Guestward Ho! (7 page)

"How do you do," I said in what I considered to be my best hostess voice. "I'm
Mrs.
Hooton.
Won't
you come in and join us for sherry?"

They did.

Just as they were seated, in came Bill, fresh from the sun and air.

"Hello," Bill said in his most winning and Western fashion. "I'm Bill Hooton. Can I offer you something to drink?"

"Thank you, young man," the new guest said, "but your mother has already offered us sherry."

There was a silence that could be heard from Santa Fe to Little Rock.

"That's not my mother," Bill gasped. "That's my
wife."

Dinner was late that night. I spent a good half hour at
the dressing table, first cursing the man for thinking that I was Bill's mother, when Bill has all of three years up on
me; then cursing myself for falling into such disrepair as to
make his
faux pas
completely justified (although, to do Bill's own mother justice, she'll look younger ten years from now, than I did that, evening); and finally doing a
little conscientious homework with hairbrush, cold cream,
powder, lipstick, and girdle. However, you can't correct
two months of neglect in two minutes at the mirror. I looked like the Witch of Endor and, what's more, I
felt
like it.

Nobody has ever called me a raving beauty. Men have
managed to see me pass by and still stay on their feet.
Stop me if I'm wrong, but I don't think I've ever been any vainer than—or even as vain as—most other women. I've
always been happy and satisfied to be clean, powdered,
kempt, and to have my underwear nice—and invisible.
Tears would have been in order, but I kept telling myself
that red, swollen eyes would only heighten the character
role I seemed to be playing. Anger came next, but when
I looked at the bristling brows, the frown lines, the down-
turned mouth, that mood was quickly abandoned in the
interests of sex appeal. Then the whole thing struck me as
so funny that I began to laugh and kept on laughing until I rolled off the boudoir stool. It was in that guise—the
jolly, roly-poly,
lovable
old mom, chuckling at her cares—
that I reappeared to a hideously embarrassed and much
chastened guest.

Dinner went off smoothly and I managed to keep awake
and
vivacious, for one of my advanced years, through the
evening. But I hadn't forgotten the mortal insult dealt to
my twenty-seven years. When Bill came tromping out of
the bathroom that night, yawning and groaning and look
ing exactly twenty-one years old, I was giving my long,
lank hair an added two hundred strokes, removing a
month's accumulation of dust, burs, sand, cactus, and, of
all things, a pearl earring.

I fixed him with a beady eye and, still brushing, I said,
"Darling?" in that listen-and-listen-carefully tone.

"Yes, dear?" he yawned.

"We're going to have a new problem," I said.

"Oh; Lord!" Bill said. "What
kind
of a problem?"

"A most unusual and welcome kind of problem," I said.
"A
servant
problem."

It probably sounds awfully lofty to be moaning about the
Servant Problem in a day and age when Annie and Bridget
and Hilda—and not the poor redskins—are the true Van
ishing Americans. But when you're in the business of feed
ing people's faces three times a day, household help
becomes not only a necessity, but a problem of such mag
nitude as to put the Theory of Relativity in the shade.

For those of you who may occasionally have hankered for that neatly uniformed treasure who answers the tele
phone and the door with flawless style, turns out feathery puff paste, and says "Dinner is served, Madam," with
devastating chic, let me offer one word of advice: Don't.

Be happy in your self-contained, servantless houses—
revel
in them!

I can now give you a few simple ground rules for household help, and anybody who's ever been in the paying guest business will back me up.

1.
Ninety-nine per cent of all professional cooks are
crazy or alcoholic or mean, or all three.

2.
No cook has ever
heard
of serving three meals on a Sunday.

3.
No cook has ever seen a kitchen that was large
enough, light enough, well enough equipped—except
the kitchen at the
last
job.

4.
No cook can ever understand why your guests don't
like soggy popovers when Gertrude Lawrence,
George V, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Elinor Glyn
all
adored
them. (And there's no use in pointing out
that all the foregoing celebrities are dead—and prob
ably from soggy popovers.)

5.
All cooks have spent their time exclusively in the service of the exalted and it's quite a step down for them to be in
your
tacky little kitchen.

6.
All cooks look upon all recipes not in their reper
toires with suspicion and/or scorn and serve soggy
popovers instead.

7.
All cooks have Spells, and those Spells occur just be
fore the arrival of twenty guests.

8.
All cooks are a wicked waste of time, money, and
patience.

9.
All cooks are essential.

But at the time we were hiring our first cook I was so
sick of the kitchen that I would have, gladly installed Cali
ban at the stove. By means of every feminine wile short of
drawing a Luger on him I had convinced Bill that at least
one extra pair of hands would be needed during the busy
summer season, and it was with high heart that we set off
for a domestic employment agency in Albuquerque.

Not being experienced in the hirings and firings of more
than a one-afternoon-a-week charwoman, I was a bit un
easy about interviewing, but I asked myself what Mother
would have done and followed suit. We got ourselves gus
sied up as the prosperous little suburban couple—Bill
looking as Madison Avenue as possible in a city suit and
low heels, and I looking as day-of-shopping-in-town as my Junior League sister-in-law in navy blue and
high
heels.

"Bill," I kept saying, as the station wagon bounced
down the highway to Albuquerque, "it's going to be just wonderful. We'll get this marvelous cook and just take her under our wing as one of the family. She'll be just like our
old Minnie. Why, Minnie was with my family for almost
fifty years. She started out at Grandma Fargo's old house
on Wellington Street in Chicago. Then when Mother mar
ried Daddy, Minnie went right along, too. She raised Susan
and Joan and Jerry and me, and if she were still alive she'd be out on the ranch with us right now."

"Or like our Lula," Bill said. "She was really excep
tional. Nobody ever knew how old she was, but I do know
she was born in slavery. Yet she came up to Indiana and
got a job with my mother, raised all of us, cooked, taught herself to read and write, and when she died we felt much
worse about it than we did about a lot of our relatives. In
fact, she's buried right along with the rest of us, because
she really
was
more a part of the family than just an em
ployee."

"Well, that's what we're going to find today," I said
staunchly, "someone
we
love who will love
us
and just stay
and stay and stay and
stay."

At the door of the agency I said a silent prayer, drew my
clean white gloves up to the elbow, blew a beetle off my veil, arranged my face into what I considered to be a gra
cious matron expression, and swept in.

The place was empty except for a man with a horrid
cigar.

"How do you do," I said, "I am . . ."

"Siddown," the man said out of the nonsmoking corner
of his mouth. "I'll call you when I'm ready."

We sat, somewhat dismayed. Unaccustomed as I was to engaging retinues of servants, I
had
expected a somewhat
more effusive greeting. Eventually we were summoned to
his battered desk where, with a grunt, he gestured us into
a couple of uncomfortable chairs.

"Name?" he said with a grunt.

"Hooton," Bill said with bell-like clarity.

"H-O-O-T-E-N?" the man said, scratching away with
his pen.

"No," Bill said. "Three O's."

"Oh, I get it:, H-O-O-O-T-E-N. That's sure a screwy way to spell it."

We let the matter drop there.

"Married?"

“Yes," I said distinctly, even though I didn't see what
business it was of his.

"A couple, then?"

"Well, We'd thought just a cook, but of course a couple
would be perfect," I said. Then I tuned out long enough
to indulge in a roseate little dream of life with a couple—
there
He'd
be, impeccable in white jacket, serving drinks
and
canapés,
circling the dinner table (unlike Curly) with
silent perfection, pressing Bill's suits, and driving me wherever I wanted to go and whenever;
She'd
be dishing
up superb meals, dusting, arranging flowers, making beds,
and pressing knife-edged pleats in every stitch I owned.
And where would I be? Right on the chaise longue!

"You say yuh been doin' ranch work, sister?" the man
said.

I came right down to earth. "Nothing else but,
brother,"
I said.

"Then you know all about kitchen work, I s'pose?"

"Everything
about it, more's the pity," I said. "That's why we want to hire . . ."

"Yuh done chambermaid work?"

"It seems as though I've done nothing else," I said.

Then he turned to Bill. "An' you—you bin drivin' and
doih' outside work an' takin' care o' horses an' all that stuff?"

"Oh, yes," Bill said. "In fact, so much so that we
thought we'd come to you and see if we could get some
sort of. . ."

"How long yuh bin workin' on ranches?"

"About a month," Bill said.

"But it seems
much
longer," I added with a winning
smile.

"That ain't much experience, folks. But I think maybe I kin place yuh at the Brush Ranch up around Santa Fe or . . ."

"But they're competitors of ours," Bill murmured.

The man went right on: ". . . er else with a crazy pair
of kids from Noo York who's taken over Miz Huntin
house's ranch. They oughta be needin' some help, if they
ain't dead by now."

"Well, they
ain't
dead by now," I bellowed. "But they're
pretty damned close to it!
We
happen to be that crazy pair
of kids from New York and we can do just fine without
any help from the likes of
you!"
Sweeping an imaginary
sable cape around me, I got up and marched out of his
office, trying to look as much like the
grande dame
and as
little like the tweeny as possible.

From the classified section of the Albuquerque tele
phone directory we located another agency where a brisk,
efficient woman, wearing a suit that cost about half again
as much as mine, took us over the hurdles of domestic
employment with breezy dispatch.

Yes, she had all sorts of help. Yes, she could send us
experienced cooks, waiters, waitresses, chambermaids, bellmen, bartenders—almost anything we wanted. Did we need
a lifeguard for the pool? Did we have any preference as to sex, size, and color? No, there'd be no waiting. Oh, mercy, there were absolute
throngs
of perfectly trained
servants waiting to be interviewed in the next room. We
could undoubtedly pick out just what we wanted and take
it right home with us—cash and carry.

I thought she was having hallucinations—or that I was—but then she explained that the Arizona season was over and that lots of experienced help regularly showed up for the New Mexico season. That suited us right down to the ground. She swung open a door and there was a perfect
harem of household help, its collective hands folded in its collective lap.

Like all other women, I pride myself on my infallible
intuition, and it
is
infallible in that it works exclusively in reverse gear. Put a pickpocket, an arsonist, a second-story
man, or a dope pusher into a room with five thousand
solid citizens and I'll go straight to the culprit and select
him as the one honest man in the whole bunch. But do
you think I'll ever admit it at the time I'm doing the choos
ing? Not on your tintype!

"How about that one?" Bill muttered, pointing to a
trim-looking woman of about thirty.

"Uh-uh," I breathed, "she's too crisp and efficient-look
ing. She'd be like having a machine in the kitchen. She
doesn't look quite
folksy
enough for a ranch."

"Or those two?" Bill whispered, indicating the most
British-looking pair I've ever seen.

"Nope, there again—too formal for a ranch. You'd
never be able to get near them and I really do aim to wind
up with one of those jolly, over-upholstered women like
Minnie."

Bill nodded to a yellow-haired Scandinavian couple. She
was
overstuffed. "Do you think, maybe, those . . ."

"Bill!" I gasped. "Just
look!
Aren't those two
perfect?"

So, like a homing pigeon, I fluttered down a row of
flawless servants and fit upon Buck and Evangeline. She cooked, and he—well, he was just as handy as a pocket in
a shirt. They'd worked in hundreds of places. Too many, I
should have realized, to have had a tenure of more than a month in any one of them. And reasonable! Oh my, but
weren't they inexpensive! Cheaper, as a matter of fact, than
we had expected only one servant to be.

And charming! Evangeline, who did the talking, almost
bowled us over with her sunny nature. Nothing she liked to do better than cook for hungry folks! Her pastry just
melted in your mouth! Her sweetbreads amandine, her
truffled grouse, her squab pâté, her filet of sole Marguery,
her creme brûlée—all were so good that she just didn't know
which
was the best. Oh, she adored to run up a baked alaska and to make her own ice cream and there
was no task she preferred above getting together a rich
afternoon tea with lots of crisp pastry swimming in drawn
butter. Oh, and they were
wild
about ranch life and . . . Well, we put them in the station wagon right then and there.

There were vague signs of discontent and hypochondria
on the part of Evangeline all the way home.

"I get a little carsick, Mr. Hooton," she said, turning quite pale. "Could we take another road?"

"I don't believe there
is
another road, Evangeline," Bill
said.

"All my family got carsick, too," Evangeline said. "Mama and Papa and Uncle Gus. And my Granny was
so carsick that. . ." From Albuquerque to Santa Fe Evan
geline regaled us with the nausea of her forefathers, carry
ing the family failing of carsickness back to the invention
of the wheel. By the time we reached the Plaza in Santa
Fe,
I
was a little carsick just from hearing about it and
feeling queasy enough to do something about it. So we
stopped at a drugstore and I went in for a quick Alka-
Seltzer. Buck got out of the car a bit behind me and kept mumbling things about having to buy shoelaces. But just
as I was going into the druggist's I caught a glimpse of him
scooting into the saloon next door, which seemed an un
usual place to look for shoelaces.