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.”
CHAPTER
5
The Bull Crap Café
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.
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 a
re 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.
CHAPTER
6
The Bay
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.
The House at Royal Oak Page 6
