Read Online Guestward Ho! by Patrick Dennis - Free Book Online

kitchen.
    6. All cooks look upon all recipes not in their reper toires with suspicion and/or scorn and serve soggy popovers instead.
    7. All cooks have Spells, and those Spells occur just be fore 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 Cali ban 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 un easy about interviewing, but I asked myself what Mother would have done and followed suit. We got ourselves gus sied 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 mar ried Daddy, Minnie went right along, too. She raised Susan and Joan and Jerry and me, and if she were still alive she'd be out on the ranch with us right now."
    "Or like our Lula," Bill said. "She was really excep tional. 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 em ployee."
    "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 gra cious 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."
    We let the matter drop there.
    "Married?"
    “Yes," I said distinctly, even though I didn't see what business it was of his.
    "A couple, then?"
    "Well, We'd thought just a cook, but of course a couple would be perfect," I said. Then I tuned out long enough to indulge in a roseate little dream of life with a couple— there He'd be, impeccable in white jacket, serving drinks and canapés, circling the dinner table (unlike Curly) with silent perfection, pressing Bill's suits, and driving me wherever I wanted to go and whenever; She'd be dishing up superb meals, dusting, arranging flowers, making beds, and pressing knife-edged pleats in every stitch I owned. And where would I be? Right on the chaise longue!
    "You say yuh been doin' ranch work,