Guestward Ho! (25 page)

As for their little daughter May, she was so sweet and
pretty and nicely behaved that it was worth her keep just having her around. (I might add, too, if you'll forgive a
moment of merciless commercialism, that May was such
a drawing card with children who had never seen a real non-Hollywood Indian before that it wouldn't have been
entirely out of line to have paid
her
a salary.)

When May first came to stay with us, she spoke only
Tewa, the Tesuque language. She understood English
perfectly, but she was just too shy to open up and give
out with it. But one day Bill took her to a movie while her
parents were making a sick call. It was a thriller, and
May got so excited that she began babbling questions at
him in Tewa. No message.

"May," Bill finally said, "I can't understand a word you're saying."

"I said, Is that a good Indian or a bad Indian?" May demanded in English.

"Well, that
particular
Indian is a pretty sneaky article,"
Bill said with a shade of embarrassment. (Those Holly
wood plots! There just never
was
a good Indian according
to the script writers.). "But the other Indians seem a fairly decent lot," Bill added suavely during an epic at
tack on the circle of covered wagons with lots of scalping
and fiery arrows.

"What about that man with the mustache, Bill?" May
continued in English.

"Oh, he's rotten to the core, May. Look at those mean, close-together little eyes. Beady! I bet he's going
to double-cross the whole wagon train," Bill said with
prophetic accuracy.

May went babbling on in English all during the film,
all the way home, and she hasn't stopped yet. She speaks
with a pronounced Boston accent, acquired from Lord knows whom, and her speech is rilled with quaint Back
Bay references to "bleüew buds" and "Hüshey bahs."

That covered all the staff except old Problem A—the
cook. While there's nothing so taxing about cleaning a
house or waiting on table or washing up after meals that
an ordinary person can't learn in two days flat, the one job that can't be entrusted to an amateur is cooking, unless that amateur happens to be someone like Bill. I'm sure that there are thousands of good cooks who could turn into superb professional chefs after a couple of
weeks of trial and error. But you just can't afford trials or
errors with a houseful of hungry guests. So once again we
starred out in search of the ideal cook. We thought that
we'd found something like perfection in Artie. He was a
good cook. He was single. He said he didn't drink—they
all
say that. There was only one immediately apparent
drawback to Artie: We all loathed him at first sight.

Of course, that was only a minor drawback. Within a few days we discovered lots of others. First of all, Artie
was a megalomaniac. You had to rave over every slice of toast and every pat of butter or he'd come marching into the dining room and rave for you. Then he was a
nonstop talker and he could only talk about one subject:
Artie. No, excuse me,
two
subjects, the second being
sex; but only sex as it concerned
Artie, with descriptions
so graphic that even the male help started skipping meals
rather than having to eat to the accompaniment of Artie's
venereal reminiscences. He was impervious to criticism,
suggestion, or even insult. But he was also either clair
voyant or awfully clever at eavesdropping, because just as Bill had decided to give him the ax Artie packed up bag and baggage and disappeared into thin air, never to be heard of again, thank goodness.

Our last cook stuck with us, and she was, all things considered, the best one we ever had. Her name was Ollie. She cooked in a sorority house during the school year and
wanted a nice, quiet, pastoral place to cook during the
summers. She
didn't
swear she was going to stay with us
forever and ever when we hired her. She
did
say she was
going right back to the Pi Phi girls in September, and we
were so stunned by her honesty that we took her on out of sheer admiration. Ollie got along just fine with the
Vigils and just fine with the young people. Ollie and Bill
only got into minor skirmishes over minor points like the
texture of baked potatoes or the amount of shortening
needed for a perfect pie crust, and those only occurred
about once a week. So that for the whole second summer peace reigned among the personnel with no comings, no
goings, no hirings, and no firings—and with a harmony
and economy that we had never believed possible.

Except for a honeymoon couple and one or two strays,
June began quietly that year. Mr. and Mrs. Boyer were
returning with their daughter, their dogs, and the Hammond electric organ to stay for the whole summer. The o
rgan had already been installed and we were itching for the arrival of the Boyers themselves. Guests like the Boy
ers, who arrive at the beginning of each summer and stay
through until the bitter end are not only the financial
lifeblood of a guest ranch, but they also give you a warm
feeling of being known and liked well enough so that
people really look forward to coming and spending a long, long time in your exclusive company. With those steady,
repeating guests like the Boyers and three or four other
families who showed up annually with the regularity of
swallows, Bill and I felt like a pair of doddering, if skit
tish, old grandparents welcoming various branches of the
clan for Old Home Week. It's a nice sensation.

We faced our second summer with far fewer qualms. As always, we were pretty solidly booked for July and
August—pending cancellations—but I could have done nicely with a little gayer society than the honeymooners,
who did nothing but giggle, and the stray pair, one of
whom was interested in finding uranium on our land (as were we—perfectly
fascinated,
in fact) and the other of
whom was a die-hard bird-watcher. Gay society, however,
arrived with a vengeance when Connie roared up the drive.

I peeped out through the curtains to see a glossy con
vertible, as long as a football field, and a chic, black, little
bug of a woman, so tiny that even in her heels and plat
forms the top of her head hardly came above the fender.

"Oh, oh," I said to The Girls, "this baby has turned
into the wrong driveway. In fact, I don't think that even
the Bishop's Lodge is going to be sufficiently chi-chi for
the likes of her."

Rancho del Monte catered to a lot of very rich people, just as many fairly poor people, and a
whole
lot of people
in between. The rates were the same, no matter what your income. But our rich were not what you'd call
conspicuous
rich, and you'd have to call in an auditor to discover that
they had a nickel more than Mr. and Mrs. Average Citizen.
Yet this dame was obviously loaded, and there was an air of genuine wealth about her that you could spot from a mile off.

"Well, the least I can do," I said to The Girls, who
weren't listening, "is go out and give her instructions for
getting to Las Vegas or Palm Springs." But just to be
utterly female about it, I put on my engagement ring—
which
is
something of a sparkler—before going out to
speak to her.

"Hello?" I said tentatively.

"Hello," she said, coming up and shaking my hand just
like a very little man. "Can you fix me up with a room and a bath for a while?"

"Well, it's very simple and . . ."

"Good," she said, genially. "Let's have a look."

Stunned, I followed her into the house as she just took over and guided
me
on a little tour of inspection. While
clothes don't interest me at all, I do know quite a bit
about them and hers were really something—a trifle ex
treme, but simple, flawless, and beautifully made.

"This is nice," she said, poking into a room which
wasn't a bit nice, since the mattress was rolled up oh the bed and there were dust covers over everything. "May I
have it?"

"Well, certainly," I stammered. "For how long?"

"How do I know? Until you kick me out, I guess."

As my menfolk were all busy outside the house, I
helped her up with her bags—every one of them from
Hermes in Paris and stamped C.P.W. "Stick around while
I settle in," she said. "I haven't had a soul to talk to since I left Mexico City. Why don't we have a little drink?"

"Oh, of course," I said, nonplused. "I'll go down and get something . . ."

"Don't bother, I have it right here." She opened a dev
astatingly smart bit of luggage, which I'd thought was
a shoe trunk. It turned out to be a small, portable bar,
equipped with silver-topped bottles and silver drinking
cups in three distinct sizes. "Scotch and faucet water okay
with you?" she asked genially.

"Lovely," I said uncertainly. I felt suddenly terribly
naughty, as though the two of us had conspired to make
fudge on a hot plate against all dormitory rules.

"Will I need any of this drag?" she asked, unfurling three Fath evening dresses, the likes of which I hadn't seen in some years.

"Not unless the Governor invites us to a ball," I said.

"That's funny," she said and laughed.

I didn't think it was so very funny, but I was pleased
to be as one with this astonishing butterfly. Simply fasci
nated.

And the fascination continued. She was a widow of
thirty. She had been born abroad of a Greek father and an
American-born mother, an only child christened Costanza Papazafiropolos. (Yes, Pa-pa-za-fi-rop-o-los, seven sylla
bles with the accent on the fifth and that's the last time I'm going to try to write it.) Her father was an interna
tional banker, directly descended from Croesus, I believe,
and her mother had not only a pot of gold, but a heart of gold as well. (She must have had to have taken on
such a name at the altar.) Her recent forebears had been
English, French, Russian, and Italian—all with tides and lots of pounds, francs, rubles, and lire. "Costanza," I gathered, was Greek, French, Russian, or Italian for
Constance, because she insisted on being called Connie.
Fortunately, she had turned in her maiden name for a
nice simple one like White when she married an American.
Unfortunately, a shell in Korea put an end to the marriage and Connie was at loose ends, drifting from one spot to
another while Mama and Papa supplied the cash from some smart watering place on the Continent.

Connie had been magnificently educated in almost every
capital of the world. She spoke, French, Italian, German,
Spanish, Arabic, Greek (both ancient and modern), Rus
sian, British English, and pure unadulterated Americanese.
She played championship tennis, golf, and bridge. She
swam like Eleanor Holm and shot like Annie Oakley. She
could discuss the international situation or the baseball
scores, Picasso or Petty, Shakespeare or Spillane with equal ease and authority. Although most of her clothes
had been made right on her back in the great dressmaking
houses of Paris, London, and Rome, she could look just as dazzling in a shirt bought in the boys' department of
Sears, Roebuck, which she patronized regularly. (Well, I
guess I could look dazzling in a cheesecloth shift with a
great big square emerald ring like Connie's to set it off.)
Plain rather than pretty—which she was the first to admit,—Connie still wasn't the kind of girl you'd want to leave
your husband alone with for too long. Not that Connie would have dreamed of applying any seductress tactics;
she was a real gentleman among women. But she was so
sparkling and warm and vital that men adored her, even
when she was beating them at their own games. And
while almost every woman alive should have hated Connie, I found that all but the most poisonously pretentious
females loved her just as I did.

Connie got around the problem beautifully by being
frank and friendly and free of any illusions of her own
importance. She never took herself seriously or gave her
self any airs, and that was probably the keystone of her
monumental charm. She knew prime ministers and princes
and presidents and porters and pants pressers and paupers
all over the world and she treated every one of them exactly the same. She was terribly interested in every
thing and everybody, and her aliveness was so contagious
that wherever she went, whole rooms full of the dreariest
people imaginable came alive and interesting, too.

Bill and I were thrilled to have her staying with us,
and at dinner the first night her charm was sufficient to
stop the honeymooners from giggling, while even the
bird-watcher and uranium-hunter became almost scintillating, which they certainly hadn't been B.C., or Before
Connie.