Guestward Ho! (3 page)

"Only because it hasn't been published yet," he said.

"I may not know all about sin, but I
do
know all about
other women and that wasn't Whistler's mother I saw in the shower room. She was the most obvious . . ."

"Barbara," Bill said with that kindly superior male tone that simply makes my blood boil, "if I had your vivid
imagination—your sense of the dramatic—I'd sit down
and write a novel that would sell a million
. . ."

Bill’s literary career was interrupted by the crash of a
bottle against the wall of the adjoining cubicle and the
brassy voice of my recent acquaintance of the shower
room shouting: "You lousy, good-for-nothing four-flusher!
Bring a girl out here an' then welsh on . . ."

Bill turned quite pale.

"Shall
I
start writing the novel or will you?" I asked
nastily. Then I got into bed and snapped off the light.

What a night! The beds at Roach Haven may have
been strong enough for two, but they were hardly wide
enough for one. In addition to that, the mattress seemed
to have been equipped with a ravine down the center so
that Bill or I or both of us constantly rolled down into it. And in addition to all
that,
the nocturnal disturbances of
Roach Haven were unbelievable. Cars kept streaming in at all hours. There was a steady roar of shrieks and
shouts, soft moans and shrill giggles seeping through the
cardboard walls. The conversations from the rooms on both the left and the right might have fascinated Kinsey
or Krafft-Ebing, but they only kept
me
awake—and not
because I wanted to eavesdrop.

At just a little after three in the morning, when most of the occupants of Roach Haven had quieted down and
I was just beginning to doze off, I felt a sudden weight on
my stomach. "This is it," I said to myself. "We've been
lured into this den of thieves and perverts to be done in.
Whoever this is will rob Bill, rape me, and murder us
both." I shut my eyes tight and tried to think of a short,
all-inclusive prayer that would cover Bill, The Girls, and
me and all of our past shortcomings, but before I could
mumble a single word, I heard a soft little yowl. I opened
my eyes and saw four glowing red eyes staring into mine.
They belonged to The Girls.

In my relief, I snapped on the light to embrace my
darlings and just then I looked down on the stained cov
erlet to discover that the two cats had deposited there a very large and very dead mouse.

It is perhaps only fitting and proper for the mother of
two young Siamese cats to make much over their first
mouse. I wasn't able to make anything more than one
blood-curdling shriek. Then I darted out of the bed, into
my clothes, and out to the station wagon where I sat bolt
upright, shuddering, for the rest of the night.

Shortly after six o'clock, Bill and The Girls joined me.
"Up early, aren't you?" Bill said, yawning.

"With the birds!" I said with a big false smile.

"Not a very good motel, was it?" he said, gingerly starting the car.

"Not very," I said.

The car coughed and sputtered, got its breath, and then
lurched out of the cinders of Roach Haven.

We only began to cheer up when the station wagon
heaved and gasped up the driveway of Rancho del Monte.
We had leased the place almost sight unseen. That is to
say, we
had
been there once before, but only on the briefest of visits. Neither one of us had set foot in the kitchen,
the corral, or any of the bedrooms. The place had been owned and operated by a perfect pet of a woman named Bess Huntinghouse who agreed to rent it to us only be
cause, I think, she liked Bill's looks. She knew nothing
about us except that we were the greenest pair of tender-
feet in the whole wild West, but she trusted us and we
trusted her—to such a point, in fact, that the contract with Bess's signature hadn't even arrived at the time we left New York.

After a straight two weeks of motor trouble and blow
outs, after several days and nights of hearing Bill's fam
ily, while we visited them, tell us how insane we were,
and after a few more days and nights of hearing my own family tell us the same thing when we were staying with
them, Rancho del Monte looked like the Holy Grail—
even if I did secretly agree with every word Bill's parents
and my parents had to say.

It wasn't that I
wanted
to end up at Rancho del Monte—
or any other dude or non-dude ranch. This was just a case of pure female
temporary thinking.
Rancho del
Monte was a place I
knew,
however slightly, unlike the
hotels and motels and tourist courts and boardinghouses in which time, fate, and motor trouble had forced us to
roost on our trip across the country. At the time the sta
tion wagon shuddered to a stop at the
portale,
Rancho del
Monte meant a shampoo, a decent bed with non-gritty
sheets, a place where I could suds my underwear and
stop living out of a suitcase for a little while. But this, as
you can see, was the pure clean-dresser-drawer attitude as opposed to the please-call-us-at-six-and-don't-bother-with-breakfast attitude. I
still wasn't able to adjust myself
to being anything more than an honored and off-season
guest at Rancho del Monte. To me, arrival meant a visit
of a week, two weeks, a month. I just wasn't able to think
of the place in terms of five years with an option on the rest of my life.

Bess Huntinghouse bustled out to greet us in her usual
warm, outspoken fashion. She herded us into the main
house and showed us a room. "This is the room I thought
you'd like," she said, "but if you'd prefer another one, it's
entirely up to you."

That shook me, but of course Bess was absolutely right.
From that moment on I could have chosen to set up living quarters on the kitchen range, in the middle of the swimming
pool, under the mam dining table—anywhere on our
2,400 acres—and there would have been no one to blame
but myself. However, the room looked fine to me and the
clean white bathtub looked even better.

"Lunch will be in half an hour," Bess said, "or when
ever you want it. It's steak. You just say. You're, the boss."

Again the words just staggered me, but not quite enough. I still felt like Bess's guest.

Of course, Bill was bustling around unpacking stiff,
new blue jeans, whistling tunelessly (always a sign that
he's uneasy), and saying bright, inane things about how lovely everything was. It was a brave attempt, I suppose,
to put me at my ease and make me think he had no regrets whatever about throwing over our whole Eastern
past and that he had a Master Plan for making our whole
Western future one big bed of roses. But it rang about as
true as a wooden nickel.

At lunch even Bill began to crack.

The main table in the dining room at del Monte was a massive, carved Spanish affair where, by tradition, the
owner sat in what was easily the largest chair ever carved,
and presided like the King of Spain over his guests.

When lunch was announced, Bill was all courtly airs
and graces and, bowing as deeply as the new jeans would
allow, he pulled out the throne for Bess.

"Oh, no," Bess said. "You sit there. This is your ranch
now." Then she took her place in one of the smaller carved chairs along the side of the table.

This, of course, was just Bess's way of making us feel
at home, or saving by means of a courteous gesture that
the place was incontrovertibly ours and that Bill was mas
ter of all he surveyed. However, it had just the opposite
effect on my Bill.

From the other end of the table—where
I
was pretty
uncomfortable, too—I had a splendid view of Bill as lord,
master, and ranchero of del Monte, and a pretty funny sight it was. If that chair had been fitted out with elec
trodes and fifty thousand volts he couldn't have looked
more miserable. He went red. He went white. He
squirmed and wriggled like those poor men in the underwear ads. He fumbled the bread, dropped a fork, nearly sent an ashtray clattering to the floor, and came close to
overturning his water glass. The sight of my suave New
Yorker acting like a tongue-tied schoolboy at the head
of the table was just too much for me. I snickered help
lessly into my soup—and don't think that
that
didn't make
an astonishing pattern on Bess's place mat—
my
place mat, I guess.

But the worst was yet to come.

After lunch Bess tossed down her napkin, got up,
handed the keys over to me, as chatelaine of Rancho del
Monte, and said she thought she'd be running along. Just
like that. Then she waved gaily, got into her car, and dis
appeared over a hilltop.

Actually, she was going to her house, which was close
by, but if the earth had opened up and swallowed her
alive I couldn't have been more desolate. I hadn't felt so
lonely and alien and abandoned since the day Mother
took me off to kindergarten, checked on my hankie, whis
pered about the girls' room, and left me flat.

This was exactly the same except that, unlike school,
there wasn't any law stating I
had
to be here. Having ab
solutely nothing else to do, I wandered like a lost soul
around the place with The Girls yowling dismally behind
me. After having lived in three elegant little rooms in
New York, the cats just weren't acclimated to Rancho del
Monte and neither was I. I just
hated it.

Well, that's not absolutely fair. The ranch was really lovely—bigger and nicer than any place I'd ever lived in
before—and as a guest I'd oh-ed and ah-ed about it the same as anyone else. As the boss-lady, it was just too much for me to digest.

Maybe I'd better tell you something about it.

The main house and the guest houses were made of
real adobe in the Pueblo style: dreadful any place else—
you know those ersatz hot dog stands and roadhouses that
are called something like El Chico—but absolutely per
fect for New Mexico. The living room in the main house
was a U-shaped cavern fifty feet long at its greatest di
mension. It was finished in white plaster with mammoth beams and furnished with massive pieces of carved Span
ish Colonial furniture, which I always condemned as arty,
self-conscious, and bogus back in the East, but which again is perfect in the Spanish Southwest.

Besides that enormous living room, the ground floor also
housed four bedrooms and baths, an office—what was
I
going to do with an office?—a big kitchen, larder, pantry,
and laundry. There were also two big terraces, for sunning, eating, drinking, or just sitting.

The second floor was made up of four more double
bedrooms, three baths, and two private terraces, with
plenty of space and existing plans to add on more bed
rooms and baths—as though that weren't enough!

That, however, was only the beginning.

Sprinkled around the main house were two guest houses, one containing three bedrooms and three baths,
the other made up of two rooms and a connecting bath,
which could be a suite if you wanted to be fancy or a
self-contained cottage if you happened to be a family of
three or four.

Then there was a small house for the help and a bunk-
house for the wrangler—which was also my very own
bridal bower during the summers and times when the rest
of the place was filled to capacity.

At the top of a hill there was a good-sized swimming
pool that glowed like the loveliest turquoise ever mined in
a setting of perfectly heavenly roseate and lavender flag
stones. It really looked good enough to eat, but since it was the middle of March and too cool that year to use the pool, looking was all I could do.

There was a concrete tennis court, surrounded by a
vine-covered wall. That interested me just about as much
as a bear-baiting pit, since I had never been even vaguely
athletic.

The corral absolutely terrified me—and The Girls—
when I came upon it quite unexpectedly and was some
what taken aback to see eight huge horses, shaggy in their
winter coats, staring me balefully in the eye. The horses
had been bought for us sight unseen, but the first sight
was enough. I turned on my heels and fled right back to
the ranch house.

Rancho del Monte had been planned, designed, and
almost
built by Bess Huntinghouse. She told me she used
to drive up to the site of the place and sit on a hill for
hours just concentrating on which would be the loveliest vie
ws, which sections would get the sun and which the shade. The whole place was planned and worked out as thoughtfully and painstakingly as an Aubusson tapestry. Bess had opened Rancho del Monte in 1932—the very pit
of the Depression. She managed to keep it going, and keep
it going at a profit, all through the Depression, when guests
and money were scarce, and all through the war when
supplies, meat, gasoline, repairs, and employees were even
scarcer.

If Bess could do it, so could I, I kept telling myself. But I didn't believe one word of it. In the first place, Bess had had experience. She had worked at the large and elegant Bishop's Lodge in Santa Fe for years. She knew the guest
ranching business inside out. She knew the region, the
people, the climate, and all the cute tricks the weather can play. Bess also knew the hotel business and the restaurant
business.

All I knew about hotels and restaurants was that you
paid your money and took your choice and that you tipped
between ten and twenty per cent, depending on the service.
When it came to ranching and the region, I knew just one
thing—that I didn't want any of it. Yet every inch of
Rancho del Monte was ours for the next five years or until
such time as we would founder physically, emotionally, and
financially. On that first day I honestly hoped we would
flop so fast and so hard that the echo would be heard around the world—excluding only Evanston, Illinois,
where my mother waited momentarily for news of our total
defeat.

"Well, here we are," Bill said that night as we were
undressing, "in our own little place. Just the two of us." I detected a determined but false note of cheer in his voice.

"Yes," I growled, "here we are. Just you and me and
The Girls and those horrid horses and no experience and a
manager and his wife and one guest and a whole three
hundred and sixty-four days of debts and defeat to look forward to. How many guests did you say we had to have
each day in order to break even?"

"Five—that's roughly fifty bucks a day."

"Fifty dollars a day, eh? Let's see, that's, um, about fifteen thousand dollars a year. . ."

"It's exactly eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty,''
Bill said. (He has a head for figures.)

"I see, Mr. Moneybags," I said nastily. (Honestly,
sometimes when I think of the Little Miss Acidmouth I
was in those first days, I blush with shame.) "And we now
have one guest—or ten dollars—for today. That means
we've lost forty. Just let me jot that down."

"What for?" Bill asked.

"So when I have to hock the silver and my engagement
ring and everything else we own to pay our way out of
here, I'll have some idea of how much to ask for at Uncle
Jake's pawnshop."

"You really think we're going to flop?" Bill asked.

"You may quote me," I said and tumbled into bed.

But the first taste of defeat came three days—or one hundred and twenty dollars' worth of deficit—later, and,
just like anyone eke, I didn't enjoy it one little bit. It
wasn't even a genuine defeat—it only
felt
like one. We lost
our first, our one and only guest.