Elin Hilderbrand: The Beach Club

As Bill opened his front door, a white envelope fluttered to his feet. The letters had begun! Bill tore the envelope open and read the letter-as ever, from the mysterious S.B.T., an offer to buy the hotel out from under Bill’s feet. Good old S.B.T. had been writing letters for several years now trying to convince Bill to sell. Twenty-two million? Don’t tempt me today, S.B.T. , Bill thought. Bill occasionally wrote back to the post office box-he’d never met the man (or woman) and they wouldn’t offer a name at the post office when Bill inquired. There weren’t any S.B.T’s in the phone book; for all Bill knew, the initials were fabricated. The mysteriousness of it was both frustrating and intriguing, like having a secret suitor. A suitor, at his age! Bill crumpled the letter and deposited it into the trash can at the side of his house. Are you watching, S.B.T.? Are you watching?

When Bill reached the kitchen and poured his first cup of decaf, he heard a car pull into the parking lot, and the tightness in his chest alleviated a bit. Mack . Bill was so happy that he wanted to shout to Therese, Honey, Mack’s here! He interrupted more than a few of her May first slumbers this way. But this time Bill was quiet. He closed his eyes and recited “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” to himself, like a prayer. And miles to go before I sleep . It was amazing the way the words came to him. After the episode at the restaurant, Bill had retreated into poetry, into the words of an old man, a New Englander. Never mind that Frost’s Vermont was a far cry from this island (there wasn’t a single tree on Bill’s whole property). Never mind that. For reasons unexplainable, Frost’s poetry helped; it was a balm, a slave. It eased Bill’s aging soul.

Mack looked exactly the same: the ruddy, smiling face and that bushy head of light brown hair. Bill knew Mack as well as he might have known a son. Bill shook Mack’s hand and he couldn’t stop himself from hugging him too.

“So,” Bill said, “you decided to come back.” This was their long-standing joke. Mack never said he would return in May, and Bill never asked. But every May first Mack appeared in the parking lot and each time, Bill greeted him this way. Bill wanted to say something else; he wanted to say “Thank you for coming back,” but he didn’t. It would embarrass Mack, and it might be better if Mack didn’t know how much Bill needed him. “How was your winter?”

“Not bad. I worked for Casey Miller on a huge project in Cisco. It snowed twice and both times I got the day off and went sledding.”

“How’s Maribel?” Bill asked.

“The same,” Mack said. “They love her at the library. And at the post office and the bank, and Stop & Shop. She knows everyone. It’s like walking around with the mayor.”

“She’s hankering to get married?” Bill asked.

“I can hardly blame her,” Mack said. “We’ve been together a long time.”

“So is this it, then? Is this the year Mack gets married?”

Mack shrugged. Bill could see he was embarrassed now, by just this. Bill clapped him on the shoulder. “How about we give this place the once-over, for starters?”

Mack looked relieved. “Okay,” he said.

There was no way Bill Elliott could look at his hotel objectively; it was as familiar to him and well loved as the face of his wife. Always on May first the hotel looked formidable and tough, boarded up like an old western ghost town, and today was no exception. The hotel had gray cedar shingles like nearly every building on Nantucket. Plywood had been fastened over her doors and windows, paint peeled from her frames. Bill pictured the hotel at the height of summer; it was the only way he could keep his blood pressure from skyrocketing. Her trim would be as white as fresh eggs, her windows sparkling, Therese’s geraniums and impatiens in full bloom-red, white, pink. The water temperature at sixty-eight degrees, the skies clear with a light southwesterly wind that would barely flutter the scalloped edges of the beach umbrellas. Who could complain then? Still, even today, Bill was in love with what he saw. Despite the shutters and the peeling paint and the undulating beach, she was the most beautiful hotel in the world. He would no sooner sell it than cut out his own heart.

Bill and Mack walked along the side deck rooms and took a left by the front deck rooms. Room 21 through room 1, skipping a room 13, of course. All present and accounted for, although Bill had nightmares during the winter of the rooms flying away in a northeaster like something from The Wizard of Oz . Bill stepped up onto each deck and stamped his feet to check for rotting boards. Mack perused the roof for missing shingles and inspected the shutters for leaks. “She’s tight,” Mack said. They headed back across the beach to the parking lot and Bill took keys out of his pocket. He unlocked the doors to the lobby and they stepped in.

“Home, sweet home,” Bill said.

“Oh, brother,” Mack said.

“Are you ready?” Bill said. He wished Mack looked more confident, more eager. Maybe this winter had taken a toll. “I’m going to shower and change,” he said. “And you can get started. We have a hotel to run.”

The Beach Club was Therese Elliott’s canvas, her block of clay. Every May presented the same challenge-to make the hotel look more glorious than the year before. Therese had embarked on the quest for beauty when she was a girl growing up on Long Island-in Bilbo, perhaps the most unattractive town in all of America. Therese’s family lived in one of the first subdivisions, on a cul-de-sac where the houses were built in three styles: ranch, split-level, and bastardized saltbox. Her parents’ house (from the age of ten she referred to it as her parents’ house, never her own) was a ranch with plasterboard walls, white Formica countertops threaded with gold, and veneered kitchen cabinets. The house had a swatch of green lawn and a chain-link fence that marked the property line along the sides and the back.

Now that Therese was in the hotel business, she compared the neighborhood where she grew up to a Holiday Inn-every living space alike in its absolute sterility, in its absence of charm. As an adolescent she felt bewildered walking home from school past the identical houses and identical yards, realizing that for some reason people chose to live like this-without distinction, without beauty. Her neighborhood couldn’t even be called ugly , because ugly might at least have been interesting. The best word to describe the neighborhood of Therese’s childhood was unliterary . She couldn’t imagine anything noteworthy or romantic happening among the white-and-black, gold-threaded Formica-ness of the place.

And so, at eighteen, she left.

For Manhattan, with its color and confusion, beauty and ugliness side by side. She flunked out of Hunter College after two semesters, because instead of studying she spent hours walking through Chinatown, Chelsea, Clinton, Sutton Place, the Upper West Side, Harlem. When her parents received her poor grades, they insisted she return to Bilbo and enroll at Katie Gibbs, but she refused. She found a job waitressing at a German restaurant on Eighty-sixth and York, where fat old men admired the color of her hair and gave her generous tips. She saved enough money to leave the city for the summer with a girlfriend whose family had a beach house on Nantucket.

Nantucket cornered the market on beauty-the tumbling south shore waves, blue herons standing one-legged in Coskata Pond, Great Point Lighthouse at sunset. Therese took a job as a chambermaid at the Jared Coffin House in town, and when summer turned into fall and her girlfriend returned to the city, Therese stayed. More than thirty years later, she loved it still. She had married a local boy, given birth to two children, one who died and one who lived, and she and Bill transformed the Beach Club into a hotel. A beautiful place where love flourished.