Guestward Ho! (4 page)

Bess Huntinghouse had had one woman who had come
for a single night and who had stayed and stayed and
stayed until her visit had lasted more than a year. There
had been all kinds of merry jokes about the Woman Who
Came to Dinner, and she was almost as permanent a
fixture at Rancho del Monte as the lounge itself. But the
minute we stepped in and Bess stepped out, our guest began packing.

It was ridiculous for us to have been sensitive about her
departure. Even before we left New York we had been told
clearly that this guest was planning to drive to Las Vegas on
March 17 and she had talked gaily about the night clubs and gambling halls of the benighted oasis quite
openly at dinner every night. But when we put her in her car and watched her drive off, we both felt that we had failed; that we had been gauche or rude or offensive or
lacking in personal daintiness or
something.
It was as though
Bill and I had driven her away from her spiritual
home.

Bill skulked out to the corral to mend fences and I
wandered lonely as a cloud to unmake her bedroom. And,
believe me, without a single guest in that rambling ranch
house I nearly went stir-crazy during the day.

I looked like a thundercloud when Bill came in for dinner that night.

"Well, here we are. Just the two of us, as you put it," I
snarled. "No guests, no money, and a giant, all-time-high
deficit of fifty dollars for today. It's certainly nice to have a
place we can spread out in! There was our guest and now
she's gone."

"Oh, don't worry, love," Bill said. "She'll be back."

"Oh, sure she'll be back—and dragging the WACs be
hind her!" I fumed. "She just
loved
us! Stayed here, more
than a year with Bess, but one look at you and me as the
gracious host and hostess and she was out of here so fast
you couldn't see her for dust."

"But, Barbara, we knew all along that she was planning
to go. She
liked
it here. She'll be back. Mark my words."

"Well, mark
my
words, she won't. And if you'd like to lay a little wager on it, I'd be willing to bet you our
hundred-and-seventy-dollar deficit that . . ." At that moment there was the sound of a horn in the driveway. She w
as back! Having misread the road signs, our parting guest
had gone straight for Las Vegas, New Mexico, instead of
Las Vegas, Nevada, and there she was on the doorstep, gay
as grig about her mistake, just in time for dinner and just
in time to save me one hundred and seventy dollars.

Bill was right. We weren't exactly social lepers. The
guest came back to Rancho del Monte—
and
to Bill and me—instead of going to any of a hundred other places
along the way to spend the night. And she came back to
del Monte again to spend Christmas with us. We were
vastly cheered. With a song on my lips, I readjusted the
deficit down to one-six-oh. Dinner that night was down
right festive.

But the next morning she left us again—this time in the
right direction—and we were guestless once more.

Helen and Bill Delano were still on hand. They were the
resident managers who worked at the ranch for Bess, but
they weren't going to be there long. In fact, at the end of
March they were leaving to go into business for themselves down in the valley, which was just as well, since Bill and I
couldn't possibly have paid them what they were worth.

However, for the remainder of the month it was their unhappy task to try to initiate Bill and me into the Delphic mysteries of guest ranching. And I must say for them that they were able to hide their scorn and contempt for us like the lady and gentleman they are, but it must have been a
Herculean task. My Bill is as bright as a button, but he
goes about learning in an awfully
funny
way and has so
many ideas of his own that he could drive the most saintly
of instructors to the madhouse before he arrives at the
proper answer. But at least Bill was willing. I wasn't. If
Helen Delano thought I was the dumbest, meanest, dullest
female west of the Mississippi, she had every right to think
so. I wouldn't learn, I couldn't learn, because I just plain
didn't
want
to learn. I was sad and sullen and lonely and
almost driven insane by the silence of the wide-open spaces.
All I wanted to do was to get into Santa Fe, off to Taos or Albuquerque—any place where there were people and not
just silence and horses. On the last day of March the Delanos left us, too, and then there weren't any other
people at all—only Bill and I alone in the wilderness.

You can get used to anything, I've discovered, especially if
you can talk yourself into believing it's only temporary. Gloom is fine for funerals and martyrdom is just splendid
for saints, but I wasn't quite yet dead and by no means saintly. Besides, it has been my misfortune to know quite
a lot of petulant, childish women who have had an absolute
genius for turning a stroke of bad luck into a major ca
tastrophe. John gets transferred from a paradise like Paris to a hole like Aden, Jim doesn't get promoted to vice-
president, Harry loses his job, and what do the little women do? They weep, they moan, they complain, they look like
keeners at breakfast and corpses at dinner. They make
everything just twice as hard as it is, and if John or Jim or
Harry don't turn into wife-beaters or philanderers it's only
because their wives have depressed them beyond making
the effort.

I happen to be better suited to comedy than to tragedy
and, besides, Bill and I had always landed on our feet be
fore and we would more than likely do it again. All I
wanted was to get this boots-and-saddles nonsense out of
my husband and land on my feet back, in New York. I
figured that the quickest way of doing it was to go along
with him, let him get his fill of the wide-open spaces, and
then lure him back to civilization. I was getting kind of
bored with playing
The Lost Soul
seven nights and seven
matinees a week, anyhow. Oh, I'd smiled, once or twice,
but I hadn't really meant it.

What really broke the ice was Bill's first solo trip into
town. Up until that point he'd looked kind of like an
Abercrombie & Fitch window dummy—Eastern-Western,
if you know what I mean. He had blue jeans, all right, but
they were kind of loose and baggy. With them he wore
loafers and challis ties and button-down Oxford shirts
and tweed jackets; all very pretty for Long Island or Con
necticut, but so Brooksy that people turned and stared at
him on the streets of Santa Fe. Then he made the plunge, quite unaided and alone, while I was spending my last
moments of sullenness out on the ranch.

All I had expected from Bill's trip to town was mail, the
New York Times
of two days ago, and a pound of butter.
What I got was the shock of my life. Bill stepped out of
the station wagon done up for a masquerade ball. At the
post office, he'd been lured into the Santa Fe Western
Wear Shop, run by Gertrude and Mark Campbell, a de
licious couple from Oklahoma. The Campbells had en
couraged him to go Western with a vengeance, and Bill
certainly had. He came teetering up onto the terrace in a
pair of boots with sort of run-over high heels that reminded
me of my first grown-up slippers. He was wearing blue
jeans so tight that he must have had to powder his thighs
to get into them and the plaidest shirt I've ever seen, as well
as a suede coat with enough fringe to make a dozen piano
shawls; Topped off by a kind of felt picture hat, he looked
seven feet tall. "Hopalong Hooton!" was all I could say,
then I started laughing and went right on laughing all through lunch.

Bill was a good deal less amused than I was. In fact, he began to feel so self-conscious in his cowboy suit that he took to skulking around corners and hiding in doorways as
though, by a series of hideous misfortunes, he had been
caught quite naked in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria.
But, unusual as he was, he did look wonderful, and even I
got a hankering for fancy dress in the Western mode.

So after my first good laugh, at poor Bill's expense, I decided to dry my tears, tuck up my hair, and get into the
act, too. I started out with the main house. It was just lovely as Bess Huntinghouse had arranged it, but show
me the woman who is perfectly satisfied with the way
another woman has arranged a house and I'll show
you
a
female impersonator. So, in spite of Bess's success with
Rancho del Monte just as it was, I launched into a little
interior decorating project of my own. From then on I spent most of the day at Dendahl's in Santa Fe racking
out new fabrics and most of the night measuring for new
curtains and slip covers. I rearranged the furniture in every
room at least a dozen times, so often and so thoroughly
that poor Bill occasionally came in from the corral and thought he was in the wrong ranch house. In fact, I wasn't
even a tenth of the way redecorated when I realized that
our first guests were due to arrive on the following day. I
felt exactly like a bride who is suddenly told that she's been
elected to entertain the British Royal Family, and well I
might have, since those first guests were to be none other
than the Carroll Binders of Minneapolis.

The name struck a sort of bell with Bill and a very tiny
little triangle in my mind. "Carroll Binder, Carroll
Binder," Bill kept musing. "I could
swear
that I've heard
that name before."

"You're probably thinking of Bookbinder's Restaurant in
Philadelphia," I said lightheartedly. "Now give me a
hand with this sofa." But even I wasn't so sure.

"It's a funny thing," Bill kept muttering. "That name is so familiar to me. Carroll Binder, Minneapolis; Minne
apolis, Carroll Binder!"

"Big city, Minneapolis," I said, still with that nagging
little doubt. "Now get off the rug while I vacuum."

At two o'clock the following morning, Bill sat up in bed.
"I have it!" he shouted.

"You've got
what?"
I grumbled.

"Carroll Binder! He's an editor of the
Minneapolis Tribune.
He writes all the editorials. He was on our
National Commission to UNESCO. He presided at the UN
Subcommission on Freedom of Information and gave the
Russians what-for!"

Together we tumbled out of bed. and raced to a dogeared old copy of
Who's Who,
heretofore serving as an
excellent doorstop. There was Carroll Binder, a good half column of him in minuscule type and bristling with perplexing abbreviations like "b., s., AB, corr., dir. Mpls"—
that last is really Minneapolis, but it will always be Mupples to me.

We didn't bother going back to bed. One look at my
newly redecorated ranch house and I suddenly knew it was
all wrong. One look at the menu for the week and I knew it was all wrong. One look at Bill and myself and I knew
we
were all wrong. Nothing was finished, everything was
pinned together and
badly
pinned together. As I started re
arranging everything for the thousandth time, I began to
visualize a long editorial—perhaps the entire editorial page
of the
Minneapolis Tribune
—dedicated to the horrors of the Hootons and Rancho del Monte.

In my mind's eye this diatribe began something like this:

"It was our misfortune to pass a few unforgettable days
and nights in a New Mexican pigsty called Rancho del
Monte. Mismanaged by a pair of New York charlatans
who call themselves Mr. and Mrs. William Hooton, Rancho
del Monte embodies all the discomforts known to man. The
food, the service, the accommodations—all were unspeak
able . . ."

And so it went.

I was in a perfect flap and so was Bill. If only our first
guests could be a pack of jolly illiterates with no publishing
connections, no experience as lecturers or commentators,
and preferably no command of any language more widely
used than, say, Catalan. But no. We had to fall not only on
our faces but also on the editorial page of a paper with more than half a million readers.

All that day Bill and I scurried around the ranch house
moving this piece of furniture and then moving it back
again, setting the table and resetting it, choosing this room and then that room and then this room again. We had four
head-on collisions with one another at the kitchen door and
three more at the front door watching for the Binders' car.

We waited all day and nothing happened. Lunch came
and went without the Binders. We smiled bravely at one
another, waited as long as we dared, and then put on
dinner—a leg of lamb with all the trimmings. Then we
moved some more furniture, made up some different bed
rooms, scoured more bathrooms, and waited with our noses pressed against the window. The dinner smelled wonderful,
but there wasn't a single soul around Rancho del Monte,
except Bill and me, to sniff it.

Around five o'clock, I decided Carroll Binder was a
perfect beast. By five thirty I decided he wasn't so bad
after all, but that he and his wife and daughter had been
killed on the road. At six I felt that both the Binders and
the Hootons had been the victims of some depraved prac
tical joker who obviously had nothing better to do with his
life than to spend all day making phony reservations in other people's names. At six thirty I decided we ought to
be glad the Binders weren't really coming at all, because we'd never be able to cope with
anyone,
let alone anyone
famous, and that dinner would be ruined—either stone
cold or burned to a cinder—anyway. At six thirty-one, the
Binders appeared.

We learned many things from our first guests, the first of which was that nothing out West ever happened when you
expected it to. Things just didn't run on that tried and true
schedule in New Mexico. Cars and buses and even trains and planes were usually late or—even worse—early, in the
Land of Relaxed Living.

And we learned some other things, too, when we simply
collared the whole Binder family, rushed them to their r
ooms, told them sternly
not
to bathe but to get right down
to dinner, and marched crossly out to the kitchen to dish
the meal up. No sooner had we sat down to a dinner
which, though snatched from the oven in the nick of time, was good, than both Bill and I realized that we had treated
guests—and
paying
guests—as though they were rather
naughty children and not as though they were the lifeblood
of our newly acquired career.

But another thing we learned from the Binders was that
the more important and influential people were in their own
home towns, the more easygoing they were away. Of
course, Mother had always told me this when I was a girl,
but who ever pays any attention to what mothers have to
say? Yet it was perfectly true, and Bill and I noticed almost
immediately that the guests who were really Somebody
simply adored living like a pack of cowhands when they
stayed with us, while those few who used the broad "A" fifty per cent of the time and the broad hint two hundred
percent of the time were the very ones whose checks were the least likely to succeed. We were cursed with mighty few
prize phonies, but it got so that we could spot them even
before they stepped out of their brand new chromium cars.
They always talked the most, dropped the biggest names,
made the most gigantic
faux pas,
and, when they checked
out—which was almost immediately after they checked in,
since our place wasn't nearly pretentious enough for them—t
hey haggled the most about the bill. But of course
Rancho del Monte just wasn't for them, not when Bess had it and not when we had it.

The Binders, inadvertently, practically established the
way of life at Rancho del Monte under Hooton manager
ship. Well, I won't say
quite
that, but on their first night, When Bill and I rushed them to the table without giving
them so much as a chance to wash their hands, we did
establish one hard and fast rule without even realizing it. That rule was: Treat the customers just as though they are
guests in our own house.

And it was a pretty good rule at that. If they had wanted
a hotel with express elevators and bellboys and sixty dishes
on the menu, they could have gone to a hotel with express elevators and bellboys and sixty dishes on the menu in any
large city. Ranch life just wasn't like that and it wasn't
supposed
to be.

But don't get the idea that everything at the ranch
skimmed along during the Binders' visit. It didn't. Fire
places decided to take up smoking. Roasts got overdone
or underdone. Instead of being the relaxed, casual, gra
cious hostess I had set out to be, I found myself chattering
like a magpie or so tongue-tied that perfect hours would
go by, or so it seemed, without my saying a word. I still
wake up in the middle of the night shuddering at the
dozens of mistakes we knew we were making at the time and trembling at the hundreds of mistakes we
didn't know
we were making.