Mirabel. He was a canny, engaging middle-aged Indian who gave me a hard-luck story which I thought was worth the dollar he wheedled out of me. It intrigued me to have a real Indian acquaintance—that is, until about his third visit to the New Mexican to hit me up each time for another dollar.
4
The first house I owned in Santa Fe was a small studio house with a large walled garden and patio. It was down a little lane off Cerro Gordo Road. There was an adobe house with a pitched roof on Cerro Gordo at the corner where my lane turned off. It was owned and had been built by a nice youngish man who I knew only as Pedro. He lived there with his wife and several small children. A large wooden plaque had been placed above the door lintel just under where the roof peaked. In bright red large letters crudely painted, it read “LIVE AND LET LIVE.”
There was a profusion of outhouses among the hills off the north side of the road. On my side, the south side, the land was flatter and sloped down toward the Santa Fe Canyon and river far below. Either there were no outhouses on my side of the road or they had been artfully concealed.
It was 1956 and Santa Fe still had a bus—as far as I know, it was the only bus route left. It was the Canyon Road, Cerro Gordo route so, coming from town, it followed Palace Avenue to Canyon Road, east on Canyon Road to just before it reached the Randall Davey property where the road made a wide curve to the north, then to the west where it became Cerro Gordo. A Mr. Gustafsson lived just beyond the junction on the south side of the road. He was Greta Garbo’s brother, and she was a frequent, rarely seen visitor. The road wound around the hills and eventually went past my lane and ended back on Palace Avenue and thus into town. One day a friend of mine was driving on Palace and had just approached its intersection with Cerro Gordo when she spotted a woman trudging toward town. It was a cold, blustery day, so she stopped the car and asked the woman if she’d like a ride. The woman got in the car and my friend recognized her, but didn’t 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
