Genteel Spirits (Daisy Gumm Majesty Books) Read online

  GENTEEL SPIRITS

  A Daisy Gumm Majesty Book

  Alice Duncan

  Copyright © 2011 by Alice Duncan.

  For the real John Bohnert who, unlike Daisy, is an excellent cook and, what’s more, is willing to share his excellent recipes!

  Chapter One

  The first few months of 1922 weren’t what I’d call boring, exactly. Nevertheless, the fact was my best client, Mrs. Algernon Pinkerton, nee Madeline Kincaid—but no, I’m wrong about that. However, since I don’t know her maiden name, it’ll just have to do—was on another long, long trip with her new husband.

  Mrs. Pinkerton’s daughter Stacy Kincaid, formerly bane of my existence, had yet to fall from grace since she’d joined the Salvation Army, so she wasn’t causing me any problems.

  No ghosts requiring exorcism had taken possession of Mrs. Bissel’s basement, as had happened once before.

  Flossie Buckingham, a dear friend and the wife of Johnny Buckingham, captain in the Salvation Army and, therefore, firmly in charge of the aforementioned Stacy, was “with child,” and elated about it. Actually, both Buckinghams were. And so was I. For them.

  Pasadena, California, my home town, remained serene and beautiful in all its bounteous spring glory, but . . . Well, the fact of the matter was that not much was going on in the Gumm-Majesty household. You’d think that was a good thing, wouldn’t you? It might have been, except that all the nothing happening had me on pins and needles.

  Mind you, the rest of the world continued to turn, and lots of stuff was going on in it. For one thing, a conference was taking place in Cannes, France, concerning retribution payments required of the Germans after the late Great War. As far as I was concerned, there was no way Germany could possibly repay the world for the damage it and its foul Kaiser had caused. Heck, I lived with one of the results of the Kaiser’s insanity every day of my life.

  My beloved husband, Billy Majesty, formerly tall, athletic and handsome, had joined up in ‘seventeen when the USA entered the European Conflict, and had come back a little more than a year later a broken man. Literally. Not only had he been shot but, worse, his lungs had been permanently damaged by the most evil weapon ever perpetrated on the world: mustard gas. I expect someone, someday, will invent a weapon of war even worse than that blasted gas, but whoever does it will probably be a German. And damned for all eternity, if I have any say in the matter, which I don’t, and which also means it’s probably a good thing God is in charge of judgment and not Daisy Gumm Majesty.

  I don’t really mean that—the hating-all-Germans part. I’d learned late in 1921 that not all Germans are vicious and evil. But I still resented the blasted Kaiser and his partners in crime more than I can ever possibly say—and I’ve said a lot. My poor Billy was a wreck of his formerly wonderful self. What was worse was that, in the early months of 1922, he seemed to be weakening almost daily, which accounted for several of the aforementioned pins and needles. He used to try to walk, swearing he’d be able to leave his wheelchair behind one day. By early 1922, he almost never wanted even to try to walk. I feared he was giving up on life and that not merely made me want to cry, but it made me want to personally tear a pound of flesh from the Kaiser’s ugly body. And, unlike Shakespeare’s Shylock, there’d be blood when I wielded my knife.

  But I guess you don’t need to know that much about my grievances against the Kaiser. I should probably get back to what had happened during the early months of 1922.

  Billy had been interested when the American Professional Football Association renamed itself the National Football League in January, but I didn’t much care. Fortunately for Billy, I’d bought him a radio-signal receiving set a year or so earlier, so he could listen to football and baseball games when they were broadcasted. Radio, which is a much more convenient way of referring to the things, seemed to be expanding its horizons like mad, too. Americans were buying radios by the thousands, and President Harding had even installed one in the White House.

  “April Showers,” by Al Jolson, was a top hit. I bought the sheet music to it because the Gumms and Majestys—Billy and I were the only Majestys in the house. Ma and Pa and Aunt Vi were the Gumms—liked to gather ‘round the piano of an evening. I’d play and we’d all sing. I’d bought “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” which was also by Al Jolson, and which was a fun, toe-tapping melody; and “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans,” by Margaret Young. I tell you, if we didn’t have much else, we had music in the house.

  Probably the most shocking thing that occurred in early 1922 was the as-yet-unsolved murder of William Desmond Taylor in Hollywood. There had been tons of scandals regarding moving-picture people in those days, but a real, honest-to-goodness murder was worse even than when Fatty Arbuckle was arrested, tried and found not guilty in another scandalous case involving picture people and what finally proved to be an accidental death. Even though he was found not to be guilty of murder, Mr. Arbuckle’s career had been ruined. Scandals did that to a person.

  That didn’t mean the pictures themselves were bad, only that some of the people who worked in and around them were. In fact, my family and I really enjoyed Blood and Sand, which had starred Rudolph Valentino. I probably enjoyed that one more than I should have, given that I had no business ogling other men, for heaven’s sake. Then again, how many Rudolph Valentinos are there in the world to ogle? Besides, every other red-blooded American female was doing the same thing. Valentino aside, we saw other pictures that were quite entertaining, including Oliver Twist and The Prisoner of Zenda, which made me cry. Nobility of character always does that to me.

  The most exciting thing that had happened to my family in 1922 up to the time this story begins was that Billy and I had started taking Spike, our black-and-tan dachshund—which I’d taken in payment for ridding Mrs. Bissel’s home of the ghost I mentioned earlier—to dog-obedience school. The Pasanita Dog Obedience Club held dog-training sessions on Saturday mornings in Brookside Park.

  Billy, although confined to his wheelchair, nevertheless cheered Spike and me on from the sidelines, while Mrs. Pansy Hanratty, a rather mannish woman, but a darling, taught us humans how to teach our dogs to heel, sit, stay, lie down, fetch and so forth. All three of us had a great time at these training sessions, and Spike was doing swell, as long as I remembered how to make him obey, which I mostly did. Spike and I practiced every day, generally in the back yard with Billy and my father watching from the porch and laughing at us. Still and all, Spike was a more obedient specimen than were most of the human children I knew.

  Obedience training aside, for the most part life was pretty much as it had always been in our household since Billy came home from the war. Ma worked at the Hotel Marengo as the chief bookkeeper, which was a darned impressive job for a woman in those days. Aunt Vi cooked for the Pinkertons, although they, as I’ve already mentioned, were on another long trip somewhere. They liked to travel. I didn’t mind them being gone, even though their absence did mean my spiritualist business slumped a bit during their absences. For one thing, her being elsewhere in the world meant life was more peaceful in the Gumm-Majesty household, and I also had lots of time to practice obedience training with Spike.

  You see, Mrs. Pinkerton’s first husband, Eustace Kincaid, had been a horrid man, a thief and a general crumb, and it made me happy that Mrs. Kincaid had finally married a nice man. Mind you, I wasn’t holding my breath waiting for Stacy to return to her formerly flapperish ways and depart from the Salvation Army, but her defection from said Army wouldn’t affect me too much one way or the other, except that when she behaved badly, Mrs. Pinkerton called on my services a lot. Then again, no matter what Stacy was doing at any gi
ven time, Mrs. Pinkerton always had tizzies that required me to bring my Ouija board or my tarot cards to her home for spiritualist sessions. That was lucky for me, as my family needed the dough.

  Ma, Pa, Aunt Vi, Billy, Spike and I still lived in our tidy little bungalow on Marengo Avenue in Pasadena, California. We still walked to the Methodist-Episcopal Church (North), where I sang alto in the choir, on the corner of Marengo and Colorado every Sunday. My best friend was still Harold Kincaid, a gentleman of whom Billy didn’t approve because . . . well, because Harold was what Billy called a “faggot.” I don’t know why, although I do know what the slang term means, and I think it’s cruel. Harold couldn’t help being what he was. What’s more, his . . . um . . . particular gentleman friend, Delray Farrington, was the person who had saved the Kincaid Bank when the evil Mr. Kincaid did a bunk and ran off with a bunch of bearer bonds. Why, if it hadn’t been for Del, the bank would have crashed and all its investors would have lost their entire savings! So there, Billy Majesty.

  Oh, and there was still Sam Rotondo. Sam, a detective with the Pasadena Police Department, was Billy’s best friend. Sometimes I considered Sam my worst enemy, because he’d entangled me in one or two of his cases. And it’s not true, whatever Sam says, that said entanglement was all my fault. How could I have known the police would raid that speakeasy? Or that a crook had infiltrated the cooking class I taught at the Salvation Army? Of course, the fact that I, Daisy Gumm Majesty, who not only could but did burn water, was teaching the class in the first place might have been considered some sort of crime, but it wasn’t the sort Sam Rotondo would ordinarily care about.

  Sam and I didn’t exactly get along together, if you haven’t already figured that out for yourself. But Sam is neither here nor there—although I preferred him there. Unfortunately, he could generally be found in my very own living room, playing gin rummy with Billy and Pa. I was the only one in the family who didn’t adore Sam Rotondo. Ma, Vi, Billy and Pa thought he was great. Even Spike, who had once perpetrated an indignity on one of his big, fat policemanly shoes as a puppy, liked Sam by that time. Oh, well.

  Probably the most exciting thing that happened in my fair city of Pasadena in 1922 was that Mr. Montgomery “Monty” Mountjoy, an actor darned near as handsome as Rudolph Valentino, bought his elderly, genteel, southern grandmother, Mrs. Beauregard “Lurlene” Winkworth, a fabulous home on San Pasqual Street. Both the Pasadena Star News and the Evening Herald had a field day with that tidbit of information. Supposedly, Mrs. Winkworth, while from an old and distinguished South Carolina family, had fallen on hard times, and her grandson had rescued her in fine heroic fashion, thus cementing his gallant image as an icon off as well as on the silver screen.

  For the most part, Pasadena was a moral, not to say stuffy, community, where motion-picture people weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms. This was especially true in light of the William Desmond Taylor affair and the constant news of drug and alcohol consumption among the members of the picture community. All this consumption was being carried out in the days of Prohibition, too. Huh.

  Mind you, I doubted if anyone really knew anything against Mr. Mountjoy, although the press had tagged him as a gay blade and something of a Lothario for some months. The gossip columnists also claimed his fame and fortune had gone to his head and that he was in danger of becoming positively decadent in the manner of, say, Nero or Caligula or another one of those old Roman guys who bathed in wine and killed people for fun, in spite of having rescued his elderly grandmother from the clutches of poverty.

  I, however, Daisy Gumm Majesty, understood that the press often got things wrong. In actual fact, Harold Kincaid, my aforesaid best friend, was a costumier for a motion-picture studio in Los Angeles, and he had told me more than once that the studios actually hired people to make up fake backgrounds and personalities for their “stars.” Harold had also informed me that Monty Mountjoy was in reality a kindhearted and relatively sober-sided gent who liked to read books and listen to classical music on his radio or gramophone most evenings. What’s more, according to Harold, when Mr. Mountjoy did go out on the town and was seen with a young woman from the pictures, the outing was invariably arranged by his studio.

  Gee, you’d think I’d become cynical, knowing all this stuff, wouldn’t you? But I wasn’t. I could still be swept away by a well-made picture, just like everyone else in America. Heck, probably the whole world was watching moving pictures by that time. Besides, I earned my living pretending to talk to dead people for people with more money than sense. If that hadn’t made me cynical by 1922, after I’d been doing it for eleven years, I don’t suppose anything could.

  In any case, all of the above doesn’t have anything to do with the story I’m about to relate. Well, some of it does, but I’ll get to that later.

  You see, Billy, Vi and I were sitting at the kitchen table one Friday morning, eating the delicious breakfast Vi had made—have I mentioned that Vi cooks for us as well as Mrs. Pinkerton? Well, she does. And a good thing, too, since neither Ma nor I could cook for anything—when the telephone rang. Vi looked at me. Billy lowered the newspaper he’d been reading and looked at me, too. I sighed, got up from the table, and went to the far kitchen wall to pick up the receiver.

  “I thought Mrs. Pinkerton was out of town,” Billy muttered under his breath. Billy didn’t appreciate having his restful mornings interrupted by the shrill ringing of the telephone. I couldn’t fault him for that. I also wondered who could be calling, since early-morning telephone calls generally came from Mrs. Pinkerton when she was in particular distress, and I was pretty sure she was riding a camel in Egypt at the moment.

  “Gumm-Majesty residence,” I said into the receiver, as I almost always did. “Mrs. Majesty speaking.”

  “I need to speak with Mrs. Desdemona Majesty, please.”

  Perhaps I should explain that Desdemona thing. You see, when I was ten years old and first pretended to communicate through the Ouija board Mrs. Pinkerton (then Mrs. Kincaid) gave Aunt Vi, people actually believed I was speaking with spirits. So I let ‘em. I mean, if people wanted to believe that sort of rubbish and I could profit therefrom, why shouldn’t I? At any rate, that’s when my career as a spiritualist began. When I was ten years old. Honest. It’s the truth. Shortly thereafter, I decided Daisy was too humdrum a name for a genuine spiritualist. Not that I was one of those, but people thought I was, and that’s what mattered. So I selected Desdemona as my nom-de-whatever. Not until three or four years after that was I forced by a particularly mean-spirited English teacher to read Othello, or I’d probably have chosen another name. I mean, who wants to share a name with a famous fictional murderee, for heaven’s sake?

  Anyhow, I said, “This is she speaking.” I did so in my low, smooth, soothing spiritualist voice, since I knew nobody’d be telephoning for “Desdemona Majesty” unless the call was work-related.

  “Mrs. Majesty, my name is Gladys Pennywhistle—”

  “Gladys?”

  Silence on the other end of the wire. For good reason, as I didn’t generally shriek into the telephone receiver and just had. But I was shocked. Gladys Pennywhistle and I had gone to school together ever since the first grade!

  In an attempt to retrieve the moment, I said, “I beg your pardon, Gladys, but this is Daisy. You know, Daisy Gumm?”

  “Daisy?” came uncertainly through the wire. Talk about sober-sided people, Gladys was probably the premier example of the species. Very smart, the Gladys I knew had absolutely no sense of humor and took everything seriously, even when it wasn’t. We’d never been close friends, although we always got along well.

  “Yes. It’s Daisy. Only I’m Daisy Majesty now. Have been since 1917, in fact, when I married Billy Majesty, whom you may remember. He was a couple of years ahead of us in school. My professional name is Desdemona Majesty.”

  “Daisy?” she said again, as if she couldn’t believe her ears.

  “I’m sorry, Gladys. I didn’t mean to startle you. But ye
s, I am Desdemona Majesty, and I am the spiritualist for whom you’re looking.”

  I decided not to startle her further by telling her I’d made up the Desdemona part of my name. For all she knew, I’d been named Desdemona at birth and Daisy was a nickname.

  “I . . . I see.” Gladys cleared her throat. “What . . . what an interesting line of work you’re in, to be sure, Daisy. I mean Desdemona.”

  “Please call me Daisy, and it certainly is. How may I help you?” I couldn’t quite imagine Gladys calling upon a spiritualist for herself. Although people do change over time, I couldn’t reconcile the Gladys I’d known in school, and who’d actually understood and enjoyed algebra, with a person who possessed the need for a spiritualist. Personally, I’d liked geometry until we got out of the theorem stage and had to begin using algebra again. For my money, algebra is for the birds. Not that it matters.

  “Um . . . yes. I see. Thank you, Daisy.”

  She didn’t say for what. I gave her one of my low, comforting spiritualistic “hmmms.” We spiritualists can make all sorts of gentling noises.

  “Well, Daisy, you see . . .”

  Poor Gladys seemed to be rather flustered. I probably shouldn’t have screeched at her, even though my raised voice had been kindly meant. I tried to help her. “Do you or does someone you know need my services, perhaps?”

  “Yes.” There she was again: the no-nonsense, down-to-earth Gladys I’d known for most of my life. “You see, I work for Mrs. Lurlene Winkworth—”

  “Oh, my! You do?” There I went again. Shoot, I was almost always more composed than this. I expect Mrs. Pinkerton having been away for so long had allowed my spiritualist mystique to rust a bit. “I beg your pardon, Gladys. I’m just surprised, is all. I mean, I just read about Mrs. Winkworth in the Star News. About her grandson buying her that mansion and all, I mean.”

  “I . . . see.” Poor Gladys.