Guestward Ho!

by Patrick Dennis

  The second floor was made up of four more double bedrooms, three baths, and two private terraces, with plenty of space and existing plans to add on more bedrooms and baths—as though that weren't enough!

  That, however, was only the beginning.

  Sprinkled around the main house were two guest houses, one containing three bedrooms and three baths, the other made up of two rooms and a connecting bath, which could be a suite if you wanted to be fancy or a self-contained cottage if you happened to be a family of three or four.

  Then there was a small house for the help and a bunk-house for the wrangler—which was also my very own bridal bower during the summers and times when the rest of the place was filled to capacity.

  At the top of a hill there was a good-sized swimming pool that glowed like the loveliest turquoise ever mined in a setting of perfectly heavenly roseate and lavender flagstones. It really looked good enough to eat, but since it was the middle of March and too cool that year to use the pool, looking was all I could do.

  There was a concrete tennis court, surrounded by a vine-covered wall. That interested me just about as much as a bear-baiting pit, since I had never been even vaguely athletic.

  The corral absolutely terrified me—and The Girls—when I came upon it quite unexpectedly and was somewhat taken aback to see eight huge horses, shaggy in their winter coats, staring me balefully in the eye. The horses had been bought for us sight unseen, but the first sight was enough. I turned on my heels and fled right back to the ranch house.

  Rancho del Monte had been planned, designed, and almost built by Bess Huntinghouse. She told me she used to drive up to the site of the place and sit on a hill for hours just concentrating on which would be the loveliest views, which sections would get the sun and which the shade. The whole place was planned and worked out as thoughtfully and painstakingly as an Aubusson tapestry. Bess had opened Rancho del Monte in 1932—the very pit of the Depression. She managed to keep it going, and keep it going at a profit, all through the Depression, when guests and money were scarce, and all through the war when supplies, meat, gasoline, repairs, and employees were even scarcer.

  If Bess could do it, so could I, I kept telling myself. But I didn't believe one word of it. In the first place, Bess had had experience. She had worked at the large and elegant Bishop's Lodge in Santa Fe for years. She knew the guest ranching business inside out. She knew the region, the people, the climate, and all the cute tricks the weather can play. Bess also knew the hotel business and the restaurant business.

  All I knew about hotels and restaurants was that you paid your money and took your choice and that you tipped between ten and twenty per cent, depending on the service. When it came to ranching and the region, I knew just one thing—that I didn't want any of it. Yet every inch of Rancho del Monte was ours for the next five years or until such time as we would founder physically, emotionally, and financially. On that first day I honestly hoped we would flop so fast and so hard that the echo would be heard around the world—excluding only Evanston, Illinois, where my mother waited momentarily for news of our total defeat.

  "Well, here we are," Bill said that night as we were undressing, "in our own little place. Just the two of us." I detected a determined but false note of cheer in his voice.

  "Yes," I growled, "here we are. Just you and me and The Girls and those horrid horses and no experience and a manager and his wife and one guest and a whole three hundred and sixty-four days of debts and defeat to look forward to. How many guests did you say we had to have each day in order to break even?"

  "Five—that's roughly fifty bucks a day."

  "Fifty dollars a day, eh? Let's see, that's, um, about fifteen thousand dollars a year. . ."

  "It's exactly eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty,'' Bill said. (He has a head for figures.)

  "I see, Mr. Moneybags," I said nastily. (Honestly, sometimes when I think of the Little Miss Acidmouth I was in those first days, I blush with shame.) "And we now have one guest—or ten dollars—for today. That means we've lost forty. Just let me jot that down."

  "What for?" Bill asked.

  "So when I have to hock the silver and my engagement ring and everything else we own to pay our way out of here, I'll have some idea of how much to ask for at Uncle Jake's pawnshop."

  "You really think we're going to flop?" Bill asked.

  "You may quote me," I said and tumbled into bed.

  But the first taste of defeat came three days—or one hundred and twenty dollars' worth of deficit—later, and, just like anyone eke, I didn't enjoy it one little bit. It wasn't even a genuine defeat—it only felt like one. We lost our first, our one and only guest.

  Bess Huntinghouse had had one woman who had come for a single night and who had stayed and stayed and stayed until her visit had lasted more than a year. There had been all kinds of merry jokes about the Woman Who Came to Dinner, and she was almost as permanent a fixture at Rancho del Monte as the lounge itself. But the minute we stepped in and Bess stepped out, our guest began packing.

  It was ridiculous for us to have been sensitive about her departure. Even before we left New York we had been told clearly that this guest was planning to drive to Las Vegas on March 17 and she had talked gaily about the night clubs and gambling halls of the benighted oasis quite openly at dinner every night. But when we put her in her car and watched her drive off, we both felt that we had failed; that we had been gauche or rude or offensive or lacking in personal daintiness or something. It was as though Bill and I had driven her away from her spiritual home.

  Bill skulked out to the corral to mend fences and I wandered lonely as a cloud to unmake her bedroom. And, believe me, without a single guest in that rambling ranch house I nearly went stir-crazy during the day.

  I looked like a thundercloud when Bill came in for dinner that night.

  "Well, here we are. Just the two of us, as you put it," I snarled. "No guests, no money, and a giant, all-time-high deficit of fifty dollars for today. It's certainly nice to have a place we can spread out in! There was our guest and now she's gone."

  "Oh, don't worry, love," Bill said. "She'll be back."

  "Oh, sure she'll be back—and dragging the WACs behind her!" I fumed. "She just loved us! Stayed here, more than a year with Bess, but one look at you and me as the gracious host and hostess and she was out of here so fast you couldn't see her for dust."

  "But, Barbara, we knew all along that she was planning to go. She liked it here. She'll be back. Mark my words."

  "Well, mark my words, she won't. And if you'd like to lay a little wager on it, I'd be willing to bet you our hundred-and-seventy-dollar deficit that . . ." At that moment there was the sound of a horn in the driveway. She was back! Having misread the road signs, our parting guest had gone straight for Las Vegas, New Mexico, instead of Las Vegas, Nevada, and there she was on the doorstep, gay as grig about her mistake, just in time for dinner and just in time to save me one hundred and seventy dollars.

  Bill was right. We weren't exactly social lepers. The guest came back to Rancho del Monte—and to Bill and me—instead of going to any of a hundred other places along the way to spend the night. And she came back to del Monte again to spend Christmas with us. We were vastly cheered. With a song on my lips, I readjusted the deficit down to one-six-oh. Dinner that night was downright festive.

  But the next morning she left us again—this time in the right direction—and we were guestless once more.

  Helen and Bill Delano were still on hand. They were the resident managers who worked at the ranch for Bess, but they weren't going to be there long. In fact, at the end of March they were leaving to go into business for themselves down in the valley, which was just as well, since Bill and I couldn't possibly have paid them what they were worth.

  However, for the remainder of the month it was their unhappy task to try to initiate Bill and me into the Delphic mysteries of guest ranching. And I must say for them that they were able to hide their scorn and contempt
for us like the lady and gentleman they are, but it must have been a Herculean task. My Bill is as bright as a button, but he goes about learning in an awfully funny way and has so many ideas of his own that he could drive the most saintly of instructors to the madhouse before he arrives at the proper answer. But at least Bill was willing. I wasn't. If Helen Delano thought I was the dumbest, meanest, dullest female west of the Mississippi, she had every right to think so. I wouldn't learn, I couldn't learn, because I just plain didn't want to learn. I was sad and sullen and lonely and almost driven insane by the silence of the wide-open spaces. All I wanted to do was to get into Santa Fe, off to Taos or Albuquerque—any place where there were people and not just silence and horses. On the last day of March the Delanos left us, too, and then there weren't any other people at all—only Bill and I alone in the wilderness.

  4. Guest appearance

  You can get used to anything, I've discovered, especially if you can talk yourself into believing it's only temporary. Gloom is fine for funerals and martyrdom is just splendid for saints, but I wasn't quite yet dead and by no means saintly. Besides, it has been my misfortune to know quite a lot of petulant, childish women who have had an absolute genius for turning a stroke of bad luck into a major catastrophe. John gets transferred from a paradise like Paris to a hole like Aden, Jim doesn't get promoted to vice-president, Harry loses his job, and what do the little women do? They weep, they moan, they complain, they look like keeners at breakfast and corpses at dinner. They make everything just twice as hard as it is, and if John or Jim or Harry don't turn into wife-beaters or philanderers it's only because their wives have depressed them beyond making the effort.

  I happen to be better suited to comedy than to tragedy and, besides, Bill and I had always landed on our feet before and we would more than likely do it again. All I wanted was to get this boots-and-saddles nonsense out of my husband and land on my feet back, in New York. I figured that the quickest way of doing it was to go along with him, let him get his fill of the wide-open spaces, and then lure him back to civilization. I was getting kind of bored with playing The Lost Soul seven nights and seven matinees a week, anyhow. Oh, I'd smiled, once or twice, but I hadn't really meant it.

  What really broke the ice was Bill's first solo trip into town. Up until that point he'd looked kind of like an Abercrombie & Fitch window dummy—Eastern-Western, if you know what I mean. He had blue jeans, all right, but they were kind of loose and baggy. With them he wore loafers and challis ties and button-down Oxford shirts and tweed jackets; all very pretty for Long Island or Connecticut, but so Brooksy that people turned and stared at him on the streets of Santa Fe. Then he made the plunge, quite unaided and alone, while I was spending my last moments of sullenness out on the ranch.

  All I had expected from Bill's trip to town was mail, the New York Times of two days ago, and a pound of butter. What I got was the shock of my life. Bill stepped out of the station wagon done up for a masquerade ball. At the post office, he'd been lured into the Santa Fe Western Wear Shop, run by Gertrude and Mark Campbell, a delicious couple from Oklahoma. The Campbells had encouraged him to go Western with a vengeance, and Bill certainly had. He came teetering up onto the terrace in a pair of boots with sort of run-over high heels that reminded me of my first grown-up slippers. He was wearing blue jeans so tight that he must have had to powder his thighs to get into them and the plaidest shirt I've ever seen, as well as a suede coat with enough fringe to make a dozen piano shawls; Topped off by a kind of felt picture hat, he looked seven feet tall. "Hopalong Hooton!" was all I could say, then I started laughing and went right on laughing all through lunch.

  Bill was a good deal less amused than I was. In fact, he began to feel so self-conscious in his cowboy suit that he took to skulking around corners and hiding in doorways as though, by a series of hideous misfortunes, he had been caught quite naked in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria. But, unusual as he was, he did look wonderful, and even I got a hankering for fancy dress in the Western mode.

  So after my first good laugh, at poor Bill's expense, I decided to dry my tears, tuck up my hair, and get into the act, too. I started out with the main house. It was just lovely as Bess Huntinghouse had arranged it, but show me the woman who is perfectly satisfied with the way another woman has arranged a house and I'll show you a female impersonator. So, in spite of Bess's success with Rancho del Monte just as it was, I launched into a little interior decorating project of my own. From then on I spent most of the day at Dendahl's in Santa Fe racking out new fabrics and most of the night measuring for new curtains and slip covers. I rearranged the furniture in every room at least a dozen times, so often and so thoroughly that poor Bill occasionally came in from the corral and thought he was in the wrong ranch house. In fact, I wasn't even a tenth of the way redecorated when I realized that our first guests were due to arrive on the following day. I felt exactly like a bride who is suddenly told that she's been elected to entertain the British Royal Family, and well I might have, since those first guests were to be none other than the Carroll Binders of Minneapolis.

  The name struck a sort of bell with Bill and a very tiny little triangle in my mind. "Carroll Binder, Carroll Binder," Bill kept musing. "I could swear that I've heard that name before."

  "You're probably thinking of Bookbinder's Restaurant in Philadelphia," I said lightheartedly. "Now give me a hand with this sofa." But even I wasn't so sure.

  "It's a funny thing," Bill kept muttering. "That name is so familiar to me. Carroll Binder, Minneapolis; Minneapolis, Carroll Binder!"

  "Big city, Minneapolis," I said, still with that nagging little doubt. "Now get off the rug while I vacuum."

  At two o'clock the following morning, Bill sat up in bed. "I have it!" he shouted.

  "You've got what?" I grumbled.

  "Carroll Binder! He's an editor of the Minneapolis Tribune. He writes all the editorials. He was on our National Commission to UNESCO. He presided at the UN Subcommission on Freedom of Information and gave the Russians what-for!"

  Together we tumbled out of bed. and raced to a dogeared old copy of Who's Who, heretofore serving as an excellent doorstop. There was Carroll Binder, a good half column of him in minuscule type and bristling with perplexing abbreviations like "b., s., AB, corr., dir. Mpls"—that last is really Minneapolis, but it will always be Mupples to me.

  We didn't bother going back to bed. One look at my newly redecorated ranch house and I suddenly knew it was all wrong. One look at the menu for the week and I knew it was all wrong. One look at Bill and myself and I knew we were all wrong. Nothing was finished, everything was pinned together and badly pinned together. As I started rearranging everything for the thousandth time, I began to visualize a long editorial—perhaps the entire editorial page of the Minneapolis Tribune—dedicated to the horrors of the Hootons and Rancho del Monte.

  In my mind's eye this diatribe began something like this:

  "It was our misfortune to pass a few unforgettable days and nights in a New Mexican pigsty called Rancho del Monte. Mismanaged by a pair of New York charlatans who call themselves Mr. and Mrs. William Hooton, Rancho del Monte embodies all the discomforts known to man. The food, the service, the accommodations—all were unspeakable . . ."

  And so it went.

  I was in a perfect flap and so was Bill. If only our first guests could be a pack of jolly illiterates with no publishing connections, no experience as lecturers or commentators, and preferably no command of any language more widely used than, say, Catalan. But no. We had to fall not only on our faces but also on the editorial page of a paper with more than half a million readers.

  All that day Bill and I scurried around the ranch house moving this piece of furniture and then moving it back again, setting the table and resetting it, choosing this room and then that room and then this room again. We had four head-on collisions with one another at the kitchen door and three more at the front door watching for the Binders' car.

  We waited all day and nothi
ng happened. Lunch came and went without the Binders. We smiled bravely at one another, waited as long as we dared, and then put on dinner—a leg of lamb with all the trimmings. Then we moved some more furniture, made up some different bedrooms, scoured more bathrooms, and waited with our noses pressed against the window. The dinner smelled wonderful, but there wasn't a single soul around Rancho del Monte, except Bill and me, to sniff it.

  Around five o'clock, I decided Carroll Binder was a perfect beast. By five thirty I decided he wasn't so bad after all, but that he and his wife and daughter had been killed on the road. At six I felt that both the Binders and the Hootons had been the victims of some depraved practical joker who obviously had nothing better to do with his life than to spend all day making phony reservations in other people's names. At six thirty I decided we ought to be glad the Binders weren't really coming at all, because we'd never be able to cope with anyone, let alone anyone famous, and that dinner would be ruined—either stone cold or burned to a cinder—anyway. At six thirty-one, the Binders appeared.

  We learned many things from our first guests, the first of which was that nothing out West ever happened when you expected it to. Things just didn't run on that tried and true schedule in New Mexico. Cars and buses and even trains and planes were usually late or—even worse—early, in the Land of Relaxed Living.

  And we learned some other things, too, when we simply collared the whole Binder family, rushed them to their rooms, told them sternly not to bathe but to get right down to dinner, and marched crossly out to the kitchen to dish the meal up. No sooner had we sat down to a dinner which, though snatched from the oven in the nick of time, was good, than both Bill and I realized that we had treated guests—and paying guests—as though they were rather naughty children and not as though they were the lifeblood of our newly acquired career.