Guestward Ho! (6 page)

bill
: Drive to town for the two thousand forgotten items essential to lunch. Pick up mail.Pick up laundry. Pick up three real-hair auburn nets for Mrs. A. Take Mrs. B's navy blue silk to dry cleaner and tell them that she
must
have it by Saturday. Pick up Mr. C's films. Pick up aspirin, orange sticks, emery boards, watermelon pink nail enamel, wave set, spool of cotton thread to match sample, and light novel—but nothing too sophisticated—for Miss D. Rearrange homebound reservations for the E. Family. (They want to go back to Seattle on Sunday instead of Thursday and they want to go family plan and they do want a two-day stopover in New Orleans, if it isn't too far out of the way, and they hate to fly at night, and Mrs. E wants to avoid all mountain ranges because she's heard they're dangerous, and Junior gets airsick, so maybe Bill had better see if they can't go by train after all, but they're in a terrible hurry.) Go to hardware store for picture wire, masking tape, Duco cement, and new plunger. Go to wholesale vegetable market for anything
except
Brussels sprouts. Go to La Fonda Hotel newsstand for
New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune,
and
Dallas Times-Herald
for assorted guests and the new
Vogue
for Miss F. Be back in an hour—no later.

me
: Finish cleaning kitchen and do whatever possible toward getting lunch.

12:30
curly
: Bring guests back from ride, unsaddle
horses.

bill
: Back to town on the double because we've
forgotten lemons.

me
: Set table and keep saying "It'll only be a minute, now," with a hard, false, bright smile that
isn't fooling anyone.

1:00 Lunch, if we're lucky.

2:00
curly
: Take out afternoon ride.

bill
: Repair fencing, plumbing, terrace furniture, anything and everything that needs fixing.

me
: Clean up lunch dishes, swab down kitchen, start dinner.

Well, that's enough to give you an idea of a quiet day as it was spent during our first weeks at Rancho del Monte, but there are a couple of other grim details I might as well cover now. First of all was the kitchen itself, which was my office, salon, boudoir, and prison during the Easter season.

To begin with, it was huge and, while all the appliances were new or fairly recent, they just were not the kind of thing you see advertised in household magazines. The equipment was all professional stuff—regular hotel and restaurant equipment—and of a size and complexity that would terrify an atomic scientist.

First of all there was the stove, which Bill could work like a dream. But all that stove had to do was to take one look at me and it knew it had the upper hand. It was big and black, with six burners and two ovens, each measuring a yard across and each yawning hungrily for a thirty-pound turkey. Then there was a broiler capable of incinerating six very large steaks. Finally there was a large, wide, elevated plateau, just the right height for resting my weary elbow. But I only rested it there once—and very briefly—for it turned out to be a griddle, ideal for bacon and pancakes and hamburgers and just lousy for elbows. The scars have since disappeared.

When we first came out here I didn't know a tsp. from a Tbsp., and to make operations still more difficult, the stove worked on gas, but not the kind of gas I'd been accustomed to. In my days of modest city cookery, the gas came from . . . well, I don't exactly know where it
did
come from, except that every two months Bill sent a small check to Consolidated Edison, Box 138, Cooper Station, New York 3, and that seemed to keep the burners bright. Not so in the mountains around Santa Fe. There our cooking was done by butane gas, which you ordered in thousands of tons or cubic feet or something like that and which was delivered by a big truck with so many menacing warnings as to its inflammability that I forbade everyone on the ranch to smoke until the tank was replenished and the truck well over the mountains. And do you think I ever remembered to reorder gas until the last, pathetic little hiss of it was gone? Of course I didn't. Oh, there was many a chilly meal of cold soup, cold salmon, tossed salad, chilly rolls, ice cream, and tap water owing exclusively to the gas running out. "It's so hot today!" I'd say with an almost hysterical gaiety to the guests. "Why, it's almost
sixty!
So I just thought wouldn't it be
fun
to have a
cold supper!"
Then I'd try to avoid the baleful stares cast at me by guests huddled around the fireplace, dash back to the kitchen, and put through another heart-tending call to the gas service.

But even assuming that the stove liked me, which it
didn't; that the butane gas was perpetually flowing, which
it wasn't; and that I am at home, so to speak, on the
range, which I am
not,
there were other knotty problems
connected with our cuisine. The first of which happened
to be concerned with
where
we were doing the cooking.

Rancho del Monte was situated seven thousand feet
up, lovely for asthma and sinus "sufferers, divine for people
with allergies and respiratory ailments, but rough on
cooks. Read all the recipe books you want and then throw
them away, because nothing cooks in that altitude in the time you expect it to. Water, for example, boils at 182°
instead of 212° F., so it's a brave man who orders a
three-minute egg and
eats
it.

Everything had to be cooked longer than it did at sea
level, or even down two thousand feet in places like
Albuquerque. Cakes were just hopeless, except, oddly
enough, the ones that were made from prepared mixes. A
fourteen-pound roast had to be cooked four and a half
hours to be served rare; one minute less and it was down
right bloody. Two hours were the minimum for a baked
potato and three hours for a pan-roasted one. Nor was
there any cut and dried formula we could use in order to
adjust the cooking time. Different things acted differently in the altitude. Meats were the most dependable and differed the least from downhill cookery. Potatoes and green
vegetables were the most likely to look as though they were
ready to fall apart from the outside, but to be hard, cold,
nasty little pellets on the inside. And as for anything in
volving eggs! Well, back East both Bill and I had been
quite capable of turning out perfectly lovely soufflés—
mountainous and fluffy—simply by mixing them up, pop
ping them into a moderate oven, and forgetting them for forty-five minutes. Not so out here. With that devil-may-
care bravery symbolic of the pioneer woman, I attempted quite a few soufflés during my early, or blindly irrational,
days in the West. None ever got to the table. They either fell as flat as flannel cakes or else they exploded all over
the oven, leaving me with a table of hungry guests and the
alternative of whipping up some grilled cheese sandwiches
or taking everyone out for lunch.

Many was the time I had to capitulate to that vicious old
stove, toss in the towel, wash myself every place that
showed, fluff my hair, change, and guide my flock of raven
ing guests to the station wagon and thence to a good restaurant for lunch or—even more ruinous—for dinner.
It was great fun for everybody, and of course, they got an
elegant meal instead of my burnt offering, but it was murder on the exchequer.

Look at it this way: Rancho del Monte was a first-class
establishment—not de luxe, but first class. Yet the rates
were very low, all things considered. Bill and I charged
between eight dollars and twelve dollars a day, depending
on accommodations, and that included all three meals—first-class meals. So when the stove blew up or ran out of
butane gas or when the main dish wouldn't do at all or overdid itself to a heap of ashes, it meant that the little
hostess had to put on her gloves, smile, make a reservation
at a local eatery—and not a hash wagon, but a first-class
establishment—and pay the check with a wide, white, hos
pitable grin.

I may be dead and forgotten as far as most of Santa Fe is concerned, but I'll always occupy a warm spot in the
hearts of its restaurateurs. Many of them who were poor,
struggling businessmen before our frontal attack on the
West are now fixed for life owing almost exclusively to my
experiments at the stove. And let me tell you, even though I am now poor and they are now rich, there is a certain satisfaction in seeing this headwaiter's new Cadillac, that
chef's daughter going off to college, and knowing that I did
it all in the kitchen of del Monte. It gives one the warm
feeling of a rather down-at-the-heels fairy godmother.

However, let me point out once more that such a prac
tice was absolutely ruinous. The average daily income from
a guest was ten dollars, but if we had to take them all off
to Hotel La Fonda, or the Pink Adobe, or to either of our
good local night clubs—El Nido or the Pink Garter over
in Lamy—or, if the meal I had planned was
really
cata
strophic, off to La Dona Luz in Taos, and buy them a
drink for their patience and understanding and then pick
up the tab, it never came to less than five dollars a head;
usually more. So you can see that many of our business
days ended up in the red, even though we hadn't a vacancy
in the house.

It was after a week of our first influx of guests that I
caught my breath for long enough to sit back and examine
our handiwork with a critical eye. And let me say quite
frankly I didn't like what I saw. It seemed to me we were working too hard at things we shouldn't be doing. We weren't taking care of our guests, we weren't entertaining them or being friends with them, we were simply
providing
for them—and not doing that any too well.

Believe me, I had never been so naive as to expect to be sitting decorously around the lounge in a diaphanous negligee, spouting brittle small-talk, and pouring tea from Bill's family's silver service. But, on the other hand, it had seemed to me that as hostess of the ranch I was expected to be more than a sullen slattern trudging gloomily from bedmaking to dishwashing and snarling at anyone brave enough to say "Good morning."

If I'd ever had any qualms about this venture before we left New York, they had multiplied like rabbits in Santa Fe. Those first people who were brave enough to stay with us were perfectly wonderful. They pitched in cheerfully and helped on the bedmaking, on dusting, on peeling potatoes—on doing all the things they were paying to have done for them. But do you know that while I can remember exactly who they were and where they came from, what they had to eat and where they slept, I can't recall ever having had one minute's conversation with any of them. Instead of the buoyant hostess, I was the household drudge. When the last dish was washed at night I was just able to stagger into the living room, collapse into a chair, and do my level best to keep my black-circled eyes open and muffle huge, convulsive yawns behind hands so rough and red with nails so chipped and broken that they reminded me more of the assembly line in a barbed wire factory than the receiving line at Bergdorf's.

It's awfully hard to
write
a yawn, but if you'd like some idea of my sparkling postprandial conversation, it went, I
think,
something like this:

"Do tell me about your nice ride up in the mountains . . .
(
Yawn
)
. . . Excuse me, the attitude, I mean altitude . . .
(
Head bobs slowly down to chest. I snatch it up sharply, thinking that I've been asleep for hours. I shouldn't have matched it up quite so sharply, either. Terrible crick in neck
)
.
. .
Sorry about that lemon snow tonight. Ho-hum. Do forgive me! . . .
(
Smother another yawn and nearly dislocate jaw doing so
) .
. .Oh, you're just saying that to be polite. I'm afraid it was quite curdled . . .
(
Head sinks slowly again and book slides off lap
)
. . . Well, as you were saying about your apartment in Dallas . . . Sorry, 1 meant Denver . . .
(
Eyes will not focus. Take deep breath, raise head, and stare glassily and inanely at guest, thus giving the impression that I've been on cocaine all day, instead of my hands and knees
) . . .
Do go on with . . .
(
Racking yawn that contorts my whole body
) . . .
Excuse me, interesting story . . .
(
Head sinks lower and lower and I am brought to life only by means of falling off my chair and striking my head sharply on the hearth
) . . .
Ooops! Sorry. Chintz is so slippery!"

By nine I would have limped off to bed, leaving a houseful of guests to entertain themselves as best they could with listless tables of bridge or canasta. Let me say again, those first people weren't just paying guests, they were patron saints, and the fact that some of them came back again for further torture makes me suspect that they were gluttons for punishment or that they couldn't quite believe what had been happening to them and had to try again to make certain.

And things didn't get better, either. They got worse. New guests kept coming, old guests kept staying. The service—as purveyed by me—kept deteriorating. Bill was working every bit as hard as I was, but his was
becoming
work. Out of doors all day long, he grew bronzed and slim and muscular. But woman's work, they say, is never done, and I traipsed from bedmaking to dishwashing to cooking to bed for fifteen hours each day, every day without even stopping to frighten myself in the mirror. It was probably just as well, but the big blow fell one evening when some brand-new guests arrived and I was alone to greet them.