Guestward Ho! (8 page)

"Mighty dusty out on these roads," Evangeline said, coughing dramatically. "It's very bad for my asthma. As
thma just
runs
in our family. Mama died of it in '32 and
poor Papa . . ."

I began gasping and coughing so loudly that I couldn't
hear the rest of her respiratory monologue.

We should have been on to them right away, but we were much younger in 1953.

Once home, I showed them their room, introduced them
to Curly and the kitchen, got out of my hot girdle, and
headed straight for the chaise—but not for longue, if you'll pardon an unpardonable pun.

Evangeline
was
a hypochondriac and Buck a drunk. Al
though he did wax the tables to such a sheen that every dish skated right off onto the floor, he didn't do anything
else and he also managed to do nothing so slowly that I
was nearly driven out of my mind just
watching
him. As
for Evangeline, I believe that her mother was frightened by a medical student. Every morning she awoke with a
new disease, in alphabetical order. We started out with
anthrax, bubonic plague, cancer, dandruff, epilepsy, and
so on. On the twenty-sixth day Evangeline got Zulu fever,
Buck got drunk, and they both got the boot.

I
got into my girdle again and went back to the agency.

Next came Clytie.

Clytie was flighty. She flew right off to a new job at
Bishop's Lodge, thence to Hotel La Fonda, thence to El
Gancho. After that I lost track of her.

After that came James B. Smith, with not one, but
two
wives.

Then there were Delphine, a religious fanatic; Maude
and Claud; Astrid; Crazy Kate—well, I'm getting ahead of the story.

Anyhow, at last we had a wrangler in the corral, a couple in the kitchen, guests in half the bedrooms, and hope in our hearts. (And not a brain in our heads, I can
tell you from the wisdom of hindsight.) June was in sight.
Every mail brought inquiries, or, better, reservations, and,
as far as I was concerned, we were open for the season.

I’ve talked so far, it seems, only about the problems of Rancho del Monte and none of the pleasures. And even though I found those first months of running the ranch a
supreme pain in the head, arms, back, and knees, both
Bill and I drew an enormous amount of satisfaction and
pleasure from our guests.

There had been people like the Binders who had resolutely shut their eyes to the horrible mistakes we were
making and people like the Easter crowd who had pitched right in and helped make beds and dust the stairs and peel potatoes when they should have been waited on hand and
foot. A Mr. Tom Power from Minneapolis even found
some old lumber lying about and made an enormous bar
becue table for us that we still love and cherish and use.
And none of these people actually had to do anything but
lie in bed, complain, and drive on to a better-organized es
tablishment run by a couple who knew what they were
doing.

And
why
did they help us? Well, it wasn't because of
my peaches and cream complexion or that I scintillated
with charm—which I certainly did not! They just did it because they were exceptionally nice people. In fact, Bill
and I have been blessed with such a wonderful succession
of guests—
and only a very few stinkers
—that to list them all would turn my story into a small but rather substantial directory of charming people. It would read like the tele
phone book of Utopia.

And as more nice people came and went, Bill and I
were able to make up an impromptu set of rules and
regulations for the ranch. That sounds terribly forbidding,
doesn't it? But the rules and regulations were very elastic
and they weren't laid down by Bill and me but by the guests themselves. We let them establish the pattern of
life at Rancho del Monte and then we followed suit. That
may have been crazy, but it worked out very well.

Rule Number One was established with the arrival of the
Carroll Binders, when we practically dragged them out of
their rooms and flung them upon the dinner table so that
the meal wouldn't be ruined. The rule was: Treat 'Em Rough. Treat them like your guests and not your cus
tomers—ugly word! If they really are guests, they'll respond correctly. If they're customers, they'd never like
Rancho del Monte anyhow.

We tried old Rule Number One on Bob and Polly Walker and it worked with them, too.

Before the season officially began that first year, a large
and impressive Cadillac from California rolled up to dis
gorge two of the nicest people you ever met anywhere—
the Walkers. They had no reservations, they had never
heard of us, and we had never heard of them. Like fairy
godparents, they simply dropped in from nowhere and stayed on and on for two months.

As far as Bill and I were concerned, the Walkers
couldn't have picked a worse time to arrive because we
were painting the dining room. And as far as the Walkers
were concerned, Bill and I couldn't have picked a worse
time to paint the dining room because they were arriving—
and they were arriving sick. While motoring around the
Southwest, Bob Walker had come down with pneumonia,
a severe case of it, in one of those unheard-of little towns
that really seemed like the end of the world. It had been
days before Polly Walker could get to a real doctor for her—husband and Bob had had to make do with an
osteopath. He'd nearly died, and just when they thought
they'd found a place where he could recuperate in the high, dry sunlight, the main floor of Rancho del Monte
was a mare's nest of ladders, buckets, scaffolds, and drop
cloths, damp and pungent with wet paint.

If
I
had been in their Cadillac, I'd have driven right on
to St. Vincent's Hospital in Santa Fe, called for an oxygen
tent, and crawled in. But the Walkers were made of sterner
stuff. Until the dining room was finished they took their meals with us at a card table in front of the fireplace and claimed that it was a picnic, even if everything did taste faintly of turpentine. When new draperies went up
they oh-ed and ah-ed over them as though they had
selected just that pattern to live with for the rest of their
lives.

Polly and Bob were in their sixties with grown children
and grandchildren and they made Bill and me feel just
as though we were a part of their large and happy family
and, conversely, I guess they felt that they were a part
of ours. They certainly would have been welcome addi
tions. In fact, they even took over the management of Rancho del Monte for a couple of days while Bill and I
went to Juarez to do some shopping.

Maybe I should tell you
why
we went to Juarez, which
is just across the border in regular, or
old,
Mexico.

The laws in New Mexico are very stringent, as they
should be, about how dishes are washed in hotels and
restaurants. If you ever spot a greasy plate or a lipsticky
cup in the state, you can rest assured that the inspector isn't far behind and that a summons will be slapped on the restaurant within the next forty-eight hours. So all
public eating places have automatic dishwashers. And I
don't mean those pretty pastel dishwashers you see ad
vertised in the magazines, where a gorgeous model wear
ing a chiffon apron and an inane smile stands in the
third position of ballet admiring her pale hands. I mean a rough-and-tumble, hell-for-leather, professional automatic
dishwasher, bristling with gauges and dials and thermome
ters and heating units and safety valves. Par for rinsing in
ours was 220° F.

Now, one of my weaknesses has always been the best
in china, crystal, linen, and silver. (That is to say, it
used
to be a weakness and a pretty fatal one at that.) I'd rather
drink out of a toilet bowl than one of those heavy crockery
cups sold to the restaurant trade because they are prac
tically indestructible. Naturally, Rancho del Monte had
a full gross of heavy restaurant ware, but
I
was ever so much smarter than Bess Huntinghouse.
Me
serve guests
on hash-house plates? Not on your life! So as soon as I
got my own china unpacked—and what a lot there used to be!—I started swanking with Wedgwood and Spode and
Limoges at every meal.

Mother always told me: "Barbara, you only have to
touch
Limoges for it to chip." Mother was wrong. You
don't have to touch Limoges at all; just stare at it hard and it disintegrates before your very eyes. But in spite
of the manhandling my good china got from Curly and
Buck and Evangeline, the only casualty was a butter plate—
until the night I decided to take matters into my own
hands.

"I wouldn't touch that dishwashing machine if I were
you," Bill said, eyeing the monster suspiciously.

"Nonsense," I said, very much the little
Hausfrau.
"Curly's been mending fences all day and it's silly to leave
this stack of sticky dishes until tomorrow morning when Buck and Evangeline get back." I can't think why I was feeling so chipper that night, but I was using one of those irritatingly bright cooking-school voices and even hum
ming. Bill gave me one of those who-do-you-think-you're-
kidding looks and asked if I'd ever tried to use the machine.

"Oh,
lots
of times!" I said. That wasn't exactly true.
The dishwasher and I had met before, but never without a
chaperone. "It's perfectly simple! Any
fool
could run it."

"Have it your way," Bill said and sauntered out of the kitchen.

I started stacking my Limoges china into the maw of the dishwasher. I tossed in the soap, set all the gadgets
the way I thought they should be set, turned up the heat
ing unit full tilt, let the water gush in, closed the top, and
let her rip.

Then I sat down at the kitchen table to read the day's
mail. There was an invitation to a wedding in New York,
an announcement of a one-man show at the Associated
American Artists gallery, a summons from a Madison
Avenue hairdresser
urging
me to do something about my dry scalp before the depredations of the Newport season
made me look any worse, and a card from a dress shop
I'd never been able to afford begging me to come in and
just rob them blind at their end-of-the-season clearance. Since distance seemed to preclude my accepting any of
these offers, I turned to the letters. There was one from
an old school friend who had married the U.S. Mint. Her
problem was that she was torn between the exertion of
packing a trunk to spend the summer in Italy and the
ennui of simply pigging it in Maine. "Too bad about her!"
I grumbled. Then I turned to a long letter from my sister-in-law who said that she, too, was contemplating Europe—
Paris especially—and why didn't Bill and I just pick up
stakes and come with her.

I was about to make a rude noise when I became con
scious of the fact that the
automatic dishwasher was making a much ruder and noisier noise. "You'd think they'd perfect these contraptions so that they'd run a little more
quietly," I grumbled. Then I turned to a letter from my
mother, which contained the disquieting news she was planning to visit Bill and me in our "mud hut." (Mother simply
cannot
understand about adobe.) After that first
bombshell there was a lot of absorbing news about my
sisters and their babies and my brother in the Army, but I found it increasingly hard to concentrate.

Then Bill came pounding out to the kitchen and shouted,
"Barbara! Do something about that dishwasher! It's shak
ing the whole house down!"

"Oh, good Lord!" I cried, jumping up.

The machine was so hot that Bill could hardly touch it, but he finally got it disconnected and silenced. When
it was cool enough to take the top off the two of us looked
in. It was a ghastly sight.

I can't tell you just exactly what
had
happened, but
I’d done something foolish about the water. It had all
drained out and what was left of my Limoges china could,
be put through a sieve. If anyone wants any powdered
Limoges, just ask me. I've got boxes of it.

Anyhow, we were gone from the ranch for two days,
leaving the Walkers in the unique position of resident-manager-guests. We did it without a qualm, and the Walk
ers accepted it in the same way. In fact, we were all the
way into Mexico before I realized with a startled little
giggle that Bill and I had acted almost like an eccentric
comedy team in a light farce who had invited a respectable
older couple to dinner and then walked out on them,
saying, "You'll find chops in the freezer and all the mak
ings of an angel food cake in the pantry. If you want any
thing, just ask the maid. There's plenty of coffee at the A & P and if Babikins starts screaming in the nursery,
just run up and diaper him. We're off to the Stork Club!"

Two days later we got back with some of the least
hideous possible Mexican earthenware—nothing that said
Souvenir de Mejico
—and some tin candlesticks. (Please
don't worry; it all looks nice in the Southwest, albeit
ghastly elsewhere.) All was serene. Polly and Bob greeted
us just as though it were the most natural thing in the
world for the management to run off and leave the guests in charge. Polly had ordered a marvelous dinner (by this
time Evangeline had worked up to undulant fever in her
alphabet of imaginary ailments, but she
could
cook well)
and had run the ranch far more efficiently than I ever
had. She had even accepted reservations from two women who used to visit when Bess Huntinghouse was running
Rancho del Monte and had rooms prepared for their arrival.

It was. here that we learned something else about the
business and that concerns the personality of a guest ranch. I don't know why it came as such a surprise, but it did.

Bill and I both felt a little apprehensive about enter
taining people who had been Bess's guests before, almost
like the second wife of a widower about to be inspected by
the first wife's bridesmaids. Still, we were running the place
pretty much as Bess had, so we didn't feel too upset—until
we met the two old-timers. Everything went well, and yet
it didn't. There was nothing wrong with them; in fact,
they were terribly nice. There was nothing wrong with us.
I was a little lady, if I do say so myself. Yet it just didn't
go.
The women were like cats in a strange house, unable
to light anywhere. They obviously preferred the rooms as
Bess had arranged them, the meals as Bess had planned
them, the other guests who had been there under Bess's
managership. We did all the things Bess had done for
them—picnics up in the hills, drives to Spanish villages,
and rides—yet we failed. Conversations were hollowly
vivacious, embarrassingly one-sided, or so loaded with
lulls that they slumped off into dead silence.