Hungry Spirits

by Alice Duncan

  “Sure it is,” said my beloved.

  I glared at him. “It is not. And I’m going to call Johnny Buckingham right this very minute and tell him so, too. I don’t believe Stacy Kincaid for a second. She wouldn’t know the truth if it bit her on the hind leg. Besides, Johnny couldn’t have recommended me to teach a cooking class. Why, do you remember the time I tried to pack a picnic for us when we were kids?”

  Billy laughed harder. It was kind of hard to tell, since he didn’t dare laugh out loud or he’d fall into a coughing fit, but I had become an expert at deciphering his moods. His laughter didn’t endear him to me that morning. Nor did his next words.

  “The eggs turned out to be soft-boiled and the chicken was raw!”

  He’d be rolling on the ground if he were still a healthy man.

  Angry and hurt, I said, “It wasn’t funny then, and it isn’t funny now, Billy Majesty.”

  “Yes it was. And it still is.”

  “Bother.”

  “Face it, Daisy. You’re a wonderful woman in many ways, but cooking isn’t one of them.”

  I huffed and got up, intending to telephone Johnny Buckingham instantly and clear this whole thing up.

  But before I got to the telephone hanging on the kitchen wall, it rang again. With an aggrieved sigh, I yanked the receiver off the hook and almost barked into it. Recollecting myself, not to mention my livelihood, I sweetened my tone just in time to say, “Gumm-Majesty residence. Mrs. Majesty speaking.”

  “Hey, Daisy.” Johnny Buckingham.

  “You beast!” I hollered into the receiver. “How could you do this to me?”

  His laughter in my right ear and Billy’s in my left almost made me shriek.

  “Calm down, Daisy. I know you don’t want to teach the class.”

  “It’s not so much that I don’t want to do it as it is that I can’t do it, blast it, Johnny! You know almost as well as Billy that I can’t cook a bean, much less a meal.”

  “You can learn. In fact, I have a book here I got just for you.”

  I didn’t understand this. Pleading for clarification, I said, “Why are you doing this to me, Johnny? There simply have to be people better qualified than I to teach other people to cook.”

  “I’m sure there are.”

  Now this is when things got really stupid. I was hurt by his words. I. Who can’t boil an egg. Was crushed because Johnny Buckingham, an old friend, had just told me the truth.

  “But that’s not the point,” he went on to say.

  “Oh? What, pray, is the point then?” I told myself it was no use getting mad at Johnny. He was another good man. And they, as has been pointed out before, are few and far between.

  “We don’t need a good cook, Daisy. What we need is someone who is kind, honest and good-hearted, and who can teach frightened women in a gentle and generous manner. We need you.”

  It was nice to hear those things spoken about my humble self, but still I said, “How do you figure that?”

  “For Pete’s sake, Daisy, you saved my Flossie’s life. And you did it not because you’re a reformer, but because you’re a kind woman with a genuine open heart. You know good and well that if it weren’t for you, Flossie would still be in the clutches of those dirty criminals. You’re the one who gave her the self-respect to better herself. You’re the one who helped her see she could have a better life if she tried to find it. You know where she came from. Don’t you realize that without your help, she’d still think of herself as dirt? You’re the one who taught her to care for herself. You’re the one who showed her there was a better way.”

  Good Lord. I had? This was news to me. Mind you, it is true that I’d helped Flossie tone down her manner of dress so she didn’t stick out in a bunch of respectable people like a black beetle on a white sheet. And I guess I had kind of tried to bolster her self-confidence and tell her she was too good for the likes of Jinx Jenkins, the brute she used to live with and who used her as a punching bag. But I’d only done that because. . . .

  Shoot, I’m not sure why I’d done it. Actually, I guess I’d helped her because she’d asked me to. She had shown up on our doorstep one miserable February morning, black and blue and with her eyes swollen almost shut, clad in a startling orange dress, and asked me to help her. So I had.

  And now, because of that one good deed, Johnny was asking me to help others. Cook, of all things!

  See? This is what happens when you allow your good intentions to override your good sense.

  Nevertheless, I knew when I was defeated.

  With a deep and heartfelt sigh, I surrendered.

  “All right, Johnny.” Wanting him to understand just how idiotic his idea was, I added, “But I’ll hate every minute of it. And, what’s more, it won’t do any good. I’m a lousy cook, and you’re only going to end up with a class full of lousy cooks if they take after me.”

  He laughed. How come all the men in my life were laughing at me that morning? “I know you are, Daisy, believe me. So consider this an opportunity for you to learn, too. I’ll bring over that book I told you about in a few minutes.”

  Aw, crumb.

  Chapter Two

  The book Johnny brought me was entitled Sixty-Five Delicious Dishes, by Marion Harris Neil. All the recipes were made with bread. It was published by the Fleischmann Yeast Company, so I guess that accounted for the bread angle.

  I stared at the book glumly. A lovely young woman was pictured on the cover, and she held a plate upon which rested something that looked a lot like a tiny castle tower brimming over with green peas. I soon learned that the recipe pictured was called Eggs and Green Peas, which sounds kind of pedestrian given the castle image. The woman’s hair was approximately the same color as mine, being a dark reddish hue, and we had the same basic facial features, but there the resemblance ended. The woman on the cover was smiling smugly. I, on the other hand, scowled. Naturally, my sour expression made Johnny and Billy, who had rolled his chair into the living room, laugh again. I frowned at both of them.

  “It’s only once a week, Daisy. On Saturday afternoons. You can do it. And the class will only last seven weeks, the last class being held between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Don’t want to tie you up for the holidays, now, do we?”

  “Huh.” The comment was ungracious, but I was feeling about as gracious as a maddened rhinoceros by that time.

  Pa, who had brought Spike back from their morning walk shortly after I’d hung up the phone the second time, took the book from my hands. He appeared puzzled. Sensible man, as well as a good one. “What’s this all about?”

  I was feeling too grouchy to explain, so Johnny did. As he did so, I saw Pa’s eyebrows lift until they darned near got lost in his hairline. He knew about my cooking skills—I’m being sarcastic here—too. However, since he was a truly kindhearted man, he said mildly, “So you’re going to teach this cooking class, Daisy?”

  Shooting a black look at Johnny, I said, “That’s what Johnny thinks. I doubt that I’ll be able to do more than teach the students how to burn a chicken to a crisp.” Or leave it raw in the middle.

  “Hey,” said my formerly wonderful husband. “I just read an article in National Geographic about Cajuns in Louisiana on the bayous there. They fix something called ‘blackened’ this and that. Maybe you can teach them Cajun cooking, Daisy. You can blacken a chicken for them.”

  He thought he was being funny, I guess. So did Pa and Johnny, because they all laughed some more. Even Spike wagged his tail. I should have taken a female dachshund, I guess, but Mrs. Bissell only offered me a male, mentioning something about breeding bitches or suchlike.

  Ignoring them, I asked a question I should have thought about before. “Just who’s going to be in this so-called cooking class, Johnny? Who are the poor dears I’ll be inflicting my paucity of the culinary arts upon?” I love to read, and sometimes I get carried away with the poetry of the English language, especially when I’m feeling beleaguered.

  Grinning broadly, Joh
nny said, “Flossie, for one. You did such a great job on her wardrobe and her sense of worth, I figured you could teach her to cook.”

  I’m sure my eyebrows soared like Pa’s. “She can’t cook?”

  “Actually, she can, but she’ll be in the class too.”

  “Huh. Maybe she should teach it.”

  “That’s the whole point, really. Or one of them. You see, she can cook, but she lacks the confidence to teach a class. I figured that since she loves and trusts you, she can learn how to teach from you.”

  “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.