Then one afternoon, as I was waxing the upstairs hall, I heard a car drive in. It was a brand-new station wagon. I watched a man and woman and a teen-aged daughter alight from the front seat. Then the rear door opened and one, two, three tykes descended. Hoping against hope that I'd give the air of chatelaine rather than char, I whisked off my apron, thrust my hands behind my back, and dashed down the stairs to greet them. If they had been a large legacy from an unknown uncle, I couldn't have been happier to receive them and, as I was showing them around the place, I kept computing the size of their daily bill. The mere thought of its size set me to stammering. Of course, we had lowered rates for children not yet in their teens. Just why I shall never know, since they notoriously take up the same amount of space, eat twice as much, make three times as much noise and four times as much trouble. Still, with things like corrective dentistry and higher education to look forward to, I suppose parents deserve a break once in a while, and who were we not to give it to them? They settled on one of the cottages and asked the price for the whole six of them.
In a jelly of nervousness, I quoted it and got all set to say something sweet and sad like Well-it-was-awfully-nice-of-you-to-stop-in-and-inquire-anyhow.
To my shocked surprise, the man said, "All right. Where shall we park the car?"
They were one of those charming, well-off, vagabond-like families who occasionally took it in their heads to go on a little trip, whereupon they simply piled all the kids and, apparently, all of their portable possessions into a car and wandered aimlessly around the continent, stopping here and there for a day, a week, or a month and then shoving off again for no particular destination. Well, they couldn't have found a hostess any gladder to see them if they'd been traveling for a hundred years.
I was so thrilled to think that at last we'd have a real Easter with lots of people milling about that I ran straight to the non-grande dame, who had been our sole guest, and said, "Guess what! The nicest couple just moved in with an almost grown daughter and three little children. They're all so . . ."
I stopped dead in the midst of my panegyric when I saw the expression on her face. She reminded me rather of Count Dracula confronted by both wolfbane and a rosary.
"Children?" she said with a shudder, and fled to her room.
It never rains but what it pours. We rarely greeted one guest without having a dozen more drop in within the next twenty-four hours. And I guess the four children in residence lured still others. The following morning a writer from Chicago arrived, unannounced, with his wife and two little ones. That afternoon a family unit of five—two parents with three under twelve—turned up. The place was beginning to look more like a Sunday-school outing than a guest ranch.
Our child-hating guest came down to dinner that night in fear and trembling, and naturally every kid in the house made a beeline for her. I've noticed that children, perverse little creatures that they are, run like turkeys from anyone who comes gooing and lisping and kitchy-kooing at them, but the minute you're indifferent—even cold—to them, you suddenly attain all the unattainable mystery and glamour of Garbo and they just can't see enough of you. That's what happened at Rancho del Monte all during Easter Week.
"Bill," I kept saying, "We've got to do something about this horde of children. They're driving the poor woman out of her mind. What with their running and yelling, around the grounds all day."
"If they can't run and yell on a ranch, Barbara," Bill said logically, "where in the world can they run and yell? Besides, they're well behaved when they're indoors. You couldn't ask for nine better kids."
Of course Bill was right. They were good children and, as in all democracies, the majority ruled at Rancho del Monte. Our one child-hater was sadly outnumbered by nine children and six parents. Bill and I, as traditional neutrals, stayed tactfully out of the fray. But as each day drew to a close our child-hater grew more and more withdrawn and the nine children, grew fonder and fonder of her.
I suppose that by all the rules of popular fiction the child-hater's hard old heart should eventually have been softened to the point where she went out and adopted several wee ones of her own. That wasn't the case. Instead, she bided her time tensely and took her own particular revenge on Easter.
With so many children in the house, an egg hunt was essential, and the minute the kids had been put to bed on the night before Easter we set about boiling eggs and putting out cups of dye.
Much to my surprise, the child-hater came out to join us. "Do let me help," she said. "I used to adore coloring eggs and I can even do little designs on them if you like."
"Oh, please do," I said, thinking that her emotions had undergone a complete revolution.
How wrong I was!
Our child-hater certainly knew her colors and her dye pots. With unerring instinct she was able to turn out the most nauseating-looking eggs I’ve ever seen. There were poisonous greens, gaseous mustard yellows, unhealthy browns, and a special taupe-and-mud hue that made the eggs look like something laid and forgotten by a prehistoric monster. She deftly decorated some of them with indelible skulls and crossed bones, others with hex signs and the evil eye.
Bill and I struggled bravely to outdo her with our own gaily tinted Easter eggs, but we were no match for her. And even when we did manage to turn out a considerable quantity of pretty pinks and blues and lavenders, our pallid pastels looked kind of weak and epicene next to the vitriolic creations of her manufacture.
The next morning everyone went to church—everyone, that is, except Bill and me and the child-hater, who was usually most particular about her devotions. We were going to stay at home and hide the eggs, and the child-hater was determined to help us. In fact, she had to be restrained from taking over the whole operation.
Every time Bill or I set down a little green nest of jelly beans, chocolate bunnies, and the less repugnantly colored eggs, the child-hater would come charging down upon us. "Oh no! Never! Not there, right out in plain sight on the terrace. Here, give me that nest! I'll hide it!" And hide the nests she did. "This is a hunt!" she kept saying gleefully. It took her most of the morning, and when, out of sheer curiosity, I nosed around the grounds to see if I could locate just one nest, I couldn't. Bill thought that he had spotted one deep in the heart of a cactus plant, but I told him he was crazy.
He wasn't.
After lunch each child was given a basket and turned loose while the adults sat on the terrace to watch. Whenever there was a shriek of anguish we knew that one of the child-hater's nests had been discovered out among the thistles. Tweezers, sterile needles, iodine, and Band-aids were at an all-time premium that afternoon, and gallons of tears must have been shed during the alternate forays into the cactus and the experiments in home surgery. But finally the last of the nests was found, the last prickly spine removed from the last little hand.
"Pshaw," the child-hater said genially, "I should have, hidden them in really difficult places. Those children wouldn't have been back for days." Avenged, she went happily up to her room.
May was invariably a get-ready month instead of a guest month. Why, I don't know, because our mountains were just as beautiful to watch when they were waking up in the spring as when they were going to sleep in the fall. I suppose it was just that old American vacationer's prejudice against going anyplace before Decoration Day. But Bill and I kept ourselves occupied with paint spray, hammer, and rake, preparing for the guests whom we hoped would pour in from June onward.
Believe it or not, we had learned a few things during our first summer. One of them was to keep the staff down to a bare minimum. The less help, the less trouble and the less money being paid out. Another was to give the amateurs a chance when it came to passing around the summer jobs. Too many times we had been impressed by lyrical references and dazzling resumes, only to find out that they were pure fiction and that the truth was a good deal stranger and a good deal less palatable. So for our second summer we got Dick back to wrangle and to be head wrangler, at that. We decided
to turn a deaf ear to all the nonsense about Dick's being too young to shoulder the responsibility. I'm glad we did. Dick had just graduated from high school—an achievement mighty few of the professional wranglers could claim—and he'd had two summers' experience so that he knew the ranch, the people, the horses, and the terrain much better than any of those smooth-talking, trouble-making old cowpokes who drifted from job to job with all the purposefulness of tumbleweed.
For the house and grounds we did what was considered a daring thing: Bill and I hired Indians. Joe Vigil had been working part time in the garden and had transformed it into a thing of beauty. So what could have been more sensible than to have hired Joe full time and asked him and his wife Veronica to move in and take over? The Vigils accepted our offer, and we never came to regret that, either. We had heard a lot of dire warnings about the danger of mixing races in more or less housebound capacities. As far as Bill and I can tell, this is pure nonsense, unless for some purely aesthetic reason you want all your help to match. At Rancho del Monte we often mixed white, colored, Indian, Spanish, and Anglo with no cataclysmic results. When there was trouble—which was often—the trouble occurred because some one person of whichever group broke loose and made trouble. But the trouble never arose because any one employee refused to associate with employees who happened to have different colored complexions or ideologies.
So the Vigils moved up from the Tesuque Pueblo in May and with May, their adorable little daughter of six, who was not only the best-behaved child in New Mexico but also the best-dressed. The combination of Vigils and Hootons worked like a charm. Big, handsome Joe labored not only in the garden but every place else, too, as he knew all about plumbing, electricity, masonry, floor waxing, that iniquitous dishwashing machine, and all the nagging little odd jobs that came up every day and just had to stay up until Bill got into the house to attend to them. Joe also found work before it found him. He was a sheer joy to have around—never excited, never at a loss, and never idle.
Pretty little Ronnie worked with me, making beds, dusting, and tidying, and she did it all so neatly and scrupulously and cheerfully that she put me quite to shame, especially when she'd look at me reproachfully and say, "Barbara, you can't make a bed that way. The corners should be square." Then I'd get all hot and bothered, as though I were working for Ronnie, and promise to be a better bedmaker next time. Eventually I was.
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 Hollywood 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 attack 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 clairvoyant 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 organ had already been installed and we were itching for the arrival of the Boyers themselves. Guests like the Boyers, 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 skittish, 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 convertible, as long as a football field, and a chic, black, little bug of a woman, so tiny that even in her heels and platforms 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 extreme, 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?"
Guestward Ho! Page 20
