Guestward Ho! Page 5

  First of all there was the stove, which Bill could work like a dream. But all that stove had to do was to take one look at me and it knew it had the upper hand. It was big and black, with six burners and two ovens, each measuring a yard across and each yawning hungrily for a thirty-pound turkey. Then there was a broiler capable of incinerating six very large steaks. Finally there was a large, wide, elevated plateau, just the right height for resting my weary elbow. But I only rested it there once—and very briefly—for it turned out to be a griddle, ideal for bacon and pancakes and hamburgers and just lousy for elbows. The scars have since disappeared.

  When we first came out here I didn't know a tsp. from a Tbsp., and to make operations still more difficult, the stove worked on gas, but not the kind of gas I'd been accustomed to. In my days of modest city cookery, the gas came from . . . well, I don't exactly know where it did come from, except that every two months Bill sent a small check to Consolidated Edison, Box 138, Cooper Station, New York 3, and that seemed to keep the burners bright. Not so in the mountains around Santa Fe. There our cooking was done by butane gas, which you ordered in thousands of tons or cubic feet or something like that and which was delivered by a big truck with so many menacing warnings as to its inflammability that I forbade everyone on the ranch to smoke until the tank was replenished and the truck well over the mountains. And do you think I ever remembered to reorder gas until the last, pathetic little hiss of it was gone? Of course I didn't. Oh, there was many a chilly meal of cold soup, cold salmon, tossed salad, chilly rolls, ice cream, and tap water owing exclusively to the gas running out. "It's so hot today!" I'd say with an almost hysterical gaiety to the guests. "Why, it's almost sixty! So I just thought wouldn't it be fun to have a cold supper!" Then I'd try to avoid the baleful stares cast at me by guests huddled around the fireplace, dash back to the kitchen, and put through another heart-tending call to the gas service.

  But even assuming that the stove liked me, which it didn't; that the butane gas was perpetually flowing, which it wasn't; and that I am at home, so to speak, on the range, which I am not, there were other knotty problems connected with our cuisine. The first of which happened to be concerned with where we were doing the cooking.

  Rancho del Monte was situated seven thousand feet up, lovely for asthma and sinus "sufferers, divine for people with allergies and respiratory ailments, but rough on cooks. Read all the recipe books you want and then throw them away, because nothing cooks in that altitude in the time you expect it to. Water, for example, boils at 182° instead of 212° F., so it's a brave man who orders a three-minute egg and eats it.

  Everything had to be cooked longer than it did at sea level, or even down two thousand feet in places like Albuquerque. Cakes were just hopeless, except, oddly enough, the ones that were made from prepared mixes. A fourteen-pound roast had to be cooked four and a half hours to be served rare; one minute less and it was downright bloody. Two hours were the minimum for a baked potato and three hours for a pan-roasted one. Nor was there any cut and dried formula we could use in order to adjust the cooking time. Different things acted differently in the altitude. Meats were the most dependable and differed the least from downhill cookery. Potatoes and green vegetables were the most likely to look as though they were ready to fall apart from the outside, but to be hard, cold, nasty little pellets on the inside. And as for anything involving eggs! Well, back East both Bill and I had been quite capable of turning out perfectly lovely soufflés—mountainous and fluffy—simply by mixing them up, popping them into a moderate oven, and forgetting them for forty-five minutes. Not so out here. With that devil-may-care bravery symbolic of the pioneer woman, I attempted quite a few soufflés during my early, or blindly irrational, days in the West. None ever got to the table. They either fell as flat as flannel cakes or else they exploded all over the oven, leaving me with a table of hungry guests and the alternative of whipping up some grilled cheese sandwiches or taking everyone out for lunch.

  Many was the time I had to capitulate to that vicious old stove, toss in the towel, wash myself every place that showed, fluff my hair, change, and guide my flock of ravening guests to the station wagon and thence to a good restaurant for lunch or—even more ruinous—for dinner. It was great fun for everybody, and of course, they got an elegant meal instead of my burnt offering, but it was murder on the exchequer.

  Look at it this way: Rancho del Monte was a first-class establishment—not de luxe, but first class. Yet the rates were very low, all things considered. Bill and I charged between eight dollars and twelve dollars a day, depending on accommodations, and that included all three meals—first-class meals. So when the stove blew up or ran out of butane gas or when the main dish wouldn't do at all or overdid itself to a heap of ashes, it meant that the little hostess had to put on her gloves, smile, make a reservation at a local eatery—and not a hash wagon, but a first-class establishment—and pay the check with a wide, white, hospitable grin.

  I may be dead and forgotten as far as most of Santa Fe is concerned, but I'll always occupy a warm spot in the hearts of its restaurateurs. Many of them who were poor, struggling businessmen before our frontal attack on the West are now fixed for life owing almost exclusively to my experiments at the stove. And let me tell you, even though I am now poor and they are now rich, there is a certain satisfaction in seeing this headwaiter's new Cadillac, that chef's daughter going off to college, and knowing that I did it all in the kitchen of del Monte. It gives one the warm feeling of a rather down-at-the-heels fairy godmother.

  However, let me point out once more that such a practice was absolutely ruinous. The average daily income from a guest was ten dollars, but if we had to take them all off to Hotel La Fonda, or the Pink Adobe, or to either of our good local night clubs—El Nido or the Pink Garter over in Lamy—or, if the meal I had planned was really catastrophic, off to La Dona Luz in Taos, and buy them a drink for their patience and understanding and then pick up the tab, it never came to less than five dollars a head; usually more. So you can see that many of our business days ended up in the red, even though we hadn't a vacancy in the house.

  It was after a week of our first influx of guests that I caught my breath for long enough to sit back and examine our handiwork with a critical eye. And let me say quite frankly I didn't like what I saw. It seemed to me we were working too hard at things we shouldn't be doing. We weren't taking care of our guests, we weren't entertaining them or being friends with them, we were simply providing for them—and not doing that any too well.

  Believe me, I had never been so naive as to expect to be sitting decorously around the lounge in a diaphanous negligee, spouting brittle small-talk, and pouring tea from Bill's family's silver service. But, on the other hand, it had seemed to me that as hostess of the ranch I was expected to be more than a sullen slattern trudging gloomily from bedmaking to dishwashing and snarling at anyone brave enough to say "Good morning."

  If I'd ever had any qualms about this venture before we left New York, they had multiplied like rabbits in Santa Fe. Those first people who were brave enough to stay with us were perfectly wonderful. They pitched in cheerfully and helped on the bedmaking, on dusting, on peeling potatoes—on doing all the things they were paying to have done for them. But do you know that while I can remember exactly who they were and where they came from, what they had to eat and where they slept, I can't recall ever having had one minute's conversation with any of them. Instead of the buoyant hostess, I was the household drudge. When the last dish was washed at night I was just able to stagger into the living room, collapse into a chair, and do my level best to keep my black-circled eyes open and muffle huge, convulsive yawns behind hands so rough and red with nails so chipped and broken that they reminded me more of the assembly line in a barbed wire factory than the receiving line at Bergdorf's.

  It's awfully hard to write a yawn, but if you'd like some idea of my sparkling postprandial conversation, it went, I think, something like this:

  "Do tell me
about your nice ride up in the mountains . . . (Yawn) . . . Excuse me, the attitude, I mean altitude . . . (Head bobs slowly down to chest. I snatch it up sharply, thinking that I've been asleep for hours. I shouldn't have matched it up quite so sharply, either. Terrible crick in neck) . . . Sorry about that lemon snow tonight. Ho-hum. Do forgive me! . . . (Smother another yawn and nearly dislocate jaw doing so) . . .Oh, you're just saying that to be polite. I'm afraid it was quite curdled . . . (Head sinks slowly again and book slides off lap) . . . Well, as you were saying about your apartment in Dallas . . . Sorry, 1 meant Denver . . . (Eyes will not focus. Take deep breath, raise head, and stare glassily and inanely at guest, thus giving the impression that I've been on cocaine all day, instead of my hands and knees) . . . Do go on with . . . (Racking yawn that contorts my whole body) . . . Excuse me, interesting story . . . (Head sinks lower and lower and I am brought to life only by means of falling off my chair and striking my head sharply on the hearth) . . . Ooops! Sorry. Chintz is so slippery!"

  By nine I would have limped off to bed, leaving a houseful of guests to entertain themselves as best they could with listless tables of bridge or canasta. Let me say again, those first people weren't just paying guests, they were patron saints, and the fact that some of them came back again for further torture makes me suspect that they were gluttons for punishment or that they couldn't quite believe what had been happening to them and had to try again to make certain.

  And things didn't get better, either. They got worse. New guests kept coming, old guests kept staying. The service—as purveyed by me—kept deteriorating. Bill was working every bit as hard as I was, but his was becoming work. Out of doors all day long, he grew bronzed and slim and muscular. But woman's work, they say, is never done, and I traipsed from bedmaking to dishwashing to cooking to bed for fifteen hours each day, every day without even stopping to frighten myself in the mirror. It was probably just as well, but the big blow fell one evening when some brand-new guests arrived and I was alone to greet them.

  "How do you do," I said in what I considered to be my best hostess voice. "I'm Mrs. Hooton. Won't you come in and join us for sherry?"

  They did.

  Just as they were seated, in came Bill, fresh from the sun and air.

  "Hello," Bill said in his most winning and Western fashion. "I'm Bill Hooton. Can I offer you something to drink?"

  "Thank you, young man," the new guest said, "but your mother has already offered us sherry."

  There was a silence that could be heard from Santa Fe to Little Rock.

  "That's not my mother," Bill gasped. "That's my wife."

  Dinner was late that night. I spent a good half hour at the dressing table, first cursing the man for thinking that I was Bill's mother, when Bill has all of three years up on me; then cursing myself for falling into such disrepair as to make his faux pas completely justified (although, to do Bill's own mother justice, she'll look younger ten years from now, than I did that, evening); and finally doing a little conscientious homework with hairbrush, cold cream, powder, lipstick, and girdle. However, you can't correct two months of neglect in two minutes at the mirror. I looked like the Witch of Endor and, what's more, I felt like it.

  Nobody has ever called me a raving beauty. Men have managed to see me pass by and still stay on their feet. Stop me if I'm wrong, but I don't think I've ever been any vainer than—or even as vain as—most other women. I've always been happy and satisfied to be clean, powdered, kempt, and to have my underwear nice—and invisible. Tears would have been in order, but I kept telling myself that red, swollen eyes would only heighten the character role I seemed to be playing. Anger came next, but when I looked at the bristling brows, the frown lines, the down-turned mouth, that mood was quickly abandoned in the interests of sex appeal. Then the whole thing struck me as so funny that I began to laugh and kept on laughing until I rolled off the boudoir stool. It was in that guise—the jolly, roly-poly, lovable old mom, chuckling at her cares—that I reappeared to a hideously embarrassed and much chastened guest.

  Dinner went off smoothly and I managed to keep awake and vivacious, for one of my advanced years, through the evening. But I hadn't forgotten the mortal insult dealt to my twenty-seven years. When Bill came tromping out of the bathroom that night, yawning and groaning and looking exactly twenty-one years old, I was giving my long, lank hair an added two hundred strokes, removing a month's accumulation of dust, burs, sand, cactus, and, of all things, a pearl earring.

  I fixed him with a beady eye and, still brushing, I said, "Darling?" in that listen-and-listen-carefully tone.

  "Yes, dear?" he yawned.

  "We're going to have a new problem," I said.

  "Oh; Lord!" Bill said. "What kind of a problem?"

  "A most unusual and welcome kind of problem," I said. "A servant problem."

  6. Too many cooks

  It probably sounds awfully lofty to be moaning about the Servant Problem in a day and age when Annie and Bridget and Hilda—and not the poor redskins—are the true Vanishing Americans. But when you're in the business of feeding people's faces three times a day, household help becomes not only a necessity, but a problem of such magnitude as to put the Theory of Relativity in the shade.

  For those of you who may occasionally have hankered for that neatly uniformed treasure who answers the telephone and the door with flawless style, turns out feathery puff paste, and says "Dinner is served, Madam," with devastating chic, let me offer one word of advice: Don't.

  Be happy in your self-contained, servantless houses—revel in them!

  I can now give you a few simple ground rules for household help, and anybody who's ever been in the paying guest business will back me up.

  1. Ninety-nine per cent of all professional cooks are crazy or alcoholic or mean, or all three.

  2. No cook has ever heard of serving three meals on a Sunday.

  3. No cook has ever seen a kitchen that was large enough, light enough, well enough equipped—except the kitchen at the last job.

  4. No cook can ever understand why your guests don't like soggy popovers when Gertrude Lawrence, George V, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Elinor Glyn all adored them. (And there's no use in pointing out that all the foregoing celebrities are dead—and probably from soggy popovers.)

  5. All cooks have spent their time exclusively in the service of the exalted and it's quite a step down for them to be in your tacky little kitchen.

  6. All cooks look upon all recipes not in their repertoires with suspicion and/or scorn and serve soggy popovers instead.

  7. All cooks have Spells, and those Spells occur just before the arrival of twenty guests.

  8. All cooks are a wicked waste of time, money, and patience.

  9. All cooks are essential.

  But at the time we were hiring our first cook I was so sick of the kitchen that I would have, gladly installed Caliban at the stove. By means of every feminine wile short of drawing a Luger on him I had convinced Bill that at least one extra pair of hands would be needed during the busy summer season, and it was with high heart that we set off for a domestic employment agency in Albuquerque.

  Not being experienced in the hirings and firings of more than a one-afternoon-a-week charwoman, I was a bit uneasy about interviewing, but I asked myself what Mother would have done and followed suit. We got ourselves gussied up as the prosperous little suburban couple—Bill looking as Madison Avenue as possible in a city suit and low heels, and I looking as day-of-shopping-in-town as my Junior League sister-in-law in navy blue and high heels.

  "Bill," I kept saying, as the station wagon bounced down the highway to Albuquerque, "it's going to be just wonderful. We'll get this marvelous cook and just take her under our wing as one of the family. She'll be just like our old Minnie. Why, Minnie was with my family for almost fifty years. She started out at Grandma Fargo's old house on Wellington Street in Chicago. Then when Mother married Daddy, Minnie went right along, too. She raised Susan and Joan and Jerry and me, and if sh
e were still alive she'd be out on the ranch with us right now."

  "Or like our Lula," Bill said. "She was really exceptional. Nobody ever knew how old she was, but I do know she was born in slavery. Yet she came up to Indiana and got a job with my mother, raised all of us, cooked, taught herself to read and write, and when she died we felt much worse about it than we did about a lot of our relatives. In fact, she's buried right along with the rest of us, because she really was more a part of the family than just an employee."

  "Well, that's what we're going to find today," I said staunchly, "someone we love who will love us and just stay and stay and stay and stay."

  At the door of the agency I said a silent prayer, drew my clean white gloves up to the elbow, blew a beetle off my veil, arranged my face into what I considered to be a gracious matron expression, and swept in.

  The place was empty except for a man with a horrid cigar.

  "How do you do," I said, "I am . . ."

  "Siddown," the man said out of the nonsmoking corner of his mouth. "I'll call you when I'm ready."

  We sat, somewhat dismayed. Unaccustomed as I was to engaging retinues of servants, I had expected a somewhat more effusive greeting. Eventually we were summoned to his battered desk where, with a grunt, he gestured us into a couple of uncomfortable chairs.

  "Name?" he said with a grunt.

  "Hooton," Bill said with bell-like clarity.

  "H-O-O-T-E-N?" the man said, scratching away with his pen.

  "No," Bill said. "Three O's."

  "Oh, I get it:, H-O-O-O-T-E-N. That's sure a screwy way to spell it."