The Orange Blossom Special

by Betsy Carter

  TWICE A YEAR, the Baron would come from Fort Lauder-dale to get programs printed for his Jai Alai games in Dania. Dania Jai Alai was Lithographics’ fastest-growing account, with all the snowbirds eager to throw money at one of the few legal gambling joints in the South. The Baron, whose real name was Barone Antonucci, was an older man with tight gray curly hair, slightly thinning on the top, dark pitted skin, and black narrow eyes that seemed to take everything in but let little out. On this day, the second day of Tessie’s rash, he walked through the door wearing a gray sharkskin suit, a royal-blue shirt, and a thick ID bracelet with the initials B.V.A. engraved on it. Everything about him defied you not to notice him.

  “Well hello, you must be . . .” the Baron squinted at the nameplate before him. “. . . Mrs. Lockhart. Barone Antonucci. Nice to meet you.” He paused for a moment, taking in the sight of the funereal white carnations and this slight woman who resembled Joanne Woodward with mosquito bites. “Looks like you had a roll in a patch of poison ivy.” He winked as if he were part of the joke.

  “No I didn’t really,” she answered. “It’s the heat. This heat . . . how do you people stand it?”

  “Our people are hot-blooded. We can stand anything,” he answered. “How long have you been here?”

  “We moved here three months ago.”

  “It gets easier,” he said. “You’ll see. Do you know where I can find Junior and Senior?”

  “Oh, you mean Mr. Bech and Mr. Bech?” she asked.

  “Yes and yes.” His laugh was deep and sharp.

  She picked up the intercom to call them. The Baron stood over her with his hands at his sides. She noticed how his dark fingers curled as though he were carrying heavy valises. While they waited for the Bechs, Tessie tried conversation. “You’ve come all the way from Fort Lauderdale?”

  “Did indeed,” he said. “Your joint makes all the printing plants in South Florida look like crap.”

  “That’s so nice,” she said, wishing the Bechs would hurry.

  “Especially now.”

  “I suppose so.” Oh God, where were they?

  Finally, the Bechs appeared.

  “Well, if it isn’t the Glenns! How you guys hanging?”

  “Long time, no see,” said Glenn Jr. “How the hell are you?” As the two men pumped each other’s hands, the Baron’s ID bracelet made a chunky noise.

  “All the better for having met your new gal here. Now you take care of that heat problem,” he said, with another wink.

  “Thank you, I sure will.”

  The three men disappeared into the office. Tessie went to the ladies room to put some Calamine on her stomach. She pulled a cigarette from her bag. Where do men like that get their confidence? she wondered, taking a long drag on her Marlboro.

  When she returned to her desk a few minutes later, she found a piece of paper neatly folded on her chair. Vellum. Expensive. She knew that. There was a silhouette of a man in the right-hand corner. Feet together, he was jumping into the air about to hit a ball. She recognized the cesta, the carved basketlike racket strapped to his forearm, from pictures she’d seen of Jai Alai. “Dania Jai Alai,” read the embossed letters next to the figure, and under that, in the inverted handwriting of someone in a hurry: “Have lunch with me today, Mrs. Polka Dottie. I promise it won’t be too hot. BVA.”

  As she studied the note, her heart started pounding, her face flushed, and all hell broke loose inside of her. She raked her nails over her screaming skin until the angry pinpricks swelled into hives and her body turned crimson.

  Who does he think he is? she thought, tucking the note into her purse.

  Ten minutes later, after the Glenns had walked the Baron to his green and white Impala, Tessie’s phone rang.

  “Lithographics, how may I help you?”

  “For one thing, you can meet me for lunch at Sundowner’s in fifteen minutes.”

  Tessie was silent as she collected her thoughts. “Oh, thank you, but I already have an engagement.”

  “With whom? The crocodiles in Alley Pond?”

  Tessie was so startled at having used the word engagement, she didn’t even hear the Baron’s answer.

  “Well, it’s not an engagement, really. It’s just that I said I would meet a friend.”

  “Okay, Dottie,” he said. “I’ll call you soon and we’ll make our own engagement.”

  “Yes, well, thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  The phone went dead.

  Three days later, a letter landed on her desk. It was addressed to her and had the word personal scribbled in the bottom left-hand corner. Tessie recognized the heavy paper and the busy backward handwriting. Inside, there was one sheet of paper with no greeting, just the following words. Tessie made sure no one was watching when she read them to herself in a faint whisper.

  Last night I took a walk along the beach. The setting sun cast a golden glow across the water. From out of nowhere a little girl in a purple pinafore and a flowered scarf on her head came to me.

  “Mister,” she said. “Won’t you buy some of my magic shells?” I said to her, “What do your magic shells do?”

  She said to me, “They make sad people happy and sick people well.” I thought about my new friend Dottie with the mean rash all over her body and said, “I know somebody who needs to feel better so I’ll buy your shells.” I threw in an extra five to make sure the happy part was covered. Here they are. I hope they do the trick.

  When Tessie turned over the envelope, fragments of shell fell onto her desk. She wondered how a man who looked like Caeser Romero and wore a gold pinky ring with an opal came up with such a sweet story. That night, she slipped a note into the Jerry Box. “There’s a man,” was all it said. The answer came back in the next day’s mail. Again, the heavy envelope, the zigzag handwriting.

  I went back to the beach last night. Our little shell friend was there again. “What’ve you got for a guy with a big fat crush on a woman who doesn’t even know he’s alive?” I asked her. She pulled out a cigar box and opened its lid. Inside were little creatures in the shape of an S.

  I ended up shelling out (no pun, ha ha) ten bucks for a handful of seahorses.

  “Whatever you ask for will come true,” she promised.

  That you’ll have lunch with me was what I wished for. Just lunch. How bad could it be? June 4. Noon at Sundowner’s.

  “Just lunch. How bad could it be?” She could hear Jerry’s voice. It was funny to think that he and Barone Antonucci might be in cahoots. I can’t do this, she thought. What would we talk about? He’s a dangerous man. It’s more than a month away. He’ll forget by then. Besides, what would I wear?

  BARONE ANTONUCCI WAS raised in a household of boys who were never expected to be any more than a lot of trouble. Their father, Christian, had worked his way up through the restaurant supply business. For thirty-two years he got up every morning at 5:30 and took a trolley half an hour from Bay Ridge to Red Hook, where he reigned over Peerless Restaurant Supplies, an old warehouse full of cast-iron fryers, ceramic plates, and stemware with names like the Salud Grande martini glass. Christian always told his boys that he could walk into any restaurant in New York City and spot his butter dishes or table settings right away. “I’ve laid the groundwork,” he would tell his sons. “All you guys have to do is not screw it up.”

  Barone was seven the first time his father came across the book he used to sketch close-ups of things like his own hand or his sleeping brother’s face. Christian noticed the thick black pad that was stuck in the middle of a pile of comic books when he came in to say good night to the boys. “What have we here?” he demanded, pulling the book from the stack. Christian didn’t like surprises; he knew what was best for his boys and what course their lives should take. He sat on Barone’s bed studying the drawings. He licked the tip of his index finger to turn the pages, making sure none of them stuck. The last picture in the pad was a still life of Mrs. Antonucci’s apron hanging from a hook behind the k
itchen door. Barone had sketched it while he kept his mother company one night as she cooked.

  “Why’d you draw this one?” Christian asked, his thick finger jabbing at the image of the apron. “You think that’s pretty?” Barone answered tentatively. “I liked the colors. I liked how the apron looks like a shell.

  “What are you, a little faggot or something?” Christian slapped Barone on the side of the head. “Drawing is for sissies. Aprons are for sissies. There are no sissies in the Antonucci family. You get that?” Christian smacked him on the other side of the head for emphasis.

  Barone absorbed his father’s blows. “That didn’t hurt,” he said, as if asking for more. But Christian just stood up, dropped the sketch book to the floor, and walked out of the room. After that, no one in the Antonucci family ever mentioned the word drawing again, and Christian fell back to his assumption that his boys would follow him into the restaurant supply business.

  Every now and again Barone’s mother, Dora, would obliquely ask him how his work was going. “Good,” he’d say, not bothering to mention that by eighth grade he was doing oil on canvas and by his freshman year he’d decided that he was going to become a painter and live in Paris. All through high school, he worked for his father and stashed every penny he earned in the brass safe box that his grandfather had given him on his confirmation. By the time he was seventeen, Barone was five feet nine inches, four inches taller than Christian. On the night that he announced to his parents that he was going to Paris after graduation, he watched his father’s face turn the color of a rainy day. “Is that what you call work?” he shouted. “Over my dead body, no son of mine is going to be some highfalutin artist.” He balled his fist, getting ready to strike. But Barone grabbed him by the wrists and pinned his arms to his sides. “There’ll be no more of that,” he said, leaving red handprints on each wrist. One week later, he sailed for Paris.

  He found a small walk-up studio with just enough room for a bed and his easel. He’d paint all morning and in the afternoons take his sketch pad and a box of colored pencils to the café downstairs where he’d sit with a sign that said LES BEAUX PORTRAITS DIX CENTIMES. Barone attracted people with his dark exotic looks and easy manner. Turned out, he’d inherited his father’s talent for sweet-talking.

  He was in Paris for three months before he met another American. That afternoon, he was sitting at the café when he heard a woman ask the waiter for “un demitasse sil vous plais.” The waiter scrunched his nose as though he had just smelled rancid butter, then shrugged. Once again she said, “Un demitasse sil vous plais,” and once again the waiter pulled away and knitted his eyebrows as if the mangled French were a physical assault. Barone knew the waiter and knew that he understood English perfectly. The woman seemed to be getting angry and Barone sensed there could be a scene. “Henri, give this lovely woman a demitasse and put it on my bill,” he said.

  “Okey dokey, Monsieur,” said Henri, and hurried off to make the coffee. The woman turned around. She had large horseshoe-shaped lips the color of holly berries and tawny-colored hair. She wore a tight purple sweater and had, as Christian would have so eloquently said, “tits that could knock you from here to Yonkers.”

  “How do you do, Miss . . .”

  “Fran. Fran Faberge,” she said, in a fractured accent part-English part-American.

  “Fran Faberge. What a refined name,” said Barone.

  “You can tell so much from a name, don’t you think? And speaking of names, may I ask, what is yours?”

  “You’re going to find this hard to believe,” he said. “It’s Barone Antonucci.”

  She laughed, an unguarded husky laugh that was purely American. And then she said the thing that he would always remember. “Get outta here. You’re as much of a Baron as I am a Faberge.”

  “Ah, but,” he said in an exaggerated French accent, “My father is Christian Antonucci, the king of the restaurant supply business in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. And I have come to Paris to be an artist.”

  “Yeah, well, my father is king of the royal pains in the asses in Tea-neck, New Jersey,” she said in her native accent. “Joey Moresco. Maybe you heard of him?”

  Fran, it turned out, had also come to Paris to pursue her art. She’d been a ballet dancer since she was eight years old. Her teacher at Swan Studios, where she’d studied for twelve years, had urged her to follow her dreams. “Fran,” she’d told her, “It’s in your blood. A natural like you comes along once in a lifetime.” She told her she must go to Paris, France, where the ballet was thriving, unlike in Teaneck. So Fran went to Paris where her gifts were just what they were looking for at the new strip club, Café Crazy. “What the hell?” she told Barone. “Art is art.”

  About the time that Fran packed up her leather valise and moved into Barone’s flat, he got a letter from his mother.

  Your father has a horrible cough. Sometimes he spits up blood. He tries to hide it from me by covering his mouth with his handkerchief, but I see the awful stains later. He gets tired very easily. I want him to go see Dr. Phipps, but he tells me that nothing is wrong and that I carry on too much. You know how he is. He is so stubborn and proud. I worry about him all the time.

  He showed the letter to Fran. “You gotta go home and help her,” she said. That was the thing about Fran—Barone never had to spell things out. She was canny without being a know-it-all. One month later, Fran and Barone landed in the United States.

  The first time Barone saw his father, he thought it was the old neighbor from down the street. Christian had lost so much weight that it seemed as if his face was falling away. The sheer effort of taking in air exhausted him. He knew better than to let on about what he saw or how it shocked him. So he said the only thing he knew would be okay. “Papa, how’s the business?”

  “Never better,” his father whispered. Later that night, after everyone had gone to bed, Christian asked Barone to join him in the living room. Barone rarely had a conversation alone with his father. He didn’t even know where to begin. Finally Christian broke the silence. “I won’t beat around the bush,” he said. “I’m sick. I need someone to help me with the business. God should forgive me for what I’m about to say about my sons. They’re my children and I love them but they are as dumb as rocks. You’re the only one of them who has a brain in his head. I am asking you as your father to do me a favor. I promise you if you do, you will be a rich man some day.”

  Six months later Christian was dead and Barone was president of Peerless Restaurant Supply. Fran and Barone were married in a small wood-framed church in Teaneck, New Jersey, on an early fall day in 1927. Their first dance was to the song “Someone to Watch Over Me,” the popular George Gershwin hit from the year before. When the singer sang, “I’m a little lamb who’s lost in the wood . . .” Fran and Barone each thought of themselves as the lost little lamb, and each felt blessed.

  After that, no one ever asked Fran what kind of a dancer she’d been in Paris. She’d put behind her the brief but colorful career of Fran Faberge. From now on, she would simply be known as the Baroness.

  SIX

  Victoria hated Memorial Day weekend. It was a different kind of being alone, as if everyone was at a party and she was left behind. When she would say something to Maynard about wanting to go away, he’d flat-out refuse. “It just isn’t right for me to leave the kids alone at the store,” he would answer, shaking his head. “This is one of the busiest weekends of the year.” On the Saturday of this long weekend, she showed up for her usual appointment at Baldy’s.

  “Where the hell is everyone?”

  “They’ve all gone to the fish,” said Jésus.

  Victoria squinted. “You don’t mean that.”

  “Yes,” he said. “To Key West. To the fish.”

  “Oh, they’ve gone fishing. Well, the hell with them. It’s just you and me and that new girl.”

  “Sonia?”

  “Yes, Sonia. Where is she?” Victoria scanned the room.

  “She’s off today
.”

  “Gone to the fish,” she said, her voice flattening. She told Jésus how she hated these long weekends, and how Maynard always felt as though he had to be at the store. “What’s the point of having buckets of money if you don’t get to do what you want to do?” she asked.

  “Maybe Mr. Landy is doing what he wants to do,” said Jésus.

  “Well, what about me? When do I get to do what I want to do? Charlie’s off to college in the fall. That leaves Crystal, who right now can’t stand the sight of me. Maynard’s never home. I’m not getting any younger.”

  “Mrs. Landy, you don’t look . . .”

  “Cut the crap, Jésus. You know what I mean. It’s lonely, just me and Ella rattling around that monster of a house.”

  Jésus rubbed her shoulders. “Sonia will be back next week,” he said. Victoria patted his hand. “You’re so good to me, even when I mouth off like a witch.”

  “I’ve been thinking about your hair.”

  Victoria perked up.

  “Maybe it’s time for a change. Something young and fresh like a bouffant.”

  Right after they were married, Maynard made her promise to keep her hair long. “How it flows on the pillow,” he’d said, staring down at her. “Like ripples in the ocean.” It was an uncharacteristically romantic sentiment from Maynard and Victoria never forgot it. She wore the same flip for the next twenty-two years. Now, Jésus piled her hair on top of her head and pulled a few tendrils around her face. “It would be very Ann-Margret,” he said.

  “Ann-Margret? My goodness.” Victoria giggled. “Shucks. Why the hell not?”

  As Jésus trimmed the hair around her face—graduating the hair, he called it—she could see her younger self emerge: she began telling him about Victoria, the president of Kappa Delta. Victoria, with the loud mouth and beautiful smile. “Miss Pearly Whites,” of the University of Georgia, 1935. Got put on suspension when she was found kissing Nora White, a freshman pledge, on the lips one night behind the sorority house. Got turned in by Sandra Beasely, some ugly small-minded girl from Asheville, who said that Victoria had unhealthy tendencies and was a threat to the other girls of Kappa Delta. Just like that, Victoria turned around and found herself a steady boyfriend. The first girl in her year to get pinned, the first to go all the way. Married before graduation. Donald Pierson. Football player, president of his fraternity, great dancer. Took her back to the family farm in Hawthorne, Florida, where his daddy raised cattle. Away from the razzmatazz of college and frat parties, Donald’s drinking took on an ugly desperation. One night she found a handful of hairpins in his night-table drawer.