Blood and Oranges

by James O. Goldsborough

  “Say, come to think of it, Eddie Mull was Willie’s brother. Are you . . .”

  “Eddie Mull was my father.”

  He stared at her for some seconds before dropping his eyes. “That’s a load of grief that you’ve had, young lady. More than enough for one family, I’d say.”

  “Thank you.”

  He held up his mug. “You use another?”

  “I think I could.”

  He ordered, and they fell silent for a while, both facing the fire, both lost in their thoughts. When the new drinks arrived, she took a big swallow, and when the grog had run down deep enough to warm her toes a little more, she checked her recorder and turned back to face him. “Okay, Fred, now you’re going to tell me what you plan to do about this.”

  “Well, you remember back at the house when I said the story was part of the record?”

  “Try to find it,” you said.

  “Well, darlin’ you’ve come to the only man who knows where to find it.”

  Chapter 33

  Playa del Rey wasn’t much, which was its charm to the few hundred souls who lived there. A sandy hill and beach on a trolley line to Culver City and downtown, with a spur to Venice, it had no schools, no local government, no police, only a volunteer fire department and irregular trash collection—people mostly burning trash on the sand, providing occasional work for the firemen. It had one grocery store, Charlie’s Market; one drugstore, Doc Dolson’s; a malt shop, gas station and burger joint called the Dutch Village. The only institution of any class was the Westport Beach Club, which was too costly for most of the denizens, who weren’t clubby sorts anyway. Officially part of Los Angeles, Playa del Rey was ignored by the city, which was fine with everyone. When people from downtown went to the beach they went to Venice, Ocean Park or Santa Monica, glitzy places with piers, shooting galleries and beauty contests.

  The only school for Didi Heyward was Florence Nightingale Elementary in Venice, which meant that Maggie or Terry had to drop her off on their way to Hughes Aircraft, which wasn’t on their way, but no school buses ran to Playa del Rey, and they’d recently pulled up the tracks for the spur to Venice. School was reached by driving down Pacific Avenue through the oil derricks, which intrigued Didi as much as they once had her mother. Maggie explained that they’d been built by Grandpa Eddie and now belonged to her and Aunt Lizzie, who didn’t know what to do with them.

  Didi didn’t like Nightingale, didn’t like the teachers, didn’t like the other children, many of whom were children of oil roughnecks and beach drifters. Didi, in fact, did not like anything about Playa del Rey or the beach. She was a fastidious little thing who from the beginning disliked dirt, sand or anything gritty, reminding Maggie of her mother. On weekends, when she and Terry took her to the beach club, she’d spend the day alone in a chair in the sitting room with a book. She always wore a dress and would not go near a pool, beach or grill. She hated sand in her pumps and refused to go barefoot. She insisted on having egg salad or chicken salad sandwiches (no tuna, please!) sent to her in the sitting room, crusts removed and cut into four neat little squares with not too much filling to squish out the sides. That was how Granny served sandwiches in Bel Air and the only way Didi would eat them.

  She liked collecting things, especially expensive things. When Granny gave her an antique doll (the very doll she’d kept in a trunk for years after discovery that Maggie hated dolls and Lizzie wasn’t interested) Didi wanted more of them. It was a rare German bisque doll from 1900 and hard to find another like it. Nelly, who finally had a girl she could spoil, found a French bisque doll on Rodeo Drive with the same embroidered costume, swivel head, glass eyes and pretty little booties. It cost four hundred dollars but Didi had to have it. Nelly loved taking her meticulous little granddaughter shopping with her. The shop owners loved to see them coming.

  After school was a problem until Maggie found an older woman, Mrs. Gertz from up on Rees Street, to stay with her. Didi didn’t like Mrs. Gertz, and the feeling was mutual. Soon Mrs. Gertz decamped and the teenage niece of a friend at the club came by after school, but that didn’t last either. Maggie often flew until dark, which in the summer was eight o’clock, and Terry spent so much time with Howard flying back and forth to the new Hughes missile plant in Tucson that he often didn’t come home at all. Lizzie had found a UCLA co-ed for Robby when Joe was in jail, but Playa del Rey was not Brentwood, and no co-eds were available.

  “Can’t go on like this,” Terry said one evening when they were having drinks on the patio and watching the sun sink into the Pacific. Soon the nightly marine layer would be forming, when the coolness of the water mixes with the warmth of air off the land. “She hates school, hates the club, hates the people who stay with her, has no friends and as far as I can see has no fun in life at all.”

  “Didi’s her own person,” said Maggie. “Nothing wrong with that.”

  “But she’s so different.”

  “From . . .?”

  “From everything—from other children. From you, from me.”

  “So she’s different. Weren’t you different? I know I was.”

  Maggie had tried everything with her, but Didi was a drudge. At the club, she refused swimming lessons. Throw her in the pool to sink or swim which was how she’d learned herself, but Didi would probably have let herself drown. When they went to the stables, Didi would not get on the pony, would not get on the horse with her mother, would not touch the reins, hated the dirt and dust and shit as much as Nelly did. Sometimes you force your children to do something, thinking it’s for their own good and knowing one day they’ll thank you for it, but Didi knew her own good better than anyone.

  Maggie had had the discussion with Terry before, and defended her daughter every time. But the truth was she’d reached the end of her tether, driven to tears sometimes by anger and frustration with Didi’s obstinacy, her refusal to do anything her parents might have liked, that might have given them even a hint of the joys of parenthood. Maggie began to wonder if it wasn’t calculated: selfishness used as a means of punishment. But why? She had no idea how to deal with something like that.

  “I wasn’t that different,” Terry said. “Can’t figure it. She has everything.”

  “Doesn’t like it here.”

  “Doesn’t like the beach.”

  The thought hit them simultaneously as they sat sipping rum in the ocean breezes. Sailboats from Santa Monica Pier tacked a few miles off Venice.

  “Nelly adores her. Remember last Christmas in Bel Air? We couldn’t separate them.”

  “Maybe that’s it,” he said.

  It was too obvious. She called her mother that night.

  They brought her over in Terry’s station wagon. Three suitcases of clothes and belongings were left in the hall while Didi walked around deciding which bedroom she wanted. Thinking she would want her mother’s old room, Nelly had installed bright yellow curtains and a new pale blue bedspread set, but Didi didn’t want her mother’s room and hated yellow; she wanted Aunt Lizzie’s room, farther down the hall from the master bedroom. Nelly looked to Maggie, who smiled as if to say get used to it. Terry carried the bags to the bedroom, and four of them sat down to lunch. Iris, who’d been with Nelly since Lupe left after Eddie was killed, poured the chablis and brought in a fresh tomato salad from the garden followed by chicken croquettes in béarnaise and squash from the garden. Didi was delighted to have a real lunch served by a real maid. She liked maids.

  “Tomorrow Ralph will drive us down to Westlake,” Nelly told her granddaughter. “Miss Pierce, the vice principal, will show us around so you can get a feel for the school. Some of the girls are already there, I understand, for summer activities.”

  Didi was eight, tall for her age, happy that her legs nearly reached the floor at Granny’s dining room table. She was a pretty girl, solid, not delicate, with her mother’s dark Latin hair and not a touch of her father�
�s Welsh red. Nelly thought she took more after Lizzie than Maggie for she tended to observe rather than talk. She was polite to a fault, and from what Nelly had heard from friends, would fit in perfectly at Westlake, where they had classes on etiquette. She was stuffy, no question, but Nelly liked that. No more Maggies, please! She was aware of everything around her, her reticence growing not from shyness or lack of observation but from withholding judgment. Above all things, Didi hated making mistakes. She was a cautious creature, circumspect to a fault, mortified by failure. The saying is that the girl is the mother of the woman, but in Didi’s case, for reasons no one ever understood, the saying would not hold.

  “What kind of summer activities, Granny?’

  Nelly sipped her wine. She’d seen her granddaughter carefully pose her fork before she asked the question.

  “Well, I’m sure I don’t know. We’ll find out tomorrow.”

  “Summer sports, probably,” said Maggie. “Girls’ sports, like field hockey.”

  Terry smiled at his wife. “Somehow I can’t see you in knickers playing field hockey with the other girls.”

  “I never did,” said Maggie. “I played with the boys.”

  “You know I don’t like sports, Mother,” said Didi.

  Terry took a sip of wine and smiled at his daughter. He would never admit he wouldn’t miss her, but it was the truth. He couldn’t warm to her, and it wasn’t for not trying. With a son he would have known how to break through the shell or with a cuddly girl or even with a tomboy like Maggie. A little thing like Didi who shunned physical contact and liked sitting by herself was a mystery to him. He had an image of Alice McKee, his friend Tom McKee’s little girl, jumping into her daddy’s arms by the club pool, a little monkey in a wet bathing suit, wrapping her skinny arms and legs around Daddy and screaming with joy as they jumped in the water locked together. Terry would have loved it. Didi would have died of shame.

  She fit right in at Bel Air, where the crusts were always removed, the sandwiches never squishy and tuna never served. For her part, Nelly was thrilled. She was starting over again, a second chance. She knew Didi would love Westlake, an exclusive girls’ school where the girls would be just as stuffy and fussy as she was. It meant a half-hour drive each day, each way, but Nelly had Ralph. Many of the girls at Westlake had chauffeurs like Ralph.

  Nelly bonded with Didi in a way she never had with her daughters. With the girls, there’d always been a gap, based on what, Nelly was not sure but sensed that the girls never looked up to her. She hadn’t been able to guide them the way other mothers guided their daughters. It was like she did not have a single quality or idea her girls admired. She was proud of what she’d done with her life: from the farm to Woolworth’s to Mull Gardens to Bel Air; Iowa to the Blue Book and Junior League. She’d tried all the things the other Bel Air moms tried, but her girls weren’t interested. With Didi it would be different. They were birds of a feather.

  Looking back, she decided she’d never had any fun with her girls, never got to do the things the other moms did. Most Bel Air girls went to Westlake and Marlborough, but private school wasn’t for Maggie or Lizzie, little public-school democrats from the start. She’d talked to Eddie about it, but Eddie didn’t care. With a son he might have felt differently, but she couldn’t give Eddie the son he wanted, and Cal and Eddie were never close. Cal wasn’t that close to his own father, and it hurt Willie, she knew it did.

  Such thoughts bothered her more now than they had at the time. At the time, she’d had no problem turning the girls over to Cal so she could spend her afternoons shopping and playing bridge. She’d gotten used to wine spritzers in the afternoon and sometimes even martinis. Thinking back on it, she would have loved to do what the other moms did, take her girls to birthday parties and sleepovers and dances. She could easily have given up a shopping day or even bridge to take the girls to the club for tennis or golf or to the Wilshire Ebell for dance lessons. It wasn’t her. It was the girls who wouldn’t go!

  Worst of all, neither girl would attend the coming-out ball at the country club where the Bel Air debutantes always got a mention by Miss Adelaide Nevin. For moms, debutante balls are the sublime reward for seventeen years of work and worry. Their darlings are officially presented to society and can find husbands who, with any luck, one day will have their own homes in Bel Air. Two Junes in a row Nelly had opened the newspaper to Miss Adelaide Nevin’s column and found all the Bel Air girls mentioned but her own. She still felt the pain and embarrassment. This time would be different. With Didi, she was starting over. Didi had loved Bel Air from the moment she’d set her little baby booties in it.

  Neither of her girls had made what Nelly would call a good marriage—a good second marriage. Nor had either one shown any inclination to move up in status and give their children what they’d had themselves. A stucco in Brentwood and a wood shingle in Playa del Rey waiting for a cigarette to drop was all they could show for the millions they’d inherited from Eddie. Nelly had never approved of Maggie’s running around, from poor Billy Todd to Howard Hughes. As for Lizzie, Nelly had liked Asa of the Aldridge Furniture Store family well enough, but not Joe Morton, who was now an official criminal.

  Didi was her chance to make amends. Nelly had read an article in the Woman’s Home Companion called “Skipping Steps” about how children often reject parents and bond with grandparents because grandparents are more indulgent and more tolerant of their imperfections. The bond is just as strong in the opposite direction, according to the author, because grandparents have learned from their earlier mistakes and now have more time and affection—and money—to spend on children.

  Exactly!

  Chapter 34

  Calvin Mull, discharged with hundreds of others from Pacific Electric, the world’s most extensive interurban railway system, opened the Sierra Club’s first Los Angeles office downtown in the Richfield Tower, the tallest structure in the city thanks to a 130-foot tower in the shape of an oil derrick on the roof. The Richfield was a glorious amalgam of New York’s Rockefeller Center and Chrysler Buildings and an historic landmark from the day it opened in a city with few of them. For the Sierra Club, an oil building made a strange headquarters, but Cal liked the irony. From Richfield’s observation deck he could see oil wells pumping in every direction—Signal Hill, Santa Fe Springs, La Brea, Beverly Hills, Baldwin Hills and, of course, Venice. Los Angeles had become one gigantic oil field.

  Howard Hughes had long coveted Eddie Mull’s Venice fields. Rumors of a vast marina to be built in the Ballona wetlands had circulated for years, and in 1949 the Army Corps of Engineers completed a study showing that a harbor for eight thousand yachts and small boats could be dredged for $25 million. The marina would replace the oil fields. Study in hand, Los Angeles County obtained a loan from the state, which appealed to Washington to make Marina del Rey a federal project. The people of Los Angeles deserved more than just highways. Hughes flatly refused to come to Richfield Tower, which he regarded as enemy territory. Cal was not surprised by the refusal. He had no role in his cousins’ decision, other than acting as their legal advisor. It was agreed to hold the meeting in the offices of Hughes Aircraft, looking out over the marshes, dunes, and oil wells that Hughes was determined to claim as his own.

  Maggie brought Terry for moral support. Lizzie was accompanied by Joe Morton, whose primary interest in the negotiation was literary: It was easier to write about tough guys like Hughes if you observed them in action. Cal arrived with a mind full of questions. Hughes knew the Corps of Engineers’ study as well as he did. The county would seek to buy the land from whomever owned it. If a fair price could not be agreed upon, the power of eminent domain would be invoked. What made Hughes think the Mulls would sell him the land so he could flip it at a higher price? What did he have up his sleeve?

  Cal had something up his sleeve as well, something he’d not yet vetted with anyone, including his cousins, the landowners.

>   Hughes’s private office was more fitting for an aircraft man than a movie or oil man, though it served all his business interests one way or another. From the top floor of the administration building, broad picture windows looked out over the nation’s longest privately owned runway toward Ballona Creek and the marshes, with the Mull oil derricks in the distance. Beyond that, invisible from the office, was the Pacific Ocean. The stables where Maggie and Lizzie had learned to ride were barely visible. Models of Hughes’s planes and photos of him with planes and trophies ringed the room. Maggie was disappointed he’d never hung a photo of the Catalina race, which had changed her life. A giant blow-up of the Spruce Goose hung on a side wall. The Goose, amphibious, would never use the runway.

  Hughes led them not to the chairs by his desk but into a semi-circle by the windows overlooking the runway. It was an odd seating arrangement, the chairs set close to each other, with Hughes’s chair, higher than the others and facing them, in the center. It looked like a setting for a group therapy session, but in fact was an arrangement for a man hard of hearing. Behind them, facing Hughes, sat chief factotum Melvin Cobb, taking notes.

  Coffee and rolls were offered. Hughes was in business clothes—gray slacks, a brown sports jacket, and blue silk tie with red polka dots. He didn’t own a lot of clothes, and Maggie recognized the jacket, recognized the button she’d once sewn on it. She found the clothes oddly baggy, noticing that he had grown thinner. She’d heard the rumors. “Howard would fuck a tree if he could get it in bed,” Joan Crawford had said in words that made the rounds. But you don’t get syphilis from a tree. Degradation was setting in, physical, mental, she didn’t know. She looked on him with affection, everything a man should be, right down to his weaknesses. It wasn’t nice seeing a man like that disintegrate. Rumors were that he was making a mess of RKO, driving Robert Mitchum during the shooting of His Kind of Woman to break up a set.