all completely unnecessary in my view, and dragged them to the
back of the laundry room. A second electric mixer, two waffle irons, and a mandoline big enough for a cruise ship kitchen went under the desk.

He noticed but didn't say anything, except to bring out a favorite spatula and ask if we could make room for it. I didn't see why we needed four spatulas, but agreed. Normally, when Hugo was cooking, I entered the kitchen at my peril. Now I missed the aura created by his autocratic chef self, even if the kitchen was more orderly. When he was in charge, the food was better.

Returning from a porch visit with Susie in the middle of the summer, I walked into the kitchen and stopped short. The boxes of extra cookware I had stashed away blocked my path. Open cookbooks, flour, sugar, mixing bowls, cream, spices, and broken eggshells covered the counter, along with a cutting board full of chopped onions and red and green peppers, which spilled onto the floor. From the oven drifted the fragrance of cheese melding with eggs and herbs—chives, dill, maybe a little rosemary too.

Hugo, in a fresh shirt, his hair neatly brushed back, wore a new intent expression on his face. Smoothly he swung the oven door open, as I watched from the other side of the cartons, and spooned out a bit of breakfast pudding, blew on it, and raised the spoon up to my mouth.

Before the bed-and-breakfast opened, we'd questioned friends, family, the electrician, the painter, colleagues of mine at the museum, and other guests and hosts whenever we stayed at a bed-and-breakfast about what they liked to eat
when they visited an inn. They all gave remarkably similar answers.

Strawberries, almost everyone said, and homemade bread or muffins, also a “baked egg thing.” Strawberries were plentiful and grown locally. The baking was well in hand. But the “egg thing” was cause for concern. The director of the Talbot county tourism office, Debbi Dodson, remembered a bed-and-breakfast where all they served was “plain old scrambled eggs.” Clearly this entrée staple, even if our eggs were cooked with fresh herbs, would have to go.

Hugo now considered fritattas, stratas, and variations on French toast—all delicious, but they didn't seem truly at home on the Eastern Shore. We started investigating traditional local favorites to celebrate the Chesapeake. Reading from a collection of historic recipes at the library, I learned that savory “puddings” were brought here by early English settlers and the dish caught on. It wasn't on any restaurant menus as far as I could tell, so I asked around. No one seemed to know about it until I happened on Kim, a physical therapy assistant and fourth-generation Eastern Shore resident. When I described what I meant by the pudding—bread soaked in egg and milk, layered with cheddar and sausage or ham, and baked, she said, “Whatever you call it, we always have that for Christmas. I love it.”

Lucy and Amanda were less enthusiastic. Maybe, Lucy said. “You'll ruin the business if you give that to guests,” Amanda advised. “It sounds gross.” After they tasted it, they changed their minds and this Eastern Shore Pudding, served with local asparagus and potatoes crusted with Bay Spice, came to be a favorite with guests.

Looking around some more, we discovered that the farmers market, set up under shady trees overlooking St. Michaels harbor from spring to fall, offers a gorgeous selection of fresh cheeses, figs, red and green tomatoes, squash blossoms, berries, peaches, pears, sweet corn, and apples—all grown or made nearby—as well as country ham, a long-time local tradition. The first owner of the Pasadena Inn in Royal Oak once slaughtered a seven-hundred-pound hog and people reminisced that you could smell it for days smoking over apple wood. There are still folks around who will smoke a quarter-ham for you, perhaps in exchange for a second ham. A mixture of apple, cherry, and sassafras wood is considered about as good as it gets.

A creamy, aged cheddar with a delicate white rind at the market caught my attention. Sometimes it was available, other times not. Eventually I tracked down the cheese-maker on her family dairy farm in nearby Easton. At Chapel's Country Creamery, owned by Eric and Holly Foster, I saw Holsteins and Jerseys grazing on clover and rye. “The grass and the sun,” Holly said, “that's what makes good milk and good cheese.” In addition to the cheddar, cave-aged for a year, she had a soft, young cheese with an earthy, nutty flavor that was luscious, and I came home with both.

Then in the fall Hugo happened on a spindly persimmon tree behind an abandoned barn and gathered a basketful of the plump orange globes, bringing thoughts of persimmon bread and sweet persimmon pudding. Being native American foods, I tried my hand at these.

After the first frost, I walked down the driveway one day and found dark brown husks the size of golf balls scattered all
over the road. I looked up and saw the tree from which they had fallen, its branches laden with more. On intuition I got a hammer and cracked one open. The unmistakable piquancy of black walnut took me back to my grandmother's kitchen, to black walnut cookies and cake. I remembered an old-fashioned milk cake baked in a cast-iron pan that would be perfect for these succulent nuts, so prized by former generations and forgotten by ours, probably because of how hard it is to pry them out of their shells. Our menus started coming together just by looking around, though sometimes it took an expert eye to tell us what exactly we were looking at. That winter, Roland stopped by and pointed out to Hugo that right at his feet bloomed lovely mounds of winter cress. “My sister really likes cress,” he said. “She'll pick it where she can.” We offered him some and brought more in the house to taste. Lacy, tender, crisp, and slightly bitter, these greens would complement almost any breakfast entrée.

Hugo conjectured that the guests would not be interested in “health foods” when on vacation and he was correct. Once in five years now has a guest asked for the “Health Breakfast” I offer of yogurt, honey, cinnamon, and fruit, along with whole-grain toast. Another quirk that took getting used to was the guests' appetite for croissants. I didn't see any reason to make or serve this French specialty on the Eastern Shore and only resorted to frozen supermarket croissants one Sunday when we ran short of homemade sticky buns for guests with big appetites. I warmed the croissants, dusted them with powdered sugar, and set them out. When it came time to clear the tables, it was a surprise to see that some poached pear
remained on plates and a few bites of ham, but the croissant plate—licked clean.

For research purposes, I tried offering croissants again. The same thing happened. Even when guests requested just coffee and toast, I put out croissants. They might leave the toast, but never yet any croissants. At brunch, guests have even left some of Hugo's award-winning praline pumpkin pie, which took first prize one year in the St. Michaels contest, in favor of croissant. I finally tasted one to see what I was missing, but this confection, made entirely by robots and loaded with trans fats, was as gluey as I remembered.

No sooner were the centerpieces of the new breakfast menus set for the start of our second season, with one hot entrée offered each morning, than the health department arrived for a kitchen inspection. This was a new regulation in our state; some regions do not require inspection.

“Let's say you serve a breakfast-type pudding,” the inspector said, walking briskly into the kitchen. “Would you set it up the night before, for example, mixing together the bread and eggs?” I caught Hugo's eye. Do these walls have ears or what?!

Hugo was ready. Drawing on his cooking school and obligatory sanitation training, he answered with confidence. “Never.”

“Why not?” the inspector persisted.

Hugo described how raw egg, if it contained bacteria, would contaminate the bread if the refrigeration didn't hold steady below forty degrees and if the cooking heat was not high enough for long enough to kill bacterial growth.