The House at Royal Oak Read Free

books they’d enjoyed to new young customers, the bookstore family circle was complete. Books and a small store that the neighborhood treated like their own living room. It seemed like a dream.
    Falling back on his other great interest, Hugo tried cooking next. Being Italian, he passionately loved food, cooking, and eating. A good idea, I thought. Work and love, Freud said after all, are the most important parts of a life.
    Cooking school proved as pleasant as the images created on TV by celebrity chefs. But the restaurant kitchens where he worked after training were nightmares straight out of George Orwell. At a lovely pastoral restaurant favored by Washington A-list types, Hugo started out as a line cook and in the second week did his first turn at “Fam,” the family-style meal cooked for staff each afternoon before opening for business. The rule was to use up whatever was left, and so Hugo turned out a Bolognese sauce with rigatoni. Later in the evening as the restaurant was closing down, a senior waiter found Hugo alone by the grill and hissed: “If you ever cook Italian for us again, I kill you.” A catering company where Hugo could be the boss seemed like a better idea.
    The trouble was that his interactions with others in the aptly named profession of catering did not live up to the life of the bookstore. Once he discussed William Styron, Julia Child, and the
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
all in a morning’s work. Now he was summoned to palatial homes to prepare, on one occasion, risotto the way the client had it in Rome, with no specifics available. When the risotto, lacking saffron, didn’t meet the client’s expectation, it was sent back and Hugo was called into the dining room to discuss it before the assembled dinner party. When he was hired to prepare a buffet for seventy-five people but a hundred turned up and the food ran out, the client was furious.
    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