by Michael Oren
* * * * *
“Welcome!” Harvey bellows, more boisterously than loud, as if the guests were long unseen cousins. “Welcome,” he strides in his baggy khaki trousers, his brush denim button-down, and crepe-soled loafers, the tousled gray hair and moustache made famous by a children’s television host back when. “Let me take your bags,” he offers, though his doctor recommended against it, not with the sciatica and the discs already herniated from lifting. But Harvey can’t desist, especially with new arrivals. For here the fantasy begins. And nothing, certainly not an arthritic, browbeaten innkeeper, must spoil it. He smiles, rather, eyes twinkling behind his half-moon reading glasses, wrinkles rippling his face, as the guests check in to their childhoods.
For that is what a country inn is about, Harvey knows. Not merely a bed and a bathtub, a breakfast service and drinks, but a shelter from a world long inured to hospitality, a world of instant needs and ever-swifter gratifications, grimly embedded in the now. An inn is about nostalgia, that yearning for the simple and the quaint. Not a mid-point in anyone’s journey, but the destination, the way not forward, but back.
“Please, let me show you to your room,” Harvey says, leading the newcomers down dark, narrow hallways lined with creaking floorboards and hunting scenes. A pudgy man, he might have to squeeze by Janine, his wife, who alone takes up much of the passage. She, too, smiles, albeit apologetically—an expression virtually tattooed—and bows slightly with chapeled hands. “So glad to see you,” she chimes.
A skeleton key opens the door to a room that seems time-frozen, preserved especially for this guest. The oaken four-poster with its Shaker quilts and pillows, the Chippendale vanity, ornamental rabbit ears on the HD TV. There is a selection of teas with Scottish biscuits, a cut-glass bowl of treats. Wine and beer in a minibar discretely wedged beneath the credenza—“Jot down what you take, we trust you,” Harvey winks. He reaches under the tasseled lampshade and turns the room sepia. “Voila,” he announces, “home.”
But, “voila,” he thinks, “hell.” For while the inn can be paradise for tourists, for the keeper it’s agony. Bedsheets streaked with every human effluvium, toilets clogged, and on top of all that the complaints. The water not hot enough, the bedsprings too twangy, the breakfast bacon that could be crispier, saltier, more copious. The endless griping outdone solely by the unrelieved need to listen. At the dining table or in the den where the overnighters wear on about their lives, their poor dead husbands and trips to the Jersey shore, their third cocker spaniels, their retirement plans and transplants, Harvey has to sit with knee-pinioned elbows and chin laden hands, his face a fabrication of interest. Doggedly, he fights the urge to doze off or, better yet, scream. Instead, “So sorry for your loss,” he mutters, and “How marvelous,” with an eye on that pounding, off-kilter, clock.
Occasionally, Janine will appear with her cauterized smile and ask if anyone wants tea or “something spicier.” Though now formless in stretchy polyester, with doughy features and hair like aluminum shavings, she was once the siren who seduced him to this lair. After meeting him at the rock festival, pert in her peasant top and jeans, after accompanying him to the stock exchange, to the hedge funds and equity firms, and later, when all had failed and the jeans and blouse wilted into pantsuits, it was Janine who suggested, “Let’s go somewhere distant. Unspoiled. Let’s find a big old Victorian house with gables and maybe a turret.” And Janine who fantasized, “The two of us, we’ll open an inn!”
At first the idea enchanted him. He saw himself hosting glamorous people, voyagers from around the world. He imagined making friends with individuals like him who had striven and taken knocks and, in the process, acquired knowledge about life and the wisdom of sharing it. He did not envision himself forearms-deep in the decorative spittoon some drunken guest took for genuine or on his knees scrubbing takeout chop suey from the tiles. Hopeless with hammers and saws, hazardous around electricity, Harvey was consigned to greeting and registering, entertaining, and mopping up puke. He cooked and he dusted, ironed linen and scoured out mud. The inn is his punishment, Harvey realizes, but for what crime he cannot recall. Where people may check out but never the proprietor, the keeper of his own lacquered jail.
His only reprieve, the sole respite from geniality, is his daughter, Meredith. Inn-raised and bred, she is accustomed to the comings and goings of strangers. She helps in the kitchen, pitches in with the wash, working every vacation when she’s home from her college up north. Meredith, who, as an only child, might have grown up spoiled but in fact became grateful and kind—at least to her father, whom she unabashedly adores. As if she knows the strains the inn places on him, the unrelieved burden of being nice. She hates to see him abased by complainers, spat upon and shrinking. “I don’t know why you put up with it,” she reproaches him. “In your place, I’d murder them.”
But Harvey merely gawks at her—in wonder at the fair, chestnut-haired beauty that he and Janine somehow produced, but also in awe. The perfect combination of femininity and power, muscular yet petite, she’s the handy one around the house, as adept with shears as she is with axes. On the fields where Harvey has watched her play lacrosse, she cradles the ball maternally while mercilessly inflicting body checks. A mystery, Meredith is, and a blessing for her father, his lone redemption from the inn.
And a seasoned staffer in a bright sleeveless summer dress and pumps, echoing her father’s welcomes as the latest arrival stomps in. Not your average traveler, she can see, neither carefree nor rumpled, but scrupulously prim in khaki slacks and a navy-blue blazer. Slender, tanned, his hair hewed into a crust-colored disc parted just off the middle. Meredith studies him, a handsome man with angular features, eyes an armament gray, and already she senses trouble. Before she can investigate, though, Harvey huffs into the den. He is carrying the man’s suitcases, the old-fashioned leather-bound kind, one in each hand.
“Here, let me take those,” she offers, but Harvey recoils, insisting, “No problem, Merri; they’re light.”
They are, in fact, empty, or nearly so. Meredith can tell from the ease with which her father balances them and the absence of pain on his face. She says nothing, though, but opens the register book and offers the lodger a pen. His signature is curiously legible.
“Great, Mister Roswell D. Frye,” Harvey trumpets, “Let me show you your room.”
He lets him, begrudgingly, but not before glancing around the den with a sneer. He lifts from the rack one of those earthenware mugs and sniffs its insides, peers into the unlit fireplace, and fiddles with an eight-track player—all with the same disgust.
“Is something wrong, Mister Frye? Something not to your liking?” Harvey is all pusillanimity again, and Meredith looks on, cringing.
“No, nothing. What could be wrong?” The visitor states, rather than asks, with a display of too-white teeth. He motions to Harvey to lead.
They enter the hallway, the man sandwiched between the innkeeper and his daughter, and their combined weight makes the floorboards shriek. “Horrendous,” the visitor grumbles, and “barbarous,” at the sight of the fox hunt prints, and finally, “You must be joking…”
Janine is blocking their path. Even turned sideways, her unconstrained bulk looks impassable. “So glad to see you,” she gasps as the three grunt by, her smile unaltered by the footfalls on her toes or the jam of leather suitcases into her belly. At last, they reach the room.
Though the best in the house, this, too, is not to the visitor’s liking. Punching it, he pronounces the mattress “mushy,” and the lamplights, switched on and off, “weak.” There’s dust on the thumb he draws across a windowsill and mold on the porcelain beneath the sink. The chamber pot’s potpourri smells stale.
“We’ll fix everything, Mister Frye, right away,” Harvey assures him and then, beseechingly, to Meredith, “Won’t we?”
“Of course,” his daughter usually says, but not today. Perhaps because this is the last weekend before she heads back to school, the final stretch of a
summer crammed with faultfinders such as Frye. A summer in which her resentment of them nears the boiling point, as does her passion for defending her dad. “At once,” Meredith could be expected to add, and yet she stays silent. Her eyes, Tiffany blue and set far apart, shark-like, are wincing. A muscle in her bare upper arm throbs.
It twitches that afternoon during complimentary tea in the den. Other guests are present—a retired pharmacist and his wife from someplace Midwestern, a classics professor on sabbatical, and a honeymoon couple joined at the thigh on the ottoman—and there is Frye. All praise Janine’s cinnamon cakes and toast her with homemade lemonade while he grouses over the paucity of mixing spoons and a shortage of Sweet’n Low. “And will someone get rid of that clock?” Meredith looks on, livid, as her mother smiles and Harvey bustles back and forth from the kitchen. His hair is a maelstrom, his moustache a flag of surrender.
“The patron is king,” Harvey reminds her when he locates her in the basement, fuming in front of her workbench. This is where she hides when aggravated by boys or boarders. In the dim light and cobwebs, she hacks and chisels away.
“And what’s that make you? A peasant?”
“A servant.” Harvey’s eyes lower to his half-moon glasses. “And a humble one at that.” They rise, but with a look not of pride but of impotence. “The inn, Merri,” he whispers, as if his wife might hear him upstairs. “It’s all I’ve got.”
Her wide-set eyes are now deer-like. “Really, Daddy?” Meredith asks, hoisting a pneumatic drill. “All?”
That night, when she should’ve been out in her beat-up Civic, working the bars with townie friends, Meredith sits alone in her room, intense at her desk, surfing. So, at last, she finds it. “Fit to be Fryed,” the site is jokingly called, though the content is anything but droll. Seems Roswell D.—for Douchebag, she decides—is in the business of visiting inns, posing as a guest, when in reality he’s a hitman, taking aim at the unsuspected keepers and killing them. That was the fate of Irma and Pete’s Country Retreat in Ashville, the Whaling Wall of Brattleboro, and Sedona’s Last Resort. All rated X for execrable, their accommodations described as disgusting, their owners, boors. All of them consequently closed.
In the glare of her computer screen, Meredith sees her own face redden. Her eyes are once again fierce. Right then she vows to stop this itinerant assassin and send him and his two empty suitcases packing. With that muscle in her upper arm pulsing, she swears to defend the inn which is as much her father’s castle as his cell.
The next morning, early in the breakfast room, he’s at it again. The pancakes are too soggy, the orange juice lacks pulp. Janine beams and apologizes. Harvey runs with freshened plates and doilies to replace the soiled ones. And still the grievances gush: the coffee’s anemic, the hash brown potatoes undercooked. The other guests look on with displeasure—not at Frye but at the owners who cannot please him. Meredith, in a splattered apron, sees it all and bristles. A spatula quivers in her hand.
Later, in the den, she tries to lure him away from the house, far from her parents, with brochures of local sites. But Frye is indifferent to stalagmites and bored by haunted mansions. The farm down the road might indeed have belonged to a famous writer, but the blogger never heard of her. The only interest he displays is in Meredith’s eyes, which in the morning light turn Wedgewood, and in the lissome figure beneath her dress. That and, afforded by a bay window, a glimpse of Harvey laboring in the yard.
He’s out there still late that afternoon, weeding the azaleas and dredging the fountain with its statue of Xenia, the peeing hospitality god. And that’s where Frye finds him. While Meredith at the window watches, he berates her father for everything wrong in his house. The overgrown trellises, the gazebo desperate for paint. From the siding he dislodges an imbricated shingle and holds it under her father’s nose. Harvey inhales and sighs in a way that makes his moustache droop and his tired shoulders sag, withered by the weight of courtesy.
“Enough,” Meredith declares, silently, as she extracts a pewter tray from the vitrine cabinet. She fills it with a slice of her mother’s Huckleberry pie and a decanter of rosé, the country’s finest. She exits the kitchen and crosses the den, pausing to inspect herself in the mirror. Gazing from its gilded frame is the very image of a hostess, unflappably sweet and servile, a lady of the house, replete with fork and knife. She examines them both for polish and sharpness as the clock on the mantel strikes twelve.
Down the dark hallway she advances, gingerly in her pumps. Past the scenes of hound dogs dismembering foxes, for once not running into her mother before she reaches his door. Perhaps it’s the squealing boards but, before she can knock, a snarly voice commands her, “Come in.”
He’s seated at the credenza, legs astride the minibar, computer glowing atop. Turning as she enters, Frye snorts, “What took you?”
She lays down the tray as he brushes his slacks and combs his lozenge of hair. One buckled shoe balances on a suitcase and rocks it imperiously.
“I brought you a snack,” Meredith informs him, needlessly, “I thought…”
“You thought you could bribe me.”
Meredith glowers at him and Frye smirks in return. Leaning back in his chair, he laughs, “Thought maybe a piece of your mom’s shitty baking and a swig of your country swill would change what I’m going to write about this flophouse. It,” he grins, “and its ridiculously incompetent keeper.”
Such words might paralyze one of the townies, but Meredith’s weathered worse on the field. “What will it take?”
Frye’s already on his feet, striding toward her, eyes fixed like gun muzzles. But the innkeeper’s daughter doesn’t flinch. Merely, she touches her fingers to his chest, murmuring, “Not here.”
“Where, then?”
“Where no one will hear us. Downstairs. In the basement.”
* * * * *
Goodbye! Drive Safely! You hear as you exit the sighing screen door and cross the gentle chorus of the porch. You have slept the sleep of yesterday and awakened to sunlight spread icing-like on the sheets. Eaten meals slathered with syrup and buttermilk without a thought of your waist or heart, strolled the garden in the afternoon heat but never once raised a sweat. You found it all—the cloisonné, the macramé, and the lace—together with that rarest of artifacts called peace. All this you received at the inn, delivered with deference and grace, and if the price seemed initially prohibitive, in retrospect it seemed almost free. Goodbye and come and see us again soon! The words flutter across the lawn, weightless as dandelion puffs, as the weekend guests trundle back to their cars, back to their lives, and the oppressive truths of the present.
From the rocker where he rests his back, sore from handling luggage, Harvey waves as the last of the weekenders depart. Now there is only Meredith. She has already embraced her mother, still smiling garishly through tears, and hugged and kissed her dad. Made him promise not to work too hard or take the customers’ bellyaching so seriously. “The patron is king,” he reminds her, but his daughter just giggles and dries off his moustache with her cheek.
And then she is also gone. Marching to her Civic with a lacrosse bag slung over one shoulder and a backpack over the other, and in each hand a suitcase which she won’t let anybody touch. Old-fashioned leather-bound valises, their heft makes her arm muscles bulge. Harvey watches as she lifts them into the trunk. Through his fogged, half-moon glasses, he thinks he sees something leak. An antique embroidery of blood.
The Betsybob
Dogwood leaves nod with falling dewdrops, the fern fronds, too. The forest appears to be motioning its approval—or reproach—as the low-lying branches part. A dim, humid morning alive with bug buzz, the undergrowth stirring with efts. Mist like a fabric unraveling. Dried twigs crackle, switches hiss until the thicket gives way to a clearing. Scattered boulders and stumps, and at the far end, a knoll. Inside, there’s a cave of sorts or a grotto, its entrance curtained by vines. But even then, a presence emerges, an energy and a song. And light. Clari
fied beams that pierce the ivy and turn the moss incandescent, but then, once unveiled, explode. Blinding, searing, redeeming. The light that reveals all secrets, promising to fulfil any wish.
* * * * *
Flinching awake in her chair, squinting and shielding her eyes, Randy mutters, “No.”
“Sorry,” the night nurse assures her. “Routine check.” She turns a switch and the room again darkens. “If you’re having trouble sleeping, I can give you something…”
“No. No, it’s okay.” The hand that had been saluting now fluttered, shooing the RN away.
“Alright, then,” she says, merely one of many shadows, “goodnight,” and exits the sterilized room.
Randy groans to her feet. Approaches the bed with its tubes and monitors, blinking like the controls of some alien ship. And lying there, resting after celestial flight, hairless and gray, the visitor from the planet Cancer. The creature who is also her son.
She feels his forehead. Clammy and hot all at once, a single vein pulsing beneath her fingers. Onion-skinned eyelids flitting. Emaciated, his features are thrown into relief, the deep-set eyes, the blunt-tipped nose, the mouth that obstinately remains fleshy. His father’s face, not that she entirely remembers it. A man she met in a bar and then in her bed for a fitful week eleven years earlier, but who then vanished without ever knowing the life he left inside her. Randy did not follow him, never tried to track him down. It wasn’t her way, a woman unaccustomed to asking. Believing it best to accept whatever the world gave her, convinced that she deserved little more, fearful of receiving less.
So it was with her son. The child she didn’t dream of, much less demand, but who seemed nothing short of miraculous. T.J., she called him, as though unwilling to waste time on his name, knowing he wouldn’t wait for it as he ran around and out of her apartment. Restless, rambunctious, he both frazzled and astonished his teachers, their report cards reading like tributes. Any day he might return with either a gold-starred math test or an eye swollen from some spat, but Randy hardly cared. To her, T.J. was the gift she wouldn’t have dreamed of, a wish she never made come true. Catching him as he burst through the door, she kissed his beaded forehead and nested her face in his curls. “T.J.,” she sighed, inhaling his bubble-gum breath. “T.J.,” short for the love a universe might not contain.