“I’m afraid not.”
“You remember how I used that very name—Temple of the Angels. You do remember that, don’t you?
“I do, I do.”
“So you know how I feel about things. How is it that article on the bulletin board says your brother’s going to build the Temple of the Angels when I was going to build it? Something not right about that, wouldn’t you say?”
Something about Eddie owing him money, wasn’t that what Cal said? Willie didn’t get into things like that: Matthew 6:24: “You cannot serve God and mammon.”
“My brother can be a hard man to move.”
Callender shifted in the chair, leaning back and looking from the chessboard to Willie and back to the board.
“And I as well, Reverend.”
Willie heard the edge in the voice. Delicate business.
“After all, what does it matter, Henry? The important thing is that the temple is built, isn’t it? Built thanks to Venice oil, God’s gift to all of us. What does it matter if the money comes from you or my brother? Seems to me the same thing. It is to be seed money only, for the temple should be built by the Soldiers, by God’s little people.
Callender didn’t answer right away. He’d had the same thought and rejected it.
“It ain’t the same thing, Reverend. You’d think it was, wouldn’t you? Same oil, same money, same temple. But it ain’t the same. In my mind it ain’t the same thing at all. Your brother has robbed me of what is rightfully mine and what I was rightfully going to do for you, and I have to find a way to set things right.”
A threat? No, certainly not.
An idea came. “Henry, I can’t give you back something I don’t have, surely you can see that. But maybe I can give you something I do have. You are a good man, Henry, a good Soldier. One of the best, I would say. I like the way you help people, look after them. I don’t know where you got the gift of compassion, but you have it. It is God-given and it is genuine.”
“Thank you, Reverend.”
“Will you join us? We’re bigger now, have more to do. In a year or two we’ll be moving into something far bigger still. I don’t know what it will be yet, but I know this: It is God’s will. We can use you, Henry, use your God-given talents. And of course, we will compensate you generously. Think of it as a start, Henry, however small, toward restitution.”
Chapter 7
Willie studied the drawings for some time without reacting, without a single gesture or twitch of a facial muscle. The men were scrutinizing him, but he stood still as a statue, giving nothing away. Eddie had called the night before to say the drawings were ready, and he should come by to meet with the architects. “You’re going to be bowled over,” he said, and now Willie was staring dumbfounded at the thing expected to bowl him over. He’d not been asked about it. “After all, what do we know about architecture,” Eddie had said. “I’ve hired the best firm in town, showed them the land, told them what I could afford. Don’t forget Mamá’s last words. This is the church she wanted you to have: the Temple of the Angels.”
And so here they were: two brothers and three architects, Wynken, Blynken and Nod, for all Willie knew of these people, and what they were showing him was monstrous.
They never argued. As children they’d had their snits, but not often because identical twins, sharing the same sperm and egg, are mirrors of each other. They are Siamese twins lucky enough to be physically, if not psychologically, unstuck. From the beginning Eddie had known how to prevail without being aggressive, and Willie, blessed with an equanimity that was lost or suppressed in his brother, didn’t mind. They’d learned when to leave each other alone. Their genes may have been the same, but their interests and values, things learned from experience, never were. Eddie learned the ranch business from his father: how to buy and sell crops and animals, how to make money. Willie went into the fields with the workers, visited their cabins, spoke Spanish to them, came to know them as people. Closer to his father, Eddie warmed to money and to business. Closer to his mother, Willie warmed to compassion and to Jesus.
Eva saw the changes in her boys as they grew into young adults, how temperamental and experiential differences intruded on genetic identities. She didn’t mind that they were different, one taking after the father, one after the mother. Very Catholic herself, she thrilled at Willie’s early love for the one true church. Later, when he chose the Presbyterian Seminary in San Francisco, not the Jesuits, she accepted his argument that the Presbyterians offered more freedom and hid her disappointment. She understood that Jesus prepared different paths to heaven. As for Eddie, she was happy when he took over the ranch when Robert was dead. She knew he wouldn’t stay long, just long enough to see after his interests. There wasn’t much more to it than that.
“Spectacular” was the only guidance Eddie had given the architects. The new Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum was going to cost a million dollars, and Eddie wanted something just as grand if not quite so expensive. In his mind the Temple of the Angels would be a monument to both of them, to their success in Los Angeles, something to stand forever as a celebration of the name Mull. He didn’t need to consult Willie, just ask himself what he wanted, and if Willie demurred, persuade him. As for the cost, Joe Sartori hadn’t turned him down yet. He took the church’s accounts to the bank. Joe saw that Willie was doing all right.
Willie tried to concentrate on the drawings, which were like nothing he’d ever seen. He watched the lead architect move his pointer—up, down, front view, side view, cutaway, overhead, quick switch to blueprints alongside, the voice monotonous, hypnotic. Willie was tuning out, entering into a private monologue with himself. This was his moment of truth. He knew it was coming and here it was. Was this his destiny, this gaudy thing in front of him, this granite opera house? Is this what God’s little people wanted? He was an evangelical, a pastor who’d left the Catholics and their catechisms and the Presbyterians and their stuffy traditionalism to work in the back alleys of Shanghai and San Francisco, a preacher without pretensions. His inspiration was Augustine, that tortured, splendid man steeped in sin. “Renounce, renounce!” Augustine adjured himself, “Give up this divided self, liberate yourself from torment.”
He wondered when the architects would stop chattering, so proud were they of their hideous creation. Eddie hovered over them like an orchestra conductor, looking down, looking up following every word, smiling at this, frowning at that, clearly delighted. Eddie had organized everything. Willie was no part of this show. But if he walked away, where would they be? A palace without a prince. Renounce, renounce! But It was too late. Things had come too far. Here he was. A golden dome? But was it really so bad? A new church for new lives was what he’d promised the Soldiers. His eyes focused on the antennas above the dome, antennas to carry his message cross-country in the new age of radio.
“Willie?”
“Yes, yes,” he said, returning.
“Magnificent, no?”
“I don’t know quite what to say.”
“You didn’t expect anything like this, did you?”
“No, I did not.”
They were meeting at Mull Enterprises on Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica, the hub of Eddie’s business interests, which stretched across the county. It had taken months for the project to be ready to show to Willie.
“Where’s the steeple?”
“It is a temple.”
“Temples don’t have steeples?”
“Not necessarily,” said Wynken, or perhaps it was Nod. Willie had already forgotten their names. “Believe me, Reverend, we researched this. Some temples have steeples, some don’t. In any case, your brother told us you should have something new, something grand, something never done before. And remember this: you don’t put antennas on steeples.”
“I knew you’d like it,” said Eddie, wrapping his arm around him. “I’ll tell you this: it doesn’t come cheap. This
little baby you’re looking at comes at exactly half the price of the coliseum they’re building out by USC. Only the best for you, little brother.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Not a penny of it was Eddie’s money. Joe Sartori was neither evangelical nor Pentecostal; he belonged to the one true church, and didn’t mix money and religion. Eddie made the point to him that the Church of the New Gospel was as much business as religion, filling up twice on Sunday just like Grauman’s Chinese showing a new DeMille movie. What finally sold Joe Sartori was the broadcasting. Hundreds of local stations were springing up across the nation, and the first national network, the National Broadcasting System, was about to be launched. Willie’s Sunday evening shows would compete with Hollywood radio dramas, Eddie told the banker, and bring in far more money. Willie was a Hollywood star.
Sartori signed the loan that allowed construction to begin.
They called it the new religion, but it was really a mix of new and old: The new was the radio and Sunday night shows scripted like Hollywood scenarios and using Hollywood actors, who had no complaints about being broadcast into millions of homes. The old was down-home preaching about baptism and sin and the return of Jesus Christ. Raised as a Catholic inspired by Augustine, ordained as a Presbyterian steeped in the piety of John Knox and John Calvin, Rev. Willie Mull abandoned Augustine, Knox, and Calvin when he took the stage at the Temple of the Angels. He understood, but he rationalized: each thing in its time. The Church of the New Gospel became something never before seen anywhere: a little bit Pentecostal, a little bit evangelical, a little bit revivalist and a great deal Hollywood.
Circular rather than traditionally rectangular, with a mammoth stage and amphitheater, the Temple of the Angels took two years to build and when completed was topped by a 100-foot-high golden dome in place of a steeple. The interior was cloaked in heavy burgundy curtains, with three tiers reaching to the base of the dome. Soldiers seated on the higher tiers looked down on the stream feeding the baptismal pool as if viewing from heaven itself. The exterior was made of white stone speckled with crushed seashells to provide sparkle, visible for miles around. Parishioners climbed into the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains to look down on their temple, glittering like thousands of diamonds in the sunlight.
Five thousand Soldiers came for the opening Sunday service and five thousand more for the first evening show. Willie was preaching not just to them but to tens of thousands listening on his own radio station, KWEM, beaming its signal from two tall antennas on the roof below the golden dome. It was the evening show, not the morning services, he’d chosen to broadcast, for radio, still in its infancy, had discovered that broadcast waves at night, unlike during the day, bounced off the ionosphere and traveled to far distant points. From there, relay stations were beaming them in every direction, soon turning tens of thousands of Los Angeles listeners into millions across the nation.
“Radio,” Willie proclaimed that first night on the air, “used in the right way, is a beautiful priceless gift from the loving hand of our Father God.”
At home that night, ashamed of his hypocrisy, sobbing by his bed in his West Hollywood bungalow, he confessed and prayed for penance. He turned to Augustine, opening the Confessions at random as Augustine had opened Paul’s Epistles. His eyes fell on the immortal words: “If not now, lord, when?”
Chapter 8
Angie l’Amoureux was from Beaumont, Texas, a Baptist girl who’d come to Los Angeles with her husband Gil, a derrick roughneck from the Louisiana swamps. There is plenty of oil around Beaumont, but Angie’s father, a Baptist preacher named Smallwood who’d married a Mexican dancer to save her from the saloons, didn’t approve of Gil and so the couple ran off where he couldn’t find them. Gil found a job in the gushing new wells of Santa Fe Springs, southeast of Los Angeles, where oil replaced the clear spring water citizens hoped would turn their little town into a world-famous spa. Oil paid better than water so no one complained, least of all Alphonzo Bell, the man who brought up the oil and got so rich he bought the place that would become Bel Air. Angie and Gil rented a three-room house in nearby Whittier, and Gil went off to work on the wells each day while Angie wondered what to do with herself.
She was twenty and pretty enough for Hollywood’s new film industry but so were a few hundred other girls. The successful ones were the lucky ones and sometimes they even had talent. The talent part didn’t matter a great deal because they stayed mostly in the background in the silent movies, usually as dancers or maybe just pretty faces in the crowd, but it was a better way to make a living than for the girls who weren’t “discovered.” The others looked for more conventional work, and in the days of telephone and elevator operators, typists, drug store counters, and Woolworth dime stores, they didn’t have to look far.
Gil didn’t take to marriage. A good-looking, hard-living, tough-talking Cajun, he was irresistible to women and so didn’t resist. He was twice Angie’s size, beat her up as a going-away present, and she threw her wedding ring at him on his way out the door. When she’d saved enough money for a lawyer she would file for divorce, which took time in California. Gil found a better job in Bakersfield, where the women in Oil City were more to his taste. It worked out for everyone. Angie moved to Glendale where she was more likely to be discovered than in Whittier and took a job at a soda fountain called Tony’s. Glendale advertised itself as the “Fastest Growing City in America”—fastest growing because, as a chamber of commerce brochure spelled out: “We have a strictly white population. There are not a half dozen [sic] other than Caucasians in the city.” It was the soda fountain’s proximity to her apartment house on Glendale Boulevard, not the city’s racial preferences that attracted Angie to the job.
Glendale was close enough to Echo Park that the Rev. Willie Mull could go there or to Pasadena or Burbank for lunch or a soda without wasting too much time or attracting too big a crowd. Broadcasts from the temple had made him famous, as famous, some said, as Douglas Fairbanks or Will Rogers. He enjoyed moving around the city on his own. Dressed in street clothes, hat and sunglasses, he could pass incognito. The temple had a Cadillac for official events and Willie had his own sporty Chevy Roadster, but he liked to slip out without a word, hop on a Pacific Electric Big Red Car and take it wherever it was headed, which from Echo Park was normally Glendale, Pasadena, or Burbank.
He met Angie on one of those hot, downtown summer days when the air comes off the desert instead of the ocean and you have trouble breathing from the moment you step outside. He went out looking for an ice cream sundae, and since there were no drugstores or soda parlors in Echo Park, he caught the first Big Red Car that came along, which happened to say Glendale. It might have said Burbank or Pasadena or been headed south to Long Beach and the story would be different. But this car said Glendale.
Leaving the car at Silver Lake just past Van de Kamp’s bakery and the Ford dealership, he could have entered any number of places along Glendale Boulevard. The one he chose, Tony’s, had a window poster showing exactly what he wanted, a three-scoop vanilla sundae with whipped cream and strawberry sauce topped with a cherry in a tulip-shaped glass vase, and so in he went. He perched on a stool under the overhead fan, made his order and watched as the pretty girl whose figure was nicely displayed in a crisp brown uniform with the top buttons undone and a white apron cinched tightly at the waist put three scoops in the dish and slowly poured the strawberry syrup, which oozed down the sides of the white mounds like fiery lava.
“Whipped cream?”
“Oh, yes, please.” He knew he shouldn’t, that he was beginning to show a little extra at the waist and recently had to have his trousers let out, but on a hot day like this he could make an exception. The young woman held up the walnuts and he nodded. Walnuts are good for you. He noticed the nametag on the apron. He also noticed that she wore no ring.
“Cherry?”
“Oh yes, please. Just like the picture in the window.”
“Texas,” she said, setting the sundae down with a spoon in front of him and pouring the coffee. She hadn’t paid much attention before, but now looked at him closely. Something in the voice. “Beaumont.”
“Ahh,” he said. “Texas. Never been there myself.”
“Not worth the bother.”
Willie was an impressive man, and he knew it. Though nearly twice the age of the young lady, he was not shy in showing off his skills. Communication, after all, was his business. He was the intermediary between Jesus and a world of sinners, a world whose salvation depended on his skills, a fearsome responsibility. He noted her brown hair, thick and tossed and down over the forehead. Her skin was creamy tan or gently olive, not unlike his own. Her eyes were deep brown and her mouth small but perfectly formed, as red and luscious as the cherry before him. It showed a sadness, and he wondered about that. Sadness was a big part of Willie’s life. What could there be in this pretty young girl’s life that brought sadness.
“What got you in the ice cream business?” he asked, hoping no one would walk in to disturb their tête-à-tête.
She leaned back against the rear counter, arms folded under her breasts, scrutinizing him. “You’re kidding.”
“Of course, I am. I wanted to see you smile.”
She smiled. The sadness went away.
“You could be in pictures, you know.”
“Ah . . . one of those. You’ve got a contract for me?”
He laughed. She was saucy. He loved it. Before he could answer he saw a change in her face. She was uncertain about something.
“Are you in pictures?”
Blood and Oranges Page 5