Blood and Oranges James Goldsborough (best romantic novels in english txt) 📖

that the way it has to be, women and men? Always protecting themselves. A good man, trying to do so much, maybe too much: advise his cousins, protect the environment, be a lawyer, be a godfather, good friend, always there. And love? Told Maggie he’d never been in love. But that was then. So strange. She thought of the line from Wuthering Heights: “Our souls are the same.”

He moved away from the window and started pacing.

Now, Cal, now . . .

It came tumbling out. “She was so alive, so vibrant, someone you wanted to understand every way possible—spiritually, emotionally, physically. You wanted to draw her power into you. Do you think Dad wanted to ruin his life? He was bewitched. So were the millions who followed her when he was gone, after the trial, the thousands who came down the aisles every week to be healed, to be saved, to get down on their knees with her and pray. She changed things. Isn’t that what we all try to do in our little way? She made lives better. She had the power. Don’t ask me what it is or how it’s done. Yes, it was a kind of magic. She lay near death for months—and then the message of Wrigley Field, and the trial where everyone opposed her—the law, the newspapers, the public, everyone but the Soldiers. And to turn it all around and become a national hero. The courage, the phenomenal courage!”

And you, she kept thinking. And you?

Gesturing as he walked, the words came flowing out non-stop, seeking to articulate something he’d never expressed before. It was coming too fast, and she took out her notebook. He didn’t even notice.

“It worked on me like it worked on Dad, like it worked on everyone.”

“Aren’t you describing love?”

He stopped pacing and stared. A cloud passed, and it dawned on him he was talking of her in the past tense. Circuits in his mind were flashing: Angie is dead! Angie is dead! He turned away, back to the window, shook his head to be rid of it.

“Dad loved her. I saw the way he looked at her—and she at him. Of course it was love. A higher kind of love, physical, yes, but mixed with something most of us don’t have. Mixed with God.” Her eyebrows might have raised, but he was not looking. “People like that are believers. They attract other believers. They attracted each other. That’s when their love began.”

“Did you love her?”

She had to ask it. Another reporter might not have, but Cal was her brother.

He spun back to face her. “Love her! Of course I did.” And then: “But not like Willie. That was impossible.”

He stopped, trying to gather his thoughts.

“There was a physicality to her. There has to be, you know. Have you ever looked closely at religious figures, the ones we see in paintings and icons—the Virgin Mary, Jesus, John the Baptist? These are not unattractive people. Who knows if they really looked like that, but the people who make the paintings and icons know what they’re doing. A homely woman could never have accomplished what Angie did. Her appeal was in the idea that God or nature or whatever gave her something special—physically and spiritually special—and that people who believed in her could tap into it. Dad had the same thing.”

He slumped down into a chair shaking his head. It was over. He’d given as much as he would. The rest she would find elsewhere. She sat quietly wondering how she was to get it into words, the right words, knowing that she would do it for the Times in the next few hours, but that later, on her own time, in the future, she would make it into something more, much more, something between hard covers, something that would endure as long as the temple itself. The words she would use now—his words—were the words she would use then.

She sat back and closed her notebook. She checked her watch. Already noon, the day slipping away, deadlines closing in. She had to be back at the office by four o’clock to start writing, which gave her four more hours for reporting. Where to start? Where to go? Whom to see? She had no time to lose.

Suddenly: “I remember that Uncle Willie met Angie in an ice cream shop in Glendale. You wouldn’t happen to know where that shop is?”

The idea revived him. “Tony’s? Of course I know Tony’s. Let’s go.”

The funeral was bigger even than Willie’s memorial service at Wrigley Field. Angie’s body lay in state in the temple for three days. The Times reported forty-five thousand people filed past her bier before it was closed, many coming from outside the state. No one recorded how many of them were women, but it would easily have been two-thirds. Flowers valued at fifty-thousand dollars were contributed, and a record eight thousand worshipers attended the three-hour service, which was led by the Rev. Marcus Wynetski—two thousand obliged to listen outside to the KWEM broadcast that went out around the nation.

Afterward, mourners followed the casket to Forest Lawn Cemetery in a mile-long cortege across Griffith Park while eleven trucks transported the flowers. Twelve pallbearers struggled to transport the 1,200-pound bronze casket to a grassy spot next to Willie high in the hills, rest platforms stationed for the casket along the way. Across the nation, newspapers and magazines devoted special sections to her life and achievements, above all her work to give women equal spousal rights and to bring evangelical pentecostalism into the mainstream of American religion.

Even the Rev. Bob Shoemaker, Willie’s old tormentor, who’d turned his righteous wrath on Angie after Willie’s death (and after his application to succeed Willie at the temple was turned down), had something nice to say on his radio program, surely biting his teeth as he said it: “I will never understand why God used the Soldiers for God to start such a movement, but I can easily understand why He