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

Lester wasn’t the greatest piano player, but knew everything, was accommodating to a fault, and wasn’t expensive. He made enough tips in the big brandy snifter on the piano that she probably didn’t need to pay him anything. Lester didn’t even mind playing on her Baldwin spinet, which she always had tuned for him, though the tuner hated it. “The sea air, the sea air,” he told her once. “Spinets are no good anyway the way the strings are bent around. Get yourself an upright—or a baby grand. A house like this deserves a baby grand.”

Promptly at six, the first cars pulled up Roscomare Road, the long, winding street running from the club up to the reservoir. Plenty of parking along Roscomare so Nelly never hired a valet. Ralph should have been back with Lester by six, but Wednesday rush-hour traffic can be bad. Didi was radiant and dashed out to greet the girls coming up the path, boys right behind. This wasn’t just a younger crowd, it was a young and beautiful crowd with a touch of Hollywood because more than a few of the Tri Delts came from Hollywood families. Didi introduced Nelly to the Volker twins, two gorgeous redheads who’d been on the cover of Time magazine for their success on Password, a game show where they’d won for weeks, setting some kind of record. The story was that Frank Sinatra called the Tri Delt house and invited them to the Academy Awards. Both of them! Sinatra who was fifty if he was a day! Chiffon dresses, one lime, one powder blue, came just above their knees and the décolletage was maidenly modest. And such lovely pale skin! Redheads are so lucky!

And there was Maggie making a beeline for her daughter. Nelly loved seeing them together, so rare. With Howard Hughes’s disappearances Maggie had taken on more duties and seldom made it to Bel Air anymore. When she came, she came alone. After two dead husbands it was like she was giving up, Nelly thought, so unlike her. The Times photographer started snapping pictures. Maggie towered over her mother, and Didi was a bit taller than Maggie.

“Mother, get in the middle,” said Maggie.

“Never!” she said, pulling away. “I’ll look like a dwarf. You two stand together.”

“Would someone please hold this drink,” said Didi. “I don’t want to look sloshed.”

“Are you getting sloshed?” asked Maggie, taking the champagne flute and handing it to Nelly. “And that dress, my goodness!”

Didi’s black cocktail dress was shorter and dipped lower than the dresses of the other Tri Delts, but had more to hold it up. Nelly had wondered about the dress, too, which they’d picked out together at Bullock’s Westwood, but Nelly didn’t know about the call from Jonathan Schwartz, who was bringing someone with him with movie connections to meet Didi. Jonathan was a Hollywood lawyer and man-about-town whom Nelly knew from the dance studio. He’d been to Roscomare Road and had met Didi. He was a hustler, but you never knew. It was time for her granddaughter to get out in the world.

Didi leaned toward Maggie and whispered edgily, “Mother, stop being a mother. It’s a little late, don’t you think?”

“There’s your Aunt Liz,” said Maggie, ignoring the comment and waving to the door where Liz and Joe had just come in followed by Robby and a girl they didn’t know. Cal was a few steps behind. Nelly didn’t know what to make of the quarrel between Cal and Robby. She liked Robby well enough because he liked to talk about Eddie, which no one else ever did. She knew Didi couldn’t stand her cousin and wondered why she’d invited him. In any case, in any quarrel involving Cal, Nelly would stand with Cal, always had.

“No music,” said Joe. “Where’s my favorite piano player?”

“I have no idea,” said Nelly, who with time had accommodated herself to her socialist son-in-law. “Ralph left hours ago for Watts.”

“Watts, did you say?”

“That’s where Lester lives.”

“Some kind of police action in Watts I heard on the radio,” said Joe.

“Not tonight of all nights, please!” cried Nelly. “What will I do for music?”

“Someone will play,” said Joe. “Someone at these parties always can play.”

“Call for you, Miss Lizzie.” It was Iris, the maid, out from the kitchen where she was supervising the catering.

“This is Dominique,” said Robby, ignoring Didi and approaching his grandmother with a luscious girl on his arm.

When Didi had phoned to invite Lizzie and Joe, it was Robby who answered, Robby the vile cousin whose only virtue in her mind was that he’d gone away for so long. Lizzie wasn’t home, and Robby wouldn’t call Joe to the phone until she told him why she was calling so she had to invite him as well, hoping, of course, that he wouldn’t come. She’d hoped that Robby’s years of exile might have improved him, but, no. As children they’d hated each other, and the only improvement with age was that hatred had turned to contempt.

What Didi could never forgive—it had been chiseled into her hippocampus as an infant—was that Robby was vicious. The few horrible times they’d been put together as children, most often in the spare bedroom at Playa del Rey, Robby, two years older, would sneak over and pinch her until she started crying. By the time someone came in, he would have slipped back to bed pretending to be asleep. For years he’d found ways to torment her whenever they were together and shift the blame onto her. To her, he was mean and devious and probably a misogynist. She felt for any girl unfortunate enough to find herself with him. Robby’s opinion of his cousin was hardly better: To him she was weak and stupid.

They stood waiting for Dominique’s last name, but it was not offered. She looked as French as her name, but the accent was Midwestern flat. Lizzie had met her for the first time on the path outside. She hadn’t spoken to their son since he