Guestward Ho!

by Patrick Dennis

  The storm was brought about by none other than Adlai Stevenson. Both of the Chicago women were passionately interested in politics and were ardent Democrats. One evening that fall they announced that Adlai Stevenson could be heard giving a brief radio address in their room at eight o'clock sharp, that all other Stevenson fans were welcome to drop in and listen, and that all others would kindly stay the hell away.

  My mother always told me there was a basic rule for female conversation and that was to avoid the five D's—doctors, diets, domestics, diapers, and dress. There is an even more stringent rule for the conversations of people who run guest ranches and that is "Lay off Politics, Religion, and Philosophy." So Bill and I settled for a movie at the local drive-in and skedaddled well before Mr. Stevenson hit the airwaves.

  When we got back, the fur was flying for fair. Naturally, the Republicans couldn't resist dropping in to hear the speech. And while each of them undoubtedly said to himself, "Now, I won't say a word unless specifically asked for my opinion," something had obviously slipped up somewhere, because the whole household was divided into two violently opposed camps—one staunchly Republicans, the other rabidly Democratic. And as in all mass arguments, our affectionate guests had gone well beyond the original question at hand. Every American president from Eisenhower back to Abraham Lincoln had been disinterred, if necessary, and dragged into the fray. The air was blue with long-forgotten expressions such as Hooverville, New Dealer, Teapot Dome, NRA, CCC, and WPA. Men who had joked and ridden and fished together for weeks suddenly appeared not to recognize one another. When they met in the lounge. People who had been on a first-name basis exchanging addresses and telephone numbers poke not at all or only through interpreters: "Would you please ask Mrs. Blank to pass the biscuits?"—as though Mrs. Blank were totally unable to understand even basic English.

  Bill and I were caught right out in the middle of it all—in the very no-man's land of politics. And don't think we weren't approached surreptitiously by both parties for support. I would gladly have ripped my tongue out by the roots before advancing any opinion at all except for the very true and sound opinion that it was all too silly for words and that they were ruining their sleep, their digestions, and their vacations. Bill steadfastly maintained that the only party for him was the Vegetarian Party and kept coolly aloof from the whole thing.

  The cold war of Rancho del Monte raged on for two or three more days until the Jeanne d'Arc of the Stevenson Army did something that was just as funny and endearing as it was odd. Coming back from town one warm day with one or two of her aides-de-camp, she saw the swimming pool gleaming bluely in the warm autumn sunshine.

  "It looks so lovely and cool," she said, "that I just can't go down the hill and bother with changing." With that she removed her wrist watch, stepped out of her pumps, and dived in—dress, stockings, slip, girdle, and all. Fully clothed, she swam several lengths and climbed out again, looking like a drowned rat but fully refreshed. Then she put on her shoes and her watch and went soppily down the hill to her room, leaving the rest of the guests so stunned that they forgot all about their recent political differences and could talk of nothing else for days.

  Playing the host or hostess at a guest ranch can be a very difficult job unless you lay down ironclad rules for your own conduct. Even at small-sized Rancho del Monte, where Bill and I treated the clientele as our guests and our friends, we had to remember that they were still paying and that all of them were total strangers until they finally did become our friends. It's the filthy lucre, I suppose, that makes the difference, but it does make a difference.

  Gambling with guests, for example, is one sure way to get into trouble. Since I hate cards and play them so I wretchedly that nobody in his right mind would ask me even to sort his hand, I was always perfectly safe. Bill, however, is a brilliant player, but he's also a brilliant enough host to realize that the shortest distance between a happy guest and an angry guest is a straight flush. True that once in a blue moon, if he knows the guests very well, the game is "just for fun," or for stakes so low that nobody could lose more than a dollar, and if a fourth absolutely cannot be found, Bill will take a hand at bridge. But only under those conditions. The guest ranchers out in the Southwest all have a wonderful example to think back upon whenever they're tempted into a "friendly little game," and if they have any memory at all, the answer is No.

  Several years ago a well-heeled and devastatingly attractive man from San Francisco retired to Arizona because of his health. For something to do, he started a guest ranch—very posh, very successful, and catering almost entirely to rich dilettantes who spent most of every waking hour clustered around the bridge table, just as they could have done back home without going all the way to Arizona. The host was a marvelous bridge player and always delighted to make up a table with any three of his guests for any stakes they cared to mention. But one evening he accepted an invitation to play with the wrong trio—three women from Chicago who lived high, wide, and handsome on fat alimony checks.

  The man was perfectly innocent, of that I'm convinced. His three female guests set the stakes, checked on the score at the end of every hand, alternated as the host's partner, and even supplied the cards that were used. But at the end of the evening the host was the only winner to the tune of several hundred dollars—purely a matter of luck and skill. But did those three furies pay up? They did not. They accused him of being a card sharp and a cheat. They started such a to-do right then and there that his ranch was soon emptied of guests. Outraged, he ordered them off the place without bothering to collect their bills or their gambling debts. But that didn't satisfy the women. They started a whispering campaign—whispering, did I say? They practically bought radio time—in every other resort around the country that kept guests away in droves. Naturally, the host got wind of it and sued for slander. He won the case, I'm glad to say, but he still lost, because by then his reputation and that of his ranch had been so damaged he was never able to repair either. He sold his ranch at a tremendous loss, his health broke completely, and he spent the rest of his radically-shortened life shunned as a card cheat, all because of sitting down with three bad losers. No thanks.

  To get back to the religio-politico question, it was always something Bill and I simply would not discuss with our guests, singly or en masse. We listened to their opinions with the stony impassivity of all those gigantic presidential faces blasted into the sides of the Black Hills, but when it came to expressing any opinions of our own, well, we just wouldn't have done it under torture. Since I am more or less apolitical, this was never much of a sacrifice for me, but back in our New York days there was nothing Bill loved quite so much as an all-night session of political discussion. Still, we were bright enough from the very beginning to keep our mouths carefully closed at those rare times when any mention of politics came up.

  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, playwrights, lawyers, miners, oilmen, geologists, editors, advertising 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, Hindus, 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 require 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 Gallery. But only one other person at the table hadn't understood him exactly.

  Our deaf bronchial case leaned forward, smiled benignly, 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, because he certainly had been reading books! They were all books or pamphlets written by anonymous or pseudonymous 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 psychiatrist said calmly.

  "If they were Russian Jews," the woman psychiatrist said gently, "they would hardly have been named Rosenfeld. That names implies German or North Austrian origin. 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 international 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" boyhood in a "Warsaw ghetto," or stated as a "proven fact" that the Cabinet and the Army were "controlled by Moscow."

  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 cannon 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 Washington "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 silently 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 syllable 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, suddenly 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, intelligent, 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 o
n 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, ignorant 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 "disturbed 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 London'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: