Guestward Ho! (11 page)

Junior circumnavigated the house twice, with Curly and
me chasing him and Murphy chasing us and the horses
coining nearer and nearer. But I guess Junior was getting
a little bored with that dull old gravelly driveway, because
the third time around he didn't stick to the road. Instead,
he swung sharply to the right and shot up the hill behind
the house where there wasn't any road at all. Horrified,
I saw his car leap up the hill between his house and the
pump house. The snapping and splintering of our trees
was almost deafening, and he'd started a minor landslide.
Murphy, in the station wagon, was in hot pursuit, charging
right up the hill behind Junior.

Rather selfishly, I yelled: "Don't take our car up that hill! You'll . . ."

My warning was drowned out by the loudest splash I've
ever heard.

"Oh, dear," I whispered to nobody at all, "the swim
ming pool!"

I raced up the hill just in time to see Junior float to the surface, a little like Vera Zorina in the
Goldwyn Follies.
Down in the bottom of our lovely turquoise swimming pool was the golden Jaguar sending up a perfect cascade
of bubbles.

Absolutely spellbound, I just stood there at the edge
of the pool and watched a perfectly fascinating succession
of things rise to the surface: Junior first, then a road map,
then a posture pillow, then some soggy festoons of Kleenex,
a pack of Lucky Strikes, a book of Rancho del Monte
matches, and finally the receipt for Junior's gin. The dam
age might have been irreparable, but it
looked
awfully
funny. I let out a little trial giggle, and by the time every
one else had raced up to the pool I was rocking with
laughter, the tears rolling down my cheeks.

It took a crew of wreckers two days to believe anybody
had got a car up that hill and then down into the swim
ming pool. "An optical illusion," the garagemen kept say
ing as they peered down through the opalescent pools of
floating oil to see the Jaguar glittering six feet underwater.
It took another two days to drain the pool, remove the car, get it down off the hill, and towed away. It took
another two days to get the pool and the wall around it
repaired. And it took another two days to get the pool
refilled. Poor Junior! By then he was wrung out, dried out,
and thrown out—back again, I suppose, in some gloomy
institution.

I felt awfully sorry for Junior, as I said to his law firm
in my letter of farewell, but not sorry enough to keep him
around for another minute. Rancho del Monte, I wrote
rather archly, was not the Keeley cure. Then I clipped all
the repair bills to my letter and mailed it off.

I'd started the season with a splash, all right. Bill says
it's just my imagination, but every time I go swimming I
keep tasting gin and ethyl.

The house was clean, the pool was repaired, reservations were coming in, Buck and Evangeline had been replaced, and we were open for the season. On top of that, Mother was somewhere between leafy Evanston and Santa Fe, bent on her tour of inspection and moving my way just as fast as my father was willing to drive. Don't think that
that
didn't put us on edge. You can always brazen it out with a total stranger, but when Mother knows best and has told you so for a good many years there's no bluffing with a scorched soup, a sullen cook, or even a crooked seam. We were thankful that Junior, Murphy, and the Jaguar were all being patched up in faraway places. And I was
prayerfully
thankful there were guests in the house and that it wasn't the yawning, empty cavern it had been before Easter. The Walkers were still with us. Dot Field was on from New York and, at seventy, was putting all the men to shame with her riding and all the women to shame with her figure. In fact, just seeing Dot dash about the place in the saddle or in her pretty Capezio slippers gave me the courage to diet and ride.

I had had some quasi lessons on horseback during my dim Evanston girlhood, but they had largely involved jogging sedately around a flat ring in an English saddle while the master said rude things about my back, neck, elbows, knees, heels, and what he called my "sloppy seat"—a term that wounded me to the quick until his exact meaning was explained. With Dot and Curly and Bill and a new blue denim riding habit to egg me on, I started out in a gingerly fashion but without much confidence. I kept saying I didn't want to fall off and break an arm—a logical enough statement, it seemed to me—and Curly kept saying: "There never was a hoss that couldn't be rode or a cowboy that couldn't be throwed." I greeted this witty thrust with tinselly laughter for the first ten or twelve times and after that I just muttered, "Oh, pipe down," said.a little prayer, and trotted off.

In fact, I was on horseback and looking suitably breeze-tossed and outdoorsy when Mother and Dad drove around the bend—much earlier than expected. Through some extraordinary stroke of good luck, I was able to put the horse in neutral, get off without falling off, and rush into my mother's arms.

After all the hugs and kisses and my-how-well-you-looks, Mother got right down to business. "Now, I want to
see
this place, Barbara," she said. Then she took my arm and started off on a tour of inspection with the thoroughness of a Housing Loan inspector. My heart was in my mouth, but it needn't have been.

"Why, Barbara!" Mother cried. "It's
nice!"
She cast an eagle eye onto the upholstery. "Why, yes, dear," she said, "it's really
quite
nice!" Then a squint into the corners for dust. "Why, Barbara, it's really
lovely!"
She checked to see that all twelve bathrooms were indoor ones. "Why, you silly girl, you told me it was a
mud
house. Daddy and I were so worried."

"It
is
a mud house, Mother," I said. Then I went patiently into the straw and mud make-up of adobe bricks, but I don't think she believed a word of it.

"Yes, it's nice.
Isn't
it nice, Harlan?" she asked my father. "Not entirely filled, though, is it, dear?" Mother asked darkly. My mother can smell a deficit from twenty miles off.

"Well, it's going to be," I said rather too staunchly. "We're expecting droves of guests right away." In all honesty, we were expecting some, but not right away. However, my words proved to be prophetic. No sooner were they out of my mouth than the Guy Houstons from Wichita and a Mrs. Hooper from Marblehead, Massachusetts, roared up the drive.
"See?"
I said to Mother, pretending I'd expected them all along. Exit deficit; enter profit.

Mrs. Hooper was a widow who had kicked over the traces of New England, and instead of sitting around in a damp place like Marblehead feeling sorry for herself, she'd taken to traveling, painting, and cooking and had
managed to master all three pastimes as elegantly and
exotically as possible. She spoke of herself almost exclu
sively as "Ma Hoops" and loved to dance the authentic Hawaiian hula singing her own accompaniment. She had
met the Houstons in Honolulu the year before and the
three of them had become steadfast traveling companions.
And I must say that with Ma Hoops playing the Massa
chusetts comedienne and Guy and Helen Houston as
straight men, they were as entertaining a trio as the Marx
Brothers.

Things were looking up, the ranch was half full, and
everybody adored everybody else; so much so that when
my parents pushed off for California, the Houstons and
Ma Hoops decided to throw a party in their honor. That
was the day—needless to say—that another cook walked
out, leaving me flat. But even this catastrophe turned into
a blessing because Ma Hoops tucked up her sleeves and
cooked the whole dinner by herself. It was a Polynesian
meal she had been taught in the Islands, and both my life
and my waistline have been richer and fuller ever since
for having learned the recipe. But since Ma Hoops made
no secret of it, neither will I. Here it is:

TWO PORK CHOPS PER PERSON, CUT MEDIUM THICK. THIS RECIPE IS ON THE BASIS OF SIXTEEN CHOPS.

Arrange chops in roaster. Sprinkle over them 1 cup of
brown sugar. Add 1 1/2 bottles of soy sauce, 1/2 cup wine
vinegar, 1/2
cup combined sweet fruit juices and pickled
juices. Cook in 225-degree oven for 1 hour, covered. Then
for 1/2
hour in fast oven.

To make gravy, pour off pork fat and thicken with corn
starch.

The vegetables used are onions (white), celery, and bell
peppers. Cut all of these into fairly large pieces. Cook in
very little water in a covered pan. The onions and celery
should cook for fifteen minutes and the peppers for five
to seven minutes. Add butter, pepper, and soy sauce to
flavor.

This is a, meal in one, and everything is served at the same time. While you are cooking the chops and vege
tables, cook enough rice for, in this case, 8 people. Ar
range a fruit platter of canned apricots, peaches, pears, and
pineapple. (Fresh pineapple is, even better.) Be sure to
include some kumquats, too. Put the chops on a
bed of
rice, dish up the vegetables and the gravy, and you're ready
to eat.

And if you have any leftover rice, vegetables, and meat,
put them in a pot with a bouillon cube the next day, and
you have a marvelous soup.

It was something of a triumph for Bill and me when
Mother left, not only with a slight hangover from the
Houston-Hooper party, but with the firm conviction that
Bill and I still had all our faculties and a couple of dollars
in the bank. "Yes, Barbara, it's really
nice,"
were her parting words.

Well, that set me up so much I decided to go hog-wild
on hiring help for the summer season. That was when James B. Smith and his wives came into our lives and also when we experimented with college vacation help.

From Colorado came two lovely young things named
Nan McKenzie and Sue Blair. Nan was tall and slim and
blonde and Sue was tall and slim and dark. Then, to help
Curly in the corral, we got Dick Clark, who was tall and
slim and redheaded. Although none of the kids had ever
worked at much of anything before, except Dick who
knew his horses, they were all eager—even when it came
to being initiated into the mysteries of scouring bathrooms and scrubbing floors.

And do you think I stopped there? No, indeedie! I got
a gardener too. Bess Huntinghouse had extensive gardens—
vegetable, flower, and fruit—and although I have the
original Brown Thumb I decided that we'd have gardens,
too. Therefore Bill and I hired Joe Vigil from the Tesuque Indian Reservation to come in for two days a
week and do things like irrigating and mulching.

So at the opening of the season we had James B.
Smith, with a wife yet to appear; Curly; Nan; Sue; Dick;
and Joe. There was just one thing we didn't have—guests.
No, sir, not a one. The Walkers had left, my parents
were gone, then Guy Houston went, and finally his wife
and Ma Hoops. Helen Houston left us in a perpendicular
position rather than a horizontal one. But let me tell
you, it was a close call, because everyone—everyone but
Bill, that is—thought poor Helen was dying.

Next to a murder, there's nothing worse for a hotel
than a death—don't ask me why, that's just the way it is.
Other guests get edgy and superstitious and ill at ease and
can't wait to move out. The word gets around fast. Reser
vations are cancelled so fast you'd think no one had
ever
died before. The place overflows with all sorts of grim
unpleasant men on official business with the remains. The staff and all the guests are asked endless routine
questions they can't possibly answer until the sadness of
death is made so grisly that the survivors absolutely
envy
the corpse. Luckily, it's never happened at Rancho del
Monte but, as I kept saying to myself that night, if Helen
Houston had died, then I wanted to die, too.

We were all in bed when Ma Hoops came streaking into our room, her peignoir billowing out behind her.
"You'd better come upstairs," she said. "I think Helen
Houston is dying." Before you could say
knife
I was out of bed and clattering up the stairs behind Ma Hoops, with
my
peignoir billowing out behind
me
and Bill at my heels.

There Helen lay, propped up on pillows, her face chalk white, gasping for breath. With what strength she had left
she panted out painfully, "I . . . I don't know what it is . . . I think I'm having a h-heart attack . . . I—I'm dying."

And I hadn't the slightest doubt that she was.
"I'll call the doctor right away!" I cried and raced down to the telephone, full of determination but devoid of hope. But it was so late and the distances were so great I was certain the doctor could never get to the ranch in time to save poor Helen.

By that time everybody was awake and the throng of
people in pajamas and nightgowns around the telephone
was so thick I could scarcely get through. Everyone was
trying to call a doctor—and everyone had a different
doctor in mind. I broke through and called our own Dr.
Hauser, who is a wonder, but I had no belief that he'd ever arrive in time to do much more than pronounce Mrs. Houston dead.

It was one of those times when a woman needs her m
ate and mine was nowhere to be found, but after I had
dispersed the mob scene at the telephone and tried my best to send all the staff back to bed, I ran head on into Bill at
Helen's door.

"Oh,
there
you are," I gasped. "You've got to help me
until the doctor comes. We
must
do something."

"I've already done it," Bill said.

I looked into the room and there was Helen's bed
completely covered by a large and oddly shaped blanket.

"Oh, Bill," I breathed, "you don't mean that she's already . . . that she's dead?"

"Certainly she's not dead," Bill said. "She has croup—
at least, I
think
she has croup—and I've made a kind of tent for her."

"Croup?"
I said. "Why, nobody ever has croup except
tiny little children!"

"Well, that's what
I
think Helen has."

I marched into the room. There was a nasty odor of
tincture of benzoin and the sound of steam hissing from
under Bill's Rube Goldberg-style tent.

"Bill!" I said, "you
can't!
We may be
killing
her this
way, trapped under all those blankets with all that stink
and steam. Who do you think you are, Dr. Kildare?"

"
I
say she has croup," Bill said steadfastly.

Cautiously, I picked up the edge of the blanket tent and peered in. Bill had devised a croup kettle from an
old coffee urn and it was hissing and sizzling away like mad. The odor was terrific. And there wasn't a sound out
of Helen.

I wondered whether Bill would be held for murder or only manslaughter and I speculated as to just how old I'd
be when he was sprung from the state prison. Then I
looked at Helen and she smiled wanly. At least she was
still alive. But for how long?

For an hour we sat there, with Bill making minor—and I felt fatal—rearrangements with his homemade
Turkish bath. By the end of that time there was no more noise from Helen. We looked again and she lay there
peacefully. Dead, I thought. Actually, she was asleep.

It has often been said of Bill that he has more courage than talent. This was a case in point. The doctor finally
arrived. His diagnosis: Croup.

After Helen Houston was cured and preparing to leave,
we all joked about the evening at great length. She'd
never forget Rancho del Monte, she said, because it was
the only place she'd ever visited where she occupied a tent in a room.