The House at Royal Oak (8 page)

“This is serious business, Carol,” he intoned. “Do you think we should just pour all that good beer away?” Wastefulness, real or perceived, was a sin in our family to the extent that roasted chicken for dinner invariably meant creamed chicken the next night, and “shadow soup” the night after because the boiled bones by then left a shadow of taste. I shook my head. No one knows your flash points quite like a sibling. I went out to buy more ice for the beer.

The first of the children to show up, Ethan wanted to see for himself if the project looked like a reasonable investment or whether the time had come, I read in his face, for the grown children to start supervising their parents.

When he arrived one Saturday morning that first spring, he took his time looking around, and said carefully that he wasn't sure. Did we think paying guests would want to come here? Could we fix it up enough for that? He took off his jacket and offered to clear some of the overgrowth from the yard. He uprooted weeds, bushes, and massive vines around the ailing magnolia, which stands front and center as you approach the house. Magnolias don't like anything around their “feet,” and someone had chopped off all this tree's lower branches and planted forsythia and Japanese honeysuckle there, so it was languishing. After Ethan finished clearing the area, he threw a shrugging glance up at its emaciated, lopsided, sixty-foot height and moved on to other parts of the yard. He worked with pitchfork, axes, shovels, and a chain saw, and I worked alongside him, talking about the economics
of a bed-and-breakfast and about a house down the road that he might want to buy and fix up.

They were asking $25,000 for it. “Maybe we should get this place fixed up first,” he said.

Hugo carried doors outside to scrape, patch, and paint and set up sawhorses near where Ethan and I were weeding and clearing more brush. Like my sister's visit, his made all seem possible, and good. By the time Ethan started putting away tools, the sun was low. I asked if he was hungry.

“Got to get going,” he said.

I had understood he would stay for the night, having driven almost a hundred miles from Washington, and we would all have a pleasant supper together, made in the temporary kitchen Hugo set up in the driveway with an ice chest, grill, and garden hose. Ethan rattled his car keys.

“Got to get back to Washington,” he said, looking up at the small third-floor window. “Been in the attic yet?”

Yes, why?

“I thought maybe I saw something up there . . . moving around.” Ethan spent most of his time camping in tents on remote islands in the Indian Ocean or in underground bunkers on the North Korea border—the life of a computer consultant to the military. Practical, direct, efficient, he was not one to see ghosts and I thought he could have come up with a better excuse for leaving. Let it go, I thought as we hugged. Respect his time if you hope to see him again soon.

After he was gone, I called up Lucy and Amanda to tell them how much Ethan helped us, and how much fun we had. This brought Amanda down to the house two weeks later to help me scrape rust off the old iron fence, spray on
rust preventive, and brush on shiny black paint. It was tedious going and the fence was 120 feet long. She asked how much she was expected to do. Grateful for the company, I assured her I never expected us to finish in a weekend. Can we go out to eat then? she asked. Go for a bicycle ride, maybe look in the stores?

The fence took me the rest of the spring, helped for a day here and there by Hugo, Rick, and Nancy, Ethan's wife. Nancy arrived during a late frigid blast and spent hours bundled in a knit hat, scarf, two coats, and gloves, scraping and painting. When the rest of us went inside for hot chocolate, she said she wasn't cold and worked until dark when Ethan started the car, insisting it was time to leave for Washington.

It was one of the least important jobs demanding attention at the time, but if the place started to look better from the outside in, it would speak well for the inn-to-be and it met an immediate psychic need, delineating the perimeter of the new future in shiny black, outlining it before filling in the colors.

Lucy, who was studying art in Florence at that time, offered to look around Italy and France for ideas and paint wall decorations when she came home. The tone of her voice said she knew all about the project from Amanda and Ethan, that they were appalled and thought we had made the mistake of our lives. Half the time I agreed with that, but couldn't see a way out now. “I thought you liked art museums and editing books,” Lucy said before hanging up.

There were setbacks from every possible direction. If it wasn't the opening of duck hunting season, then it was goose, deer, dove, or rockfish season, or something else to do with
local customs. Celebrating the Fourth of July around here, for example, starts a good week out. People knock off work early to stock in supplies, set up lawn furniture or the boat, repair fishing gear, and start cooking. If that's the week you think you need a new well dug or a building inspection, it's better to forget the idea and work on something else or, better yet, join the party.

And I still didn't see quite why, as people kept telling us, we needed a plumber, except to put in the pipes and drains for the bathrooms, maybe a new faucet in the kitchen.

The kitchen posed an interesting problem. Our living quarters occupied what was probably the original kitchen with its defunct chimney, once for a cookstove, more recently a winter home for snakes. A five-by-twelve-foot pantry between our space and the dining room had been converted in the 1930s, to judge by the sink, into the kitchen, so we were stuck.

Hugo sketched plans for a miniature professional kitchen, all stainless steel with a commercial range and sizable restaurant fridge, plus dishwasher and shelving. With a door to the dining room and another to the hall, in addition to a big window at the far end, space was ridiculously tight. He got everything to fit on his plans but looking them over I noticed that there wasn't enough clearance to open the oven or dishwasher doors. He rearranged everything until it all fit and we triple-checked the measurements. The much harder question was how to make it happen cheaply.

A kitchen, so important to a bed-and-breakfast, the nerve center really, from which Hugo planned to serve discriminating palates from breakfast through tea to candlelight dinners,
and subject to health department inspection, had to be up to a certain standard. Fortunately the small commercial range and the fridge were less expensive than high-end household versions. Hugo found steel shelving at a home supply store at a fraction of the cost of professional kitchen design wares. That left countertops, another potential sinkhole for the budget. It occurred to Hugo that his brother Bobby, a racecar builder, could help out and Bobby willingly agreed to construct stainless steel countertops around the home supply store sink.

Rick later laid a handsome cobalt-blue tile backsplash above Bobby's countertop. Even with all the economies, Hugo was ever more worried about costs and suggested that we scale back the baths: The guests could share.

Absolutely not, I argued, insisting on private baths long before coming across a study of bed-and-breakfast guests that listed their top priority as a private bath. Personally, I never did like walking around in my bathrobe in front of strangers, the way you may have to do at an English inn or a bed-and-breakfast with a shared bath. In such situations, a friend once advised me, correct behavior is to wear a heavy robe and if you encounter anyone, no greeting is expected, just keep your eyes straight ahead.

Eyes straight ahead. The thought reminded me that Hugo seemed to be keeping his eyes straight ahead as we passed in the yard or the house, or ate a quick hamburger together, standing over the grill in the driveway at the end of the day. Eyes straight ahead, no talking. I worried that the stresses of the work and the expense were causing our relationship to take an ominous turn. Unless it meant the
opposite, the evolution of the relationship to a higher state where much communication is nonverbal. Or it could just mean he was tired. The trouble was I didn't know which. I said something.

“It's just a phase,” he answered, looking out the window. “It's just the way things are right now.”

AT LEAST THE HOUSE WAS STANDING STRAIGHT. BUCK
and Larry even knew a plumber. “There's only two good plumbers anywhere around here,” Larry offered when he and Buck stopped by to see how the foundation was holding up. “Take your pick. Find them eating breakfast around six a.m., down at the Bull Crap.”

“Pardon?”

“Bull Crap Café, town of Trappe, fifteen miles down the road . . . if you can get going that early.” He gave me their names.

I decided to try calling them up. The first of the two, George, agreed to meet at noon on a Friday at our place. He had worked nearby and everyone I asked said good things about him.

His truck pulled into the driveway at 11:56, an encouraging sign. We shook hands and walked through the house. Hugo and I took turns explaining the plans for a bed-and-breakfast, where we needed a new bath in the upstairs sitting room and about cutting the large bathroom in half to make a third bath. He was silent.

Coming back downstairs, my nervous small talk bounced off him like pebbles off a Humvee and echoed around the empty rooms. We came to a stop in the parlor. He cast a cool, appraising eye over us.

“We'll do it. But you'll lose ceilings or floors. Take your pick.”

I explained that the original plaster and the pine flooring were important to the ambience, to what people expected when they came to a bed-and-breakfast, and told him the bricks were made right on the property from the clay soil and the oak beams came from local trees, and about the integrity of the original building, its place in history, the importance of preserving it. George waited patiently until I finished.

“Ceilings or floors. Otherwise we can't get in to run the pipes. Some might run the pipes right up the inside walls, but I won't do that. You wouldn't like it either.”

“How much?”

“Ten thousand, maybe. Can't really tell until we get into it.”

Like the foundation contractor, he worked on “time and materials,” meaning no contract, no set price. If you don't like the local system, you can bring in your own workers from the Western Shore, put them up at a motel, as some people did. Even if you can afford a work crew's living expenses, other come-heres cautioned, outsiders can have a slow time getting their construction permits approved. Worse yet, you won't have anyone to call in an emergency.

Territoriality is the issue. If they haven't worked at your place, forget calling them in an emergency. They take care of their own.

I called up the other plumber for a comparative bid. The following week he arrived, spent five minutes looking around and said maybe he could start before the end of the year but would charge $20,000.

I called George back to tell him the job was his, but couldn't reach him. Two calls a week for four weeks. The office staff always promised to give him my message. Something was fishy.

With the foundation work finished and the new bathrooms framed up, time would soon be wasting. Slowly it dawned on me that the two plumbers talked over breakfast at the café and were not pleased I had contacted both of them, taking up their time.

I decided to try a ploy that sometimes worked at my day job. Call very early, before the office staff arrives, and you might find the head of the company there working alone, even answering the phone.

George probably got up around five-thirty, got to the Bull Crap by six, to the office by six-thirty. I set my alarm for six.

Sitting down at the kitchen table with coffee, paper, and pencil, I jotted notes. I knew what to say, it was how to say it. At six-thirty-five, I dialed.

On the first ring, he answered. There was no mistaking his voice.

“George?”

“Yes.” It was a wary yes.

I started to identify myself but he remembered. The bed-and-breakfast.

“We would like you to do the work if you are still willing.”

Silence.

“We would like you to do the work because of your outstanding reputation.”

More silence.

“And of course we will follow your advice,” I added in a rush. “Would you prefer ceilings or floors removed?”

“Ceilings.”

I thanked him and offered to send a deposit. Not necessary, he said. I assured him we would take the ceilings down right away, no problem. Hugo, I didn't say, had never taken down a ceiling in his life, but maybe he could learn fast.

“One more thing.”

“Yes?”

“You need a new well, more capacity. Might as well get a new hot water heater while you're at it. Don't want guests at that B&B of yours running out of hot water. Call me when the well's in and we'll start.”

Hugo came into the kitchen as I was hanging up and headed for the coffeepot. I waited until he sat down at the table.

“So?”

“Great news. George will do the work. All you have to do is take down the front and back hall ceilings and the kitchen ceiling first, and we need a new well.”

“Great,” he said, matching my upbeat denial of the bad news.

It was a bad news time. A few days later Hugo and Rick measured out the old shed. The new well required a larger well tank, and with the larger hot water heater it would all be impossibly tight in the small space. Poking around, they
also discovered that powder post beetles (who ever heard of them?) had finished off the lower third of the vertical supports for the structure. It was more or less resting on nothing.

When George dropped by, he pointed out that the oil furnace was likely to quit any day now, and the shed foundation was cracked and sinking as well. He wouldn't install the new equipment over it if it was his house, but, hey, our choice.