Complete Stories (66 page)
Authors: Dorothy Parker,Colleen Bresse,Regina Barreca
A strong factor in the popularity of the ouija board as a domestic utensil is the prevalence of ouija-board agencies throughout the country. No shopping round is necessary; you can buy one anywhere, from a notion counter to a used-car emporium. Its purchase used to involve much secret diplomacy. You had to worm the manufacturer’s address from some obscure acquaintance who was rumored to go in for all that sort of thing, and then you had to send to some vague place in the West, whence your ouija board came to you, f. o. b., in a plain wrapper. Now there is not the slightest hitch—you can pick one up anywhere on the way home. Our own corner drug store has been celebrating Ouija Week for the past month or so, and I understand that the boards are going like hot cakes—after all, you can’t better the old similies. They certainly make a tasteful window display, combined, as they are, with garlands of rubber bath hose, with notes of color introduced by a few hot-water bags here and there. I imagine that the exhibit was arranged by the same person who thinks up names for the drinks served at the soda fountain.
What a simple matter this thing of communicating with the spirits has turned out to be, since the ouija board made its entrance into the great American family life. There is practically nothing to it—anybody can do it in the privacy of his own room. Look at the results that the members of our little circle have been getting, for instance, since we took up the ouija board in a really thorough way. And we never had a lesson in our lives, any of us. It has been a rough season, locally, for the professional-medium trade; I doubt if the professionals have even made expenses, since we learned that we could do it ourselves.
Home spirit communication has completely revolutionized our local social life. I often wonder what we should ever do with our evenings if it weren’t for the spirits. Since they have taken to dropping in for an informal chat over the ouija board we never lack a lively parlor game for one and all—metaphysical, yet clean.
And then just look at the money we save on amusement taxes! You know how it is yourself; the minute you leave home to make an evening of it, it runs right into expense. What with the cost of theater tickets, cabaret food and taxicab charter—good night, as the saying goes. Even such wholesome community activities as interapartment poker games, wives welcome, come under the head of outgo sooner or later. Of course this is a relatively free country, and no one has a better right than you to your own opinion of the ouija board as a medium of communication with the next world; but considering it solely as a means of after-dinner entertainment you must concede that the price is right, anyway.
Where would our little circle be of an evening if the spirits had not grown so clubby? Sitting round, that’s where we would be, trying to figure out if the William Hart picture round at the Elite Motion-Picture Palace was the same one that they showed the week before over at the Bijou Temple of Film Art. Since we got our ouija board I have so completely lost touch with the movies that Theda Bara may have got religion, for all I know about it.
WHEN THE BRIDGE HOUNDS WERE UNLEASHEDOf course, we did have our bits of the higher life once in a while in the old days. Whenever the husbands could be argued into it we used to take up the rugs and devote the evening to Terpsichore, as the boys say. But we got little or nothing out of it, considering all the effort involved. The talent for dancing among the male element of our set would, if pooled, be about equal to the histrionic ability of Mr. Jack Dempsey. The only one who really worked up any enthusiasm about it was old Mr. Emery, who as a parlor Maurice had one foot in the grave and the other on his partner’s instep. He had taken up dancing along about the time that the waltz was being condemned by press and pulpit, and his idea of a really good jazz number was “Do You See My New Shoes?”
The community dances never went over really big, that you could mention; by the time the second fox trot had reached the place where the record was scratched the men had all gathered in one corner and were arguing about how long you ought to let it stand before you put it in the still; and the women were settled along the other side of the room, telling each other how you could reduce without exercising or dieting. Those evenings were apt to cause hard feeling between husband and wife, and one word frequently led to another on the way home.
Then there was the time that we went in rather heavily for bridge. The bridge hounds were unleashed on Tuesday evenings, and at eleven o’clock chicken salad and lettuce sandwiches would be served and the one who had the highest score could choose between a blue glass candy jar with a glass crab apple on its top, and a hive-shaped honey pot of yellow china with china bees that you’d swear were just about to sting you swarming all over it; in either case what was left went without any argument to the holder of the next highest score.
On the next Tuesday the club would meet again, and play till eleven o’clock, at which time chicken salad and cream cheese and olive sandwiches would be provided, and the winner had to make up his mind between one of those handy little skating girls made of painted wood with a ball of colored twine instead of a bodice, and a limp-leather copy of
Gitanjali
, by Rabindranath Tagore, the well-known hyphenated Indian.
Gitanjali
, by Rabindranath Tagore, the well-known hyphenated Indian.
The bridge club would doubtless have still been tearing things wide open every Tuesday, but the ouija board came in, and the hostesses’ imagination in the selection of prizes gave out, at about the same time.
Mrs. Both, who is awfully good at all that kind of thing, tried to inaugurate a series of Sunday evening intellectual festivals, but they were never what you could really call a riot. The idea was that everyone should meet at her house, and the more gifted among us should entertain and at the same time elevate the majority. But Mrs. Both could never get enough backing from the rest of the home talent. She herself read several papers that she had written on such subjects as “The New Russia, and Why”; and “Modern Poetry—What of Its Tomorrow?”
HENRY G. TAKES TO VERSEAnd Mrs. Curley, who is always so agreeable about doing anything like that, did some of her original child impersonations, in her favorite selections, “Don’t Tell the Daisies I Tolded You, ’Cause I Pwomised Them Not to Tell”; and “Little Girls Must Always Be Dwessed up Clean—Wisht I Was a Little Boy.” As an encore she always used to give, by request, that slightly rough one about “Where Did Baby Bruvver Tum Fwom, That’s What Me Wants to Know,” in which so many people think she is at her best. Mrs. Curley never makes the slightest change in costume for her specialty—she doesn’t even remove her chain-drive eyeglasses—yet if you closed your eyes you’d really almost think that a little child was talking. She has often been told that she should have gone on the stage. Then Mr. Bliss used to sing “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep,” and would gladly have done more, except that it was so hard to find songs that suited his voice.
Those were about the only numbers that the program ever comprised. Mr. Smalley volunteered to make shadow pictures and give an imitation of a man sawing wood, including knots, but Mrs. Both somehow did not quite feel that this would have been in the spirit of the thing. So the intellectual Sunday evenings broke up, and the local mental strain went down to normal again.
Mrs. Both is now one of the leaders in the home-research movement. She has been accomplishing perfect wonders on the ouija board; she swung a wicked planchette right from the start. Of course she has been pretty lucky about it. She got right in touch with one spirit, and she works entirely with him. Henry G. Thompson, his name is, and he used to live a long time ago, up round Cape Cod way, when he was undeniably a good fellow when he had it. It seems that he was interested in farming in a small way, while he was on earth, but now that he has a lot of time on his hands he has taken up poetry. Mrs. Both has a whole collection of poems that were dictated to her by this spirit. From those that I have seen I gather that they were dictated but not read.
But then, of course, she has not shown me all of them.
Anyway, they are going to be brought out in book form in the fall, under the title
Heart Throbs From the Hereafter
. The publishers are confident of a big sale, and are urging Mrs. Both to get the book out sooner, while the public is still in the right mood. But she has been having some sort of trouble with Henry, over the ouija board. I don’t know if I have it quite straight, but it seems that Henry is behaving in a pretty unreasonable way about the percentage of royalties that he insists must go to the Thompson estate.
Heart Throbs From the Hereafter
. The publishers are confident of a big sale, and are urging Mrs. Both to get the book out sooner, while the public is still in the right mood. But she has been having some sort of trouble with Henry, over the ouija board. I don’t know if I have it quite straight, but it seems that Henry is behaving in a pretty unreasonable way about the percentage of royalties that he insists must go to the Thompson estate.
But aside from this little hitch—and I dare say that she and Henry will patch it up between them somehow—Mrs. Both has got a great deal out of spiritualism. She went about it in the really practical way. She did not waste her own time and the spirits’ asking the ouija board questions about who is going to be the next President, and whether it will rain tomorrow, and what the chances are for a repeal of the Vol stead Act. Instead she sat right down and got acquainted with one particular spirit, and let him do the rest. That is really the best way to go about it; get your control, and make him work your ouija board for you, and like it. Some of our most experienced mediums agree that that is the only way to get anywhere in parlor spiritualism.
But when you come right down to it there are few who can get more out of a ouija board than our own Aunt Bertha. Her work is not so highly systematized as that of Mrs. Both, but it is pretty fairly spectacular, in its way.
I knew that Aunt Bertha was going to get in some snappy work on the ouija board; I could have told you that before I ever saw her in action. She has always been good at anything anywhere nearly like that. Now you take solitaire, for instance. I don’t think I ever saw a prettier game of solitaire than that which Aunt Bertha puts up. You may be looking over her shoulder while she deals out the cards for a game of Canfield, and from the layout before her you would swear that she had not a chance of getting more than one or two aces up, at most. In fact, it looks so hopeless that you lose interest in the game, and go over to the other end of the room to get a magazine. And when you come back Aunt Bertha will have all the cards in four stacks in front of her, and she will smile triumphantly and exclaim: “What do you think of that? I got it again!”
AUNT BERTHA’S SNAPPY WORKI have known that to happen over and over again; I never saw such luck in my life. I would back Aunt Bertha against any living solitaire player for any amount of money you want, only providing that the judges leave the room during the contest.
It was no surprise to me to find that she had just the same knack with a ouija board. She can take a ouija board that would never show the least signs of life for anybody else and make it do practically everything but a tail spin. She can work it alone or she can make a duet of it—it makes no difference to her. She is always sure of results, either way. The spirits seem to recognize her touch on the board immediately. You never saw such a remarkable thing; it would convert anybody to spiritualism just to see her.
Aunt Bertha asks a question of the spirits, and the words are no more than out of her mouth when the planchette is flying about, spelling out the answer almost faster than you can read it. The service that she gets is perfectly wonderful. And, as she says herself, you can see that there is no deception about it, because she does not insist upon asking the question herself; anyone can ask whatever he can think of—there are no limits. Of course, the answers have occasionally turned out to be a trifle erratic, but then, to quote Aunt Bertha again, what does that prove? The spirits never claimed to be right all the time. It is only human of them to make a slip once in a while.
She can go deeper into the affairs of the Other Side than a mere game of questions and answers, if you want her to. Just say the word, and Aunt Bertha will get you in touch with anybody that you may name, regardless of how long ago he or she may have lived. Only the other night, for instance, someone suggested that Aunt Bertha summon Noah Webster’s spirit, and in scarcely less time than it takes to tell it, there he was talking to her on the ouija board, as large as life. His spelling wasn’t all that it used to be, but otherwise he seemed to be getting along splendidly.
Again, just to show you what she can do when she sets her mind to it, she was asked to try her luck at getting connected with the spirit of Disraeli—we used up Napoleon and Cleopatra and Julius Cæsar and all the other stock characters the very first week that Aunt Bertha began to work the ouija board, and we had to go in pretty deep to think up new ones. The planchette started to move the minute that Aunt Bertha put her hands on it, if you will believe me, and when she asked, “Is this Disraeli?” it immediately spelled out, “This is him.” I tell you, I saw it with my own eyes. Uncanny, it really was.
There seems to be nobody whom Aunt Bertha cannot make answer her on the ouija board. There is even a pretty strong chance that she may be able to get Central, after she has had a little more practice.
Mrs. Crouch, too, has been having some pleasant chats with the spirits. And it is only natural that they should treat her as practically one of the family, for she has been doing propaganda work for the Other Side for years. I often think that one of the big undertaking corporations is overlooking a great little advance agent in Mrs. Crouch. She has a way of asking you how you feel that would make you swear you could smell lilies.
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