Last month my friend Mary and her sister came to visit from Virginia. Their three-day stay was my great chance to show that, though exiled in Manhattan, I could still haul out the Southern hospitality. I wasn’t sure that I and my tiny, dust-bunnied, grad-student apartment were up to it, and it turned out that we weren’t, quite. I had to ask my guests to bring their own towels, because I owned only two. (Well, now I own four: Mary sent me a pair of fluffy 110-ply blue ones as a thank-you gift.)
I grew up on biblical stories about hospitality. In Genesis, Abraham goes out of his way to welcome three guests, strangers all. They turn out not to be weary, rumpled travelers but angels who have come to tell the childless Abraham and Sarah that they’ll soon have a son. This story is echoed in the Gospels, which tell of two men who encounter a stranger on the road to Emmaus. As they walk, the two men invite the stranger to join them for dinner, and while breaking bread they realize their guest is the risen Jesus.
Hospitality is supposedly something we do for others, but whenever I have guests (even those who don’t buy me towels or turn out to be angels or deities), I feel like I’m reaping the benefits. Hospitality involves sharing an intimate, private place, and letting someone in shows trust. It shows that we’re committed to lasting relationships with our friends, not just quick coffees when convenient.
If Mary and her sister had stayed in a hotel when they came to New York, we would have met up for dinner one night, but I wouldn’t have spilled my romantic woes to her at 7:45 A.M. while her sister was showering and I was curling my hair. I wouldn’t have counseled Mary, over late-night tea, about whether she should continue to scrape by as a writer or search for a teaching job. There simply wouldn’t have been time.
My mother, a fine hostess when she sets her mind to it, rarely has overnight guests because she feels she has to turn her house into Martha Stewart Living to accommodate them. She stocks the kitchen with home-baked goodies, dusts floorboards that were dusted two days before, and buys new hand towels, soaps, and lotions for the guest bathroom. In the 1957 edition of Etiquette, Emily Post describes the endless trials of the perfect hostess: If the cook leaves, the hostess will have to organize a last-minute picnic. Unless she “is actually unable to stand up,” a hostess must keep any physical ailments hush-hush. “The ideal hostess must have so many perfections … that were she described in full, no one seemingly but a combination of seer and angel could ever hope to qualify.”
The first step to reviving hospitality is redefining it. I can’t imagine having time even to shop for dinner, much less cook it, but I can order in exotic Swedish food that Mary and her sister won’t find in Charlottesville. I can scan my crowded bookshelves for the titles they’ll enjoy and leave them on the bedside table. And I can make sure Mary’s favorite Irish tea is in my cabinet. Guests aren’t looking for five-course meals. They’re looking for a little comfort away from home, a firm mattress, a warm welcome. And what they offer in return is the incomparable joy of closeness.