The House at Royal Oak

by Carol Eron Rizzoli

  Coughing and wiping plaster dust from his face with a bandanna, Hugo Junior walked beside him. I trailed close enough to listen but far enough back to stay out of any “discussion.” When his dad turned abruptly and headed back down the porch steps for the waiting car, Hugo stopped coughing enough to say, “Come on, Dad, I’ll show you around inside.”

  “No, thanks. Got to get back to Washington.”

  “But you just got here. Don’t you want something to drink or eat?”

  “No, thanks.” He reached for the car door.

  “Did I ever tell you . . .” His father stood there, seemingly lost in thought.

  “Dad? Maybe you should come inside and rest before you leave.”

  “No, we’re leaving in a minute. As I was saying, did I tell you about the time I got a call from the State Department? They wanted me to go to the Mideast, maybe to operate on someone. When we landed, I found out we were in Baghdad and that the president of the country had disappeared. This other guy was in charge, Saddam Hussein. Some thuggish bodyguards drove me across the city to an impressive building and took me to an upper floor. I came into a room and the first thing I saw was a circle of eighteen gilt chairs. I recognized physicians from all the major countries sitting there. Then I noticed at the head of the room, up on a platform in a big bed, was Hussein. He was having back problems. They wanted a diagnosis from each doctor.

  “It was clear to me, after examining him, that if he rested he’d be fine. I didn’t want to operate. I said so. The others agreed.

  “Then the toughs who were guarding us drove us to a hotel, to get some sleep, before they took us out to an island. They pretty much had control of us. We had to go. When we got there, I saw a tent and there was liquor, anything you could possibly want to drink. I didn’t know what they were going to do. They built a big fire. I was kind of relieved when they used the fire to cook fish. We had a feast. After we ate, they gave us gifts and drove us back to the airport. I was happy to be going home . . .”

  He looked around then, coming back to the present. “Don’t know what made me think about that—” He got in the car.

  As the door closed, Hugo quickly asked, “Well, what do you think?”

  “Probably a good investment, if you ever get it fixed up and ever get anyone to come out here.”

  The car rolled down the driveway.

  In the hunch of his shoulders, it was clear how Hugo felt. Years of dreams, plans, and work merited a ten-minute visit.

  “Honey, you know that’s as expansive as he gets,” I said, aware that both of us could not afford to be down at the same time or the project was doomed. I was always encouraging him to work faster, because every day we weren’t open for business cost double: money out, no money in. Hugo could always go back to the job he disliked and I could try to stick it out at the office if it came to that, but turning back now would be admitting failure and opening the door wide to bigger failures. “The only people who never fail are those who never try,” Mark Twain said, a quotation that I taped to the kitchen door in the first days of the project.

  Hugo walked on ahead of me. He knew we needed to finish this and I did, too. I thought about the glorious bookstore days, then about Hugo in cooking school working alongside “the kids,” the other students half his age, then sweating it out in restaurant kitchens and enduring the humiliations of the catering business. He needed a success soon.

  I was enthusiastic about the bed-and-breakfast for my own reasons, but being his idea, it weighed more on him. In this we were typical of couples who start a bed-and-breakfast. One person instigates it, the other goes along.

  “Hey,” I called to his back. “Your dad didn’t say it’s a stupid mistake.” This characteristic remark was probably easier to take if you hadn’t heard it all your life. My father-in-law mostly meant it as a joke. If you’re going to make a mistake, please don’t make it a stupid one. But Hugo had trouble seeing it that way.

  I hesitated, trying to get at the truth. In his late eighties, his dad no longer saw well enough to drive himself around the Beltway, across the Bay Bridge, and down Route 50 to our back roads. He asked a friend to make the three-hour round-trip with him, without even stopping for a rest. He didn’t call the project stupid. He even said something positive about it. Hugo was too close to see.

  “It seems like he damned us with faint praise, but . . .” I thought for a moment, aware that this was a very important moment. Hugo was on the edge. I needed exactly the right idea and the right word to say it. Then I had it. It was a sort of benediction.

  He wasn’t listening. “A what?”

  I repeated slowly. Ben-e-dict-ion. His blessing, a cool one. It was as much as he could give, something like a light kiss on the forehead by someone whose focus is elsewhere. There was no hint that day of what he really thought, what he might do.

  Take what you get, I could hear my mother saying. And like what you take.

  CHAPTER

  8

  Pennies and Nails

  UP ON THE ROOF, IN THE FIREPLACE, UNDER THE PORCH, pennies by the hundred were everywhere. Good luck, I hoped, and left them there. There were nails everywhere too, in the floors, doors, walls, and ceilings. Hugo pulled out hundreds of old, hand-forged nails and piled them up in buckets.

  Why anyone needed that many nails was a mystery. And why did every wall in the house look like someone had kicked it or thrown something at it? I had time to consider the question as I worked on repairs. Most of the time we divided up the chores, except for the very, very dreadful ones that neither of us could bear to do alone, like collecting discarded syringes, contraceptives, and plastic bags from around the yard. We filled seven trash cans with empty beer and soda cans.

  Once all this was cleared, smaller objects began to emerge, shards of blue and white dishware, spoons, children’s marbles, old bottles, and a tiny porcelain friar, a bright expression glimmering on his round, grimy face. The house mascot. I washed off the dirt and set him on a shelf surrounded by pennies.

  There were oyster shells, too, a commonplace along the bay, where shell mounds mark early Indian settlements and later centers of commercial oystering, times when oysters were so abundant that a good eater might devour as many as a hundred at a sitting. The quantity of shells I saw suggested that previous residents, including the minister who first lived in our house with his mother and sister, and those who followed him enjoyed oysters as much as anyone.

  Our attempts at rescuing the house from nature were apparently unending. A tug-of-war was in full swing long after we thought we were in charge, with snakes, vines, wasps, and wood rot all trying to claim shares. Six brown turkey buzzards, beaked ellipses—I’m sorry to use the word— lurked in a half-dead cherry tree near the front door.

  I regretted a lack of sympathy for these fellow travelers but couldn’t help it. The sight of them perched high in the branches day after day sent shivers of foreboding through me. Fortunately, a storm blew the cherry tree down and the buzzards departed, at first for a tree next door, then, as activity peaked around our place, they moved farther away and stayed there.

  Reclaiming the house from former inhabitants seemed easier than taking it back from nature, but in the end it took longer and called for different tactics.

  One Saturday afternoon an attractive thirtyish man came by and sat down on the porch floor, yoga-style in the half-lotus. He heard we were looking for a painter. He spoke well and was cleanly dressed in khakis and a white shirt that hung too loosely on him, as if he weren’t eating enough. He said he used to live in our house and would really like to be around again. He was having trouble getting his head together, but when he did, he wanted to do some of the painting. Hugo finally got rid of him by suggesting he write up a proposal for his work.

  Another Saturday, which seemed to be the day for visiting, a man wearing a sleeveless undershirt, short shorts that could have been underwear, and flip-flops showed up. He sported tattoos head-to-foot of pirates and coiled snakes wit
h long forked tongues.

  Hugo noticed him first and went forward. This man also said he used to live in the house and if we wouldn’t mind, he’d like to take a look around.

  “Maybe some other time,” Hugo said, holding his ground on the path between the man and the kitchen door. Hugo is six feet tall and had developed some muscle from the construction work. This man had a full half-foot on him and about forty pounds.

  As our visitor launched into reminiscences of good times at the house, he kept edging closer until he and Hugo faced each other inches apart. He said he would appreciate seeing the room that used to be his, the one at the top of the backstairs.

  “It’s all torn up right now. We’re working on it,” Hugo lied.

  “Hey, okay.” He held out his hands, palm up, and turned to go, then stopped.

  “Okay if I come back later, maybe bring along a metal detector, take a look around?”

  Sure, Hugo said.

  These visitors made me long for other visitors, pleasant company who might offer a word of encouragement now and then. There weren’t any ghosts around, as most of our neighbors claimed to have. So I invented a ghost of a former resident, Mrs. Jefferson, whose mother had acquired the property from the Methodist Church in the 1930s and whose son sold the place to us. Neighbors said that in her day it had been a fine house. It was easy to imagine what she would think. Her voice would have my grandmother’s soft, Southern cadence. If I may say so, she would have remarked once the tattooed man left, I did not approve of some of the goings-on around here. I most certainly did not. . .

  As I went about estimating how much fabric it would take to improvise a swag across the four bay windows, seven feet high, in the sitting room and the two front-facing windows, I knew what she would advise. Measure twice, cut once, dearie.

  When Hugo and the rest of the family heard about Mrs. Jefferson, they didn’t seem alarmed or, if they were, they didn’t let on. I overheard Hugo telling family that he saw it more as a reflection of the character of the house and how hard the work was, rather than someone losing her marbles. Lucy called right up though, asking about it. “Really interesting,” she said. “Be sure to let me know if the House Spirit says anything else.”

  It was time to choose paint colors and I quickly learned what any decorator could have told me in a minute, a swatch is one thing, color on a wall can be something else entirely. For the woodwork throughout the house, I tried out Simply White (too white), Old Ivory (too yellow), Vanilla Ice Cream (far too yellow), Bone White (chalky), and Navajo White (pinkish) before finding Linen White. Then I had to learn that a semigloss finish was much better than high gloss, which only highlighted the wood’s imperfections. The choice of a white proved the most challenging, but it went much the same way in each room.

  In the dining room, I saw no need to try to improve on a great master and intended to simply copy what Claude Monet had chosen for his own home at Giverny, a blue-and-yellow color scheme. The five yellows I tried were much too bright. Eventually, I realized that one of the discarded whites, Old I vory, matched almost exactly the yellow walls pictured in one of my favorite books, Monet’s Table. Some people (smarter than I), a bed-and-breakfast guest later informed me, take the book right into the paint store, have the color scanned and the color custom-mixed.

  Elsewhere in the house, where I’d painted test patches on the walls, I asked anyone who stopped by which they liked best. Usually everyone agreed on what was the most appropriate and serene color.

  But what everyone from neighbors to friends, family, guests, and would-be innkeepers really wanted to discuss was this: How will you make it? What does an enterprise like this cost and can you make any money at it?

  So here it is. Naturally, getting started cost much more than estimated and took much longer. We had never heard of the 3-2 Rule, which decrees that any home project will take three times longer and cost double your estimate. We created a new rule, the 4-6 Rule. I have yet to meet an innkeeper who opened on time and on budget, even with spreadsheets, but if you are more precise with your estimates than we were and factor in enough margin for overruns, you can avoid surprises like these:

  Certainly it’s possible to buy an up-and-running bed-and-breakfast, if you can afford that. Either way, be sure to consider why people would want to come and stay at your place. It should be near a resort or tourist area, on a popular travel route, or in proximity to other attractions, such as a historic town, a college, or areas of natural beauty.

  What, then, can you expect if you find a place, obtain a license (in our town the house has to be historic or deemed “interesting” by a county agency to qualify), open for business, advertise, and eventually guests start to come? To make money, the general rule is that you need at least five rooms with a decent occupancy rate. A key factor is how many nights a year you can reasonably expect to be booked, based on other inns and businesses in the area, and on what you are offering. Fewer than five rooms can be borderline and is often considered a hobby, though an income-producing one. Fewer than three rooms is considered companionship. Technically, we were at the hobby borderline, but hoping to cover expenses and get lucky, with plans of one day making a go of it. More recently, with the higher cost of real estate, this has become trickier to do.

  Another factor to consider is furnishing the place. A bed-and-breakfast requires that charm quotient, an elegant aura of the romantic, the bygone, the exotic, or the rustic, a pleasing suggestion of “elsewhere,” that allows guests to escape from the everyday. And that, everyone who knew of our scheme warned, is really going to be expensive.

  No, it won’t, I answered, because I knew our budget and the secondhand shop in our village where unbelievable finds awaited anyone willing to do a little work on the furniture you bought there. I also knew the family attics. Between my father-in-law and my own mother, I calculated that there was a staggering 178 years of living to draw on without even counting what had been passed on to them by their parents. So I started with what we already had and planned a short shopping list of lamps, linens, and new mattresses. Bed-and-breakfast guests rank good beds second only to private baths on their list of preferences, according to industry studies.

  Another preference among guests, as it turns out, is for an absence of teddy bears, chintz, and bric-a-brac. Some guests will specifically inquire about this before booking as a prelude to asking about dust and allergens. For others it’s a question of aesthetics. This was lucky for us, because my own strong preference was for a suggestion, an evocation of the past, not a full-blown set piece.

  Even so, we were going to need a certain amount of stuff beyond my short list of basics. After exhausting the attics, I took frequent walks down to Julie’s Oak Creek Sales to hunt for fixable chairs, tables, dressers, mirrors. In time we had to look further, stopping at thrift and used-furniture stores wherever we happened to be, usually on trips to and from the hardware and lumber supply stores.

  The idea of saving a house that would otherwise bulk up a landfill is hugely appealing. Old houses also hold history and secrets that you can sense at every turn, in their nooks, their hand-hewn beams, windows, mantles, and unpredictable corners. I used to avoid impassioned conversations among home renovators, but I came to understand. It becomes an obsession with addictive rewards if things go well, a kind of gambling. No wonder saving old houses is an industry and a culture all its own, with blogs, Web sites, magazines, newsletters, TV shows, clubs, and stores.

  The same rewards lie in preserving smaller objects, and an unexpected advantage of starting a bed-and-breakfast is that what could be a time-consuming, not to say expensive, hobby becomes your business. After more than a few futile efforts and mistakes, I began to get the hang of this new sport, sizing up quickly if a thrift store had something we needed and could work with. It might mean nothing more than reinforcing a shaky structure, a wobbly chair or table legs with L-brackets.

  I explained to Hugo how I had seen my father do it. The first time Hugo tried
, he screwed the brackets to the outside of the chair. “Think anyone will notice?” he said, reaching for the screwdriver to move them.

  It might mean sanding a stained or chipped surface or just brushing on furniture stain to bring an old end table or bookcase back to life. At the home supply store I came across marker pens in many different wood finishes—oak, beech, mahogany, walnut, ash, cedar, redwood, cherry, and “colonial”—and bought them all. I walked around the house with these pens in my pockets, ready to touch up scratches on the thrift store furniture until it crossed a line in my estimation between neglected and well cared for.

  Sometimes we returned from shopping empty-handed and frustrated, certain that although we had come far, the shoestring was just too short. A pleasing ambience was beyond our reach. How do you improvise a good, solid bed frame that also shows style? Then a real find would give us energy for more hunting. At a secondhand clothing store that also dealt in used rugs, books, and odd pieces of furniture, Hugo spotted some dining chairs shoved in a back corner.

  Unpriced, they were wobbly and needed new upholstery, but their beautiful, spare grace would distract the eye from our undistinguished dining table. Hugo asked if they were for sale.

  “They’re in bad shape,” the owner said. “Fifteen each?” Hugo paid for all six and picked up four, two in each arm, leaving me to follow him out of the store with two more. He hurried to load them into the truck, explaining that we needed to get out of there before the owner changed his mind. If they aren’t Duncan Fife, he said, they’re fine copies. I didn’t know this famous furniture maker and asked how he knew. The usual, he said—a book.

  One chair was covered in pale-green, moiré taffeta. I imagined the refined house from which it came, where no one ever spilled anything. For our purposes, I selected darkblue velvet and Hugo showed me how to use the staple gun. The main rule was never hold it toward your face.