My City Different. Betty E. Bauer
ever let on that she knew her hitchhiker was the great Greta Garbo.
Neither Canyon Road nor Cerro Gordo yet had been paved so it was a dusty ride on the non-air-conditioned bus. One time I was riding the bus on the afternoon run and the bus driver stopped in front of a house set up the hill away from the road. The driver got out of the bus, went to the mail box at the side of the road, took out the mail, trudged up the hill to the house, opened the door and set the mail inside. I wondered if it was his house, but I later learned that a little old lady lived there who was badly crippled with arthritis, and that he stopped every day to take her mail to her.
Another time I got on the bus and there was a large box of groceries sitting in the well next to the driver. I assumed he’d done some shopping for his wife, but discovered that was not so when he made a stop in front of a house on Canyon Road, honked the horn and put the box by the side of the road. As we were pulling away, a young woman came out of the house followed by a couple of toddlers, picked up the groceries and marched back into the house with the groceries and the two young ones. She had no car and this was the way she got her groceries.
Around and about Cerro Gordo, there was a dapper little man who was always astride a beautiful chestnut horse and, on the ground by his side, a lively cocker spaniel of almost the identical color as the horse tagged along. I asked a neighbor who he was and she laughed and said, “Oh, that’s El Borracho. He’s the keeper of the horses.” It was still okay to have horses and, for that matter, all manner of domesticated animals—sheep, goats, pigs, chickens—on Cerro Gordo, and it was El Borracho’s job to see that the horses all stayed in their own corrals. I thought El Borracho was his title, sort of like the Major Domo of the ditches, but it wasn’t. Translated it means “the drunk”
Well, there was no doubt that El Borracho earned his name. Driving home from work along Canyon Road, many’s the time I would see that beautiful chestnut horse with his cocker friend of the same color waiting patiently in front of the Canyon Road Bar.
One bitter cold night, I was coming home from dinner at The Chinaman’s downtown (it was the New Canton, but we all called it The Chinaman’s) when, as I started to turn off Cerro Gordo into my lane, my headlights caught the chestnut cocker spaniel sitting by the side of the ditch. Oh, oh, where’s El Borracho? I stopped the car and got out and went over to the ditch—there lay El Borracho on a bed of ice. I didn’t know whether he was passed out or dead. I got back in the car and raced down the lane to my house and the phone. I called the police and told them El Borracho was in the ditch. They all knew him and came and got him and the little cocker spaniel. They were kept the night in a nice warm jail; and the next morning when I went to work, there he was sitting astride his chestnut horse with the faithful little dog following along.
5
Ibelieve I met Claude James at a poker party. A bunch of us would get together on Saturday nights and play penny-ante. Claude loved to play cards and someone invited her to join the group. Claude’s father was the Managing Editor of the New York Times. Her mother was a pretty, petite French woman. Claude had been raised in France and spoke French fluently, and English with one of those delightful accents that Americans love. She arrived in Santa Fe wearing a perky little navy blue hat, navy and white dress, blue pumps and white gloves. She was five feet tall and svelte at the time. Her traveling companion and friend was Allison Abott.
When I met her, her figure had blossomed. She wore men’s trousers, a tweed jacket, open-necked white shirt and very dirty oxfords. She had long since forsaken Allison and, although she and Happy Krebs were still partners in The Clip Joint, a successful dog-grooming operation, they no longer lived together. Happy had been married to Peter Krebs and, when Claude moved in with Happy, Peter moved out. Years later, Happy ended up with Allison, and Peter became very friendly with Mike James, Claude’s brother. Santa Fe was like that—musical chairs all around.
Claude decided she was going to have a party and she wanted me to come. It was late April, but still cold and windy; and Santa Feans, bored with winter and hibernating, were ready to party. Claude lived in a fair-size derelict of a house. It was full of dogs, mostly big standard poodles, and she was a lousy—really non-existent-housekeeper. The morning of the party, Claude called me in a panic. “My house—merd everywhere, the dogs you know—You’ll have to have the party at your house!” “But, Claude, I don’t know these people and how many? 16!, you say—my house is tiny—where can I put 16 people?” I wailed—“I can’t do it—You’ll have to find someone else.” Well, she wasn’t about to find someone else—it was going to be at my house period and, furthermore, she’d already called everyone and told them it would be at my house and how to get there. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll bring the food and the liquor.” “But,” I said, “how will I know who these people are if some of them arrive before you get here?” She read me her list and some I knew by sight, although I’d never met any of them—one pair I’d never seen or even heard of. “How will I know those two?” I complained. She replied, “Moya Canning is the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen and Cecily Cunha is the biggest woman you’ve ever seen. They’ll arrive in a yellow Cadillac.”
There was no mistaking those two even without the yellow Cadillac. Moya Canning was in her mid-fifties, an ex-patriot Brit, about my height, 5′6″, and slender but full-figured. A halo of silvery white hair framed her exquisite patrician features. She was obviously a woman of the world—a commanding presence—a woman used to having it all.
Cecily Cunha was equally stunning. She was part Hawaiian and part Portuguese—tall, a 6 footer, with wide shoulders like a football player encased in his protective padding. Her figure was V-shaped—wide shoulders, narrow waist and slim hips. She had a mop of naturally curly hair and a perpetual suntan. She wore a full-length mink and teetered on spike heels, like an enormous grizzly bear on roller skates. She had been an Olympic swimmer.
Cecily had come to Santa Fe before the war with an escaped white Russian, the Countess Zena DeRossin. She bought Rancho Ancon out in Pojoaque, about 20 miles north of Santa Fe, which she and Zena ran as a sort of dude ranch playground. Parties were frequent and the guests many. Sometimes the party moved on for dinner and dancing at El Nido, a roadside restaurant and bar in Tesuque, a village just north of Santa Fe.
One memorable evening when things were going full tilt at El Nido, Fritzy Bard, another White Russian, a major in the WACS, and Zena DeRossin were talking animatedly in Russian when the FBI descended. Santa Fe was infested with agents during the war and for some years afterward because of Los Alamos. Poor Fritzy almost lost her commission and ended up in the brig over that one, but it was finally all straightened out when the FBI learned it was just innocent chitchat between two ex-patriot Russians who had barely escaped that country with their lives.
El Nido was run by the sure hand of Charlie Besre and the eagle eye of his wife, Mimi. Mimi employed her eagle eye at the cash register and kept the other eye on her husband, Charlie, who was known to have a weakness for les femmes.
El Nido was very popular. The food was exceptional, the bar generous, and it had one of only two dance floors handy to Santa Fe—the other was La Fonda.
6
La Fonda was still a Harvey House when I first knew it, and the waitresses wore the same kind of uniforms that they wore in the Judy Garland movie, albeit slightly modified. A very handsome Taos Indian hung around La Fonda—Old Joe, we called him. He’d let you take his picture for 25 cents, and I doubt there was a tourist that visited Santa Fe that didn’t have a shot of Old Joe tucked away in an album somewhere.
At that time, Shorty, dressed in a crisp white uniform, patrolled the streets around the Plaza with his cart, broom and dust pan. Nary the smallest scrap of paper escaped his broom. No one seemed to know his name or for whom he worked, but he certainly kept the Plaza clean.
La Fonda was so other-worldly that, upon entering, you felt that you had walked into a picture from a history book depicting another era.