Genteel Spirits (Daisy Gumm Majesty Books)

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 . . . W
ell,
the fact of the matter was that
no
t 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 W
ar
. As far as I was concerned, there was no way Germany could possibly repay
the world
for
the damage it and it
s 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, athlet
ic and handsome, had joined up i
n ‘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-
German
s
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 Pro
fessional
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 broadcast
ed
. 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 t
he 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, Spik
e 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 lif
e 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 was
n’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 given 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 B
ank 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.