Ellen Prentiss Campbell

White Laurel

    Priscilla shifted the glossy laurel leaves in the big vase on the lobby table to reveal the white blossoms.  Everything must be perfect tonight.

    The cook and the waitress stopped talking when she walked into the kitchen.  The air was warm and heavy with cooking steam.  Her glasses fogged, she slipped them off to dangle on the chain around her neck.

    “Good evening, Joyce.  Everything alright?”  she said.

    “Yes, ma’am.”

    She opened a cutlery drawer and selected a spoon.  Standing at the huge range she stirred Joyce’s gravy, checking for lumps.

    She asked, “Relish trays ready, Annie?”

    “Almost, Mrs. Crichton.”

    She would have preferred a more experienced, older waitress, particularly tonight.  Annie was too young, her uniform too snug.  Finding good help had never been easy here in the country and had grown harder over the years.  She knew she had a reputation for being difficult but she had maintained her standards.  After tonight, she need not worry about waitresses again.

    She pushed through the swinging door into the dining room.  The dove gray walls, white table linen, the soft glow of pewter and warm heart-of-pine floors pleased her, as always.  The stage was set.  This was her favorite moment - everything ready, undisturbed by guests and food.  

    Sixty years ago, the first time she sat at a table in this room, her feet had not touched the floor.  She remembered swinging her feet until the Windsor chair jiggled; she remembered her mother’s impatience.

    “Priscilla, sit still.”

    “Let me take her out for a little walk while we wait.”

    She held her father’s hand and he let her swing their joined arms high and hard. He took her outside to the bowling alley in the long narrow wooden shed.  He stood beside her, placed her hand on the ball, and guided her arm back and forward,

    “Now, let it go!”

    The ball rolled down the wooden floor, the shed echoed with soft musical thunder and the wooden pins fell in glorious, noisy cascade.  He promised her a real game after dinner, and kept his promise.  He kept every promise.  Each summer until she was eighteen she and her parents took the train from Pittsburgh for a week’s sojourn at the inn.  Few children stayed there.  Priscilla and her father bowled, played croquet and tennis, and rode horseback along the trail to the quarry to swim.  Her mother read undisturbed on the wide porch.

    Now, a lifetime later, she stepped onto that same porch.  The western sky was beginning to glow through the hemlock branches.  She waited as she had almost every evening for forty years – waited for guests to come to her little valley, William’s Cove as locals called it, after the first tavern keeper, two hundred years ago.

    The grandfather clock in the hallway chimed once, marking the half hour, five thirty.   The moon on the clock’s painted face would chase the sun down across the dial as outside the evening fell and the moon rose.  She returned to the dining room for a final  inspection, circled the tables, straightening a fold of linen, lifting a goblet and polishing off a speck of dust.  She had taken even more than her usual care with the flowers tonight.  Sprays of crimson sheep laurel with narrow, graceful leaves floated in crystal bowls on the tables, white mountain laurel stood sentry in the big vase on the cherry sideboard.  It had been beautiful in the woods today, walking slowly up the mountain, harvesting her blossoms for the last time.  

    She placed a Reserved sign on the table by the west window, selected for the view across the road toward the pavilion over the spring.  The reservation sign was not necessary, but there would be a few other diners tonight, sentimental or just curious.  She wished the room would be full just this once more, filled with murmurs, muted laughter, and the music of silver on china.  She would orbit her orderly universe, making sure all was well, saying farewell. ^.               

    She hoped the buyer would not close the Inn for long. Dust would silt the polished floors, vines would encroach upon the paths, hemlock needles would sift down and clog the gutters.   Just a brief break for inventory, and some minor renovations, the realtor said.  

    The room looked well tonight and she knew she did, too.  First time visitors were often surprised to find such atmosphere, such a hostess, three hours from Pittsburgh.  She had gone into town this afternoon and had her hair done.  She no longer went weekly.  In the beauty shop’s bright lights she looked every bit of her seventy years; she did not like to confront her gray hair in the beautician’s large mirror.  At least she had not gone gray early, like her father.  He had joked that his iron gray hair matched the source of the family fortune.  The fortune was gone now; some poured into this Inn , more wasted by her husband Parker’s poor stewardship. 

    Parker.  She remembered the dinner party in honor of her graduation from Bryn Mawr.

    “Let me introduce my new right hand man, Parker Crichton.  Parker, my daughter Priscilla.”

    “Lovely to meet you, Priscilla.  I have admired your paintings in the office.  You are most talented.”  He shook her hand, and held it a moment. Her heartbeat roared in her ears as though magnified by a seashell.  The chatter of the party around her faded in the surf until her father’s voice pulled her to shore.

    “Parker is from Philadelphia .  Priscilla won an award in a competition at the Art Institute.”

    “A student competition, Father.”         

    “Perhaps you could show me the Carnegie Institute one day, Priscilla.”

    And so began the summer of their courtship.  He, ten years her senior, was so at ease with the ritual of wooing.  It was like dancing in the arms of an experienced partner, a relief after the awkward, uncertain attempts with earnest young men from the University or Haverford.  She remembered that summer as a time of delights - tea dances, concerts, picnics in Schenley Park , rides up and down the Incline.  Beneath the froth of activity was desire.  They often strolled through the Carnegie, dim and quiet in that time.  One day, in a gallery over-crowded with Greek statuary, they paused before a marble tableau, Apollo pursuing Daphne.  The sculptor had caught the moment of her escape, her magical metamorphosis into a white laurel tree.  Long toes sprouted root tendrils, breasts tipped up and budded, slender arms stretched, fingers turning into twigs.

    “After he lost her, Apollo made the laurel sacred,” she said.

    “Sweet classics major, did he bring other nymphs to picnic beneath her branches?”   

    He reached out a hand and ran it down Daphne’s marble thigh.

    “The guard will see you.”

    “He’ll understand, I couldn’t resist,” he said, reaching out for Priscilla’s hand.

    The first summer they owned the Inn he persuaded her to re-name it.  “Magnesium Springs Inn is too medicinal.  We’ll attract more tourists with something pretty, besides you.”  So it became the White Laurel Inn, after the white blossoms sprinkling the mountainside like confetti. 

    She left the dining room, passed through the hall, crossed the wide threshold to  the porch.  Wide gray floor boards stretched out on either side, the ceiling was blue to repel wasps according to local custom.  Twenty empty rocking chairs sat poised at the rocking rail. Only the gentlest toe tap, the slightest exertion was required to initiate perpetual gentle motion on languid summer afternoons.  She sat and rocked, stretching  and flexing her aching fingers.   Her hands were ravaged by arthritis, roped with veins, but the engagement ring, the mysterious fire opal, still glinted.   He had paid for it from the wages he was earning from her father.  She remembered laughing toasts at their wedding, sly innuendo about marrying the boss’s daughter.   By the time she had been ready to stop wearing the ring, she could not pull it over the swollen knuckle.

    Gravel crunched in the circular drive.  A sleek gray car pulled to a stop, elegant, expensive.  Parker would have known the make, model and cost, at any distance.

    A man stepped out, tall, broad shouldered, about forty.   He wore khaki pants, a soft green jacket - cashmere, possibly, a good choice, for the cool June evenings.  Parker had judged guests by cars, she by clothes.  She stood up, prepared her smile, and descended the porch steps.  The discipline of decades of professional hospitality would see her through tonight. 

    “Welcome to the White Laurel Inn .”

    “I’ve been looking forward to this evening.”

    He held out a bouquet of hothouse roses, long stemmed, deep red.  Out of season and out of place, she thought....

Painting by Kevin Kutz

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