The House at Royal Oak

by Carol Eron Rizzoli

  Eventually, if not when friends arrive then by the next day, the idea may dawn on them that we have not “retired.” It is redefinition or dreamchasing, maybe some of both. It is definitely work.

  As for those who don’t get it, I’ve decided that if they want to think of us as “retired,” so be it. I choose to consider it a compliment, the sign of a job done well enough that it seems effortless.

  Back at the museum I found myself explaining to the summer interns that we didn’t spend all day in the galleries looking at art and that I closed the express mail office more nights a year than I wanted to count. In this regard little has changed. I find myself explaining that we don’t sit on the porch all day sipping mint juleps. What I don’t say, because our visitors are in an up, light mood: When you’ve come this close to losing everything, it’s all good and, exactly as my sister had foreseen, it’s all easy.

  The bed-and-breakfast community proved welcoming locally and beyond. After several seasons I was surprised one afternoon by a phone call from the state bed-and-breakfast association asking if Hugo would be willing to inspect a bed-and-breakfast that was applying for membership. Hugo said he didn’t feel qualified to pass judgment on others. I reminded him that we had passed the state’s 135-point inspection with high marks. The purpose of this inspection is to ensure the public of basic standards of safety, comfort, and convenience. Criteria include general cleanliness, appropriate amenities for guests like good reading lights, adequate exterior lighting, general procedures for greeting and serving guests, and attractiveness of the décor. Plus, there’s a check of basic sanitation procedures, such as how food and dishware are handled.

  Believing that Hugo deserved this after all he had done to get us up and running, I had another motive in encouraging him to accept the assignment. The inn to be inspected was a beautiful old plantation house with history. Shackles for slaves could still be seen attached to the basement walls, people said, because the house served as a stop on the Underground Railroad and fleeing slaves were confined at night. There were two reasons for this. One was to prevent a maverick from harming those who were sheltering them. The second was also to protect the homeowners: If a posse pursuing fleeing slaves came by, an owner could demonstrate that he had already captured them. I wanted Hugo to see this basement.

  After a tour by the current owner, which did not include the basement, and the inspection, he ventured to ask about any Civil War history connected with the house. The period has not been well documented and preserved in our region and only lately have some important stations on the Underground Railroad been uncovered, discussed, and mapped out.

  “There isn’t any,” she answered. “Absolutely none.”

  Hugo came home pleased with his new job of bed-and-breakfast inspector, even if some aspects of life here remained opaque, and probably always would.

  I guess everything’s set, I thought for the last time, with two solid years behind us. We’ve got the hang of this reinvented life. It’s not easy for older dogs to learn new tricks but it looks like we somehow renewed a house, and ourselves along with it. The doctors pronounced Hugo’s comeback miraculous. The catastrophe brought us closer than I could have dreamed. He still couldn’t drive for more than an hour at a time, which meant I had to go along whenever he went to a doctor’s office, to see his dad, or any distance at all. He still took a nap or two most days and he still forgot things like locking doors at night, closing his office window before a storm, paying bills on time—trivialities.

  As for the bed-and-breakfast, bookings continued to flow in. The pain I got in my chest when money was tight let up. Each season after the first was busier than the one before, with tourists, weekenders, and brides-to-be booking for their guests, families, and sometimes themselves. Almost everyone is pleasant and fits the profile of the typical bed-and-breakfast guest: affluent, sophisticated, and seeking a pleasant alternative to the commercial hotel experience. Hotels and large inns have been trying to tap into the bed-and-breakfast market, but until they come up with truly personal service, freshly prepared meals with authentic ingredients and flavors, until they decorate with genuine furniture rather than made-for-hotels reproductions and plastic-lined curtains—the business, according to analysts, seems reasonably secure. Of course there are clouds on the horizon.

  Guest expectations are on the rise. Once a bed-and-break-fast, a British invention, promised not much more than that, a concept that didn’t flower on this side of the Atlantic. The traditional British bed-and-breakfast was, and is, a relatively inexpensive, no-frills form of accommodation, often with a bath shared with other guests and breakfast served at the host family’s own table. In this country guests seek luxurious amenities and facilities. How thick are your towels? the newsletter of the national innkeeper association asks. What is the thread count of your sheets? How many courses do you offer for breakfast? Do you provide WiFi, computers, Jacuzzis, in-room telephones, voice mail, and flat-screen TV? Do you offer breakfast in the room as an alternative to the dreaded communal breakfast table? Do you have separate entrances for the guests? A pool, a sauna, a massage room? If not, the association advises, consider adding these and as many other luxuries as you can conjure.

  Another cloud is the ever-increasing cost of the real estate necessary to house all this luxury. The Wall Street Journal calls the American bed-and-breakfast, as it has evolved, endangered. Unless you already happen to own the real estate, it now takes an establishment with many guest rooms, booked more than just seasonal weekends, to pay the bills. Ten rooms is the number often given. As the president of the Maryland Bed and Breakfast Association, Joseph Lespier, points out, the average length of bed and breakfast ownership is seven years; the average age of the innkeepers is over fifty-five; in Maryland more are going out of business than are opening up. “Do the math,” he observes. “In ten years, at this rate, there won’t be a significant number of bed-and-breakfasts left in Maryland.”

  Still, the bed-and-breakfast, with its invitation to escape into a more romantic, bygone era and relax over an inviting breakfast, has become an established tradition. More accurately, it is a group of traditions with bed-and-breakfasts as different as snowflakes, as individualistic as their hosts. There are bed-and-breakfasts with books, easy chairs, and reading lights. Others specialize in skiing, cooking classes, breadmaking, spa treatments, horseback riding, wine tasting, yoga, theater, ghosts, musicmaking, ballroom dancing, or murder mysteries. There are bed-and-breakfasts in vineyards and on flower farms and I visited one recently with a wolf protection program and some forty wolves in residence on the grounds. All manner of experience awaits enjoyment. If enforced conviviality isn’t for you, just ask before booking at a particular bed-and-breakfast. Speaking with the owner or innkeeper is an excellent way to find out about the general ambience and determine if you will feel comfortable.

  For the time being, I decided not to worry about the long-term implications of the business. We were fortunate to have enough guests coming our way to keep going, even without Jacuzzis and television. A neighbor stopped me as I came out of the post office and remarked on how much we’ve done for the village by fixing up the house and opening a business. Since we arrived, the closed-up general store became a café-restaurant. Other neighbors have put lights like ours in their windows. The latest newcomers, the ones from New York, got an all-out welcome from the neighborhood. The place is brighter, through the efforts of many. That’s more than enough.

  For the last time ever I think, we’re all set. . .

  It’s the middle of September. I half-listen to a weather report on the radio before falling asleep. A hurricane is moving up the Atlantic Coast and predictions are that it may veer left and roar straight up the Chesapeake Bay. As far away as Washington, D.C., sandbags are being piled along the Potomac River.

  Not directly on the bay, we expect heavy wind and rain—nothing to worry about. I fall into a peaceful sleep.

  At dawn, Hugo shakes me awake. I know we have
guests checking in, but I don’t want to get up yet. He’s hunched over, looking out the window.

  He points down Royal Oak Road. “Look.”

  From the window as far as I can see before the road curves away toward the church, the road looks exactly the way it always does in the rain—shiny and black.

  “No, look at the fire truck.” With lights flashing, a fire truck moves silently past our driveway. The water, he points out, reaches almost to the top of the truck’s huge wheels.

  I look again, tear out of bed, and run downstairs. Stepping into duck boots and throwing a slicker over my nightgown, I rush outside. Hugo, in pajamas, follows.

  Water, coming from I don’t know where, laps the hubcaps of my car, which is parked near the bottom of the driveway. “Get the car keys,” I yell, always better at giving orders than taking action. While he moves the car to higher ground, I try to make sense of what I see.

  The road is definitely under a lot of water. In the dim light I make out that the spacious lawn across the way has vanished. The lower trunks of the old oaks and cedars are submerged in a lakeful of water. The garden bench and putting green are gone. Where the volleyball net used to be, I see the tops of two poles. Overnight we have become a waterfront property.

  Not knowing what else to do, we go inside and fill pans with drinking water in case the power goes off, which means the well pump won’t work. I hunt for candles and flashlight batteries while Hugo takes phone calls from the incoming guests, all canceling. The wedding has been moved to Baltimore.

  The TV news reports that all roads around us are flooded. The Tilghman Island road is closed and Route 33 is under water at the Oak Creek Bridge. Even if we could get to the Bay Bridge, it too is closed because of high winds. We cannot go anywhere.

  I recall the former owner’s description of our house. “One of the prominent structures of Royal Oak,” he wrote, “the house sits along a historic road, on high ground.” The prominent structures presumably being our house and the falling-down church, I had to wonder what he meant by high ground.

  Outside I take another look around and it crosses my mind that I’m about to find out. The rain has let up but the wind is wailing at thirty-five, maybe forty miles an hour. The ground doesn’t look especially high around our house and in the side yard a pond has appeared, complete with three ducks.

  Now with more light what I see is astonishing. It takes long minutes to comprehend the new landscape. In place of the road, a wide, shimmering canal stretches out of sight. The house diagonally across from us on the creek side is, unfortunately, completely surrounded by water, rising almost halfway up the front door.

  In a canoe, neighbors paddle our way. High tide in two hours, they call out helpfully. Walking around to the front of our house, I see water lapping at the stone steps below the gate. I check my watch, realizing that everything we’ve tried to build here could all wash away before tomorrow.

  A crack like gunfire interrupts my thoughts and I look up to see the old locust on the north side of the house crash down on the power line thirty feet from where I am standing. The neighbors paddle away. If water reaches the porch steps, I decide we’ll start rolling up the rugs.

  With an hour to go, I station myself at the old iron gate to keep an eye on the tide as it advances in small muddy swirls, each swirl not especially dangerous-looking by itself, but each one lapping determinedly higher under the gate.

  Okay, I say out loud to no one, I finally get it. You are not all set, you will never be all set, and you will never think like that again. The gods do not like it. That is why the wise talk about the universality of change. That is why your grandmother and your mother always said, “I’ll be there, God willing, and the creek don’t rise.”

  A few minutes before ten, with water licking the toes of my boots, I watch, hardly daring to breathe, as it stops rising; it just stops. In disbelief, I stare as the water touches the tips of my boots again and then again before it starts inching away.

  Almost imperceptibly at first, it retreats. Over the next hours the receding water picks up speed, leaving a long tail of mud and debris, plastic bottles, strips of rubber tire, lumber, and soda cans, along with handfuls of pottery shards. A canal still flows where the street used to be and the lawn across the way is still a lake, but unmistakably the water is ebbing.

  I keep watch for another half-hour to be sure it doesn’t start rising again and to warn neighbors away from the downed power lines dangling in the water. Two young children row up the canal. As they climb out, smiling and splashing their way toward me, waist deep in the dark sinister-looking water, I shout at them to get away. In the wind they can’t hear me. I wave my arms frantically until I see them climb back in their boat.

  Hugo comes outside and we watch a weak sun break through the clouds. The wind lets up. We walk around checking for damage, looking up and down the canal for an electric company truck, not really expecting to see one unless they have an amphibious vehicle. A flicker of light from the deserted cottage on the other side of the fallen locust catches my eye and I turn in time to see an enormous white bird, head high, emerge from the doorway in ridiculous mincing steps.

  It’s a ptarmigan, Hugo says. With his medications and whatever rearrangement of his neural pathways has taken place, he now possesses the gift of an exotic vocabulary at the tip of his tongue. He seems surprised, almost dismissive, that I don’t know what a ptarmigan is. A type of grouse, he explains, found in northern Canada. He spells it out. I flatly say I don’t believe him.

  The white bird hesitates outside the cottage door. With jerky movements of a long scrawny neck, it surveys the mucky, transformed landscape, the piles of detritus at its door, the new canal and the lake beyond. It takes a sidestep, then another, skittishly detouring around a downed tree limb. Noticing us, the bird stops short and I see ruffled feathers sticking straight out the top of its head that remind me of a peacock.

  The bird retreats—I can’t say for sure but my impression is that it can walk in reverse—to the cottage. Once we back off to our front porch, it reappears. Darting glances right and left, it advances with a few steps forward, a few back, more forward, until it crosses the ravine. Under the willow on our side of the ravine, the bird stops.

  It is very white, I see now, and has unexpected brown eyes. Some of the white head feathers, like an off-kilter bridal wreath, are sadly broken or twisted. Fixing a long stare on us, the bird unfurls its tail in a great luminous crescent, casting an unworldly glow across the mud. Without a doubt a peacock, not too much the worse for the storm.

  The next morning Hugo reported the amazing sighting to Roland when he stopped by to see if we were okay. Before Hugo could ask what peacocks eat, Roland said, “I know that old peacock!”

  “You do?”

  “Sure, I do. He lives in the woods back of my house.” A white peacock?

  “Sure. He’s been around a long time. Probably got away years ago from one of the big farms. Came down your way after the wind let up to see for himself what all the commotion was, the water rising and all that. Won’t stay though.”

  “Even for food?”

  “Nope. This one wants to be on his own. Won’t stay unless you fence him in or clip his wings. My grandma kept peacocks and that’s what you have to do—nip the wing feathers so they can’t fly. Of course if you do that, then you have to watch out for foxes.” Peacocks like corn, he said, and will go into a field after the harvest and eat all the corn kernels that are left.

  I set out canned corn for the peacock, but didn’t try to fence in this bizarre, roving symbol of—what? Curiosity? Adaptability? Endurance? Luck? Maybe all of these. The bird stayed in the boarded-up cottage, coming out twice a day to eat corn on our porch steps. After three days, when all the water was back in the creek, it left for good.

  CHAPTER

  24

  Home

  OF COURSE OUR LITTLE BYWAY WILL CHANGE, IS changing, and neither we nor the house will stay renewed. A developer is
proposing to construct a “faux marsh” up the way so more housing can be set closer to the waterline. New cracks are opening in ceilings we patched so carefully. Last week a hawk almost got Annabelle.

  At the same time, sensations and rhythms have imprinted themselves. The scent of a freshly mown field, the first sighting of the osprey pairs in spring, early summer calls of the bob-white, the clammy smell of the late-summer creek, the geese families arriving in fall, as you come to know the land and water and anticipate the signs of change. The search for renewal, for something more than the old life, all this says, worked.

  It still didn’t seem completely like home, though. Maybe you can’t have both renewal and a comfortable at-home feeling, I reasoned, even after we built a bedroom addition onto the house and moved in for good in the fourth year. I can’t remember exactly when I stopped saying it wasn’t home.

  It was sometime after I found, on the north side of the house where runaway bushes, wisteria, and brambles separate us from a line of tumbledown cottages, a patch of white-flowered mint. Wild mint, I said to no one. I could make a julep if I like. There are no cultural police or ordinances to say you can’t. You could make a julep and sit on the porch.

  Old French from the Persian, gul for rose and ab for water, julep means a syrup or sweetened liquid used in drinks or desserts. In English, an early reference is to a julep made of violets. This cooling drink is a traditional way to celebrate summer, I remembered reading in a history of local cooking at the library, a way, as a Marylander once expressed it, “for noble minds to travel together upon the flower-strewn paths of happy and congenial thought.”

  Just now the house is empty; new guests won’t arrive until tomorrow. There’s time, I tell myself. There is time. You could make a julep, sit on the porch, and rejoice that the path, not always happy, congenial, or flower-strewn by any stretch, led us here together. You could sit here and remember all the family, friends, and strangers who helped you along the way. And I did.