Blood and Oranges

by James O. Goldsborough

  Cries of sympathy and support—amens and hallelujahs—rang from one side of the field to the other. Toward the end, with not a dry eye left in the stadium, she closed with two lines from scripture:

  “Thou shalt not harden thine heart, nor shut thine hand from thy poor brother.”

  When she added “or sister,” the crowd roared its approval. She ended, quoting from John: “This is my commandment: That ye love one another, as I have loved you.”

  They had forgiven her.

  Good God, thought Barton Pitts, reading the story the next day. Do they really want this woman, an admitted adulteress, to take over the temple? What has this city come to?

  Chapter 20

  McManus always said he would have hired Lizzie anyway. He knew there would be conflicts of interest and did his best to keep her out of them, but in the end there were simply too many. She was too good to keep on the sidelines just because another story touched her family in some way. He blamed himself for not putting her on her uncle’s trail sooner, for she would have found him and the whole thing might have been avoided. She talked him into sending her to Union Station to interview her sister returning from Europe. He drew the line, however, at the trial of Gil l’Amoureux. He assigned a veteran Times court reporter. Lizzie could attend to gather information for a book if she wanted, but not to write for the Times.

  Maggie’s last letter home from Paris was dated May 20, 1940, three days after Arnaud was killed. He had pressed her to return home since war was declared the previous September, but it was a strange kind of war in the West, dubbed the “phony war” because for eight months nothing happened. There was nothing phony about it in the East and North, for Poland, Finland, Denmark, and Norway, but France and Britain spent the winter on the sidelines, preparing for the war that would start at Hitler’s convenience, which turned out to be May 10. If the date was hardly a surprise, the complete collapse of the French and British armies was a shock for everyone. For Capt. Arnaud Ricot de Scitivaux the war lasted a week. For France, a month.

  When the news came about Arnaud (a knock on the door from a corporal at the Ministère de la Défense), Maggie grieved alone in their little apartment on the rue de Vaugirard. Every moment of those terrible lonely days was etched into her mind. Hopelessness and helplessness. She paced in the darkened apartment, never went outside, hardly ate, turned to Arnaud’s little tome of Baudelaire to share her grief: “The abyss, the abyss, I fear sleep as one fears a great hole.” No one from the family called on her. Except for Arnaud, no one considered her part of the family. When the day of the funeral came, she draped herself in black and walked alone to Sainte-Clotilde for the service, which was brief for the church had several others to follow. There was no burial for there was no body. Still a stranger in Paris and now a widow, she attended the family veillée on the rue las Cases and returned home to sit alone and cry in the dark, listening to the big German guns in the distance.

  With Arnaud gone, she had no ties to France, certainly none to his family, which had no use for her now. The Germans were coming fast, pushing the Allies into the sea at Dunkirk, and it was only a matter of days until they reached Paris, a city rapidly emptying as its people and government fled southward in a terrible time of death, destruction, and humiliation. Paris had known other terrible times as well, but these were the worst.

  She was desperate to help, to do something, to do her part, but the armistice was signed before she had a chance. With the Germans arriving from north, west and east the only exit was to the south, which was complete chaos, thousands fleeing and, with the armistice, other thousands trying to get back to Paris. Refugees from every country, pushed south by the advancing German army, filled the roads in the direction of Bordeaux where they might find a ship bound for America or at least escape to Portugal. She made it to Bordeaux and caught the first ship she could get for the States, one fortunate enough to cross without being torpedoed.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  They were five at dinner in Bel Air the night she arrived home. Lizzie met her at Union Station and drove her home before returning downtown to write her story. Along with other refugees, Maggie had been interviewed in New York when their ship docked, but no one in Los Angeles saw the New York papers. Hollywood had been filling up with prominent European refugees since Hitler came to power, but Maggie was the first local girl to return home since the war in the West broke out. She held a little press conference in a quiet corner of Union Station. All the papers were represented, but the Times was the only one represented by her sister.

  They found her more beautiful than ever, character and suffering showing in a face that had always been sans souci. The old vigor was not dissipated, but there was a new composure. “I could never have made it without the plane Arnaud gave me,” she told them at dinner. “Cars, horses, carts, animals, every manner of contraption loaded till the axles broke. A few miles a day—if that. Only one highway south to Bordeaux. The side roads all go the wrong way. I found my little MS 315 sitting under a copse at Villacoublay. Amazing. I took on a French pilot who needed to get south, fueled up and off we went. In Bordeaux, I gave him the plane.”

  “Such a sad story,” said Nelly. “Your young man died before we could meet him.” She dabbed at her eyes with a napkin. She’d been in a fluster trying to decide what to have for Maggie’s first night home in two years. Lizzie solved it by telling her to stop by Castillo’s.

  There was a sense of unreality around the table as they ate their enchiladas, a moment of family normality squeezed into the tumult of death, destruction, and disappearance they read about every day. Only Eddie seemed to take it all in stride.

  “Glad to have you back, Mag,” he said, raising his glass. “’Course, I never wanted you to go in the first place. America needs gals like you at home.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Cal, raising his as the others did. “And let’s drink to Arnaud, a good man. His family must be devastated.”

  “It is the story of France,” said Maggie. “Retold for the hundredth time. There are two more pilots in that family still alive, at least last I heard. The plane Arnaud flew was not much different from the one I flew. Against Messerschmitts—no chance. They have some new Dewoitines coming out now. I flew a prototype.”

  “Lot of good they’ll do now,” said Eddie.

  “Not for the French,” she said. “The Germans will get them.”

  “If fly you must, you can fly here,” Nelly said. “But it will have to be without a war. They fight all the time, those Europeans. Their quarrels are not ours.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Eddie, lifting his glass again. “Here’s to peace in our time.”

  Maggie froze, and only Nelly drank with him. Eddie did not notice.

  She looked across at her father. “Speaking of prototypes, what do you know about Howard Hughes? I hear he’s working on some new planes, making movies about planes.”

  “Hughes makes movies about girls, not planes,” said Nelly.

  “He makes both,” said Eddie.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know him would you, Dad? Doesn’t he have an airfield out near your Venice oil wells?”

  “I do know Howard. Sold him that land. More like Playa del Rey than Venice.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Never met him. Everything done on the phone. Very mysterious guy.”

  After dinner they drove down the hill to the girls’ apartment in Westwood. Maggie was moving back into the bedroom on Tiverton she’d vacated two years before. Cal had moved from Westwood into an Echo Park stucco.

  “As if nothing happened,” Maggie said as they opened beers and settled down to talk. “Strange to come back as if I’d just stepped out for cigarettes. How come you’re in Echo Park? What about Uncle Willie’s place on Sunset?”

  “I haven’t set foot in it.”

  “Ghosts. You want me to go with you?”

 
“Would you?”

  “I have some time on my hands.”

  “What’s this about Howard Hughes?”

  “Just an idea. Have to start somewhere.”

  “So where do we start?” said Lizzie.

  “How about with Asa Aldridge?” said Maggie.

  “You’ll meet him soon enough.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “Doesn’t seem like a good time to get married.”

  “That’s what Cal told me in Paris,” said Maggie.

  “And was I right?”

  “No, Cal. You weren’t,” she snapped. “Changing the subject: Tell me about Sister Angie.”

  He looked closely, wondering what Lizzie might have said in her letters. “She’s still recovering, trying to prepare for a nasty trial—if that’s what you mean.”

  “What I meant was—how could Uncle Willie have done it, run off with a girl like that, put his career at risk, his life? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Didn’t you do something like that?”

  “Oh, come on, Cal.”

  “And it’s not fair to say ‘a girl like that.’”

  “Ah, well then, a girl like what?”

  “I told you two years ago, right here in this apartment. I think they were in love.”

  “I think I was asking about you,” said Maggie.

  “Well, stop it, please.”

  It was getting prickly, and they exchanged long looks, looks of people who need each other too much to go to the mat. “Do you think she’ll take his place?” she said at length.

  “It depends on the congregation. And on Eddie, who is on the board.”

  “And on the trial,” added Lizzie.

  “The trial, of course.”

  “Do you miss Willie?” Maggie asked Cal.

  “Of course, I miss him,” he said, surprised at the question. “We went through a lot together. Won’t you miss Eddie when he’s gone?”

  She thought a moment. “I don’t know. Maybe I won’t. The brothers were both so—so, how to say it, wrapped up in their own lives. Not fathers in the usual sense. I can’t ever remember doing anything with Dad.”

  “They had their own lives,” said Lizzie. “But how could you not miss Dad? He’s part of you, just like he’s part of me. Of course you’ll miss him.”

  “What strikes me,” said Maggie, who had lit up, smoking more than ever since returning, “is how different we are from our parents. Did you hear Dad at dinner with ‘peace in our time?’ How can anyone say something like that with what’s happening in Europe? That’s why he hates the president, because Roosevelt wants to do something about Hitler. With Dad and Mother, it’s all bank accounts and charge accounts. What’s in it for me? They never ask—what’s the right thing to do?”

  “Why should we be like them?” said Lizzie.

  “Some children take after their parents,” said Cal.

  “Sure,” said Maggie. “If you admire them, why not? Uncle Willie would have loved to see you come into the church. Dad has always wanted to take you into his businesses. You could be a bootlegger, own a gambling ship in the bay, live in a big house in Bel Air. Or Lizzie or I could do it. None of us ever showed the slightest interest.”

  “Because?” said Cal.

  “Because we all want to do something of value. At least to try.”

  “I think Dad tried to do something of value,” said Cal, uncomfortable.

  “A lot of good it got him,” said Lizzie.

  “And your children,” he said. “How do you know they’ll take after you?”

  “Why wouldn’t they?” Maggie said.

  “Because maybe they’ll want charge accounts and a big house in Bel Air.”

  “Not if we raise them right, teach them right.”

  “It doesn’t always work like that. Children react—just like we did.”

  “Do it their own way,” said Lizzie.

  “Or leapfrogging,” said Cal, “to take after their grandparents.”

  “Heaven forbid,” the women said together, laughing, ending the tension.

  Chapter 21

  The trial began November 14, six months after the murder. The Superior Court of Los Angeles held that there was no reason to move it out of the city because there wasn’t a city in the state or the country that didn’t know all the details. The newspapers took full advantage of the delay, and Herman Anzug, the judge unfortunate enough to be assigned to the case, knew the chance of finding jurors who didn’t know the story were about as good as finding someone in Hollywood who didn’t know that Clark Gable had married Carole Lombard. But knowing the story didn’t mean they had made up their minds, and Anzug, who’d used every means he knew to get off the case, had no doubt he could empanel a jury.

  “You’re finished as a judge and maybe as a husband if you go through with this,” his wife Hilda told him. “If you’re not careful you’ll have every woman in the county against you in the next election.”

  Anzug knew—or at least Hilda knew—that murder charges were only part of the trial, and the easy part at that. Sister Angie had not been idle. As “acting” pastor at the temple, she’d used her time in recuperation to meet with the Soldiers. The temple directors, led by Eddie Mull, did not want her named to succeed Willie, but were finding it hard to stop her. Willie’s memorial service had sent her star soaring. Where the directors saw ambition and sin, the Soldiers saw love and penance. They also liked the idea of a woman in the pulpit. Cal stayed on to help her. Willie would have wanted it, and he wanted it himself. Keeping her on helped keep his father alive. That was part of it.

  She filled the temple just as Willie had done—the difference being the presence of more women, especially single women. Never had the temple had more contributions or KWEM more listeners or advertisers. Letters poured in from women across the nation. The memorial service had done it. Angie was the martyr risen from the ashes, the standard-bearer for women everywhere. Her message was clear: women could no longer be abused with impunity. The “message of Wrigley Field,” she called it.

  Beyond sympathy for the battered woman who had survived by the grace of God, there was curiosity. Could she preach like Willie, bring the sick and lame down the aisles to be healed and reborn? Henry Callender, identified in newspapers as Willie’s closest friend and collaborator, compared her to Mary Magdalene, purified and reborn. Skeptics attacked her more ferociously than they had Willie—for how much easier it is to abuse a woman than a man—but amid all the attacks, the Soldiers never wavered. War was on—in more ways than one.

  Preparing for the trial, she refused to yield an inch. Yes, her husband must be punished for Willie Mull’s murder, but he must also pay for what he’d done to her. To ignore that, she told Federmeister, who Pitts sent again to “talk sense” to her, was to treat women as second-class citizens. Frustrated, Pitts invited Angie and her lawyer to the hall of justice for a parley.

  “We’re on the same side, you know,” he said. “Adding rape to murder and attempted murder will confuse the jury and jeopardize conviction. The man is your husband.”

  “Am I to understand that the district attorney condones spousal rape?” she asked.

  “What is spousal rape?” he bellowed at her.

  Up for re-election the following year, Pitts complained to Judge Anzug, who summoned them all to his chambers. Anzug had had a complete search done. Not only did California have no law against anything called spousal or marital rape, but neither was such a law to be found in US or English Common Law. “However strongly we might feel about it, spousal rape is not a crime. Plus the fact that it makes people uncomfortable.”

  Hilda would have gasped.

  “Uncomfortable?” Angie began.

  Pitts cut her off. “I agree with Judge Anzug. Attempted murder, yes. Rape, no.”

  “Rape may be uncomfortab
le to the court and to the district attorney . . .”

  “Irrelevant, is what I meant,” sputtered the judge. “Rape is irrelevant to this trial.”

  “But it is not irrelevant to me,” she said, “or to the thousands of women raped and abused by husbands and frightened out of bringing charges by cowardly courts and district attorneys. Either you allow the rape charges to go forward or I will take it to the newspapers and have it tried in the court of public opinion. Let me ask you both this—what do you think the nation will think of court officers who refuse to prosecute the man who abandoned his wife, then returned and raped and tried to murder her? Do you want me to lift my skirts in court, show the jury the scars that are still there? Is that what you want?”

  At home that night, Hilda, who had a good legal mind (better than her husband, some said), suggested a solution. It was not a particularly good solution, but would have to do.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  November of 1940 was unusually harsh for Los Angeles, and the people who waited in line the night before the trial were cold and miserable, though not enough to give up their places. Local newspapers planned extra street editions throughout the trial. Editorials, never losing sight of their owners’ primary goal, which is to make money, watched closely to see how the wind was blowing. Defenders of tradition, they could not afford to offend the mainstream churches that despised Willie Mull’s evangelism and recoiled at the idea of anointing an adulteress as his successor. But neither could they ignore the “message of Wrigley Field” nor the feminist wave washing across the country since Amelia Earhart took her place beside Eleanor Roosevelt as the world’s most acclaimed champion of women’s rights. Earhart was gone but not the cause she championed, a cause in search of a new torchbearer.

  There are seventeen courtrooms scattered over the fourteen floors of the Los Angeles Hall of Justice, and for the State of California vs. Gil l’Amoureux the largest was chosen, seating two hundred people. That left thousands of clamoring, mostly angry women in and around the streets, steps, lobbies, corridors, and elevators who would have to stand in line another night if they wanted to see anything. It took half an hour to get the lucky two hundred into the courtroom, seated and quieted. The Hall of Justice is a massive, classic, Beaux-Arts building whose exterior is constructed primarily of marble and granite. It is stately, solid and normally quiet as any office building except for the top two floors, where the jails are housed. Yet even in his chambers many floors and corridors from the courtroom, Judge Herman Anzug could not escape the din.