The House at Royal Oak (3 page)

Hugo decided to find a different way to make a living.

At a historic summer camp on Martha's Vineyard, he did a stint as chef, preparing breakfast, lunch, and dinner for ten to forty guests a day. He was in charge of the kitchen, which came complete with “chore girls,” as the summer helpers were called, who chopped vegetables, made sandwiches, and washed the kitchen dishes. The “chore boy” helped Hugo carry the food up to the dining room in an old barn.

To keep the chore girls' spirits up, Hugo let them make desserts, which they turned out with enthusiasm. This saved Hugo time and the chocolate mud pies, chocolate mousse, and double-chocolate brownies did wonders for everyone's morale. Hugo began to think that we would both move there full-time the second year. My role wasn't exactly defined, but I would help out and get to do some of the interesting cooking. The office headaches were getting worse and I cut back to four days a week, taking unpaid medical leave.

A true dream job, everyone who heard about the camp said, and the cachet of the setting drew friends who came and worked in the kitchen for free, just to be there, just to experience it. The camp, on a hilltop, overlooked vistas of old stone walls and green fields, complete with grazing sheep, stretching down to Chilmark Pond and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. Since 1919, artists, writers, and liberal intellectuals gathered there to relax, work, exchange ideas, and frolic, which included nude swimming at the secluded beach. Over the years members included Thomas Hart Benton and Max Eastman.

It was only a matter of weeks until Hugo discovered what was wrong with this dream. First, there was the Lobster Lady. Every week after lobster night, she collected the carcasses from all the dinner plates as she had been doing for as long as anyone could remember, maybe fifty years. Then she sat in the barn doorway for hours extracting any remaining shreds of meat from the shells and mixing it up with mayonnaise. After that it went into an ancient refrigerator. The next evening she served it on crackers to the guests.

She offered a lobster canapé to Hugo. He politely declined, but she set one on the kitchen counter where he was working. “Waste not, want not,” she said and headed off to the dining room with her tray.

“Do you have any idea how many rules of sanitation that violates?” he whispered to me from the only working phone on the property. “People have
chewed
on those shells—the bacteria! The lobsters shouldn't be re-refrigerated after all those hours out in the heat, the mayo is a perfect medium for a sanitation disaster and if anyone gets sick around here
they'll blame me.” No one got sick, but Hugo said it was only a question of time.

The second problem, also a sanitation issue, was the milk. Custom dictated that milk be served in its bottles on the tables to adults and children alike. Leftover milk was put away for the next meal. In the heat of summer Hugo recognized this as a poor idea. He poured the milk into pitchers and discarded any unused milk after each meal. The main supply remained relatively safe in the fridge. He was reprimanded.

He persisted and a meeting was called. Hugo was ordered to reinstate the milk bottles on the tables.

Third, and worst, his living quarters, a picturesque cottage on the hillside above the camp, had no shower or toilet. Those were communal and located a quarter-mile away. In addition, when he left the kitchen at night to trek back through the thick woods to the cottage, he needed an Army-issue mosquito helmet. This exquisite setting also happened to be an epicenter of Lyme disease. When I visited to preview our new life, the tick bite and rash I got took six months to clear up.

Back to the drawing boards. Hugo read and reread Paul Hawken's books and listened to his tapes. Work should be play, he repeated like a mantra; play should be your work. An almost impossible dream for most of the world, but if you've ever experienced it, ever come close, the concept is always out there, beckoning, tempting you. Hugo missed the daily flow of people, books, and ideas, the sense of place and community that were a good bookshop. We took a short vacation to a bed-and-breakfast to regroup and think.

Hugo observed the owner of this bed-and-breakfast on Martha's Vineyard, who happened to be Hugh Taylor, brother of James Taylor, emerging from the kitchen in an apron to greet guests, then outside repairing bicycles in the shade of an old tree or bringing in baskets of fresh produce. Later he saw Hugh and his wife Jeannie, who seemed to enjoy working together each in their separate spheres during the day, then deep in conversation with guests as they presided over happy hour.

We looked around at the other guests at this bed-and-breakfast. With few exceptions such places seemed to attract nice, interesting, bright people. Good food, books, conversation, and music with people who are on vacation and likely to be in a pleasant frame of mind—it looked like a solution worth gambling on.

It was easy enough to say, but facing up to the risks caused sleepless nights for months. How do you justify ditching everything you know, and have some experience—even proficiency—at, for the new and uncertain? Questions from friends, colleagues, and family hinted politely at this. Only the oldest of my children, Ethan, dared a blunt joke: “A business plan by a red-ink bookstore owner and an editor—great. Maybe you can think up a tax-deductible business for me, too.” We stood to lose much more than pride if the new idea didn't pan out. Hugo was still paying off bookstore debt and more debt on top of it would sink our boat.

Assuming we found a fixer-upper house and were able to transform it into an appealing bed-and-breakfast, if real estate prices fell or if the bed-and-breakfast failed to attract enough business, we would be in a sorry state. At the office when I
hired editorial help, there were always stacks of resumes for every position and at higher levels the competition was fierce, with directors of other publishing programs applying to work with the rank and file in ours. If I left, I would never get my job back, or one close to it.

The rational mind urged staying put, trying to keep doing what you've always done well. Forget about reinventing, redefining, retooling, reengineering. Forget taking a leap of faith and striking out in a new direction.

This is what almost everyone we know—friends and family alike, in professions from medicine to law to teaching to business—has done. This they judged to be the wise course. The only three exceptions, who did not stay put because they lost their jobs or quit, were worth noting. Two went on to make a spectacular success of redefinition; the third, who went into day-trading, crashed and burned the first time the stock market took a dive.

My own sister, a bank director, survived mergers and takeovers for decades. When the latest round of new young bosses arrived, she sensed that her days were numbered. The bank wanted its executives young and lean and actually warned them about gaining weight. She was as lean as anyone, but she couldn't help getting older. A music major back in college, she had set her flute aside to earn a living. Now she dusted it off and began practicing. She started flute lessons again. She organized a trio. When the ax fell, her trio already had bookings. She trained as a Suzuki flute instructor and went on to a full schedule of teaching and performing.

From getting down on the floor, eye to eye with her youngest students, coaxing them to make a beautiful sound
for their favorite teddy bear, to attending advanced training sessions with the master teachers and musicians, to performing with her trio and other ensembles, it's a rosy picture. The only shadow is the competition for a coveted position with an orchestra. “I'm doing as well as I can, but I'm competing with musicians who have played the flute two hours a day for thirty years. That's a little disappointing. No matter how hard I work, I'll never make up for that.”

The second eye-popping success was a close friend I'd known since our sons were born, who worked as a lawyer for the federal government. Deciding that she had accomplished as much as she could there, Rita landed a plum university position when she “retired” that allowed her to conduct research, teach, write, and promote racial diversity. This opportunity, like my sister's, did not fall from the sky. Before entering law school, this friend had initiated a class action suit against the state of Tennessee for a system of higher education that discriminated against African Americans. “If I had known more at the time, I probably wouldn't have tried it,” she said when the case was finally settled thirty-eight years later, bringing her public attention and the new job. She sees this as the third and final phase of a career devoted to public service and equality issues.

Several acquaintances have made less dramatic changes with mixed results: boredom and a sense of unease at consulting in their fields, rather than being at the center of their universes. But everyone else we know is staying put, doing what they've always done well, a careful and evidently contented group.

One reason our plans raised eyebrows had to do with the “service industry” aspect of the new business. “Do you think
Carol has the . . . stamina for all the bed-changing and cleaning?” my sister asked Hugo in confidence. “I hope you'll enjoy the innkeeper's tasks,” a museum colleague remarked. “Lotsa luck,” said Hugo's brother Paul, a neurologist. The remarks jolted me, but only momentarily, because I chose to dwell on the creative aspects of our plans, rather than the mundane ones.

Another reason was that we weren't exactly forced into change, though it wasn't exactly voluntary either, which made it harder for friends and family to understand and support. Either way, I saw the same questions waiting for us down the road: Does it work? Have you moved in an exciting, courageous, and sustaining direction—or not?

Not being a superstar lawyer or a banker—turned—flutist, or one of the wunderkinds you read about who retires from a lucrative corporate job to start a foundation for the arts or another good cause, Hugo and I were hoping for a modest transition. But would we land on our feet, be able to pay our bills, provide a respite for others, and be a little happier ourselves? It all sounded too uncertain, too risky.

On the other hand, Hugo argued, and I had to admit the point, how many more years will go by before it's too late? If you don't have the stamina for change now, do you think you'll have more when you're older? The current path, though known, was one neither of us wanted to continue down. I didn't try to assess the odds of failing. The uncertainty was undeniable, but this could be a last chance at building a life that would take not just one or the other of us, but both, somewhere better. Every silver lining has clouds, I reasoned. At least they will be new clouds.

Hugo prowled country roads extending out from Washington for two years—long, tiring trips that always ended in no prospects—before he came across a last chance kind of place.

THREE STORIES HIGH, WITH EIGHT HUGE WINDOWS ON
the first floor alone, seven more above, the house's steep cross gables each sheltered a small, arched window in which you could almost see a rocking chair and lace curtains. Stately, it had presence in a shaky sort of way.

Hugo had driven up and down the Bay Hundred peninsula from St. Michaels to Tilghman Island all day, exploring back roads down to the water, looking for properties for sale. Calling it quits, he headed for home and happened on an out-of-the-way village we had passed through once on a bicycle trip. He was curiously fond of the place, but neither of us could have pinpointed it on any map.

Now a decade or two later, he stopped in front of a rusted iron gate with a “For Sale by Owner” sign. “I felt like I was in a cheesy movie,” he told me that night. “The house is actually . . . perfect. An angular, white Victorian, a cozy grandmother's house. It looks like a bed-and-breakfast.”

This was not a turreted Queen Anne Victorian, laden with gingerbread, but a true country Victorian, decorous, yet with touches of trim in the simply curved decorative brackets on the porch and delicate cut-out pattern above the bay windows, like the veil on a lady's hat. A stand of tall maples clustered to one side of the deep, shady yard, and a long weedy driveway led past the south side of the house and porch to a pleasing outbuilding, maybe once a barn, with massive, painted wooden doors. Directly across the country road was an imposing waterfront inn, graciously standing ever since the 1700s and now with a putting green, too. Hugo thought that no mini-mart or gas station would ever be built there in our lifetime.

Maybe it would be a safe investment and provide the life we pictured, running an elegant bed-and-breakfast, living happily ever after. “Of course there's still some work to be done,” he said that night as we sat up late talking. “All within my ability, though.” Yes, a couple of windows were boarded up and a rusted propane tank occupied a prominent position near the front door, but that could easily be moved. He pulled a paper napkin out of his shirt pocket on which he had scribbled a short to-do list: