The House at Royal Oak (13 page)

“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.

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.

“You must be kidding” was all I could think to say. His nerves weren't the only ones beginning to fray.

Because I couldn't drag a 150-pound sander up and down
the steps or trim a door with the circular saw or do the other heavy work, cleanup was my job. I didn't mind. It seemed like a fair trade-off, although I had heard stories about construction dust wrecking marriages.

Now I got it. Even when I taped doors closed and covered passageways with plastic, dust seeped around—or through?—the plastic and sifted over every surface in the clean, finished rooms on the other side of the house.

I reminded Hugo about this and said that if he started refinishing floors, I was quitting. No, you wouldn't, he said.

Try it and see, I thought. We simply couldn't afford a big step back, like redoing floors, because it would mean too many more months until the third room was ready for paying guests.

In the days leading up to opening weekend, we would be discussing something like this when Hugo would just walk off. It was so unlike him that I followed once to see what he was up to.

Out in the garage he was sawing wood, building something. He didn't want to say what it was because I wouldn't approve.

He picked up a hammer. “It's an enclosure for the electric meter.”

Now, when the rooms aren't even finished?

He didn't answer.

I asked if everything was okay.

“Yep.” He went back to measuring and sawing.

I suggested that he didn't seem like himself. Was it a reaction to all we'd been through? Or the debt? Should I apologize again for my tantrums along the way? Or was he just decompressing now that the end was in sight?

He didn't think anything was wrong. He felt great about everything, he said and switched on the electric saw.

Five days to go. Hugo wanted to do it really right to prove to the guests, and most of all to himself, that we could.

He moved faster and faster. I could hardly believe how much the painstaking perfectionist could accomplish in a day.

He was moving so fast I never heard about the phone call from his dad, saying Zia Lillia was very ill, until I found him throwing clothes in a knapsack. He planned to drive to Washington, pick up his dad and continue from there straight to New Jersey, where Zia Lillia lived.

That night he called to say she was unable to speak, move, or open her eyes, but she unmistakably squeezed his hand. An hour later she was gone. He sounded hoarse. I asked again if he was all right.

“Not really. Dad kept bugging me to drive faster even though I was already doing seventy-five.” He broke off for more news. Home tomorrow to finish details like installing a bedroom door and cleaning up the yard. On Friday he would drive back to New Jersey in time for the funeral on Saturday morning. “So,” he concluded, “you'll have to run the bed-and-breakfast.”

It wasn't my best moment and I said something like, “What do you mean? This is your business. Why can't the funeral be on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday? The guests will be here on Friday and . . . I have to be in the office on Friday for a very important meeting.”