Run River (6 page)

On the night of the election, Lily and Edith Knight sat in the living room alone and listened to the returns on the radio. Although the shape of Walter Knight’s political future was clear by ten o’clock, Edith Knight waited until the last votes had been reported before she folded her needlepoint and stood up.

“Don’t cry,” she said to Lily. “It’s nothing for you to cry about.”

“I’m not.”

“I can see you are. It’s your age. You’re going through that mopey phase.”

“He can’t be Governor now. He couldn’t lose this election and ever get nominated.”

Edith Knight looked at Lily a long time.

“He never could have been,” she said finally. “Never in this world.”

From the stair landing, she added: “But don’t you dare pay any mind to what those Okies said about him. You hear?”

Lily nodded, staring intently at the red light on the radio dial.

She was still crying when Henry Catlin came on the radio to accept his sacred burden. He explained in his Midwestern accent how humbling it was to be the choice of the people—of all the people, you folks who really work the land, you folks who know the value of a dollar because you bleed for every one you get—to be the choice of the people to help lead them into California’s great tomorrow, the new California, Culbert Olson’s California, the California of jobs and benefits and milk and honey and 160 acres for everybody equably distributed, the California that was promised us yessir I mean in Scripture.

“Well,” Walter Knight said, taking off his hat. “Lily.”

She had meant to be upstairs before he came, and did not know what to say. “I’m sorry,” she said finally.

“No call to be sorry, no call for that at all. We’re in the era of the medicine men. We’re going to have snake oil every Thursday. Dr. Townsend is going to administer it personally, with an unwilling assist from Sheridan Downey.”

She could tell that he was a little drunk.

“Snake oil,” he repeated with satisfaction. “Right in your Ham and Eggs. According to Mr. Catlin, we are starting up a golden ladder into California’s great tomorrow.”

“I heard him.”

Humming “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” Walter Knight opened the liquor cupboard, took out a bottle, and then, without opening it, lay down on the couch and closed his eyes.

“Different world, Lily. Different rules. But we’ll beat them at their own game. You know why?” He opened his eyes and looked at her. “Because you’ve got in your little finger more brains and more guts than all those Okies got put together.”

She tried to smile.

“Now, Lily. Lily-of-the-valley. Don’t do that. I’m going to have a lot more time to spend on the ranch. We’re going to do things together, read things, go places, do things. I don’t want to think you’re crying about that.”

“That’ll be nice,” she said finally, crushing the handkerchief he had given her and jamming it into the pocket of her jumper.

“You’re still my princess.”

She smiled.

“Princess of the whole goddamn world. Nobody can touch you.”

He opened the liquor cupboard again, replaced the bottle he had taken out, and picked up instead the squared, corked bottle which held the last of his father’s bourbon, clouded and darkened, no ordinary whiskey.

“This is to put you to sleep,” he said, handing her a glass. “Now. What you may not have realized is that Henry Catlin happens to be an agent of Divine Will, placed on earth expressly to deliver California from her native sons. He was conceived in order to usher in the New California. An angel came to Mr. Catlin’s mother. A Baptist angel, wearing a Mother Hubbard and a hair net.” He paused. “Or maybe it was Aimee Semple McPherson. I am not too clear about Scripture on this point.”

“He’s not at all a nice man,” Lily said firmly, encouraged by the bourbon.

“Everything changes, princess. Now you take that drink to bed.”

Everything changes, everything changed: summer evenings driving downriver to auctions, past the green hops in leaf, blackbirds flying up from the brush in the dry twilight air, red Christmas-tree balls glittering in the firelight, a rush of autumn Sundays, all gone, when you drove through the rain to visit the great-aunts. “Lily is to have the Spode, Edith, the Spode and the Canton platters Alec brought from the Orient, are you hearing me?” And although Aunt Laura dies neither that year nor the next, she does die one morning, fifteen years later: the call comes from the hospital while you sit at breakfast telling Julie that soft-boiled eggs will make her beautiful and good, and the Spode does pass to you, the Spode and the Canton platters Alec brought from the Orient. (You have seen only one yellowed snapshot of Alec, and that was much later, after he had lost his health and mind and all memory of the Orient. But imagine him a young man, a fine figure of a man or so they said, sailing out from San Francisco and Seattle in the waning days of the China trade, touching
home once a year with Canton for his sisters and sailing out again.) Things change. Your father no longer tells you when to go to bed, no longer lulls you with his father’s bourbon, brought out for comfort at Christmas and funerals. Nobody chooses it but nothing can halt it, once underway: you now share not only that blood but that loss. A long time later you know or anyway decide what your father had been after all: a nice man who never wanted anything quite enough, an uneven success on the public record and a final failure on his own, a man who liked to think that he had lost a brilliant future, a man with the normal ratio of nobility to venality and perhaps an exceptional talent only for deceiving himself (but you never know about that, never know who remains deceived at four o’clock in the morning), a good man but maybe not good enough, often enough, to count for much in the long run. When you know that you know something about yourself, but you did not know it then
.

5

“You might marry Everett,” Martha McClellan had suggested to Lily, once when they were both children, “if I decide not to.” “You aren’t allowed to marry your own brother,” Lily had said, quite sure of her ground until Martha smiled wisely and predicted, apparently interpreting the regulation as something else initiated during the first hundred days, “Roosevelt won’t be president forever, you know.”

It seemed in retrospect an amusing story, and Lily wondered, the June afternoon in 1940 when Everett and his father came to the house for a drink, whether or not she should tell it. She decided that she should not: his four years at Stanford and her one at Berkeley had made Everett seem almost a stranger. She could not remember even seeing him for a couple of years, except once that winter when she had gone down to Stanford for a party and had gotten sick on Mission Bell wine at the Deke house. (Everett had gotten her some cold coffee from the kitchen and had made her date stay in another room until she felt better; she had thought herself humiliated, and neither she nor Everett’s girl, a blond tennis player from Atherton, had much appreciated his gallantry.) He looked, now, taller than she remembered, and older. She wondered whether some small tragedy had befallen him and hardened his face, whether perhaps he had thought himself in love with and spurned by the tennis player. He would be, she thought, the type.

“I tell him he ought to go into the law,” John McClellan said, taking off his rimless glasses and polishing them on a corner of his jacket. “Into politics. We could use some growers in Sacramento.”

“Maybe I better get to be a grower first,” Everett said politely. He had been, Lily remembered, a precociously polite child. Her clearest recollections were of him assuming full responsibility for Martha’s social errors, gravely apologizing for the spilt strawberry punch, the uprooted azalea, the hysteria when someone other than Martha pinned the tail on the donkey.

“You tell him how they need us,” Mr. McClellan said. “You’re the one to tell him.”

Walter Knight picked up a pair of garden shears from the tiled terrace floor and pruned a branch from a dwarf lemon.

“I’m not sure they do,” he said finally, intent upon the lemon. “I’m not at all sure they need us. The San Joaquin still makes itself heard.”

“Hah,” Mr. McClellan said triumphantly. “The big boys. The corporation boys. There’s your point.”

Lily did not look at her father. When he spoke at last there was no inflection in his voice.

“This isn’t the San Joaquin. They don’t run ranches around here from offices in the Russ Building in San Francisco.”

“There’s your point,” Mr. McClellan repeated.

“Here’s my point,” Walter Knight said. “We’re expendable.”

Everett smiled at Lily. The sun was setting behind his chair and his blond hair, cut close, looked white in the sunset blaze. Lily extended one bare foot and contemplated it, not smiling back. Neither she nor her mother ever mentioned politics to her father any more: it had been tactless to speak of the Legislature.

Although Everett called her at six-thirty the next morning he did not wake her, because the heat had stayed all night and she had gotten up at five-thirty to lie on the terrace in her nightgown. By six o’clock the sun had been high enough to make the heat shimmer in the air again. Looking to the east and squinting to block out the sun, she could make out the Sierra Nevada swimming clear on the horizon.

She wanted to go somewhere but did not know where. There was a glass of beer on the table, left from the night before, and she flicked a small colorless spider from the rim with her fingernail and let the warm flat beer trickle down her throat. That there was really nowhere to go (she did not like the mountains and had only a week before come home from the coast) made her no less restless, lying almost motionless in the still morning heat and chewing absently on the sash to her nightgown. She wanted to stay here and she wanted something else besides. Her grades had arrived from Berkeley yesterday, neatly and irrevocably recorded on the self-addressed postcards she had left in her bluebooks. One B-minus, in English 1B; a C in History 17A, a C in Psychology 1B, a C-minus in Geology 1 (commonly known as a football players’ course in which it was impossible to get below a B), and a D in French 2. Because the single B was in a three-unit course and the D in a four-unit course, she supposed that she was down grade points and therefore on probation. Had the postcards arrived at school, she would have been embarrassed. Here, it did not seem to matter. As her mother had observed, she had read some interesting books and gone to some nice parties; once she was home, that was about the sum of Berkeley. She did not want to go back anyway. She could read books at home; she could have a better time at parties at home. It was not that she had not been asked, at least at first, to the parties which were the parties to go to; she had. On a campus where healthy color and easy smiles were commonplace, her fragile pallor, her uncertainty, had attracted a good deal of attention and speculation. Only when the boys who asked her out discovered how real the uncertainty was did they begin, bewildered and bored, to lose interest. As one of them told Lily’s roommate (who, reprovingly, told Lily), taking out Lily Knight was like dating a deaf-mute. “You have to kid around with them, be more fun,” the roommate advised. “Be yourself.” Although these admonitions seemed to Lily in some sense contradictory, she tried, the next weekend, to be more like the girls who were considered fun. Out with a Sigma Chi who had just been accepted at Princeton Theological Seminary, she had attempted some banter about Reinhold Niebuhr; when that failed, she admired the way he played the ukelele. After several drinks, he told her a couple of
double entendre
stories, and although she neither understood them nor thought he should be telling them to her, she laughed appreciatively. When he asked if she would like to drive up in the Berkeley hills, she smiled with delight and said it sounded like fun; later, she reflected that it had not been entirely his fault that he had misinterpreted her behavior that evening, which had ended in front of an all-night drugstore on Shattuck Avenue where, the prospective theologian told Lily, he could get some rubbers. (“Rubbers?” she had said, and he had looked at her. “Safes. Contraceptives.” She had begun shaking her head then, unable to think what to say, and he, sobered, had driven her in silence up the hill to the Pi Phi house.) After that, she had refused all invitations for three weeks. During the spring semester she had gone out briefly with a graduate student who read for her psychology class, a Jewish boy from New York City named Leonard Sachs. He had graduated from the University of Chicago and knew none of the people Lily knew. They had taken long walks in the hills above the stadium, back through Strawberry Canyon; had eaten dinner by candlelight in the small apartment he shared with a friend who did not like Lily and made a point of going to the library whenever she was around; and had sat on Thursday nights in the empty box at the San Francisco Symphony for which the Pi Phis paid every year. He gave her articles clipped from
The New Republic
outlining the intrinsic immorality of an itinerant labor force, hunted up for her an old pamphlet demanding repeal of the California Criminal Syndicalism Law, took her to San Francisco on the F train to hear a tribute to Harry Bridges, and urged her, after he had observed her knitting a sweater for her father, to utilize what slender talents she had by teaching handicrafts in a settlement house. Unable to locate “settlement houses” in the Berkeley Yellow Pages, she finally abandoned that project. He referred to the ranch as “your father’s farm,” and regarded her with an uneasy blend of the disapproval in which he held defective mechanisms and the craven delight he secretly took in luxury merchandise; she asked him if he would not miss being home at Easter, and regarded him in constant and only occasionally unwilling wonder. What both aggravated and enthralled him was her total freedom from his personal and social furies, and those Eumenides at his back were what attracted and repelled Lily. “You’re my haunted lover,” she would laugh, although he was, literally, neither; a fact which, in his roommate’s eyes, tended to confirm Lily’s social uselessness.