Blood and Oranges

by James O. Goldsborough

  “Thanks for coming,” she said, stupidly.

  “There’s Lizzie and Joe crossing the grass,” he said, waving.

  Surrounded by family, she felt better. “I thought you might not come alone.”

  “Angie?”

  “You’re seeing her.”

  “I’m staying with her for a while.”

  Up the hill, men were coming out of the vet’s home and starting down toward the chapel. A few nurses pushing wheelchairs were the only women in view. If the men had women they wouldn’t be in the home, would they?

  “Staying with her?”

  “Her ex is out of prison.”

  Maggie stared. “And . . . ?”

  “It’s better this way.”

  “I thought they turned down his parole.”

  “They did. Twice. He served his full sentence.”

  Her mind went to Willie. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “Till it blows over.”

  She’d asked Nelly and Didi to come early, but saw no sign of them. Lizzie had invited her to stay with them in Brentwood, stay as long as she liked in Robby’s empty room. She declined. Better at home, get over it sooner, go riding mornings, walk on the beach. She needed to be alone. Anyway, Lizzie was returning to Chicago the next day.

  The chapel was filling when the long black sedan started slowly up the incline from Wilshire. She was annoyed. She’d specifically asked that the hearse not arrive until after the service began. She wanted a celebratory service, not a morbid one. She’d asked the pastor for uplifting passages. But it wasn’t the hearse, it was Nelly’s black Buick with Ralph at the wheel. She watched as the car stopped and Ralph dashed around to open the door, first for her mother, then her daughter.

  They came up the path, Didi nearly as tall as her grandmother. Nelly was dressed suitably for a Santa Monica funeral, which is to say you knew they were mourning clothes but someplace else they might pass for something else, the chiffon dress not quite black enough and maybe a little too airy, a little too short. Her mother always had nice legs. Didi wore subdued gray, a clingy wool dress Maggie had not seen before. She was a pretty girl already with signs of a figure. They looked like mother and daughter, and Maggie felt a surge of affection for them both. They kissed, Maggie holding her daughter close for a moment, feeling the sprouting body before Didi pulled away. She had an odd look on her face, not so much mournful as sullen. Maggie had seen the dismay on her face when she’d told her. She’d called Nelly on the phone from Tucson, but told her not to say anything, that she’d come over to tell Didi in person. Come at teatime, said Nelly, and I’ll have Iris bake a cake.

  They’d sat in the living room with Didi still in her navy Westlake skirt and white polo. Tea and cake were set out on the low table by the sofa. Nelly served. Didi sensed that her mother did not have good news. It was hard. Maggie saw shock when she told her. The girl’s head sagged. Was it anger? No tears, just a little choking sound, and she got up and went to her room, Lizzie’s room. “Keeps things in,” Nelly said. “Good student, her teachers say, but shy. Not popular, but then you weren’t either, were you? Not with girls, you weren’t. I don’t know where it comes from, certainly not my side of the family. Dr. Lambert says she’s acrophobic.” Dr. Lambert went back with the family a long way, all the way to Santa Monica Hospital.

  “Acrophobic—with two pilots as parents. Is that possible?”

  “Well, where did your daredevil side come from? Certainly not from me or your father. Or Lizzie’s literary side for that matter.”

  Maybe it hadn’t been anger on Didi’s face, but blame: blaming them for flying, blaming them for leaving her alone, for sending her away.

  But she’d wanted to go to Bel Air!

  “Front pew right,” she whispered to Nelly and turned to watch them disappear inside, walking slowly, erect, looking straight ahead. The pastor had already gone in. Lizzie, Joe, and Cal followed. She greeted one more guest, and that was it. She stood alone, looking out toward Westwood, back toward Wilshire.

  How many times had they passed this place on their way to the beach? She felt the rush of life swirling past. Already past forty and yet still the girl screaming into the wind from the back seat of the Chrysler as Nelly made the turn down toward Rustic Canyon, always too slowly, always too cautiously. How can life slip away so fast while things like the chapel remain constant? As a girl she’d wondered about this building, the pretty white-clapboard chapel with steeples and cornices and balustrades, none of which fit with the rest of the grounds, like dropped into Westwood from New England by accident. So many years, so many deaths.

  Lizzie was still with her, thank God, dear Lizzie, so steady, so clever. She’d been in the back seat of that Chrysler, too, observing her mad sister shouting into the wind, never joining in but never critical, quietly enjoying all that life had to give. She’d come today in a navy frock that she’d probably worn to a dozen funerals for the Times—go home and put it in its plastic bag until the next person died, whoever it was. Maggie watched them go down the aisle, Joe taking her arm, Joe who had so much more than he showed, keeping it in so he could pour it into his writing. Joe would miss Terry. Who would have thought Lizzie could make such a good marriage with a pudgy, bald socialist? First marriages are for glamor; second marriages are the real ones, the ones for children, however the children turn out. Behind Joe, Cal walked alone. Living with the woman whose husband killed his father.

  The hearse was waiting when they came out, sinister black death vehicle followed by two V.A. buses and a few cars, Ralph’s Buick at the front. Six men of varying ages and physiques carried the casket, two from Hughes, two from the beach club, two from the V.A. The gathering broke up, some people joining the cortege, some apologizing that they couldn’t make the burial or the repass in Bel Air. She understood. Some of the vets could barely walk. Some couldn’t walk at all. Many had sent regrets.

  The Buick was specially made, heaven knows where Nelly had found it, not at all like Eddie’s old Buick. It had gray velveteen seats, a roll-up window between the front and back and ample room for three in the rear. It was the first time Maggie had been in it. Nelly quickly pointed out that the window was never rolled up. Ralph was part of the family.

  “What did you think of the service, honey?” Maggie asked her daughter as Ralph followed the hearse down to Wilshire. Motorcycle policemen were stationed at each end of the cortege to keep cars together. In the chapel, the casket had remained closed. He’d flown right into the mountain. The control tower said they’d lost contact; that he shouldn’t have been over Mount Lemmon but coming down the Highway 10 corridor. There’d been a storm and he’d strayed off course. So much for the Hughes night flying system. She’d watched her daughter standing by the casket, her lips moving like she had things she wanted to clear up with Daddy while there was still time. Maggie felt tears, but Didi’s eyes stayed dry.

  “I don’t want to go to any more funerals,” she said as the Buick turned off Wilshire toward the cemetery.

  “Ah,” said Nelly, “that is a wish I share with you completely.”

  “The funeral is not quite over,” said Maggie. “Now comes the hardest part.”

  “Do we have to?” asked the girl.

  The thought of bringing Didi back to Playa del Rey had passed Maggie’s mind, but it wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen. She would remain alone. Didi was happy with Nelly, grandmother substituting for mother. Why interfere?

  “Life is full of things we have to do, sweetie,” said Nelly.

  “Why?”

  Maggie turned to look at her daughter, pretty, vulnerable, something of Terry’s solid build in her, not as fragile in appearance as in character. Different from the rest of us, she thought, with an odd sort of emotional lethargy. Where did it come from? No one else in the family had anything like it.

  “Duty,” Maggie said.


  “To whom?” asked the girl, who at least had the grammar right.

  Chapter 39

  He bought a .38 Colt Detective Special and took it to an indoor pistol range on Sixth Street to learn how to fire it. Along with most able-bodied men born in 1910, he’d been to war but never learned how to fire a pistol. A rifle, yes, the M-1 that every infantryman learned to handle, but a pistol was something new in his hand. The gun shop on Pico sold him on the Colt after asking what he wanted it for. Dangerous neighborhood, he said. The salesman, looking at the Los Feliz address on the application, knew it wasn’t true but wasn’t going to argue the point. He pulled out the snubby Detective Special, let Cal turn it over in his hand a few times and made the sale. No good for long range, he said, but for household protection it was the best. Up close, you can’t miss. Can’t miss what was left unsaid. It was a strange conversation, but Cal supposed not really that different from buying a car or a hat. “What are you looking for, sir?” they ask. There are different cars for cross country and tooling around town; different hats for rain, sun, snow, show; different pistols for firing ranges or shooting someone up close in the heart, as Henry Callender had done.

  She’d showed him the card Gil sent to the temple from San Francisco after they released him from Folsom:

  Been thinking about you, Angie baby.

  Been thinking about you for 15 years.

  See you soon.

  Of course, it was unsigned. If he violated the restraining order he’d be back in Folsom. She took it to the police who said there was nothing they could do. Afterthat she invited Cal to move in. They were still seeing each other, so why not? She was scared to death and didn’t hide it. He bought the pistol without telling her, stashed it in the closet by the back door off the kitchen and moved into the upstairs bedroom next to her master bedroom. It was a nice arrangement. They saw each other when they wanted, and went their own ways the rest of the time. She had new locks put on every door and thought of fencing the property but no fence would keep out killer or coyote that wanted in bad enough. Pines and slopes on both sides made fencing impractical. She thought of getting a dog but didn’t like barking dogs.

  All that was six months ago, and she’d never heard from him again, evidence perhaps that the restraining order was working despite what he’d written. Cal gave up his apartment at Echo Lake. Los Feliz was only ten minutes further from his office. The temple and the Richfield Building were on the same bus line and sometimes they rode together. The G.M. buses were a poor excuse for the Glendale-Burbank trolley with its own right-of-way—which his father had taken years before to visit the same woman—but the trolley was gone.

  Angie was a phenomenon. Nothing had been certain when she took over from Willie. Her position was provisional for the board and its chairman, Eddie Mull, but not for the Soldiers, who wanted her and no one else. After Eddie was gone, the Los Angeles establishment, which hated notoriety, still opposed her for a while—just as it had opposed Willie until it saw he was good for downtown business. None of it turned out to matter. Sister Angie had become a postwar symbol for women who’d stepped into new roles during the war and had no intention of giving them up. Angie was too good a politician to hold a grudge, and with time the establishment came to accept her. Like Hollywood, the Temple of the Angels was a national institution, good for morale and good for business. Make your peace.

  She left her robes at work. At home, she was all woman, barefoot on the carpet, bare legged on the couch, naked in bed. She loved quoting from the Song of Songs, that strange Old Testament book celebrating sexual love. Everything about the Song is a mystery, she told him: when it was written, where, by whom and how it ever got into the Bible. Blasphemous for Christians, it was a product of old Jerusalem, its origins closer to Egyptian love poems or Tantric sex hymns than anything in the Bible. In sermons and shows she never mentioned it, but knew it by heart and would recite it to excite him. Never did the subject of marriage come up between them. They didn’t expect the arrangement to last forever. One day at a time while Gil was at large. People found out if they wanted that Calvin Mull was living with Sister Angie. It made sense if anyone thought about it: Sister Angie needed protection from a murderer who had vowed to kill her. Her protector was the son of the man he had murdered.

  Gil l’Amoureux had gone to ground. After Folsom he’d gone to San Francisco for that’s where he’d posted the card. From there he disappeared. Much later, in an interview with a San Francisco Chronicle reporter who visited him in San Quentin, he claimed he’d simply worked his way down the coast on derricks, boats and in the fields, the kind of jobs where no one asked about you or expected you to stay. If he ran out of money or slept with the wrong woman or got drunk or in fights or fired, he simply moved on down the coast a little farther, getting closer to Los Angeles as he went. He never sent another card, but as he got closer, he told the Chronicle man, his nose started twitching and that wasn’t all. He hadn’t used his real name when he got out of Folsom for it was too well known. As he got closer, he began to use it again. Let them wonder.

  One evening found them, unusually, alone together in the dining room. Catalina, the Mexican housekeeper who lived in the cottage behind the rear patio, had made mole poblano and sopa de tortillas, and Cal opened a bottle of Spanish Rioja to go with it. Dinner with them was never formal, just something that happened if they both found themselves at home and Catalina had prepared something ahead of time. Cal, who now had a private law practice in addition to running the Sierra Club, often stayed out for dinner with clients, and the temple regularly scheduled evening events requiring Sister Angie’s presence and kept its soup kitchen open until eight. Life on Lambeth Street was casual. The kitchen, which looked out onto the rear patio, was normally a busier place than the dining room, and it was more common to find one or the other in the kitchen munching tacos or enchiladas Catalina had stacked in the refrigerator than to find them together in the dining room with a bottle of wine.

  It was a handsome room, with a lower ceiling than the salon because of the bedrooms above it. Dark heavy beams angled up to the vault at 45 degrees from both sides to connect with a longitudinal beam running the length of the room. The table, chairs, and sideboard were heavy California oak, and the floor of dark travertine tile. Leaded, arched windows gave onto the front patio. Evenings, curtains were always drawn. They never entertained together. Angie occasionally had Soldiers or benefactors for dinner, but Cal never joined them. They saw no point in advertising the arrangement.

  They’d been talking about a legal case that was to take Cal into the San Bernardino Mountains the next day. Developers were seeking permits to build a ski resort near Palm Springs on Mount San Jacinto, a mountain sacred to the desert tribes, and Cal had been hired to represent the tribes in opposition to the permits. They hadn’t had dinner together in a while but planned this one because it wasn’t certain how long Cal was to be away.

  “Three days at the most,” he said. “In any case, I should be back before the weekend. Make our pleas, submit the files, see what the judge has in mind.” He looked to see if she seemed at all bothered, but she was in good spirits. He would be sleeping in her bedroom that night. With time, Gil and his threats were fading. It had been more than a year since he was released. If he was coming, it figured he would have come already. The conversation was interrupted by buzzing from the kitchen intercom. Catalina was calling from the cottage, something she rarely did.

  “I think I see someone in the patio looking into the kitchen,” she said when he answered. “Maybe you check.”

  Slipping into the kitchen, he turned out the light and looked through the window. He saw nothing moving.

  “What is it, Cal?” came the call from the dining room.

  “Nothing,” he called back. “Catalina wants something.”

  He took the .38 from the cabinet by the rear door, from the back of the highest shelf where neither woman could find it or r
each it. He loaded it and walked out the rear door into the patio. Standing silently in the dark, he listened for sound, watched for movement. Yes, something was there. He couldn’t see it, but sensed it, something pulsing, the nightlife too quiet. He stood dead still, hoping Angie would stay put so he could hear anything that moved. He spun the chamber, wanting it to be heard. Whether it was a housebreaker or a murderous ex-husband, he would be unlikely to carry a gun. Gil had needed only hands to kill Willie. He glanced up to the second floor of the cottage and saw the curtain fall back into place. Catalina had heard the gun clicking and that was enough for her. Had she really seen something? She’d said “someone,” which would rule out critters, though the neighborhood was full of them, possums, skunks, raccoons, coyotes, and it was close to dinner time for night critters.

  If it was a someone it was likely to be Gil. The man at the gun store was right: Los Feliz is a quiet neighborhood, nothing dangerous about it, not at all a good place for prowlers, too many dogs and children and comings and goings, patrol cars cruising Glendale and Los Feliz Boulevards. He stood motionless in the penumbra, the pistol pointed in front of him. If someone was in this patio he had to have entered from the slopes on either side of the house, not from the front, for the gates were locked. He saw Angie at the kitchen window, her silhouette clearly visible. More silence. Why no crickets? Bizarre.

  Suddenly there was rustling and movement on the southern slope, twigs breaking, a shadow in the moonlight. He hadn’t thought of a flashlight. He didn’t move, and silence crept back in. He walked to the slope and saw footprints rising to the top. No animal. Someone was up there. More rustling and then the shadow was gone.

  “I could ask for a postponement,” he told her next morning as they were dressing, “ask the judge to reschedule.” He’d already called the police, and they were sending a patrolman to investigate.