The Inevitable Guest!

Our book today is The Inevitable Guest: A Survival Guide to Being Company & Having Company on Cape Cod, a spirited but ultimately hopeless 2000 book by Marcia Monbleau, writing from the hallowed precincts of Harwich Port. I took it down from its shelf in a perversely contrarian moment, since the book is about the complications of being and receiving guests to an old Cape Cod house … during the summer. Guests don’t “stop by” Cape Cod during the winter, especially to the glory of the region, the unweatherized saltbox – but as any owner of such a blessed plot can attest, guests are forever finding reasons to “stop by” during summer (even though, as Monbleau points out, the Cape is sufficiently out of the way so that nobody actually “stops by” – rather, they “make a beeline”). The perversity comes into the picture because Boston is currently bitterly cold and probably on the doorstep of a two-month block of glacial misery; the region is about as far away as it can get from the season of Monbleau’s guests – which makes re-reading the book curiously extra-enjoybable.

This is a sarcastic little treat of a book, full of salty Cape Cod humor. The ruling impression lurking behind all of the advice and warnings in these pages is, ironically enough, that the Cape can be cranky, unpredictable, er, inhospitable place. “Bring clothes for hot weather,” our host warns, for instance, “warm weather, cold weather and rain. (That’s one day.)” Guests should prepare in case of rain, of course, and one of the main preparations for it is simple – don’t bring kids: “Presumably they will be putting the dog in a kennel or leaving their cat with food on the floor and an open window. See if they can make either of those arrangements for the children.”

But there’s an exception:

However, guests with infants should be encouraged to bring them. Children who are not yet ambulatory are welcome in most places. They arrive in a tote bag, can be placed on the floor and are unable to move. As long as you don’t step on them they’re quite pleasant to have around, and you have proven yourself to be child-friendly.

Despite the fact that The Inevitable Guest is all about how magnetically house-guests are pulled to reluctant Cape houses, Monbleau is clear over and over about how magnetically repulsive most old Cape houses are when it comes to accommodating visitors. The roofs are low and slanted, the stairs are so steep and narrow that they used to be called “ladders,” the mystical phenomenon of mildew is omnipresent, the windows are closed and crowded with treasures (“fishies, antique cup plates, stained glass, crystal prisms – anything that looks pretty with sunlight shining through”), and the everyday furniture doesn’t seem to want to be used: “The procedure for opening any drawer on the Cape is as follows: take hold of the two pulls or knobs, begin a rocking, side-to-side, pulling-pushing motion and have someone standing behind you to break your fall when the thing finally lets go.”

In her friendly-but-prickly way, Monbleau tries to make it clear that the occasionally primitive amenities of the old Cape house are more than countered by the glories of the place – as grudging and partial as those glories can be:

On a good day, New England has the best weather in the world. That perfection is appreciated all the more because of oogy days in between. The Cape has pea soup fog, rain, black clouds and gale force winds; later the same day it has blue sky, silky ocean and perfumed air. What it does not have are tornadoes, flash floods, six-month droughts, sandstorms, earthquakes or 150 inches of snow in the winter.

Re-reading The Inevitable Guest of course brought back all kinds of warm Cape memories (of Harwich Port, among other places), both as a guest and as a host. But these days, the key word is that “warm.”