Guestward Ho! (27 page)

"But, Connie," I said, "how did they ever get into our
place?"

"I can't tell you that," she said, "but I can tell you how
to get them out."

"Oh, I couldn't ask them to leave, horrible as they are. They're still paying forty dollars a day and . . ."

"That's what you think. Wait till they start cutting corners on the bills—a night here, a meal there, and that sort of thing. Wait till you count their linen. And
wait till you count the real paying guests they've driven
away from here. Then you'll see that it's worth forty dol
lars a day to keep them out. Anyhow, I'd just as soon make up the difference out of my own pocket, if only to be rid of them . . ."

"We couldn't let you do that, Connie," I said unhappily.

"But you
could
let me give them the bounce, couldn't
you?" she asked slyly.

"Well, yes, I suppose . . ."

"Good. How far are we from the Atomic Energy Com
mission's testing grounds?"

"Oh, it's miles away. I've never even heard a pop."

"Well, don't tell them that in case they ask. I'll have
them out of here in no time at all. Put me back at your table for dinner. Promise?"

Connie ran upstairs and in a minute's time there was
such ach-
ing
and
mein Gott-
ing
and
mon Dieu-
ing
that
I couldn't hear myself think. However,
I could
hear all sorts of luggage bumping and thumping on the floor
above me. A minute later, Connie was back downstairs
drawing on her gloves.

"I'm just going to hide out at El Nido for an hour or so," she said. "They'll be well on their way before then. But remember, don't let them gyp you on the bill and
don't
take a check." With that, Connie was out on the
terrace.
"Auf wiedersehen,"
she shouted up toward their
rooms. "Remember," she shouted, "Malhuevo, New Mex
ico. About three hundred miles south. Very smart, very gay and
very
inexpensive. I'll meet you there for dinner
at Casa Dolorosa. Hurry!
Vitel Vite! Precipitevolisimevol
mente! Au revoir!"
Connie got into her car and zoomed out of sight.

Taking Connie at her word—as I have learned one
must
always
do—I began preparing their bill, but without
much hope. How wrong I was. Before the ink was dry, the
four of them were down the stairs, their belongings
cascading behind them. They were speaking pure gibber
ish interspersed with
ach Gotts.

"Leaving so soon?" I asked pleasantly.

"Why you aren't telling us about the atom explosions?"
Maxl demanded furiously.

"Oh,
those,"
I simpered, "they're nothing. We just have them at three in the afternoon on alternate Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays."

"Three o'clock?"
Roszika wailed, looking at her solid
diamond wrist watch,
"Mein Gott!"

"Oh, they're nothing to get excited about," I said blithely. "Sometimes the force kills a few of our horses and poisons the food, but otherwise . . ."

"Mein Gott!"
the other woman screeched. "Putzi, come!
Allons!"

"The bill?" I said, placing myself squarely in the doorway and bringing forth their bill with a flourish.

"Wait,
liebchen,
I write a check," Maxl said, reaching
for his fountain pen.

"Oh, it's so small, sir," I said. "Only forty dollars.
Why don't you just pay cash to save time. It's very nearly
three o'clock, you know."

"Mein Gott, yes,
Maxl!" Roszika said in a panic.
"Come! We meet Costanza in Malhuevo. She make us a
little loan. Pay and come!"

In less time than it takes to tell, they were gone forever.
After I'd laughed until the tears flowed, I began wonder
ing idly about this place of Connie's named Malhuevo. I
thought I knew all the resorts in New Mexico, smart, gay,
inexpensive, and otherwise. I even got out a map and
combed the state for such a place. None existed. Then it
occurred to me that it was pidgin Spanish for "rotten egg." Well, four of the rottenest were certainly headed there.

Connie returned, doubled with laughter, to report that
from a warm, dry table at El Nido she had observed the
four of them over the rim of her cocktail glass streaking
along the rainy highway at a good seventy miles per hour
with the state police hot on their tail.

Connie was such fun to have around that I wished she could have stayed forever, and Connie obviously wished she could, too. But she had been invited to spend a few weeks with some people in Colorado Springs and the end of June found us both up in her room sipping
while Connie packed. That evening we had what Connie
called Surprise Night. And lavish surprises 'they were,
too. She had remembered everyone in the house—even the
other guests—with lovely, useful, and thoughtful gifts. "Just so you won't forget me," she said casually—as though anyone ever could.

But the biggest surprise of all came the following morn
ing as I was seeing her to her car.

"Connie," I said sincerely, "we're going to miss you
terribly.
Please
come back."

"Don't worry," she said. "I'll be back and next time I'll stay longer—maybe forever."

"Forever?"
I asked

"Maybe," she said. She got into the big car and almost disappeared from view, she was that tiny.

"Well, any time you want to do that, Connie," I said, "you'll certainly be welcome. We'll even reduce the rates
for a lifetime subscription. I was so lonely and bored and
depressed around here," I said, feeling good and sorry
for myself, "and then you checked in and it was like
having New York and London and Paris and Rome under
the same roof with me . . ."

"And Athens?"

"Yes, Miss Greece,
and
Athens. Your being here has
made me so happy and yet so sort of homesick that . . ."

"Listen, Barbara," Connie said, starting up her motor
with an impressive roar, "—and I'm not kidding—if you
and Bill ever feel like selling this place and moving back
East, I'll take it over from you lock, stock, and barrel. You name it. I'll pay it."

"Connie!”
I said, too stunned to say anything more.

"Don't decide now. Think it over and let me know. I'll be seeing you." With that, she was off.

I was so stunned by Connie's offer to take Rancho del Monte off our hands—and at a price—that I couldn't believe it. Then I got into a series of those involved
mental processes where you do believe and then you don't
believe, and while your hearing tells you one thing your
reason tells you another thing and then another thing and
then still another thing.

I got so tangled up with my own thinking on the subject that I finally had to put it all down on paper in more,
or less numerical order just to keep things straight in my mind. I've torn up the paper long since, but it went some
thing like this:

1.
Connie is a dear, good, sweet, generous girl.

2.
Connie was just making an impetuous gesture when she offered to buy the ranch.

3.
Connie never kids. She knows her own mind and
speaks it

4.
Connie is lonely. She wants a place to roost where
she can have something to occupy her brains and
her talents; where she can put down roots.

5.
Connie can afford to buy the Taj Mahal to plant her roots.

6.
If so, why would Connie want to buy a place like
this?

7.
Connie displayed real interest and talent when it
came to running the ranch.

8.
Connie is fond of Bill and me and this is just her
tactful way of dispensing charity.

9.
Connie knows that Bill and I don't need charity—
yet.

10.
Connie should be committed to an institution if she really wants to buy our lease.

11.
I should be committed to a ditto if don't sell.

12.
What of Bill? Is it fair to him?

13.
What of Connie? Is it fair to her?

14.
What of me?

15.
What the hell!

The sheet of paper didn't make any more sense than my own thinking had, so I carefully hid it and kept my
own counsel. I would just wait, I decided, until Connie
made the next move, and then I'd see exactly how serious
she had actually been. Quite honestly, I couldn't really
believe
any
woman would want to tie herself to running a guest ranch, least of all a social butterfly like Connie.

Didn't I say—and ever so originally—that it never rained but what it poured?

A week after Connie's bombshell had fallen, another one landed in the same place.

An elderly and rather stately Packard arrived early
one afternoon to disgorge an elderly and rather stately
woman. Rancho del Monte had been recommended to her by some people who had stayed there the summer before. No, she wasn't interested in becoming a guest. Yes, she did want to look the place over.

I disliked her on sight. I daren't name her and I don't
actually think I could remember all of her names in their proper sequence. Rather than having nice, straightforward
names like Mrs. John James Jones, this woman had a handle that sounded like the stops on a crosstown bus,
and I can't honestly remember whether she called herself
Mrs. Madison Park Lexington, 3rd, or Mrs. Lexington Park Madison, 5th, but she was such a tiresome old
harridan that I ended up by referring to her almost ex
clusively as The Dreadnought.

Anyhow, The Dreadnought swept down on me like a
hawk on a chicken yard. She was very conscious of names
and addresses and did quite a bit of probing to find out just who my parents were and where they lived. I felt that she was not wholly pleased by my reply and I couldn't have cared less; no more than I cared who she was or where she lived or who her ancestors were or where they lived—all specific information she supplied
during the first five minutes of her rather forceful con
versation.

The Dreadnought was, she told me in no uncertain terms, descended from the greatest bloodlines America
has ever known—like a race horse, which she closely
resembled. Name your favorite aristocrat, East, West, North, South, and she was kissin' kin. As a child debutante—and a beauty, you may be
sure
—she married a
man who was far beneath her. (Well,
naturally
he was fair beneath her; what mere male could compete with The
Dreadnought?) As luck—
his
luck—would have it, he
deserted her and ever since then she'd made her own way in life.

The Dreadnought had become the little breadwinner,
apparently, through a series of red-hot deals in real es
tate, such as buying up old New England farms cheap,
remodeling them, and selling them to city slickers as ex
pensive country seats.

She'd taken little flyers in Maine boardinghouses, turning them into "quaint country inns" and selling at a profit.
And the trail of artsy-craftsy gift shops and tea rooms she'd left behind her—at a profit—was stunning indeed.

"Of course you know the Chambered Nautilus Gift
Shop in Woonahaupahasset, Vermont?" The Dreadnought
said.

Of course I didn't.

"Or the Gentian Shutters Tea Shoppe in New Tippe
waronkonkoma, New Hampshire?"

No message.

"Or the Abide-With-Me Caravanserie in West Semino
lahaha, Massachusetts, or the Hound and Horn Hostelry
in Crotchet, Connecticut, or the Godawful House in Dia
thermy, Delaware?"

She obviously considered me a hopeless barbarian
when I professed ignorance of any of these thriving
establishments, but she wasn't sufficiently miffed to get in her car and go.

"This place has
such
possibilities, my dear," she said,
looking over the rooms once more.

If there is any statement geared to make another
woman's hackles rise, it's that one. Still, I was too fas
cinated to kick her out. Half my fascination was in won
dering what she had planned to rechristen poor old
Rancho del Monte, which had done all right, in its casual
way, during both the Huntinghouse and Hooton tenancies.
Another quarter of my fascination lay in wondering how
The Dreadnought would, look if only she'd take the
trouble to shave every day. And the last vestige of fas
cination was that somebody whom
I
didn't like and who didn't like me was seriously trying to take over our ranch.

Odiously affected as she was, The Dreadnought was no
fool. When it came to cold cash, she had everything at the tips of her white gloves. Staff, capacity, horses, cost
of food (when I told her what we spent on feeding each
guest each day she looked at me with a pitying grimace),
extras—she knew her business, all right.

"You have children, my dear?" she said.

"Not as yet," I said, "but my husband and I . . ."

"I didn't mean that, my dear, I meant do you
take
children?"

If there's anything I loathe it's to have people call me
"my dear" when I'm neither dear nor theirs. "Sure," I said. "All we can get."

"A mistake," she sighed, shaking her head dolefully. "We must chance that."

"We?"
I was becoming what my mother used to call
"needlessly unpleasant." And I was loving it. But still I was fascinated.

"And do you take Chinese?"

"Chinese?"
I said, somewhat awed.

"Chinese," The Dreadnought said most definitely.

"Well," I stammered, "I've met Madame Wellington
Koo, but she's never evinced any interest in visiting us.
Still, if any Chinese did want to . . ."

"My dear," she sniggered. "I don't mean
real
Chinese. I mean the . . . er . . .
chosen
people."

"You mean Jews?" I said, thinking back to the crazed old fanatic who'd been thrown out of our house.

"Mmmmm-hmmmm," she nodded sagely.

"Why, of course we do. Right now we have . . ."

"A
terrible
mistake, my dear. But we can mend that, too. With a good deal of work on my part, we could get
nice
people in here."
There was something hypnotic about the complete and
utter repulsiveness of this woman.

"Listen," I said, "I haven't said that we
want
to sell Rancho del Monte. I . . ."

"My dear," she said, "my
People
tell me that you do."

That floored me. I felt that the Afterworld was against
me.

"Now, don't say a word, my dear." She was safe there. I couldn't. "You'll have lots of time—
oodles
of time," she added kittenishly "to think this over. I'll just give you a ting-a-ling [that's Dreadnoughtese for telephone call] from time to time to see how you feel about
it. But to buy out your lease and option—and your good
will,
such as it is,"
she said scornfully, "I'll give you . . ."
Then she said no more. Instead she dug a rather soiled visiting card out of her purse, wrote a figure on it, and handed it to me. "The walls have ears," she said with a
horrid smirk. "Ta-ta, my dear!"

Then she reverted to her old, triple-tiresome, aristo
cratic self and began reeling off a list of the supposedly
impressive names of people with whom she was to have
tea that afternoon. In that vein she picked herself vari
cosely across the flagstones and into her car.

Transfixed, I looked at her card. On it was penciled a
figure—a good-sized figure; not big enough, but sufficient
to pay off our bills and set us up back in New York. But when I looked around the empty lounge I suddenly hated the thought of having somebody like The Dreadnought taking over what had been our home and reshaping what
had been our pleasant, casual, cozy policy into something
that would suit people just like her. In my mind's eye I could visualize our ranch renamed something like The
Lilac Hacienda—Restricted (we did have lovely lilacs}
and filled with prickly old women who would talk about
their ancestors and undertip a staff of tea-room waitresses
dressed in lilac rayon. But as repugnant as I found The
Dreadnought, I was still intrigued to know that Bill and
I owned something—or might one day own something—
that other people wanted.

"Who was that old biddy?" Bill asked, nodding toward
The Dreadnought's taillights as he came in from the corral. "I hope
she
isn't planning to stay with us."

"No," I said, crumpling tier card in my hand, "not with us.”

Along about the middle of June, when guests began to arrive—we hoped—in droves, Bill and I traditionally, moved from our winter quarters to the summer palace: our bunkhouse. There we lived as dormitory roommates
with the wrangler and his partner. The bunkhouse was
partitioned into rooms, but it might as well not have been since the walls were so thin and so punctured as
to afford F.M. reception of all snores, grunts, groans, and
private conversations and scenic views of the other occu
pants' underwear, pajamas, limbs, and dentures. Still,
giving up our own room and bath meant that we could accommodate two more guests and that there would be an
extra twenty dollars in the till for every day we suffered. I could suffer a lot for twenty dollars a day.

If you like nature, you'd love the bunkhouse, for there
nature held sway in all its unbridled fury. In fact, we got a double dose of nature in the bunkhouse. If it was 90° outside, it was 100° in the bunkhouse. In the winter,
if it was zero outside it was 10° below in the bunkhouse. Picturesquely constructed of logs and Scotch tape, the bunkhouse had a roof, walls, a floor, electric lights, and
nothing else. There was no plumbing whatever and the
bunkies had to queue up at a bathroom off the kitchen
reserved just for them. As well as being partitioned by
Swiss cheese the rooms were small, and when I say small
I mean that once you got a double bed and a dresser into one of them, it was impossible for two people to
stand in the available floor space. Bill and I had to dress
and undress in shifts—one getting onto the bed and wait
ing patiently for the other to finish.

Flora and fauna abounded. In fact, flora kept growing up through the plank flooring while fauna, in the shape
of squirrels and chipmunks, scampered over the roof and peered through the window, and pack rats and field mice
gamboled gaily under the floor. The wooden walls har
bored lots of little insect friends. Around the doors and
windows fluttered a great variety of our feathered friends—the earliest-rising and loudest-singing god-damned birds you ever heard! And the reptile world was well represented
by street gangs of friendly lizard types, as well as a harmless but menacing bull snake or two. I got quite
fond of the lizards, but the snakes—no matter how harm
less—and the spiders did absolutely nothing for me.

To make the wonders of nature even more evident and
abundant, Bill and the wranglers took to rising at dawn and dashing mother-naked to the pool for a manly
plunge
au naturelle,
while I modestly covered my eyes with
a sleep mask and blindly batted at flies. But if Bill and
the wranglers thought they went unobserved in their early-
morning nudity, they were to be sorely disillusioned—or at least
I
was. One of our bird-watching guests was an old maid in the real comic-strip sense of the word and a fairly dour party she was, too. She took to rising at dawn and sallying forth with her binoculars and bird
log, but I'm afraid the specimens she logged between the
hours of six and six-thirty every morning could only be
described as the "hairy-chested barebottom."