Guestward Ho! (16 page)

"At
last!"
I said, pirouetting into the lounge and col
lapsing on the sofa where Bill was still fitting the puzzle
together. "Three glorious days without having either of
les
girlies around my neck. No more timetables, no more
sleazy slacks and fiesta dresses dogging my footsteps from
dawn till dark! Ecstasy!"

"You're not being fair to her, Barbara," Bill said stuff
ily. "I thought she looked very striking as they set out
this morning." (Oh, but I was thankful for those broken
bones.)

"Striking?
She was enough to scare a vulture away. She
looked exactly like . . ."

"Barbara," Bill said grandly, "it just isn't like you to be
so prejudiced against another woman. Now, I'll admit that
Miss Mouse is a terrible bore and certainly no looker, but
that other one has a lot of spirit—just good, healthy, animal spirits."

"Indeed?" I said. I plunked a piece into the corner of his puzzle, gave him a black look, and went off to the pantry for some spirits of my own.

That night I felt especially gay. I had a lot of sidecars
and what seemed to me the best dinner I'd ever eaten. I
talked to anyone I felt like talking to about any subject
under the sun. We square-danced—which I don't usually
like to do very much—and I fell into bed about midnight
feeling like a debutante.

But my freedom was short-lived. At eight o'clock the
following morning the whole pack trip reappeared, suddenly and sullenly. Harry looked like a thundercloud and
went straight off to the corral. Miss Mouse came into the house in a perfect trance and drifted off to her room without seeming to notice anybody. The two men of the party
came in looking confused and embarrassed, while their
wives tried in vain to conceal their expressions of feline
amusement.

The last one to come in was Miss Ladydog. How did
she look? Different, certainly, but I can't quite describe it.
First of all, she was a good deal less "done up" than
usual. The super paint job that had attracted so many admiring glances from the men looked as though it had
been applied hastily in the pitch dark—as it probably h
ad—so that, while the result was still overwhelming, it
just wasn't the effect she must have had in mind. The
glossy, brilliantined black bob was a trifle disheveled, too,
and looked as if there might have been a few burs nestled in it—as there also probably were. But the greatest differ
ence was her carriage and her expression. She no longer
switched and twitched like a Grade B show girl; instead,
she sort of glided in as though her feet hadn't quite touched
the ground. And as for her face, it looked kind of humble and softened, as though she were about to go into a cata
leptic seizure.

"Good morning," I said with a cheer I didn't feel.

Miss Ladydog, always one to get a half nelson on any
conversational opening, didn't say anything. As one struck
deaf, she floated up the stairway and disappeared from
view.

Bill, who was seated before the jigsaw puzzle, was just
as perplexed as I was.

"What do you suppose has happened?" I said.

"How should
I
know, Barbara?
Ask
somebody."

Well, there wasn't anybody around to ask. The whole pack trip had disappeared into its individual rooms. So I
ordered breakfast to be made for all of our unexpected
adventurers and waited impatiently for someone to show
up who could tell us the news. At last one of the women
came down and I pounced upon her for details.

"Well, my dear, I don't actually
know
what happened," she began, "but in the middle of the night—about three
o'clock in the morning, really—there was this terrible noise and caterwauling and . . ."

That was as far as she got. Just then Harry came in,
dressed in his city suit.

"Mister Bill, Miss Barbara, ma'am," he said, turning
bright red, "I'm quittin'."

"Quitting?"
I said.

"Yes, ma'am," he said, getting still redder.

"But why, Harry?" Bill asked. "You've only been here
a week."

Harry choked and strangled. "I—I'm gettin' married." Then he was so embarrassed as to be absolutely mute.

I
was not.
"Harry!
Don't be such a fool! You're cer
tainly not going to go and let yourself be trapped by that
obvious, scheming little man-chaser who's been after
everything in pants ever since she . . ."

Harry turned magenta and glared at me. "Ma'am, that
ain't true. She's the sweetest, kindest, prettiest girl I ever seen. She's the first person ever loved me an'
I
love her!
We're gonna get married right away an' settle down." It
was the longest—and almost the only—speech Harry had
ever made.

"Settle
down?
With
her?"
I fumed. "That'll be the day!
Why, Harry, you'd be so miserable out in Hollywood. She'd lead you such a dog's life that . . ."

"Miss Barbara," Harry said, squirming, "I don't mean
her
—I mean . . ."

"He means me," a voice said. It was Miss Mouse. She
was standing at the foot of the stairs, carrying her suitcase and dressed like nothing on this earth—she was
wearing a frumpy flowered Georgette dress in shades of
periwinkle, lavender, rose, and pigeon's breast, her slip
peeping out from beneath it. The cameos, the opal brooch,
the necklaces of amber, coral, and jade—all were there.
Harry simply beamed and drank her in adoringly from her
orthopedic sandals to her terrible hairdo as though she were the Botticelli Venus.

I was too stunned to say anything, which was probably
just as well. Bill looked absolutely faint.

The rest of the day seemed to be composed entirely of comings and goings of the station wagon. First of all Dick
drove the bridal couple into town. When he came back,
Miss Ladydog was waiting impatiently on the terrace,
dressed once again in her shocking pink traveling costume
and surrounded by her shocking pink luggage. Hers had
been a quick checkout and highly irregular, but one I was
delighted to handle. Ordinarily, I would have been worried
to have Dick driving off with the Menace, but today
Miss Ladydog was so subdued that I had no fears. She left
without a word to anyone—not even to Bill and Gate,
who had just completed the jigsaw puzzle. The finished
picture, by the way, was a garishly Technicolored horror
of the nineteenth-century school of painting entitled
Virtue's Triumph.

Finally I was able to corner one of the women who had been on the pack trip and get a rather vague and disjointed
account of what had happened. It seems that Miss Lady
dog had been a terror from the very beginning of the trip. She had flirted with Harry every minute of the day. She'd
been unpleasant to the other women and perfectly beastly
poor Miss Mouse, making fun of her clothes and her
job and her accent—not that her own speech would have
won any diction prizes—until Miss Mouse was on the
verge of tears. Both of the older women and even one
of the men suggested tactfully to Miss Ladydog that she
lay off Miss Mouse, but Miss Ladydog paid no attention
and went right on picking at Miss Mouse and flirting
brazenly with Harry, who kept getting redder and redder
and stiller and stiller and grimmer and grimmer.

When the party made camp for the night, everyone
pitched in to help—everyone but Miss Ladydog, needless to say. So while Miss Mouse was scurrying around cook
ing and getting water and opening cans and performing
other equally seductive functions, Miss Ladydog slipped
into full war paint and an especially naked fiesta dress and
moved in for the kill. Apparently she was downright
flagrant during the meal and the rest of the evening. Miss
Mouse was utterly crushed and Harry was so stony that he gave up all attempts at speech.

After that nobody knows exactly what
did
occur. The
next thing that happened was that the whole party was
awakened by a screaming and yelling that nearly started a landslide. There was Harry sitting calmly on a rock
with Miss Ladydog turned over his knee, spanking her for
all he was worth, while she shrieked and Miss Mouse wept
dewily in her sleeping bag. Then Harry asserted himself
still further and announced that they were breaking camp
immediately. That was the end of the pack trip.
But it wasn't quite the end of the story.
The story had a happy ending, but not the perfect
ending. Ideally, Miss Mouse should have turned into a
ravishing swan, hung with sables and beautifully dressed
and living happily ever after in a marble palace with radiant heating. It didn't happen quite that way.

Miss Mouse and Harry came back to visit us more than
a year later accompanied by a beautiful little baby girl.
I looked at Miss Mouse and sighed. She was wearing a
rayon crepe dress, both ruffled and flounced, in a particularly taxing shade of American beauty. She gave the im
pression of wearing two or three cameos and necklaces
made of coral, amber, and jade. Her hair was arranged
in three sausage curls over the forehead, a stiffly lacquered
wave over one temple, and a bird's nest of ringlets at the neck. She was wearing glorified nurses' oxfords in
plum suede and artificial lizard with a modified wedge
sole, a T-strap, and an open toe. Her mouth was still a
perfect Cupid's bow of orange lipstick. Dowdy to the end.

I'd never believed that a three-month-old baby could also be called dowdy, but this one could. Pretty as the
little girl was, her mother had spared neither trouble nor
expense to dress her just as badly as possible in a mass
of slobbered-over pleats and, ruffles writhing with machine-
embroidered rosebuds and machine-made lace.

As for Harry, he had moved Miss Mouse over to Lamy
where he had got a job as foreman on the Santa Fe Railroad. He'd lost a lot of his shyness and talked quite a lot
about the schedule of El Capitan, the appointments of
the Super Chief, the relative merits of Diesel and steam
engines, and told endless anecdotes involving signal towers,
frog switches, and timetables. Miss Mouse babbled hap
pily along with him, blending her timetable past in St.
Louis with her Santa Fe present in Lamy, where she had
become something of a belle, gathering about her a de
voted coterie of railroad men.

Although Bill and I learned a good deal more about
railroads than we cared to know during that afternoon,
we counted it as a happy one and time well spent. No
question about it, Miss Mouse was still dowdy and still a
bore, but she was a
radiant
dowdy bore, and my heart went out to her as she gabbled away about the omnipresent iron horse.

The baby didn't say anything, but I'll bet you a round-
trip ticket to Taos that her first word was "choo-choo.”

After too many cataclysmic events for one season, the first summer settled down to what was more or less pure routine: the house filled to capacity most of the time; the two guest houses filled, thanks to the affectionate under
standing of the Collins family and the Boyer family—our "difficult" Texans. Guests came and went, but it's a relief
to report that they did so quietly, punctually, and unobtrusively. Don Campbell, son and heir of the couple who run Santa Fe Western Wear, took over as head wrangler for the balance of the summer and the staff stayed put. It is true that the new cook, frustrated perhaps because
he and Miss Ladydog had been kept well apart during her
visit, took to yelling and screaming at poor Nan and Sue whenever cakes failed or rolls burned, but after all we'd
gone through so far, a few bellows from the kitchen seemed
comparatively peaceful. Besides, he was a good cook, and
he taught me quite a lot about menus and mass ordering.

I was floored—and I still am—by the quantities of grub twenty-five guests and a household staff of ten
(counting the cook's two children and Bill and me) could
consume in a single day. When we were full to capacity—
I still love to mouth that phrase—breakfast invariably meant more than one pound of coffee just to begin with.
According to commercial restaurant economics, one pound
of coffee produces one hundred cups, but that's the kind of coffee that looks like tea and tastes like bilge. Since I hate bad coffee myself, there was no reason to expect
my guests to like it either. So we squandered by buying the
best coffee and using half again as much as was eco
nomically advisable. Breakfast was a meal—and the
only
meal—when guests could order just about what they
liked. This involved a perpetual inventory of ten dry cereals and two hot ones. It meant batter for hot cakes
and always five dozen eggs, fifty slices of toast, and
seventy-five strips of bacon. At least that's the way it
averaged out. Then there were melons and grapefruit, in
season, and a variety of fruit juices to be kept on hand,
chilled and ready to serve.

A lot of so-called effete New Yorkers insisted, rather
too fervently, that they
never
took more than one slice of
toast and three cups of black coffee at breakfast, but I
noticed that, almost without exception, they broke down
after a couple of days in the mountain air and started
wolfing down the flapjacks like a longshoreman. Still,
breakfast was no real problem. The guests did their own
deciding and all we had to do was provide the food and pay for it.

In fact, I often wished we could serve breakfast three
times a day to ease the strain on me, because at the other
meals there was no choice—other than mine. The food was there and the guests ate it or left it. I'm both proud and happy to say they always ate it, but planning the
menus at once for a full week grew more and more tax
ing, especially with a full house.

Now, when the ranch was comparatively empty, we could size up the guests and ask them quite frankly how
they felt about Mexican dishes or beef Stroganoff or a Polynesian dinner or a peppery hot curry or beef in Bur
gundy, but with a dining room full of people of all ages from all parts of the country, there was no counting votes
or taking chances on offbeat menus. I hate generalities, but
I will advance a few about food.

1. People from the coastal regions of America are,
by and large, more willing to experiment with new or
unusual dishes than those from the inland areas, who still
seem to regard anything with spices, a foreign name, or
sour cream with the darkest suspicion. This applies espe
cially to men.

2. People from Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Cincin
nati, Omaha, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are terrible
snobs about beef.
And they ought to be!
Their beef is
far better than New Mexican beef. Well, actually, it isn't
really
better,
but it's
aged
properly.

After imbedding any number of inlays in steaks of local
origin—the thickness and consistency of a linoleum rug—
Bill had a man-to-man talk with our butcher, ordered a
side of beef, and left it hanging for months, deaf to the
butcher's pleas and to his grim prophecies of ptomaine
poisoning at Rancho del Monte. Then Bill supervised the cutting of what the butcher obviously considered offal.
Instead of toting home a hundred limp steaks cut so thin
that you could read a newspaper through any single slice, Bill arrived with a few perfect beauties, thick, dark red,
streaked with just enough fat, and so deliriously tender
that they could be cut with a fork. Well, the butcher was
certain that we were all headed for the grave—via the
psychiatrist—but when he came out to see real live sane
people actually
eating
this carrion and
enjoying
it without
getting deathly ill, and when he finally agreed reluctantly
to try a tiny slice of steak himself, he got the idea right
away. After that he hung and butchered beef as Bill
ordered it, but even then his heart wasn't really in it.

Just why is it that butchers adore men and hate women?
Butchers are perfectly normal, I'm almost certain of that,
even if they do choose to spend every waking hour in
the company of dead steers, but I didn't get much satis
faction when I asked the question of Bill.

"He just likes me, I guess," Bill said. "He respects my
understanding of meat."

"Yeah?" I asked bitterly, the battle-scarred veteran of
many a chewy chop and leathery slab of liver.

"Well, that's the only reason
I
can discover," Bill said
smugly.

I was able to discover another—and far more con
vincing—reason when the butcher's bill arrived. It de
scribed Bill's delicious, well-hung steaks and roasts as the
"New York cut." (Since the only abattoir in New York
I
ever heard of was replaced years ago by the U.N., this
is pure New Mexican fantasy.) The size of the bill en
lightened me just as much as it frightened me.

The reason butchers like men is this: When a man buys
meat, he buys quality and quality alone. His visits are as
rare as they are rewarding. Price means nothing. A man
wants a wonderful slab of meat and nothing else. But when the little homemaker goes to the butcher—once,
twice, three, four, five times a week—she's buying
price.
"How many will that feed? But what about the bones?
Not seventy-nine cents
a pound?"
Who can wonder that
butchers like men?

3. People will almost invariably eat what is put be
fore them—unless they're cranks or invalids. I think we
may have been lucky here, because our guests were ex
ceptionally nice. But I'm powerful proud that we never
once took advantage of their good natures or good man
ners. According to hotel economics—how I loathe that
word!—Bill and I should have spent a dollar and a half
per day on food. That means
all three meals!

To our way of thinking that was just impossible, even
buying at wholesale. Yet almost every resort owner we've
ever talked to has told us that on the American Plan—
which means all meals included for the price of accommo
dations—the most that can feasibly be squandered on feeding a ten-dollar-a-day guest is a dollar and a half. Well, I'm sorry. I'd rather go broke.

Oh, it's perfectly possible to get under the wire; you can
cut all sorts of corners. Use your coffee twice, save the
salad dressing, buy those big, gobby rolls that are made
of equal parts of sawdust and flour, order barreled gravy,
never use real oil, employ just as many synthetics and
extenders as possible, and always feed the staff something
even less good than you feed the paying guests. But who
wants to
eat
such meals?

If there's anything I deplore it's that boarding-school
school of cookery where the aim is bulk, not nourishment
or enjoyment. This kind of menu always involves bread,
potatoes, dumplings, noodles, a slithery macaroni salad slathered with synthetic mayonnaise, and a bread pudding
for dessert. It's the kind of diet that hits your stomach
like a lump of concrete and plays perfect havoc with the
figure, the digestion, the complexion, and the disposition.

No thanks! Bill and I both decided to feed our guests
properly. Bankruptcy would be preferable to cornflakes in the stew, cornstarch in the ice cream, and corn meal in the soup. I've always been—as I shouldn't—crazy
about noodles. I still am. But I refused to serve them except when they were an integral part of the dish, just be
cause I didn't want the guests to think we were trying to pull something
funny.
The rule of the ranch, whether we
had a cook or not, was
always
homemade rolls, home
made mayonnaise, homemade French dressing, whipped
cream
and not chemically processed soya beans, prime cuts of
everything
for
everybody
—this included the staff
—and positively
no
cutting corners. We never regretted it
After all
, we
had to eat the stuff, too.

There, now I've finished my little diatribe.

To get back to planning fourteen meals for thirty-five e
aters each week, I really had to keep in mind all three
of the foregoing generalizations. First, every meal had to
be made up of something every person of every age and
environment would and could eat; second, we had to go
easy on beef—at least until the time came when Bill's
butcher was won over; third, we had to keep down the
costs without sacrificing the quality. Now, just try
that
on your kitchen range and still get sufficient variety so guests
who have been in residence for more than two weeks won't say, "Oh, lamb again?"

The seven dinners finally worked themselves out into
a kind of system, but not—I
hope
—a pattern. We lived
mostly on roasts. There were two of them every night, one
rare and one well done, to suit all tastes if the roast hap
pened to be beef. We had steak—
good
steak—one night
a week and chicken one night a week. Thursday was cook's
night out and that meant a barbecue up by the pool, cooked to crisp perfection before your very eyes by my mate, and just great. Fridays were sheer
agony.

There are no fish—
is
no fish—plentifully abundant in
New Mexico's markets. Until the advent of quick-frozen foods, New Mexico Catholics even had a special dispen
sation from the Vatican allowing them to eat meat on
Fridays because of the deplorable fish situation in the Southwest. Hard-frozen lobsters from the East and crabs
from the West were available, but my heart wasn't really
in them. They were wildly popular in Santa Fe and
proportionately expensive, but not—to be brutally frank—
nearly as good as they would have been on their own
seashores. The streams of New Mexico are, however, filled
with young trout, as tender as they are delicious, and they
make luscious eating. But, at two trout per diner, that made seventy trout of a Friday evening to be caught,
cleaned, cooked, and served. Send
your
husband out some
day to bring back seventy trout! So Fridays generally
wound up as a kind of compromise between religious tra
dition and Hooton standards and we leaned fairly heavily
on dishes made of canned or frozen seafare, even knowing
they weren't as good as they would have been back East.

But planning the lunches was, I think, the biggest chore
and the biggest bore of all. Back in New York lunch
used to be my favorite meal—a dry martini and a shrimp
salad and some attentive beau to pay for it. But out in the West it was a towering nuisance. It had to be filling
but not too filling. It had to be something everybody liked.
It had to be hearty enough for the men and fight enough
for the women. It had to include something hot and some
thing cold. And it had to have
variety.

In the beginning I used to sit down once a week and beat my brains out planning seven lunches in a row. I
know that doesn't sound hard, but I could have literally done all the menus for the Coronation festivities more
quickly and more easily than those seven consecutive
luncheons. Then one day, when I'd got up to about
Wednesday on the Master Plan, the telephone rang. I an
swered it and had a good, long, female gabfest. When I
got back to the menus, the list was gone and so was my
husband.