THE INN AND US
By
The inn was a continental restaurant-and-supper club in the Berkshires (near Stockbridge, Mass.) which Stephen Citron, Piaf's former accompanist, started up with his second wife before she left him--at which point novelist Anne Edwards joined him in the enterprise/idyll. Both very much in love, both with two failed marriages behind them, they also shared a passion for the place, Orpheus Ascending--which eventually descended into worse and worse debts ($17,346.78), what with the too good food they served for too little and the constant repairs from stove to furnace. True, they began in a derrière-over-teakettle fashion with assorted vagrant help, insufficient everything (even ice, which had to be stolen from a nearby Holiday Inn), and constant crises; but they enjoyed it--hard work, patÉ and escargots, guests and all--before they had to give up. An incidental his-and-her alternating account for that evening out at home.