Guestward Ho! (19 page)

Politically, socially, philosophically, and religiously
speaking, Rancho del Monte was Liberty Hall. During the time of our tenancy, we entertained businessmen, politicians, newspapermen, contractors, doctors, dentists,
psychoanalysts, teachers, writers, painters, sculptors, play
wrights, lawyers, miners, oilmen, geologists, editors, adver
tising men, musicians, salesmen—all kinds of people and
their wives. They came from all over the United States and Europe and Africa and Asia—South America, too.
We received Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Moslems, Hin
dus, Agnostics, and Atheists. We liked almost every one of them and, without exception, we learned something valuable from each of them. And while we were never
confronted by either the extreme left or the extreme right,
we met all shades of opinion in between, with interest, to
be sure, but not with arguments. Only once did Bill ever raise his voice in opposition to that of a guest and I not only approved, I applauded.

One quiet day between seasons our party was joined by
a lone older man. He arrived quite unexpectedly, sent to
us by Paul Radle's service station in Santa Fe. I was alone
when he checked in and I didn't especially like his looks—
he was paunchy and red-faced and had a loose mouth with
a perpetual cigar in one corner of it that he preferred to treat as a sort of pacifier instead of something to smoke.
On the other hand, I didn't
not
like his looks, either He
parked himself in a single room, went out for a stroll, and
that was the last time he entered my mind until dinner.

Being a stray, as it were, he was seated at the main
table with Bill and me. Also at our table were a brilliant
Jewish couple from Philadelphia, who were old friends of
Bill's sister. Both of them were psychiatrists and both
famous. There, too, were a pair of strapping Air Force
officers on leave and a very spry little old lady who wasn't
noteworthy for anything, really, except that she suffered
of bronchitis in damper climes, was almost stone deaf, and
was too vain to wear a hearing aid.

I introduced the new man around the table and put him
on my right, hoping he wouldn't be a terrible bore, or
tongue-tied and so shy that he'd have to be drawn out. I
needn't have worried on any of those counts. He didn't re
quire a bit of encouragement. He was a pathological talker
and, far from being bored, I was in a perfect frenzy from
almost his first word.

"Well," he started, shifting his cigar to left field and
leaning so close to me that my jaw was almost scorched, "I
guess we all oughta be
ve-ry happy
about the sit-chew-ay-
shin in Warshington. First Rosenfeld, then Trumanski, an'
now Eisenstein runnin' the show. Just like Israel."

I smiled at him a little blankly. I honestly hadn't the
foggiest notion of what he was talking about. Setting the poor rusty machinery of my mind to work, I tried to make
some sense of what he was saying. "Show?" I knew that
the theater in Washington had been reactivated but I'd
never heard of any of the producers he'd mentioned. Then
I connected the word "show" with a traveling collection
of pictures and thought for a moment that these three intriguing characters were all directors of the National Gal
lery. But only one other person at the table hadn't under
stood him exactly.

Our deaf bronchial case leaned forward, smiled be
nignly, and said, "Would you mind repeating that a little
louder, sir?"

Just like Echo Canyon, he repeated his opening barrage
word for word and then added, "It sure would be good
to get all them Jew presidents outta the White House an'
back to wherever they come from. Amurrica fer the
Amurricans,
I
say." Then he leered at me and gave me a nudge with his elbow.

Looking aghast into his crazed eyes, I suddenly realized
I had a real, live fanatic sitting on wry right, at my table,
in
my
house. I also realized that what one might modestly
call a Situation had been thrust upon me.

"Read any good books lately?" I said, with a marked
degree of idiocy.
Anything
to change the subject.

It was a leading question and just the wrong one, be
cause he certainly had been reading books! They were all books or pamphlets written by anonymous or pseudony
mous authors, and not the kind you buy in bookstores or
see reviewed in reputable newspapers and magazines, but
real hate literature, published with a towering disregard
for the laws of libel and grammar in the back rooms and
basements of unheard-of hate merchants just like him.
They seemingly constituted his complete reference library.

He had "proof," he said, that the "whole Roosevelt
family were Russian Jews who changed their name from
Rosenfeld."

"Please state your source of reference," the man psy
chiatrist said calmly.

"If they were Russian Jews," the woman psychiatrist
said gently, "they would hardly have been named Rosen
feld. That names implies German or North Austrian ori
gin. My own people were Russian Jews and there are no
such names among . . ."

"What?" the little deaf woman cawed.

I was simply speechless. Our hate merchant, however, was not. Like all real fanatics, he hadn't even heard the
interruptions. He plunged right on. He also could "prove"
that President Eisenhower was "in the pay of an inter
national Jewish banking syndicate" and that the armies of Israel were "massing at the border" ready at a moment's
notice, so it seemed, to "invade the United States."

There's a hoary old saying that goes something like "The
coward dies a thousand deaths, the valiant only taste of death but once"—Shakespeare, I think. There must be a
wide streak of chrome yellow up my back, because I died
a million times during that meal. Our delicious dinner—
one of Bill's thick, prime steaks—tasted to me like the
ashes I wished I had become. I couldn't look at anything or anyone and I tried not to hear, but even in my self-
imposed entombment I could grasp disconnected snatches of his ranting, as he "proved" President "Einstein's" boy
hood in a "Warsaw ghetto," or stated as a "proven fact"
that the Cabinet and the Army were "controlled by Mos
cow."

As he got really wound up, he took to banging the table with his fist to drive home his more pointless points. Each
time he did, I leaped as though I had been shot. With a
noise that sounded to me like the report of an atomic can
non he slapped several greasy flyblown booklets down
onto the table. They had titles like
Hitler Was Right
and
Slaves of Zion.
The covers were decorated with smudgy
drawings of the American flag or the Cross and the authors were called things such as "A 100% American" or
"A True Christian" or "X" instead of by their real names.

Except for a constant screech of "What?" and "A little
louder, please" and
"Who
did you say did what?" there
was no sound in the room except for the man's crude,
maniacal voice.

I wanted to crawl through the floor right there or leave
the room and be very sick, but I couldn't move. Then I began Bearing bits about the Army of the Vatican—I
suppose he meant those few dozen picturesque Swiss
Guards—and something about a tunnel that had been
dug right under the Atlantic Ocean from Rome to Wash
ington "for the Catholic invasion."

"What was that you said about the Constitution?" our
deaf guest screeched.

I wouldn't have pardoned him for one million dollars cash, but as I looked miserably down the table I noticed
that one of the Air Force men's fists was clenched so
tight around his glass that the knuckles were white. It then occurred to me for the first time that the flier's name was
O'Reiley, that he came from South Boston, and that the
chances of his being a Jehovah's Witness or anything other
than a Roman Catholic were slim.

"Oh, please, dear God," I said—whether aloud or si
lently I don't really know—"please let me get through this meal."

This man didn't seem to hate any
one
thing, he hated
everything.
I did my level best not to listen to another syl
lable of his vicious monologue and I concentrated hard on
being as deaf as our other guest. But after what seemed like forty-eight hours of concentrating I heard another pretty phrase. That one was "dirty niggers," and it was
spat out of his big, blubbery mouth just as our colored
houseman was clearing for dessert. It was the first time in
my life—and the last—that I had ever heard the, word "nigger" used by anyone I had ever met as an equal,
Northern, Southern, Eastern, or Western.

"Please,"
I began miserably. That's all I ever got to say.
"You don't belong here," a voice said very firmly and very quietly. "And I want you to get out now." I looked
down to the other end of the table and there was Bill. He was standing up and his eyes were blazing.

". . . a good lynching party is the best . . .
What did you say?"
The man stopped, popeyed, in the middle of
his diatribe on race relations and stared at Bill.

"I said," Bill continued quietly, "that you don't belong
here and that I want you to get out right now. Don't finish
your dinner. Don't pay your bill. Just pack up and get out."

"Don't even come back through this room," I said, sud
denly inspired by Bill. "Leave by the side door."

"Saaaay," old Chock-Full-of-Hate blustered, "what kinda joke
is
this?"

"It isn't a joke at all," Bill said coolly. "Nobody can
talk the way you've been talking at our table. I want you
out of here in five minutes or I'll call Sheriff Sena and have you thrown out."

"Well, I'd like to know since when isn't a civilized, in
telligent, Christian gentleman welcome in a two-bit dump
like this, Sonny."

"A civilized, intelligent, Christian gentleman is always
welcome here," Bill said. "But since you don't happen to be any of those things, I want you to leave. Do your rabble-rousing someplace else—not on our ranch."

"Just supposin' I don't
feel
like goin'?" he swaggered.

At that the two Air Force officers stood up—all chests
and shoulders and jet propulsion. Our guest hadn't much
choice. He stalked across the room with as much dignity
as he could manage—which was precious little. At a safe
distance he turned and shouted back to us, "This is a hell
of a place an' I'm gonna tell all my friends just exactly what kinda people you are . . ."

"Sure," I yelled hysterically, "tell 'em. Tell
both
of them!"

Then he absolutely bellowed. "Yer all of yuh nothin
but a pack of dirty red Jew
Communists!"
With that, he
slammed out of the room.

"Common?" the deaf woman cackled. "I think that
he
is
very
common."

Nobody said a word—or ate a mouthful—until we
heard him start up his car and drive away. He had left his
filthy pamphlets on the table beside me. I picked them up with the ice cube tongs, carried them over to the fire, and dropped them in. They burned very brightly as the rest of
the guests took their places around the hearth for coffee.

"Just imagine," the deaf woman said, "a vulgar, ig
norant man like him knowing Professor Einstein!"

The rest of us laughed a little too heartily and then our
ladies and gentlemen tried hard to pretend that he had never really existed.

The two psychiatrists, in the maddeningly calm manner
of all psychiatrists, diagnosed our recent guest as "dis
turbed but not dangerous—just part of the lunatic fringe."
Maybe, but
I
thought he was dangerous. I had seen
fanatics of all leanings gibbering to no one as they walked
along city streets or haranguing amused crowds in Lon
don's Hyde Park, but that evening marked the first time I had ever looked squarely into the face of the enemy—and it had better be the last time.

I was so shaken by the old maniac that for a few days I even contemplated having a kind of rider printed to enclose in the Rancho del Monte brochures we sent out
in answer to any inquiries. It would have been worded
something like this:

1.
Guests of all shades of opinion are welcome as long
as those opinions are not aired in the public rooms
of Rancho del Monte. This is a dude ranch, not a debating society.