Strong Spirits [Spirits 01] (2 page)

      
Billy’s mother and father had died in the influenza epidemic that had swept the world in 1918 and 1919. His sister had married a nice man who trained horses for Mr. Lucky Baldwin. They were living in a cottage on his ranch in Arcadia, which is a small community about twelve miles across the Arroyo Seco from Pasadena. Therefore, my family became Billy’s.

      
We lived with my parents, and my work helped to put bread on their table, too. By that time Pa had come down with a bum heart and couldn’t work as much as he used to. My cousin Paul had died in the war. He’s buried in France, and I’ve told Aunt Vi I’ll take her there one day to visit the site of his burial. Uncle Ernie had succumbed to his excesses as well, so Aunt Vi, twice-bereaved and heartsick to her bones, came to live with us.

      
The plain truth was that Ma needed all the financial help she could get. Since both my brother Walter and my sister Daphne were married and had families of their own to provide for, that left me.

      
The only problem with working as a spiritualist is that you tend to meet a lot of strange people. Sometimes that can be interesting and even amusing, at least for me, because I like all kinds of people. At other times, it can be merely bizarre, and sometimes it’s downright frightening.

      
For some reason, too, I seem to attract weirdness. I don’t understand it. A policeman friend of mine once told me it’s because I’m cursed, but I think—I hope—he was only kidding. He won’t admit it.

      
The first real hint of this characteristic of mine happened in 1920, not even two full years after the war ended, and about six months before my own twentieth birthday. Everyone’s life had been changed by the World War. Not only had I, a very young female person, become the virtual support of my entire family, including a crippled husband, but everyone was still shaken by the atrocities the world had seen in that most brutal of conflicts.

      
I still felt a pang of trepidation every day when I picked up the
Star News,
one of Pasadena’s two daily newspapers, because it continued to print the casualty lists for nearly a year after the official end of the war. I guess they kept finding bodies, which is a terrible thought. My heart aches to this day when I remember reading, day after day, row upon row of names of the dead and wounded, searching for those of my friends and family.

      
The nation was having a hard time recovering from the war, too. It wasn’t only my family that was suffering. In other words, times were hard.

      
I’ve read Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books about all those rich, bored, alienated people back East, who can’t find anything worthwhile to see or do in life, and his work only makes me mad. What do those people have to complain about, for Pete’s sake? Heck, if I had all that money, I’d
do
something with it; something worthwhile. Not them. They just wallow in their disenchantment and pretend to suffer.

      
Phooey. They don’t know what suffering is. Anyhow, if they hate the good old U.S.A. so much, why don’t they move to Europe? I have a sneaking hunch they could be miserable anywhere. Even Paris, France, or Egypt (I’ve always wanted to see the pyramids).

      
I don’t understand people who claim to have lost hope and have no dreams for the future, either. For so many years after that horrid, awful war, all I lived on was hope. Heck, I dished it out for a living, to people who
needed
it. Besides, the way I see it, it’s only the rich in this world who can afford to be disenchanted and blasé. The rest of us are too busy trying to earn a living.

      
Anyhow, when it comes to reading for entertainment, I’ll take a good old murder mystery or a rip-roaring western any day over Fitzgerald’s books. I like it when the good guys win in the end. None of your moral ambiguity for me, thank you very much. If I want to be depressed, all I have to do is live. I’d as soon be entertained when I read. Mary Roberts Rinehart and Zane Grey are my heroes.

      
Maybe I’m just bitter, but I think Mr. Fitzgerald ought to have talked to me about what was going on with
real
people after the war before he wrote his books. Or he might have talked to Billy, who was not only shell-shocked to his soul, but physically ruined into the bargain. Mr. Fitzgerald’s so-called “lost generation” might not find life so darned boring if they got jobs of real work and did something useful with their lives. They might even consider helping somebody else for a change instead of sitting around being miserable all the time. Most of us
real
people can’t afford to wallow, darn it.

      
Sorry. Sometimes I get angry about things I can’t change. It’s a foolish habit, but there you go.

      
For my part, when the war ended I gave up flamboyant Gypsy attire in favor of more sober clothing. Bright Gypsy stripes didn’t fit my mood or the profound melancholy that seemed to have a hold on my family underneath its surface pretense of well-being. I now wore dark colors, either blue or black, for my spiritualist work.

      
In my heart of hearts, I knew better times were coming, but with my husband a ruin of himself, my cousin and uncle both dead, and so many of my friends and relatives similarly bereaved, I couldn’t have made myself wear bright colors even for money, which was a distinct change for a Gumm.

      
Billy didn’t like how I brought home the bacon, but he was unable to work at all. Neither his legs nor his lungs worked any longer. Telling fortunes and conducting séances was the only way I could make a decent living. Sure, I could have worked as a housekeeper at the Huntington or Green Hotels, or cleaned houses as I used to do with Daphne, but spiritualism paid more.

      
I don’t mean to whine or anything, but.

      
I really do think my policeman friend might have been a little kinder to a poor young woman who was only trying to make a living when we first met. It wasn’t my fault Mrs. Kincaid’s daughter liked to think of herself as a member of the “lost” generation. And it certainly wasn’t my fault that Mr. Kincaid was a louse. Heck, before my spiritualist business took off, my family was so poor we could scarcely keep food in the cupboard, much less skeletons.

      
Then again, my policeman friend might possibly have had a valid point when he claimed I’m too darned nosy. He’s wrong to suggest I attract these things, however. I swear to you, none of this was my fault.

      
At any rate, my life’s work has been interesting, even if it’s also been a little bumpy in spots.

 

      
 

Chapter Two
 

      
“Don’t go, Daisy.” Billy grabbed my hand before I could pick up my hat. “Stay here, with me.”

      
I held on to my patience and Billy’s hand because I knew his pain, both physical and psychological, drove him to say these things. He’d once been a happy-go-lucky fellow and one of the human race’s cheerier specimens. His experiences in France and the results thereof had changed all that.

      
“I have to, Billy. You know that.” I smiled at him to let him know everything was ginger-peachy, even though we both knew better.

      
He didn’t mean to be fussy. I kept telling myself that in order to keep my temper in check. The truth of the matter was that I got tired of his whining at me all the time about leaving him to go to work. I didn’t think he was being fair to me, although I also didn’t think I had any right to think so, if that makes any sense. After all,
life
hadn’t been fair to poor Billy. Indeed, it had dealt him a wicked blow. And anyhow, he was a wounded war hero. I was only a woman.

      
But blast it all,
somebody
had to make a living for us, and I was the only one left. That this was so only because Billy had run off to fight the Huns wasn’t either of our faults. We’d both been swept up in the fervor of the moment, and we’d both thought his had been a noble sacrifice for a just cause.

      
Besides, it made me sad to look at him. He used to be so young and straight and strong. Now he was like the shell of himself. A human ruin. A blasted-out husk of a once-proud young man. When I didn’t want to cry about it, I wanted to rush over to Germany and shoot Huns. Never mind that the war was over and that most of those German soldiers had believed their cause to be a just one. The war wasn’t over in our house, and what the Kaiser’s men had done to my husband was unforgivable in my book.

      
When he’d left for France, Billy had been nineteen years old. I’d been seventeen. Now he looked a hundred and ten, and I felt at least that old.

      
Another terrible truth that I didn’t often feel like facing was that exhaustion and worry had very nearly depleted my supply of love for poor Billy, although my devotion to him remained unswayed. I couldn’t afford to be swayed. I had too darned many people to support.

      
Which brought me back to leaving our house so that I could toddle over to Mrs. Kincaid’s and pretend to raise the spirit of her dead nephew, Bartholomew Septimus Withers Lilley (rich people give their kids far too many names sometimes), from the Great Beyond, wherever that was.

      
Every time I thought about doing a séance, I had to fight hysteria. For some reason I envisioned those poor dead people rising from their graves, still swaddled in their burial finery, dripping dirt, and looking skeletal, except for who were still in the process of rotting. Especially when it came to the soldiers who’d lost their lives overseas, the visions were hideous and bloody and made me feel sick to my stomach. They were unpleasant mental images, but I couldn’t help it that they invaded my mind’s eye any more than I could help Billy.

      
“I don’t know why you can’t get a normal job.” Billy let go of my hand and hunched in his wheelchair. He could walk a few steps at a time, but his lungs were so bad from the mustard gas, and his legs were so badly damaged from grapeshot, that he couldn’t walk like he used to walk: forever and ever without even thinking about it. Or run. When we were kids, we used to run everywhere. He’d pretend to find me annoying because I liked to follow him around, but I didn’t believe him then. I believed him now. Nevertheless, his tone of voice riled me. Still, I tried to keep my anger from showing.

      
“A normal job wouldn’t pay as well as this one.” I’d pointed out this trenchant fact before, but Billy didn’t buy it. Or maybe he did and just didn’t want to admit it. Sometimes I felt as if I didn’t know anything for certain any longer.

      
“Money’s not the only thing that’s important in this world, you know,” Billy said in the strange, querulous voice that seemed to belong to someone other than the Billy Majesty I’d known all my life.

      
“Maybe not, but money keeps food on the table and clothes on our backs.” Every now and then, when I remembered how his rich laugh and deep baritone voice used to thrill me when I was a starry-eyed bride, I wanted to cry. At the moment, I wanted to shove his wheelchair down the front porch steps and save us both more pain and grief.

      
“It’s sinful, what you do.”

      
“
What
?” It was too much. I snatched up my handbag and whirled around, my fists planted on my hips, and glared down at my poor, destroyed husband. “What I do is
not
sinful, Billy Majesty. What I do is called
work
. I can’t help it if you don’t like it. It’s all I know how to do, and it pays a lot of money.” I hated that I had to pass the back of my hand under my eyes to catch tears. “Besides, it helps people, whether you want to believe it or not.”

      
“Hunh. You’re only fooling yourself, Daisy. It’s wicked.”

      
“It’s not wicked! What I do gives comfort to bereaved people.” That there wasn’t a darned thing I could do to comfort Billy was a fact that seemed to shimmer in the air between us. I wanted to stamp my foot and scream.

      
His bitter expression didn’t alter appreciably, even in the face of my fury and well-reasoned arguments. He ignored my impassioned speech. Sometimes I thought he ignored all of my impassioned speeches because he knew it was the best way to hurt my feelings. I knew I was being unfair to both of us.

      
“Who’s going to be there?”

      
I turned around, slammed my handbag on the dresser since I hadn’t meant to pick it up in the first place—these arguments always rattled me—and picked up my elegant black cloche. I tried to keep my hands from shaking as I settled the hat over my knot-in-a-pouf hair-do. The style was a little old-fashioned, but I was afraid I’d look like Irene Castle if I got my hair bobbed. I’d have liked to get a bob. It would have been so free and easy or simple, especially since my hair was thick would have taken to the “do” with relative simplicity. But then, nothing in my whole life was free and easy any longer.

      
As you can probably tell, every once in a while I’d get to feeling sorry for myself no matter how much I tried not to.

      
“How should I know who’s going to be there? I’ll probably see Edie.” Edwina “Edie” Marsh was one of my friends from high school. She worked as a housemaid for the Kincaids, and we always had a good time trading gossip when I conducted séances the mansion. “And I’m sure there will be some of Mrs. Kincaid’s rich friends there. Oh, and her sister, Mrs. Lilley, I guess, since it’s her son we’re trying to reach.”

      
“That’s horrible,” Billy said in a low voice.

      
It was, kind of. I’d never say so. “Maybe, but it pays the milk man and the grocer.”