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

that with Sister Angie leaving the hospital they could now proceed. The trial of Gil l’Amoureux was docketed for Nov. 14.

By then, spring had come and gone, and it had not been a good one. Willie Mull was murdered on May 3, 1940, one week before Hitler invaded France and two weeks before Capt. Arnaud Ricot de Scitivaux was shot down over Sedan. Maggie’s letter informing them of Arnaud’s death arrived two weeks later, and the family penned a joint letter of sympathy urging her to come home before it was too late. Willie’s death also changed things for his son, who had been planning to leave the temple to begin study for law school. Cal decided to stay on to prepare the memorial service and make sure the temple passed into the right hands.

The Soldiers arrived from across the country, thousands of them, from as far as the KWEM antennas could reach. They came to honor the man who for years had been a part of their lives, a fixture on their radio dial, a voice in their homes as familiar as that of Henry Aldrich or the Great Gildersleeve. When the day arrived, twenty thousand of them marched down Santa Barbara Avenue and filed into the ballpark as the choir sang the familiar funeral hymns—“Oh Day of Rest and Gladness” and “Cast Thy Burden Upon the Lord.” They’d known death and had sung those songs before. Seated, they watched as the young woman dressed in black and wearing a black veil was helped across the grass and up to her place on the dais.

Reporting the story the next day, the Times wrote:

Not even a cough could be heard as the battered young woman whose lifted veil revealed her terrible scars came to the words of the eulogy that everyone was waiting for. This was the service for the Rev. Willie Mull, and surely she must say something about his adultery. What would scripture answer to a man of the cloth murdered by a husband who caught him with his wife? Scripture must deal with it today, the mourners knew; tomorrow the law would have its turn.

Speaking slowly, as though each word was excruciating, she did not flinch: “To those who say Willie Mull committed adultery, I say this: He did not know! I am the sinner.”

With this, many in the crowd leapt to their feet shouting, “no, no!”

“Yes,” she continued. “Willie Mull did not violate the Lord’s commandment. I did! I loved him so. I loved him so much that I hid the truth, fearful he could not love me as I loved him. Cast your stones at me, not at Willie. The man’s heart burst with love . . . with love for you . . . with love for me . . . with love for Jesus. He did not know! He did not know!

“And when I told him—yes, as the end approached, I told him the truth, that I was married to a monster. What was he to do? Cast me over? Send me back? No. He comforted me. And he knew; yes, he knew what was coming, and still he loved me and he comforted me. Can one go upon hot coals and his feet not be burned? He knew, and we wept together.”

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