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Oradell at Sea
Meredith Sue Willis
Vandalia Press, Morgantown, WV. 2002.
212 pp. $22.50 hardcover, $15.00 paperback.
ISBN 0-937058-69-6
This short, engagingly written novel is the story of a woman's journey of the self from a spunky but passive victim to a person capable of moral action on behalf of another. Willis' style is a clean, unpretentious realism with lyrical moments that bring depth and believability to her character. The Golden Argonaut, on its voyage from Acapulco through the Panama Canal to Puerto Rico, is the luxurious cruise ship setting for Oradell's late-in-life pleasures.
Oradell has come a long way from her hardscrabble beginnings as a baby whore, in a small mining town in West Virginia. Now, in her senior years, she has graduated to an indulged life as a cruise ship passenger, thanks to money inherited from her marriage to the deceased Morris Greengold. She is free at last to play, as hard as her health permits, riding the Golden Argonaut, her favorite liner.
"Not too large, and elegant," Oradell, now a connoisseur, tells her fellow passengers, comparing ships. But the passengers are not the greatest interest on the voyage. Geriatric flirt that she is, socializing with the "boys," the waiters who serve her, is both her occupation and her principal pleasure.
"I bet you were good-looking when Mr Morris married you, Mrs Oradell, because you're still good-looking," says Stavros, who has been promoted to Assistant Chief of Housekeeping, as he escorts her to the dining room where he hands her over to Nikko, the youngest and tallest of the waiters, who will bring the frail and failing Oradell, to her table, supported on his arm. Stavros would like to persuade her to help him realize his dream, by investing in a restaurant, but no such luck! Oradell is not about to share her money. Still, alone in her room, Stavros enjoys his boss's company enough to cheerfully rub her aching legs with sincere good will. Oradell listens as he complains about the manager's work speedup and the looming crisis with the rebellious bad-tempered waiter Jaime, who has dared to fight the manager.
Oradell has not lost the memory of her own rebellious adolescence. Growing up in poverty and motherless, with a mostly drunken father, her isolation has kept her as raw and naive as an animal. She has never been offered the opportunity for the luxury of self pity by any of the few adults who befriended her. Once, a neighbor, observing the bloodstains on Oradell's bedraggled and dirty clothes, explained to her about the use of sanitary napkins.
The middleaged, unhappily married Mr. Myers who hires her as a receptionist for his movie house, offered her gifts of perfume, and a cream colored blouse with ruffles as his first move of seduction. Oradell accepts the blouse and other gifts as well as his hysterical and guilty apologies, in exchange for her virginity. She had never expected anyone in town to care or even notice that she is having sex with her employer.
The town has a motherly Grace who offers Oradell kindness, but the key to the most powerful emotional commitment in her life is her encounter with Mike, a labor organizer who sleeps with her. He marries her because the watchdogs of the town have threatened to run him off from his job as organizer of the mineworkers, if he does not agree to make Oradell his wife. Although he leaves her when she is pregnant, Oradell loves him. He is the best that has ever happened to her.
In the days on the Argonaut, it is Mike's memory that brings her to a culminating act of commitment to the workers on the ship in their resistance to mistreatment. This act brings with it no sacrifice of anything but her self-absorption. It is a free choice that gives Oradell a connection with Mike's memory. The book's climax lies in her capacity for moral choice. Oradell's uncharacteristic act of kindness for the benefit of the unprepossessing Jaime in his battle with the management gives her aging spirit a transcending moment.
Phyllis Ehrenfeld has received the Arnold Gingrich Award in prose for the most highly evaluated fellowship from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts. She has been Editor of the American Anorexia Bulima Associaton for many years. Several of her plays have been presented as staged readings in the Bergen County area. She is presently representative to the United Nations for the National Service Conference of the American Ethical Union.
Oradell at Sea
Meredith Sue Willis
Vandalia Press, Morgantown, WV. 2002.
212 pp. $22.50 hardcover, $15.00 paperback.
ISBN 0-937058-69-6
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