Ancient Spirits (Daisy Gumm Majesty Books)

For my Rebelwriter sisters. I don’t know what I’d do without you guys. Thanks also to Deb Brod, a great (and understanding) editor. And for Anni and Robin, my wonderful daughters. You made me realize that family members don’t automatically detest each other. How’d that happen?

Sometimes the months of June and July are foggy and overcast in Pasadena, California, my home town. However, the fifteenth day of June in that year of 1922, the day of my Billy’s funeral, the sun shone brightly, the sky glittered blue as a sapphire, and high, puffy clouds decorated it at perfect intervals. The day was as beautiful a one as I’d ever seen. Didn’t seem fair somehow.

I’d wanted my friend and Billy’s, Johnny Buckingham, to conduct the graveside service, but I didn’t argue much when my family told me the minister of Pasadena’s First Methodist Episcopal Church, North, should conduct the service. After all, the Gumms and the Majestys had gone to the Methodist church for decades. Johnny, while a good friend, was a captain at the Salvation Army.

Much to my relief, Johnny and his wife Flossie stood beside me at the service. So did Sam Rotondo, a Pasadena police detective and Billy’s best friend; and my good friend, Harold Kincaid, a costumier at a motion-picture studio in Los Angeles. Harold had come with his . . . oh, nuts. This is always so hard to explain.

You see, Harold was what Billy and Sam called a faggot. Harold’s long-time companion, Del Farrington, had taken the day off from his duties at the bank to attend Billy’s obsequies. I thought that was nice of him. Whatever Sam and Billy called them, I called Harold and Del dear friends, and I was grateful for their support on that ghastly, glorious day.

My parents and my aunt Vi, who lived with us, both cried, holding on to each other, throughout the service. I noticed for perhaps the first time that they looked kind of alike. That really didn’t make much sense, since Vi was Pa’s sister-in-law and his late brother’s widow, but it struck me then. Ma and Pa wouldn’t allow me to bring Spike, Billy’s dachshund, to the service, although I think Billy would have liked to have had him there. Billy didn’t have any family left by the time of his death. Both his parents had died during the flu pandemic that swept the world at the end of the war, and he’d been an only child.

Nevertheless, the place, Morningside Cemetery in Altadena, California, was packed with friends of the family and concerned clients of mine. I, you see, earned a living for Billy and myself working as a spiritualist medium. That day, more than any other day before or since, I wished I could honestly I communicate with the dead.

Naturally, everyone wore black, including me. What do they call a flock of crows? A murder of crows? I think that’s it. Well, as I gazed upon the assembled mourners, they appeared to me to be a murder of crows. That seemed totally appropriate, since my Billy had been, in effect, murdered.

You see, Billy was yet another casualty of the late Great War. Yes, I know the war had been over for years by 1922. That doesn’t negate the fact that it and the forever-cursed Kaiser killed my husband. Slowly, painfully and horribly. By the way, in spite of the fact that Billy actually did himself in on purpose by taking an overdose of the morphine syrup Dr. Benjamin had prescribed for his pain, his death was documented as accidental. No one who really knew Billy’s story believed that, but Dr. Benjamin, one of the most wonderful men in the world, had filled out the death certificate.

Doc Benjamin was at the funeral, too, small and dapper and without one of his almost-constant cigarettes between his lips. I appreciated his tact and consideration in regard to Billy’s death certificate almost more than I could say, and he knew it, but he never said a thing about it. But his kindness spared my family and me a whole ton of trouble. Why, I don’t think the minister of our church would have presided over the funeral if it was known Billy was a suicide. I wonder who made up that stupid rule. Whoever’d done it must have been unfamiliar with the lingering cruelties of war.

In April of 1917, right after Billy joined the army, Billy and I were married. We both thought his joining the army in the effort to free Europe from the Hun plague was a great, even a romantic, idea. Boy, were we wrong. He never got the chance. He hadn’t been in France for more than a month or two before he was gassed out of his foxhole on the French frontier and shot when he tried to crawl to safety. He spent nearly a year in hospitals overseas and came back to me a ruined man. I knew he wished he’d died over there in the mud and blood of the battlefield, because he often told me so.

He hated the way he was. He hated that he hurt all the time. He hated that he couldn’t take a deep breath, go for a walk, sing as he used to be able to sing or take the dog for a walk unassisted. Most of all, he hated that he couldn’t earn our living for us as he’d planned to do, as a mechanic at the Hull Motor Works, but had to rely on me. Yes, he got his monthly soldier’s benefit, but that wouldn’t have kept Spike alive.

About the only thing Billy could still do at the time of his death was play gin rummy with my father and Sam Rotondo and let me push him in his wheelchair when we took Spike for walks on pleasant days. Oh, and he could read. He loved to read National Geographic, probably to see pictures of all the places he’d never be able to visit, and he enjoyed reading the Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs and various detective thrillers. I kept him in reading material by visiting the library at least once a week. Naturally, because the library had steps, he couldn’t pick out his own books. Do you blame him for feeling hopeless and helpless?

I didn’t blame him one little bit. I felt hopeless and helpless myself. This was especially true when Billy criticized the way I earned our living. I tried to pass his negative comments off as a result of his war injuries and general state of melancholia, but they hurt me anyway.

By the time of Billy’s funeral, four years after the war ended, casualty reports still appeared in our local newspapers at least once monthly. I used to run down to City Hall to see the names posted daily on the lists while the war lasted. For over a year after the conflict ended, the lists were still posted outside for people to glance through, hoping to find—or not to find—the names of loved ones. By 1922, I guess most people scanned the printed lists in the newspapers, praying the remains of their missing husbands, sons, cousins, lovers, etc., might have been identified. The only worse fate I can think of than the way my Billy died was never to know for certain what had became of a loved one. I knew exactly what had happened to Billy.

The funeral service was lovely, I guess. At the time, my spirits alternated between benumbed to enraged. If I’d had the Kaiser at my disposal at the moment, he’d have died a slow and painful death. The same kind of death he’d dealt my Billy. Mostly, however, I stood between Johnny, tall, lean and handsome; and Flossie, shorter, pretty and loving, and stared at the hole in the ground into which the undertaker was going to lay my husband Billy, the only man I’d ever loved—and I’d loved him pretty much from the time I could walk.

My name, incidentally, is Daisy Gumm Majesty. Billy and I lived with my parents and Aunt Vi in a neat little bungalow on South Marengo Avenue in the fair city of Pasadena, California. I’d got into the spiritualist business when I was a kid one Christmas time, pretty much by accident. Aunt Vi’s employer, who was then named Mrs. Kincaid, had given her an old Ouija board, and everyone else in the family pretended to be afraid of it. I, being ten and having no scruples about much of anything at that age, manipulated the board with my cousins and my sister Daphne. I got quite the reputation at that family gathering, and it eventually paid off rather handsomely. I’m not saying Billy couldn’t have made more money at the Hull Motor Works than I did doing my spiritualist act, but I made considerably more money than other women who had to hold down jobs in the 1920s. Well, except for movie stars. They only have to look good on the silver screen. Life isn’t fair now, never has been, and probably never will be. I know all about it, believe me.

Billy left me a note, in case you wondered. In it, he told me that he couldn’t stand living the way he had to live any longer, and he asked me please to forgive him. He said he’d waited until June because June was the middle of the year and didn’t correspond with any particular family holidays. He didn’t want me to be sad at Thanksgiving or Christmas or whatever because he’d died then. As if I wouldn’t think of him on holidays, no matter when he died! Still, it was a nice note, he told me he loved me and that he hoped I’d understand.

I did understand. I’d been fighting for my Billy’s life and against his desire to leave it for a long time by then. He’d waited until I was out of the house, working on a motion-picture set for a bunch of Hollywood people. Ma was at her job as chief bookkeeper at the Hotel Marengo, and Aunt Vi was at her job working as a cook for Mrs. Kincaid, who was by that time Mrs. Pinkerton. Pa had gone for a walk with Spike—Pa used to be a chauffeur for some of Pasadena’s wealthy residents, but had been forced to quit working because of heart problems. In other words, Billy had planned well for his demise. Pa came home while he was still barely alive and called an ambulance, but by the time I got to the Castleton Hospital, driven there by Sam Rotondo who’d come to the set to deliver the news, he’d stopped breathing.

As much as I didn’t want to admit it to myself, I knew Billy was better off dead. There’d been no hope that he’d ever get better. As he’d told me over and over again, he was merely marking time. At the time of his death, he was twenty-four years old.

I’d come to the conclusion shortly after Billy returned from the war that the people who start the cursed things ought to be the ones to fight in them. In a world governed by me, President Wilson, Clemenceau, the Czar of Russia, the King of Serbia, the guy who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand, Prime Minister Asquith and the Kaiser would get into an arena together and slug it out, thereby doing their own dirty work and leaving the young and healthy men of all their countries at home, alive and well.

As ever, I had no say in how the world ran. Heck, although I was twenty-two at the time of Billy’s death, I hadn’t even voted yet since the last election had been held when I was twenty.

“You holding up all right, Daisy?” Flossie whispered in my ear.

She was worried about me, which I thought was sweet, since she was “with child,” as the quaint saying goes, and all this standing by the graveside probably wasn’t very good for her. I squeezed the hand she’d laid on my arm. “I’m all right. Thanks.”

I felt someone put a hand on my shoulder, and was surprised to look to the right and discover it was Sam Rotondo, tall, the least little bit heavyset, and looking worn out and unhappy that day. Sam and I hadn’t got off to a very good start together when we’d first met. He’d thought I was a crook, and I’d thought he was a bully. I guess we were both more or less . . . well, not right exactly, but not exactly wrong, either. I earned my living fooling people, and he earned his dealing with criminals. For some reason unknown to me, on that day I lifted my other hand and put it over his. I’d overheard a conversation between Sam and Billy shortly before Billy died, during which he’d asked Sam to look after me if anything happened to him. Even then, I knew he was planning something.

Heck, I’d found a box full of morphine syrup bottles while looking for a shoe in our closet one day. His suicide wasn’t a surprise when it came, but it certainly was painful. I felt as though I had a huge, gaping hole in my heart as I stood in the cemetery that gorgeous June day, staring at that hole in the ground and at the coffin next to it, which contained the mortal remains of my beloved Billy.