I cut out a rough square of velvet, stretched it tight, shut my eyes, and fired. The gun went off with a sharp bang. Opening my eyes, I saw that I half-missed the fabric. The second try was better and I stapled all around the bottom of the frame before turning the seat right side up to see the fabric bunched up. When I yanked it free from the staples, it ripped. My next chair was better and the fifth one looked almost professional. The green taffeta was simply too beautiful to cover over, so I left it.
The decorating, as it evolved, became a real witches’ brew, with an antique Persian rug from Hugo’s dad next to the thrift store dining table, lace handmade by Hugo’s grandmother and mine alongside synthetic silk swags from the remnant table at the fabric store. I was especially proud of this imitation silk couleur changeant, which can be seen in portrait paintings by the Old Masters, who delighted in capturing the varied hues of this intricately woven fabric.
My remnant reflected rose and blue, picking up the colors planned for the sitting room. For the dining room’s two huge windows, I found ready-made blue silk curtains that fit, so I splurged. When someone interested in such things asks if the curtains are silk, I’ll ask them to guess which ones are the real thing.
The dining room became my favorite example of the witches’ brew. A 1911 portrait of my father in his white christening dress, still in its original oval gilt frame, presides over a handsome, polished pewter candlestick from Julie’s store that she sold to me for $7 because its mate was missing. On the mantle also are an antique English tea box, an anniversary gift from Hugo; blue-and-white pottery shards from the backyard; a sampling of hand-forged nails from the house; the iridescent feather of a wood duck that I found on a walk; and a bird’s nest from the attic rafters, complete with the blue half-shell of a robin’s egg.
On the other side of the room a somewhat hulking, late nineteenth—century buffet that once served as theater staging dominates. Hugo discovered this marble-topped wonder covered with dust in a barn in western Maryland and used it as the cash register counter in the bookstore for years before its fall from grace to kitchen work counter for the catering business. This was very hard on the buffet and before installing it in the bed-and-breakfast, I spent many days gluing broken pieces into place and applying furniture stain to bring it back. Oak for the doors, a darker walnut stain for some of the inlaid trim. On a band of badly nicked faux ebony, I tried a regular marker pen but it left a shiny scribble so I bought a small can of flat black paint and a fine brush to go over all this trim, which ran from one end of the buffet to the other. More inset wood with a marled surface required three different pens for the touch-up. When visitors compliment the piece, I can only smile. It took me almost as long to fix it up as for Hugo and Rick to rebuild the front porch.
Before opening, I scrutinized the dining room because guests would be sitting there in bright daylight for an hour or longer. They’d have time to look around and be pleased, or not. Most of the house’s original light fixtures were missing by the time we came along, including the dining room chandelier. Where bare wires extended from a gap in the plaster ceiling we hung a reproduction wrought-iron chandelier with amber globes. This large room, which runs the width of the house, demanded a substantial light fixture and an antique, we learned in months of futile scouting, was much too expensive.
The reproduction looked all right at night, but I thought its newness showed by day. The dried flowers I strung into it began crumbling right away and I worried about pieces falling into the guests’ breakfasts. Eventually, I hit on another idea. Gathering up my mother’s red-handled rolling pin, an egg beater, wooden spoons, ravioli cutters from Hugo’s aunt, a berry basket, and an old tin camp mug, I hung them in and around the chandelier and stood back. In an embassy dining room I had once seen something like this made with new cooking gadgets and I decided that whether or not my rustic version worked for anyone else, here it would stay.
Another source for décor turned out to be an architectural salvage business that opened up less than two hours away in the center of Baltimore. As green a business as could be, it sits in the shadow of the Ravens stadium. We made the roundtrip at least five times to hunt for everything from doors to hinges, latch plates, and antique doorknobs. Wading with a flashlight through snow melt into one of their darkest, deepest warehouses, we came across a hoard of genuine, old interior shutters. Sadly, our house had once been outfitted with shutters inside as well as out, and either for modernizing or an economy of repair, every last one had been removed. The hinges still in place showed where a dozen interior sets, individually made for each window, had hung.
In the warehouse two pairs of solid mahogany shutters from someone else’s house waited for us. They needed only scraping and painting to put in ours. I say “only” because the first set took about five hours’ work but with experience Hugo did the second set in less than half the time. We also found several more sets of shutters that day for the exterior of the house. Of course you never know what surprising gifts you’ll receive when you buy old things, and the shutters came complete with a baby bat clinging tightly to a slat. Hugo gently nudged it loose before laying the shutters in the bed of the truck.
This salvage business, called Second Chance, frequents buildings about to be demolished, strips away good windows, doors, bath and light fixtures, staircases, mantles, transoms, decorative architectural elements, metalwork, and lumber to resell. An entire surreal courtyard is filled with claw-footed bathtubs. Operating in several cities now, they hire and train unemployed local inner city residents to do the work. Our pine front door, two inches thick, was salvaged from a 1901 Baltimore hotel scheduled for teardown. The business is booming and on our last visit they had expanded to five warehouses.
Good luck like that went into the mix, along with gifts from Hugo’s beloved aunt. Zia Lillia had followed our progress at every phase, and although she was too ill to come visit from New Jersey, she kept asking how soon we would be in business and what we needed.
Her extra china, book cabinets, and lamps were the very vintage of the house. They filled in around the attic and thrift store finds, giving the house a truly settled feeling. Although she never said so directly, Zia Lillia, the Italian equivalent of a steel magnolia, wasn’t happy that she didn’t get to arrange her possessions in the new setting. Could be worse, I heard her say after I placed a cabinet in a corner of the small sitting room at the front of the house I called the parlor because that’s what my grandmother called a like room in her house. The parlor was for company.
Setting a photograph of Zia Lillia in her schoolgirl dress, white stockings, and high-buttoned shoes inside the cabinet, I shuddered. As soon as I moved her to the fireplace mantle, I heard her say, That’s more like it. From here I can see and be seen . . .
I moved on, filling overlooked nail holes as I planned the rest of the decoration and to take my mind off the boring work, pictured Zia Lillia meeting Mrs. Jefferson. In these encounters, as in life, Zia Lillia always got the last word.
If Mrs. Jefferson observed pleasantly over tea, My house has come back, and I must say I’m rather pleased. . . Zia Lillia would snap, Your house? Yes, it’s come back, no thanks to you.
Sounds from the driveway brought me back to the present. I looked out and saw two trucks parked. Three men, smoking cigarettes, formed a half-circle around Hugo.
CHAPTER
9
Pink Paint
“HAPPY NOW?” HUGO ASKED AS I JOINED HIM OUTSIDE. Two painter’s assistants dragged on their cigarettes, flipped the burning butts into the garden, and followed their boss up onto the porch. We followed the painters. “I know I’m a little slow,” Hugo was saying, “and like you said, if we have some help we can open a lot sooner.”
Summer again—our second year of work on the house. With painting and finishing the walls and woodwork going slowly, it could mean another year before we opened. On the dining room alone Hugo spent four weeks. I assured him I was very happy and went back to see if
the painters’ cigarettes were still burning.
Greg, the painter, was in demand, with more jobs than he could get to, but he obviously felt sorry for us and our sad-sack house. He himself lived in a development of new houses many times the size of ours, we knew from the friends who recommended him. Greg didn’t mind painting just the front façade of our house for now and would do the rest of the exterior when we could afford it. Only after they finished that and moved indoors did trouble start.
I found Greg offering sympathy to Hugo because he had the same problem with his wife—all the wacky paint colors she demanded. They were in the parlor and an assistant painter stared down at the bucket of paint, an old-fashioned hue called ashes of roses I had chosen for the walls, and then at Hugo. He didn’t know about other guys, but personally he wouldn’t be caught dead in a house with pink paint.
“Just paint it, Bunk,” Greg ordered. “It’s all green to me.”
After the parlor they headed into the front hall with its twenty-foot ceiling in the stairway, and after that would come the upstairs hall. The painters moved with amazing speed. They finished the exterior in two days, the parlor in one, and they were starting on the hall as Hugo and I went out to buy more paint.
Weeks before, Lucy had arrived home from Italy and come straight to Royal Oak on a sweltering weekend to paint a fire screen and decorate the guest bedroom doors. Each guest room was named for a tree in the yard—Elm, Linden, Acorn—and for each of the grown children, in hopes that they would bond with the future family home. Lucy and I spent time in the cool of the air-conditioned public library studying tree books and she sketched leaves and acorns until she came up with images that she thought were both true-to-life and artistic. She stenciled them on the doors and painted them with fine sable brushes in delicate shades of green and brown, adding gold highlights at the end and the name of each room. By the time she finished, she was light-headed from the heat and the paint fumes, but happy. They were beautiful.
On the way to the paint store, I asked Hugo if we should go back and tape plastic over Lucy’s decorations just in case the painters got upstairs before we returned.
No way, he assured me. That hall would take them two full days. Greg said so.
When we got home, I was relieved to see a painter on a towering ladder, hard at work on the ceiling in the downstairs hall. The other assistant wasn’t around and Greg’s truck was gone, likely to another job they were juggling with ours. I found plastic and masking tape and headed upstairs to cover Lucy’s artwork. At the top of the stairs I ran into the second painter, a kid in his teens, with a bucket of primer and a brush in hand, a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said politely and stood aside. I gasped.
In a surge of efficiency he had gone ahead upstairs to prime the woodwork in the halls, so it could dry and be ready for final enamel the next day. Lucy’s work did not escape. Through the thin chalky paint, a ghostly shadow of Lucy’s art was visible. Two full days ahead of schedule, the painter had hit all three doors. In tears I went downstairs to find Hugo.
I know it’s not a big thing in the overall scheme of the universe, I told him with enraged calm. But I never should have listened to you. This was her gift to us, and the house, and our new life. It represented her presence with us, and it’s gone, destroyed.
Hugo asked me to calm down. He’d think of something. The painters, he reminded me, are just kids.
Greg was called and promptly came over. He said the same thing: They’re just kids, they didn’t know. He and Hugo did not think I should try to repaint her work and pretend it never happened. Tell her the truth, they advised.
I called Lucy and asked her if she knew what a pentimento is.
“It sounds like something I ought to know, but don’t,” she said.
You see it when an artist has a change of mind, I explained. An image is painted over, but the artist’s previous idea still shows through. There’s a fine example of pentimento in Hieronymus Bosch’s Death and the Miser, a work that asks whether the miser will choose good or evil, angels or demons, when he dies. His empty hand reaches out. Under the thin paint you can see drawing, which shows that the artist originally drew the dying man holding a sack of earthly possessions but then changed his mind. In this way Bosch left the viewer and the miser together to consider what the choice would be, heaven or hell . . .
“What are you trying to tell me?” Lucy interrupted, out of patience.
Your beautiful door decorations, I finally got out. The painter covered them up by accident.
“What? Why did he do that?”
It was the clash of two cultures, I think, and everyone in a hurry. Even if the painter had noticed the delicate elm and linden leaves, the luminous, magical-looking acorn, he was probably trying to show the boss how good and quick he was, maybe angling for a raise so he could pay for the truck he needs to get to work. We were in a hurry, too, like animals staking out our territory, to place imprints on the house, make it ours, with a dash of narcissism thrown in. Look how refined we are, look what nice taste we have. The house balked, and so did the culture to which it belonged. In a way it was a perfect irony.
“I’m so sorry,” I say again. “Do you want me to repaint them?” She hears something in my voice and softens.
“Oh, I’ll do it.”
Postscript: The following year it was Greg and his painters who bailed Hugo out, when, just before the opening of our second season, he decided to rehab the attic, a grungy cave where wasps and flies and who knew what else lived, a place the housekeeper and even the cat refused to go.
Rushing to finish, Hugo tossed an empty paint can out the third-floor window. The can ricocheted from the side of the house to the ground, and bounced hard. There was more paint in the can than he realized, and it splattered a wide arc of dark teal across the side of the house as high as the second story.
Greg and his crew came the next day and finished covering the dark teal with white before I showed up for the weekend. As I got out of the car, Greg was promising Hugo secrecy. That night Hugo drank a gin and tonic before telling me about it.
CHAPTER
10
Showtime
BY LATE FALL, WHEN THE AREA QUIETS DOWN, THE summer houses close, the big boats sail south for the winter, and some of the restaurants and shops board up, we could see progress everywhere, and smell it.
At last the house’s musty, rancid odor yields to the sweet scent of latex paint mixing with breezes gusting in the newly opened windows. Nailed and painted shut for decades, the windows were thoughtfully positioned to catch the slightest stir of air, coming from the bay to the west, the ocean to the east, and the bay and ocean when the wind turned southeast. Clearing northwest winds blew through the utility room, and, if you wanted them, northeasters blustered in the office-bedroom window. Pliers, mallets, screwdrivers, and more than a few broken panes later, you could smell a wind shift. The house has started to breathe.
When I drape the blue-rose fabric across the bay windows in the parlor I know exactly what Mrs. Jefferson would think. Longer, dearie. I prefer my skirts tea length, if you know what that means these days. I go out and find the last five yards of the fabric on the remnant table exactly where I’d left it weeks before. It’s enough so that the swags reach below the windowsills.
It was a good time. The slog was over and now nothing seemed like too much trouble. Tiredness vanished. I hemmed and hung curtains until after one in the morning and stopped worrying about money because we were close to opening for our first paying guests.
Ethan and Nancy visited for Thanksgiving, tried out the one finished guest room and pronounced it “Fine.”
Anything wrong? I pressed. We need to know.
“It’s good,” Ethan said. “But you need darker curtains, so people can sleep later.” I thanked him and silently sighed. Lined curtains are expensive. I decided to wait and see if guests complained.
In early March on a warm
rainy afternoon, our third spring at the house, Hugo stopped by The Oaks Inn and told the manager we would be ready for guests next month if they had any overflow. The next day she sent us a booking. It was a bride-to-be and her mother for one night, the first Friday in April.
Miraculous. I wanted to write it down somewhere to make it official but there wasn’t a reservation log set up yet or even a notepad around. In the new shed, housing the new furnace, I remembered a wall calendar the propane delivery-man had left. It showed the bright red company truck parked under an enormous oak tree. I found a carpenter’s pencil and wrote down the reservation.
No matter that we were playing second fiddle to the other inn—that was the plan. Hugo set the calendar on the table, saying it was time for self-congratulation. Eating dinner that night, we marveled at the reservation and penciled in last-minute tasks to be completed. Even if a dozen things went wrong, I figured, looking at the days left, we would be all set for the first guests.
Around this time a puzzling thing happened. Hugo seemed more anxious every day, even edgy. His mood was moving in inverse relation to our progress. It made no sense. When I reminded him how far we had come, he listed everything that was left to do and worried about what was already done and whether it was good enough. He was planning to resand and restain the bedroom floors.
Dust from redoing floors would mean taking down the curtains just hung, rolling up rugs, covering furniture with plastic, taping doors, and it would mean major cleanup afterward. The windows would have to be rewashed, everything would have to be vacuumed. Even if I covered them, dust would lodge permanently in the brand-new mattresses.
The House at Royal Oak Page 9