WASHINGTON BOARDING HOUSE

...The important thing for her, after all, is to maintain the fine balance of energy in her household...

...She can bend the itineraries toward Social Conscience or toward Culture...

...They have a nightly audience for the details of their frightful day at the office, and should a guest mention a recent pack trip to Alaska they whisk him off to become the program for that night's meeting of the Explorer Scouts...

...More important, with only rudimentary skills at managing, she can abdicate most of her jobs...

...Every Washington housewife does it, every spring, without even trying, and without benefit of a neon sign...

...For one thing, because of the rapid turnover of guests, the need for diversity in menus in minimal...

...The approach of the high season is as traditional and relentless as the days before Christmas—the incoming mail almost as impressive...

...Besides, even without a single thought in her head, she can establish herself as a kind of "clearing house" of ideas and keep afloat by exchanging the thoughts of the various passers-through...

...It is also the season when crucial hearings are coming up on such local issues as zoning, public accommodations, and budgets for schools...

...She can do it by hobbies, by heroes (Lincoln is a natural), by old houses within a potshot of Andy Jackson astride his hobbyhorse in Lafayette Square...

...A family of musical blockheads finds its home suddenly ringing with song, thanks to visiting alums from the New York Collegiate Chorale...

...One visitor is making hush puppies, while another makes the pies...

...They have circled the Tidal Basin bumper to bumper, and at some expense to disposition dragged their children away from one last push at the button that sets the gastric juices of the exhibit model into splendid illuminated motion...

...If she goes into a slump at the end of the season—if she seems listless and flat when summer starts—it has nothing to do with the mounting humidity or even with galloping exhaustion from the multiple reunions she has housed, fed, and sped onward to the springtime sights of the nation's capital It is more a matter of her diminution in status—the return to the role of housewife after having been, through the long flowering of Washington's spring, a figure of some national importance...

...The university friends end up entertaining the cousins...

...The Washington hostess is aware of ploys, without actually stopping to classify them: ". . . of course we haven't dared promise the children yet 'til we hear from you, but ZeeZee and Nipper (you remember the twins) are hellbent on seeing the FBI...

...Turnover also works in the hostess's favor so far as conversational fodder goes...

...Often the handiest thing is to present the Japanese economist's bedroom slippers to the visiting cousin as she takes over his room...

...The grass roots come to her...

...They don't really put their minds to sorting out the situation...

...They gain status in the neighborhood by providing an outfielder and occasional good hitters, and on rainy days they can count on enough players to keep Monopoly, Spit-in-the-Ocean, and billiards going simultaneously...

...The host is curious to know if this is a treatment he reserves for the Executive Mansion...

...The thing that keeps them from being burdensome is that even the most anonymous customer, due to the vastly increased volume of business, comes to be treated like the manager of a new Hilton Hotel...

...By dinner time they are most becomingly subdued, which bodes well for an evening's reunion, in which no one is one up on anyone else, or up to very much at all...

...And she can keep her oar in with the young by directing them to Dan Sickles' leg, which he shipped from the battlefield, and to the grisly remnants of Lincoln's assassination at the Medical Museum...

...Washing Boarding House by PEGGY BEBIE THOMSON Running a boarding house in Washington has been a time-honored profession since well before Thomas Jefferson sat at the foot of a board-inghouse table on New Jersey Avenue...

...One thing the host families recognize from the start is that their own children are going to show up considerably less well than the offspring of their guests...

...PEGGY BEBIE THOMSON is a free lance writer and Washington housewife...

...They offer her a choice of four Indonesians, three homesick Malayans, or a brace of Japanese and their photographic equipment...

...She can not be too sensitive about how all the arrangements are going to suit...

...They trickle off with alternate dates, appropriate mention of tents, cots, a collapsible crib, and how great it is going to be "to see all of you" (which is the routine gambit to cover possible ignorance of the names of family members...

...The question of the inevitable leavings-behind of the guests is best handled quite arbitrarily...

...so here we are, Bink, with five weeks unused leave, and the boys refuse to go to camp...

...Let Congressmen hie to their grass roots on prescribed schedules...

...With some years of practice and research behind her, she has the sights of the city cross-filed in her head and can, on demand, present them by geographical section, by period, by subject matter—and either as bird's-eye views or as explorations in depth...

...Cherry blossom season is also precisely the time when experience-hardened telephone committees remind the Washington housewife of foreign students, also liberated by vacations, who want to do the American thing of going to Washington...

...to ensure seats for the sunrise service at Arlington, is just another hazard of the season...

...Hope you are not just filled to the brim, because Jim's Aunt Flo wants to come with us and she loathes hotels...

...We were wondering, if you aren't brimming over, if we couldn't pack up the tent and...

...Multiple instructions tend to confuse...

...Spring holidays being as unsyn-chronized as they are across the country, she is already well into her Perle Mesta role when the buds on the cherry trees are still inscrutable...

...It is no one's fault but her own that her turn has come up as den mother of the month...

...It is this, though, that spares her from troublesome remembrances of things past, inasmuch as her own past marches before her in the stream of people carrying suitcases up her front walk...

...Rick may have to stay home with you the day we go to the White House...

...Though the housewife steers her guests to the sights, she mostly stays home herself—unless it is to accompany the visitors on restorative walks along the towpath or through the box hedges at Dumbarton Oaks...

...The various activities she volunteered for during lazy Indian Summer days are reaching an ill-timed crescendo...

...Washington husbands (kindness of the visiting cooks) get presentable meals and possibly the only decent coffee of the year...

...dean is 11 sharp, Thurs., and I'd feel better if you see that he scrubs his nails and doesn't wear those tight pants...

...Double ploys are not unknown...

...A fine line divides what is efficient from what is downright rude...

...By the time it is all over—when the dogwood has lost its waxy petals and the azalea and redbud their fragile blooms—the Washington housewife finds herself quite alone, munching the last of the chocolates sent from guests safely returned home...

...The first lines reestablish contact, account in one of a number of humorous ways for the lack of correspondence in recent years, and get on to the business at hand, which has to do with showing their kids the sights of the nation's capital, meeting deans about colleges, seeing Senators about summer jobs...

...There are enough trips, anyway— to grocery, bakery, liquor store...

...While the continuing Congressional show at the Capitol may be endlessly entertaining, the views from the Washington Monument and Mt...

...In a house that is unusually quiet and is showing the first intimations of humidity, she begins composing a letter to her old hockey captain, now living on Lake Champlain...

...they know there will be another set by the time they do...

...The Washington housewife finds herself blithely sloughing off many of the refinements commonly expected to go with hospitality...

...Lunches are not even to be considered, for the housewife becomes as expert at loading people into cars and outlining a full day's program as the tour officials in visored caps who lurk outside the White House...

...A good day's take is a bouquet of remembrances from all parts of the country sent by classmates, officemates, long-ago neighbors, people who shared a rough Atlantic crossing, the man who Washington Boarding House by PEGGY BEBIE THOMSON played guard the year his Washington host was fullback, the bosun's mate from the sub chaser—plus relatives and all the people urged to come last year who think they could come this, or those scheduled for this year who would rather come next...

...And so she orders them all to bed...

...During the cherry blossom festival itself she is running her establishment at peak capacity, every bed and cot occupied, the feathers from old sleeping bags floating through the house like blossoms from the trees...

...The interest she expressed in church or peace now involves thirty table centerpieces done up in pink gumdrops to look like cherry trees...

...She has to come out with just enough energy at the end of the day to hoist the bathtub-proportion stew bucket to the table—though not, it is true, with much more...

...An aunt, whose feet collapsed at the National Gallery, is apt to have discovered the family mending pile (perhaps because it filled her closet) and be well on her way to demolishing it...

...Jim's appointment with the G.W...

...And the physicist from Madras, amid smoke and exploding mustard seeds, is preparing the vegetables...

...It is also this that puts her, if she keeps her wits about her, among the best informed people in Washington...

...It even comes to the point where the fact that her own children are practicing piano, trumpet, and flute from seven to eight a.m...

...There are, to be sure, factors in running a sometime boarding house that make it a great deal easier than might be expected...

...scarcely bothers her at all, while the fact that the visiting children, being on vacation, have no set bedtime, does...

...The playmate from camp days is driving the Belgian to see Washington's bed and is arranging for the Japanese to photograph the city skyline from L'Enfant's tomb...

...Vernon's portico are not...

...Sam can go to a kennel but Fluffer just won't be parted from us and we figure after all these years you probably aren't allergic to cats any more...

...The guests, however overpowering they may have been in the morning, have had their tempers tried during the day by diabolic parking restrictions (a single lamp-post may have five separate and not necessarily coordinated signs...

...The real dividend of the overflowing house is that the time, happily, slides by, leaving the traditional spring cleaning and the major over-haulings in the garden undone...

...Nor are the Washington children ever at all sure who the visitors are, which accounts for the rather adenoidal expression they wear during the introductions...

...On the other hand, they are perfectly cheerful about the arrivals...

...And she is still welcoming the fresh troops of sightseers who bunk with her on their patriotic pilgrimages long after the Tidal Basin's gutters are running pink with fallen petals...

...They have mounted countless flights of steps, stood in endless lines, set foot to miles of marble corridor...

...give the book she left behind to the nice Australian boy, the boy's white shirt to the nephew, who in any case lacks one for a crucial interview, and pocket his ballpoint pen for yourself...

...This keeps things moving, and though it makes some happier than others, and is no solution for cameras or blankets, it eliminates a lot of trips to the post office...

...No one on a four-day stay even suspects that the hostess may have run her entire gamut of surefire meals...

...If the hostess plays it right, the kitchen is well-manned without her...

...I'm afraid he'd go through it like a dose of salts...

...While women elsewhere may be pining for their friends of yesteryear and the lives they left behind them, the Washington-based housewife is juggling dates to try to keep down the number of reunions under her roof...

...Snatching the bedding for the laundry before the guests have elected to get up on their final day is quite unacceptable...

...Visiting children know a great deal more about Washington— both how to get around in it and what is there—than Washington children, who are dead set against sight-seeing...

...For the housewife, if not for her children, the transition from one set of visitors to another can be a bit of a problem...

...Arranging matters, however, so that the housewife alone, with her delicate ear attuned to the sound, can detect the tumbling of sheets in the washer as she waves the guests down the driveway is all right—and, for her, eminently satisfying...

...Resident children in a jam over science fair projects can usually turn up an electronics expert among the guests...

...But the messages are as much of a pattern, paragraph for paragraph, as mimeographed Christmas newsletters...

...The fact that some guests are stumbling into the attic dormitory late at night after a hard push across the Midwestern plains, while others, already tucked in, have set the alarm for four a.m...

...Some of the letters, coming from all-but-forgotten chapters of the host family's life, ring only the faintest and most bewildering of bells...

...This suits most homeowners and their guests, who are reassured on subsequent visits to find their old friends in comfortable familiar surroundings...