Blood and Oranges, James Goldsborough [spicy books to read txt] 📗

be physically, if not psychologically, unstuck. From the beginning Eddie had known how to prevail without being aggressive, and Willie, blessed with an equanimity that was lost or suppressed in his brother, didn’t mind. They’d learned when to leave each other alone. Their genes may have been the same, but their interests and values, things learned from experience, never were. Eddie learned the ranch business from his father: how to buy and sell crops and animals, how to make money. Willie went into the fields with the workers, visited their cabins, spoke Spanish to them, came to know them as people. Closer to his father, Eddie warmed to money and to business. Closer to his mother, Willie warmed to compassion and to Jesus.

Eva saw the changes in her boys as they grew into young adults, how temperamental and experiential differences intruded on genetic identities. She didn’t mind that they were different, one taking after the father, one after the mother. Very Catholic herself, she thrilled at Willie’s early love for the one true church. Later, when he chose the Presbyterian Seminary in San Francisco, not the Jesuits, she accepted his argument that the Presbyterians offered more freedom and hid her disappointment. She understood that Jesus prepared different paths to heaven. As for Eddie, she was happy when he took over the ranch when Robert was dead. She knew he wouldn’t stay long, just long enough to see after his interests. There wasn’t much more to it than that.

“Spectacular” was the only guidance Eddie had given the architects. The new Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum was going to cost a million dollars, and Eddie wanted something just as grand if not quite so expensive. In his mind the Temple of the Angels would be a monument to both of them, to their success in Los Angeles, something to stand forever as a celebration of the name Mull. He didn’t need to consult Willie, just ask himself what he wanted, and if Willie demurred, persuade him. As for the cost, Joe Sartori hadn’t turned him down yet. He took the church’s accounts to the bank. Joe saw that Willie was doing all right.

Willie tried to concentrate on the drawings, which were like nothing he’d ever seen. He watched the lead architect move his pointer—up, down, front view, side view, cutaway, overhead, quick switch to blueprints alongside, the voice monotonous, hypnotic. Willie was tuning out, entering into a private monologue with himself. This was his moment of truth. He knew it was coming and here it was. Was this his destiny, this gaudy thing in front of him, this granite opera house? Is this what God’s little people wanted? He was an evangelical, a pastor who’d left the Catholics and their catechisms and the Presbyterians and their stuffy traditionalism to work in the back alleys of Shanghai and San Francisco, a preacher without pretensions. His inspiration was Augustine, that tortured, splendid man steeped in sin. “Renounce, renounce!” Augustine adjured himself, “Give up this divided self, liberate yourself from torment.”

He wondered when the architects would stop chattering, so proud were they of their hideous creation. Eddie hovered over them like an orchestra conductor, looking down, looking up following every word, smiling at this, frowning at that, clearly delighted. Eddie had organized everything. Willie was no part of this show. But if he walked away, where would they be? A palace without a prince. Renounce, renounce! But It was too late. Things had come too far. Here he was. A golden dome? But was it really so bad? A new church for new lives was what he’d promised the Soldiers. His eyes focused on the antennas above the dome, antennas to carry his message cross-country in the new age of radio.

“Willie?”

“Yes, yes,” he said, returning.

“Magnificent, no?”

“I don’t know quite what to say.”

“You didn’t expect anything like this, did you?”

“No, I did not.”

They were meeting at Mull Enterprises on Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica, the hub of Eddie’s business interests, which stretched across the county. It had taken months for the project to be ready to show to Willie.

“Where’s the steeple?”

“It is a temple.”

“Temples don’t have steeples?”

“Not necessarily,” said Wynken, or perhaps it was Nod. Willie had already forgotten their names. “Believe me, Reverend, we researched this. Some temples have steeples, some don’t. In any case, your brother told us you should have something new, something grand, something never done before. And remember this: you don’t put antennas on steeples.”

“I knew you’d like it,” said Eddie, wrapping his arm around him. “I’ll tell you this: it doesn’t come cheap. This little baby you’re looking at comes at exactly half the price of the coliseum they’re building out by USC. Only the best for you, little brother.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Not a penny of it was Eddie’s money. Joe Sartori was neither evangelical nor Pentecostal; he belonged to the one true church, and didn’t mix money and religion. Eddie made the point to him that the Church of the New Gospel was as much business as religion, filling up twice on Sunday just like Grauman’s Chinese showing a new DeMille movie. What finally sold Joe Sartori was the broadcasting. Hundreds of local stations were springing up across the nation, and the first national network, the National Broadcasting System, was about to be launched. Willie’s Sunday evening shows would compete with Hollywood radio dramas, Eddie told the banker, and bring in far more money. Willie was a Hollywood star.

Sartori signed the loan that allowed construction to begin.

They called it the new religion, but it was really a mix of new and old: The new was the radio and Sunday night shows scripted like Hollywood scenarios and using Hollywood actors, who had no complaints about being broadcast into millions of homes. The old was down-home preaching about baptism and sin and the return of Jesus Christ. Raised as a Catholic inspired by Augustine, ordained as a Presbyterian steeped in the piety of John Knox and John Calvin, Rev. Willie Mull abandoned Augustine,