The House at Royal Oak (2 page)

Guests come to this home away from home, a bed-and-breakfast, to celebrate an anniversary, a wedding, a birthday, a family reunion. They come for business, for trysts, to consider life transitions, and to recover from them. They come to house hunt, to goose hunt, to escape from houseguests, to get engaged, to honeymoon, to start a family, to get away for a romantic weekend without the kids. Others come to shop, bicycle, sail, kayak, go fishing, take in the sights, sketch, visit art galleries, eat crabs, read. Some just want to practice the fine art of doing nothing, as they say in Italian,
il dolce far niente.
The loose local translation might be “Come sit on the porch.”

They come curious, bored, adventurous, tired, delighted to escape “real” life for a day or two. A few are suspicious, wary of the experience at hand. A few are superstitious. On September 11 every year someone from New York or Washington always books a room just to get out of the city.

Long after you're certain you've seen it all, know it all, guests will arrive with more lessons to teach about human nature—theirs and yours. Serving breakfast, for example, should be an easy sort of task. One morning I was getting breakfast together while Hugo went out for eggs. When he came back, jazz was playing in the dining room, coffee was brewing, and I was taking hot biscuits from the oven. Green tomatoes, coated with cornmeal, were fried and in
the warming oven, ham browned on the stove. The breakfast these guests requested was coming together nicely.

“What happened?” he said, walking in the kitchen door.

“What do you mean?”

“Guests are gone.”

“They can't be.”

“Look for yourself. The front door is wide open and their car is missing.”

Half an hour later when they still weren't back, we went up to check their room. The key lay on the dresser, their luggage was gone.

We ate their breakfast in gloomy silence. Because they'd paid in advance, we didn't come up short, but the experience led to a sign, a small act of defiance, in the front hall:

PLEASE CLOSE DOOR SO COYOTES DON'T GET IN!

• • •

There are many philosophies about what makes a person. You are what you think. You are the work you do. You are what you love. You are where you live. You are what you read, said François Mauriac, “but I'd know you better if you tell me what you reread.” All partly right, but most completely right to my way of thinking is the biblical idea that you are what you give. Whatever we are able to give by way of comfort, good food, and a pleasing setting that I hope leaves space for the imagination, the souls of the guests, it has all come back. Beyond the gifts, the wine, crab cakes, doorknobs, and so on—beyond that, more than a few guests
leave behind something of themselves, a wise insight, a hard-won life lesson, a way of being.

Bad things happen, I know it. Why, after all, should we be any different from anyone else? I know it from the stories other innkeepers tell about the strain on their personal lives and relationships, and about trying guests. The guest who ironed on an antique table and left a deep burn. The guests who ate pizza in bed, ruining the duvet. The guests who lit hundreds of candles and almost burned down the house. The guests who held a “small wedding party” that started with warming up a whole roasted pig in the fireplace and ended with beer cans and meat bones strewn around the floors alongside the sleeping guests.

Another time a woman I didn't know leaned across the table at a dinner party on hearing our plans to open a B&B and said, “Oh, you'll just hate it. My mother had one for a few weeks, until she saw guests on the way out to their car, carrying boxes packed full of furnishings from the room they stayed in, pictures in frames and everything. Kleptos are a big problem at B&Bs.”

A friend tells about his brother's bed-and-breakfast, a main house and cabins in Montana. A group that turned out to be Hells Angels reserved the cabins. When the partying got wild and they started destroying the place, the police were called. A death threat was issued against his brother, who now prefers to spend his time in Mexico.

But my favorite cautionary tale is not so much about bad guests as it is about Innkeeper's Mistake Number One. After a couple departed, leaving behind an expensive nightgown, this
host called up the guest to ask if he should mail it. The wife, who answered, knew nothing about a weekend away and the host and husband in question narrowly escaped lawsuits. Not one to make the same mistake twice, this host was thriving last I stayed at his place. We compared notes. He, like us, has a drawer full of left-behind paraphernalia. Ours is heavy on reading glasses, pens, and . . . negligees. Three of these, each lacier and more provocative than the one before, hang on Hugo's closet door, one green, one white, one black. Why?

I think they're kind of interesting, he explains.

I wait for the truly dreadful thing to happen and when it does I only hope to be ready, able of mind and body, to deal with what may come, grateful that, whatever it is, it didn't happen at the very beginning when we desperately wanted to please everyone and be liked. Of course I also realize and appreciate that in this particular place we exist under a protective aura. A nineteenth-century parsonage in the countryside self-selects a certain kind of guest.

So it's a joy when guests arrive and it's a joy when they leave. When checkout time comes, the room keys are back on the desk in the hall, the last car crunches on the driveway gravel, the last good-bye is waved, and the money is in your pocket—then the clock can be stopped for an hour, maybe longer if no new guests are arriving. On a Sunday morning, two servings of breakfast pudding are set aside and by noon we sit down on the porch or in the garden, guests for an hour in our own place.

If all the guests are out on a Saturday night, we might walk out on the grass and do a few steps to music coming from a party at the inn across the road or wander into the back field, which in May turns to a mirage of limpid yellow light, thousands and thousands of buttercups. The most surprising of gifts, the yellow stretches as far as you can see, all the way to a line of cedars and oaks at the horizon. I make a mental note to ask the farmer who tills this land what makes the buttercups bloom each spring before he plants corn or soybeans.

The burnout rate in this business is high. Most who start out full of energy, optimism, and enthusiasm have had enough and are gone in seven years. Those who stay after the seven-year mark stay a very long time. I don't know which we will be, but for now I know that if you like people and work, can set up a place that lets both the guests and the hosts feel comfortable in very separate quarters, if your business plan and, not least of all, your working partnership are solid, and all the other ifs—it can sometimes be heaven.

BACK IN MY OTHER LIFE, CHANGE WAS LONG OVERDUE.
It wasn't the politics or competitive culture of the museum where I worked at the time and it certainly wasn't the work itself that got to me. I loved editing art books that lived long lives in scholarly libraries and museums, loved producing them on fine paper with beautiful endsheets, full-color reproductions, and sewn bindings. It was a real privilege to participate in the making of these books.

No, after a dozen years it was the inexplicable, blinding headaches that set in whenever I went to the office. I became obsessed with the idea that in the throes of one of these “icepick” headaches, a monstrous mistake would strike, not only humiliating me but, far worse, the museum.

The gods of publishing had been kind for a good, long time and I worried how much longer it could last. In a typical three-hundred-page book of a hundred thousand words in three or four languages with five hundred images, the probability of an error had to be high. No matter how carefully I checked proofs, it was always an act of faith to sign off and print. I kept a sheet of blue paper in my top desk drawer, a gift from another colleague when I first arrived at
the museum, a constant reminder to be careful. Handwritten in blue ink, it read:

The Six Phases of a Project

1.
Enthusiasm

2.
Disillusionment

3.
Panic

4.
Search for the Guilty

5.
Punishment of the Weak

6.
Praise & Honors for the Nonparticipants

That, and a story told by a renowned art historian when we met to discuss the editing of his book, kept me on continuous high alert. Working with another editor, the art historian said quietly, an appalling error occurred. The historian himself approved the text and verified the placement of every image. In the middle of the night, the printer phoned the editor because one image was incorrectly oriented: You could clearly see the upside-down signature of Michelangelo. The editor approved rotating the image and the presses rolled.

The book was printed and bound. Unfortunately, the drawing in question, the subject of the volume, was now upside down because Michelangelo often used a sheet of valuable paper more than once, turning it around to sketch his flow of ideas. The art historian peered at me over the tops of his half-frame glasses: We can't be too careful, can we?

In the bend of his head, his eyes lowered as if fending off invisible blows, you could see that Hugo was more disillusioned
than I was. His store, The Bookstall, a community fixture and gathering place for nineteen years just outside Washington, D.C., went the way of hundreds of other independents when the chain booksellers with their extraordinary selection of titles entered the picture.

When it closed, the store left him with a lot of debt and fond memories of the book lovers who came to browse, shop, and exchange news. Among the celebrity customers there was one who liked to shop in his pajamas. Every Christmas Eve a car let him off at the door and he sat in the Bookstall's back office while Hugo made recommendations, brought him books to peruse and discuss before wrapping up his selections. With a fountain pen from his bathrobe pocket the customer wrote out gift cards. The staff did their best with Hugo preoccupied for two hours on the busiest day of the year, but it wouldn't have been Christmas without this interlude.

For a broadcast journalist, Hugo always kept copies of the
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
in stock because this one customer, Ted Koppel, liked to present the small volume of Stoic wisdom as a gift when he interviewed heads of state. Hugo stacked the
Meditations
on a shelf right inside the front door because Koppel was always in a hurry. One day Hugo asked him what part of the
Meditations
he himself was most drawn to. Right here, Koppel opened to a page: “Accustom yourself to reflect upon the universality of change.” Just an ordinary day at the bookstore.

Another time, Linda Pastan brought in a poem titled “The Bookstall” that she had written about her experience in the shop, later published in a collection of her work:

Just looking at them

I grow greedy, as if they were

freshly baked loaves

waiting on their shelves

to be broken open—that one

and that—and I make my choice

in a mood of exalted luck,

browsing among them

like a cow in sweetest pasture.

For life is continuous

as long as they wait

to be read—these inked paths

opening into the future, page

after page, every book

its own receding horizon.

And I hold them, one in each hand,

a curious ballast weighting me

here to the earth.

The bookstore brought in John McPhee to sign copies of his latest book. It brought mystery writers Tony Hillerman and Martha Grimes. Books brought Hugo face-to-face with John Ashbery, Helen Frankenthaler, Ansel Adams, James Dickey, and Arthur Ashe. Most thrilling in the view of my daughters, Lucy and Amanda, who worked in the store when they needed money, was seeing Wonder Woman, actress Lynda Carter, shopping for books for her children. Lucy, just turned twelve, volunteered to work for free on Saturdays when Wonder Woman liked to shop.

Hugo's own personal favorites were the families who came, bought, read and discussed books, and brought their children along year after year to share the experience. These regulars became good friends who had a way of turning up later, in our new life, to repay his favors. Hugo helped their children start with
Goodnight, Moon
and go on through E. B. White to Stephen Crane and Edith Wharton in their high school years. When these children returned to work in the bookstore and pointed out books they'd enjoyed to new young customers, the bookstore family circle was complete. Books and a small store that the neighborhood treated like their own living room. It seemed like a dream.

Falling back on his other great interest, Hugo tried cooking next. Being Italian, he passionately loved food, cooking, and eating. A good idea, I thought. Work and love, Freud said after all, are the most important parts of a life.

Cooking school proved as pleasant as the images created on TV by celebrity chefs. But the restaurant kitchens where he worked after training were nightmares straight out of George Orwell. At a lovely pastoral restaurant favored by Washington A-list types, Hugo started out as a line cook and in the second week did his first turn at “Fam,” the family-style meal cooked for staff each afternoon before opening for business. The rule was to use up whatever was left, and so Hugo turned out a Bolognese sauce with rigatoni. Later in the evening as the restaurant was closing down, a senior waiter found Hugo alone by the grill and hissed: “If you ever cook Italian for us again, I kill you.” A catering company where Hugo could be the boss seemed like a better idea.

The trouble was that his interactions with others in the aptly named profession of catering did not live up to the life of the bookstore. Once he discussed William Styron, Julia Child, and the
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
all in a morning's work. Now he was summoned to palatial homes to prepare, on one occasion, risotto the way the client had it in Rome, with no specifics available. When the risotto, lacking saffron, didn't meet the client's expectation, it was sent back and Hugo was called into the dining room to discuss it before the assembled dinner party. When he was hired to prepare a buffet for seventy-five people but a hundred turned up and the food ran out, the client was furious.