Blood and Oranges by James Goldsborough (top 50 books to read .TXT) 📕

pilot daughter, brought her down to earth, so to speak. She’d been happily surprised when Maggie showed up at the bank in a skirt instead of her usual pants.

“Farther down, almost to Hancock Park. And it was his second church. The first was a little place just off Wilshire. Eddie used to call it a grocery store with a steeple.”

Chasen’s was a comfortable, red-leather booth and wood-panel place that became boisterous at night with the movie crowd and gossip columnists and sometimes a brawl or two. At night, the bar was three or four thick with heavy drinkers and you never got your table on time, which was the point. Maggie had been there once before with Howard, who lived nearby and always got his tables on time. Lizzie had never been there.

“I wish Cal would change his mind,” said Lizzie.

“Why?” said Nelly, quickly. “No one adores Cal Mull more than I do, but he has less need of money than you do. Just be thankful to your father.”

“And to you too, Mother dear,” said Maggie, patting Nelly’s hand.

She was a handsome woman, as vain about her appearance as the day Eddie first spotted her on the boardwalk at Lick Pier. She’d kept her Iowa body, which is to say it was more farm solid than city slender, but still well maintained as she advanced through middle age. She’d never had surgery, though lately had begun to wonder. She’d had enough money to purchase the dance studio and with probate was ready to bring it up to the standards of her Beverly Hills clientele. Widowhood, in her daughters’ view, was engendering extravagance. She wore too much make-up, dyed her hair too light and wore clothes with too much red. She seldom appeared with a man who was less than thirty years her junior. But if she had no great virtues, neither were her vices worse than those of any other Bel Air matron. The girls admired how quickly she’d rebounded from tragedy, but worried about her running around so much. She wouldn’t talk to them about any of it.

Maggie smiled at her sister. It was the signal.

“Mother,” she said. “First chance to tell you. I’m five months pregnant.”

Nelly smiled and reached for her hand. “I thought I saw a little tummy but wanted to let you tell me.” She looked to Lizzie. “You knew, of course, you who know everything. It’s your turn next, you know, one child’s not enough, at least two in each family, that’s what Granny Sinclair used to say. Of course your father wanted to have more, but it wasn’t meant to be.”

“Why at least two?” asked Lizzie.

“On the farm you want as many as possible, but at least two, because that way the family doesn’t shrink, generation to generation.” She looked back to Maggie. “By the way, I hope you don’t do any flying while you’re pregnant.”

“Why not?”

“You might crash and kill the baby.”

Maggie laughed, couldn’t help herself.

“I’m certainly not going to have another,” said Lizzie.

“I think I might like it,” said Maggie.

“You like everything,” said Nelly. “Maybe too much.” She sipped her wine and looked for something else to say. It was never easy with the girls, always easier with Cal. “I trust you’re not involved with this monster plane I keep reading about.”

Maggie laughed. “The Spruce Goose? Howard hates the name. Plane’s not even spruce, it’s birch. To him it’s the H-4 Hercules, and he keeps it surrounded in the hangar like it was radioactive. I’m testing the F-11, different program.”

“Why don’t you want to be pregnant again, Lizzie?” Nelly asked, switching back. “Robby needs a sibling. He’s an aggressive little thing, don’t you think?”

The problem was that Nelly didn’t like Joe. Or maybe it was that she’d liked Asa better even though it was Joe who provided her first grandchild. She rarely had them over because Joe didn’t fit in with her friends. At her last Christmas party, an annual thing she’d had for twenty-five years, there’d been a bad moment when a tipsy Freddie Gibson from the Bel Air Club staggered over and asked Joe why he wasn’t in jail. Along with some other Hollywood types he’d been called back to Washington by the House Un-American Activities Committee and convicted for holding views unpopular with Congress. Joe, who was appealing the conviction, turned his back and walked away. Nelly thought he should have defended himself.

Lizzie ignored the second question and answered the first. “We don’t have the time.”

“It doesn’t take long.”

It was their mother’s humor. They smiled.

“It’s not making them,” Lizzie said. “It’s everything else.”

“Is Joe too old? He must be nearly my age.”

Lizzie frowned. “We can’t all find men thirty years younger.”

Nelly smiled. “My boys aren’t for making babies, dear.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Deirdre Mull Heyward, called Didi, was born the summer of 1948. Even in the basinet she was an intense, restless child. It was a good year to be born in Los Angeles, off to a perfect start. The Rose Parade had never been more glorious. Whatever miseries affected the rest of the world, Los Angeles, cut off by its deserts, mountains, and ocean, remained apart. It still took three days to arrive by train from the East, just a little less than to cross the Atlantic. Hollywood quickly adapted to the postwar era. Gone was the slapstick of the twenties, the shootouts of Prohibition, the frothy romances of the late thirties and battle triumphs of the war years. Westerns were more popular than ever—the lonesome sheriff standing up to the gang was the perfect metaphor for America in a nasty world. If some didn’t agree, the House Un-American Activities Committee and Sen. Joe McCarthy were there to persuade them.

Cal was Didi’s godfather, just as he was godfather to her cousin Robby. Maggie had considered asking Joe, but Joe was in jail and would have his hands full when he got out with Robby, who made it clear from the first that he didn’t like having a new cousin. With