Blood and Oranges by James Goldsborough (latest books to read txt) 📗

of a godless society if he did not lead a spotless life. Like Augustine, he was tormented, one whose spirit was ready to renounce but whose body was not. He prayed to find the right woman, the new Millie, the woman to return him to the safety and sanctity of marriage, end the torture of a divided self. He read from Corinthians: “To avoid fornication let every man have his own wife and every woman her own husband.” Exactly so, he thought. I am looking for a loving wife—and yes, a new mother for Calvin.

And then came Angie, who was hardly what he expected. She was young and (so he thought) single. There was something of Chun hua in her—small but brave, less exotic but more alluring. He could not get Angie’s bounteous figure from his mind. He wanted to renounce, but could not. He fought, fought as Augustine had fought, but was not ready. The spirit was strong, but the flesh was stronger. A gentle man, like Augustine, he was in the grip of something violent. “And up to the very moment in which I was to become another man, the nearer the moment approached, the greater horror did it strike in me.”

On his knees in the bungalow, his mind seeking Augustine but finding only Angie, he nodded and repeated the words: “I all but did it, lord, but not quite.”

♦ ♦ ♦

With the success of the temple, Willie moved to the top floor of the new Sunset Tower, the tallest and most luxurious apartment building in Los Angeles, a city whose earthquake building codes did not like tall buildings. He rode the trolleys down Sunset to the temple during the week, saving his Chevy roadster for Sundays. Sunset also was more convenient for Cal, who was at USC and worked part-time at the temple, sometimes staying overnight with his father.

Willie began dropping into Tony’s regularly, sometimes driving, sometimes taking the Big Red cars. She’d see him coming and already start making the strawberry sundae he always ordered. The shop was not always empty. Sometimes Tony was there and once he found two teenage boys at the counter eating sundaes and flirting. It was harmless prattle about where she lived and what time she got off and did she like the pictures, but he found himself annoyed. He was about to say something when she shut them off with a—“I don’t think my boyfriend Tony would like you talking to me like this.”

When the boys left, she smiled for him. “Tony isn’t really my boyfriend.” He knew she said it for him.

Angie was anything but naïve. She knew the Rev. Willie’s interest was not just in her soul and her sundaes, but she liked the idea of being courted by a famous evangelist. Her father was a preacher; her family was steeped in Texas Baptism and she’d been churchgoing until Gil came along. As a girl, she’d mounted the chancel with her father to recite scripture. One local newspaper named her “Sister Angie Smallwood, Beaumont’s child preacher.” Angie knew her Bible and she had her standards. She’d been seduced by Gil but had no regrets because she’d got him to the altar and he’d brought her to Los Angeles. Abandoned, she’d grown to miss her church but not her man, and had gone to the Temple of the Angels to be born again.

When Willie learned she’d done some preaching and knew scripture he invited her to temple rehearsals and soon cast her in minor roles in the Sunday shows—as an angel, as a member of the chorus, twice with minor speaking roles in shows based on the Beatitudes. Clad in long robes, she looked little different from the other girls, but Willie always knew where she was. For the first time since Millie he felt his heart engaged again. He’d not expected it, not from a girl he’d been drawn to, he confessed, by lust alone. On his knees in the temple chapel he prayed, and the Lord replied, “Love her, love her,” and he did love her. It is what made everything possible. He knew there were risks: To love is to be vulnerable, to face loss, to face pain worse than anything physical. The heartsickness he’d felt after Millie’s death crept back at the edges of his mind, the shudders of pain. He could not go through that again.

As for Angie, she loved it. Raised by a Bible-thumping father and a born-again mother, she missed all the church hooptedoodle. Saturday night in Beaumont had potluck and bingo, and Sunday the children dressed up and off to church for a morning of hallelujahs followed by cake and coffee and fruit juice and the families socializing while the children went outside to play with fruitless warnings not to get their Sunday best dirty. When she was seven she’d mounted the chancel for the first time and her father helped her onto a chair so she could recite the 23rd Psalm and the 91st, and the 103rd, and when she was nine she read from scripture, John 4 and 1 Corinthians and the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew, and when she was eleven she didn’t have to read anymore because she knew it all by heart.

She still knew it. Maybe she’d forgotten it with Gil when she’d lost her way, but she still had it and sometimes lay in bed before work at the ice cream shop and sought it in her memory, and if there was a lapse she went back to her Bible, the same worn leather Bible given to her by her daddy. It was never far away. It was all coming back.

Chapter 9

The Depression slowed Los Angeles down but not by much. The city lacked the heavy industry of the East and big farms of the Midwest that doomed those regions. The main industry in Southern California was sun and entertainment, precisely what people needed to lift sunken spirits in hard times.