by Alice Duncan
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STRONG SPIRITS
By
Alice Duncan
Book 1 in the Spirits Series
Chapter One
It all started with my aunt Viola’s Ouija Board. It was an old one, and sort of shabby. I guess Mrs. Kincaid had been using it ever since she bought it in ‘03 when they first came out, but she claimed it still worked.
Whether it worked or not, Mrs. Kincaid gave it to Aunt Vi after her own custom-made one with a large emerald in the center arrived from overseas. Mrs. Kincaid claimed it had been made by a Gypsy woman in Rumania but I had my doubts then, and I have my doubts now. After all, Mrs. Kincaid was rich, and we all know how gullible some rich people are. I suppose I should amend that to read that I know how gullible some rich people are. Lord knows, I’ve had plenty of experience in gulling them.
On the other hand, my aunt Viola Gumm, like the rest of my Gumm kin, wasn’t at all gullible. Or rich. In fact, Aunt Vi worked as a cook at Mrs. Kincaid’s mansion on Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena, which is how she came to be involved with the Ouija Board to begin with.
Aunt Vi claimed to be a little scared of the thing, but I think she was only teasing. Everybody knew Ouija Boards were just pieces of wood some smart guy painted and patented to swindle people with money out of it—money, that is to say. You didn’t have to look any farther than Mrs. Kincaid if you doubted it.
So that’s what started it. What kept it going was Aunt Vi taking the thing out on Christmas Eve to show the relations. Everybody laughed at it, but nobody wanted to touch it. I thought that was strange, since if Ouija Boards weren’t truly conduits to a Great Beyond somewhere past death, what harm were they?
I decided to take a crack at it. Why not? I had no morals to speak of, being only ten years old at the time. Back then my main concern was in not making the adults in my life so mad they’d spank me. Since they seemed crazy for this silly board, I decided to have some fun on my own.
You could have heard a pin drop when I sat down across from my cousin Eula and we settled our fingers lightly on a triangular shaped piece of wood Aunt Vi told me was a planchette which, I assumed, was a French word for a triangular piece of wood. Eula, who was sixteen and showing it in every detail, wanted to know if there would be any beaux in her future. I didn’t much like Eula, since she wouldn’t let me beautify myself with her new eyelash curler, so I made the planchette tell her she’d have three boyfriends, turn Catholic, and enter a nunnery.
Needless to say, my spelling wasn’t great, but I invented a spirit control named Rolly, who’d lived in 1055, and who’d never been to school. Therefore, since nobody expected Rolly to spell well, it worked out all right.
I was quite proud of Rolly. I’d listened hard when Aunt Vi explained the Ouija Board to Ma. She’d said that people conjured up some sort of spirit control from the Other Side, whatever that was, with which they communicated through the Ouija Board. That’s how I came up with Rolly when I felt a need to explain my rotten spelling. Nobody else in the family could spell worth beans anyhow, so I probably could have dispensed with the control altogether, but Rolly added a touch of panache to an otherwise childish exercise.
To my utter astonishment and her absolute horror, Eula believed me. Everyone joined in communicating with the Ouija Board and Rolly through me after that, except Uncle Ernie, who’d already drunk most of the punch and had taken to snoring in his big easy chair. Uncle Ernie, Aunt Vi’s husband and my father’s younger brother, snored through most of our family get-togethers.
The thing you’ve got to understand is that back then, in 1910, Pasadena was a rich man’s town. Wealthy folks from back East would build winter homes in Pasadena, or stay at the Green Hotel during the winter months, or even, if they were rich enough, spend the whole year there except when they were jauntering off to Europe or Egypt or somewhere else exotic.
What’s more, Pasadena was a sophisticated place. We had 24-hour telephone service before the turn of the century, electrical lighting on our streets shortly thereafter, and several electrical car lines. Daphne, some of our friends, and I would ride the cars from Pasadena to the beach at Santa Monica for picnics sometimes, although most of the time we were too busy trying to make money.
And then there was the Tournament of Roses. There’s nothing like a parade, and ours was (and still is) spectacular. People from back East are astonished to see so many flowers abloom in January. Believe me, the city fathers knew it, too, and did everything in their power to promote Pasadena’s friendly weather conditions.
Consumptive people, too, came to Pasadena, if they had money enough. There were two or three sanatoria in the area. I suppose that was a good selling point for our fair city, but knowing about those sick people, even if they were rich, struggling for the breath of life itself always made me sad.
And several presidents have made trips here, too. Theodore Roosevelt, my personal favorite, stayed in Pasadena in 1903, so I don’t remember it. Harrison, Taft, and Wilson also sojourned in the lovely city of roses.
My family would have had no business being in Pasadena at all except that all those rich people needed poor people like us to work for them. Aunt Vi was Mrs. Kincaid’s cook, my pa was a chauffeur to several rich millionaires in the moving pictures, Uncle Ernie ran the concession stand at the Annandale Golf Club, my mother was head bookkeeper at the Hotel Marengo, and Eula and my brother Walter worked at the Raymond Hotel.
My sister Daphne and I went to school. Daphne cleaned houses for a couple of rich families in Altadena after school. I helped Daphne with that unpleasant task until Christmas Eve, 1910. After that seemingly trivial but eventually momentous date, I worked the Ouija Board and tried to learn everything I could about other forms of spiritualism.
Even with the success of Christmas Eve, 1910, I guess I would have continued cleaning houses with Daphne and maintained the poor but proud Gumm tradition, except that Aunt Vi told Mrs. Kincaid about my so-called “gift.” The “gift,” according to her, was my ability to work the Ouija Board through a spiritual control. Mrs. Kincaid asked Aunt Vi to ask me to work at one of her big society parties, entertaining her rich society friends. She even offered to pay me. Sure as shooting, I wasn’t going to turn down money for doing something as easy as manipulating the Ouija Board.
The only problem was my name. As well as my appearance, come to think of it. A red-headed, blue-eyed, freckle-faced kid named Daisy Gumm didn’t convey, to me, the appropriate image of a Gypsy fortune teller. At the time I thought all fortune tellers were Gypsies. So I had Aunt Vi tell Mrs. Kincaid my real name was Desdemona. When I was ten, I only thought the name sounded mystical and dramatic. I didn’t know Desdemona was a world-famous murderee, or I might have adopted someone else’s cognomen.
I wowed ‘em on the night of the party. I wore Daphne’s peasant blouse, the one she’d bought when her church group visited Tijuana, Mexico, in order to buy flowers and spread the Gospel. I did so without her permission and caught holy hell for it from Daphne the next morning, but by that time I was rich and didn’t care. Mrs. Kincaid had paid me twenty dollars—twenty dollars—for playing with the Ouija Board at her party.
For the record, Mrs. Kincaid really took to Rolly. She spelled his name Raleigh and told me his English spelling was odd because he grew up speaking Gaelic, which is what people spoke in Scotland a long time ago. Back then, I didn’t know Scottish people spoke anything other than English. For that matter, I don’t know why I’d decided on Scotland as the homeland of my spiritual control. Maybe it was because I’d been reading Rob Roy right before the Ouija Board appeared in my life.
Mrs. Kincaid also pronounced the name of Rolly’s language “gahlic.” I thought she’d said “g
arlic.” Speaking garlic seemed a trifle odd to me, but for twenty bucks Rolly could have spelled his name Raleigh or dozen other ways, and he could have spoken in onions or scallions or even turnips, and I wouldn’t have cared.
What really mattered was that I’d found my calling in life. And I was only ten years old. From that day on, I read up on every aspect of mysticism, occultism, and transcendentalism, from turning tables to rapping to reading tea leaves to astrology. Fortunately for me, there was a First Spiritualist Church on Garfield Avenue in Pasadena, and I managed to talk my mother into letting me attend it a couple of times. It was interesting, to say the least.
Along with the genuine beliefs adhered to by people in the transcendentalist movement, I talked to lots of other folks about lots of other things. I’ve always been friendly and already tended to collect unusual people. My experience with the Ouija Board increased my attentions to such folks.
From some of my buddies, I learned how to read cards(both Tarot and playing), palms, crystal balls, astrological signs (I’m a Sagittarius), and I even studied up on how to summon people from the grave to chat with their living relatives, a notion that sounded appalling to me. I mean, who wants a moldy old corpse yakking in his ear? But people are funny, and a true Gumm never turns down a business opportunity.
I don’t mean to sound cynical, because I’m not. Since my tenth year, when I fooled with the Ouija Board as a lark, I’ve learned that there are, more or less in Shakespeare’s words, more things on heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our normal, everyday lives and philosophies. A lot of the learning has been hard, and I long ago ceased disparaging people for believing in or needing my services.
By the time I graduated from Pasadena High School, my classmates thought Daisy was a nickname for Desdemona. Some of them were actually afraid to do me wrong for fear I’d put the evil eye on them. But I’d stopped doing stuff like that when I was eleven, pretended to cast a spell on Billy Majesty, and he fell out of a tree and broke his collarbone. That scared me, and I never pretended to cast a spell again.
It also scared Billy, although not much, as you’ll soon see. When I was seventeen and the United States entered the Great War I married him, in fact. He’d forgiven me for his broken collarbone long since. We were in love as only adolescents can be, never having been tested by life. As I soon discovered to my dismay, not even high-school algebra can hold a candle to life when it came to difficulties.
But it was a hellishly romantic time, what with the uniforms, the flag-waving, and the tears and all, and Billy and I both needed the attachment. We, like most of the other people in this great nation, were both proud and scared, and it helped to know Billy and I were united in the eyes of God and man, even though we had to part almost immediately after the marriage ceremony ended.
I can still remember how he looked on that day. He was so handsome in his new uniform, and I’d made a pretty, lacy white dress and carried orange blossoms. Everybody cried, although there really wasn’t any reason to at the time. I didn’t know that then, although I discovered my mistake not long afterwards.
The truth is that I can still look at the photographs taken at our wedding and get teary-eyed. We were both different people that day.
We were married in April. In June the Kaiser’s men gassed Billy out of his trench on the French frontier and shot him when he tried to crawl to safety. He was shipped home in September, more dead than alive, and languished in the army hospital in Los Angeles for months. This broke my heart, needless to say, even though Billy and I didn’t really know each other very well for all that we’d grown up together and been man and wife for six months. Because of his terrible injuries that rendered him unable to work, he received a small pension. Unfortunately, it wasn’t anywhere near enough by which to support a family.
That being the case, when Billy was finally able to leave the hospital and come home to Pasadena, he was confined to a wheelchair, his lungs were ruined, his legs were bad, and I was one of the legion of women who suddenly had to make a living for their families. Out of that legion, I was one of the few who was more or less prepared to do so.
Fortunately for me, if not for Billy, when the war ended in November of 1918, even though Congress never did ratify the Treaty and eventually came up with separate Resolution officially ending the war with Germany, the spiritualist movement boomed. Lots of mothers wanted to get in touch with their dead fathers, sons, and lovers. Some of them even wanted to make contact with deceased husbands.
At first I felt like a rat for taking advantage of the bereaved. Gradually, however, I realized that people needed to hear that their late loved ones were content on the other side of life, and that they still thought with fondness of the ones they’d left behind. Everybody needs to know their kin want them to be happy. I learned after the War that the desire to communicate with those we love extends beyond life’s boundaries.
In the beginning of this rush for my services, it shocked me that people were so eager to pay me for my sort of work, which was basically a sham. Then I began to view what I did as a form of necessary spiritual healing. That probably sounds blasphemous, but it’s not meant to. Besides all that, I had a crippled husband and several other family members to help support.
Billy’s mother and father had died in the influenza epidemic that had swept the world in 1918 and 1919. His sister had married a nice man who trained horses for Mr. Lucky Baldwin. They were living in a cottage on his ranch in Arcadia, which is a small community about twelve miles across the Arroyo Seco from Pasadena. Therefore, my family became Billy’s.
We lived with my parents, and my work helped to put bread on their table, too. By that time Pa had come down with a bum heart and couldn’t work as much as he used to. My cousin Paul had died in the war. He’s buried in France, and I’ve told Aunt Vi I’ll take her there one day to visit the site of his burial. Uncle Ernie had succumbed to his excesses as well, so Aunt Vi, twice-bereaved and heartsick to her bones, came to live with us.
The plain truth was that Ma needed all the financial help she could get. Since both my brother Walter and my sister Daphne were married and had families of their own to provide for, that left me.
The only problem with working as a spiritualist is that you tend to meet a lot of strange people. Sometimes that can be interesting and even amusing, at least for me, because I like all kinds of people. At other times, it can be merely bizarre, and sometimes it’s downright frightening.
For some reason, too, I seem to attract weirdness. I don’t understand it. A policeman friend of mine once told me it’s because I’m cursed, but I think—I hope—he was only kidding. He won’t admit it.
The first real hint of this characteristic of mine happened in 1920, not even two full years after the war ended, and about six months before my own twentieth birthday. Everyone’s life had been changed by the World War. Not only had I, a very young female person, become the virtual support of my entire family, including a crippled husband, but everyone was still shaken by the atrocities the world had seen in that most brutal of conflicts.
I still felt a pang of trepidation every day when I picked up the Star News, one of Pasadena’s two daily newspapers, because it continued to print the casualty lists for nearly a year after the official end of the war. I guess they kept finding bodies, which is a terrible thought. My heart aches to this day when I remember reading, day after day, row upon row of names of the dead and wounded, searching for those of my friends and family.
The nation was having a hard time recovering from the war, too. It wasn’t only my family that was suffering. In other words, times were hard.
I’ve read Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books about all those rich, bored, alienated people back East, who can’t find anything worthwhile to see or do in life, and his work only makes me mad. What do those people have to complain about, for Pete’s sake? Heck, if I had all that money, I’d do something with it; something worthwhile. Not them. They just wallow in their disenchantment and pr
etend to suffer.
Phooey. They don’t know what suffering is. Anyhow, if they hate the good old U.S.A. so much, why don’t they move to Europe? I have a sneaking hunch they could be miserable anywhere. Even Paris, France, or Egypt (I’ve always wanted to see the pyramids).
I don’t understand people who claim to have lost hope and have no dreams for the future, either. For so many years after that horrid, awful war, all I lived on was hope. Heck, I dished it out for a living, to people who needed it. Besides, the way I see it, it’s only the rich in this world who can afford to be disenchanted and blasé. The rest of us are too busy trying to earn a living.
Anyhow, when it comes to reading for entertainment, I’ll take a good old murder mystery or a rip-roaring western any day over Fitzgerald’s books. I like it when the good guys win in the end. None of your moral ambiguity for me, thank you very much. If I want to be depressed, all I have to do is live. I’d as soon be entertained when I read. Mary Roberts Rinehart and Zane Grey are my heroes.
Maybe I’m just bitter, but I think Mr. Fitzgerald ought to have talked to me about what was going on with real people after the war before he wrote his books. Or he might have talked to Billy, who was not only shell-shocked to his soul, but physically ruined into the bargain. Mr. Fitzgerald’s so-called “lost generation” might not find life so darned boring if they got jobs of real work and did something useful with their lives. They might even consider helping somebody else for a change instead of sitting around being miserable all the time. Most of us real people can’t afford to wallow, darn it.
Sorry. Sometimes I get angry about things I can’t change. It’s a foolish habit, but there you go.
For my part, when the war ended I gave up flamboyant Gypsy attire in favor of more sober clothing. Bright Gypsy stripes didn’t fit my mood or the profound melancholy that seemed to have a hold on my family underneath its surface pretense of well-being. I now wore dark colors, either blue or black, for my spiritualist work.
