The House at Royal Oak (9 page)

Hugo paid the penalty fees and dipped into his small retirement savings. The contractor returned to build the new shed. To save money Hugo would install the floor and interior walls while the new well was being drilled.

It was a perfect, early September day. The workers, usually on the job by seven, at latest by nine if they had to pick up supplies or check on someone else's job, were nowhere in sight. We assumed it was another no-show day. These were an exasperation but Hugo never phoned them unless there were two in a row, which meant they were sandwiching in another job and if you didn't call them on it two days would lead to three, four, a week or more.

After painting primer on some siding to save the work crew time, Hugo went inside to make more coffee and switched on the TV. He called me over as the second plane hit the World Trade Center.

Fifteen minutes later the phone rang. The contractor wanted to let us know the crew was on its way, they were running late because of problems at another site. This was a first, consideration spurred by the stunning calamity.

In an hour they arrived and Hugo went outside. The contractor's sons, his work crew, stood in a tight, silent group
staring at the ground. The contractor and Hugo exchanged a few words. After a few more minutes the contractor signaled the end of the impromptu mourning. “I say we nuke 'em.” As if on cue everyone strapped on toolbelts, climbed ladders, and got to work.

Four months later George and his helpers finished installing the brand-new bathrooms. The combination of old and new, original floors and windows, along with quietly new fixtures and white brass, came together better than I had hoped, a pleasant surprise. Also in their places, glinting importantly and expensively, were the new hot water heater, the new well tank, and the new furnace—all in the new shed.

George himself arrived to supervise the first firing of the furnace, now attached to the old pipes and old radiators, which no longer tipped so badly because the repair of the damaged floor joists more or less leveled the floors. The January day was unusually cold and he found Hugo in a parka, cap, and gloves, suspended high on a makeshift scaffolding, scraping the two-story ceiling in the secret backstairs.

George walked back and forth in the upstairs hall, taking in Hugo at every pass as he checked the antiquated system of pipes and radiators. While his helper and I rushed up and down the stairs to make sure everything held, he fired the furnace. Soon the all-important flow of hot water into pipes and radiators resounded softly through the house. The old pipes, and everything else, held. The house started to warm up.

We shook hands and he drove off. He didn't want payment; he'd send a bill. Hugo had paid $2,000 up front for supplies, but after that George did not want more payments.
Worrisome as hell, but we didn't know what to do about it.

Six weeks later his bill for the balance of the work came. It was February again, one year after the place had become ours. Taking a work break around four in the afternoon, we walked down to the village post office, by now a weekly ritual, to see if the bill was there.

“If it's here, don't tell me,” I said, suddenly weary. For the first time outside the office, I felt a sharp pain starting along my right temple and running down into the back of my neck, a migraine. Hugo unlocked the mailbox.

“Let's get this over with.” He fumbled with the mailbox key and pulled out a small yellow envelope, hand addressed. That was it: I saw George's name in small block letters in the upper corner.

Hugo ripped it open and his eyes fixed on the page. We'd been up and down ladders all day, patching plaster and, in between, removing and cleaning door hardware, a seemingly endless stream of time-consuming, trivial tasks, the kind of detail that would make or break the place as a bed-and-break-fast. In other words, the kind of soul-numbing work they fast-forward on home restoration TV shows. We were six months behind schedule and falling more behind every day. I asked him again, less than pleasantly, not to tell me.

“Look,” Hugo said, holding up a tissue-thin sheet. Handwritten were our names, address, and this. Balance due, $9,480.

I looked again. It was a gift beyond belief. We hugged.

Hugo stuck the bill in his jacket pocket and I saw the weariness in his eyes evaporate. We strolled back to the house, enthusing over a feeble sunset and the bracing wind. This
entirely unexpected act of kindness was the sort of thing you might read about, but never seems to actually happen.

George himself worked long hours, had bills of his own to pay, a daughter to send to college. I asked myself why he did it and guessed that it had to do with the day he came to fire the furnace and saw Hugo working alone in the twenty-degree house. He saw and understood. He knew we couldn't afford help and he knew from experience that after hours of working under those conditions you have to warm your feet and hands slowly in warm water, as Hugo did every night for weeks that winter in a friend's bathtub.

This bathtub belonged to Ellen, who had just showed up in our driveway one late fall day. Getting out of her car, she'd called, “Hugo?”

He came from the garage to see who it was. “Ellen?”

“What are
you
doing here?” she asked.

“What are
you
doing here?” he answered.

Ellen was an avid reader who had frequented Hugo's bookstore with her daughters. He explained what we were up to and she said she had a weekend house less than a mile up the road. Casting a quick eye over our house that day from the driveway, she had asked, “Do you need a place to stay?”

It wasn't two weeks before we moved into her guest cottage. Hugo got cleaned up that first night, shaved, did his laundry, and we sat down to dinner in a warm room where we didn't need jackets and boots. “The bookstore and bookstore friends are still with us,” he said simply.

I couldn't think of any way to repay George's favor so as soon as we both had money in the bank, Hugo and I wrote
out checks, half each, and drove down to the town of Trappe to leave them in his mailbox.

The road passed long stretches of fields with glimpses of icy bay. George's house, a small brick ranch, was surrounded by fields and bay. I thought his understanding of our situation and generosity must have originated here, where he grew up, where his father ran the business before him in unforgiving isolation, a place of limited possibilities.

HUGO SANDED, FILLED, AND RESANDED THE WOODWORK
in the dining room. Examining it in the bright morning light as guests would see it, I decided to go over it again, trying to erase more of the deep ugly marks, not the small gentle ones, the patina of people and time.

He didn't mind my going over his work, but when he went over my spackling of the doors, I lost it. I took off a clog and heaved it at the door, cracking the new paint and taking out a chunk of wood. Seeing that only irritated me more, and I felt worse still when he quietly started repairing it. I ranted and said that he was just a better person than I was. Not everyone can be so calm, even, controlled, and such a perfect spackler.

“You care more about this house than you do about me,” I yelled before aiming the second clog at him. I banged out the screen door and headed down to the water.

He's acting like a moody husband with a mistress, I thought. Too bad I had to spend all week in the city earning money to help support this project. Could he be taking advantage of that? Again I considered the possibility that work and stress were driving us into separate, lonely worlds. What a perfect irony if we shore up this nice old house and in the process damage our relationship beyond repair.

Often these days, I found myself walking down to the water's edge, for a few minutes or an hour. It always helped to clarify my objectives, the consoling sight of this geological marvel that surrounds our finger of land on three sides. From the dock where I like to stand, you can see the water turn almost any shade of blue, silver, white, gray, orange, mauve, pink, or black. Depending on the weather and time of day, it changes quickly, slowly, always unpredictably. On the most ordinary of afternoons it will surprise with a showing of luminous pale green, reflecting early spring light off the maples, oaks, and willows leafing out along the shoreline.

The largest estuary in North America, two hundred miles long, four thousand miles square, the Chesapeake Bay spans an astonishing 11,600 miles of coastline. Formed by glacial melt at the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago, the bay is the drowned valley of the mighty Susquehanna River. Long before rising seas flooded the river valley, a meteorite carved out the mouth about 35 million years ago, to the south where the estuary opens to the Atlantic Ocean.

Much of the bay is shallow, less than thirty feet deep, and in places you can wade far out before the depth increases much over five feet. The shallowness of these warm, partly salt and partly fresh waters nurtures a magnificent ecosystem of fish, fowl, and plant life. There are hundreds of species of finfish and shellfish, thirty kinds of waterfowl alone. There are diving ducks, such as the canvasbacks and redheads, with their legs far back under their bodies to help them dive deep for food, and dabbling ducks, with their legs more centrally located for walking, such as mallards and black ducks. There are gorgeously plumed wood ducks, mergansers, Canada and snow geese, mute and tundra swans. Among the most beautiful of water birds, the great blue heron and the snowy egret inhabit the region for part or all of the year in the company of little blue herons, laughing gulls, oystercatchers, swallows, pelicans, cormorants, sandpipers, plovers, bald eagles, and ospreys.

That splendid raptor, the osprey, also known as the seahawk or fish eagle, was once in decline. Intensive study revealed that the pesticide DDT caused the shells of osprey eggs to become fragile and easily broken, resulting in “egg failure.” Since the banning of DDT, ospreys have resurged and are more abundant now on the Chesapeake Bay than anywhere else in the world. Osprey pairs, which mate for life, return to the bay every March from the Caribbean and South America to occupy the same nest and hatch their cinnamon-brown eggs. Even with an improved environment, they have a much harder life and obstacles than we humans typically do.

Contemplating all this, I think, should be enough to catapult anyone into a permanent state of gratitude, not to say renewed loyalty to one's mate.

Whenever I take time to consider it, the bay's huge beauty and riches fill me with awe and hope. With its distinctive, extravagant flora and fauna, the bay once defined an entire culture centered on shipping, agriculture, fishing, and later crabbing and oystering, that spanned centuries. By 1900 a second culture appeared, one of recreation, and these two cultures now coexist side by side and compete with each other for diminishing resources. There are bay work boats and bay pleasure boats, bay industries and agriculture, bay tourism and development.

Following construction in the 1950s of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, conveniently linking the Eastern Shore to the mainland, massive development got underway. Even still, stretches of bay and shoreline appear as untouched and picturesque as a century or more ago, if you know where to look.

Along with the new, traditions also survive, especially in the architecture of towns dating to the seventeenth century and in bay foods and bay cooking. At almost every dockside restaurant and crab house, a distinctive seasoning imparts zing to the famous steamed blue crabs and also to potatoes, corn, bread, eggs, popcorn, crackers, and anything else people want to put it on. A blend of spices, it usually includes coarse salt, mustard seed, paprika, black and red peppers, bay laurel, ginger, allspice, mace, and clove.

These days, of course, the defining force that was the bay is doing far less defining. It has been eaten up, like our house, from inside and out. Though saving a house, I remind myself, is nothing compared to saving a bay.

You would never guess from the developers' advertisements about the good life here or from the restaurants
offering all the crabs you can eat that the bay is deathly ill. The trouble started long before a campaign to “Save the Bay” was launched in the 1970s. Every step of development from the steamships and railways in the nineteenth century to the cars, highways, and housing of the twentieth has contributed. By the 1970s the situation was critical and billions of dollars later the crisis is worse. No matter what the agencies working on the problems or responsible for them may say in their “cautiously optimistic” reports, the situation remains desperate.

The oysters are all but gone and the legendary blue crab,
Callinectes sapidus,
too. The name, given by a Smithsonian Institution scientist, comes from the Latin
sapidus,
meaning savory or tasty, and the Greek for beautiful swimmer. More than beautiful swimmers, they're beautiful, tasty swimmers and, like the taste of the oyster, the taste of crab only creates a desire for more—which helps matters not at all.