Guestward Ho!

Patrick Dennis is the pseudonym of the famous creator of
Auntie Mame
who in his own words says: "I was born in Chicago—same hospital, same room, same bed as Cornelia Otis Skinner—different
time."

He served for two years in American Field Service as an ambu
lance driver in World War II. He married Louise Stickney in
1948
and they have two children and live in New York City. He likes
beer, Scotch, gin, coffee, reading, writing, long-hair music and going
to the barber.

Barbara Hooton was also born in Chicago and was educated in Evanston. She is married to William Hooten, the "Bill" of
Guestward Ho!

POPULAR LIBRARY EDITION Published in February, 1958

Copyright, 1956, by Patrick Dennis and Barbara C. Hooton

Library of Congress-Catalogue Card Number: 56-5034

Published by arrangement with The Vanguard Press

The Vanguard Press edition published in April, 1956 Five printings

Published simultaneously in Canada by

The Copp Clark Company, Ltd., Toronto

Italian edition published by Valentine Bompiani & C, Milan, Italy

British edition published by Rich & Cowan, London, England

German edition published by Verlag der Arche, Zurich, Switzerland

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

All Rights Reserved

To Mikie Collins, my godchild, who loves New Mexico as I do. —B. H.

Once upon a time I was young, frivolous, carefree, and relatively slim. That was way back in 1953
a.d.
I had the
longest, reddest nails of anyone who worked at Bergdorf
Goodman and I used to stand elegantly in Bergdorf's marble
rotunda from half-past nine until half-past five, five
days each week, looking just as
soignée
as all get-out and being only moderately haughty to the cash customers.
(Imagine, I can still recall the five-day, forty-hour week!)
Every Friday they paid me fifty lovely dollars, less
withholding, less social security, less retirement benefits, less hospitalization, and I could do just about anything I liked with the change.

My husband, Bill, and I lived serenely and compactly in
part of a house that once belonged to Winthrop Aldrich
on East Seventy-third Street between Fifth and Madison,
and I could walk stylishly down Fifth Avenue to work
in thirteen minutes flat. If it rained, I took a taxi. Bill worked a little farther down Fifth—a
thirty-five-
hour week
if you please—at a nice, dim, genteel, well-paid job
dealing with facts and figures and budgets and things
that. Except for an occasional ink stain, his hands never got dirty.

Our
apartment was a little dream of grace and efficiency. It practically took care of itself, and our two Siamese cats
did
take care of themselves. After a long, hard day of being haughty under the crystal chandeliers of Bergdorf Goodman, I had only to stroll home, kick off my pumps, mix drinks for Bill and me, sit down, and discuss the rigors of New York life.

At seven I used to heave an icy block of frozen something
into a pot of boiling water and ten minutes
later dinner was ready. If
that
proved too onerous for the
little working girl, there was always Bill to fall back on—and I’ve thanked my lucky stars more times than I care to count at the rare wisdom I showed in marrying
a man who can cook—or we could simply dine out at one
of many excellent and inexpensive restaurants nearby.

Then it happened.

We got a ranch.

How often at night (when the heavens are bright, etc.)
have I lain in bed in the ranch house—or, worse, out in the bunkhouse—and asked myself just how in the name
of Tophet I ever got myself into such a fix. There wasn't one good reason in the world for us to leave Manhattan Island. We just adored it. Next to Paris we liked it better
man anyplace else in the whole world. We didn't feel dis
tressed or guilt-ridden about our rootless way of life, we
didn't long for grass and trees and the wide open spaces—
Central Park was right out the window—we had more
friends than we could manage to see, and almost enough money (more than we have now, at any rate). We were
perfectly ecstatic and not one bit interested in making
any sort of change. Or at least we didn't think we were.
This sounds awfully silly, but I suppose the only reason we took on Rancho del Monte and the whole state of
New Mexico is that we did it all on a
whim.
That seems
frivolous to the point of wickedness, but if you want a
better explanation, you'll simply have to supply it your
self. I'll be grateful for any suggestions.

However, my husband Bill—or the starry-eyed mem
ber of the family—is a great one for whims. Take the
time we spent the summer in Europe, for example. One
day Bill calmly said, "Let's go to Europe."

"Fine," I said. "When?"

"Friday," Bill said.

A week later I was in London trying to explain to my
mother in a few well-chosen words just why I happened
to be writing her on the back of a picture of Westminster
Abbey.

Well, that's how things work in the Hooton household.
Don't ask me why.

And how did we wind up at Santa Fe, New Mexico?
Just about the same way. We took a little trip. "I think we'll go West," Bill said.

West sounded incredibly dreary to me, but I started packing.

So we went West and, to my surprise, we loved it, We
did all the usual things and looked up at all the usual redwoods and mountains and bridges and looked down into the usual canyons. All very pretty, but I was getting a trifle fed up on scenery by the time Bill suggested a little side trip to Santa Fe.

"Santa
Fey!"
I said. "Who wants it? What's there? Sand, dust, heat, and a lot of pseudo intellectuals from
New York who've come out to be arty. We'll undoubtedly
meet some old phony we wish we didn't know and . . ."

"Get in," Bill said. He started the motor and I was on
my way—
seething
—to Santa Fe.

Well, we just loved that, too. We spent four days at a dude ranch and we were mad about it. In fact, one day while we were out riding, Bill said casually, "Wouldn’t this be a lovely way to make a living?"

I was rather busy remembering to keep my heels down,
elbows in, grip with the knees, and so on. So I said,
"Wouldn't
what
be a lovely way to make a living, dear?"

"Running a dude ranch, naturally," he said.

"Naturally,
dear," I said. You know how we have to humor them. Then I went right on remembering the ru
diments of riding and forgot that he'd ever said it.

But back in New York, whenever I bothered to look, I noticed certain subtle changes going on in my spouse.
In the first place, he was becoming an absolute bore at
parties because he did nothing but rave about the glories
of New Mexico and its unique way of life. (People hate to hear about other people's trips.) And alone at home
Bill was different, too. No longer his gay, helter-skelter
self, he spent a good deal of time pecking out things on me typewriter and totting up figures and reading rather
thick books. Just a sign that he's settling down, I thought
.
Improving himself.

I'd always wanted Bill to supplement his Northwestern University education with a few of those fun courses avail
able to adults, but Comparative Civilizations of the XX Century or Folk Music of the Balkan Peoples was more
what I had in mind. I don't have to tell you what
he
was up to.

The blow fell on Washington's Birthday, 1953. Bill gave me that wide, blue stare of a rather clever and deceitful child who's been caught en route to the cookie jar. "Sit down," he said.

"Thank you, dear." I sat.

"The lease here runs out on March first, doesn't it?" Bill asked.

"Yes, it does," I said. "And I want you to tell Brett,
Wycoff, Potter and Hamilton that unless they promise to redecorate
throughout
and do something about that stove, we're not going to . . ."

"Good," Bill said. "We're going to New Mexico—per
manently. I've taken a dude ranch for five years with an
option to buy."

"William Jay Hooton," I said levelly, "
I
am divorcing
you."

"Well, one of the nice things about New Mexico is its
convenience to Reno. You can drive out with me. Or, if
you reside in New Mexico for one year, the divorce laws
are such that. . ."

"Live there for one
year?"
I shouted. "I wouldn't live
there for one
minute!
It's nice for a visit, but . . ."

"That's what people always say about New York," Bill
said.

Mother always told me that it was a woman's duty to
follow her husband—"to the ends of the earth, if necessary, Barbara," Mother said. However, my mother only had to follow my father from an apartment in Chicago to
a sweet house in Evanston, a distance of almost ten miles,
and that, was that.

Another thing Mother always told me was, "Men are
just like children, Barbara—willful, naughty, headstrong,
never satisfied to be in one place at one time—and we have to be
very
firm with them. Always put your foot down, Barbara."

You can see that I was confused, not to say
torn.
So I decided to try a little of each of Mother's maxims—
that is, put one foot down and then follow Bill with the
other foot if the first one didn't work.

"Now you just listen to me, Bill," I fumed. "It's all very well to go fluttering out to Santa Fe on a vacation,
but you can't decide on the strength of a four-day visit to
throw over your job,
my
job, our life here, all of our
friends, everything we're accustomed to, in order to move
out there and . . ."

"But I've worked it all out on paper," Bill said. "It's really very simple . . ."

"You're
very simple," I roared. "What do
we
know about ranch life? What do we know about running a great big house and making beds and cooking meals for a dozen guests . . ."

"Two
dozen guests," Bill said. "Twenty-five, actually.
That's the capacity of Rancho del Monte."

I paid little heed. At that point he might just as well have said two thousand guests, it all seemed so im
possible to me. I went right on raging. "What do we know
about entertaining people and taking them out on rides
and pack trips and keeping the horses from getting preg
nant? You can't even
ride
one—not properly."

^v
But don't you see," Bill said with maddening calm, "I've reached the age when . . ."

"You've reached the age of thirty and you're acting more
like three. You've reached the age when you're supposed
to be settling down in the world, forging ahead in your job, socking away some money for your old age—and mine, when . . ."

"But that’s just what I'm doing," Bill said calmly. "I want to settle down and I want to settle down as a rancher in Santa Fe. Besides," he reminded me, “you
said yourself that running a dude ranch would be a won
derful way to make a living."

"I've said, from time to time, that being a ballerina or an actress or a taxidermist or a toll gate keeper or any of a hundred other professions sounded like fun, but I
never meant a word of it—not really—and I
didn't
mean
it when I said that running a ranch would be fun," I shouted.

"Well," Bill said, "this ranch is going to be different."

"You bet your boots it's going to be different," I said.
"Sloppy, run-down, empty of guests, debt-ridden. Why, in
one year . . ."

"Will you
give
me one year?" Bill asked eagerly.

I could feel him wriggling out from under the foot I'd
put down, so I decided that the best thing I could do in order to save my face and still maintain the upper hand—or foot—was to heed Mother's other word of advice and start following to the ends of the earth, but on a strictly short-term tour.

"Very well," I said, "I’ll give you one year, and no more, Bill Hooton. But if that doesn't work, I'll, I'll. . ."

"Maybe you'll give me another," he said.

A week later we were on our way to Rancho del
Monte, which sounded unpleasantly like a fruit cannery to me. We'd given up our perfectly good jobs, our perfectly lovely apartment, our perfectly divine life in New York to go west and make a new life in a place about which we knew only from a four-day visit and at a career about which we knew from nothing.

It's amazing how fast you can act when you have to. It
had taken me three months to get our apartment the way
we wanted it. Should that sweet little French clock that I bought at the Flea Market in Paris (and that sounded
like a bomb to the customs man who inspected our lug
gage) hang above the sofa, above the table, above the
chest? Which yellow should those wonderful tweed cur
tains be dyed—mustard, canary, lemon, champagne?
Well, in three days flat that sweet little French clock was ticking away in an antique shop. Those yellow curtains—
they were saffron, by the way—were being dyed brown
for the rather hearty bachelor who bought them. And most of the rest of my treasures were on their way to Bill's sister in Connecticut. The girls at Bergdorf's had
given me a corsagey little luncheon and I was trying to compose a letter to my mother that would be light, bright,
newsy—
newsy indeed
—and at the same time convey the
impression that the man of my choice wasn't insane, but
only nervous, and that I loved him anyway.

After a number of attempts at such a letter, I gave up the whole idea and decided simply to drop in on
Mother as we were driving through Chicago and surprise
her. And she certainly was surprised; shocked you might
even say.

And so on March 1 we were off, just Bill and I and
our miserable possessions in a neurotic secondhand Ford station wagon with The Girls scratching and clawing and
yowling in their lucite cat carriers.

I knew next to nothing about the whole deal except
that by dint of hundreds of dollars' worth of long distance
calls to Mrs. Wheaton Augur, the Santa Fe real estate
agent, Bill had saddled me with 2,400 acres, a fifteen-room
house, two guest cottages, a bunkhouse, a swimming pool, a tennis court, eight horses, a couple of smallish private mountains, some gardens, and more out-buildings than I've been able to count. We also had no money
what so ever.