Hungry Spirits [Spirits 04] (3 page)

“
What if I can’t teach either?”

His grin looked positively diabolical. “We all know better, don’t we?”

Did we? Nuts.

Since I couldn’t get out of teaching the stupid class that way, I asked another question that had been puzzling me. “How come you brought me
this
book?” I waved the soft-covered pamphlet—because it wasn’t really much more than that—in Johnny’s face.

He shrugged. “Bread’s cheap. The women are poor.” He gave me another grin. “The book was cheap, too. It was the cheapest one I could get at Grenville’s Books. I had to get enough copies for the whole class.”

Oh. Well, that pretty much stifled the rest of my sulky protestations. If there was one thing I knew about, it was poverty. Not that we Gumms were especially poor. In actual fact, we were better off than a whole lot of people, but that’s only because we able-bodied family members all worked like slaves and, in spite of Billy’s problems, had been remarkably lucky. Heck, if it hadn’t been for Aunt Vi’s Ouija board, I personally would have been in the soup. Or at least operating an elevator in Nash’s. Other people weren’t so lucky, and I knew it. There was still a bit of a depression going on even then, several years after the war ended. According to the newspapers, that was why people like Sacco and Vanzetti and other anarchists kept throwing bombs at people they believed were trouncing the poor working classes. Maybe they were right to resent the wealthy, but I still didn’t approve of the bomb angle.

However, that’s neither here nor there. On Saturday afternoon at two o’clock, I drove our lovely new self-starting Chevrolet (bought after receiving a most munificent gift from the mother of a woman I’d helped during the same episode that garnered us Spike) down to the Salvation Army on Walnut and Fair Oaks. There I went to their fellowship hall, or whatever they call it—we Methodists call it a fellowship hall—armed with the cookbook Johnny had given me and about six hours’ worth of Aunt Vi’s advice, ready to do this latest duty that had been thrust upon me. I felt like Frederic in
Pirates of Penzance:
a slave to duty.

I stopped dead at the door when I heard what sounded like Babel issuing from within the hall, and it was only then I remembered that Johnny had stopped telling me about students after he’d mentioned Flossie and the students’ poverty. Evidently Johnny was close behind me, because someone took my arm and when I turned to see who it was, I saw Johnny.

My face must have shown my puzzlement, because Johnny said softly, “A few of your students will be foreign ladies who were brought here after the war. They’re war refugees who have lost everything, you see, including their families and livelihoods and even their countries, some of them. The church is sponsoring them.”

“
Where are they from?”

“
Different places. Belgium, mostly, I think, and I do believe there’s an Italian lady.”

Frowning, I listened some more. That language in there didn’t sound French or Italian. Didn’t Belgians speak French? I decided to clarify the matter and asked Johnny about it.

“
Some of them speak Flemish.”

“
Flemish. Huh. It sounds like German to me.”

He shrugged. “There might be a German lady or one who speaks German in the mix.”

You can understand how rattled I was when I burst out, “But I
hate
Germans!” I’m almost always more respectful than that.

He patted me on the back. “I know, Daisy. And I know why. And I don’t blame you. But these women are as much victims as you and Billy.” I didn’t buy it, and I guess Johnny could tell, because he said, “Just go on in, Daisy. It’ll be all right.”

Like heck it would.

Shooting one last hateful glare at Johnny, I entered the hall. The chattering stopped, and Flossie came forward to greet me with a huge smile on her face. Flossie had turned out to be a very nice woman, and she looked quite pretty in a printed blue frock with long sleeves and a dropped waist. She’d let her hair grow out to its natural light brown—she used to be what they call a platinum blonde—and she had it twisted into a knot at the back of her neck. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was just another attractive young Pasadena housewife.

“
Daisy! It’s so good of you to do this!” She gave me a hug and a little peck on the cheek.

That’s another thing. Until she met me and she and I started our mutual Flossie-redemption project, she’d sounded like an escapee from the slums of New York City’s Five Points district, which is exactly what she was. Now, while she still had a slight New York twang, she used proper grammar. She’d been working awfully hard, in other words, and I felt a little guilty about my resistance to teaching this stupid class.

“
Happy to help, Flossie,” I lied nobly.

Good old Flossie. She didn’t even realize I was being less than truthful. With an arm around my waist, she turned me to face the class. “Ladies, I’d like to introduce you to one of my very dearest friends, and the most good and talented person I’ve ever met, Mrs. Billy Majesty. Desdemona Majesty. We call her Daisy.”

Good Lord. I felt myself blushing, mainly because I knew Flossie meant precisely what she’d said. Shoot. All I’d done was help her change her mode of dress a little bit. Well, and introduce her to Johnny. Nevertheless, I attempted to hide my embarrassment and smiled at the class. As I did so, I tried to pick out the German women among them, and was disappointed to find I couldn’t. Gee, you’d think evil would stand out like a sore thumb, but it sure didn’t then.

“
Good afternoon, ladies,” I said, striving for aplomb. After all, I knew I couldn’t cook, and Johnny knew I couldn’t cook, but I didn’t want these people to know it.

Nine women sat before me in a semicircle, all smiling, all eager. They’d each been provided a student desk. You know the kind I mean: a little wooden seat attached to a little wooden desk. Ink pots sat in the holes in the desks, and each woman held a pen poised in her hand over a lined note pad—to take down recipes, one presumes.

“
Before you begin, Daisy, I’d like to introduce you to your students,” Flossie continued.

Good. Now I’d know which of them to hate.

Hmm. When put like that, it doesn’t sound awfully reasonable, does it? Well, never mind.

“
I’ll start at this end.” Flossie pointed to the end of the semicircle on my left. “We have here Maria, Margaret, Hilda, Della, Gertrude, Mildred, Rosa, Merlinda and Wilma.”

Since they all only smiled and nodded, I
still
didn’t know which one was the German, if any of them even were. It was then I began to think that my irrational hatred of all Germans was stretching it a little bit. According to Johnny, some of these women were refugees who had lost everything, including their homelands. Clearly, none of these ladies had gassed my husband. Also clearly, they were all eager to learn how to cook in America. From me. Oh, boy.

“
Good afternoon, ladies. I hope we’ll all learn a good deal from this class.” And
that
wasn’t stretching the truth a bit.

The ladies all nodded eagerly.

Johnny had explained to me that I’d only be recommending simple recipes to the ladies, and showing them how to put the dishes together. He’d also explained that another reason he’d selected
Sixty-Five Delicious Dishes,
besides the price, was because it was the simplest, easiest-to-understand cookbook he could find in Grenville’s bookstore. You’d think this would be an uncomplicated thing to do, but I was scared to death. I’d taken my many cooking failures to heart, and they embarrassed me.

Recalling Aunt Vi’s instructions, the first thing I did was put on my apron—well, it was really one of Vi’s, but I’d made it for her—and recommended that my students do likewise. They did. Obedient little rabbits, the poor dears.

Then I opened
Sixty-Five Delicious Dishes
and turned to page twenty-five. “Today we’re going to make Bread and Macaroni Pudding, ladies. Another thing that was cheap in those days was macaroni, which came in long tubes and which you had to break into small pieces. Aunt Vi had shown me approximately how big to break them, but sometimes the macaroni tubes didn’t cooperate. Flossie, who had been warned in advance of my plans, handed out some macaroni tubes to the ladies.

I broke my macaroni. The ladies, after watching me intently, broke theirs. Maybe this wouldn’t be so hard after all. We’d see.

“
And now we need to boil our macaroni until it’s soft,” said I, only then remembering that I was supposed to have started heating the water before I broke the macaroni. Oh, well. The ladies didn’t have to know that. Besides, the stove was in the back of the hall, so it almost made sense to do this part backwards. In any event, we all took our bowls of macaroni pieces and traipsed to the back of the hall. “Remember that you need to salt your macaroni water,” said I, doing same, “and be sure to use plenty of water. The water needs to more than cover the macaroni, because the noodles will swell when they’re cooking.”

Aunt Vi had told me that; otherwise, I wouldn’t have known. See what I mean about it being stupid for me to teach this class? Besides, didn’t German ladies cook with noodles all the time? One of these women probably already knew the stuff I was telling the class. Actually, if one of them was Italian, she’d know all about noodles, too.

Never mind.

Eventually, we all got our noodles boiled until they were soft, and then drained them and went back to our original places, where we smashed our pieces of dry bread into crumbs, grated our cheese, melted our butter—I had to make another mad dash to the stove, because I should have done that while we were boiling our noodles—mixed everything together along with a little bit of mustard, larded our fireproof dishes, and layered everything into them, just as the recipe instructed. I was real proud of all of us when we stuck our dishes into the oven, which, thanks to Flossie, had been turned to a moderate heat. Truth to tell, I nearly fainted from relief, although my faint would have been ill-timed, since I still had to make sure our meals didn’t burn to soot.

As our macaroni dishes cooked, I had planned to lecture the ladies on some of the uses for stale bread, which, according to the book, was so abundant in most households that the average housewife couldn’t keep up with it all. Needless to say, I didn’t know this fact from experience, although Vi confirmed the book’s veracity in that regard. Astonishing what you can learn even when you don’t want to, isn’t it?

My plans suffered a check when, just as I was launching in to the economic value of frying bread in bacon fat in order to stretch the family budget in a tasty way, who should roll into the fellowship hall but my husband. Worse, he was followed by his best friend and my mortal enemy, Sam Rotondo, detective with the Pasadena Police Department. Sam and I had encountered each other before, almost always under unfortunate circumstances. Unfortunate for me, I mean.

I must have been standing there with my mouth open for quite some seconds, because it was Johnny—I don’t know where he’d been lurking—who suddenly showed up and graciously introduced Billy to the ladies, all of whom muttered and fluttered. They appeared almost as embarrassed and disconcerted as I was.

“
And this is Detective Sam Rotondo,” continued Johnny, smiling happily. I guess he was glad Billy and Sam had joined the fray. That made one of us. “He’s originally from New York City, but he moved here several years ago and is now working for the Pasadena Police Department.”

More flutters and mutters.

“
I didn’t know you were going to come,” I said, perhaps a trifle ungraciously. I wanted to ask if Billy had showed up in order to watch me fail, but that would have been unkind, not to mention self-defeating. After all, these women didn’t know I was a failure as a cook. Yet.

“
We just decided to drop by and offer encouragement,” said Billy, smiling his winning smile.

Billy had always been a very handsome fellow. Even from his wheelchair, he exuded the charm that had won my heart when I was no more than a girl and used to follow him around, much to his annoyance. He got over it.

“
Well . . . thank you.” I tried to sound sincere.

“
Please,” said Sam, “carry on.” He waved his hand in the air with a nonchalance I didn’t believe for an instant. I squinted at him hard, but could not discern any deeper motive for his sudden arrival at this strange place. Strange for him, I mean. Well, and it was strange for me, too, but. . . . Oh, forget it.

Then I noticed the big clock hanging on the side wall and recalled our not-yet-burning noodles. Ignoring the men, I said, “Let’s check our dishes, ladies.”

So we once again trooped to the back of the hall. Praying hard, I opened the oven door and, wonder of wonders, all nine of our little dishes were bubbling away and looked wonderful! Pretending I knew what I was doing, I said with some satisfaction, “You see? The custard is almost set and the tops are getting brown. That’s exactly what we want. We should give them another minute or two, though, to be sure of the custard.”

The ladies nodded happily, and we discussed stale bread for another little while as we waited for our dishes to be perfectly done. One of them mentioned croquettes, and I started slightly. There were a couple of recipes in the little booklet for croquettes, little volcano-shaped things that looked far beyond my limited capabilities. I said something about maybe trying croquettes another time and then, thank God, it was time for me to open the oven door again.