Guestward Ho!

by Patrick Dennis

  "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 certainly 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 Ladydog 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 cooking 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 impression 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 happily 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 devoted 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.”

  11. Come and get it

  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 understanding 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 economically 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 s
trips 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 taxing, 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 Burgundy, 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 especially to men.

  2. People from Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Cincinnati, 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 satisfaction 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 convincing—reason when the butcher's bill arrived. It described 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 enlightened 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 before them—unless they're cranks or invalids. I think we may have been lucky here, because our guests were exceptionally nice. But I'm powerful proud that we never once took advantage of their good natures or good manners. 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 accommodations—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 because 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, homemade 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 eaters 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 happened 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 dispensation 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 wi
th 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 someday to bring back seventy trout! So Fridays generally wound up as a kind of compromise between religious tradition 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 something 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 answered it and had a good, long, female gabfest. When I got back to the menus, the list was gone and so was my husband.

  Bill had seen the list, assumed it was complete, and had driven off to Santa Fe to do the buying. For the rest of the week we had to depend on whim, ingenuity, the pantry shelf, and prayer, and it worked out much better, giving that heretofore deadly meal a kind of impromptu inventiveness it had never had previously. It was quite exciting for a while. Every morning when Bill woke up I'd say, "What would you like for lunch today?"

  "I don't care," was the inevitable answer.

  "Oh, come on. What would you really like?"