Page 45, “The Persuasion”
It was like a hotel, all in order for our stay: The white linen hand towels, monogrammed in red with “Pale Brook Park,” were starched, ironed, and hung on maple dowels; the gas-fired refrigerator was cooled and supplied with milk, eggs, butter, and a loaf of bread; fires had been laid in the stone fireplace and the wood stove. Even the generator was primed for use if we wanted electricity (normally, Tonin had explained, lighting was by candle). Bill apologized for the low trout stock in the streams. “Your grandparents fished it out something awful this summer.”
The main cabin was a study in Adirondack design, each piece a family member I came to know well over the years—the gleaming Garland from the Michigan Stove Company, the twelve-foot-long dining table hewn from an old cherry tree that had gone down near the cabins in the Hurricane of 1938, the claw-foot soapstone tub brought down from a Montreal auction.
Built at the turn of the century as a hunting retreat for the Hardee family of Indiana, Pale Brook came to life when they traveled east by train each summer to take up residence. Tonin’s grandfather had bought the land on speculation in 1931, when he’d first set up business operations in the U.S., long before he’d ever thought about having to become a Czech exile.
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