In Vermont: Keeping Up with Keeping Inns

By Gregory Jaynes

The night it snowed in the Green Mountains, coming down so densely in places that vision ceased just in front of the head lamps on the car, an engineer with General Motors, a troubleshooter in the Chevrolet division, stopped off for the evening in one of those wonderful old Victorian inns in Vermont. The innkeeper was bearded, avuncular, inquisitive, fleshy, and given now and again to alcohol and nicotine. His wife sometimes fretted that he might be a heart in search of an attack. There was a cheery blaze in the fireplace.

The engineer, a soft-looking fellow named Jim, came from New Jersey, one of an elite 25 in the "field force." He had charge of all New England--Willy Loman with a wrench. He was here, in Bethel, to see about a problem at the Chevy dealership. He accepted a white wine.

The innkeeper, whose name was Lyle Wolf, was from Los Angeles. One of a growing number of novices in the trade, he had allowed romanticism to overtake him a couple of years ago, chased the ghost of Thornton Wilder across the continent, and set himself up as a country squire, the possessor of a first-edition mortgage--Bob Newhart with a plumber's helper. His wife's name was Barbara, and Barbara was saying, over wine, that she had a relative hurt in a Corvair.

Jim said that the Corvair was a little before his time, then sidestepped his interlocutors' curiosity about the trouble down at the local dealership. And what was it like to run an inn? Does it strain a marriage?

"Only when we're alone," said Lyle, "or with other people."

One was reminded of S.J. Perelman, who wrote: "Outside of a spring lamb trotting into a slaughterhouse, there is nothing in the animal kingdom as innocent and foredoomed as the new purchaser of a country place. The moment he scratches his signature on the deed, it is open season and no limit to the bag."

But what was wrong with the Chevys?

It was just an engineering question, said Jim. And how was the foundation on this old place?

"Not very good," said Lyle.

"Sound," said Barbara, playing Jim's game.

And what do the Wolfs think of the Bob Newhart show, the television series about a proprietor of a Vermont inn?

"I can't stand his stuttering," said

Lyle. "He never greets a guest," said Barbara. "It's unrealistic," said Lyle.

"He never has to mow a lawn or unclog a toilet."

Hours passed, dinner passed, Jim went to bed, and Lyle, over brandy, reflected on his lot. He had been a high school teacher in California, a respected one, and he had enjoyed the classroom but abhorred the system, for reasons he did not expand. He quit after 24 years and withdrew $40,000 from his state teachers' retirement account. He paid $103,000 for the inn, called Greenhurst. He was 54 years old. Barbara, a registered nurse, was 44. Greenhurst was 90. Bethel was 203.

The first month they were open, January 1982, they took in $80.

To cap the evening, Lyle lit a fine cigar. In his new life, he said, talking to his guests was the part he liked best. He raised his snifter, and when he drank, the snifter pushed his half-spectacles from the tip of his nose to the bridge. When he removed the snifter, the eyeglasses slid back, like a beginning skier on a beginners slope.

The snow stopped before dawn, and still only Jim knew what was wrong down at the dealership. The old bell in the church belfry rang soon after light, just as Lyle took his muffins out of the Garland gas stove and served the engineer, who ate and ran, maddeningly, without divulging the reason for his stay. In a town short on stimulant, such intelligence could have been dear.

But what a morning! Cold and clear, giving a snap to the step. Bing Crosby's vocal cords would have come in handy.

There was snow on the tennis court, snow on the gazebo. "We were going to use the gazebo for weddings and parties but we haven't used it that much," Barbara said.

"What do you do with a gazebo?" Bright bars of sunlight lay on the rag rugs and the pine floors, and a shaft of the stuff glinted off the Wolfs' decanter collection and their cut-glass saltcellar collection (here a discerning eye might see that a couple of the spoons came from a head shop in Hollywood). The house held dried ferns, wicker furniture, an odd assortment of rocking chairs, a hand-turned oak banister, framed advertisements from long ago, framed pictures of flowers from National Geographies of the 1920s--phlox, gentian, evening primrose, wintergreen, bird's-foot violet and figwort--little bottles, ancient mirrors, failing philodendrons, warmth, pleasantness and no guests.

There was a terrible period just after they opened, said Lyle, when "nobody came, nobody called." They grossed $23,000 their first year. The 1983 gross was $40,000. They do not speak of net-out of fear, one suspects, of nervous col lapse. Everywhere about the place is evidence of awfully hard work, the kind of work that makes a man dream that his right hand has turned into a power drill, that makes a woman dream that brass will never tarnish, never again. Tough labor, requiring a backbone tough as hickory. (At the risk of irrelevancy, it comes to mind that Calvin Coolidge, a Vermonter, was presented with a walking cane by Vermonters when he became President.

A windy presenter said that the President, like the hickory cane, was unbending, un yielding and several other ways of saying "stiff." Coolidge, the soul of taciturnity, took the cane, sighted down the shaft, said "Ash," and sat down.) Lyle gives the impression that renovating the house made his nose feel like a paymaster's window. So far, $25,000 has been eaten by the structure. And in thinning his purse, the innkeeper says he has learned something about the Yankee tradesman's sense of priorities. If, for ex ample, the Wolfs' prehistoric heating sys tem goes blooey at 3 a.m., the repairman is Johnny-on-the-spot. If, on the other hand, troubles are not dire, fat chance of finding a fixer.

In the argot of this therapy-minded age, the Wolfs' daunting change of life is called a stretch. A narrower, strictly prag matic view would adjudge them just an other pair of fools nocking to the flinty ground, for they are not alone. There are no hard figures, but couples new to innkeeping are scattered all over New Eng land. They tell tales of tribulations that match the Wolfs' stories to a T. Dewy-eyed urbanites, they sought life in bucolic splendor. Instead, they found a most difficult row to hoe -- so much so, in fact, that one state agency's statistics reveal that ev ery year at least one out of four inns changes ownership.

But what is admirable, and touching, about these people is that, to a person, they seem fired by enthusiasm and grit.

Since falling in love with the region while vacationing there, and purchasing a piece of the rock, none can recall having had time to take a vacation. Tom and Sue Yennerell gave up holidays when they bought the Pittsfield Inn, ten miles from the Greenhurst, two years ago. Sue, 32, worked in a Pennsylvania bank. Tom, 30, was in sales of carbide tooling. Today they live by a long-range "survival forecast" that Tom draws up at the beginning of ev ery year -- "and we stay within the survival range."

"The first question a guest always asks," Sue Yennerell volunteered one snowy day, "is what I do for entertainment. I say, 'Talk to you. This is it.' " Lyle Wolf had said essentially the same thing to Jim the engineer, who probably had no idea that with a little less economy of language, he could have been, to the New England innkeepers, a day at the beach.

-- By Gregory Jaynes