Guestward Ho! (26 page)

Before twenty-four hours were up, Connie had staked
a claim on Bill and me and on the whole ranch. She rode
like a jockey, and the three of us often took all-day rides together, inconsiderately leaving the bird-watcher to watch
birds, the uranium prospector to prospect uranium, and
the honeymooners to giggle, once freed of Connie's magic
spell. When the three of us went to La Dona Luz in
Taos for lunch, Connie got into a technical discussion of
wine with Frenchy, the owner, and insisted that he show
her his cellar, which she pronounced the best in America
west of Twenty-One. When we went antiquing in the shops of Santa Fe, Connie invariably knew more about the antiques than the dealers did. On Artie's night off,
Connie marched out to the kitchen with Bill and, cantan
kerous stove and all, put a dinner onto the table the like
of which I have never eaten. Connie was a joy and a de
light to everyone—to everyone, that is, except to Connie
herself.

Rich and popular and dazzling as she was, Connie was
not especially happy. In fact, you might even say that
she was especially unhappy. Widowed and alone in the world, Connie had the means and the entree to go wher
ever she chose. But she had been everywhere and she was
sick and tired of gallivanting from one corner of the globe to the next. She kept an apartment in New York,
but with her husband dead and the place silent and filled
with memories, Connie found it just as gloomy and de
pressing and seedy as Bill and I later found it bright and gay and elegant. She could have joined her parents and lived like a queen, trooping from one smart spot to an
other, but that would have been only a slight change from
the A-deck gypsy life she had always led. While Connie
had what almost everybody else in the world wanted,
Connie wanted what almost everybody else in the world
had—roots, something to do, a purpose in life, and a place
to call home.

She seemed to be finding them all at Rancho del Monte.

Within a week of her arrival, Connie had taken to bus
tling around the place as if she owned it. She could
receive guests, check over menus, make beds, and answer
inquiries as though she had taught Cesar Ritz all he had ever known about the hotel business. Since she did my
work with amazing speed, efficiency, and cheer, and was
simply competent and not aggressive or busybodyish about it, I couldn't have cared less. In fact, I was delighted to have someone so pleasant and helpful around the place.

One day, though, when Connie was tooting around
Santa Fe visiting old friends whom she'd met in various
parts of the world at various times I had a little surprise waiting for her when she got back. Connie's surprise had
been a surprise to me, too, because I hadn't expected it either. It consisted of a party of four Central Europeans
who had rolled in quite unannounced around lunchtime.
Hotel La Fonda and the Bishop's Lodge, they had ex
plained to me, were far too grand for them. That should
have tipped me off right then and there, because neither La Fonda nor Bishop's—both of which are excellent
places to stay with marvelous food, service, and accom
modations—could possibly be described as "too grand."
But since half the people we know are Europeans, I put
it down to foreign eccentricity. The four Europeans them
selves, however, were
quite
grand and equally fussy. They
asked very cautiously about the rates, which I said would be ten dollars a day apiece, then they went into a long conference in a language that was totally unintelligible to me. (It was Hungarian, I discovered later, which is totally
unintelligible even to Hungarians.) Then, in a melange of
English, French, and German, with an Italian expletive or
two tossed in for good measure, they made sure whether
the rates included meals.

"Yes," I said.
"Oui. la. Si."
(for Italian)
"Si."
(for" Spanish), and
"Da."

How many meals?

"Three," I said.
"
Trois. Drei. Tre. Tres.
"
That seemed to cover that.

Then they set out on a thorough tour of the place, hag
gling about locations, poking into rooms that were already
occupied, and asking if I couldn't have them vacated just for them—which I certainly could not and would not—and being generally tiresome. They were so tiresome, in
fact, that I wouldn't ordinarily have bothered with them,
but we'd gone through a lean winter and in early June the place was still only half filled.

"Oh, I like this—the
numero quatorze—viith
the double
bed and the private terrace," one of the women said, bursting into Connie's room.
"Ja,
Maxl?"

"Ja,
Roszika," her husband agreed, pushing past her into the room.

I told them rather peremptorily that the room was occupied and when they heard by whom, all four of them
settled for what was vacant and more or less shut up.

The party showed up at the lunch table in full force,
having spent a stimulating hour demanding things like
eiderdown quilts, hot water bottles, bidets, bath sheets,
and candles in case of a power shortage.

Their luncheon conversation, carried on in several
languages at once, consisted of three topics: soup, the travail of travel, and Connie.

The soup, as they all dived into it, proved to be too
hot. "Oh,
Gott!"
they roared,
"mein
mouth—
la bouche
—
la bocca!"

"Why don't you just wait a moment," I said patiently,
feeling a bit like a governess just employed in a mother
less home. "It will cool."

So then they all clattered their spoons down onto the
place mats and began telling me in unison what an awful
trip theirs had been.

"Oh,
Gott!
It wass terrible!
Mein Gott!
The roads! Oh,
Gott!
The prices! Oh,
Gott,
dot hotel in Alb-you-queer-
kay!"

Oh,
Gott,
they moaned in chorus. Why had they ever left Budapest with its strudels, its noodles, its Danube, its
tziganes?
I tactfully refrained from saying that the reason was probably because none of them would have
been very popular with the local commissar and that they
were damned lucky to be
out
of Budapest alive.

Their complaints continued for a good twenty minutes
in a variety of tongues and then they all tackled their soups again.
Mein Gott!
It was too cold.

So the soup went back to the kitchen for reheating.

While they waited, they burst into a polylingual discus
sion of Connie, leaving me quite out of the conversation, but when they pronounced her father's unpronounceable
name with a reverence reserved usually for Our Lord and when they lapsed occasionally into French, I got sufficient
breezes to understand that they fairly worshiped
"la belle
Costanza . . .
tres chic . . . tris amusante . . . tres riche,"
even if she was staying at a flea bag like Rancho del
Monte.

The soup came back. You guessed it. Oh,
Gott!
It was
too hot.

Although I could not fathom what a charmer like Con
nie could possibly see in a quartet like this one, I de
cided that they were all fast friends from happier days on
the Continent. That night I had Connie's seat shifted to the table assigned to the four Hungarians, just so they could talk over old times without any interruptions.

Connie had been delayed and charged in just as the first course—undoubtedly too something—was being
served. There was such a babble of tongues, heel-clicking,
and hand-kissing as I've never heard. Then I dug into my dinner, feeling rather pleased with the cosmopolitan
air the ranch had suddenly acquired and even more pleased
that it was all going on at another table.

But right after dinner, Connie, who was generally the
life and soul of every evening, pleaded a sick headache
and stamped up to her room, shooting a look in my direc
tion that would have withered an oak tree as she passed.

The next morning there was no sign of Connie. I assumed she was still sleeping until I noticed that her
car was missing. She had apparently got up at sunrise and
gone off someplace on her own. But that was like Connie,
and I didn't give it a second thought.

Her friends, however, appeared in full force for break
fast.
Mein Gott,
the coffee was too hot.
Mein Gott,
the
coffee was too cold.
Mein Gott,
the coffee was too strong.
Watered,
Mein Gott,
the coffee was too weak.
Mein Gott,
the eggs were too soft.
Mein Gott,
the eggs were too hard.

When I ventured to ask, without much caring, whether
they had all passed a comfortable night, they told me in no uncertain terms.

"Mein Gott,
it was horrible! There was a fly in my room!"

"Mein Gott,
it was wretched! My mattress was too hard!"

"Too hard?
Ach, mein Gott,
my mattress was too soft.
It was miserable!"

It didn't take me long to gather that they hadn't had
too good a night. Still, I felt that any friend of Connie's
ought
to be a friend of mine.

After breakfast they all moved out to the terrace to
soak in the sunshine. They grumbled quietly among them
selves for almost half an hour, then the cantata began
again.
"Mein Gott,
the
heat!
I can't
stand
it!" they howled. If they were up in the mountains, they complained, why
wasn't it cool like the Tyrol, the Alpes-Maritimes, the
Apennines? Like all the places where they
weren't?

With a grim smile, I resumed my nursery governess
role once again. "
I
know what you'd all like," I said with more enthusiasm than conviction, "a nice picnic in the
mountains. A
fête champêtre."

They looked at me with a certain amount of suspicion,
but I plunged right on. "I'll ask the cook to put up a
nice lunch for you and you can hike right up those moun
tains there. They're called the Sangre de Cristos, and they're higher than the Apennines and
very
cool."

An hour later, equipped with their
lederhosen,
Tyrolean
hats, alpenstocks, and
my
clothesline, they set off on what
I had always considered a brisk walk rather than an
arduous climb. A fairly spiffy luncheon had been packed
for them—
"Mein Gott,
it's so
heavy!"
—and I was look
ing forward to a whole day of their absence.

Two hours later they came pounding down the hillside, soaked and shivering and
mein Gott-
ing
for all they were
worth. New Mexico has an average of five days of rain per year. That had been one of them. And don't think
I didn't get it hot and heavy from them on account of the
downpour, not only in French, German, and English, bits
of which I could understand, but mostly in their native
Hungarian which, all in all, was a blessing since I couldn't
follow a single word. I was able to gather, however,
that they'd never been so miserable in all their lives and
that I was to blame for it all.

While they were up in their rooms screaming down to
Ronnie for hot lemonade and specific brands of aspirin not manufactured in this country and squabbling over
who was to have the first mustard bath, Connie came
sneaking in.

"Where in the world have you been, Connie?" I asked.
"Your friends have all . . ."

"My
friends?"
she fumed. "Smile when you say that.
And if you ever put me at the same table with them again,
I’ll scratch your eyes out!"

"But, Connie, I thought you
knew
them," I said, bewildered.

"You bet your life I know them," she said. "And I
know a few more just like them. Those people are 'pro
fessional refugees' and I've seen them in London and Lisbon and Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro and New York and Mexico City and almost any other place you care to name."

"But Connie," I said, "Bill and I know lots of Euro
pean refugees. They
like
it here. They say that Santa Fe
reminds them of the Continent. They've all been charm
ing."

"Sure they have—good guys and grateful to get out with their skins. But these four have never been within a hundred miles of the Iron Curtain; they never were near a Nazi. They left their native countries years ago, and they left in style, their fortunes with them. They've
sat through the wars—hot and cold—at a safe, comfortable distance. They're refugees only by definition—
their
own!
This bunch would go to heaven and wind up telling
Saint Peter how much more efficient the central heating
was in hell."