The Orange Blossom Special Read online

  CRYSTAL AND DINAH might as well have been on the other side of the moon.

  “What if I’ve lost my dad forever?” said Dinah.

  “I’ll bet you haven’t,” said Crystal.”

  “You just need to find another way to talk to him.”

  “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had,” said Dinah.

  “Me, too,” said Crystal.

  “Let’s be best friends forever.”

  “I promise.”

  EIGHT

  The world was a sorrowful place; whatever Ella knew of it was proof that it was so. By the time she was eight years old, her mother had died from smallpox, and her father had been shot dead in a robbery over eleven dollars. She and her younger brother, Reggie, were all that was left. Them and their grandma Olie. Olie had three children of her own and one husband, dead for the past seven years. Two of the children lived up north and the other was a caretaker for some fancy man on Lake Okeechobee.

  From the time she was a young girl, Olie worked at the First Baptist Church of Alachua. She swept the floors and washed down the pews. When Arthur Finn, the white minister of the church, got too old to walk unaided, Olie held his arm and made sure he ate three meals a day. At night, she would lay out his pajamas and pray with him before he went to sleep. Olie was self-schooled and learned to read by following the text of songs she had long since memorized. Reverend Finn had always read aloud to her the letters he got from his relatives in North Carolina. After he was finished, Olie would read them back to him. Sometimes they would spend a whole evening working on the words she couldn’t pronounce.

  Olie was well into her fifties when she took in Ella and Reggie. It was no problem, she said. She was glad for the company. The three of them lived in a cramped two-room house right outside of Gainesville. There was no running water, and Reggie and Ella slept separated by a sheet tacked across the middle of their bedroom. Later Ella would say that Olie gave her gifts worth more than all the money in the world. She taught her to read. She taught her the words of Jesus and to put her life in His hands. That trust, unbroken and truer than anything she had known, was what defined her world and made living in it bearable. Her faith remained unshakable in the face of formidable odds: Olie’s descent into dementia, Reggie’s instability, Victoria Landy.

  Ella came to work for the Landys right after Reverend Finn passed and Charlie was born. Olie’s husband had worked for Matthew Landy laying ties on the Seaboard Airline. “He worked until the very last,” Olie had told her. “And when he was gone, Mr. Landy said to me, ‘Olie, as long as I and my family are still drawing a breath, you and yours will never want for bread on your table.’” Olie had a way of making everyone sound as if they spoke right out of the Old Testament. No matter, Matthew Landy proved to be good to his word.

  She was fourteen when Maynard Landy gave her a job delivering liquor to people’s homes. “Now Ella, make sure you go to the back door,” he’d instructed. “People in this town aren’t used to col-oreds calling.” When he married Victoria, he had her come to their house once a week to wash the laundry and straighten the house. “Victoria has many talents,” he’d said then, “but housekeeping isn’t one of them.”

  After Charlie was born, Ella moved in with the Landys. She slept in a small room off the poolroom, with her own bathtub and toilet. From her window she could look into the neighbor’s yard, where there was a mango tree and a hibiscus bush. There was a Venetian blind, which she could pull up or down depending on the time of day. She slept in a narrow single bed, and the roundness of her body left its imprint on the mattress. At night, she fit into all the right places like an old pair of shoes. There was a little closet to the right of her night table, and over her bed she hung a cross made of birch wood and twine that Olie had made for her sixteenth birthday. She called the room her sanctuary.

  When Charlie was a baby, Ella would rock him in her arms and sing the songs she had learned in church. Victoria knew better than to complain too much about Ella. She was as much a part of her life as Maynard was. In truth, the woman’s constant singing drove her to distraction. “Either the baby or me—one of us is going to start talking in tongues any day,” she told Maynard one night. “I mean, religion is one thing. Obsessive behavior is quite another.” What Victoria did not know was that Ella was as compulsive about reading as she was about singing. She read everything she could get her hands on, though her taste ran to mysteries by Agatha Christie and novels by Harold Robbins. From those books, she learned about men’s needs and women’s compliance, and the practicalities that attended these impulses.

  Having given herself over to Jesus, there were certain facts of life that she knew would never be relevant to her, though she figured that He would want her to be fully informed. Just in case she was wrong, she hid the books under her mattress and in an old plaid suitcase in the back of the closet. Every now and then, some salacious reference would creep into her conversation. Once, when Maynard and Victoria went away for a three-day weekend, Ella stopped them as they headed out the door. She wrapped her long dark fingers around Victoria’s wrist and whispered to her, “Don’t get pregnant.” Victoria turned and said, “Ella, what goes on in that head of yours? Where do you come up with this stuff?”

  Ella smiled, taking this as a compliment. “You know what happens on those sultry moonlit nights, Miss Landy. A woman can let go her senses and the next thing she knows . . .” Ella patted her stomach, then went back inside the house and continued singing her hymns. Alone with baby Charlie, she would read to him from the Bible and talk to him about the stories they read. She’d even baptized him in the pool once. Mindful that he was an infant, she only held him under the water for a few moments, long enough to get the job done.

  Ella lived by the principle that if you don’t set yourself up to be judged, no one can judge you, and she in turn never judged those around her. Judging was the Lord’s work, hers was just to watch. Many mornings when she’d make up the Landys’ bed, she’d notice that no one had slept on Mrs. Landy’s side. She’d gone and spent the night on the couch in the television room. One day she found Crystal Landy’s diary open to a passage that read, “I wish Mom and Daddy would get a divorce, and he would marry someone with a head on her shoulders.” She heard Victoria cuss at the landscaper: “I’m not interested in your goddamned excuses, just get those grasses in the ground before Memorial Day!” Whenever Victoria bought a new dress or blouse, which was almost always, she’d model it for Ella. She’d twirl around and arch her back, and her voice would get all girlish. “How do I look, Ella? Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Ella always said the right thing. “Mrs. Landy, that might just be the prettiest thing I have ever seen.”

  But it was Charlie Landy’s secrets that Ella nurtured as her own. From before he could talk, she could see the child was blessed with a soul like no one else in that family. “You have the gift of God in you,” she would tell him.

  When he was four, he said to his parents, “Where’s my sister?” That was a year and a half before Crystal was born. Charlie told Ella that he had these strange feelings. They rose from a knot in his stomach and made his head throb the way eating ice cream too fast did. Sometimes the images came before the words. They filled his dreams and ripped through his thoughts.

  He would tell Ella about dreams that were so specific and vivid, it was often hard for him make the distinction between what had happened during sleep and real life. One night in his dreams he saw a bowl of cooked peas, a platter of roast beef, and roasted new potatoes on the kitchen table. He watched Crystal’s hand grab the gravy boat and accidentally knock it over, spilling the hot brown liquid onto their mother’s lap. “Christ almighty,” Victoria cried, plucking a gravy-sodden mushroom from her white slacks. “Crystal you are as uncivilized as a hobo.” When the scene played out the following night, just as he had dreamed it, he couldn’t stop Crystal from reaching across her mother’s chest for the gravy, nor could he reconfigure the claw-shaped stain fanning qui
ckly over his mother’s white pants.

  Sometimes the dreams were frightening enough to pull him out of sleep. He’d wake up drenched in sweat, with horrible sounds from some far-off place ringing in his ears. One night he dreamed of lights flashing; crunching metal, moans, and cries in the distance. In the middle of it, all he could make out was the number 65. The next night, he heard on the news that there’d been a plane crash sixty-five miles south of Mexico City.

  Crystal called him the Mad Mutterer because he was always singing to himself. That was because he thought by filling his head with Buddy Holly lyrics and the batting average of the Dodgers’ starting line-up, there wouldn’t be room for anything else. He tried exorcising the visions by playing football, tennis, by waterskiing—anything to keep his body in motion until exhaustion set in. That girl Dinah, the one with the red hair who his sister had been palling around with the past few months, kept showing up in his thoughts. Nothing specific, just her looking at herself in the mirror, her on a bike, her with Crystal rolling their eyes behind his mother’s back.

  “Don’t you go telling people this stuff,” Ella would say to Charlie when he’d tell her these things. “You and me know it’s God’s way, but not everyone will understand that.”

  Since the poolroom was in a wing of the house that was seldom used, Ella felt as though she was living in a house of her own. “This is where I’ll stay until it’s my time to go,” she would tell Reggie when she saw him at Christmas. “No place gonna be finer than this.”

  On the Thursday morning before the last day of school, Charlie yelled upstairs to Ella. “Are you there?”

  “Sure honey, come on up.”

  When he was a boy, Charlie would lie on Ella’s bed and they’d talk. Sometimes, she’d sit next to him and he’d place his head in her lap. Now he was too big for all of that. On this morning, he sat on the foot of her bed, his legs crossed Indian style.

  “I had one of those dreams last night,” he said. “This one was so real. There was fire and burning trees and twisted metal. Do you think you can smell in dreams? I swear, I could smell the smoke, feel the heat on my skin.”

  Ella settled herself down on the bed next to him. She didn’t look straight at him, but let her eyes wander back and forth among the titles on her bookshelf. It was awhile before she spoke, and when she did there was a heaviness to her words.

  “God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Charlie.

  “God’s telling you there’s changes coming. Big changes. Charlie, pray with me.”

  The two knelt by the small bed. Ella bowed her head and closed her eyes. Charlie kept his open. “From now on I will watch closely,” he said to himself. “When the changes come, I want to be ready. Please God, help me be strong.”

  That night, the Landy family sat together at dinner. Ella had baked a Virginia ham with glazed apricots. It was the color of terracotta and smelled like the Fourth of July. Along with it, she served peas topped with butter and fresh hot cornbread. “Ella, you have outdone yourself,” said Victoria, cutting a sliver of ham and forgoing the cornbread. Charlie could see her tense as Ella carried the platter of ham around to Crystal. “No thanks,” said Crystal. “I’m not hungry.”

  Charlie held his breath, hoping his mother would have the sense not to say anything. But of course, she didn’t. “Great day in the morning,” Victoria exclaimed, as if a rabbit had leaped out of the ham. “I never thought I’d live to see the day when this little girl of mine said no to something edible.”

  “Congratulations, Mom,” said Crystal sullenly. “I guess today is your big day.”

  Victoria narrowed her eyes as if trying to discern whether or not she had just been insulted. The little smile on Maynard’s face told her all she needed to know. “Crystal Landy,” she said, putting down her fork for emphasis, “I am sick and tired of whatever adolescent crap you’re going through. It is boring and impudent, and I don’t want to hear any more of it.”

  “That makes us even,” said Crystal, pushing her chair away from the table. “Because I am just as sick of whatever hysterical thing you’re going through.”

  Ella continued to serve the ham, as though she hadn’t heard a word. Crystal ran from the room. “I’ll talk to her,” said Charlie, leaving Maynard and Victoria alone at the table.

  “She seems upset,” said Maynard.

  “Oh, pooh! It’s just one of her attention-getting tantrums,” said Victoria.

  Maynard stabbed some peas with his fork. “I see you’ve been reading your Spock again.”

  When Charlie caught up with Crystal, she was sitting on a hammock in the backyard, pushing herself back and forth with her bare feet. Charlie grabbed the hammock long enough to sit down beside her. Together they rocked back and forth. “That woman is a moron,” said Crystal.

  “That woman is our mother,” he answered.

  “Our tough luck then.”

  Charlie leaned into his sister. “I heard that boy died last night,” he said. “That’s why you’re so upset, isn’t it?”

  “I was over at Dinah’s this afternoon,” she began. “You know she had this weird thing with him. She was real sad, of course. Her mother came home from work early and made us fries and cherry Cokes. It was this big deal, I think. Dinah wouldn’t touch any of it. Her mother got all teary and said that Dinah knew far too many dead people. ‘She has to think about the living,’ she said. Then she made me promise her that I’d help Dinah get over this. I said I would. But I also told Dinah we’d go to Eddie’s funeral, you know, to say goodbye. I mean I promised, so now, what am I supposed to do?”

  Charlie knew exactly what she should do. “You need to go to that funeral,” he said. “I’ll help you get there. Let’s keep it between us.”

  “You’re the best,” said Crystal, poking at his naked toes with hers. Had Charlie been anybody else’s brother, she’d have dismissed him as a goody-goody. But to her he was unique and heroic—the one sane thing standing between her and a cuckoo mother and preoccupied father.

  “We’d better get back to the ham,” said Charlie. “Ella worked on it all afternoon.”

  After dinner, Maynard and Victoria went to watch Walter Cronkite, Crystal went to call Dinah, and Charlie helped Ella with the dishes. He told her about Eddie and Dinah, and Crystal’s promise to Mrs. Lockhart. The more she concentrated, the more Ella creased her brow. Charlie used to kid her that she listened with her forehead.

  “There ain’t no question about it,” she said. “That boy needs a proper send-off. We’re going to that burial.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” asked Charlie.

  “You, me, and them two girls,” she said. “Who’d you think I meant?”

  As much as anything, Ella loved a good funeral. Any right of passage that showed the Lord’s hand was worth celebrating. Besides, hadn’t she long ago taken responsibility for Charlie Landy’s deliverance? It gave her pause to think that, in all the seventeen years she had known him, this would be the first time they would ever stand together in a house of worship. “I know this is a sign, Lord,” she prayed silently, raising her eyes to the skylight above the sink. “Thank you for this moment of opportunity, and may you accept into your glory the poor young soul of Eddie Fingers.”

  On Saturday morning, Ella told Victoria she was taking Charlie, Dinah, and Crystal to a school function. “Well, isn’t that sweet,” Victoria answered, thinking she’d call Baldy’s and see if she could squeeze in a manicure. She’d gotten used to filling in the time alone on weekends with what she liked to call visits to her helpers. When else do I have the time to get all this maintenance work done, she asked herself while dialing Jésus’s number.

  WEEKENDS WERE THE hardest for Tessie Lockhart. When Jerry was alive, she luxuriated in Saturday mornings. Jerry would wake up around eight. She’d hear him prepare the coffee and talk to Dinah and the sound of him underfoot would lull her back to sleep for another hour. When
she awoke, she’d call out his name and he’d come to her with a cup of hot tea. If Dinah was watching television, he’d get back into bed. “God invented Tom and Jerry,” he’d always say, “so man could procreate.” And then they would make love. The rest of the weekend, they would run errands, take long car rides, go out for an early Sunday dinner of meatloaf and hash browns—the things that families do together. Those days would float by. There’d be no accounting for how they’d fill the time.

  Without Jerry, every hour of the weekend took on great moment. On Saturdays, before Dinah went off with Crystal, Tessie would lie and tell her daughter, “Oh gosh, I have so many errands and things that need fixing around the house, I don’t know where to begin.” In truth, after straightening the house and shopping for groceries, she would find herself with hours to fill. Sometimes, she’d park the car and walk around the campus at the university. She’d fall in step with a group of girls, and imagine herself a co-ed talking about tonight’s fraternity party and worrying about the biology test on Mondays. She liked daydreaming about these girls because their stories were just starting, their lives so full of possibility. It was easier on her than her other pastime, wandering through Grumman’s department store pretending to look at glassware and washing machines. That’s where the families were, touching or leaning into each other as naturally as puppies in a crate.

  On this Saturday, Dinah left earlier than usual. She told her mother that Gainesville Junior High was having an all-day party in honor of the last day of school. “You are dressed to the nines!” Tessie said, when she saw Dinah in a black shirtwaist dress with her black patent-leather pumps and her hair up in a twist.

  “What kind of party did you say this was?”

  “Oh, you know, kind of formal. There’ll be speeches and songs and stuff like that. Crystal and me, you know, we’re going together from her house.”

  Lately Tessie was feeling bogged down by all of her daughter’s “you knows” and “stuff like that.” For a girl who gets As in writing, she can barely speak English, thought Tessie. But she wasn’t in the mood to correct her grammar or tell her to quit squeezing the pimple on her chin. Horrified by the relief she felt that Dinah was leaving, she kissed her on the cheek and told her to have a good time. Then, she looked at the time sprawled out ahead of her. It was nine o’clock; the temperature was already eighty-six degrees. “The hell with it,” she said out loud. “This is my morning, and I’ll do exactly what I want.” She poured herself a cup of coffee, then got back into bed with the latest copy of Life magazine. On the cover was a picture of Mr. and Mrs. Sherman Adams in fly-fishing gear with the words “The Adamses Relax” underneath it. Adams, who had resigned his position as Chief of Staff to President Eisenhower several months earlier because he’d accepted a vicuna coat from a businessman, was wearing a tam-o’-shanter and squinting into the sun. Mrs. Adams had on a fishing vest and a toothy smile and looked like Jerry Lewis in drag. Both were wearing waders. “Sturdy people,” was the last thing Tessie remembered thinking before dozing off. “I wonder if they really have sex.”