Fine Spirits [Spirits 02]

by Alice Duncan

“As long as I don't have to go home again,” she said, her voice trembling.

  “You won't have to go home again,” I promised. I only hoped I wasn't lying to the poor child.

  Chapter Nine

  The rest of that night was pure hell. I don't think I got more than an hour's worth of sleep altogether.

  First I had to sneak Marianne out of Mrs. Bissel's house and into the Model T. That wasn't too difficult, since the rest of the household was upstairs, although they probably weren't sleeping. Not since Marianne and I had startled them out of their collective wits.

  I threw my blanket over her, hoping that if anyone was looking out the window, maybe they wouldn't see her. I know it sounds stupid, but I was desperate. Besides, the night was a dark one, and the wind was still howling like the devil's choir in hell. I didn't think anybody would notice a black lump huddled near me as I walked to my automobile. The wind darned near blew both of us to perdition before we got to the Model T and I gestured for Marianne to squat next to a back tire.

  Marianne did as I'd told her to, staring at the driver's side of the car. “Where's the door?” She pointed, her whispered question almost blown away before it reached my ears.

  I whispered, too. “There isn't one on that side.”

  “Oh.”

  “I'll have to crank it up. You'll have to wait until I get it started and get in. Then you can get in, too.”

  “I've never seen a car without a door on this side.”

  That's because she was rich and didn't have to get around in an old Model T Ford. I didn't say so. “I'm hoping to buy a new machine soon. Do you know how to handle the choke wire?” I was hoping for the best but prepared for the worst, which turned out to be a good thing.

  “What's a choke wire?”

  “Never mind.”

  Cranking the Model T to life was difficult even in the daytime. In the dark of night, with the wind trying like mad to whip me away, it was even worse than usual. I couldn't see a blasted thing. I persevered, as I always did back then no matter what I was doing, and eventually the motor coughed to life. And I didn't even break my arm, which was perhaps the first truly good thing that had happened all evening.

  The Model T didn't have headlights like cars today have, and it was hard to see anything by squinting into the blackness as wind-blown dust made my eyes water. Marianne sat next to me in the machine, shivering, although she was still wrapped in the blanket.

  Once I got the automobile on the road, I asked, “Are you all right?” If she took sick from eating such a poor diet for two weeks, I didn't know what I'd do. If she visited a doctor, there was no way in heck her presence in my life could be kept a secret.

  I think she nodded, although I couldn't see her very well. “I'm just scared.”

  Perfectly understandable. I was scared, too, for that matter. Sam's warning about the obstruction of justice kept clanging in my head like an alarm bell. Darn him, anyhow. Trust Sam Rotondo to make my job more terrifying than it already was, even when he wasn't even there.

  “Try not to worry,” I advised. She might as well relax, since I was worrying plenty enough for the both of us.

  “I'll try.”

  Boy, was she easy to manipulate. Her father must have whipped her into obedience when she was a baby. I don't think she had a backbone to call her own--not unlike her mother. I decided to work on her; maybe get her to respect herself and stand up for her rights. She'd better learn how to take care of herself, and quick, if she expected to remain independent of her family.

  All at once the task facing me loomed up like a mountain in my mind's eye. I couldn't do this. I was being an idiot. I was wrong and bad, and Billy was right about me. And so was Sam.

  “Thank you, Daisy,” Marianne said in a small but sincere voice. “Nobody else has ever understood or tried to help me before.”

  Okay, maybe I wasn't a total failure. The poor thing needed somebody on her side. She deserved for someone to be good to her for once. Smothering an internal sigh, I said, “I'll do my very best to help you, Marianne.” I'd never expected rich people to be so much trouble before I took up spiritualism as a profession.

  “Thank you.”

  I heard her sniffling and sighed inside again.

  I managed to get Marianne inside our house on South Marengo Avenue in Pasadena without making too much of a racket. Tiptoeing around the house like a thief in the night, I brought her bedding, an old nightgown and robe, and some slippers. Her feet were bigger than mine, but she didn't complain. By that time, if she had complained, I'd probably have carted her straight back to her family, no matter how much I sympathized with her.

  Hiding a daughter from her parents was a frightening and perhaps illegal proposition, and I was in an anomalous position. Actually, it wasn't anomalous at all. I was doing something both the law and everyone else would consider wrong. But I couldn't abandon her. Not now that I knew the hell she suffered in her home.

  I couldn't stop having mental visions of cutting her father's privates off, but I kept them--the visions, that is--to myself. Even Marianne, who had good reason to wish her father a eunuch, would likely have been appalled.

  After I got her settled, and after reassuring her approximately six hundred and fifty times that I'd be back as soon as could be, I left her in our basement and drove the Model T back up the hill to Mrs. Bissel's house. The car objected strenuously to being driven uphill twice in one night, but I forced the issue, praying all the while that it wouldn't break down or that I wouldn't run into anything in the dark. Because I figured I'd asked enough of God for one night, I thanked Him once I was safely parked in the circular driveway.

  Then I trekked back down to the basement, cleaned up the crumbs, grape stems, banana peel, and apple core left over from Marianne's meal, carried the tray upstairs, and searched around until I found paper and a pencil. I wrote a note to Mrs. Bissel, telling her that I believed I'd solved her problem and would return to her house later that afternoon (it was almost dawn by this time), and I'd talk to her then. Fortunately, I remembered I'd told her not to return to the kitchen until she heard from me, so I left the note attached to the telephone in the pantry.

  When I got back home, I checked once more on Marianne. She'd made herself snug on top of an old desk Pa had carted down there a couple of years before. He'd planned on making an office for himself, then decided he didn't need an office, which was true, but the desk remained.

  I held a candle since if she'd fallen asleep I didn't want to awaken her, and I saw her eyes, glowing like a cat's in the dark. “Don't be afraid,” I whispered. “It's just me. I only wanted to see if you needed anything else before I went to bed.”

  She sank back into her nest on the desk. “Oh, my! I was so frightened. I was afraid somebody'd heard me and decided to check the basement.”

  “No, I think the household's asleep. Try to sleep, Marianne. My family will be leaving the house about nine in the morning to go to church, and there's always lots of coffee cake left over. My aunt Vi is a wonderful cook. You'll find plenty to eat in the kitchen. There are eggs in the ice box and bread and so forth.”

  There was a lengthy pause before Marianne said, “Thank you.”

  I surmised the reason for her hesitation. “You can't cook, can you?”

  “No.”

  “Don't worry about it. Just eat things you don't have to cook. You can make toast, can't you?”

  “Um . . . I don't know.”

  Again I wondered how this was going to work. It was as if the girl had been trained to be helpless. “Just eat the coffee cake, then, and maybe an orange. All right?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “You're welcome.”

  When I finally trudged upstairs from the basement for the last time that night--or morning, I mean--I was done in. It was all I could do to remove my dress and shoes, and I fell into bed with my combinations and stockings still on.

  And I couldn't get to sleep to save myself. I kept envisioning myself b
eing handcuffed and hauled off to the pokey by Sam Rotondo.

  # # #

  When I finally did get to sleep, it didn't last long. Billy woke me up around 6:00 a.m. with one of his nightmares.

  “Joey! Joey! Oh, God, no!” he shouted, all but scaring the life out of me. “Oh, Jesus! The blood, the blood. Joey! God, Joey. No. He's gone.”

  I jerked to a sitting position and blinked to get my bearings. After no more than a second or two, I understood what had happened, so I lay back down and wrapped my arms around my poor, ruined husband. “Hush, Billy. It's all right.”

  Every time this happened, the crack in my heart grew wider, and I loved him more. Life had been so darned hard on Billy. He deserved better. Before the war, he'd been a cheerful, happy-go-lucky man, with a good start on a career as an automobile mechanic.

  Not any longer. Now he was a shell-shocked, shot-up, gassed-out husk of himself, and guilt gnawed at my insides like rats gnawing on stale bread. I was so often short-tempered with him, and I tried his patience constantly, even though I didn't mean to. Months earlier, I'd started thinking that Billy deserved a better wife than I was proving to be, and I couldn't shake the thought out of my head. The poor man was stuck with me. I vowed I'd try to be a better wife to him. I made the same vow almost every morning, and broke it every day.

  Shaking and sweating with the aftermath of his terrible dream, he whispered, “Sorry, Daisy. I was fighting the damned Huns again, I guess.”

  “I know,” I crooned, trying not to cry because Billy hated it when I did. “It's all right, sweetheart.”

  He groaned and I felt his body go stiff in my arms. When he flailed around in his sleep as he'd just done, his legs and his lungs suffered afterward. He lived with pain all day, every day, even when he didn't have nightmares. Although I worried constantly about his morphine use, I whispered, “Do you need me to get your medicine, darling?”

  He tried to hide the extent of his torment, but I could tell how much he hurt because he gasped involuntarily when he opened his mouth to answer me. Then he said in his tight, pain-racked voice, “Yes. Please.”

  “Be right back.” As carefully as possible, I unwrapped him and crawled out of bed. Without bothering to put on my robe, I ran to the bird's-eye-maple dresser on the other side of the room. I was shocked when I withdrew the bottle from where Billy kept it, because it was almost empty. I'd picked up a full bottle from Dr. Benjamin two days earlier. Could this be the same bottle? It was on the tip of my tongue to ask Billy if he'd had to use that much morphine syrup in two days' time, but I swallowed the question. Better he have the medicine, I reasoned, than live in anguish.

  The fact that he'd taken so much of a potent opiate in two days' time frightened me, though. A lot.

  He didn't need me nagging him about his drug use. He had sufficient hardships to bear without adding a pestiferous wife to the mix. I exasperated him quite enough already. That being the case, I took him the bottle and turned to go to the kitchen. “I'll get a glass of water.” Dr. Benjamin had told me he should take the medicine with a full glass of water.

  “Don't bother.” He lifted the bottle to his lips and drank.

  My mouth fell open and I spoke before thinking. “Billy! That's too much!”

  “No, it's not.”

  He stared straight at me as he said it, and my heart hurt as if talons were digging into it. I pressed a hand over my bosom, and didn't know what to say. When he re-corked the bottle and held it out for me to take, I shook my head slowly. “Oh, Billy.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It's a rough life.” Then he let his head fall back against the pillows, still gripping the bottle.

  Without any more fussing, I went to the bed and took the bottle from Billy's grasp. It was empty. After staring at my husband for several seconds, wishing there was something I could do for him and knowing there wasn't, I gave up and put the bottle back in the dresser drawer. Leaving Billy to recover on his own, I put on my robe and slippers and trudged to the kitchen, feeling disheartened and hopeless and full of rage at fate.

  # # #

  I guess I've had worse days--well, I know I have--but I sure hope I never have to go through another one as tense as that first Sunday in December, 1920. The weather didn't help. Fog had rolled in overnight and now blanketed our neighborhood. Well, I thought, as I had many times of late, why not? Might as well add dismal weather to what was certain to be a horrid day. It lived up to my expectations, too, with a few bright spots.

  Suffice it to say that I managed to sneak downstairs to confer with Marianne before heading for church. She was in a blue mood, which I appreciated and understood although I think I might have been a bit short with her. I'm not sure about that.

  She'd always sort of reminded me of one of those long-eared, baggy-eyed basset hounds, even when she wasn't scared for her life and safety. There were good reasons for her sadness, but that morning I was bone tired and inclined to be snappish. I find helpless women difficult to tolerate, probably because I've never been allowed to be helpless.

  In an attempt to redeem myself, I reminded her about the coffee cake. If anything will make a discouraged person perk up, it's Aunt Vi's cooking. “Wait until we're out of the house,” I said. “Then eat all you want.”

  “Thank you.”

  I guess I'd intimidated her, because she didn't say another word, and she stared at me as if she expected me to rustle up a bullwhip and flay her alive. I sighed heavily and climbed back up the basement stairs.

  I also succeeded in getting in touch with Harold Kincaid, discovering in the process that Harold isn't an early riser. I apologized abjectly for telephoning him so early on a Sunday morning, and he agreed to consider the Marianne problem and get back with me later on in the afternoon.

  Surviving breakfast with my family turned out to be easier than I'd anticipated, mainly because there was an interesting article in the Pasadena Star News.

  “By gum, will you look at this!”

  We couldn't look, because Pa was the one holding the newspaper. But we all asked him what he was reading.

  “A fellow named Marconi started a radio broadcasting station in England!”

  “Really?” Billy was always interested in new inventions. He and Pa had been gabbing about radio-receiving sets for months. “I read where they broadcast a football game in Texas a while back.”

  “A football game?” My fork stopped its path to my mouth, and the piece of coffee cake I'd speared fell off. “How'd they do that? Do they tell you when the ball's in the air and stuff like that? Would you like to listen to ball games on a radio set?”

  “Sure! I think it would be swell.” Billy chewed a bite of bacon enthusiastically.

  His eyes were bright, too, and I knew he wished he could still play football and baseball. Failing that, he'd have liked to watch some games. I had a hard time featuring how entertaining merely listening to somebody talk about football would be. Perhaps my state of exhaustion accounted for my failure of imagination.

  “Gosh, Billy,” Pa said. “Just think about it. If we got a radio-receiving set, we could listen to all sorts of events. And the news. By God, we could get the news first-hand instead of waiting until it gets from wherever it's happening to us here on the west coast.”

  “I don't know,” I said, contemplating the nature of recent news events. “Do you really want to know who the rum runners are killing every day?”

  I'd been hell-bent on Prohibition before it went into effect. And really, when I thought about it on a personal level, I was still glad the country'd hopped aboard the water wagon, mainly because I was afraid Billy'd take to drink if he could--instead of taking to morphine, I guess. But the illegal liquor trade was becoming more vicious by the day, and I wasn't so sure any longer that country-wide Prohibition was even possible, much less a good idea.

  “There's more to life than bootlegging,” said Billy dryly. “I think it would be swell to be able to listen to ball games on a radio set.”

  Oka
y. After I brought Billy's dog home and bought a new motorcar, I was going to get the family a radio-receiving set. That depended, of course, on whether I could find one in Pasadena. Since Los Angeles had become the center of motion-picture activity in the nation, I didn't suppose it was too farfetched to believe it would also become the radio capital of the world.

  We hadn't talked radio to a standstill before we had to leave for church, so we were still yakking about it as we walked through the thick, cold fog to the First Methodist Episcopal Church, North, where perhaps the most miraculous occurrence of that day took place considering all the loose ends cluttering up my life: I remembered the alto part to “I Want a Principle Within.” What's more, I sang the whole song without falling into a coma, which I think demonstrates remarkable determination under the circumstances. It's a truly boring hymn. Don't tell anyone I said so. I think it's some kind of sin to hate hymns.

  During the church service, I kept an eye on Billy, unable to shake the vague horror that had bothered me since I saw him finish off that bottle of the morphine concoction Dr. Benjamin prescribed for him. I had a good view of the congregation from the choir stall behind the minister's pulpit. Generally I used the boring parts of Mr. Smith's sermons to take in the ladies' fashions and decide what I should sew next (I might not be able to cook worth a darn, but I could sew like a champ). Not that day. That day I stared at my husband and tried to spot signs of drug addiction. Since I didn't know what signs to look for, my scrutiny didn't serve to bring me to any conclusions on the matter.

  My word, but he was a handsome man. He'd been tall, my Billy, and slim. That was before he'd been confined to a hospital overseas and then in Los Angeles for months after he'd been shot and gassed in France. When he came home to me again, he was a stoop-shouldered, skeletal wreck.

  As I sized him up that day, I decided he looked more gaunt than slim nowadays. The hollows in his cheeks hadn't been there before the war, nor had the slouch to his posture. He found it difficult to sit up straight since the mustard gas had ruined his lungs and any exertion brought on fits of painful coughing.